Rancid Pansies (28 page)

email from Dr Adrian Jestico ([email protected])
to Dr Penny Barbisant ([email protected])

I’m sorry to have taken so long to answer yours, Penny. There’s probably a p.c. excuse for falling behind on one’s emails or else a judicious lie that nobody really wants to investigate – such as
claiming
to have just had a piles operation that precludes sitting. I can’t offer this although I did make a brief field trip a fortnight ago to the Severn estuary to see how a couple of my PhDs are getting on with a copepod survey. I’m pleased to say the little fellows are doing fine – the copepods, I mean. Anyway, the trip set me back a bit in terms of keeping up with correspondence, which included an invitation to give a paper at next year’s 10th International Conference on
Copepoda
. Will you be going? It’s being held next July in Pattaya,
Thailand
. The last one in 2005, you may remember, was in Hammamet, Tunisia. I like it. The more that global alarm & despondency about the environment escalates, the more conferences & symposia the scientific community holds in tropical & subtropical resorts. At least it’s honest in recognising that with entire ecosystems already out of kilter a few more hundred tonnes of jet exhaust in the upper
atmosphere’s
just pissing in the ocean.

Luckily, things here at BOIS are suddenly quieter. Everyone’s now waiting for the results of sundry inquiries and feasibility studies and EIAs due on the Severn bloody Barrage. The captains & the kings have departed, likewise the Darwin Advisory Committee, the
Millennium
Ecosystem Assessment Panel & the Advisory Committee on Business & the Environment. FoE is dead opposed to the Barrage & suggests a system of tidal lagoons instead. The Sustainable Development Commission is about to report. Greenpeace astutely
observes that ‘the jury’s still out’ (out cold with boredom, at a guess). The Labour Party has launched its own feasibility study. And
everybody
else you can think of, including the North Somerset Wreckers’ Association (‘will the Barrage threaten our Members’ livelihoods by reducing shipwrecks?’), is ‘looking at all the options.’ Except me, that is. Since the pressure’s now off me to meet-and-brief I’m
slowly
resuming a normal life.

This normality – to stretch the definition a tad – has included a quick visit to Italy to inspect Gerry’s new house. He was getting a bit
shirty
with me for my non-appearance in his hour of need & I can’t blame him. But it was all OK as soon as we met at the airport. On the way back he warned me not to expect total solitude at home. You won’t fully appreciate the irony but he has been obliged to give temporary house-room to Marta and her new official partner, this old RN girl Joan. Marta’s own house is no longer hers. She was obliged to sell up because Le Roccie – which I’m sorry you never saw, Penny, it was such a fabulously remote & silent place – has now become a madhouse milling with pilgrims & quack healers &
dubious
characters having ecstatic moments & wearing bogus robes, all hoping for miracles & demanding alms with menaces. Gerry told me Marta held out for an incredible price – €615,000 – because she got wind of plans for a hotel up there. She had to have somewhere quiet to work on her music so Gerry offered her a room upstairs on the far side of the other half of the building he’s not living in. This one room has now expanded to include a double bedroom & a bathroom. Small wonder Gerry’s panicky.

The house is lovely & the site is hardly less secluded than Le
Roccie
yet it’s barely ten minutes from town & surely better for Gerry as it’s more accessible. It’s huge for one person, rather less so for three when one of those is Marta. The poor man has acquired a slightly hunted look. Marta keeps odd hours & may well start playing the piano at 3 in the morning although Gerry has largely (but not infallibly) prevailed on her to use headphones with an electronic keyboard that was given her by an Italian film director some years
ago. On my first night we were woken in the small hours by a series of distant lugubrious chords. We thought she & Joan were about to break into Voynovian sea shanties. Meanwhile Joan is doing her best to find somewhere suitable to rent or buy so they can move out but she’s hampered by not speaking much Italian while Marta – who speaks it fluently – is too busy with the score of Gerry’s opera to spend time on the task. So nothing looks like changing much & the girls have already been there over a month. Gerry fumes & mutters darkly when Marta’s not within earshot, advising her under his breath to remember Gesualdo – a sixteenth-century madrigal
composer
, it seems, who had his unfaithful wife & her lover murdered & may even have done the job himself. So this much-heralded
masterpiece
of theirs may yet be launched by a televised double
funeral
& a sensational court case.

Their obsession with this opera is something to behold & reminds me of those young couples whose entire life gravitates around their baby. In a weird sort of way Marta & Gerry are more married than Marta & Joan, & looked at retrospectively their union must surely have been fated from the moment they first rather crossly
discovered
they were neighbours up at Le Roccie, back in the days when I didn’t even know him. On my last night they ran through the opera for me, as much as it’s composed. Because Marta has worked on different numbers at different times & not in consecutive order it’s sort of patchy. But between her piano renderings with Gerry’s vocal acrobatics – now falsetto as Diana, now tenor as Prince Charles, now bass as Mohamed Al Fayed – & the fully orchestral stuff she’s done on the synthesizer, I did get an overall idea of something that really is quite impressive. God knows it’s deeply odd, but how could it not be when Gerry wrote it? The ‘Squidgy’ & ‘Tampax’ arias are sensationally strange. Yet it was all rather affecting & that was
unexpected
because I’m not often touched by a new piece of music the first time around, let alone modern music.

What’s it about, I’ll pretend you’re asking? Not too sure. Gerry tells me it’s less a full-out opera than a
Singspiel
like
The Magic Flute,
with spoken parts as well as sung. It seems not to be a
chronological
account of the Diana story but more a series of episodes – some based on fact & others completely fanciful – designed to … designed to what, exactly? ‘Make a memorable evening’s
entertainment
, of course,’ Gerry said in a surprised tone. Now Diana’s sad, now she’s frivolous, now she’s earnest, now she’s no better than she should be, now she’s almost a religious icon, now she’s
practically
a page 3 sex symbol. Marta says grimly, ‘She was not very interesting. She was only interesting because of other people’s interest in her, & they weren’t interesting people, either. So we must make her interesting.’ The result is a series of scenes, some funny and some tragic (in a stagey way), leaving you feeling Diana was a fictional heroine who never really existed at all but was just a lot of slightly footling component parts & who comes together in the end as a public myth. Anyway, that was my impression & as I said, this was just a run-through of an incomplete work for my benefit. Joan says there was a good deal of dykey sympathy for Diana (new to me) & wouldn’t approve of her being mocked. This may yet cause friction because some of the bits sounded hilarious to me. I
remember
a duet for 2 wardrobe assistants complaining about Diana’s clothing expenditure that was pure comedy. But that’s merely on the way to the grand finale with her apotheosis as a people’s saint or secular icon or similar. Even that may turn out to be tongue-
in-cheek
. There’s probably something wicked up Gerry’s sleeve.

Still, what do I know? I’m just someone who’s unnaturally
fascinated
by very small crustaceans. But it’s good to see Gerry at last
completely
swallowed up in a properly creative project instead of bleating about the horrors of having to write about people like Millie Cleat. It’s also nice to have been able to tell my brother-in-law Max that not only is a lot of the opera already done but it does sound as though the finished article will be hot stuff. With a full orchestra,
professional
singers, some props & scenery & a succession of
increasingly
eye-catching outfits for the heroine, I can’t see why
Rancid Pansies
(or whatever it’s to be called) shouldn’t be a success. Max was very pleased to hear this & became quite lyrical about Marta’s
genius as a composer. I tried to boost old Gerry, too, whose stock at Crendlesham is still not yet quite back to its pre-Great Puke days. Max softened & said how glad he was that Gerry had at last found a way to be serious. I’m not sure I dare ever tell Gerry that, given it’s the complete opposite of the image he likes to project. Maybe he’d be secretly flattered. Anyway, I’m relieved to see him back in a house of his own & doing something he really wants to do. He & I got on extremely well & my disgracefully long absence was quite forgiven.

Gerry also dares me, when I’m in London, to eat a meal at the UK’s first – & so far only – Voynovian restaurant. It’s called ‘Danubya’ & Marta’s very complimentary about it though Gerry says having a resto for Voynovian cuisine is like building a concert hall for the deaf. It’s somewhere up the Edgware Road, apparently, next to the wittily named Lebanese place,
Bonhommous
, where Gerry tells me they have an excellent Allah carte. So next time you’re over here & feeling brave maybe we should try a Voynovian lunch in a spirit of scientific enquiry. According to Gerry, the aftermath of a Voynovian meal is very similar to the sensation of being goosed with Tiger Balm, so you’re free to protest that eating should be a pleasure rather than an ordeal that leaves you feeling you’ve just done a month as an inmate in Abu Ghraib.

A lot of what pleasure there is in my life at present comes from nephew Josh, whom I see every other weekend, more or less. If you find small children at all interesting, Penny, do you think it’s at least partly because you’re a zoologist? I’m definitely touched by him, but I’m also fascinated to watch that little brain joining up the dots,
getting
better at hand-eye co-ordination, catching & kicking balls, lying, etc. His manual dexterity is amazing while his kicking is rubbish. Just as well he doesn’t seem to be at all interested in football. He likes small, intricate stuff he can fiddle with, such as Rubik’s
Cub-etype
puzzles. Maybe this is odd for a 6½ year-old. He has parked dinosaurs for the moment & is now pretty heavily into those
Transformer
things that look like vaguely ordinary model cars &
helicopters 
but which unfold into Hollywoodian creatures with names like Scorponok & Bonecrusher. He witters on about Autobots &
Decepticons
which look & sound to me like glorified pieces of US military hardware (a brilliant bit of spin when you consider that the US
military
has hardly won a single real war since sharing victory in WW2). As far as Josh is concerned they’re hi-tech dinosaurs. Just as a small boy who’s been told to wash his hands before a meal could turn himself into a velociraptor who eats grown-ups for lunch, so he can transform himself from an ordinary-looking car into a
space-going
gunship that smashes planets with its armoured stinging tail. Inside impotent little Josh is omnipotent big Josh with unlimited destructive power. That’s boys for you.

On the other hand, I can get him to forget his robots simply by
getting
out the microscope. I’ve taken to bringing him interesting
specimens
from the labs & have just introduced him (it had to happen!) to copepods. I explained that their name means ‘oar feet’ & of course you can see why as soon as you watch them rowing
themselves
around with five pairs of legs (we were looking at a Calanoid). Showing small kids this sort of stuff does remind you how easy it is to become a professional bore simply by trying to explain too much. That’s the worst of supervising PhD students (& I’m sure you felt the same about your tutor, oh dear, oh dear): it naturally turns you into a crashing didact. But Josh doesn’t have exams to worry about yet, so rather than volunteer lots of stuff I tend just to answer his questions. If I can. ‘Adrian, s’pose you’ve got this giant copepod as big as a car, no, as big as a house, what will it eat?’ ‘Small boys, exclusively.’ ‘That’s silly. Go on, what will it eat?’ Etc. (Actually, a carnivorous copepod the size of a house would almost certainly think a child the size of Josh would make an ideal snack.) My facetious answer probably does give him a moment’s pause since his imperious little ego identifies with everything he sees, so maybe these weird & intricate creatures jerking swiftly across the lens remind him of Transformers (which some of them do quite resemble) which in turn makes him wonder what it would be like to be a copepod. I tell him it would be quite hard work because when
you’re that small water’s pretty viscous stuff & it would be like trying to swim in treacle. Under slightly higher magnification some of the little beasties I’ve got on slides look downright terrifying – real
ferocious
space monsters. Josh gets slightly scared watching them & then reassures himself by looking at the dot on the slide that they’re actually so tiny he could squash millions of them without noticing: i.e. pretty much what he already does to humans & monsters when he’s in dinosaur or transformed mode. He did ask if there are lots of these creatures around, so I told him there are probably more
cope-pods
in the world than almost any other animal & you can find them virtually everywhere there’s water & especially in the ocean.
Wow
… I’m thirsty, Adrian. When’s lunch? That’s when you know it’s time to stop.

One needn’t worry about telling children too much because they just switch off anyway. I’m afraid a lot of the time I watch Josh as if he were a lab animal instead of my nephew. He’s constantly doing things that if he were an adult would land him in a neurological unit pronto. Peculiar gestures, spastic movements of the limbs,
exaggerated
facial expressions that have no obvious relation to external circumstances, odd gaits, sudden leaps, novel ways of going upstairs, looking at things upside-down from between his legs. All these things we take for granted in small children so we scarcely notice them. Are they involuntary? Are they signs of a young brain & body discovering what they can do? Are they sheer exuberance at being alive? When I ask him why he did that he might not answer, or he might say ‘dunno’, or he might say ‘’cos it feels funny. You try.’ Or he might just look at me as if I simply don’t know anything. But when does this familiar behaviour die away & stop, & why? When does one finally have to curb all these childhood tics & jinks? When you’ve done them all & got bored? Or when you acquire self-
consciousness
? Either way one still has to be a bit guarded. The other day at Southampton, on learning that someone from the Drinking Water Inspectorate had had a car crash on the M3 & would have to call off his meeting, I danced a jig in the middle of my office. It was unfortunate that Nick Vatican chose that moment to look in & I
immediately felt embarrassed at having been seen. But why? Josh wouldn’t have been. Nobody should have been, not in front of our Pontiff himself, whose own eating habits make Josh look like a
master
of dinner-table etiquette.