The Great Mortdecai Moustache Mystery Page 8

  The Times Concise Atlas opened readily at pages 32/33 and again at 52/53: Central Europe and Western USSR respectively. Not surprising, since the late owner had professed Mod. Slavonic Studies. Feuchtwanger’s Ugly Duchess and Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: they made sense but told nothing. Wodehouse’s Summer Lightning: only proved that she’d had better taste than one would have thought. (Perhaps the fluffy pink piggy-wig was a sort of joke? Incidentally, it was on the bloody bed again; again I dropped it down the stairwell. Memo: tell Turner ‘more dusting and fewer piggy-wigs is what this set needs.’) Back to the books. A highly covetable early edition of Boccaccio with woodcuts: shouldn’t be surprised if it inadvertently crept into my suitcase before I left. A recent Len Deighton thriller, in hardback no less: bedside reading, I supposed. Pinched from a public library but that didn’t signify: lots of otherwise upright citizens believe that pinching books doesn’t count. Last, a Shorter Greek Lexicon of Victorian date and in that hateful binding which antiquarian booksellers call ‘ecclesiastical calf.’ Some long-dead, luxurious undergraduate had told the binder to interleave it and the interleavings showed many a crabbed little notation. No use to me: I only know the first four letters of the Greek alphabet: the ones they mark on exam papers. (I was chiefly familiar with ‘Δ’ or ‘delta.’ That’s the fourth letter, if you care.) As I gave the pages one more riffle before casting it aside my eye was caught with a densely-written interleaf. It was in ball-point. There were two more such pages. The Greek was neither the small, precise script of the sedulous scholar, nor the dashing cursive squiggle of one who writes it freely; it struck me as clear but laboured. Memo: have it looked at. Might be anything.

  I called for Dryden on the way to the SCR and Hall; he told me in sombre tones that he had heard through usually reliable sources that High Table was to be regaled with fricassée of turkey that night. I blenched. He made us restoratives in the shape of a pitcher of Fried Fox, which is gin with both sorts of vermouth. I took the gentle old soul out to dinner at the Luna Caprese in North Parade (so called because it points East and West and isn’t a parade, you might think, but in fact because Charles I had an encampment in those parts). Dryden proved to be a surprisingly deft spaghetti-twirler and, taking a line through this, I asked him how his Ancient Greek was. Once he appreciated that this wasn’t a vulgar joke he vouchsafed that he had no command of that tongue at all. We washed down our rognoni trifoliati and vitello alla Marsala with at least one bottle of something red, then went back to Dryden’s set and made more Fried Foxes and, to be frank, became a trifle whiffled. So whiffled were we that after a second or perhaps third pailful of Fried Fox we had sketched out an absolutely foolproof nineteen-point plan for setting the world to rights in a fortnight: the sort of plan that earnest freshmen dream up after two pints of cider. The first point, I recall, the point upon which the whole grand scheme pivoted, was that Dryden and I should that very night heave a rock through the Junior Dean’s window.

  The Night Porter came upon us crawling on all fours in the Garden Quad searching for rocks which might have been overlooked by officious gardeners and, far from helping us search, implored us to repair to our beds, moving us to tears with his scenario of what the Astronomer Royal would say if we woke him. I fancy he must have helped me to my rooms; indeed, I know it for a fact, because I was in bed when I awoke, you see.

  ‘Awoke’ is perhaps too flimsy a word: I was in fact wrenched from sleep by a frightful hubbub which led me to believe, at first, that the Yale–Harvard Annual Football Match had chosen Bronwen’s study as its venue. My piercing shrieks brought an apologetic Turner into the bedroom; he had assumed, he said, that I was even then at breakfast and had seized the opportunity to do a little hoovering. (Why is it that technology which has put men onto the moon cannot evolve so elementary a device as a silent vacuum-cleaner, or, if it comes to that, a noiseless dish-washer, a hushed food-mixer? I suppose the answer is that women would not buy them: the housewife’s axiom is that work must not only be done but must be heard to be being done and that the more often she can cause her snoozing husband to rise from his armchair like a rocketing pheasant, the more his heart will melt at his helpmeet’s incessant toil on his behalf. Indeed, there’s probably a fortune to be made by the first man to patent a really noisy electrical hair-curler or a rowdy automatic sock-darner. The whistling kettle has shown the way.)

  Setting all that aside for the moment, the simple, two-point plan I outlined to Turner was that first he should give that hoover a decent burial and that second he should bring me a pot of strong tea. Not in that order, though. Anon I heard the tea approach, rattling hideously on a tin tray; I clenched my eyelids so tightly that their muscles must have stood out like iron bands as I groped blindly for the proffered cup. Curiously, I found myself incapable of grasping the handle of the cup with any sureness. Turner coughed.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, but perhaps you’d find it easier if you took your pyjama-trousers off.’ I unclenched one eye so as to glare at the saucy fellow but observed, to my chagrin, that my arms and hands were indeed swathed in pyjamalegs, while a tentative movement of the ankles showed that they, too, had made an equal and opposite mistake when they put themselves to bed.

  ‘Turner,’ I said manfully, ‘I think I ought to make a clean breast of it: to tell the truth I believe I may have been a little worse for wine last night.’

  ‘Is that right, sir?’ he said – incuriously, for thirty-nine years man and boy as a College servant arms a chap against whistling with surprise at such statements.

  ‘Turner, was I sick by any chance?’ He looked around.

  ‘No, sir. Not so far as I can see, sir.’

  ‘Bad luck, Turner,’ I said (for being sick brings a scout a £1 mandatory tip for a few moments’ work to which he is well inured).

  ‘And how is Dr Dryden this morning, eh?’

  ‘Haven’t seen him; he’ll have gone off to Parson’s Pleasure for his bathe before breakfast, never misses.’

  ‘Good God.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Fortified by the rich Indian tea, I made shift to unbed myself by careful degrees and to extricate myself from the gents’ slumberwear. Then I sat with my head in my trembling hands, wishing that it would drop off and put me out of my misery. It did not oblige. After a while I shaved, rested again, dressed after a fashion and considered the tasks which lay before me that day.

  First, unquestionably, a visit to the Buttery. A glance at my watch showed me that it would be open and soon I was picking my way across the lawn to its benign hatch, where Henry, the merry Buttery-hatch custodian, having diagnosed my condition as I wove across the Quad, was already decocting an Uncle Christopher’s Hangover-Repellant, Patents Pending in All Countries. It comprises a pewter pot of the very best bitter, preferably a little on the flat side, which must be swallowed at one draught. If you can keep it down, you see, you feel wonderfully better; if you cannot keep it down, why, you also feel wonderfully better for the stomach-shampoo. Henry watched me narrowly as I gurgled.

  ‘All right, sir?’

  ‘All right, Henry.’ He put away the enamel basin he had held in readiness. I readied myself for the next task of the day: the Dean of Degrees. I ran him to earth in his office, where he was staring with jaundiced eye at the University Statutes. He was an unremarkable man: when you have seen one Dean of Degrees you have seen them all. Deans of Degrees lead simple, undemanding lives; their duties are curious but few. Each Michaelmas Term they lead a crocodile of freshmen to where the Vice-Chancellor hoves; the latter tells them in polished Latin that they are now matriculated into the bosom of the University and had better watch their step. Nine terms later he takes the same young men, or such of them as have stayed the course, to that year’s Vice-Chancellor (one year of Vice-Chancelling is reckoned to be the maximum dose for an adult) and, holding them by the hands (yes, truly) he Supplicates that they be admitted to the Degree of Bachelor and allowed to wear a rabbit-skin hood. Yet nine
more terms later, any of the same now not quite so young men who have clean noses and a clean slate at the Buttery are again led before the latest Vice-Chancellor who courteously removes his ‘square’ or mortar-board, administers another dose of Latin and zaps them gently on the noggin with a Bible, thus entitling them to wear a much richer gown, a red silk hood and the right to vote for the office of Professor of Poetry. During this ceremony it is the embarrassing task of the Senior and Junior Proctors to float up and down the aisle of the Sheldonian so that, theoretically, any Oxford burgess or tradesman can tug at their flowing gowns and forbid the banns, as it were, of any would-be Master of Arts who has flagitiously failed to pay his vintner, tailor or horse-holder.

  The Dean of Degrees presently under advisement was clearly resting after the emotional wracking of last Michaelmas Term and recruiting his strength for next Michaelmas Term. Nor was he of any great help to me. He admitted listlessly that he had given Bronwen a provisional OK to her proposed sabbatical term but he didn’t think she had made any firm arrangements with a Continental university, she hadn’t seemed to have shopped around at the time. He had no knowledge of any extraneous academic grants she might have enjoyed but when I prompted him he sort of remembered that three terms ago he had written a letter for her to some extraordinary American place, declaring that she had a brace of degrees and was in good standing at Scone. Yes, ‘Kleiglight’ and ‘Wichita’ rang a bit of a bell, that would have been the place. As a matter of fact he remembered enclosing a declaration from the Chaplain to the effect that Bronwen was a practising Protestant, which may very well have been the truth for all he knew. I left the care-worn fellow to his onerous task.

  I was a little stronger on the wing by now; I made it to the Library without difficulty and winkled out the Protobibliothecarius or librarian, who is a good egg and considers me to be pretty farm-fresh myself. He hoisted a monstrous tome called The World of Learning onto his desk and quickly snared the entry for the F. Xavier Kleiglight Univ. of S. Wichita, Kansas, USA, for there really was such a place, it seemed. Founded in 1936 and richly endowed by the mourning relict of F.X.K., it offered degree courses in Divinity of the Episcopalian or Protestant flavour (judging by his names, Protestantism must have been old F.X.K.’s third and last shot at salvation) and also had in its gift or advowson some fat post-graduate grants for research at doctoral level into Industrial Glues and Modern European Church History.

  ‘Bizarre, wouldn’t you say?’ I asked.

  ‘Not specially, Charlie. There’s a place in Canada which spends fortunes on Creation-Myths of the Prehistoric Esquimaux.’

  ‘How the other half does live, to be sure. Did you know Bronwen at all well? No, I suppose you wouldn’t. D’you recall her ever asking you for the latest titles concerning Industrial Glues? No? Then it must be the Mod. Ch. Hist. Bizarre, as I said. See you at dinner tonight?’

  ‘Not bleeding likely; they can’t make me swill that garbage, I’ve got a Doctor’s Certificate for duodeno-something or other.’

  ‘And, of course, you’re a Papist, aren’t you, so they can’t rope you into Chapel, either. I dunno, some of you dons seem to live for pleasure alone. Come and have a drink, it’s nearly lunch-time.’

  A brace of drinks later I felt sturdy enough to face luncheon: even Scone’s College Chef, I reasoned, could hardly spoil Dover Sole and pommes frites. I proved to be wrong, of course – when, when will I ever learn?

  XII

  Dealer’s choice: seven-card stud

  When fortune gave good wind unto my sail,

  Lo! Then of friends I had no little number:

  But a squall arose and fortune ’gan to fail;

  Adversity blew my friends and me asunder;

  Amidst the sea, my ship was all too shaken,

  And I of friends and fortune clean forsaken.

  Crammed with distressful fish and chips, I collected the Shorter Greek Lexicon from my rooms, gargled with a little Scotch in case of salmonella or other food-poisoning and went in search of the Gulbenkian Professor of Greek Palaeography and Ancient History who happened – indeed, probably still happens – to be a Fellow of Scone. I had telephoned; he had admitted that he was in and that he could spare me ten measured minutes of his valuable time.

  Now, setting aside such trumpery gewgaws as bank managers wear on their smirking lips, there are two major classes of moustache that need to be taken into consideration: the dashing, trendy, vigorous kind such as I was fostering, and the grand old timeless classics; massive, drooping patriarchs which have seen the clean-shaven fads come and go ‘in patient, calm disdain – They watched the Legions thunder past, then sank in sleep again.’ Professor Weiss’s face was inhabited by a moustache of the second category, except that no Legion, not even Ulpia Victrix itself, could have thundered through it without the use of machetes, pangas and other jungle-clearing implements whose names I forget. From the outset it made it clear that it was not going to take any impudence from my young upstart; it rustled threateningly against Weiss’s very collar until my amateur orchidarium wilted into a sulky sort of deference, then it whiffled benignly as if to say ‘persevere, young feller-me-lad, soak up all your nice, nourishing soup and one day you, too, will be a credit to your sire and this University.’

  Precedence, protocol and pecking-order thus established, he parted the rich draperies from his mouth (the ungarnished mouth disappointed; it was pink and petite, quite unworthy of its princely pelmet) and uttered.

  ‘Ah,’ he said with his mouth. ‘You are Mr er ah um, what?’

  ‘Just so, Professor. Very kind of you to remember me.’

  ‘And you were up here at Scone, were you not, in er ah um …?’

  ‘Yes.’ He pretended to make a note in his journal and, who knows, perhaps he did. I warned myself not to take him too readily for a cloth-head, bluffing his way through academic life by virtue of a moustache; there are people of a certain kind of brilliance who choose to defend themselves against merely clever people by radiating daftness. Brilliant people never have to worry about their abilities: it is not the kind of thing we – sorry, I mean they – ever question. Daft people are like them in this respect. It is only the merely clever chaps like you and me who munch our fingernails to the quick, agonising over their placing in the 1 to 10 scale from ‘smart-arse’ to ‘Vice-Presidential material’ (that’s reading downwards, of course, from top to bottom).

  ‘You’ll take a glass of sherry, won’t you, Mr er ah um, eh?’

  I agreed that his forecast was correct. He rummaged for sherry without enthusiasm and unabashedly confessed – or pretended – that he could find none. I fumbled with my cigarettes and lighter in an enquiring sort of way but this was met with a flat glare of such malevolence that cigarette-case and lighter seemed to leap back into my pocket as though of their own volition. He then proceeded to ignite, with every sign of extravagant relish, the foulest-smelling pipe I have ever sat across a desk from, and huffed and chuffed vile fumes across at me so vehemently that his great moustache cracked and snapped like a ring-master’s whip. I am a man of much humility, as you must by now have guessed, and in my time I have been put down by far more hateful Professors of Greek Palaeography – aye, and of Ancient History, too – but I confess I was ashamed that my moustache should have had to witness such a second humiliation.

  The incivilities completed, I proffered the interleaved Lexicon, which he accepted between knobbly fingertips as though it were the corpse of some small, inedible animal, rich in fleas.

  ‘Beastly binding,’ he grunted after a while, ‘what they used to call “ecclesiastical calf,” blind-tooled, with Oxford corners.’ Well, I knew that. ‘Printed at Leyden in 1845; bound and interleaved in Oxford some thirty years later.’ I could have told him that, too, for I read print like a native, but I held my tongue. ‘Not of the least value to a collector, nor as a reference work, but I daresay a bookseller would give you a pound for it.’ I went on holding the tongue but the effort was great.

/>   You must have come across those sad smokers who put their spent matches back into the box. They rationalise about it, mouthing rare words like ‘ecology’ but any psychiatrist worth his gestalt knows jolly well that it is a symbolic hoarding of the faeces and that the hoarder, fumbling amongst the grotty detritus to find an unused match, derives an intense if unconscious pleasure from this dirtying of the fingers. ‘Ah, well,’ is what I say, or sometimes, ‘whatever turns you on,’ but what I am saying now is that Prof. Weiss, as he began to leaf through the book, gave a wonderful imitation of a cleanly smoker who has borrowed a box of matches from one of the above.

  ‘Hmmm,’ he hmmmed, after conning a few of the early interleaves, ‘hmmm. Evidently some diligent but unpromising young Grecian wrote these postilla, the sort of boy who used to come here to Scone because he was afraid of Balliol. I’ve seen hundreds of them, hundreds; at the end of their first term I usually advise them to change over to one of these new, bogus disciplines. English Literature or Sociology or something of that sort.’ He closed the book with a snap.

  ‘Well, good day to you, Mr er ah um; won’t you have a little more wine? No? Must you go? Can’t you stay? Such a shame; I was enjoying our little chat.’

  Look, I really do have the greatest respect for my elders and academic betters; reverentia is meat and drink to me. On the other hand, I had eaten quite enough shit for one afternoon, especially since I was committed to dining at High Table later on.