4. MARMADUKE ON HOLIDAY.

A fourth silly story about Marmaduke Lauderdale, right wing politician.

Marmaduke Lauderdale had been a Member of Parliament for long enough to need to get away from the sheer face of deceptive politics that were at the centre of his life. It wasn’t that he was above deception because being vaguely crooked was, if he were to be honest, the only thing that he was good at.

It has been recorded elsewhere that he was a rather unpleasant person, and had been since the day he was born. He supposed that his innate nastiness was a quality that particularly suited him when it came to enjoying a highly paid job as an MP as well as being rewarded with a few other little earners on top of that, the other little earners being in either cash or kind.

In particular, he had arranged for a gentleman of Eastern origin to bid for his local and as yet rather unknown football club, and his personal reward was in five figures, which delighted him. On another occasion he made it rather easy for an Italian Mafia family to buy what they looked at as a hideaway in the home counties of England. They might have called it a hideaway, but to him it was a mansion, and in return he was offered the ownership of a tasty villa in northern Italy, no charge.

And it was when domestic politics started to bite him in that he had to give some thought to the people he was supposed to serve, and even needed to do research to assist his own understanding, that he remembered that villa.

The truth of the matter is the Prime Minister had decided that Marmaduke had gone to the wrong school as a boy and couldn’t be edged up the greasy ladder because of that. True, he had been semi-educated at a public school that was so expensive that his father had shuddered when he paid the annual bill, and the experience for the boy Lauderdale had been less than pleasant, especially when one of the older boys had taken a fancy to his bottom. He shuddered again and tried not to remember that. The fact that the same older boy had joined the Church of England on leaving university and was well on his way to becoming a bishop didn’t sit comfortably in that memory. Could it be, he asked himself, that he himself had led the fellow on? No: never!

Anyway, he was temporarily disenchanted with politics and decided to take a holiday in his newly remembered Italian villa. His mind was filled with gorgeous images of extensive grounds and lawns and a house big enough to invite all of his friends along if he felt like it. When he thought that he completely forgot that he didn’t actually have any real friends and his acquaintances were all slimy men who had slithered close to him until they realised they might be on a loser, and had slithered away again.

It was the long summer break when Westminster was quiet and MPs were expected to refresh themselves as well as take care of any outstanding problems raised in their constituencies. He didn’t fancy the outstanding problems, chief of which was the closure of a large factory and its relocation in the Netherlands, a devious way its owners had chosen to circumvent the poor trading atmosphere brought about by the tragic spat with Europe that his Prime Minister had supervised. He really didn’t want to touch that, particularly as his own younger brother had been relocated with the business, he being on his way to becoming its CEO, being too bright for politics himself.

If he’d got more than the fictitious wife he mentioned when it was useful to have a wife then he might have had someone to offload his problems on, but he didn’t, so he booked a flight to Italy and planned to stay in his villa, maybe supervising a few enhancements, until it was time to go back to Westminster.

The trip out was disappointing in that the flight was fully booked yet nobody recognised him. That struck him as being wrong. Surely at least one person our of the many sitting in their seats on a flight to Italy will have watched at least one of the news programmes on television in which he’d contributed a rather dodgy opinion? But no. To all intents and purposes he was anonymous until, and this hurt him, he went to collect his luggage from the carousel and a small boy came up to him and said, “Daddy says you’re a b*****d”.

Although his prize villa was supposed to be only a shortish distance from the airport it took him an age to find it after he hired a small Italian car for the duration of his holiday, and paid in advance.

He had the address on the documents provided by the generous donor of the place, and they even recorded the coordinates, and to help him anticipate what he had been given he’d watched a television film set in an Italian villa, a film in which a small group of friends were spending a holiday under the sun together and in which the TV wartime policeman Foyle had put in an appearance as its owner, and he knew what he expected to find, but there was nothing remotely like it anywhere near the exact spot he decided was where his papers said it should be.

Unless, that is, the broken down what was it? Barn? Cottage? The one that almost marked the spot had something to do with it. Could it be a gatehouse of some sort? A kind of large entrance lobby to what he expected would be extensive grounds manicured to perfection behind it?

In the end he decided to knock on the door just in case someone lived in it, and make his enquiries. He knew less Italian than do most Englishmen who claim to know no Italian, but had an inkling that shouting slowly would get the message across.

He knocked the door, briskly because he was in a hurry, and the door collapsed inwards and fell noisily into a dusty interior.

“Ey, you, Englishman,” came a voice from behind him, a male voice with a rough edge to it. But at least the owner of that voice could recognise an Eglish gentleman when he saw one, and by the tone he used expressed the opinion that the Englishman was his superior.

So he turned round and the man standing there might have lived in his own town back in what he looked on as Blighty and had nothing to do with his preconception of what an Italian countryman might look like. Where was the floppy hat, or was that in France? He shook his head and pulled out one of his papers and pointed at the address on it.

“Where good fellow is this?” he shouted so slowly that he almost forgot where he was in the sentence before he reached the question mark.

The Italian man frowned at him, not enjoying being shouted at by what he decided was an ignorant pig, then indicated the tumbledown building with a broken door.

“This,” he said, “fancy villa!”, and he indicated the name on its door, faded, admittedly, and hard to read seeing that it had fallen flat on the floor in the shadowed inside of the building.

He stared at the door then he stared at the paper in his hand, then he stared at the door again. There was no doubt. This derelict building with its grossly inadequate door was his villa.

The Italian man sauntered off, grinning and muttering about mad Englishmen in very broken English, leaving Marmaduke on his own, surveying the gift he had received in return for smoothing a Mafia godfather’s way to own a British mansion where he could hide until the coast was clear and his enemies all deceased or had forgotten all about him.

“That’s politics for you,” he muttered as he made his way into the wreck of a building, “sod the Italians. Crooks, the lot of them, not at all like a decent British politician. Well, I’d best take a look at my hovel.”

His hovel was about to fall down onto him, or so a second visitor told him in almost perfect English with only a smidgen of an Italian accent.

“This building is condemned,” Marmaduke was told, “and if you enter it we might have to lock you up for your own safety.”

“But I’m a British Member of Parliament!” he exclaimed.

The man grinned back at him. “One of the criminal classes, then!” he said with a wink, “Brexit, eh? Take what you please and to hell with the people, what?”

For once Marmaduke was lost for words, though he did nod his head before he could stop himself.

He decided to spend his holiday back home, and on his way lost an argument with the man who had hired him the car for a couple of weeks and who refused a refund.

“Bloody foreigners,” he grumbled.

© Peter Rogerson 21.05.22

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