Much of the building dates from the sixteenth century and there are traces of earlier work and hints of religious use. It is of a pleasant, pink granite of the sort no longer quarried and it has been tactfully coaxed into a state of comfort and dignity. There are tourelles, rondelines, bénitiers and so forth – I’m sure you know what all those are. For my part, I forget. Most of the front is at the back – doors, terraces and so on – but the front proper faces a sunny, agreeable courtyard on the other side of which lies the Other House, which belongs to Sam’s best friend.
The Other House
This belongs to George Breakspear who is Sam’s best friend and it is called Les Cherche-fuites – I don’t know what that means. It has been extensively dandified in the eighteenth century and its windows, because of the exigencies of the underlying granite, are all slightly out of kilter, which rescues it from the drab symmetry of most houses of that period. Like La Gouluterie, much of its front is at the back (gardens, pool etc.) and at the back, too, there is a curious and engaging porch with concave glazing of the kind associated in Jersey with ‘cod houses’ – places built in the piping times of the cod industry when dozens of daring Jersey skippers ventured to the Grand Banks and suddenly found themselves rich. At one side there is an ugly Victorian stable of yellow brick with a clock which doesn’t go.
Consider, Then,
These two agreeable houses beaming affably at each other across the old stone cider-press in the centre of the courtyard; consider, too, how rare and fortunate it is that the owners should be such firm friends. (The fact that the owners’ wives loathe each other’s essential tripes is of little importance, one supposes, and indeed it rarely comes to the surface even when they are alone.)
Consider, Too
The proprietors of these houses, starting with George Breakspear of Les Cherche-fuites. George believes in God, but only the C. of E. brand, as advertised on television by virtue of the Equal Time Agreement, although he has an Open Mind because he has seen some Pretty Queer Things in India and places like that. His manners are too good to let his religion show, which is as it should be. He is not a fool. You would guess that he had been a brevet major in the War; in fact he was a full and substantive brigadier and holds the DSO, the MC and many another bauble but, here again, his too stringent manners forbid him to use either the rank or the ribandry in civil life. (This is going a little too far, I think: it is subtly rude to keep your honours in your handkerchief drawer along with the french letters. Give me, any day, those jolly European hussar officers who swagger out at night in their splendid comic-opera uniforms, rather than those po-faced English Guardees who change, at the drop of a bowler hat, into sad imitations of solvent stockbrokers. Officers should have dash and debts and drabs and, above all, duns, whom they can horsewhip outside their quarters to give them an appetite for breakfast, don’t you agree?)
George is of middle height, average appearance and normal weight. His friends do not always recognize him, which is what it’s all about, isn’t it. In his favourite armchair in his club they recognize him, of course, because he’s there you see. The better sort of bartenders recognize him, too, but that’s their job.
His clothes are in such quiet good taste that they almost amount to a disguise, a cloak of invisibility, perhaps.
Despite this greyish coloration one somehow knows for certain that, were the Hun or Boche to invade us, George would not only spring capably to arms on the instant but would, without debate or question, assume command by invoking some ancient English password, token or shibboleth which we would all recognize, although hearing it for the first time since King Arthur sank below the waves of that lake near Avalon.
In the meantime, however, here and now in Jersey, one certainly didn’t want not to know him, for he listened to one’s stories; he poured big (but not vulgarly big) drinks; did not smile too unhappily if one swore in front of his wife and, if the party lasted too long for him, he didn’t make going-to-bed noises, he just sort of faded away and re-materialized, one supposes, in his dressing-room.
He drinks quite a lot in a diffident sort of way; there’s no shooting in Jersey, you see, and that makes the winter days rather long unless you happen to be over-sexed.
He scraped a sort of degree at Cambridge and won a boxing blue – one almost says ‘of course’ – and he is knowledgeable about the Napoleonic wars. He is one of those enviable people who – like Balliol men – are serenely certain that what they do and think and are is right. This inability to see any flaws in oneself is a branch of pettiness, of course, but much less harmful than being unable to see any good in oneself.
George cannot quite understand why we gave up India and he is a little puzzled about Suez. He polishes his shoes himself; they are all old, crackled and expensive.
He is, or was, what used to be called a gentleman, or have I said that already?
George’s Wife
is called Sonia, although her women-friends say that the name on her birth-certificate was probably Ruby. It is hard to say why she and George married; you sometimes catch them stealing puzzled glances at each other as though they, too, were wondering still.
She is a slut and a bitch, every woman can tell this at a glance, so can most homosexuals. Nice young men can persuade themselves that her languishing glances are for them alone, although they should surely be able to see that her instructions to the gardener about bedding-out are an equally clear invitation to bedding-in. George believes in her, I think, but like Matilda’s aunt, the effort sometimes nearly kills him. She is flashy by nature, choice and art: her eyes are deep blue and enormous, her skin is like magnolia petals and her hair is so black that it seems to be Navy-blue. Her breasts, when they are lugged up and squashed together by her valuable brassière, resemble nothing so much as the bum of a beautiful child, but when she is naked they are lax and unpleasing, the muscle tone long gone. I happen to prefer a breast that I can hold in one hand, don’t you? – but I know that Americans, for instance, prefer quantity, if you’ll forgive the pun.
Under a shellac-layer of cultivation and coffee-table books her manners and morals are those of a skilled whore who has succeeded in retiring early and now dedicates her craft to personal pleasure alone. She is very good at it indeed. I dare say.
While by no means mutton-dressed-as-lamb she is nevertheless subtly wrongly clothed, in that and in one other respect. She wears clothes exactly three years too young for her – never more, never less – and, like those men who contrive always to have two days’ growth of beard – never more, never less – just so she is always expensively dressed in the height of last year’s fashion: never quite up-to-date nor ever quite out of it.
This of course pleases her women friends mightily, although their menfolk do not twig and are in any case more concerned with admiring Sonia’s teats.
She is, of course, an accomplished liar but then they all are, aren’t they? (Or aren’t you married?) George is quite clever enough to detect her in her falsehoods but both breeding and common-sense forbid this in him.
Sonia and George have two sons. One of them, very clever, is serving out the last of his stretch at a school called Wellington; Sonia does not mind having a son at school – although she manages to give the impression that he is at prep school – but she is a little cross at the existence of the other son who is what is called grown-up. He is marvellously stupid and drives a helicopter for the Army or Navy or some such out-dated nonsense. He is always breaking their valuable aircraft but his superiors never seem to mind, they just buy him a new one. They don’t pay for it themselves, you see. You do.
Now Sam Davenant
and straight away we detect a falsehood, an affectation, for no one has been christened Sam for a hundred years. His real name is Sacheverell, of course. At school he would have died rather than divulge this but nowadays he quite likes one to find out.
He affects to be affected, which he is otherwise not, if you see what I mean, and hopes that his chief fault,
congenital idleness or accidie, will pass as an affectation. His infrequent swings to the manic phase, made much of, help him to carry this off.
He would think shame to be seen out of bed before noon – unless he had been up all night – and has eaten no breakfast for twenty years.
He is almost tiresomely well-read. In public he is usually immersed in a trashy paper-back but it is quite certain that in his bedroom he reads Gibbon, Fénelon, Horace and ‘tous ces defunts cockolores’. On the other hand, he stoutly denies that he has ever heard of Marcuse and Borges, whoever they may be. (For my part, I adamantly believe in teaching Fénelon, Racine, Milton and Gibbon to the young as soon as may be; you cannot learn too early in life that most classical literature is both dull and unimportant.)
Sam is absurdly kind, easy-going, tolerant and has a harsh word for no one, but I have long recognized in him an insane iron core which would make him, if ultimately provoked, a very bad enemy indeed. He used to play backgammon uncommonly well until the sparks took it up, whereupon he dropped it; he’s like that. I can sometimes beat him at poker.
He seems to be quite rich in a vague sort of way but no one knows how or whence. He hints naughtily at gun-running or worse in his youth – perhaps white-slaving – but I suspect a string of dry-cleaning shops in Northern Ireland: why else should he be so vexed about the news of bomb-outrages in Belfast?
He is tall, pale, curly-haired, thickening a little and a trifle older than me. Let us say fifty.
On the Other Hand
his wife is tiny, sweet, silly and called Violet, if you’ll believe it. Sam calls her The Shrinker. She does, indeed, shrink from most things; I’ve watched her often. Sam treats her with amused tolerance but secretly adores her, if I may quote from the women’s weeklies. She is nervously vulnerable and can blush and even faint, just as they used to in the olden days.
On rare occasions she is an inspired cook but most of the time she burns or otherwise ruins food but, luckily, Sam is not greedy and can cook. I must not pretend to any knowledge of their nuptial relationships but I should think on the whole probably not. He treats her with a courtesy so elaborate that you might be forgiven for thinking that he hated her, but you would be wrong.
There is something vaguely mysterious about Violet’s mother who is always referred to as ‘poor mummy’. She is, I suppose, either potty or an alcoholic or kleptomaniac or some such nonsense and there are times when I wonder a little about Violet herself: her verbal habits are odd and she tends to say things like ‘rabbits breed like hot cakes’.
And Now, For My Last Trick
this is the narrator, or, if you’ll pardon the accidence, me. My name is Charlie Mortdecai (I was actually christened Charlie: I think my mother was subtly getting at my father) and I’m a Honble because my father used to be – and my brother (God rot his soul) is – a Baron, which is a kind of failed Viscount, you might say, if you cared about that sort of nonsense. As my father did.
For the time being I live just a few furlongs across the fields from the two houses in half of a lovely mansion (a mansion, according to estate agents and other housemongers, is a house with two staircases) called Wutherings with my absurdly beautiful new Austrian-Jewish-American wife, Johanna, and my equally unbelievable one-eyed, one-fanged thug, Jock. (I’m by way of being an art-dealer, you see, which is why I have to keep a thug.) I’m not here permanently; I haven’t enough money to make it worth while dodging taxes and my wife has too much of it to bother. I really live in London but, although I’m not exactly persona non grata there, a particular branch of the police sort of prefers me to live outside the place for a while. You wouldn’t be interested in the reason and there’s nothing in the fine print that says I can’t be a little shady, is there?
Nor would you be interested in my reasons for having married Johanna, suffice it to say that it was not for her money. She loves me fiercely, for reasons which are a mystery to me, and I have come to like her very much. We don’t understand each other in the least, which is probably a good thing, but we agree fervently that Mozart is marvellous and Wagner vulgar. She doesn’t care to talk very much, which is the prime ingredient for a happy marriage: in Runyon’s deathless words – ‘Naturally, a doll who is willing to listen instead of wishing to gab herself is bound to be popular because if there is anything most citizens hate and despise it is a gabby doll.’ In any case, we are, in an important sense, worlds apart for she is devoted to the game of Contract Bridge – a kind of lunatic whist – whilst I dearly love Gin Rummy which Johanna loathes because it is too utterly simple-minded and perhaps because I always win. She really is quite astonishingly beautiful* but too well-bred to flutter her eyelashes at other men. We never quarrel; the nearest we ever got to it was once, when I was being intolerable: she quietly said, ‘Charlie dear, which of us shall leave the room?’
All three of our houses stand in the parish of S. Magloire, the smallest parish in Jersey. It is wedged between S. Jean and Trinity and has a short coastline of its own at Belle Etoile Bay – just East – or is it West? – of Bonne Nuit Bay. Such pretty names, I always think.
2
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night,
Fleeter of foot than the fleet-foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Mænad and the Bassarid;
And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
And screen from seeing and leave in sight
The god pursuing, the maiden hid.
Atalanta in Calydon
It all started – or at any rate the narrative I have to offer all started – at Easter last year: that season when we remind each other of the judicial murder of a Jewish revolutionary two thousand years ago by distributing chocolate eggs to the children of people we dislike.
I had been in a vile temper all day and had cursed Jock roundly. He knew very well that it was only because there had been no newspapers and hence no Times crossword, but for reasons of his own he had chosen to sulk. When I asked what was for dinner he pointed out smugly that gentlemen’s menservants always have the day off on Easter Monday and, indeed, those with thoughtful masters were often given the whole week-end.
I explained to him kindly that he was not a proper manservant, trained to gentlemen’s service, but only a mere thug and that I had noticed lately that he was getting notions above his station in life.
His answer was in the plural – and they bounce.
Shaking with rage at having nursed such a viper in my bosom, I huddled on some clothes and drove off to get dinner in St Helier, my tyres cutting up the gravel savagely and spraying it on to the lawn. (The gardener had, in any case, been making grumbling noises for weeks and I would be well shot of him: his snail-like working pace had earned him the sobriquet ‘Flash’ from Johanna.)
In St Helier, the restaurant I had readied my gastric juices for was, of course, closed. It wasn’t just Easter Bunny time, it was That Kind of Day, too. That did it. Stomach churning with chagrin and thwarted peptins, I went to the Club, determined to spite myself with cold steak-and-kidney pie and spurious new potatoes forced into pallid maturity in Cyprus with doses of chicken-crut and peasants’ pee.
On the steps I met George, coming down.
‘Eaten already?’ I asked.
‘No. Looked at the menu. A shop-girl would eat any quantity of it. I’m off. Come back with me and play backgammon. There’s half a duck in the fridge if the maid hasn’t swiped it. And you could make one of your potato salads. And I’d open a bottle of that Fleurie you like so much.’
It was a deal. Off we sped, he in his Rover, I in my absurd Mini GT which I bought because I can never resist a contradiction in terms.
As we swung into the courtyard and George killed the engine I heard the screams. He didn’t hear them until he’d opened the door of his better-insulated car, so I was first at the door, which was locked. He stabbed it with his key and was through the hall and up the st
airs before I had recovered from the mighty shove he had given me.
In the bedroom was his wife, quite bare, legs spread wide and shrieking as though she were approaching a grade on the Atcheson, Topeka and Santa Fé Railroad, Inc.
I couldn’t help noticing that her bush, contrary to the usual practice, was of a lighter shade than the hair of her head. The window was open wide and a warm wind stirred the curtains but the room was fragrant with sex. George was already out of the window and taking a grip of the creeper on the wall outside. It ripped loose under his weight and he landed on the gravel below with what I suppose I may as well call a sickening thud and an oath more suitable to the Sergeants’ Mess than to his own station in life.
Sonia left off shrieking, pulled a rumpled sheet over her rumpled charms and started concentrating on tragic expressions and ugly gulping noises. I studied her curiously. It was an act, but then she was a woman, so she wasn’t necessarily acting, if you follow me. I had never before observed the behaviour-pattern of a recent rape-victim (I can’t say rapée, can I – it reminds one of that delicious Rapée Morvandelle that one puts into quiches.) (It’s also a kind of snuff, isn’t it?) nor had I any preconceptions as to how such a victim would react, but somehow I found the performance unsatisfying; suspension of disbelief wouldn’t quite come. However, there was no time to waste. I had no intention, I need scarcely say, of following George and the rapist out of the window: I am a little portly just at present and I was wearing a new and costly mohair suit, but I felt that something should be done and I felt, too, a little de trop in that bedroom.
The Mortdecai Trilogy Page 40
