7. MARMADUKE'S HONEYMOON

Disaster threatens, and Marmaduke meets an old school friend.

Marmaduke wasn’t too sure about what to do when it came to his honeymoon.

His main problem was the fact that he’d had for most of his life a situation in which men joshed with men, made plans with other men and, occasionally, took themselves to the upstairs toilet for a few minutes of private introspection.

Now he had a wife, a commie at that, a red s**t, a left wing w***e, and he didn’t know what to do with her. Mother had arranged it, and surely she knew her son better than to have lumbered him with a commie?

There was a holiday booked, that much was true, a short break in what was said to be a particular beautiful corner of his home country because time was precious and he didn’t want to waste too much of it with a woman he didn’t particularly like in blasted queues at airports. No: correction, not any woman but a woman he at first had dismissed as an unknown quantity and now hated.

Anyway, a hotel was booked, not on the coast because that’s where Dragona had said she’d love to go, but in the heart of the country and about as far away from the coast as you could get. But there were trees and pastures and hills involved, so it was, he supposed, beautiful.

His mother had arranged this marriage and he hadn’t given much thought to who he was marrying, just that he was going to have a woman hanging off his arm whenever he wanted that sort of decoration. It’s what other men had, women they could call darling and then ignore.

Not that the actual physical contact, woman on arm, particularly appealed to him. It took him back to his school days and rugby scrums when bigger boys than himself embraced him because that was what they had to do in scrummages. He had hated it: the aroma of sweat and other bodily substances, the way he would occasionally feel hands groping his shorts, and yet here he was planning to have the exercise repeated. No scrum and no shorts, admittedly, and the intruding arm would belong to a woman, but it would be akin to the old rugby scrum and it wouldn’t be pleasant.

And to make matters really worse, it was still Dragona driving! He had a car, a Jaguar, and here he was in an electric car being driven by a woman.

Women aren’t safe on the road and anyway cars are supposed to guzzle petrol… the thought went round and round in his head until he thought he might be going mad, especially as the fact they’d gone the fifty miles to their honeymoon hotel without incident, without anyone bashing into them (if they had he was sure it would be her fault) and the only dodgy incident was one involving a fast sports car that had swerved in front of them and Dragona had fought her steering wheel to avoid an accident. It had been her fault, of course. He was sure of that. She was a woman and women couldn’t drive. Their hormones or DNA or something like that wouldn’t let them. His own father (RIP) had told him more than once.

They hadn’t even ended up with a flat battery at that. The least that could have happened to give his sneer an outing was stopping on a motorway with a flat battery! What was the world coming to?

“We’re here,” she told him, pointing to the satnav screen which quite plainly told them they had arrived at their destination.

“I can see that,” he grunted.

“No need for you to be a sour puss! It’s our honeymoon! A few days in which we can behave like irresponsible kids and enjoy ourselves! Be naughty and have fun””

“How can that be fun?” he asked bitterly.

“You wait until you’ve got your jim-jams on!” she teased.

What in the same of goodness are jim-jams? Then he remembered It’s what Colin Fairfax had called his pyjamas at school in the dorm at night.

“What do you think of this pair of jim-jams?” he had asked, flashing a leg cased in florescent green at him.

Damn Colin Fairfax! He kept repeating himself in ancient memories that should have been swept away years ago. He supposed they must have been mates and anyway Colin Fairfax always wore really colourful pyjamas, and Marmaduke squirmed when he remembered how he had sort of envied them.

He’d liked watching those pyjamas, privately, secretly, when nobody could see where his eyes were roaming, though one boy had noticed once and called him names because of it.

“Look at Lauderdale!” he had taunted, “watching his boyfriend in bed! He’s a pervert!”

And the other boys in the dorm had sniggered, though Colin himself had blushed and scowled at him, and pulled an angry face and told him to keep his eyes to himself.

“I wasn’t,” he had protested, knowing he was lying. Colin had known too, and had winked.

So Dragona had mentioned his pyjamas. She was going to see him in his pyjamas! Wasn’t that sort of perverted in itself? And while she was gawping at his pyjamas, what would she be wearing? He struggled back to when he’d been at home. What had his mother worn at night?

He didn’t know. He’d only seen her in a dressing gown or a house coat. She’d been a decent woman and had kept her private night-time couture to herself.

He shook his head and went to the reception desk to ask for their key.

“Mr Lauderdale?” asked the pretty young woman behind the desk.

She had been looking at the guest-list but he thought that she was reacting to his personal fame.

“That’s me,” he said, and then, “with my wife.”

“The honeymoon suite,” nodded the receptionist, “newly weds, I see? Mr Fairfax wanted to know when you arrived. He likes to greet all newly weds on their honeymoon personally. I’ll tell him your here.

Fairfax… there was that name again, chasing him round the planet in absurd fluorescent pyjamas...

A mental image of the school dorm and Colin Fairfax flashed through his mind for the hundredth time recently, and he grabbed hold of Dragona by one hand and virtually tugged her to the lift, which they wouldn’t need because their suite was on the ground floor.

They arrived at a door marked ROMEO AND JULIET and with the number printed on the key tag that he was holding tightly to tell him it was the right room.

He opened the door and they walked in.

For a wedding suite it wasn’t anything special, but there were some chocolates on the bed and a floral tribute in a vase on the desk.

“Humph,” grunted Dragona critically after peering at the flowers. “Plastic! How romantic!”

“There are chocolates for you,” he pointed out as if the world was made brighter by the presence of a small selection of chocolates.

“Two of them. The sort you can get from the pound shop by the kilo!” she exclaimed almost tearfully.

“There’s a separate toilet and shower,” he said encouragingly, peering into the small room that led off their so-called suite.

“I like a bath! In fact, I need one right now!”

What possessed mother to tell me this creature would make a good wife? Not that I know what a good wife is like, though I imagine dad was keen on mum till he sort refuge in death…

“We’ll have to make do while we’re here.” Then he added “Darling” so awkwardly that he might have been calling her something dreadful.

He would have started marvelling at his sudden use of almost romantic language when there was a knock at the door.

“Now who’s that?” he grumbled, returning to form.

“I’ll see,” said Dragona, making sure that he knew who was in charge at this early stage of their marriage and even if the fact that they’d arrived in her own car hadn’t been a huge clue.

She opened the door.

The man standing there had a twisted sort of smile and the kind of moustache that went out of fashion when the fictitious detective Hercule Poirot died.

“Mrs Lauderdale?” he heard the man say.

She nodded. “Only just,” she told him.

“Then let me ask you. Is Marmaduke there? Do say he is and ask him if he remembers me? I’m Colin. Colin Fairfax, and we were at school together… here, take this bottle, it’s a gift from me, a nice fruity red, I own this hotel and we like to greet newly weds with a bottle of something delicious.”

© Peter Rogerson 24.05.22

...