The Mortdecai Trilogy (57 page)

Let us rise up and part; she will not know.
Let us go seaward as the great winds go,
Full of blown sand and foam; what help is here?
There is no help, for all these things are so,
And all the world is bitter as a tear.
And how these things are, though ye strove to show,
She would not know.

 

A Leave-Taking

 

The next month or so was pretty rotten. If your mouth is all wired together, you see, you can’t brush your teeth and if you also catch a cold, as I did, the whole situation becomes squalid beyond belief. Moreover, they had fitted a beastly tube into one nostril and down into my gullet, and it was through this that they fed me nameless, though probably nourishing, pap. Worse, every book I started to read seemed to carry, on the third or fourth page, wonderfully vivid descriptions of gravy soup, oysters, roasted partridges and steak-and-kidney puddings. Whenever I quaked with lust for food, the little thin nurse would clip a bottle on to my nose-tube and fill my poor stomach with the costive pap, at the same time trying to slip an icy bed-pan under my bottom. Naturally, I never put up with this latter indignity: I used to stride – or perhaps totter – to the loo under my own steam, festooned with protesting nurses and with gruel streaming from my nosetube: an awesome sight I dare say.

When I had some strength I found out where Johanna was and used to creep out and visit her. She was pale and looked much older. I couldn’t talk and she didn’t want to. I would sit on the side of her bed and pat her hand a bit. She would pat mine a bit and we would wink at each other in a wan sort of way. It helped. I arranged through Jock for flowers and grapes and things to be sent to her at frequent intervals and she arranged, through Jock, for me to receive boxes of Sullivan’s cigarettes and things like that. The night nurse, who was fat and saucy, contrived to fiddle a straw into my mouth through a gap where a tooth is missing behind my upper left canine; thereafter I was able, each evening, to drink half a bottle of Burgundy, which blunted the edge of misery a little.

The doctors were pleased with my jaw, they said it was mending well but my ear went bad and they had to cut some of it off, and then the rest of it. That was why Johanna was discharged quite a bit earlier than I was.

My homecoming was not jolly; Johanna had known about the ear but she was a bit taken aback when she saw me without it (I’d discharged myself the moment they took the bandages off) and she burst into tears – a thing I’d never seen her do before. I made a few jests about how she had never thought much of my looks anyway and the lop-sided effect might grow on her but she was inconsolable. I shall never understand women. You probably think you do but you’re wrong, you know. They’re not a bit like us.

In the end I took her gently to bed and we lay there hand in hand in the dark so that she could cry without my seeing her eyes get puffy and we listened to
Le Nozze di Figaro
which turned out to be a bad mistake: one forgets that it’s not nearly such a lighthearted piece for people who understand Italian. As Johanna does. When it came to
Dove Sono
she really broke down and wanted to tell me all about what had happened on that dreadful night. This was too much for me, I simply wasn’t up to it; I rushed downstairs and fetched a tray of drinks and we both got a little drunk and then it was better, much better; but we both knew that I had let her down. Again. Well, that’s the price you pay for being a coward. I only wish one could be told exactly how much the instalments are, and when they are likely to fall due. A moral coward, you see, is simply someone who has read the fine print on the back of his Birth Certificate and seen the little clause which says ‘You can’t
win’. He knows from then on that the smart thing to do is to run away from everything and he does so. But he doesn’t have to like it.

‘Jock,’ I said the next morning. ‘Mrs Mortdecai will not be down to breakfast.’ I looked at him levelly. He twigged. His good eye crumpled up into a huge wink, which left the glass one – carelessly inserted – leering up at the cornice. Sure enough, he had read my mind and the eggs and bacon, when they arrived, were mounted on delicious fried bread and accompanied by fried potatoes, all quite counter to Johanna’s ‘Standing Order Concerning Mr Mortdecai’s Waistline’. Well, dash it, why should I persecute my waistline; it’s never done me any harm. Yet.

The last fried potato had captured the last runlet of egg-yolk and was about to home in on the Mortdecai waistline when George and Sam appeared. They looked grave and friendly for I too, now, had suffered, I was a member of the club – but they both looked askance at the marmalade and richly-buttered toast which Jock brought in at that moment. Sam never breakfasts and George believes that breakfast is something that gentlemen eat at a quarter past dawn, not at half-past noon.

I waved them to chairs and offered them richly-buttered toast and marmalade. They glanced at it with ill-concealed longing but refused: they were strong;
strong
.

I knew most of their news: there had been only two rapes in the intervening period and one of those had been a bit suspect: a young Jersey girl who was already a teeny bit pregnant by a fiancé who had absent-mindedly joined a boat going to Australia. The other incident bore all the marks of being ‘one of ours’ but the victim was a hopeless witness, even by female standards, and could add nothing to our dossier.

George and Sam had been patrolling in a desultory and half-hearted way but with no results except that Sam said he had chased a mackintoshed suspect for half a mile but had lost him in the outbuildings of one of George’s tenant-farmers. A search had produced nothing but a pair of bicycle-clips in a disused cow-stable.

Sonia was quite recovered. Violet was much worse: clearly catatonic now, having to be watched night and day.

George was withdrawn and morose; Sam was in a state of suppressed hysteria which I found disturbing: long silences punctuated by random and bitter witticisms of poor quality. Not at all the Sam I had known and loved.

News exhausted, we looked at one another dully.

‘Drinks?’ I asked, dully.

George looked at his wristwatch; Sam opened his mouth and shut it again. I poured drinks. We drank three each, although we had had no luncheon. Johanna joined us. By the hard light of noon she looked older by ten years but her air of command was still there.

‘Well, have you boys made a plan?’ she asked, looking at me, bless her.

We made three apologetic grimaces. Sam started to sketch out a smile but gave up at the attempt. George cleared his throat. We looked at him wearily.

‘Let’s go fishing,’ he said. ‘My bass-boat’s all new-painted and varnished and they’re putting it into the water tomorrow. Do us all good, a bit of a sail. Try for some mackerel, eh?’

Sam and I, by our silences, registered total disapprobation. George on land is merely brigadier-like; at sea his mission seems to be to prove that Captain Bligh was a softy.

‘Oh yes, Charlie, do go!’ cried Johanna. ‘A bit of a sail will do you so much good, and I would adore some fresh mackerels.’

I shifted sulkily in my chair.

‘Or pollocks,’ she added, ‘or basses or breams.
Please
, Charlie?’

‘Oh, very well,’ I said. ‘If Sam’s coming.’

‘Of course,’ said Sam bitterly, ‘of course, of
course
.’

‘Wonderful!’ said Johanna.

‘Nine o’clock, then?’ said George.

‘Dark by that time,’ I said.

‘Got a dinner engagement at eight,’ said Sam.

‘I meant nine a.m.’ said George.

We stared at him. Finally he settled for immediately after luncheon and, later still, agreed that this should be construed as 2.30 p.m.

By an excess of zeal, I was at Ouaisné Bay at three minutes short of 2.30 p.m. Clearly, the thing to do was look in at the pub on the
shore and seek a fortifying drop of this and that. Sam was already there, fortifying himself diligently.

We grunted, then sat for a while in a silence broken only by the steady sip-sipping noise of two born landsmen about to embark on a sixteen-foot boat captained by another landsman with a Nelson-complex. George stamped into the bar and stared rudely at us.

‘Hullo, sailor!’ we cried in unison. We had not expected him to smile, so we were not disappointed.

‘Waiting for you for five minutes,’ he said. ‘Can you tear yourselves away? Got any dunnage?’

Sam’s dunnage consisted of a slim volume of verse wrapped in a plastic bag to keep typhoons out. Mine was a sou-wester and full oilskins (because the meteorologists had predicted calm, sunny weather), one flask each of hot soup, hot coffee and the cheaper sort of Scotch whisky, my sandwich-case and a pot of cold curried potatoes in case of shipwreck or other Acts of God. George carried a battered, professional-looking ditty-bag full, no doubt, of
sensible
things.

The boat, I must say, looked splendid in all its beginning-of-season paint and varnish and carried a huge, new outboard motor. George’s ubiquitous Plumber, who also acts as his waterman, helped us to launch; the new motor started without trouble and we sailed away across little dancing blue waves which stirred even my black heart. There was a light haze which was probably thicker further out, for the doomily-named
La Corbière
(‘The Place of Ravens’ – our friendly neighbourhood lighthouse) was giving out its long, grunting moan every three minutes, like a fat old person straining at the seat. We recked not of it. In no time we were the best part of a mile out and George bade us troll our lines for mackerel. We trolled, if that is the word I want, for half an hour, but to no avail.

Puffins, shags and smews passed overhead, puffing and shagging and doing whatever smews do, but they weren’t interested in that bit of water. Moreover, there were no gulls feeding, and no gulls means no fry and no fry means no mackerel.

‘There are no mackerel here, George,’ I said, ‘moreover, we are going too fast for mackerel; two or three knots would be better.’

‘Nonsense,’ he replied.

I kneaded a piece of Marmite sandwich and a piece of cheese ditto into a lump on a larger hook, added a heavier weight to my
line and almost at once boated a fine big pollock. George glared. I slipped Sam a lum of my mixture and soon he, too, had a good pollock.

‘Keep it up, George,’ I said, ‘this is the perfect speed for pollock.’

‘Mackerel obviously not in yet,’ he grated. ‘Going to bear in a bit, find some broken water and try for bass.’

La Corbière
groaned, muffling deeper groans from Sam and me. There’s nothing we like better than broken water, of course, but we prefer to brave it with a professional boatman at the helm. In we went, though, and found a stretch of the stuff which looked as though it might serve, although it was unpleasantly close to a razor-edged miniature cliff at the shoreline. Worse was to come.

‘Going to step the mast,’ said George; ‘run up a scrap of sail, then we can cut this engine, get a bit of quiet.’

I am nothing of a mariner but this appalled me. I looked at Sam. He looked at me.

‘George,’ said Sam gently, ‘are you certain that’s wise? I mean, isn’t this a lee-shore or something?’

‘Rubbish,’ he said. ‘A shore is only a lee-shore if there’s an on-shore wind. There is no wind at present but at this time of a warm day we can depend upon some light off-shore airs. And I must remind you, Sam, that there can only be one skipper in a boat: disputing an order can
kill
people.’

‘Aye, aye,’ said Sam, in a puzzled, insubordinate voice.

I started to remember that I hadn’t heard
La Corbière
for some minutes, wondered whether a breeze had got up to dissipate the haze, but too late now. George had raised and locked the little mast into its tabernacle and was halfway up it, wrestling with the daft little leg-o’-mutton sail, when the first gust out of the South-East hit us.

Over we went on to our beam-ends, the outboard motor screaming as the screw found no water to bite, George dangling then vanishing overside amidst a raffle of canvas and cordage. In we drove to the murderous rock, beam on, until a fearful gnashing noise told us that the mast had gone and we felt our craft strike – not with a crash but a nasty, mushy sensation. Bubbles came up from where George must be. I seized an oar and fended us off as best I could; Sam grabbed the gutting-knife and slashed and hacked
us free from the raffle of wreckage overside. We caught one glimpse of George, face up, an arm flailing, then the undertow seemed to catch him and he vanished under the boat. He reappeared after a minute, twenty feet to seaward, still with one arm thrashing the water; we ground against the rocks again and again. I fended us off with one oar. The motor coughed and died. Like the fools we were, none of us was wearing a life-jacket, nor was there visible a length of casting-line to throw to George. As I battled with the oar Sam crawled to the little forepeak and rummaged frantically, dragging out our dunnage in search of anything useful; then kneeling, frozen, staring at what he had ripped out of George’s sea-bag. It was a tight ball of cloth, wrapped about with ¼? line. Sam raised this to his nose and made a face of loathing.

‘What the hell are you doing?’ I screamed against the rising noise of wind and sea. He didn’t answer. He undid the parcel: it was a mackintosh, the cuffs and shoulders studded with nails. From it he drew a hideous rubber mask. He didn’t look at me; he wiped his fingers on a thwart and looked to where George had thrashed his way, one-armed, almost to the side of the boat. Sam took the other oar and slowly, as though carrying out some ritual gesture, raised it two-handed high above his head, blade upwards.

George had his good hand on the gunwale now and we could see a great flap of skin hanging from his scalp and the bloody ruin of his crushed arm. He looked at Sam. His hand left the gunwale and his face vanished. Sam threw the oar into the boat, then lurched aft to the motor. I fended off for dear life: our timbers couldn’t take much more punishment from those granite daggers. The engine roared into life; Sam revved it until it screamed and then suddenly we were in open water. I started to bail. Once, looking over my shoulder, I thought I saw something half a furlong away with an arm up-raised, but it was probably only a cormorant.