Kitty & Virgil

by Paul Bailey

  I have some claret to drink, which a good friend has brought me. I must stop writing for today.

  ‘Nelly?’

  ‘No, this isn’t Nelly. It’s Daisy.’

  ‘Hullo.’

  ‘Is that all you can say? No “Lovely to hear you, Daisy”? Not after all your sister’s been through?’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  ‘You promised to ring me on Sunday.’

  ‘Did I? I must have forgotten.’

  ‘Obviously.’

  ‘The truth is that I’m working on a very difficult manuscript at present. It has masses of cross-references. The author keeps jumping from one subject to another. I am finding it very hard to keep pace with him. He’s presented me with quite a challenge, Daisy.’

  ‘Excuses, excuses.’

  ‘No, my dear. This isn’t an excuse. How are you?’

  ‘I thought you’d never ask. In actual fact, I’m on top of the world, to coin a phrase. Can you guess why?’

  ‘Surprise me.’

  ‘It’s to do with him.’

  ‘Cecil?’

  ‘Him. The one and only. He’s agreed to the deal. He has coughed up with everything my solicitor demanded. There wasn’t a peep of protest out of him, apparently.’

  ‘I’m glad it’s settled.’

  ‘Not half as glad as I am. Now I can say I am finally shot of him.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And look forward to a new life.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And start afresh. I shall be giving the male of the species a very wide berth from now on, I can tell you.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m wasting my breath, aren’t I? There are other words than “yes”, you know.’

  ‘I’m not in a talkative mood.’

  ‘So I gather.’

  ‘I have to get back to work, Daisy.’

  ‘Work, work. My clever silly sister and her work. I’ll go and talk to the dogs instead. They can’t be less interested than you.’

  13 January 1991

  Kitty, did I ever mention a friend called Dinu Psatta? Radu I talked of I remember, but perhaps not Dinu. His parents named him after our great concert pianist Dinu Lipatti, who died very young. Dinu is also a musical man. He publishes music here in Paris, but before that he was in the embassy in Rome. He led a quietly dangerous life there, helping people who had escaped. We met in the Eternal City in clandestine fashion, in churches mostly. He says he has become a Roman Catholic as a result of those furtive meetings, to the accompaniment of Palestrina and Lassus.

  I hope he will befriend you. I hope you will befriend him. He is a believer in everyday miracles. The accidents of fate that aided me on my journey through Yugoslavia he sees as miraculous events, preordained from Above. He will tell you this with his wry smile, but I am sure he is sincere. I know him to be sincere.

  Kitty, I have discovered your poet George Herbert. I did not read him in liceu when I was reading John Donne. That was my loss. I have been studying him and learning his words ever since I came upon a very old copy of his Poems – dated 1895 – on a Left Bank bookstall. It was owned by a Mr Cedric Tiverley, who must have been a discerning gentleman. I am passing Mr Tiverley’s book on to you. It is not a cast-off, like the clothes I wore that so upset the stylish Felix. Mr Tiverley died, I think, and then it set off on its travels. Now it is travelling from me to you, with love.

  Kitty, it is a wonder to me that these marvels of wit and intellect were on the printed page two hundred years before my country (but we had no country, as such) had a written literature. What a fortunate English boy I would have been in 1633, in 1733, in 1833, to have sat in school with a book of Herbert’s poems on my desk. (I am forgetting that I might have been a poor English boy in 1633, in 1733 and 1833, who had had no schooling.) In Moldavia or Wallachia I would have been listening to an elder speaking Mioria, the oldest ballad in our language – the ballad that did not find a resting place until the 1850s. And perhaps I would have added a line to it, a new conceit, a flourish of my own, as others have added their special conceits and flourishes, century after century. The poem, truly, of a people.

  The man who sired me said on the evening of his revelations that our national poet, Mihai Eminescu, would have been ‘on the side’ of the butchers. ‘He was dead, Tatã,’ I told him – and that was the last time I called him Tatã, you must know, Kitty. ‘His ideas are alive to this day,’ he thundered. He apologised for shouting. I accepted his apology. I could accept his apology for shouting.

  Eminescu, Kitty, was a man of his time, and the time was ferociously nationalistic. He blamed the Jews for all the troubles that beset our young uniting country. He is, nevertheless, our Keats. He is our first great poet on the printed page. He is our first literary name out of the dark.

  I think I once spoke for you a poem by George Bacovia, complete with approximate translation. It is he, of all our poets, I have most loved and envied. I cannot envy him his life, which he spent on the rack of depression, but I am jealous to this day of his finest work. There is a poem, Kitty, about a town bathed in autumn twilight. The sky has turned everything violet. Two poplar trees, appearing in silhouette, seem to the poet like a couple of apostles in violet surplices. His urban poetry is filled with such startling visions.

  George Vasiliu (that was his real name) worked for a period as a government clerk, though he had no faith in politics. He left it to others to welcome the various glorious futures that became grim history in his lifetime. He drank to keep despair at a distance, but the drink only brought it closer.

  I remember that when I was thirteen the man who sired me came into the room where I was reading and snatched the book of Bacovia from my hands. He flicked through its pages and stopped at the poem ‘Liceu’. ‘What kind of a man is it who compares his school to a cemetery? The cemetery of his youth?’ he asked. I was silent. I waited for him to provide the answer. ‘A drunkard. A morbid drunkard.’

  Constantin Florescu did not appreciate Bacovia’s irony. He had seen the sad Visiliu shuffling about the city supported by his wife and was confident in the judgement that such a wreck of humanity could produce nothing but ‘morbid’ verse. The idea that inside the wreck there existed an artist of the rarest delicacy and subtlety could not occur to one who was and is a stranger to those qualities.

  I have finished thought-collecting for another day.

  ‘Is that Mrs Florescu? Pamela Florescu?’

  ‘It’s been a long time since anyone called me that. Yes, this is she.’

  ‘I have some news of your husband.’

  ‘My husband? Husband in word, not deed. I allowed him a chaste kiss in the registrar’s office and then it was curtains matrimonially speaking. Who am I talking to?’

  ‘My name is Kitty Crozier. I’m a friend of Virgil.’

  ‘A friend friend, may I enquire, or someone more intimate?’

  ‘Someone more intimate.’

  ‘He’s never mentioned you. He had nothing of any consequence to tell me, he wrote in his last letter, sending me yet another change of address. I always suspected him of being a dark horse.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘So what’s the news?’

  ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Dead? Virgil Florescu dead?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘They haven’t murdered him, have they? He didn’t go home and get himself murdered?’

  ‘No. No. He died in Paris.’

  ‘Were you with him? May I call you Kitty?’

  ‘Yes, Pamela. No, I wasn’t with him. I wish I had been.’

  ‘I bet you do. How did he die, Kitty?’

  ‘His heart gave in. He’d had problems with his heart.’

  ‘He wasn’t fat, was he? I didn’t have to see him with his clothes off to know he wasn’t carrying any surplus flesh. What doctors describe as a murmur, was it?’

  ‘Probably.’

  ‘What a waste. He was still quite young, wasn’t he?’

  ‘F
orty-four.’

  ‘That’s young these days. Have you had the funeral?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did you give him a nice send-off?’

  ‘It was very quiet.’

  ‘And what have you done with him? Has he been buried or cremated?’

  ‘Cremated. It was what he preferred. The ashes are going to Romania.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Kitty. For him and for you.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  ‘Bear up.’

  ‘I’ll try.’

  ‘I suppose I could offer myself for marriage again. But I shouldn’t imagine there’s much demand any more, would you. Those countries are free now, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, they are.’

  ‘Not as free as us, but freer than they were.’

  ‘Yes, Pamela.’

  ‘Well, thank you for letting me know. And, as I say, try to bear up.’

  ‘I will. Goodbye.’

  ‘Goodbye, Kitty. God bless.’

  14 January 1991

  Kitty, I received my unwanted history lesson the year before I made my escape. I told no one about Constantin Florescu’s involvement in the ‘mystical occasion’ – except for Radu, that is. Radu said, ‘Sons do not have to emulate their fathers. You must live as well as you can.’

  My ‘aversion’ began the moment I left the Florescu apartment. My body sent the message to my brain that I could no longer eat meat. It was easy not to be carnivorous in Romania at that time. Steak, lamb and pork were luxuries. Chicken too. I had vegetables (not many), and rice (a little), and apples to nourish and sustain me.

  ‘You must live as well as you can’ – Radu’s advice made a kind of sense. I went on with my teaching and then I wrote the poem that caused the authorities to take a particular interest in the writings of Virgil Florescu. Corneliu paid me his first visit.

  (‘We knew we had arrived, Kitty, when we became aware of the bugging device above our heads. They were listening in on our every conversation. What is that funny poem in Alice in Wonderland?’

  ‘Oh, “Jabberwocky”.’

  ‘Yes, yes. Virgil tormented our hidden listeners – we hope tormented – with “Jabberwocky”. He and I would sit in silence and then he would recite “Jabberwocky”. Night after night he recited it – softly, loudly, fast, slow. But always seriously. That was the beauty of the joke for us. He spoke the “Jabberwocky” poem as if it was very serious, very sombre and serious.’

  ‘Tell Kitty about the bean feast, Radu.’

  ‘The bean feast, yes. Doina is referring to a mad evening when she cooked for us all the beans she could find.’

  ‘In a tomato and onion sauce of my own invention.’

  ‘She cooked this mountain of beans in a big pot, and Virgil and I gorged ourselves eating them. We washed them down with beer.’

  ‘I insisted they eat them up, Kitty. So that everything went according to my brilliant plan.’

  ‘Which it did. Doina said not a word that evening, which was a terrible strain for her. And a relief for us.’

  ‘Ignore his sarcasm, Kitty. The opening salvo came at nine fifteen, with a tremendous blast from Virgil. We vowed we would not laugh, and oh, it was an agony for us keeping a straight face. We were determined they would hear nothing but the farts, which went on and on and on, I am pleased to remember.’

  ‘Our thoughts were in our arses, Kitty. And our glad tidings to those who were preying on us.’)

  And soon there was the orchestrated business with my mother’s precious carpet and its cheap replacement, which Radu and I emptied our bladders on.

  I believed I was simply running away from a dictator and his minions. It is with shame I record that the ‘mystical occasion’ was not foremost in my thoughts. I believed in a future for Virgil Florescu and the loved and loving friends who would one day taste freedom. I was fleeing a country ruled over by a man of consummate mediocrity, a man smaller in soul than he was in height. I was leaving a city in which that pygmy’s dog Comrade Corbul was better fed and better housed and better groomed than the majority of its human occupants.

  (Kitty, did you read or see that many people raided his villa and stole the tins of food that were flown in for Comrade Corbul? They filled their hungry bellies with the meat. They fed themselves to bursting.)

  I was escaping from a banal farce, Kitty, in which the Conducator and his vicious little spouse were the leading players. We – his and her underlings – were required to assume supporting roles, with our positions neatly chalked on-stage. We were meant to remain on our marks and speak the lines that were scripted for us. But there were those, and I was one of them, who found the lines unspeakable. I lacked the late Corneliu’s aplomb. I wanted to live a natural, ordinary life but that was denied me. The farce demanded actors and I was reluctant to perform.

  (The diverting Derek would understand this. He has recreated himself, as he admitted the day he surprised me in Green Park. He has done this of his own volition, not at the whim of a despot.)

  So, as I journeyed towards Italy, with these ideas of freedom crowding inside my head, the significance of the ‘mystical occasion’ had still not completely ‘sunk in’, as you say. It was not until I lay ill in the kind Freda Whiteside’s attic that the horror struck me, as it strikes me now, you must know, Kitty.

  ‘Felix Crozier speaking.’

  ‘Hullo, Daddy.’

  ‘Kitty, my dearest darling, what an unexpected pleasure. How was your Christmas?’

  ‘I spent it with Nelly, as usual. Daisy joined us, with Janet and Andrew.’

  ‘The grandchildren I’ve never had the privilege of meeting. Your twin has recovered, I take it.’

  ‘Yes, she has. She’s happy, too. Cecil has given her a great deal of money and the house in Richmond as well.’

  ‘My, my. It’s amazing what a chap will pay to free himself from a woman on the warpath. I expect he would have parted with the crown jewels, if he’d had them.’

  ‘Daddy, is Derek there?’

  ‘Mr Mockery, you mean. I’m a martyr to his tongue, my dearest. It’s Crozier this and Crozier that the livelong day.’

  ‘Is he there, Daddy?’

  ‘Yes, he’s here, thinking up his next put-down. Honing it to perfection.’

  ‘I should like a word with him.’

  ‘With Derek?’

  ‘With Derek.’

  ‘What on earth have you got to say to him that you can’t say to me?’

  ‘It’s a cookery matter.’

  ‘Ah. Ah, yes, that is rather his department. I’m as useless as the Pope’s balls, I have to admit, where cuisine is concerned. My skill lies in polishing off the delicious concoctions the master-chef provides. Whatever faults Crozier has, failing to appreciate Derek’s food is not among them. We ate wood pigeon this evening, my darling, in a port-wine gravy, with a celeriac dauphinoise on the side. And then a caramel orange tart for dessert. My waist is a thing of the distant past, only to be glimpsed in the photograph album upstairs. But do I miss it? No, I do not. I won’t let vanity get in the way of my appetite any more.’

  ‘I should like a quick word with Derek.’

  ‘You’re asking for the impossible. No one has a quick word with Derek, unless it’s a word in edgeways you have in mind. He might grant you one of those.’

  ‘A word with Derek.’

  ‘If you insist.’

  She heard her father calling Derek to the phone. ‘It’s my daughter. The sweet one, of course. She wants a quick word with you.’

  ‘Good evening, Kitty.’

  ‘Hullo, Derek. Is Daddy in earshot?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ve told him I’m ringing on a cookery matter.’

  ‘I am at your service.’

  ‘But I’m not ringing you about cookery. I don’t want Daddy to know what I have to tell you.’

  ‘Carry on.’

  ‘Derek, Virgil is dead.’

  ‘Mayonnaise, Kitty, has driven finer cooks than I am to
despair.’

  ‘Thank you. He killed himself.’

  ‘The ingredients should be at room temperature. For a generous half-pint you require two egg yolks, two tablespoons of white wine vinegar and three of olive oil.’

  ‘In Paris.’

  ‘I am of the Dijon mustard persuasion myself. Add the tiniest amount, along with the salt and white pepper.’

  ‘Ten days ago.’

  ‘And please use a balloon whisk for beating in the oil. The spoon and the spatula have brought grief to many a talented chef. And while I am on the subject, lemon juice could be substituted for the vinegar. A lemon-flavoured mayonnaise is the perfect accompaniment to asparagus.’

  ‘He was cremated. There was no funeral, at his request.’

  ‘The monstrous duke for whom I once slaved and skivvied expressed a preference for the dreadful bottled muck. It contains milk and cornflour and is cooked. Cooking mayonnaise is a contradiction in terms.’

  ‘He left a note. It was an open-and-shut case.’

  ‘Why don’t I write down the recipe for you? With all the possible variations?’

  ‘A friend has Virgil’s ashes. He is sending them to Romania.’

  ‘I wish you every success in advance. You can’t go wrong with a balloon whisk.’

  ‘That’s it, Derek.’

  ‘The recipe will be in tomorrow’s post. Crozier is signalling that he has something else to charm your ear with. Goodbye, Kitty.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  ‘Here he is.’

  ‘Kitty, my dearest darling, please forgive me. I was wittering on about my waistline, or rather the lack of it, and I clean forgot to ask you how you are. How are you?’

  ‘I’m fine, Daddy.’

  ‘I’m glad. Is that Romanian fellow still abroad?’

  ‘Virgil. Yes, he’s still abroad. He keeps in touch.’

  ‘I should hope so. Now make sure you follow Derek’s instructions. His mayonnaise is second to none.’

  ‘I’ll follow them.’

  ‘That’s my girl. Good night, my dearest darling. Lots of monkey’s bums to you.’