Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

‘Splendid. Splendid. Good afternoon, Mr er ah um …’

I opened my mouth to say ‘Mortdecai’ but he was faster on the draw.

‘The Hon. Charlie Strafford van Cleef Mortdecai,’ he mumbled sleepily. ‘Came up in ’50, did you not; scraped through Prelims, spent your second year drinking and wenching, pulled yourself together in your third and managed a respectable Second Class Honours. I ran across one of your contemporaries the other day: Cadbury. He was clever. ’ He pronounced the word as though he rarely used it. ‘Good afternoon again, Mr er ah um.’

I tottered out into the bitter-lemon-coloured sunshine, feeling some three inches shorter. My feet were cold; the book in my hand was furnace-hot. It had taken a dotard to teach me just how hot. The Quadrangle was busy with men who might have been undergraduates, girls who might have been boys, people who might have been anything – who can tell nowadays? I ducked back into Professor Weiss’s staircase (no. XXXIX if you want to know), tucked the incandescent vol. under my waistcoat, counted to one hundred and sauntered forth again, my hands empty, my back stooped, my face contorted with scholarly thought, like a visiting American Professor giving his celebrated impersonation of a visiting American Professor. I was uncomfortably aware of the fact that my anguished nerve-endings were fiercely protruding from every pore and follicle.

I sank into Bronwen’s armchair and coaxed them back inside by inhaling Scotch whisky like a distraught suction-pump. I shut my eyes and turned them on my heart, a tip I got from Childe Roland. It is a well-known medical fact that any Scotch, taken internally, will retract protruding nerve-endings, but only a few specialists are aware that very good Scotch, such as I was administering, is rich in all kinds of rare minerals, congeners and esters; it acts directly on the grey brain-cells, stirring the idle little blighters into frenzied activity. Ever so slowly I became aware of a prickling, formicating kind of sensation inside my skull as synapse after synapse thronged around and in a few minutes I opened the eyes, snapped the fingers and said, ‘Tom Cadbury! The very chap!’ I seized the house-telephone, buzzed the Lodge.

‘Fred,’ I said, ‘where is Mr Cadbury?’

‘Still at All Souls, far as I know, sir.’

‘Try and get him for me, please.’

Ten minutes later I had trousered the Lexicon , along with a pair of Bronwen’s scissors, and was swooping, gowned, towards All Souls. En route, I stopped off at Queen’s where, anonymous in my gown, I cunningly purchased two packets of envelopes emblazoned with the Queen’s College coat of arms. These, too, I pocketed.

I left Queen’s and swiftly made my way to the nearest newsagent to have a bash at one of those new-fangled “Xerox” machines. Photocopies carefully concealed in my innermost breast pocket, I set off to find my old mate, Tom Cadbury.

In the appointed room at All Souls I found a pale-pink, portly, bald chap – amazing how some people age in twenty years or so, isn’t it?

‘Hullo, Charlie,’ he said cheerily, then: ‘Good God, what have you done to your face?’

‘What cheer, young Thomas,’ I rejoined with equal cheeriness, then: ‘Good God, what have you done to your pate? Why the disaster area, the barren plain, the stricken field?’

‘Work and care, old top; care and work.’

‘Precisely what I apply to the upper lip – and with rather more pleasing effect. But more to the point, what are you doing here? I mean, last time I saw you, a mere twenty years ago, you had just penned a stiff letter to the Dean of All Souls, curtly refusing their offer of a Fellowship in no ambiguous terms. I posted the letter for you as I left, if memory does not fail me.’

‘Ah, yes, well, it was all rather strange, almost surreal. You see …’

But it occurs to me that the ensuing dialogue will prove incomprehensible to any reader not steeped in All Souls lore, unless I weigh in with a brief prologue.

All Souls, you must understand, is an odd College, even by Oxford standards of oddness. It was founded five centuries ago by one H. Chichele, who’d made a good thing out of being Archbishop, and it is a fine example of ‘all chiefs and no Injuns’: just a Warden, forty Fellows and four ‘Bible Clerks’ – all of whom had to be kinsmen of the said Archbp., which must have made its first lot of dons something of a mixed bag, for Chichele sprang from what is politely called ‘yeoman stock.’ Their only duty, originally, was to pray for the souls of those killed in Henry V’s French Wars and to be ‘ bene nati, bene vestiti et modice docti ’ – ‘well bred, well dressed and moderately well educated.’ Of course, All Souls has changed with the times a bit, nowadays likely contenders for Fellowships have to be very well docti indeed and skilled in the art of eating cherry pie. Prospective F.’s are asked to dine, you see, and on such occasions the sixth or seventh course is always cherry pie. There is only one way of disposing of the cherry pits which is acceptable at All Souls and it’s a closely-guarded secret. Spitting them over your shoulder, for instance, is practical but not considered bene natus. Now read on.

‘You see …’ Thomas Cadbury was saying, ‘that letter of refusal you so officiously posted for me was really more of a displacement activity than an actual refusal because no-one had offered me any such Fellowship. I’d spent the previous evening with you, if you recall, and had naturally woken up with the sort of hangover which makes you want either to disembowel someone or to write a stiff letter. Since you had not yet appeared that a.m. I had to fall back on the stiff-letter ploy and I must say I felt the better for it until later, when I realised you’d actually posted the blasted thing. Judge of my amazement when, by return of post, I received a letter from the muddle-headed old codger who was Dean here in those days, infinitely regretting my refusal and asking me to show that there were no hard feelings and come and have a bite with him on the following Thursday week. I jolly nearly wrote back to say that I didn’t expect to be hungry on the following Thursday week but that would have been a falsehood, because in those days I was invariably peckish of a Thursday. So I turned up, as bene vestitus as a borrowed dinner-jacket could make me, and had a grand time, browsing and sluicing quite as freely as the phalanx of Fellows around me. Indeed, I recall telling a learned genealogist opposite me that the ninety-third in succession to the Throne was a chap called Browne-Windsor. Then something quite dreadful happened: a plate was slid in front of me groaning under a dashed great slab of pastry laden to the plimsoll-line with cherries!’

‘My dear chap,’ I said, aghast. ‘Tell me, what did you do with the stones?’

‘Well, the sight of the confection sobered me up more than a little, but not enough to make a snap judgement in a matter of that gravity so, pending a decision, I sort of tucked them in my cheeks until I must have looked like an unusually provident chipmunk. Then I felt a sneeze coming on and, well, not to put too fine a point on it, Charlie, I swallowed the bloody things.’

‘My word, Tom,’ I said admiringly, ‘I’d never have thought you had it in you!’

‘You’d have thought so if you’d passed me in the street on my way back; I must have been rattling like a Salvation Army collection-box. But come, I am neglecting you, dear old friend of my youth. Do you still take a little brandy at this time of the afternoon? I’m sure you do, you were ever a steadfast soul. There. Now, I’m sure you aren’t here just to feast your eyes on me – what’s the trouble? Where does it hurt?’