The Mortdecai Trilogy

by Bonfiglioli, Kyril

  ‘Do you have a portable tape-recorder?’ were his first words.

  ‘Of course I have, who hasn’t? But whatever for?’

  ‘Tell you tonight. After dinner.’ And with that he dived back into the hell-hole. I spent five instructive minutes in the excellent little Agricultural Museum near the mound, marvelling at the monstrous tools the tillers toiled with in the olden days. How they must have sweated, to be sure; it made me feel quite faint.

  When Tichborne re-emerged we rounded up Jock and ‘cased’ the chapels. (‘Cased’, you understand, is a piece of thieves’ cant meaning ‘surveyed with intent to commit a felony’ – but I dare say that you, who must be the sort of person who reads this sort of story, would know that sort of thing already.)

  The earlier chapel – Notre Dame de la Clarté – exhibited a notice saying that it had been ‘recoiled’ by some meddlesome bishop with too much time on his hands. Tichborne explained that this meant sort of re-consecrated and de-Romanized.

  ‘Drat it,’ he added petulantly.

  The Jerusalem Chapel, however, displayed no such advertising matter and Tichborne said that it would do beautifully – almost certainly disused since they closed all the chantry-chapels after the Reformation thing in 1548, he told us.

  ‘Reelly?’ said Jock.

  In the car going home we asked Jock whether it would be practicable to gain access to the chapel and dolmen by night in a clandestine fashion.

  ‘A doddle,’ he replied. ‘Just a doddle. The gate into the grounds isn’t worth opening, you can nip over it easy if your piles are better this week. Sorry, sir.’ (I was startled until I realized that ‘sir’ was meant for Tichborne – then I was a little piqued.) ‘That underground tomb,’ he went on, ‘has got a first-class padlock but the chain to it is no better than the common shit-house variety (beg pardon, sir) and a liddle old pair of wire-cutters will soon sort that out.’

  ‘Ah,’ said Tichborne, ‘but what about that formidable great iron lock to the chapel?’

  Jock made a coarse noise by expelling air from between his closed lips.

  ‘That ain’t a formigal lock,’ he said contemptuously, ‘ ’t’ain’t even a Yale; it’s just big. I could open that bugger with me old …er, I could open that lock with any old bit of wire. No sweat.’

  ‘Jock,’ I said, ‘pray stop the car at the next decent inn or hostelry so that I may buy you a large and toothsome drink. “Thou shalt not muzzle the ox when he stampeth out the corn” is what I say. So did Deuteronomy.’

  ‘XXV; 4,’ agreed Tichborne.

  ‘Reelly,’ said Jock.

  That night, after dinner (I think it was Médaillons de Chevreuil S. Hubert au Purée de Marrons with a saucy little Chambertin on the side, unless it was a Friday, in which case Jock would have gone out to fetch fish and chips) that night, I say, I reminded Fr Tichborne about his interest in portable tape-recorders.

  ‘You were going to explain about portable tape-recorders,’ is how I put it to him.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ he said, ‘I believe I was. Yes, so I was.’

  His childlike eyes flitted about wildly as he sipped at Johanna’s incomparable, inherited brandy: one got the impression that it was not quite his bag, as the children say nowadays.

  ‘I must apologize for this brandy,’ I said, flicking a glance at Johanna. ‘For my part I believe I’d rather have some of that Pastis stuff: could you face it? I daresay there’s some in the house …?’

  A few gollups of Pastis later (it’s really just absinthe without the wormwood) he was relaxed and expansive.

  ‘Do you promise not to laugh?’ were his first words.

  We crossed our hearts.

  ‘Well, two years ago I read a book by a man called Konstantin Raudive. It’s a perfectly respectable book and endorsed by respectable scientists. Raudive claims, indeed proves, that he heard gentle chattering and muttering coming from the unused intervals of tape from his recorder. I had had the same experience but had put it down to the random wireless reception …er, radio?’

  ‘Wireless is fine with me,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, good. Well, as I say, I had thought it was the sort of stray reception that people get from hearing-aids and things but after reading Raudive I naturally tested it and found that even on virgin tape I still got the gentle muttering if it was played through on “record” in silence and at a nil recording level. Like Raudive, I found that if I boosted the gain when playing-back it sounded uncommonly like speech, but with quite strange intonations, odd grammatical sequences, random relevance.’

  Johanna rose, excused herself gracefully and said that she really had to go to bed. She hates long words, although she is very clever. (Why do I persist in entangling myself with clever women when the only ones I find truly adorable are the transcendentally stupid, the ones whose intellects are bounded on the North by the ability to count to nine? Alas, the latter get rarer every day. ‘Il y a des gens qui rougissent d’avoir aimé une femme, le jour qu’ils aperçoivent qu’elle est bête. Ceux-la sont des aliborons vaniteux, faits pour brouter les chardons les plus impurs de la création, ou les faveurs d’un bas-bleu. La bêtise est souvent I’ornement de la beauté; c’est elle qui donne aux yeux cette limpidité morne des étangs noirâtres et ce calme huileux des mers tropicales.’ I forget who wrote that. Probably not Simone Weil.)

  ‘Do go on, Fr Tichborne,’ I said when the good nights were over.

  ‘I say, would you care to drop the “Fr” now?’ he asked. ‘The boys at school call me “Eric” – I can’t imagine why, for it’s not my name, but I quite like it.’

  ‘Please go on, Eric. And pray call me “Charlie”.’

  ‘Thank you. Well, once I got the hang of these odd attempts at communication, I found them quite, well …’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘Interesting,’ he said defiantly. ‘Interesting!’

  Trying, as ever, like Caesar’s wife, to be all things to all men, I tried to help.

  ‘But disturbing?’ I guessed.

  ‘Yes, that too. Certainly that. Disturbing is a good word. You see, I began to recognize voices and to unscramble them and they were all from dead chaps, you see, like my old headmaster and the Principal of my Seminary and people whose books I had read – well, of course I couldn’t recognize their voices but if you hear a chap talking really barbarous Latin with a strong Slav accent and telling you not to wash because it’s a sin of fleshly luxury and then he says his name is Jerome, what can you think?’

  ‘What indeed?’

  ‘Quite. But I felt that I had to go on taping and listening and trying to hear and understand and it got worse.’

  I slid some more Pastis into his glass, added a little water and helped him aim it at his mouth. He wasn’t drunk, I think he was in some sort of private ecstasy, like a menopausal woman thinking about Cassius Clay.

  ‘It got worse?’ I prompted.

  ‘Much worse. Cardinal Manning shouted and shouted at me and seemed to know all about my, er, case; and then someone calling himself Pio Nono kept on saying that he would pray for me but that he couldn’t promise anything and then, worst of all …’ His voice broke.

  ‘Your mother?’ I asked gently.

  ‘Oh, no, she’s always very understanding. It was St Francis. At first I hoped it was Francis of Assisi but he soon put me right: it was St Francis Xavier. He was horrid to me. Horrid. You can have no idea what that old bastard can be like.’

  His eyes were full of tears. Well, of course, I know what to do with drunken nut-cases. You humour them, listen to them, get them really pissed, then put them to bed, first loosening their collars and removing their boots. My only pre-occupation was how to loosen a Roman collar and how to prevent Eric from moistening my landlord’s rather good Empire sofa.

  ‘Look,’ he said suddenly and articulating clearly, ‘would you like to hear? Please?’

  ‘Certainly, certainly; I’ll go and fetch the tape-recorder. Tell you what, let me just freshen up your glass first.’<
br />
  I fetched my rather good tape-recorder, broke open a new sixty-minute blank tape, fed it deftly into the machine and set it ready for action at 3¾″ per second. Eric gazed at the machine in an ambivalent sort of way, as you or I might gaze at the dentist’s drill, which both giveth and taketh away pain. He went on gazing until I sort of shuffled and fidgeted. He looked up at me with a startling, seraphic smile.

  ‘Forgive me,’ he said, ‘I should have told you. All these phenomena seem to be linked to an alpha-rhythm in the brain of around eight to twelve cycles. It seems that people who can do telepathy and telekinesis and thing like that are people who can more or less organize their alpha-waves. Sometimes it can be induced by hypnosis, sometimes it just occurs naturally when one is falling asleep or in a half-aware condition when awakened from sleep too soon; adolescents and menopausal women can often induce it by thinking unclean thoughts with their eyes shut. Mediums who insist on half-darkness and silence and so forth during their parlour-séances are usually, if they’re at all genuine, fumbling for conditions in which they can depress their alpha-waves to the required level, whether they know it or not. I suspect that many “fake” mediums are women who are genuinely receptive at times but do not understand how to set up the conditions properly and so fudge the results when it doesn’t really work.’

  I was a little taken aback. Not much of this made a great deal of sense to me, but it certainly didn’t sound like the ramblings of a drunkard.

  ‘They’ve done a lot of work on this in the Soviet Union,’ he went on, ‘and I must say that it does rather look as though their approach has been rather more intelligent than the Americans. I mean, they feel that things which are clearly outside the laws of science as at present understood cannot be examined by standard scientific methodology. Like trying to weigh neutrons on a grocer’s scales, do you see.’

  ‘That seems reasonable to me,’ I said. ‘I remember saying to one of those psychic/psychologic researchers from a comic new University – Lancaster? – that most poker-players are familiar with that rare and wonderful feeling which occurs perhaps once in a thousand hands, when they know they cannot lose: I told him that I’d had it twice and so strongly that I hadn’t looked at my hand, hadn’t drawn to it, had betted it to the hilt and had not been in the least surprised when I’d won. The researcher-twit’s reaction was to deal me singles from a cold pack of cards, inviting me to guess the colours. My results were nine per cent below random probability, or whatever they call it. That made me a liar in his eyes and him an idiot in mine. I could have told him, had he had the wit to ask, that the necessary conditions were that we should have been playing a real game for several hours, that I should have ingested perhaps a third of a bottle of brandy, that I should have been slightly ahead of my table-stakes by virtue of the ordinary run of cards and that, in short, I should have been in that state of drowsy euphoria where I was effectively asleep in all bodily departments except my card-sense.’

  ‘You couldn’t have put it better!’ cried Eric. ‘All the conditions were there, you see: mild fatigue, mild euphoria, mild depression from the brandy – I’ll bet your alpha-waves were at something very like ten cycles per second.’

  ‘No takers,’ I said.

  ‘Quite. By the way, I’m sorry to say “quite” all the time but much of my work lies amongst Americans and they expect Englishmen to say it.’

  ‘Just so,’ I said.

  ‘Whether these receptions, if that is a useful word, come because of me, or through me, or merely from me, I cannot say,’ he went on. ‘So far, however, like Raudive, I must admit that I have not encountered any words which were in a language I did not know, nor from any sources with which I was not familiar. This might seem to suggest that I am, as it were, the prime mover; but it could just be a communication-problem, don’t you think?’

  I didn’t mean to say ‘quite’ but it seemed to slip out. I poured him some more Pastis and gave him a friendly grin, which probably looked more like a rictus.

  ‘Well,’ I boomed uncertainly, ‘let’s have a shot, shall we?’ He did his gazing act again for a minute or two, then put an arm protectively around the machine and sort of nestled against it as he switched on. He gazed moonily at the revolving tape for five long minutes, then shook his head violently and rewound the tape to the beginning.

  ‘No good?’ I asked cheerfully.

  ‘Can’t say.’ He turned the gain up to about half-strength and pressed the ‘play’ key. The machine began to emit the usual ‘white noise’ and machine noises and the gentle susurrus of his breathing; nothing else. I was embarrassed for him, wished he hadn’t started this nonsense, wondered how I could help him talk his way out of the let-down.

  ‘D’you hear it?’ he asked suddenly.

  ‘Oh, Christ, he really is barmy,’ I thought, making an apologetic grimace at him, as one does to chaps who point out pink elephants in the corners of a room. He turned up the gain – and I heard it. A soft, infinitely distant twittering, then a chuckle and a protracted cackle which rose and fell in an oddly odious way.

  He tinkered with the volume and speed-controls here and there and played with the ‘cue’ and ‘review’ keys until suddenly, rising clear and sweet over a tangle of gibberish, a laughing voice quite clearly said:

  ‘FILTH! Filthy sot! Filthy sot? Filthyfilthy filthyfilthy filthyfilthy,’ on a rising scale which ended with a bat-like shrill which hurt the ears. Eric pressed the ‘pause’ key and looked at me, his eyes brimming with happy tears.

  ‘That’s my mummy,’ he said. ‘She worries about me a lot.’

  There was a time when a remark like that would have given me no trouble: I would have tossed off a rejoinder both witty and respectful, but I am no longer the man I once was. All I could find to say was, ‘Really?’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ he said, ‘she usually comes on before the others start and says something playful.’

  ‘Others?’

  ‘Oh, lots of others. Let’s try.’

  He fiddled with the knobs and things again and, in a little while, isolated a hoarse, gin-soaked voice, choking with passion, which said ‘De profundis clamavt ad te, Domine’ again and again in tones of bitter reproach.

  ‘Not anyone from antiquity,’ said Eric. ‘That’s the sort of Latin that Irish priests still learn in their seminaries today. The speed’s not quite right; he sounds lighter than that if one can hit the exact speed.’

  ‘Oscar Wilde on his death-bed?’ I couldn’t help asking.

  ‘Do you know, you might be right, I really think you might.’

  We did not have much more luck, if that’s a suitable word, from then on. Someone did some peculiarly unpleasant laughing, Eric’s mother came through again in a flurry of animal noises and seemed to accuse him of having practised something which would have brought a blush to the hairy cheeks of old Krafft-Ebing himself (‘She will have her little joke,’ Eric murmured uneasily) and, near the end, a still, small voice delivered a message plainly intended for me, concerning a matter which Eric could not possibly have known about, and with which I do not propose to trouble the reader at this point. Or ever.

  Oh, yes, and whenever we hit one particular speed/volume combination an urbane and friendly voice repeatedly said, ‘No, don’t. Don’t. Not tomorrow. No, I really wouldn’t. Not tomorrow. Don’t, please.’

  ‘All quite fascinating,’ I said heavily when Eric had at last switched everything off. ‘Fascinating. It seems to me, though, that it might not be a good idea to let every Tom, Dick and Harry share this sort of, ah, recondite harmony, perhaps?’

  ‘Goodness, no. I only do it when I’m alone or with people of quite exceptional emotional stability – like yourself, if I may say so.’

  I didn’t – couldn’t – comment on this astonishing assessment of me: I keep my emotional stability and things like that at the bottom of my handkerchief drawer, along with the vibrator and the naughty photographs, as W.H. Auden has probably already said. It was the other part of what
he said that drew my fire.

  ‘Do you mean to say that you sometimes do this sort of thing alone?’ I asked, wonderingly. ‘At night?’

  ‘Goodness, yes. Often. What have I to be afraid of?’

  I didn’t answer that. If he, with his qualifications, didn’t know, it wasn’t my place to tell him. I mean, I wasn’t his bloody Bishop, was I?

  He was smart enough, however, to notice that I was becoming moody and he set himself to the task of amusing me, with some success. I yield to few when it comes to telling dirty jokes but it takes a seminary priest to tell a true Catholic story with the right admixture of shyness and authority. He had this art to such a state of perfection that I recall falling about a good deal.

  Later, he taught me how to make and drink a ‘nose-dive’ – an art little known outside the campus of the University of Southern California, where Eric had once spent a happy semester teaching the well-nourished undergraduate girls there the full inwardness of Verlaine’s Chansons Pour Elle.

  How you drink a ‘nose-dive’ is as follows – you ought to know because it is the only way of gagging down the nastier forms of alcohol, like tequila, pulque, Polish vodka at 149° of proof, paraldehyde and aircraft de-icing fluid. You fill the shot-glass with the desired but normally undrinkable fluid and place the shot-glass inside a high-ball glass, which you then fill, to the level of the shot-glass, with iced orange-juice or some other sharply nourishing fluid. Then you drink it all down as one. The juice, unpolluted with whatever lunatic-soup happens to be in the shot-glass, nevertheless marks its horrors during the progress over your palate. As a bonus, at the end, the adhesion of the inner glass fails and it slides down and bumps you gently on the nose – hence the name of the game. The nose-bumping, I may say, in my experience compels you irresistibly to repeat the process. I have no knowledge of other mixtures but I don’t mind telling you that, practised with Pastis and pineapple-juice, you soon find yourself sitting on the carpet, singing songs you didn’t think you knew the words of.