Кирил Бонфильоли - The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery

From An Envoi to a Projected Work

And patiently, O Reader, I thee pray,

Take in good part this work as it is meant,

And grieve thee not with ought that I shall say,

Since with good will this book abroad is sent,

To tell men how in youth I did assay

What love did mean and now I it repent:

That musing me my friends might well beware.

And keep them free from all such pain and care.

‘I wooden, Mr Charlie, I reelly wooden,’ mumbled Jock, moodily gnashing his toothsome way through the bunch of grapes he had brought me. ‘I mean, you know the aggro you’re going to get if you try to complete that projeck, if you’ll pardon the expression.’

I was, you see, in what Jock calls ‘horse-piddle’ – what you and I would call ‘King Edward the Fifth’s Hospital for Officers Who Cannot Afford the London Clinic’ – and was recovering from a trifling operation which is none of your business. (Oh, very well, if you must know, I had been there to have a cluster of haemorrhoids beheaded, which was one good reason for having no appetite for grapes. The other good reason was that I don’t happen to like grapes, a fact well known to Jock.)

Perhaps I should explain that I have a Fully Comprehensive Accident Protection Policy which guarantees that if anyone even looks as though he’s going to be horrid to me he will be cured of all known disease. Permanently. The Policy’s name is Jock.

Jock, in short, is my large, dangerous, one-fanged, one-eyed thug: we art-dealers need to keep a thug, you understand, although it isn’t always easy to persuade HM’s Commissioners for Inland Revenue that it’s a necessary expense. Jock is the best thug that money can buy; he’s quality all through, slice him where you will. When I decided to conserve my energy resources – who’d want to become fossil fuel? – and gave up art-dealing in favour of matrimony I tried to pay him off but he just sort of stayed on and took to calling himself a manservant. He is not quite sane and never quite sober but he can still pop out seven streetlights with nine shots from his old Luger while ramming his monstrous motorbike through heavy after-theatre traffic. I’ve seen him do it. As a matter of fact, I was on the pillion-seat at the time, whimpering promises to God that if He got me home safely I would never tell another lie. God kept His part of the deal, but God isn’t an art-dealer, is He? (Don’t answer that.)

Ah yes, well, I’ve introduced both God and Jock so I’d better start tidily by putting on record that my name is The Honble. Charlie Mortdecai. I was actually christened Charlie; I suspect that my mother was getting at my father in some unsubtle way, she was like that. He wouldn’t have noticed, he wasn’t good at jokes.

Yes, well again, there I was, in my valuable hospital bed, tossing back little shots of Chivas Regal from the bottle-cap while Jock tore juicily at the bunch of grapes already cited, which had camouflaged the top of the paper bag in which he had brought me the booze. Pray do not think that Jock had no stomach for the Scotch; he, too, dearly loves such fluids but would have been shocked if I had offered him a suck at the Chivas R., for he knows his station in life. He was, in any case, more concerned to persuade me from the perilous venture upon which I was embarking.

‘Honestly, Mr Charlie,’ he pleaded on, ‘don’t do it, I beg of you. It’s bloody madness, you know it is.’ He paced to the open window, sprayed a moody mouthful of grape-stones into the welkin and returned to my well-smoothed counterpane. ‘Playing with bleeding fire, that’s what you’re doing, Mr Charlie.’

‘Enough, Jock!’ I commanded, raising a commanding head. ‘I am touched by your concern for my personal safety but my mind is made up. I shall go through with this, come what may. I must strike a blow for the free world while I still have my strength.’ My commanding hand strayed to the subject of our debate: the already thriving thicket of vegetation which sprouted from the Mortdecai upper lip.

My ravishing wife, Johanna, you see, had taken the opportunity of my hospitalisation to nip across the Atlantic Ocean and pay a call on her terrifying old mama, the Gräfin or gryphon Grettheim and I too had seized an opportunity; viz., to grow a moustache, thus filling a much-needed gap between the southern end of the nose and the northern ditto of the mouth. It was prospering well although it tickled a bit – indeed, no fewer than two of the nurses had assured me that it tickled quite deliciously. I had often longed for such a thing – yes, the moustache – and was devoting all my energies to it. Meditation and a high-protein diet work best, you may take my word for it.

‘Well, Mr Charlie, I daresay you know best,’ said Jock in glum tones which belied his words, ‘but I wooden be in your shoes for anythink when Madam gets back.’ With that he pulled the now stripped stalk of the grape-bunch from his pursed lips, looking for all the world like some conjurer extracting a small Christmas tree from a rabbit’s backside, and rose gloomily to his great feet. I raised a brace of benign fingers and promised that no blame would attach to him; I would assure Johanna that he had fought the good fight.

‘By the way, Jock, was it you who kindly bought those delicious grapes for me?’

‘Yeah. ’Course. Well, I put them on your account at Fortnum’s, didden I? They weren’t half expensive. Very tasty though.’

‘Yes. They sounded tasty indeed.’

‘Well, I got to go, Mr Charlie, got a mate coming round to play dominoes.’

‘Splendid, it will keep you off the streets. Enjoy yourself. Having any trouble with the new lock on the liquor-cupboard?’

He left in a huffed sort of way. I fished out the pocket-mirror to see what progress the moustache had made since lunch-time, then rang for a nurse.

During my last few days in hospital nothing much happened. Jock continued to smuggle in my whisky-ration; young nurses sneaked into my room for a tot when the senior nurses weren’t administering shaming enemas; the Senior Consultant – a chum of mine – popped into the room to scrounge a tot himself (poor underpaid wretch, he probably had to drink cooking-sherry at home) and to urge me to give up drinking and smoking lest I should contract Art-Dealer’s Elbow; birds jabbered outside the window at dawn (when do the bloody things sleep ?); and colour television made the evenings hideous. I applied for permission to have my canary brought in but it was rated a health-hazard, so my studious brain applied itself to nurse-watching. I soon had them scientifically classified by plumage, habitat and ethology, as follows: the elderly, ugly ones in moult, whose only pleasure was the administration of cruel enemas to the root of the trouble, so to say, and who sniffed like aunts when they caught a whiff of whisky on my breath; the Roman Catholic ones whose characteristic cry was ‘You may stop that at once or I’ll tell Sister;’ the very brightly-plumaged ones who chirruped ‘Ooh, you are awful;’ and the almost-pretty ones who only said ‘Oooh!’