The Mortdecai Trilogy (Charlie Mortdecai #1-3)(89)

‘Good luck, Mortdecai,’ she said dismissively.

No retort sprang to my lips.

It was a bad day; a rotten day. (It was like a compressed version of that hateful first term at a fourth-rate Public School when you are hounded and persecuted and you can’t lock yourself into the lavatory to cry because the lavatories have no locks and you spend all your private-study time writing frantic, tear-spattered letters to your parents, imploring them to take you away although you know they will only reply in a jocose way, using phrases like ‘forming your character’ and so forth.) When I say that the pleasantest two hours of this first day at the Terror College of Dingley Dell were spent high up in the fork of a Douglas Fir or some other hateful fourth-rate conifer, being shot at with graphite bullets, I think I have said all.

I lost not a single tooth, but the black eye I sported at dinner excited some tasteless ribaldry. I recked not of it, for dinner was, once again, superb; it seemed to heal all wounds. They tried to spoil the Navarin d’Agneau for me by saying that it was my turn to wash up but at this point I dug in my heels. There are some things a white man simply does not do. Yell for mercy from armed lesbians when halfway up a Douglas Fir or other conifer, yes. Wash up after them, no.

The place of honour beside the Commandant was empty throughout dinner; the new guest or victim had clearly not yet reported aboard. I was glad not to be sitting there bandying polite remarks with Madam, nor having to avert my gaze from Kitty’s appalling and treacherous bosom. In my new place, halfway down the table, I was flanked on the one hand by an amusing, scholarly American who told me that he guessed I could call him a kind of Sinologist, and on the other by quite the nubilest girl on the premises. She had an engaging giggle and a blouseful of the most ravishing tits you can imagine. She promised that she would take over my washing-up chores for me and then confided that I had hit her with a graphite bullet that afternoon and raised a drettful bruise which she couldn’t show me just then because she was sitting on it.

So soon as the stopper clunked into the neck of the brandy-decanter I pleaded fatigue – which was no less than the truth – and chugged up to my bedroom. Tomorrow morning was to be devoted to Theory, which meant that I must master an instructional brochure or two before folding the hands to zizz. First I mastered a generous slug out of one of my half-bottles, then selected the Racial Impersonation booklet to take to bed with me. The chapter entitled ‘Somato-Ethnic Ambience-Values’ seemed just the thing to induce a wholesome slumber but I was wrong – for the eleventh time that day. ‘Somato-Ethnic Ambience-Values’ proved to be about all kinds of fascinating things; I read avidly. It seems that these S-E-A-Values are all about what ethologists call the Umwelt – the area of alarm around members of the brute creation, such as human beings. It seems that we are all born with, or acquire, a racial sense of personal territory around our bodies and that outside this inner periphery of ‘privacy’ there lies an outer sphere of ‘friendliness’ which may be penetrated by permission or mutual agreement. Thus, if you are interviewing someone whom you wish to humiliate without actually saying so, you seat him just far enough away from yourself to make him feel vaguely ill at ease, to make him speak just a little louder than he cares to – and to enable you to raise your voice in a minatory way. Most tycoons learn this dodge when they are mere suckling managing directors – and it was not the least of Hitler’s secret weapons. On the other hand, ask the bloke to come behind your desk and sit a couple of feet from you and he feels admitted to your ring of dentifrice confidence.

Similarly, if you are impersonating an Arab or Levantine, you must chat with other Arabs or Levantines belly to belly: if you step back from the dread gush of garlic and dental caries you will cause raised eyebrows, be your disguise and your mastery of the language never so perfect.

There were lots more fascinating nuggets, some of which I knew already. I knew, for instance, that you don’t touch people’s turbans but then I have never desired to. I knew that amongst Muslims you don’t touch food with your left hand but I didn’t know that to touch almost anything with it can be construed as a deadly insult in certain circumstances. (Muslims, you see, only use the left hand for one purpose. Shortage of water in the desert, you understand.) I knew, too, that a closed-lips smile from certain kinds of Chinese means ‘I don’t understand,’ but I had not known that a broader smile means ‘You are embarrassing me,’ and that a smile revealing the teeth means something quite else again. Chinese restaurants, I felt, after reading the brochure, would never be quite the same for me again. (I was comparatively innocent at the time; had I been given a glimpse into the future I would have been through the window in a flash, prepared to take my chances with the Dobermanns and the electric fence.)

I was still poring over these gobbets of useful lore when the lights went out and, thirty seconds later, the dyke-like voice of the loudspeaker told me that the lights were about to go out.

I composed myself to sleep by trying to visualize just where the bruise on my charming dinner-partner was situated. Had I been younger and less fatigued, such thoughts would have kept me awake.





13 Mortdecai is dismayed to find that this game is not being played for bobby-pins, nor even for money





With prudes for proctors, dowagers for deans

And sweet girl graduates in their golden hair.