Amazing Disgrace (30 page)

‘…
parodie
of Italian opera. Example: “The Cat Above and the Mouse Below”. Tom, he is Figaro singing “
Largo al
factotum
” and Jerry, he is under the stage and trying to sleep. But by the end they have changed places. Once more, the action is so beautifully
synchronisiert
with the music.’  

‘They also used
The Barber of Seville
earlier in the series. If I remember correctly it was in “Kitty Foiled” …’  

Once normally unpompous people start saying things like ‘if
I remember correctly’ at a dinner party it’s time for the host to start worrying that the conversation is in danger of becoming a monologue. But right on cue Nanty, who has been singing ‘The Blue Danube’ to himself in a falsetto at the end of the table, now remembers a Tom and Jerry cartoon in which Tom retires to an attic to teach himself to play the piano. This is so he can lure Jerry out of his hole because the mouse can’t resist waltzing by himself when he hears music.  

‘Ah, yes,’ Max says at once, ‘“Johann Mouse”. It won an Academy Award. In that one the musical satire’s aimed at extreme pianism. You have Tom playing these incredible roulades à la Josef Hofmann or Horowitz but with his
feet
, even as he tries to hit Jerry over the head with a poker. It was actually Jakob Gimpel playing his own paraphrase of “The Blue Danube”. He was a sadly underrated pianist.’  

‘But much earlier than that is “Cat Concerto”,’ Pavel puts in, his hair an enthusiastic aureole that seems to give off a glow. ‘Tom, he is in tails, par excellence the romantic maestro. I think that is from 1947 …’  

Adrian and I discreetly lurch to our feet to open more wine and fetch a second tray of rosemary potatoes from the oven. I notice the floor suddenly seems unstable and bright shimmers frame everything I look at. It’s a very pleasant sensation, this dreamy swaying and the opulence of my vision. We both simultaneously clutch at the marble work surface.  

‘I’m afraid I must be getting a bit pissed,’ Adrian confesses. ‘Also, do you know, I feel mildly stoned.’  

‘Me too. Don’t tell anyone,’ I say conspiratorially, ‘but not everything lurking beneath that puff pastry would have been approved by Mrs Beeton.’  

He catches on fast. ‘You rotten sod,’ he says with a giggle. ‘You’ve doctored it.’  

‘Nothing much. Just a little something to help th–’  

But at this moment there is an imperious knocking on the front door. By now Max is holding forth about how American culture in the Forties and Fifties had felt itself still overshadowed
by the grand European artistic canon and sometimes felt obliged to poke gentle fun at it with an artistry all its own. But at this knocking he, too, breaks off and a sudden hush falls. ‘Who on earth can that be at this time of night?’ he asks for all of us. ‘This is hardly the sort of place where neighbours just drop in.’  

‘It’s probably the Grim Reaper,’ says Derek. ‘He’s come to tell Gerry that he’s actually sixty after all and that his time is up.’  

More people laugh at this tasteless remark than I should have wished, but I suppose alcohol dulls the wits. I’m out in the passageway and opening the door to a squat lump with a halo. Can this be the Marian apparition I have long dreaded? I then notice that everything I look at has a halo, which
probably
has more to do with magic mushrooms and Chianti than with innate divinity, but who can tell the difference? The figure’s features come suddenly into focus and –  

‘
Marta!!
’  

‘Gerree! I’m sorry to –’  

‘You’re
back
! At last!’ and incredulously I fall on her and give her a great big hug. She smells faintly of Etro’s Gomma, a remarkably sophisticated scent for her to be wearing and by several light years an improvement on her usual Musky Temptress or whatever it was called. ‘Oh, Marta, I’m so pleased to see you! I – I thought you were dead.’  

‘
Dead
?’  

‘Well, I mean, you just walked out leaving your house unlocked and the gas on and your car in the garage and
bloodstains
in the kitchen; what else were we to think? I was sure you’d been kidnapped and taken off to one of those horrible CIA “black zones” to be tortured to death.’  

‘But I was in California. Writing film music.’  

‘California? How was I supposed to know that? You might have left me a note, Marta. I do think it was mean of you not to tell me. I’ve been off my head with worry.’  

‘Oh, Gerree, I’m so sorry. I remember now, the taxi arrived early and muddled me and I cut myself taking the trash out.’
And she squeezes my hand. Hers, I notice, is stone cold.  

‘Never mind that.’ What is there to say to anybody as absent-minded and ditzy as Marta? ‘You poor thing, you’re frozen. Come in, come in. When did you arrive? We’re having a bit of a party here. Some quite distinguished people,
actually
,’ by way of preparing her for the social disparity she’s bound to feel. I am, of course, ecstatic to see her again but I do rather wish she had chosen any evening other than this for her
resurrection
. Though doubtless distinguished in her way, I’m not sure that Marta exactly fits into Samper’s natural milieu of world-class artists, not to mention a world-class scientist and, less probably, a world-class hairdresser. Frankly, old Marta diffuses about as much glitz and glamour as a debtors’ prison. Still, all this while I’m leading her into the kitchen and in the doorway I pause and raise my voice like a butler announcing a late arrival.  

‘Er, guess what, everyone? This is my neighbour Marta, returned from the dead. I still can’t believe it.’ But my disbelief has only just begun because Max rises courteously from his chair with the easy warmth of an old acquaintance.

‘Hullo, Marta,’ he greets her. ‘This is a surprise! I didn’t realize you were Gerry’s neighbour. Long time no see.’  

‘You
know
each other?’  

‘But of course, Gerree,’ she says. ‘Max and I met in Boston in April. We were sort of sharing an orchestra briefly, weren’t we, Max?’  

‘Good God …!’ I begin but the rest is drowned by squeals of delight from Pavel, who springs from the table and flings himself into Marta’s arms. There follow some interminable Slavic endearments from which the pianist eventually emerges.  

‘We were bestest friends in Moscow,’ he explains.  

‘Oh, that’s right, so you were.’ It all comes back, now, her telling me about camp, gossipy times in student digs a long time ago. Gradually things calm down.  

‘You I know too,’ Marta tells Nanty, who all this time has been beaming vacantly from the end of the table like a
Labrador with its nose out of a car window, ears blown back in the slipstream. I fear he’s rather far gone. ‘I saw you on
Gerree
’s terrace here.’  

‘Yah,’ he agrees. ‘You’re the one kissed that bloke from the UFO.’

‘That was my brother Ljuka. And it was a helicopter.’  

‘Whatever,’ says Nanty equably. ‘You stick to your story. Don’t go away. I’ll soon need a bit of beaming up myself.’  

Meanwhile I have been trying to take stock of old Marta. In some ways she’s exactly as she was when I last saw her a year or so ago: the same frizzy mane of derelict hair that looks as though insects are probably hibernating in its depths, the same bollard-like physique like that of a bargee on the River Volga more familiar with liverwurst than liposuction. But her clothes have climbed several rungs up the fashion ladder in the
interim
, even if they plainly spend the night on her bedroom floor. And now there is about her a general air of easy
internationalism
, partly reflected by her now almost fluent English with a faint American accent. She feels less – what can I say? –
Voynovian
, somehow, no longer the bumpkin fresh from the steppe.  

‘So what is this party I’ve crashed?’ she asks brightly. ‘I must apologize for coming over but I’ve only just arrived and I can’t get into my house. None of my keys will open the door.’  

Of course! I’d overlooked that. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Marta. I’m afraid I took it upon myself to change your back door lock, and bolt the front door from the inside. Can’t be
bothered
to go into it now but you remember that estate agent of ours, Benedetti? I found him sneaking around inside your house with prospective buyers. Turns out he’d kept your keys, mine too, probably, so I changed our locks. But how did you get up here?’  

‘By taxi. I just had the man drop me, assuming I could get in. But I can’t.’  

‘Actually it’s Gerry’s
birthday
party,’ Derek puts in,
obviously
dying to answer her question. ‘That’s why we’re all here. It’s
up to you to guess his age and you’re not allowed to cheat by using radiocarbon dating.’  

‘Gerree!’ she squeals at me, instantly reverting to olden times. ‘I’d no idea! Many happy returns,’ and she presses me to her dugs before I can evade her grasp. Out of the corner of my eye, amid psilocybin shimmers, I catch Adrian’s look of amusement.  

‘My dear, you can’t possibly stay in your house tonight,’ I tell her when I can disentangle myself. ‘Out of the question. I was over there a week or two ago just to check on it and the place is an icebox. Apart from that your electricity has been cut off so there’s no light and no water. The phone’s off, too, and there’s a creature from another planet living in your fridge. We’ll tackle it in the morning. You must stay here tonight. We’ve heaps of room.’ (Those careless gestures of
hospitality
that come well before an actual counting of beds!) ‘Pull up a chair, now, and have something to eat. Vino. Where’s the vino? I’ll open some more.’  

‘I’ve left my bags outside my house.’  

‘It’s not raining, is it? Don’t worry, Adrian and I – this is Adrian, by the way, he’s a world-famous oceanographer – will fetch them over once you’ve had something to eat. Golly, Marta, I still can’t get over it.’  

‘Oo, Gerree, you’re not thirty-nine again, are you?’ she asks roguishly, and Derek gives an unpleasant guffaw at which she rounds on him and says she thinks I’m ‘very youthful-looking’ and that I still have ‘a great ass’. What on
earth
sort of company has she been keeping this last year? But thank you, Marta; and put that in your pipe and smoke it, Derek, the man whose own ass got up and walked out on him a good ten years ago. That’ll teach you to make a mock of the birthday boy.  

And now the evening really begins to mellow. Despite my earlier misgivings I now realize Marta has actually been the party’s missing element, the absentee member of this group. All the feelings of vexation amassed over the past year’s
caretaking of her house evaporate as I watch her demolish several thick slices of badger thigh and wash them down with copious draughts of Chianti. That’s certainly the Marta I remember, she of the terrifying native delicacies: the
dreadful
shonka
sausage, dense
kasha
balls and a sort of satanic haggis whose name I never did learn. Also a Voynovian cheese like spreadable leprosy. Obviously a bargee’s appetite is something she shares with the poet of the keyboard sitting next to her. Maybe it’s in their east European genes, an urge to gorge themselves and store fat against the long winter months of hibernation while Siberian winds howl outside their caves and woolly mammoths trumpet mournfully in the taiga. This picture may be a little fanciful because, as I keep pointing out, I have yet to discover where Voynovia actually is. But watching them put the badger away I’m sure I can’t be far wrong. Marta’s mammary shelf is soon supporting a
dandruff
of puff-pastry flakes, and so authentic a reminder is this of my old neighbour that I suddenly feel immense
affection
for her, as for all my friends at the table who tonight have come from far and wide across the universe wearing haloes to celebrate my humble birthday. It’s so very warm and comfortable, sitting back with all my friends in this
gently
undulating, glowing room. A couple of logs collapse
noisily
in the hearth and from somewhere comes a dull rumbling, but this is exactly what one expects after eating a really good badger Wellington. Adrian is telling me the latest on the Cleat front, which is that Lew Buschfeuer has also had a
rethink
and has withdrawn his financial support from the Deep Blues, and the loony Neptunies have moved to California and formed a new sect, their object of worship being The Face as the oceanic Great Mother, a.k.a. the mother of all mothers. Max and Marta are reminiscing about an oboist in Boston who shot a concertgoer for blowing his nose. Derek is bent over Pavel in a shared cloud of Allure and tutting over the state of his fingernails while Nanty is apparently
mesmerized
by the gleaming brass cartridge cap that lately decorated
the pie. With a fatuous smile he watches it slide gently across the polished table until it is arrested by a puddle of wine.  

‘Very clever, Nanty,’ I shout down the table. ‘I saw that. You moved it just by using the power of your mind. It’s called something kinesis and it could win you a million dollars from that American magician with the beard, James Randi.’  

‘I’ve already got a million dollars, thanks,’ says the bald pop star mildly. ‘I’ve transcended money, y’know. I shall never, never need money again. From now on I’m
renouncing
money.’  

‘This is not what your biographer wishes to hear,’ I begin, but this time the rumbling noise is much louder and the
glasses
on the table chatter. This provokes some expressions of mild interest but by now even the appearance of the Angel Gabriel would be accepted with good-natured equanimity.  

‘I shouldn’t worry,’ I tell them in the relaxed tones of an old hand. ‘Probably just a minor earth tremor. We get them now and again. The whole of Italy’s seismic.’  

‘One of the joys of living in an orogenic area like the
Apennines
,’ Adrian comments languidly. ‘It’s the bit the estate agents tend not to mention.’ I notice he has his eyes closed as though in rapt contemplation. ‘Basically, you know, the
trouble
is your African plate’s sliding beneath your Eurasian plate. The whole mess dates back to Mesozoic rifting in the Tethyan areas, which foreshadowed the Mediterranean’s Tertiary and Quaternary subduction zones … I learned that from a
Christmas
cracker.’