12. MARMADUKE, SUPERSPY

Marmaduke suddenly finds himself mixed up with subterfuge...

It’s very hard to believe that an educated upper class man like Marmaduke Lauderdale got the biggest shock of his life when his wife Dragona told him she was pregnant. He had no idea how that had come about. He was vaguely aware that there is some input from the man when a baby is conceived, but he only had the vaguest idea what that input might be. Here he was, well into his twenties and ignorant of what is loosely called the facts of life.

His main problem was that he didn;t know he was ignorant. He thought he ust surely share the same masculine disinterest as other men everywhere. He was, indeed, out of tocuh with the real world.

At the minor public school that his father had spent a fortune on providing an education for him the society was entirely male except, as has been noted, a brief time when a French mistress held sway in as hort skirt which he, frankly, found embarrassing. But that had only been for a short time and her very presence had disturbed Marmaduke and he was glad when she left.

He knew so little about the females of the species and their physiology that he felt inadequate when he contemplated what might be lurking up that tiny garment when the skirt swished past his desk in the classroom, and so he switched off. Colin Fairfax had filled a gap and had actually kissed him! Or had he? Memory can play such awful tricks. Maybe it was a hope or a dread or something in between the two.

Did reproduction have anything to do with kissing? Maybe, because Dragona was apparently pregnant (the doctor had confirmed this). But it all seemed rather hit-and-miss, and he liked absolute certainties, like one and one equalling two.

Anyway, this needed looking into or he’d be left completely out of any loop that chanced to come his way, and his ignorance would follow him to the grave in the far distant future when he would, hopefully, be geriatric and reproduction no longer mattered like he wished it didn’t matter now.

“But how did this happen?” he asked when he really ought to have been ashamed of his ignorance.

“You can’t have forgotten already!” she told him, “that time in the park when we were coming home from what you call a honeymoon and I call a waste of time,” she added.

“But what did I do?” he asked, vaguely recalling the few moments sitting with her at a picnic table.

And she told him, omitting no detail whilst including a dozen or more references to the fact that they’d only done it once in the weeks they’d been married when she’d have liked a few more chances to be whisked off to the moon.

What had space travel got to do with it?

“You don’t know, do you?” she asked. And when it was blatantly clear that he didn’t she carried on in minute detail until he was utterly and completely confused. How, he wondered, could the thick milky stuff that sometimes seem to come in the night and make his pyjamas sticky have anything to do with relatively enormous things like even tiny babies?

He eventually got the message and decided that they’d probably only have the one child.

From then on the weeks passed in a crazy whirlpool of worry and concern and regret until on a particular day Dragona was whisked off to hospital, and she had morphed into a huge, gross woman given to moaning. He was asked by an impatient nurse it he wanted to be present at the birth. He hesitated but Dragona decided for him.

“He’d better not,” she said, “he’d probably get the shock of his life if he saw my lady bits.”

The nurse lookeed at her and winked. “Better come to the waiting room then,” she said, “or you can go back home and we’ll phone when there’s any news.”

So not at all reluctantly Marmaduke went back home, calling in at his club for what he called snifter and hoping he wouldn’t be done for drink driving on his way home, though if he was he knew somebody with influence over such things. He might have hung around in the waiting room of the hospital but decided that his time was too precious for that, and anyway his club was calling. Maybe he would have been better served by lingering in the waiting room and even reading the odd pamphlet.

Because when he had got home and poured himself a stiff whisky or,as he called it, a second snifter, in order to recover from the shock of potential fatherhood someone knocked on the front door. He wasn’t used to it being knocked because people usually used the bell, even total strangers who were lost and needed directions or they’d die in the wilderness rang the bell. That was something, he thought, that never happened, but one day it might, though he had no idea where that wilderness might be.

This time the stranger looked weird in a posh kind of upper-class way, dressed in jodhpurs like sometimes (or even quite often) Marmaduke himself wore because he found them comfortable. Marmaduke was, indeed, rather weird himself, so consequently he didn’t recognise the condition in others, so he merely asked what the fellow wanted.

“Are you Lauderdale?” he was asked, and he thought that if the fellow didn’t know who he was why was he asking him to confirm his name? It seemed an odd way of going about anything.

“Of course,” he replied, “Can I help you? And please be quick. My wife is having a baby. At least, I hope that’s what she’s doing.”

“I’ve come to warn you,” said the stranger, “and if your wife’s giving birth to a sprog then you’d be wise to take note.”

Sprog? Who uses words like that these days? And what is a sprog, anyway? He faintly recalled being called one himself when he’d been, what, quite small.

“Who are you?” he asked, hoping to fill a gap in his ignorance, “are you from the hospital?”

“Hospital?” asked the stranger, “what hospital? Are you trying to say something? I mean, are you trying to talk in code? Are you one of them?”

Code? What code? That was enough for Marmaduke. This stranger was annoying him already because he could barely understand a word the fellow was saying.

“Please explain yourself!” he almost barked. That was an arrangement of sounds that he used quite often when what was apparently a conversation made up of words failed to make any kind of sense to him.

“If you want to be like that…” grated the other, and he put one hand in his coat pocket and made it point threateningly at Marmaduke. And Marmaduke had seen movements like that in films. Baddies, left wing hooligans probably, who had guns on them pointed the weapons of destruction at good people in such a way that it would be unnoticed by anyone passing by and then probably proceed to discharge them through the material of their coats, possible creating an untidy hole, which would be a dead give-away.

“What is it you want? I’ve got to go to my wife,” he stammered.

“Lauderdale, if that’s who you are, I’ve been sent to you because my boss knows you’re in with the powers that be. I’ve got a job for you, and you must do it before it’s too late. Get a message to those who understand these things and tell them to warn the bloke at number ten, you know who I mean by that? Well, tell them that there’s going to be a gunshot today, and if the bloke at number ten gets in the way he might find himself filled with lead… So go to Sid at MI5 and warn him.”

Marmaduke’s mouth opened and closed as his unwelcome visitor walked slowly away, as if he was no threat at all and as if his talk of filling people with lead was some sort of joke on the off chance that someone had heard him and thought he was serious.

But who was Sid? He knew all about MI5, but Sid? Surely there was nobody there called Sid? And did all this mean he was suddenly some kind of superspy? Was someone out to slaughter the Prime Minister? Did they hate him that much? Left wing commie b******s!

Meanwhile, the phone inside the house rang most insistently.

It was the hospital and his wife wanted him. She had already had the baby and all was well, but she still wanted him.

© Peter Rogerson 29.05.22

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