Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

He took these delicate hints and the nightcap and soon we were toddling up to our respective beds, as sober as a judge. (You will note that I speak of only one judge; i.e. we shared one unit of judicial sobriety between the two of us.) Normally I would have urged such a guest to stay up until dawn, irrigating him with many an intoxicant and perhaps recouping my overheads by winning a few bob off him at gin rummy but I was by now concerned for Dryden’s health: he is no longer the don he was, however keen his mental powers remain.

(Nor would I have you think that I am one of those who sneer at senescence: why should I admire the astronaut whose mind has just learnt to conform to the mouse-maze pattern loosely called ‘thought’ and who assures us that the moon is knee-deep in dust and nothing else, yet scoff at the man sixty years older who has begun to discard the mass of mouldering luggage we call ‘facts’ and says ‘I don’t believe a bloody word of it’? Put it like this: if you were the Man in the Moon, and a spaceship – perhaps the hundredth such intrusion in the last millennium – clumped down on your territory, would you put yourself out to go and greet the idiots and meekly accept the regulation Hershey bar? If your territory happened to consist of valuable green cheese, wouldn’t you arrange for a few feet of dust to be strewn over it? I’m not saying I’m necessarily right, mind; I’m just saying that explorers are usually quite as bad at their jobs as most people are. We still call a certain marsupial the Kangaroo because an early explorer asked an aborigine what the beast was called and the aborigine said ‘ kang a run ,’ which means ‘buggered if I know, mate’ or, in some dialects, ‘I’m a stranger here meself.’)

That parenthesis was really so that I could put off having to relate the gruesome incident which happened that night, an incident which scarred me as deeply as any haemorrhoidectomy. I was, you see, in my Village Squire mood again and was certain that this time I would Have My Way because Johanna, when she has just separated a few bridge-playing friends from their hard-earned trading-stamps, becomes suffused with marital affection, mere putty in my hands. I play on her as on a stringed instrument: it’s something to do with bodily chemistry and red corpuscles, I believe. So, slipping on a suit of silken pyjamas and checking that all my own lance-corpuscles were on parade with bayonets fixed, I sauntered to the communicating door and rapped on it in a masterful way.

‘Hmmmm?’ she murmured in a mistressful, languorous way.

‘Open the door, O moon of my delight,’ I commanded, my voice husky with unslaked lust. ‘I have come to carry you off on my milk-white stallion into the burning desert and Work My Will on you under the tropic stars. A groundsheet will be provided of course, for I know you are sensitive to sand in your, er, shoes. At first you may find the saddle-bow uncomfortable but you will soon embrace Islam, I swear it by the Beard of the Prophet!’ (That sort of approach rarely fails to please.)

‘Oh, Charlie, dearest, can it be …?’

‘Yes,’ I said in an even huskier voice this time because by now the corpuscles had broken ranks and were advancing in skirmishing order, their Tommy-guns at the High Port.

‘… Can it be that our hearts beat as one, that we are twin souls?’ Her voice was tremulous with womanly submission. I thought about the question.

‘On the whole, I’d say “yes.” ’

‘Oh my sheikh! My instant, vanilla-flavoured milk-sheikh! You are trying to tell me that you have scimitared off that Moustache of the Prophet, aren’t you?’

‘Er, well, not exactly. But I have rinsed away every trace of Pomade Hongroise and it is now a silken Perfumed Garden, redolent of Secret du Désert ; you will learn to love it.’

A great silence fell.

‘Johanna?’

Silence continued to fall.

‘Look, Johanna, you know jolly well that you are the tree upon which hangs the fruit of my life. This is your own, personalised, sanitised Sheikh of Araby who seeks admission to your tent. You thwart me at your peril.’

‘Get lost, Charlie Mortdecai. Go stuff a mattress with that thing. The moustache, I mean.’

If you are unclear about the precise meaning of the word ‘aghast’ you should consult an up-to-date Illustrated Dictionary, where you will find an artist’s impression of a rejected husband with his left earhole glued to a keyhole. I considered asking her, in suitably strangled tones, whether she wanted me to beg on my knees but I realised that I already was on my knees – one cannot cajole through keyholes in a standing posture – and pretty soppy I must have looked, too. Well-nourished husbands in early middle age and silk pyjamas are not seen at their best when kneeling and pleading at their wives’ keyholes, especially when viewed from a southerly aspect. I pulled myself together, made one last onset.

‘Johanna,’ I onset, ‘you cannot deny that you are the wife of my bosom; you probably have a certificate to prove it, sewn into your stays. Shall the frail barque of our wedded bliss be shipwrecked on so small a reef as this scrap of shy moustache?’

‘Yes,’ she cried crisply. ‘And it is no reef upon which the frail barque you speak of is foundering, the frail barque is becalmed in the doldrums of a Sargasso Sea of suppurating seaweed. If you choose to walk through life with streamers of Giant Kelp trailing from every nostril, well, that is a matter for you and your God to decide. What I have decided is that this bed is not wide enough for the three of us: that thing has come between us. I have been an indulgent wife; your Kermit the Frog is always welcome in my bath and your teddy bear has spent many a night under my pillow, beside my nightdress, but a line must be drawn somewhere and pot-plants are where I draw it; they have no place in the nuptial couch.’

I rose stiffly to my feet, for the draught through the keyhole was bitter. I did not vouchsafe a ‘goodnight’ for I knew it would only elicit another stinging ‘yes.’ As I crept into my narrow bed and reached for the latest edition of Playboy , I was reminded that Sir Preston Potter’s immortal beaver was dubbed ‘Love-in-Idleness’ by the Master himself. I began to see the inwardness of that sobriquet.

Some officious early bird roused me from fitful slumber with its bellow of triumph at having lassoed a laggardly worm. (Try telling worms about the merits of early rising.) Billowy-bosomed Sleep, whom I love almost as much as twelve-year-old whisky, would not return, so I set myself to musing on the problems which had to be faced that day. I tabulate these, for my mind is tidy although my soul is a mess.

Johanna’s proud spirit must be quelled; she must be brought to heel.

Since force majeure seemed unlikely to prevail (that knee of hers stings cruelly), the best course, surely, was to prove to her that the moustache of contention was not a mere toy but a precision scientific instrument: a thing of worth, a moustache with a mission.

Setting all that aside for the nonce, it was imperative to think of some way of gift-wrapping the ultimate ‘NO’ which I proposed to issue to Dryden as soon as he had crunched up his Rice Krispies, his kippers and his richly buttered toast. This problem had priority, for if my presentation of the ‘NO’ was at all fumbled I would receive a reproachful stare from Dryden, carrying all the weight of vicarious stares from the Warden and Fellows of Scone College. Reproachful stares of that calibre are hell on the well-being of chaps recovering from minor surgery: my snip-cock or surgeon had specifically warned me to avoid such stares.