5. MARMADUKE NEEDS LOVE

A single man needs a woman. Full stop.

It was coming to the end of the long summer break, and Marmaduke was feeling disconsolate. It had been hard work, trying to convince the less affluent peasants in his constituency that really they were quite wealthy if only they learned to cook rather than go to restaurants like he did. And why did it matter that the petrol for their cars cost so much. They could always use a bicycle, couldn’t they? Or walk?

His holiday scheme hadn’t worked out and he found that he was responsible for the cost of demolishing what had become anything but a fine Italian villa but a health hazard that was threatening to fall down all on its own and, who knows, maim a few passers by. They’d be poor, so what did it matter? But such nonsense as health and safety as forced by the EU regulations obliged him to pay a small fortune to get the place levelled. The mafia family had known what they were doing when they’d given it to him, he thought. And it was just as well, he thought, that his ultra wealthy father old man had passed away recently, and left him a few millions.

So even though Marmaduke wasn’t bothered about any Italian passers by, he had detected there just might be something missing in his life.

He didn’t have many friends calling on him and he concluded it ust be because he was a single man and they didn’t like to parade scented wives in front of him. It was so considerate of them.

He concluded, after giving it all of two minutes thought, that he needed a woman. A wife. Someone to hang beautifully off his arm when friends called or he was socialising A lovely piece of womanhood to flirt with half a dozen fellow parliamentarians he knew hated women for no better reason than they much preferred other men. And when he wasn’t out and about, it would be good to have a bit of skirt available to cook his meals and wash his boxer shorts when he came back home.

“What I need,” he told himself, “is a wife. What I must do is find a woman. And not any woman. That would never do because she might not understand the finer points in politics if she was,” he shuddered, “a communist. I need a spectacularly beautiful woman who will forgive me all my peccadilloes, not that I have any.”

The most beautiful woman he knew was Nancy Burgoyne. She was maid to one of his colleagues, and that colleague winked a lot when he talked about Nancy in somewhat lurid terms, and it sometimes worried Marmaduke Lauderdale that a married man should do so much winking in such a suggestive and highly erotic manner.

So he set himself out to corner young Nancy. At least, that’s what he mentally called her, stressing the young in his mind. And it wasn’t difficult because suddenly there she was, actually running down the street, her hair drifting behind her like a glorious cloud as she tried to escape from Peregrine Pondlife, her employer, a near neighbour to Marmaduke and fellow member of the same political club, who was chasing her with a packet of condoms in one hand and a whip in the other.

“I say,” grinned Marmaduke as she tried to run pass his front drive (he had several drives, being stinking rich, but the front one gave the better view of what was going on in the world and its private lives). And so he rudely blocked her way, forcing her to screech to a stop.

“What do you want?” she demanded.

He frowned. No sir, no “Mr Marmaduke” or “sir Lauderdale”. No respect whatsoever, just that lovely long hair and her peaches and cream complexion and lips many a man would die for, though not Marmaduke. He’d only ever kissed boys, and that had been only once, when greasy lips had been forced on his at school, and a sherbet and Woodbine flavoured tongue had been forced into his fourteen year old mouth. That whole episode of his life had been so distasteful it had made him quite forget that he quite liked the look of Colin Fairfax Junior when they were in the shower ain the fourth form after Rugby. It had, he’d supposed at the time, been his well toned bottom that he found attractive, and he couldn’t help it. The fault was that bottom, and that bottom alone, and nothing to do with himself.

And there she was. Not a sex mad teenage boy but the reality that was Nancy Burgoyne in all her most charming allure, breathless and until that moment running his way.

“I wondered,” he said as a breathless Peregrine Pondlife panted up to them and tried to look as if he hadn’t been chasing her at all.

“What?” she asked

“Would you like to marry me?” he asked.

“What?” she repeated, “you mean that? Your really think I’d consider anything so damning? You got to be joking! I work for this piece of s**t,” indicating Peregrine Pondlife, “so I have to lower my knickers every so often or he won’t pay me. But actually marry one of you lot? Not in a million years, and that’s a fact!”

“What’s wrong with me?” he asked, and Peregrine Pondlife giggled as if he knew a thousand things wrong with his near neighbour.

“You’re a self-opinionated, overpaid and under-brained prat!” she pronounced, and darted round him to continue her escape from her panting employer.

So that wasn’t ever going to be the answer. He didn’t mind her opinion of him, but he had noticed a strand of something green on one of her teeth, and that put him off her completely.

Peregrine Pondlife cracked the whip he was carrying and grinned at Marmaduke.

“I’ll be using one of these later,” he gloated, holding forth the condoms so that Marmaduke, who wasn’t quite sure what they were for, might see them, “and she might tap me with this,” he added, holding his whip up so that any passer-by could see it and marvel at it.

“A balloon?” Marmaduke grinned, meaning the condom, and before his near neighbour could reply he turned and stomped off.

“I still need a woman in my life,” he told himself. And he was in luck because the unmarried Lady Hortensia Biggleswade strode towards his gate.

“Could you help me?” she asked, “my little pooch hath run away and I’d love to find him,” she said with an unappealing lisp but untainted white teeth.

“What’s he called?” he asked.

“Lover boy,” she replied.

“I mean, the dog?” he queried.

“I told you. Lover boy,” she replied, frowning.

“I didn’t hear you,” he protested.

“My pooch ith called Lover Boy,” she spat at him, and, just in time to stop real confusion, Lover Boy ran up from the direction of the Pondlife residence and jumped into her arms, smelling of freshly roasted beef.

“Oh,” he sighed, “so that’s Lover Boy?”

“You don’t think I meant you, thurely?” she asked, and emitted an almost deafening shriek of laughter that had nothing to do with humour and a lot to do with her opinion of herself.

“Of course not,” he replied dishonestly, and decided not to propose to her.

Which was fortunate because less that ten minutes later his own widowed mother rang his Westminster Chimes doorbell before pushing the door open and marching in.

“Marmaduke, dear, it’s time you got married,” she explained after he offered her a sherry and she refused it in preference to a large gin and small tonic.

“Mother, I’m too busy to do anything of the sort,” he lied.

“Then it’s a good job you’ve got me on the lookout for what’s best for you,” she exclaimed, “and I’ve found a wife for you. You remember Julius Cranbury?

He did and told her he’d always found him odd.

“Sleazy, you mean,” said Mrs Lauderdale, “there’s no doubt about it: he liked ‘em young. So his ex, Dragona Dogsbody, she reverted to her maiden name after the divorce, she was so ashamed of the Cranbury part. Well, she’s free and as lovely as… as … you know her.”

“As lovely as poison,” he completed her analogy.

“Well, I’ve told her she must marry you and move in better circles with you. She might be a bit of a tomboy at heart, and I can honestly ask who isn’t? But she’s got all the right bits and pieces and she scrubs up well. And she won’t let you go astray like you did over that rather expensive Italian adventure you had. So you’re to go out with her on Saturday, I’ve got tickets for you, to the Opera…”

He groaned. “I hate opera,” he complained.

“It’s not to do with you, Marmaduke, but Dragona loves Puccini. And then, three weeks from today, you’re to be at Saint Mockford’s church at ten a.m. sharp. It’s got to be sharp because the Reverend Pike only just managed to fit you in between two funerals. Poor souls, passed away from Covid even though your boss suggested it might all have gone away. So you’d better wear a mask. Dragona will. She’s very firm about that!”

There was only one thing he could say.

“Yes, mother.”

Because she knew that however many obstacles he put in the way of marrying the dreadful Dragona Dogsbody, he would still be there at the church and afterwards, she’d still be hanging from his shoulder like a wet window leather.

© Peter Rogerson 22.05.22

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