Deception Read online

  ‘’Oo’s ’ee?’

  ‘The man who wrote the book.’

  ‘’Ee don’t count,’ Mr Buggage said. He leaned sideways in his chair and began to scratch the left cheek of his rump in a slow meditative manner. ‘And I’ll bet ’ee ’asn’t anyway. These travel guides use any Tom, Dick and ’Arry to go round for ’em.’

  ‘Here’s one!’ Miss Tottle cried. ‘Hotel La Mamounia in Marrakech.’

  ‘Where’s that?’

  ‘In Morocco. Just round the top corner of Africa on the left-hand side.’

  ‘Go on then. What does it say about it?’

  ‘It says,’ Miss Tottle read, ‘This was Winston Churchill’s favourite haunt and from his balcony he painted the Atlas sunset time and again.’

  ‘I don’t paint,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘What else does it say?’

  Miss Tottle read on: ‘As the liveried Moorish servant shows you into the tiled and latticed colonnaded court, you step decisively into an illustration of the 1001 Arabian nights …’

  ‘That’s more like it,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘Go on.’

  ‘Your next contact with reality will come when you pay your bill on leaving.’

  ‘That don’t worry us millionaires,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘Let’s go. We’ll leave tomorrow. Call that travel agent right away. First class. We’ll shut the shop for ten days.’

  ‘Don’t you want to do today’s letters?’

  ‘Bugger today’s letters,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘We’re on ’oliday from now on. Get on to that travel agent quick.’ He leaned the other way now and started scratching his right buttock with the fingers of his right hand. Miss Tottle watched him and Mr Buggage saw her watching him but he didn’t care. ‘Call that travel agent,’ he said.

  ‘And I’d better get us some Travellers’ Cheques,’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘Get five thousand quid’s worth. I’ll write the cheque. This one’s on me. Give me a cheque book. Choose the nearest bank. And call that ’otel in wherever it was and ask for the biggest suite they’re got. They’re never booked up when you want the biggest suite.’

  Twenty-four hours later, Mr Buggage and Miss Tottle were sunbathing beside the pool at La Mamounia in Marrakech and they were drinking champagne.

  ‘This is the life,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘Why don’t we retire altogether and buy a grand house in a climate like this?’

  ‘What do we want to retire for?’ Mr Buggage said. ‘We got the best business in London goin’ for us and personally I find that very enjoyable.’

  On the other side of the pool a dozen Moroccan servants were laying out a splendid buffet lunch for the guests. There were enormous cold lobsters and large pink hams and very small roast chickens and several kinds of rice and about ten different salads. A chef was grilling steaks over a charcoal fire. Guests were beginning to get up from deck-chairs and mattresses to mill around the buffet with plates in their hands. Some were in swimsuits, some in light summer clothes, and most had straw hats on their heads. Mr Buggage was watching them. Almost without exception, they were English. They were the very rich English, smooth, well mannered, overweight, loud-voiced and infinitely dull. He had seen them before all around Jamaica and Barbados and places like that. It was evident that quite a few of them knew one another because at home, of course, they moved in the same circles. But whether they knew each other or not, they certainly accepted each other because all of them belonged to the same nameless and exclusive club. Any member of this club could always, by some subtle social alchemy, recognize a fellow member at a glance. Yes, they say to themselves, he’s one of us. She’s one of us. Mr Buggage was not one of them. He was not in the club and he never would be. He was a nouveau and that, regardless of how many millions he had, was unacceptable. He was also overtly vulgar and that was unacceptable, too. The very rich could be just as vulgar as Mr Buggage, or even more so, but they did it in a different way.

  ‘There they are,’ Mr Buggage said, looking across the pool at the guests. ‘Them’s our bread and butter. Every one of ’em’s likely to be a future customer.’

  ‘How right you are,’ Miss Tottle said.

  Mr Buggage, lying on a mattress that was striped in blue, red and green, was propped up on one elbow, staring at the guests. His stomach was bulging out in folds over his swimming-trunks and droplets of sweat were running out of the fatty crevices. Now he shifted his gaze to the recumbent figure of Miss Tottle lying beside him on her own mattress. Miss Tottle’s loaf-of-bread bosom was encased in a strip of scarlet bikini. The bottom half of the bikini was daringly brief and possibly a shade too small and Mr Buggage could see traces of black hair high up on the inside of her thighs.

  ‘We’ll ’ave our lunch, pet, then we’ll go to our room and take a little nap, right?’

  Miss Tottle displayed her sulphurous teeth and nodded her head.

  ‘And after that we’ll do some letters.’

  ‘Letters?’ she cried. ‘I don’t want to do letters! I thought this was going to be a holiday!’

  ‘It is a ’oliday, pet, but I don’t like lettin’ good business go to waste. The ’otel will lend you a typewriter. I already checked on that. And they’re lendin’ me their ’Oo’s ’Oo. Every good ’otel in the world keeps an English ’Oo’s ’Oo. The manager likes to know ’oo’s important so ’ee can kiss their backsides.’

  ‘They won’t find you in it,’ Miss Tottle said, a bit huffy now.

  ‘No,’ Mr Buggage said. ‘I’ll grant you that. But they won’t find many in it that’s got more money’n me neither. In this world, it’s not ’oo you are, my girl. It’s not even ’oo you know. It’s what you got that counts.’

  ‘We’ve never done letters on holiday before,’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘There’s a first time for everything, pet.’

  ‘How can we do letters without newspapers?’

  ‘You know very well English papers always go airmail to places like this. I bought a Times in the foyer when we arrived. It’s actually the same as I was workin’ on in the office yesterday so I done most of my ’omework already. I’m beginning to fancy a piece of that lobster over there. You ever seen bigger lobsters than that?’

  ‘But you’re surely not going to post the letters from here, are you?’ Miss Tottle said.

  ‘Certainly not. We’ll leave ’em undated and date ’em and post ’em as soon as we return. That way we’ll ’ave a nice backlog up our sleeves.’

  Miss Tottle stared at the lobsters on the table across the pool, then at the people milling around, then she reached out and placed a hand on Mr Buggage’s thigh, high up under the bathing-shorts. She began to stroke the hairy thigh. ‘Come on, Billy,’ she said, ‘why don’t we take a break from the letters same as we always do when we’re on hols?’

  ‘You surely don’t want us throwing about a thousand quid away a day, do you?’ Mr Buggage said. ‘And quarter of it yours, don’t forget that.’

  ‘We don’t have the firm’s notepaper and we can’t use hotel paper, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I brought the notepaper,’ Mr Buggage said, triumphant. ‘I got a ’ole box of it. And envelopes.’

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Miss Tottle said. ‘Are you going to fetch me some of that lobster, lover?’

  ‘We’ll go together,’ Mr Buggage said, and he stood up and started waddling round the pool in those almost knee-length bathing-trunks he had bought a couple of years back in Honolulu. They had a pattern of green and yellow and white flowers on them. Miss Tottle got to her feet and followed him.

  Mr Buggage was busy helping himself at the buffet when he heard a man’s voice behind him saying, ‘Fiona, I don’t think you’ve met Mrs Smith-Swithin … and this is Lady Hedgecock.’

  ‘How d’you do’ … ‘How d’you do,’ the voices said.

  Mr Buggage glanced round at the speakers. There was a man and a woman in swimming-clothes and two elderly ladies wearing cotton dresses. Those names, he thought. I’ve heard those names before, I know I have … Smith-Swit