The cat followed me up the slope of Walling’s Lane, mewing inquisitively, but it turned tail at the sight of the big white tom who crouched under the hedge like a phantom Dick Turpin. Lights were burning up at Yewbarrow and a strain of New Orleans jazz filtered down through the trees – old Bon would be settling down to an all-night poker and whisky session. As I turned right at Silver Ridge there was one brief deep bay from the St. Bernard, then no more sounds save for the whisper of my own feet along Elmslack. Someone had been burning garden rubbish and a ghost of the smell lingered – one of the most poignant scents in the world, at once wild and homely.
Off the lane I picked my way along the just discernible footpath which drops down to the back wall of Woodfields Hall, the seat of Robin, Second Baron Mortdecai, etc. Golly, what a name. He was born shortly before the Great War, as you can tell: it was de rigueur to call your son Robin in that decade and my mother was remorselessly de rigueur, as anyone could tell you, if nothing else.
You’d never guess where I am writing this. I’m sitting, knees doubled up to my chin, on my childhood’s lavatory in the nursery wing of my brother’s house. It has happier memories for me than most of the rest of the house, which is haunted by my father’s cupidity and chronic envy, my mother’s febrile regret at having married an impossible cad and now by my brother’s crawling disgust at everything and everyone. Including himself. And especially me – he wouldn’t spit in my face if it were on fire, unless he could spit petrol.
Beside me on the wall there is a roll of soft, pink lavatory paper: our nurse would never have allowed that, she believed in Spartan bums for the children of the upper classes and we had to use the old-fashioned, crackling, broken-glass variety.
I have just been in my old bedroom which is always kept ready for me, never altered or disturbed; just the kind of false note my brother loves sardonically to strike. He often says, ‘Do remember that you always have a home here, Charlie,’ then waits for me to look sick. Under a floorboard in my room I groped for and found a large oilskin package containing my first and favourite handgun, a 1920 Police and Military Model Smith and Wesson .455, the most beautiful heavy revolver ever designed. A few years ago, before I took up whisky as an indoor sport, I could do impressive things to a playing card with this pistol at twenty paces, and I am confident that I could still hit a larger target in a good light. Like, say, Martland.
There is one box of military ammunition for it – nickel jacketed and very noisy – and most of a box of plain lead target stuff, hand-loaded with a low powder charge, much more useful for what I have in mind. You wouldn’t be allowed to use it in war, of course, that soft lead ball can do dreadful things to anything it hits, I’m happy to say.
I shall finish my bottle of Teacher’s, with a wary eye on the door lest a long-dead Nanny should catch me, then go downstairs and visit my brother. I shall not tell him how I got into the house. I shall just let him worry about it, it’s the sort of thing he does worry about. I have no intention of shooting him, it would be an inexcusable self-indulgence at this time. In any case, it would probably be doing him a favour and I owe him a lot of things but no favours.
I called him brother, Englishman and friend!
As I let myself quietly into the library, my brother Robin was sitting with his back to me, writing his memoirs with a scratchy noise. Without turning round or ceasing to scratch at the paper he said,
‘Hullo, Charlie, I didn’t hear anyone let you in?’
‘Expecting me, Robin?’
‘Everyone else knocks.’ Pause. ‘Didn’t you have any trouble with the dogs as you came through the kitchen garden?’
‘Look, those dogs of yours are as much use as tits on a warthog. If I’d been a burglar they’d have offered to hold my torch.’
‘You’ll be wanting a drink,’ he said, flatly, insultingly.
‘I’ve given it up, thanks.’
He stopped scribbling and turned round. Looked me up and down, slowly, caressingly.
‘Going ratting?’ he asked at last.
‘No, you needn’t worry tonight.’
‘Would you like something to eat?’
‘Yes, please. Not now,’ I added as his hand went to the bell. ‘I’ll help myself later. Tell me who has been asking for me lately.’
‘No village drabs with babies in their arms this year. Just a couple of comedians from some obscure branch of the Foreign Office, I didn’t ask what they wanted. Oh, and a hard-faced bitch who said you’d been heard of in Silverdale and wanted to ask you to address the Lakeland Ladies’ Etching Society or something of that sort.’
‘I see. What did you tell them?’
‘Said I thought you were in America, was that right?’
‘Quite right, Robin. Thanks.’ I didn’t ask him how he knew I had been in America; he wouldn’t have told me and I didn’t really care. He sets aside a certain portion of his valuable time to following my doings, in the hopes that one day I’ll give him an opening. He’s like that.
‘Robin, I’m on a Government assignment which I can’t tell you about but it does involve getting quietly up into the Lake District and living rough for a few days – I need some stuff. A sleeping bag, some tinned food, a bicycle, torch, batteries, that sort of thing.’ I watched him thinking how many of the items he could plausibly pretend not to have. I unbuttoned my coat, which fell open: the handle of the Smith and Wesson stuck up out of my waistband like a dog’s leg.
‘Come along,’ he said cordially, ‘let’s see what we can rustle up.’
We rustled up everything in the end, although I had to remind him where some of the things were kept. I also took the Lake District sheet of the one-inch Ordnance Survey map to add colour to my fibs and two bottles of Black Label whisky.
‘Thought you’d given it up, dear boy?’
‘This is just for washing wounds out with,’ I explained courteously.
I also took a bottle of turpentine. You, shrewd reader, will have guessed why, but he was mystified.
‘Look,’ I said as he let me out, ‘please don’t tell anyone, anyone, that I’ve been here, or where I’m going, will you?’
‘Of course not,’ he said warmly, looking me straight in the eye to show me his falseness. I waited.
‘And Charlie …’
‘Yes,’ I said, face blank.
‘Do remember, you always have a home here.’
‘Thanks, old chap,’ I replied gruffly.
As Hemingway says somewhere: even when you have learned not to answer letters, families have many ways of being dangerous.
Topheavy with my load of Boy-Scout dunnage, I pedalled erratically to the cemetery, then down Bottom’s Lane, turned left at the Green and skirted Leighton Moss until I came to Crag Foot. I pushed the machine very quietly past the farm for fear of dogs and threaded my way up the broken road to the Crag.
The Crag is a sort of crag-shaped feature of limestone, rich in minerals and seamed with crevasses or ‘grikes’ as they call them hereabouts. It is a mile square on the map (SD 47:49,73) but it seems a great deal larger when you are trying to pick your way over it. Here, two hundred years ago, hoved the dreaded Three Fingered Jack, conning the Marsh with his spy-glass for unprotected travellers whose bones now lie full fathom five, enriching the greedy sands of Morecambe Bay. (Oh Jock – ‘never shake thy gory locks at me!’)
The Crag is riddled and pitted with holes of every sort, the Dog Hole, Fairy Hole, Badger Hole – all of which have given up ancient bones and implements – and forgotten shafts where minerals were dug in the vague past, and the foundations of immeasurably old stone huts and, highest of all, defence works made by the Ancient Britons themselves. It’s a wonderful place for breaking a leg, even the poachers won’t risk it at night. In front are the salt marshes and the sea, behind stands the Gothick beauty of Leighton Hall. To the right you can look down over the reedy haven of Leighton Moss and to your left there is the desolation of Carnforth.
Copper was the great thin
g to mine for here, long ago, but what I was aiming for was a certain paint mine. A red-oxide working, to be exact. Red-oxide or ruddle-mining was a thriving industry on the Crag once upon a time and the deserted shafts still weep a messy redness, the colour of a really vulgar Swiss sunset. It took me an hour to find the shaft I remembered best; it goes down steeply for ten feet, looking very wet and red, but then flattens out, turns right at an acute angle and becomes quite dry and airy. A friendly bramble now cloaks its entrance, I had the devil of a job fighting my way in.
19
So, I soberly laid my last plan
To extinguish the man.
Round his creep-hole, with never a break
Ran my fires for his sake;
Over-head, did my thunder combine
With my under-ground mine:
Till I looked from my labour content
To enjoy the event.
Instans Tyrannus
Happiness is pear-shaped
‘Playing it pear-shaped’ was a favourite expression of Jock’s; it seemed to mean deftly turning a situation to one’s own advantage; seizing a favorable opportunity: Boxing Clever.
So the new, resourceful, pear-shaped Mortdecai arose at noon and brewed his own tea today over a little butane camping stove. Quite successfully. How about that, Kit Carson? Move over, Jim Bridger!
As I sipped it I tried to think the situation over carefully, examining it for neglected apertures, but to little avail – noon on Sunday has a special significance for some of us, you know; it is the time when the pubs open. The thought of all those happy drinkers bellying up to the bar counters in Silverdale and Warton kept driving all pear-shaped considerations out of my head. True, there was whisky, but noon on the Sabbath is sacred to bottled beer. I wanted some.
There hasn’t been a soul on the Crag all day; I can’t understand how people can frowst in public houses drinking bottled beer when there’s all this splendid fresh air and scenery to be had for nothing. Even the campers, whose lurid tents and tasteful pastel caravans pimple the landscape here and there like dragon’s teeth, are not in evidence: they’re probably leading the simple life in front of their portable tellies, watching a nature programme, bless them. Most of them will be back in Bradford tomorrow, glowing with virtue and comparing mosquito bites.
I have taken the bicycle to pieces and wangled it all down into the cave. I’ve also been down to the icy spring which runs in a miniature canyon between two huge slabs of limestone; I washed myself all over, squeaking with the cold, and even drank a little of the water. It was delicious but I had to drink some Black Label when I got back up here, to take the taste away. It would never do to take up hydropathy at my age. Hydrophobia, yes, perhaps.
There is a most inaccessible spot above the mine where no one can creep up on you and I have built a small, discreet camp fire on which a can of baked beans is warming. From where I sit I can see the long necklace of Morecambe’s lights – ‘the bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there’.
Later
I like the ‘wet and wilderness, weeds’ of this place very much. It is quiet and no one has been near. I have been sleeping very happily, dreaming innocent dreams, listening to the sweet wild call of the redshanks whenever I wake. Now more than ever seems it sweet to die; the grave cannot be darker nor more solitary than this: nor stiller except when the wind, stirring the brambles at the entrance furtively, tries to frighten me. I recall the only really poignant ghost story –
(Sexton: ‘What are you a-sniggering at?’
Ghost: ‘It’s not funny enough for two.’)
Another day – I’m not sure which, now
I saw a marsh-harrier this morning; it quartered the reed beds of the Moss for a time, then flew strongly across Slackwood Farm to vanish in Fleagarth Wood. There’s a new tent in Fleagarth, the first I’ve seen there; it’s the usual awful fluorescent orange – when I was a boy tents were of proper colours, khaki or white or green. I studied the unsuspecting simple-lifers through my bird-watching binoculars – 8.5 × 44 Audubons – they seem to be a fat-bummed father, a rangy, muscular mum and a long, lean, grown-up son. I wish them joy of their late holiday, for it has started to rain in a subdued, determined sort of way. Lord Alvanley used to say that his greatest pleasure was to sit in the window of his club and ‘watch it rain on the damned people’.
I am simmering a tin of frankfurter sausages on my little butane stove. I have some sliced plastic bread to clothe them in but I wish I had thought to bring mustard and bottled beer. Still, appetite and fresh air make a fine relish: I shall eat like a Boy Scout. ‘Palate, the hutch of tasty lust, Desire not to be rinsed with wine.’
The same day, I think
I have been very abstemious with the whisky: I still have one and a quarter bottles of the lovely bully; when these are gone I shall have to sally forth and restock. Food is running short: I have two large cans of beans, one ditto of corned beef, a third of a sliced loaf and five rashers of bacon. (I must eat those raw: the smell of frying bacon carries for miles, did you know?) The local magnates, I fear, are going to lose a pheasant or two in the near future; they are still quite tame for they have not been shot at yet. The pheasants, I mean, not the magnates. I dread the thought of plucking and dressing them – again I mean the pheasants – I used not to mind but my stomach is more tremulous nowadays. Perhaps I shall simply emulate Nebuchadnezzar, that princely poephage, and graze. (Now, here’s the good news: there’s plenty of it.)
It feels like Tuesday, but I could be wrong
After my icy morning wash I have climbed circuitously to the highest point of the Crag, marked FORT on the map. Far below me I can see the gamekeeper’s Landrover bouncing and splashing along the half-flooded causeway towards his release pens on the near side of the Moss, and the RSPB warden pottering about usefully in a boat on the Scrape. People often marvel at the existence of a successful bird sanctuary in a shooting preserve but there is no real paradox: what better place for a shy bird to breed than a well-keepered shoot? Shooting only takes place long after the breeding season, after all, and serious sportsmen – nearly all good naturalists – would no more shoot a rare bird than their own wives. All right, perhaps they do sometimes shoot a rarity by accident, but then we sometimes shoot our own wives, on purpose, don’t we?
I am looking on this skulking period as a kind of holiday and I’m sure it’s doing me a power of good. With any luck my ill-wishers are miles away, combing the Lake District for me and terrorizing the campers there. Indeed, they may have decided that I died with Jock; they may all have gone home. If I only had a few bottles of beer I would be feeling positively serene.
Noon
I have been lulling myself again.
I made my usual binocular survey ten minutes ago, before venturing forth to the little deserted vertical shaft which I have been using as a lavatory. The Fleagarth tent was apparently deserted; probably, I thought, they were all inside playing cosy games. (Incest – The Game That All the Family Enjoys?) I had crept to within thirty yards of the natural latrine before I smelled the sweet, chocolatey smell of American pipe tobacco. Parting the brambles I saw, standing with his back to me, the form of a long, lean young man, apparently using my privy. He was not in fact using it; just looking. He went on looking. He had an American haircut and wore those unbecoming Bermuda shorts. I didn’t wait for him to turn around – I never could tell one young American from another – I just eased gently backwards and stole silently back here to my paint mine.
I am sure he is one of the Fleagarth campers: what can he have been doing? Perhaps he is a geologist, perhaps an inefficient badger-watcher, perhaps just an idiot; but the deep, sickening sensation in my belly will not be assuaged by these hypotheses. My belly is convinced that Fleagarth holds an anti-Mortdecai squad. Idle to wonder which lot they are – I can think of very few people who are not anti-Mortdecai this week.
Later
‘Finish, good lady, the bright day is done
And we
are for the dark.’
This is it, or that is that; slice it where you will, the game’s up. For several minutes just now I had the whole Fleagarth Mob in my field-glasses through a gap in the bramble defences. The thin American – whose shoulders are broader every time I study him – is perhaps one of the Smith and Jones comedy act I met in the sheriff’s office in New Mexico; perhaps he is Colonel Blucher; it doesn’t matter, probably their own mummies couldn’t tell them apart. The burly female part of the sketch I seem to know, I fancy I last saw her fuming in a Triumph Herald at Piccadilly Circus, you remember. From the way she handles herself I’d say she was past child bearing but not past entering Judoka contests at Black Belt level.
Grow old along with me – if you’re quick – for the best is yet to be. The tertium quid, the fat-bummed daddy-figure is – oh, you’ve guessed it – yes; Martland. Excepting myself, I’ve never seen anyone more ripe for death. Why I should hate him so much I cannot understand, he has never done me any serious harm; yet.
My recce this afternoon didn’t get very far; before I parted my porte-cochère of bramble I heard the sound of water buffaloes tromping through a swamp: it was Martland himself, on all fours, being a Woodcraft Indian, looking for spoor. Back I slunk, mustering a faint giggle. I could have shot him there and then, I nearly did. I could scarcely have missed the pungent, powdered division of his suety nates as he bent over – he’s going to get it in the end, why not that end? Take, oh take those hips away, that so sweetly were forsworn at Hailsham College for the Sons of Officers, and elsewhere.
But I am saving powder and shot for when – if – they find my creep-hole; this Smith and Wesson discharged in a narrow mine-shaft will sound enough like a poacher’s twelve-bore to bring the keeper and his two-fisted mates running: I wouldn’t give anything for Martland & Co’s chances against a determined keeper at this time of the year. Poor Martland, he hasn’t tackled anything rougher than a traffic warden since the War.
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 18
