The Mortdecai Trilogy (29 page)

Under my breath I muttered a short word concerning the hidden attributes of aunts.

‘Cheer up, Mortdecai,’ roared the Commandant, ‘you’re only here for three weeks and – only the first twenty days are painful!’ She must have got that one out of the
Beano
comic.

‘Ha ha,’ I said politely. ‘Goodnight, er, Madam.’

‘Goodnight … oh, wait a sec –
catch!
’ and with this she threw a blotting-pad towards me. Well, I wasn’t born yesterday, as I have often freely admitted. I let it fall at my feet, making no attempt to catch it, and I had the Airweight out and pointing at her equator before she had even begun to haul out her old Webley.

‘Oh, jolly good, Mortdecai,’ she crowed, ‘oh full marks!’

‘Old stuff,’ I said, closing the door behind me.

The only nice thing that happened to me that day was two minutes later, that night. No one was in my bedroom: no sacrificial rams, no half-assed Amazons hoping to sublimate their castration-complexes by boffing me on the head or other soft, vulnerable parts. Someone had been there, all right, because my suitcase had been unlocked – I had expected that, for any school-boy, indeed, any airport luggage-handler can open the ordinary suitcase in a trice, using only a set of those feeler-gauges which you can buy at any garage. I was unconcerned, for the smaller suitcase is made of sterner stuff: it has a combination lock with three cylinders, each bearing ten numbers. I cannot say off-hand how many permutations this affords but I would guess that it would take the average chambermaid something like a million years to hit upon the right one. Even your average chamber maid does not have that kind of time to spare unless she is exceptionally ugly and there are no tired business-men in the hotel.

‘BAD, Mortdecai,’ quacked the loudspeaker as I drew a pair of pyjamas from the larger suitcase, ‘
bad
. Lesson Four.’

‘
Three
,’ I snapped.

‘No, four. Never leave incriminating matter in easily-opened luggage.’ I allowed myself a smug smirk.

‘Anything incrim …, that is to say,
private
, is in the other, smaller suitcase.’

‘The other, smaller suitcase was the suitcase I meant,’ said the loudspeaker. I tried the smaller, unopenable suitcase. It, too, was unlocked. As I gaped the hated voice squawked out again.

‘Our research has shown us that people in middle life find it difficult to memorize random numbers; they tend to utilize numbers which they are unlikely to forget. If you must set your lock to the numbers of your birthday – 30th of the 9th, right? –
then never tell the date of your birthday to people like Kitty.
That
was Lesson Three.’

I muttered something obscure.

‘What you suggest, Mortdecai, I have tried once or twice. It gave me little or no pleasure.’

‘I’m leaving,’ I said flatly. ‘Now.’

‘Ah, yes, well, that’s not really awfully easy: all students’ bedrooms are automatically time-locked and cannot possibly be re-opened until
reveille
. No, please don’t look at the window, don’t; the grounds are full of Fiona’s Dobermann Pinschers and the Dobermanns are full of blood-lust. You’d have to shoot an awful lot of them before you even got near the electrified fence and Fiona would be
cross
if you hurt even one of them. She lives for those doggies. She’s a sweet child but her temper is ungovernable and she will insist on carrying that silly old sawn-off shotgun.’

I began to understand that the loudspeaker was trying to tell me something. I sat on the edge of the bed, for I always fume better in a seated posture. How, I asked myself, had the old she-butch known that I had been casting wistful looks at the window? My eye fell upon the big looking-glass which commanded both my bed and the entrance to the bathroom. I snapped out the light, stole to the mirror, flattened my nose against it. Sure enough, there was a faint glow to be discerned; the unmistakable glow of a cigarette being puffed upon by an ageing Girl Guide. It was the work of a moment to find my First Aid Kit, to tape a First Field Dressing across the mirror and to switch the light on again.

‘Oh,
well
done, Mortdecai, there’s good stuff in you after all.’ said the loudspeaker. ‘That was going to be Lesson Five, after the girls had watched you get into your sleeping-suit, ho ho.’

I did not deign to answer but marched into the bathroom to ply an angry toothbrush and conceal one or two trifling matters which had not been in either suitcase. On the bathroom mirror a message was scrawled in lipstick: ‘
PLEASE DO NOT HIDE THINGS IN THE LAVATORY CISTERN: IT ONLY MAKES WORK FOR THE PLUMBER
.’

Huddled in my comfortless bed, I made shift to study the thinnest of my lesson-brochures: the one entitled
Mastering Five
Simple Ways of Suicide
, for this seemed to fall in with my mood at the time. I was shuddering my way through the passage about how to bite through the large blood-vessel at the base of the tongue and breathe in the resultant blood until asphyxia supervened, when the lights went out.

‘Soddem,’ I said to myself, composing myself to sleep.

Comrades, leave me here a little, while as yet ’tis early morn:
Leave me here, and when you want me, sound upon your bugle horn.

 

Locksley Hall

 

Towards morning, in that half-awakened state when the worst and best dreams come, my repose was marred by hideous visions of female dominators: Catherine the Great, Mrs Bandaranaike, the Erinyes, Mrs Indira Gandhi, Leila Khaled, Ulrike Meinhof, Marion Coyle, Fusako Shigenobu, the Valkyries, Eleanor Roosevelt, Ermyntrude of the Bloody Sword, Mrs Golda Meir, Carrie Nation, the Empress Livia … all trooped before my inward eye, gibbering and cursing and waving their blood-boltered hands, red to the elbows. I was bracing myself to receive comfort from the vision of Mrs Margaret Thatcher, for I have ever been a staunch Tory, when to my delighted relief I was aroused into full wakefulness by a whirr and a clunk from the time-lock on my door.

‘Wakey wakey, Mortdecai,’ cackled the hateful loud-speaker. ‘Three minutes for a shower, one for brushing teeth, two for shaving. Draw a tracksuit from the Quartermaster in eight minutes, be at the Gym in ten. Any questions?’

‘Tea?’ I questioned feebly.

‘No, Mortdecai; PT. Do you a power of good. You can skip it if you like but the only entrance to the breakfast-hall is through the Gym.’

PT was hell. People made me prance absurdly, climb up and down wall-bars, hurl myself at hateful vaulting-horses and try to do press-ups. Then they threw monstrous medicine-balls at me. I panted and groaned my way through it until a bell rang and we all trooped into the showers. They were communal, unsegregated showers. Kitty twinkled at me as she soaped her luggage-like carcass and the younger girls played
pranks
on me.

Breakfast, on the other hand, was unrivalled. It was one of those lovely country-house breakfasts where you lift the lids off silver dishes on the sideboard and find eggs and kidneys and chops and bacon and kippers and haddock and kedgeree and fried ham and devilled turkey and scrambled eggs and grilled tomatoes and, when you sit down, there are two sorts of tea as well as coffee and jam and three sorts of marmalade and people keep bringing you more and more hot toast. I ate heartily for, although I do not love such things, I knew that I must keep my strength up, you see.

‘This is your last time to sit at the head of the table beside me,’ said the Commandant. I made rueful noises, muffled by the piece of toast (laden with that black, chunky marmalade which Oxford makes so well) which I was gnashing. ‘Yes,’ she went on, ‘another guest will arrive before luncheon and it is the privilege of the latest-arrived to sit on my right hand, naturally.’ I opened my mouth to make the kind of joke that chaps like me make but closed it again.

‘Quite understand,’ I gurgled, sluicing a recalcitrant shard of toast down with another cup of capital coffee.

‘Ladies!’ she suddenly bellowed – ignoring the weedy males at the table – ‘Ladies. Captain Mortdecai will be reporting to the Armoury in five minutes to shoot-in his new pistol. According to the custom of the College, when he emerges he will be Fair Game for 24 hours.’ People laughed and said ‘hooray’ and things like that, but the piece of toast jolted to a halt on its way down the Mortdecai gizzard.

‘?’ I asked courteously.

‘It means,’ she explained courteously, ‘that from 1010 hours you are Fair Game. It is the custom here with new students, whatever their age, sex or weight. Let me put it like this: it will be open
season on C. Mortdecai from the hour stated. Your fellow students will take all reasonable care to avoid maiming you seriously, for it is all in fun, you see. Some of your predecessors have survived their Fair Game Day with little more than the loss of a tooth or two.’ She gazed at the butter melting into her toast and heaved what might well have been a sigh of regret for happier days, days when no pat of butter durst slink into a piece of toast without written orders signed by herself.

‘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.