Rancid Pansies (13 page)

She perks up. ‘A favour, Gerree? What is that?’

I thought that would get her interest. Expecting Marta not to rise to the idea of having me indebted to her for a change
would be like imagining Dracula walking past a blood bank without salivating. ‘We need to pretend that we escaped from my house before it fell over the cliff because the ghost of Princess Diana warned us to leave. I know it sounds silly … For God’s sake, it
is
silly … But it’s terribly important that you don’t tell anybody it’s untrue.’

‘But nobody says it is true, Gerree.’

‘Not over there in London, no. But they do here. These people who’re ruining your house’s peace and quiet believe that’s what happened. They’re religious maniacs and there are sound political reasons why we mustn’t deny the story. I’ll explain it all when you come over. I promise you, Marta, it’s in both our interests. Even
financial
interests.’

‘Well, if you say, Gerree. But I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Neither do I. But if anyone asks you if it’s true that the ghost of Princess Diana saved our lives that night you must just lie and say yes … Oh, I wish you were here. It’s so
difficult
explaining from a thousand miles away. Incidentally, how is work with Ms Donimus going?’

‘I think perhaps Sue and me, we are washing up.’

‘I thought you were writing an opera together?’

‘That was our plan. But it’s not going so good.’

‘Washed up? Oh, you mean the project’s over?’

‘She is very violent, that one. There is much whipping even in Act 1, Gerree. I cannot write music for whipping. We in Voynovia have enough tortures when the Soviets were
occupying
us. I want loving, Gerree! I want to write passion! I do not want to write people in pain from their
vudel
parts whipping and burning. We’re talking wall-to-wall S&M,’ she ends
surprisingly
in Bay Area leather-bar style.

Crikey, what kind of an opera is that? It sounds like a cheap way of evoking those staples of classical tragedy, pity and terror. Maybe it’s a comic opera, a sort of upmarket musical tailored to suit the degraded tastes of modern Britain? After all, the common horde is for ever having holes drilled in its
vudel
parts in order to insert rings and studs and pins. And not just
there, either. Also in its nasal, labial and auricular regions. We have finally become the sort of people
National Geographic
photographers used to go to Papua New Guinea to record, allegedly for anthropological purposes. Tattooed, pierced and infibulated, Britain’s tribespeople are now the vanguard of a new Stone Age. So possibly this Sue Donimus libretto would admirably suit Glyndebourne (Nun orgy bleed, One bulgy nerd, Nylon bee drug or – as I often refer to her among
operatic
friends – Beryl Dungeon).

‘Poor Marta. That doesn’t sound at all like your sort of thing. Apart from that, is the lady hard to work with?’

‘She is like many writers, Gerree. She has no music. It is the concept she likes, the idea to make an opera so many people will give her claps.’

‘Applaud her.’

‘Oh yes. Applaud she likes very much.’

‘Well, look, if you come out here I think you’ll find there’s a perfect story just waiting for you. Do you remember when we first met you told me you admired the British royal family?’ (What she had actually said was ‘I love you British queens and kings tradition’, a phrase that stuck in my mind as an
indication
that this was someone not destined to become a soul mate). ‘This story has high romance, high farce, high tragedy and absolutely no whipping. It’s made for you.’

‘I may go back to the States, Gerree. Perhaps Max is trying to commission me.’

‘It’s your life, Marta. But it’s also your house and I urge you at least to pay a visit to Italy before you run off to America again.’

With that I leave her to the joys of the cuisine in London’s first (and I’d bet last) Voynovian eatery. Such has been the strain of conversing with her that I seem to have consumed rather more glasses of Fernet-Branca than I’d intended and my thoughts have taken on that floating quality I normally
associate
with early afternoons in Italy. I idly wonder what sort of a place the Danubya is. I can readily imagine its kitchens might
surprise a health inspector by their lack of mice and
cockroaches
. What mightn’t cross the inspector’s mind is that these creatures are probably essential ingredients in the
plats du jour
and are therefore not allowed to go to waste. Still, as students of the Samper philosophy of food will know, any adventurous cook should indeed think seriously about rodents and insects. The industrialised world is only gradually waking up to the ecological soundness of tapping food sources that are plentiful and require no ‘food miles’, in the current cant expression. Above all, in a grotesquely overpopulated world I think we should definitely be looking speculatively at our own species as offering real gastronomic potential. I am sorry that
pioneering
German gourmet, Armin Meiwes, is unjustly languishing in jail for an entirely consensual culinary act, although if I may say so it was a blunder to sautée his friend’s
vudel
part with garlic, salt and pepper. No wonder its owner found it too tough to eat. It would obviously require slow, juicy cooking as cock au vin. However, these are mere details. Anthropophagy would definitely be a small but decisive gesture towards
dealing
with the population explosion. We could start by putting environmentalists into the pot. They are multiplying at an alarming rate and are easily outbreeding and endangering more traditional natural science species. ‘Eat up your Greens!’ could once again become a nursery injunction.

Although nobody would feel sentimental about
environmentalists
, let alone miss them, it’s possible the old taboo against cannibalism might occasionally deter even
venture-some
diners. And it is here that modern science will shortly come to the rescue. If culturing stem cells will enable us to grow new body parts, then it is surely only a matter of time before slabs of boneless human meat can be grown in great vats: meat that was never part of any individual and so required no slaughter. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. The alimentary raw material could be grown from the diner’s own stem cells, heralding a glorious new era of autophagy. Better still, at really expensive restaurants it would become
possible to dine off the famous. Fans could eat steaks cultured from the film stars of their choice. Flushed with hero worship, young groupies could bite into hamburgers whose patties were made from the
vudel
parts of their pop idols and favourite sports personalities, drawing an ancient superstitious strength from the idea of incorporation … At this point, however, the thought of facing a plate of Millie-and-chips makes me come all over faint and I’m obliged to retire to my hotel for a
lie-down
, much as the late W. G. Sebald was always doing in his books.

On awakening with a slight headache I find a note waiting for me downstairs. It is from Benedetti, who begs to inform me that he is in a position to show me a property that, he humbly ventures to suggest, might satisfy my exacting requirements for a domicile. I believe it’s the first written message I’ve ever received from the
mustelje
, as Marta called him, and it’s nice to see his written communications are as florid as his speech. There’s much to be said for consistency of manners, even when we both know it’s based on amused contempt. I’m perfectly certain he doesn’t affect this sort of language with any other client. I suppose in a quaint fashion it amounts to a kind of intimacy. Once again I find myself wondering about his home life. As with his dumbfounding revelation a little over a year ago that he was a keen amateur plane-spotter, I feel sure there are aspects of Benedetti’s private life that would readily incite both pity and terror.

Instead of immediately replying, I take myself off to the
Farmacia
for a packet of
paracetámolo
tablets. This late winter weather of early chill mists and brilliant sunshine seems to be having a slightly headachy effect on me. Then I go to my favourite bar to give the whole question of Whither Samper? some serious consideration. The problem of buying a house that is not merely a holiday home is it throws into question the whole business of why one chooses to live in any particular place. Most people can answer this by saying they want to be not too far from where they were brought up, or they need to
be near their work and their children’s schools, or else they understandably require a minimum distance of several
hundred
miles from their in-laws or ex-partners. In short, there are usually compelling circumstantial reasons why the average person is pretty much tied to a particular area. This makes house-hunting both simpler and more difficult, especially if everyone else wants to live in the same place.

I, however, can do my work anywhere. I have no relatives whom I wish to live near, nor any relationship that crucially depends on geography for its future. I am a free spirit, which makes house-hunting both more difficult and simpler.
Theoretically
, I could live just about anywhere I choose, and this
constitutes
a real problem. If like me you happened to read English Literature at a proper university – i.e. one founded before 1600 that does not offer online dating or origami as special subjects – you will doubtless recall having to study things with titles like
Sir Gawain and the White Night:
dreary mediaeval texts where knights and ploughmen alike lie awake in the small hours wondering whether their souls are
sufficiently
shriven (answer:
no
). If so, you may be surprised to learn that although he entirely lacks a soul, even G. Samper has the occasional white night in which a chef’s panic about running out of thyme somehow takes on a disproportionate and dismal urgency. I’m also reduced to compulsively playing with words, which appear in my fevered mind as large white letters on a blackboard that re-shuffle themselves unstoppably. The anagrams take on an aura of spurious significance that fades even as dawn strengthens outside. Thus Lyme Regis is turned to Grey Slime, just as it has reduced my life to that of a Sly Emigré; while Lyme Regis Cobb cries ‘Come, grisly ebb!’ and ‘Go, sly ebb crime!’ or simply remains for ever a chill
Iceberg
Symbol of my past.

It’s exactly in these small-hours moods that one wrestles with the question of where to live. The imagination proposes locations in copious variety. Each has advantages, each
drawbacks
. At the end, in fretful impatience with my irresolution,
the white-night questions come: ‘Why live anywhere in
particular
?
Why live at all?’
And suddenly the simple, practical problem of buying a house takes on existential proportions and swamps the mind with desolation. This may be
connected
with eating Gorgonzola before going to bed. Certainly the utter futility is overwhelming once we have truly seen
ourselves
in the hours of darkness as plankton adrift in an ocean of time, each microscopic organism pathetically calling ‘Remember me!’ before winking out. I review all this from my bogus marble table in the bar, drinking coffee with a Fernet chaser, both of which cast a deep umber pall over my mood. I can see Nico the owner occasionally giving me a sardonic head shake. I can read him like a bad paperback. He thinks I’m brooding over the loss of my house at Le Roccie. He can’t imagine why I should be sitting glumly alone when I’m a local celebrity whose life was saved by a vision. Any Italian who had had such a sensational write-up in
Il Tirreno
would long since have worked out a way of capitalising on it, even if only to get other people to pay his bar bills. It would be a complete waste of time trying to explain to Nico that yes, the loss of Le Roccie was grim; but equally though differently grim was the confirmation in Crendlesham Hall that I ought never again to think seriously about returning to the land of my birth. It seems that even crafty old travellers manage to shut
themselves
out of places without a key to get back in. Does it
matter
? Maybe just occasionally, when I recall some vivid childhood pleasure such as the deep reassurance of a
particular
food or the associations that the seasons (four of them in those days) carried with them. People never hear me saying this, of course. I assume a scoffy radicalism in company but I’m often nostalgic when by myself. Nostalgia is my private default position.

But this will never do. I am surely not the sort of person who falls easy prey to introspection. My present task is to recognise that I wish to go on living
here
: here in hospitable Italy, right here in Versilia, even though a house in this area is going to
cost me an arm, a leg and probably even a kidney if it’s to be somewhere acceptable that I shan’t need to renovate with my own two hands. Well, so be it. But even if re-establishing Samper in a house that befits his superior style will mean some years of having to eat fried grass and woodlouse paste, I am
not
going back to Champions Press. As I keep telling myself, never again will I ghost the biography of Millie Cleat’s
successor
or the next Formula One pin-up goof or anybody else wearing a baseball cap and making those learned-from-TV gestures of punching the air and snarling. They are unfit
company
. Nor will I extend my range, as the nicotine-pickled Frankie has suggested, and write the life story of one of those celebs-for-fifteen-minutes or TV cheffies. He defends himself by saying it would have given me the opportunity to write a comic masterpiece. That’s all very well, except that Gerald Samper is destined to write a
serious
masterpiece and it’s time Frankie knew it. I don’t need to be sidetracked by daft
suggstions
, all the less so now that I’m moderately affluent. There’s a grand opera waiting to be written, and despite our slightly weird relationship I think Marta might actually be the right person to do the music. Her score for Piero Pacini’s aborted last film,
Arrazzato
, did genuinely surprise me by its originality and skill, although it costs me something to admit this because of the brutal way in which she used it to lampoon my singing. I personally feel that a cruel musical parody whose target is instantly recognisable constitutes a kind of libel, although Little, Gidding LLP of Lincoln’s Inn have advised me otherwise. It has taken almost two years for the pain of this betrayal to diminish to a dull ache, but over this period my scrupulous sense of fairness has enabled me to appreciate how good the rest of her score is. The film itself was never
completed
and, since the great Piero Pacini’s untimely death, is
destined
to remain a torso that will only ever be watched by dedicated cinéastes. Marta was well paid for her work but I gather she has cannily retained the copyright. It strikes me that some of the music could well be adapted for an opera. God
knows it’s melodramatic enough, but it also has a
neo-Prokoviev
astringency that is brilliant for portraying sleaze. I think with her avowed romantic leanings tempered with her instinct for down-and-dirty, Marta would produce a
sensational
score for my Princess Diana libretto. The libretto I have yet to write, that is. I shall try to keep the whippings to a bare minimum.