Rancid Pansies (30 page)

But Joan is pulling firmly on my arm to turn me away. A gaunt, bearded fellow in a stained dressing gown has just appeared in the open doorway.

‘That’s him!’ she says in a fierce undertone. ‘I don’t want him to recognise me. That’s the bugger I chivvied away. You know, the one I told you wanted to stay the night?’

‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. ‘He’s not exactly the woodcutter’s son, is he?’

‘What?’

I’m forgetting that Joan is not privy to the fantasy I used to harbour about her new partner’s sex life. ‘I wouldn’t trust him an inch. Shifty-looking. Insanitary.’

‘He acts as though he’s in charge of the site. Bloody hell. Let’s get out of here. This place makes me feel like throwing up. When you think what it must have been like.’

‘I do,’ I say. ‘All the time.’

Once I have dropped Joan off, reached home and soaked off my moustache I make a vow never to return to Le Roccie. There’s no point. My home for years has been irrevocably erased, and that’s that. Samper has moved on since those days of writing up taped interviews with dull people and turning them into books. These days he’s writing stuff that puts him in the ambit of world-renowned artists and singers, the milieu he has always known was his birthright. There’s no going back from that. I set about preparing an intriguing
little
dinner of buntings in savoury custard while singing Marta’s setting of ‘It’s truly a pathetic world’. This has hooks, as they say in the world of commercial music. In fact, it’s so catchy it wouldn’t surprise me if it became a single once the opera’s had its first performance. Diana sings in a fervent outburst:

Really, it
is
all a bit Amnesty International. But artistic
reasoning
dictated that at this point in the opera we needed some
passion that had nothing to do with either marital breakdown or shopping, the two major themes thus far.

Awfully easy to write, this sort of stuff, and of course it will have absolutely zero impact on an audience whose own
government
has for years been raining fire and brimstone on the heads of ‘evildoers’ and child shepherds for dastardly
threatening
the peace of a realm three thousand miles away. But what else can one sing to citizens who think they permanently represent civilisation’s moral high ground? As I say, it’s catchy stuff and will blend painlessly into the season of peace’n’
good-will
. There remains, of course, the single nearly insoluble problem I’ve had as the librettist of
Princess Diana
. Namely, why should becoming a princess earn you tear-stained
adulation
merely for saying what any morally sane person knows: that it is wrong to kill innocent civilians with bomblets and that AIDS sufferers and lepers are merely ill people needing kindness and treatment? Is it because we no longer expect the slightest sign of humanity from our royals and celebs that we grovel and fawn on them for showing the most elementary
evidence
of decency? I describe this as a nearly insoluble problem, but I trust that between us Marta and I have successfully papered it over by means of jokes, spectacle, and some very diverting music.

More time speeds by and now at last it’s December and I’m back in Crendlesham picking up the threads of a very different life. It gives me a lurch of excitement to see the playbills
posted
outside Haysel Hall and all around the village, knowing the announcement will long since have been in the national press. The name of Gerald Samper is right up there with those of
Max Christ, Tizia Sgrizzi-Pulmoni, Brian Tydfil and, of course, Marta Priskil. This is the first time I have seen Marta’s family name written in what must be its new international form, a spelling Joan tells me she has been obliged to adopt because the Voynovian original, Pr¸sˇkj-l, was never going to trip off many tongues. The thrill of it all means something
unmistakable
to me. Samper has definitely arrived!

To their eternal credit and my considerable relief, Max and Jennifer are as warmly welcoming as they were this time last year in the aftermath of the earthquake and the tragic loss of my home. The minor episode of the Great Puke really does seem to have been forgiven. As well it might, to be fair. After all, nearly a year has gone by and we’ve all had lives to be
getting
on with. This includes Josh, who has since aged by nearly a sixth of his entire life. He also seems pleased to see me, although probably as a figure he can assault with stuffed toys and impunity very early in the morning. However, when I go out for a short walk of reorientation and to take advantage of a bald and sunny December day, he insists on coming along. He is heavily armed with a futuristic pistol made of Lego he has invented expressly for our defence since, he assures me, there are evil minions everywhere. My religious step-mother Laura would undoubtedly agree. We amble past Crendlesham Church and I’m pleased to see the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull is still earning her stipend by putting up notices for her parishioners. Oddly, she’s advertising for Pontius Pilates even as she’s
auditioning
for Three Wise Men and a Virgin. It will make for a very distinctive sort of Nativity play. And a new-looking poster pinned to her cork board announces ‘Birching and
Parenting
Classes’.

‘Why are you laughing, Gerry?’ asks Josh.

‘Just something on this notice that’s spelt wrong,’ I say.

‘Although I expect it’s really what she’d
like
to say.’

‘Gerry,’ he says in that tone that shows he has been listening only to his own thoughts.

‘Yes, Josh?’

‘Gerry, if I tell you a secret do you think it’ll make you cross?’

‘I very much doubt it. Why don’t you try me and see?’

‘But you’ve got to promise you’ll never ever tell anyone. Specially not Daddy or Mummy or Adrian. Really
honestly
.’

‘OK Josh, I promise.’ What can a child rising seven years old possibly have to confess that would make it worth breaking a promise?

‘Well, you know when … you remember when all those people came to dinner that night when the gorilla man came, and they all went off to hospital and Mummy said it was because of something they ate that you’d made?’

‘Ye-es?’

‘She said it was because of the mice.’

‘Did she? Well, that’s certainly what some people said at the time.’ Bastards.

‘Well, do you think it could have been my mouse?’

‘
Your
mouse? But you didn’t have a mouse, Josh.’ However, it turns out that he did. It turns out he had spotted me keeping the cadavers of the mice I’d trapped. Inquisitive little spy, he’d seen me putting them into the box in what temporarily became their mouseoleum, the fridge in the pantry that Jennifer
seldom
used. Thinking he’d be helpful he had secretly added the corpse of one he’d found in the potting shed. I come to a halt in the middle of the Suffolk lane. The potting shed was, of course, the place where that genius gardener had put down his squill.

‘You’re not cross, are you, Gerry?’ he looks up at me
anxiously
. ‘It wasn’t me that did it really. There was this giant
minion
made
me do it. I morphed but my Zord didn’t work.’

Whatever this gibberish means it only makes me laugh
helplessly
. I put an arm around his shoulders. ‘I’m not a bit cross, Josh. In fact I’m really glad you’ve told me. It solves a tiny
puzzle
I’ve had all this time. I was pretty certain I’d only caught ten mice, but I definitely prepared and cooked eleven so of course I thought I’d just made a mistake and counted them
wrong. But now you’ve told me about your mouse it all makes sense. Anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t yours that made them ill, although we’ll never know now. Let’s just keep this our secret, shall we?’ Who needs to enter his eighth year guilty of manslaughter?

‘Not tell anyone at all, ever?’

‘Exactly. We’re the only two people in the whole world who know.’

‘Cool.’ He gives a little skip. ‘
Pew! Pew!
’ He picks off a brace of incautious minions sitting in a crab apple tree. ‘I bet I’ve seen more copepods than you have.’

‘Lots more, if Adrian has been showing you.’

And so the most momentous confession of his young life falls away from Josh, along with discarded dinosaurs that have lost a leg and expensive toys that never worked. I,
however
, return to the house thoughtful and vindicated. True to my oath, I shan’t tell anyone because it will give me much deeper satisfaction to
know
– as I knew all along – that
Samper
is innocent and wronged. It won’t be a grievance to nurse so much as another small superiority to cherish.

It is now December 14th and the première is on the 20th. Only six more days! Max invites me to sit in on the orchestral rehearsals which, on the 18th, will finally involve both chorus and soloists. On my last stay at Crendlesham I hadn’t paid much attention to the Haysel Hall. It was just a vast expanse of roof somewhere on the edge of visibility among rook-filled winter mists. I have to doff my metaphorical hat to Max and his benefactor Sir Barney Iveson, inventor of the Shangri-Loo, who has so resoundingly demonstrated the affinity of muck for brass – not to mention strings and woodwind. Looking around inside at the acres of blond new oak and beech, at the raked auditorium and the futuristic shapes of the acoustic
baffles
on either side of the generous stage, it is an odd thought that all this has been made possible because enough people have enjoyed having their fundaments pampered by the ‘
gossamer
fingers’ feature of Sir Barney’s ‘Arabian Nights’ model.
Those naughty old Buddhists were absolutely right, and
feeling
you’re whole is deeply refreshing. And to prove it, here we have a very beautiful private concert hall in the middle of a Suffolk field. I reflect that Mozart would have been
hysterically
amused at the thought of defecation enabling art.

Wearing rumpled corduroy trousers and shirtsleeves, for the hall’s heating system is turned up high, Max takes the
orchestra
through the overture. Marta sits nearby. My well-known sense of delicacy stops me from joining her. Watching
unobtrusively
from the back of the hall I find myself – against all habit – moved by the sight of that familiar figure slumped in the stalls. The music, which I’ve only ever heard on her Petrof upright or synthesizer, is dramatic and impressive with full orchestra and I can’t help a certain incredulity at the thought that these complicated, highly individual sounds all came out of that lone tousled head. I realise it’s a hackneyed reflection, but you have to have experienced it. I also take a slightly less humble pleasure in thinking it was my words that started all this, that triggered these sounds in Marta’s musical
imagination
. That counts for something, let me tell you, when you hear the solo trumpet softly announce the theme that will be associated with Diana throughout the opera. It’s not in any way similar to Prokoviev’s marvellous trumpet tune in
Lieutenant
Kizhe,
being more of a leitmotiv, but it’s instantly recognisable even when it appears in different instrumental guises. Depending on its orchestration and tempo it can sound lonely, amorous, entreating or triumphant, and Marta’s use of this simple device is really inspired. Small wonder that Max is so enthusiastic about her.

Meanwhile, the stage curtains are closed and from time to time there are muffled sounds of banging and scraping and the curtains bulge and sway as unseen stage hands shift things around. As a concert hall and recital room the Haysel
naturally
doesn’t have elaborate stage machinery, and any production is going to have to be kept simple with a few straightforward backdrops and a handful of props. The producer tells me that
Max was toying with putting on Handel’s four hundred and fifty-fourth opera next season to compete with Glyndebourne. The whole thing was to be done in lounge suits with the stage completely bare but for an immense flat TV screen on which static pictures of appropriate scenery were to suggest
ambience
. But the idea was swiftly dropped on closer examination of
Balbo in esilio
. Its plot concerns a depressed Roman
general
posted to Britain and homesick for Viterbo who orders a fort built on an Iron Age site, his ‘capital of misery’, which one day will become Weston-super-Mare. Not a lot happens; and somehow the lounge suits could only have made things worse. Nonetheless, the Haysel’s stage is well suited to
minimalist
productions and I am therefore all the more pleased that the production of
Princess Diana
is to be as elaborate as it possibly can be within the constraints of simple resources. The costumes have already arrived and are splendid, with Diana’s dresses mostly excellent pastiches of her designer
originals
. So I’m quite sure that the production’s flair and energy will more than make up for an overall simplicity. Plenty of time for the grand machineries of Covent Garden, where divas really can be borne heavenward on remarkably thin wires and chorusing sailors can stagger from side to side of a heaving deck onstage.

I begin to get nervous about my own lines. As I’ve already mentioned, the role of the Duke of Edinburgh is largely silent, consisting of a few more or less tetchy pronouncements and a good deal of shotgun-polishing. Whilst writing the libretto I thought it might be fun to design the part for myself, and Marta, Max and Adrian have all unexpectedly insisted I play it for at least the opening night. Still, it’s one thing blithely to write oneself into a production and quite another to share the same stage with international stars like TS-P and Brian Tydfil. All of a sudden I’m falling prey to stage fright. I know it seems incredible: Gerald Samper, of all people, who for fifty years has played the lead in the story of his own life with such panache. How could he possibly be nervous of standing in the
wings wearing lovat plus-fours and occasionally saying single lines like ‘I wouldn’t buy a used camel from a fellow like that,’ or ‘Backs to the wall, chaps, it’s that valet again.’ Not an unduly taxing role, in short, yet suddenly I’m worried I shall dry or fail to ad-lib convincingly.