17. MARMADUKE AND PATERNITY

Marmaduke gets a shock.

There was no doubt about it: with the able assistance of Basil Beechhound, Marmaduke had unintentionally opened a huge can of worms. It was over all the newspapers, even the more serious ones, the sort that preferred to tell the truth whenever the truth hadn’t been slurried by the tabloids.

And that news was that the nation’s Prime Minister was on the verge of leaving his wife and their children and taking up with the wife of his home Secretary, with or without her tribe of children. It was also speculated that the Home Secretary’s oldest daughter, the sweet and lovely Letitia Dewhurst, might be willing to share her beauty with the most powerful man in the land (if you except Fingles, the No. 10 Tom Cat who was sure that he must be the most powerful male in the kingdom) if he insisted in the devious reported intention of living with her mother.

Added to that the most scurrilous rag even suggested the PM was aiming for the daughter, going to her via a brief flirtation with Mrs Dewhurst, and the air was alive with the sound and fury of rumour and counter-rumour, with Marmaduke somewhere high enough in the mix to have become a sudden person of interest to one and all.

“I must hide away until this lousy mess is over and done with,” he decided aloud, and he packed a bag with essentials like underwear and shaving tackle, and set out.

He only set out as far as the rear door of his garage and had edged his Reliant Three-Wheeled car, his favourite toy since Colin Fairfax had taken him for what he called a spin in his own three-wheeler in the days when he’d shared his later schooldays with Colin before that friend had even dreamed of sporting a Poirot moustache (which would have been dreadfully off-putting to someone as unBelgian as Marmaduke). One or two of the older boys had their own cars, but Marmaduke hadn’t been given one even though he supposed his parents could even have afforded a Rolls Royce had they wanted to give him one. They couldn’t, of course, the fees of the third rate public school they sent him to saw to that, and anyway they didn’t trust him to stay awake even if he was driving a pedal car.

But during a moment of madness, and because it was cheap, Marmaduke bought a second hand Reliant that would remind him of those halcyon days when he and Colin, hidden away from the world, had spent glorious hours at a stream the other side of the county, fishing for tiddlers and exchanging untrue but lurid details about their female conquests. And an additional bones was because the car was small he imagined it offered anonymity.

Therefore, bag packed and a dirge in his heart, he set out only to see Dragona, the apple of his eye and with the threat of tears in her own, dragging a pushchair along the drive to his large house, the sort that needs a drive, towards him.

It was Dragona. He hadn’t forgotten her just yet, and he supposed that of all the women he knew she was far more fetching than many. Even than Letitia Dewhurst, who had started involving his emotions when he thought of her.

So he pulled up rather than knock her over, and opened the door as opposed to opening the window because he hadn’t yet fathomed how to do that in this car.

She looked him straight in the eye, her face drooping more than it usually did.

“You’re a filthy b*****d!” she told him.

“I’m what?” he asked, shocked at such an outburst masquerading as a greeting.

“It’s all over the papers, and you know that they never lie,” she spat at him.

“Er … I don’t take any papers any more, so what is?” he asked, frowning as if trying to recollect anything he’d done in his life that might be construed to be the activities in the life of a filthy b*****d.

“You and that b***h. That’s what is!” she replied, and tears started falling, running down the tracks left by an earlier flooding.

“Me and a b***h?” he asked.

“Yes. You and that Felicity creature!”

“I don’t know any Felicity,” he protested, almost truthfully, though he had passed Felicity Dewhurst at a drinks do at number Ten during the lockdown because it was the only place a man could go to to get a drink if he fancied one. He was only too pleased that the pm hadn’t been there or he’d have had more awkward questions to answer.

“It’s all over the papers,” she repeated.

“You mean the very same papers that suggested you were eloping with a Russian Oligarch in order to become his favourite mistress?” he asked, and he might well be forgive for the trace of irony he inserted into the question. He didn’t know whether any Russian Oligarch was mentioned in any of the more sleazy newspaper reports, but he wouldn’t have put it past any of them if one had.

“Yes,” she confessed.

“And you’re to live in a ten million pound maisonette with its own extensive gardens and a butler?” he added.

“I didn’t know about the butler,” she sighed.

“And every word of that was true? Every sleazy adjective describing your morality is founded on absolute honesty?” he persisted, “or are you just hoping it’s true? After all, you might have been seen out in that tiny skirt you wore during our honeymoon. It does show the perfection of your legs, which are a lot finer than those belonging to the Letitia kid you mentioned, I seem to remember from the one moment she passed me by in No. Ten.”

“But you’re going off with her, to a private residence, which doesn’t have a butler, or if it does one wasn’t mentioned, to make glorious love with her for hour after hour… I remember your glorious love making. It doesn’t last hours It’s lucky if it lasts for minutes!”

“The it’s a good job it’s all concocted by the fertile imagination of the best Fleet Street mhas to offer,” he said. “That’s all they do: make up sleazy stories to titillate their thickest readers.”

“Claude’s hungry,” said Dragona, changing the subject and nudging the pushchair in the hope of waking the little one sleeping comfortably inside it.

“Is he all right?” asked Marmaduke, who had decided he was right about the paternity of his erstwhile son, and delighted about it. He would never have called himself a racist, but that didn’t stop him being one and loathing the idea that anyone might associate the dusky-skinned babe with his own ancestry.

“What do you mean all right?” demanded Dragona, “he’s your son: you ought to know!”

“I thought we’d concluded that he was sired by your new boyfriend,” almost snarled Marmaduke.

“Oh him? He only had to read what the papers said about me and he was off,” she almost whispered. “It’s what really upset me. Anyway, you’re Claude’s father, not him, and that’s that.”

Marmaduke groaned. “Not that tale again,” he said bitterly, “I’ve seen that lad, what’s his name? Earl? The one you were walking out with and he’s the spitting image of Claude. I mean, Claude’s the spitting image of him!”

“Science proves things, and it proved this,” retorted Dragona, “and it proved that Claude’s youre biological son and there’s nothing you can do about it! The DNA test proved it.”

That rocked Marmaduke back onto his heels. He had happily concluded that Claude had nothing whatsoever to do with him and here was Dragona quoting from a paternity test.

“You can’t know anything yet,” he decided to brazen it out because he was probably right, being a politician.

“But we’ve had the letter,” she said, “and you’re Claude’s father. The fascinating thing, though, is that you are actually also a cousin several times removed from Earl.”

“Now that’s impossible! You must have mixed the samples up! He’s a foreigner!”

“We’re all foreigners if you go back far enough,” sighed Dragona, “each and every one of us! If you want a native Englishman you’ll probably have to look for some kind of deer or squirrel, but certainly nothing human.”

“That doesn’t stop him from being a foreigner!”

“Or you, my handsome husband! You’ve got African blood in your veins relatively recently and the only difference between yours and Earl’s is yours got watered down over a few generations. But traces of your origins are are still there. As witness your lovely son.”

“But…” stammered Marmaduke.

“Anyway, I’ve got the ultimate proof,” smiled Dragona, her tears dried up. “And that ultimate proof is you’re both pretty lousy in bed! Now, if you don’t mind, I’ve come a long way to get here and a cup of something hot and wet would suit me to the ground!”

© Peter Rogerson 03.6.22

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