‘Well I really would like to know how you possibly know so much about your father’s intimate life.’
‘I chanced upon the lady’s locked up diary in the Westminster flat. Brought it to a locksmith and then to a typist. I have the voluminous volume on my bedside table. From time to time on matinée days I had it updated. Possibly the most disgusting document ever penned by a human being in history. Most of it unspeakable even by club after dinner standards. The Marquis de Sade, dear man could have learned something from these pages. I mean among the most mild references, a long long discourse on the amounts of sperm this lady has had discharged into her mouth. And remarking on the quality. Including damn it, the Duke’s. You wouldn’t think a woman could be so contemplative about such an intimately squeamish matter. And at what depth of penetration into that orifice discharge took place. I mean I don’t want to be a prude gentlemen. But there are limits you know.’
‘But you are reading her diary.’
‘Of course I am Kildare. In the interests of my father whom I love dearly. And the cheeky lady informed him that she must remain celibate for six months. And in the next bloody sentence in the diary, she’s picked up a raunchy, her word not mine, female member of the military she’s met in the underwear department of Harrods and took her back to Westminster and had it off with the Naval lady for an entire night. Using bloody appliances including blessed left footer candles I might add, attached to their persons what’s more. I mean that’s morally fraudulent. The old Duke paying her medical and grocery bills. Although the old Duke never made it above Major he is an Army man. And of course she and the Naval lady who went absent without leave, are at it hammer and leather thongs and iron tongs and ruddy priapisms.’
‘But mournful as her infidelity may be, surely isn’t that the lady’s own business.’
‘Of course Rashers or rather Ronald, of course but I haven’t said what my present dilemma is chaps. She’s discovered I’ve copied the diary, and the bloody lady’s now in correspondence with a filthy literature publisher in Paris and threatening to have it published. Word for bloody word. Names included. She wants five thousand quid. And the flat. And the furniture. Including a Gainsborough, two Turners and a Bonvicino. Not to mention the pair of French rouge marble and ormolu candelabra and torcheres by Sormani in the bathing light of which she writes her diary. One does get awfully depressed you know. Damn lawyers’ bills mounting up. I suppose it’s all cheap at the price if we can chuck the lady but it’s the feelings of my father I mind. She doesn’t give a tinker’s curse how she hurts the poor old gentleman. Taunting him. I mean, as genuine as a Duke’s love is capable of being, which is not very, he does at least seem to feel it for this wretched lady. But dear me I do rave on. Of course now the bloody lady is trying to kill the Duke. Made him meet her in Sloane Square, in the freezing cold. Then steps out of a taxi in a sheer evening gown and says she wants to go for a walk to Victoria Station. And the Duke chivalrously removing his coat to put on her. Of course by the time the poor old shivering devil got into the safe warm confines of the Grosvenor Hotel at Victoria Station he was having pneumonia. He must have damn silly well said she’d hear something to her benefit from his lawyers when he popped off, what. I demanded to see her back stage, said what the devil do you mean pushing my old pop into the pond at St James’s. She has these eyes, I don’t know what they did to me but I could not say another word. And the very worst happened of course, I fell in love with her. I proffered an assignation and she said my dear, you’re not the Duke yet, you know. And the damn old goat is still seeing the girl.’
The Mental Marquis’s hands were strangely delicate under their hairy exterior and clearly immensely strong. And somehow sad. One would never think he might have had these mournful occasions concerning his father. Or would protect the old gentlemen so in his dotage. But he does get back on the subject of the actress and the Duke every time the port was passed to him.
‘Of course we never think we ourselves will ever be old men one day, and we won’t of course. Die young that’s my motto. Drink to it, chaps, shall we. Welcome to the club, both of you. Ah we shall have many similar dinners, what. Grow old together, what. Man must have men to talk to you know. Every bloody thing you say to a woman can be taken the wrong way. Used bloody well against you. Damn nuisance in conversation. I’m not suggesting we have to be homosexuals about it but short of that, a man’s company is the most satisfying thing in the world. You run a nice little squadron here, Kildare. Let’s drink to it. And be damned hypocrisy, what.’
After we had all taken a good long pee off the front steps his Lordship did suggest we mount up again on fresh horses and ride the rest of the night away. However after a few miles I did suggest that one’s dinner clothes were freezing me to death and that since the moon was hardly evident we were certain to be killed. Although there was no doubt that it cleared the port from one’s brain. The damn Marquis however insisted we race the stretch up the front park lawn for a fiver, which I lost, the evening now having cost me on top of being a generous host an additional total of fifty five pounds.
‘Thanks Kildare, for the fiver. And I wonder, does one ever seriously contemplate marrying a woman who can’t ride a horse. Damn dilemma.’
I watched his Lordship proceed ahead with Rashers who’d awaited our return, into the library. I reddened the fire embers with a few blows of the bellows. And there was no doubt that one had to regard the Marquis in another light. He seemed to have finer feelings which his bluff and blunt exterior hid. Even though he dredged up a mundane subject which indicated not one penny of my loan of forty pounds had been repaid the Marquis.
‘Now Ronald my dear. Where did my fifty pounds go, would you like to enlarge upon the reason. I’m sure you would. Come come now.’
‘Well as a matter of fact, my dear Marquis it was a horse. The first time The Bug ever lost a race. Which left the bloody streets around Duke, Anne, Dawson and Grafton and Stephen’s Green empty, most having pawned everything decent off their backs. And were left naked all over Dublin.’