Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  As I shave, one of my all-time favourite quotations pops into my mind: ‘Feeling you’re whole is deeply refreshing.’ Many years ago I overheard a Buddhist make this astonishingly frank confession on a BBC World Service programme called Words of Faith (broadcast on 31/8/95, if you’d care to check), and it has been with me ever since. I hadn’t realised that Buddhists, too, indulged such furtive pleasures. It makes them seem quite like the rest of us. Anyway, today I discover I am myself deeply refreshed, yearning to be up and doing, full of energy. It is like being in my twenties again: a sense that there’s nothing I can’t do, nothing and no one to stop me. And suddenly – yes! – I’m glad not to be a householder with a life organised by fridge magnets. I am also happy that I no longer have to worry about a lump of property a thousand miles away. I am newly relieved of the burden of a lifetime’s accumulated possessions. In short a novel, simplified Samper begins here. Above all, a Samper determined never to write another book for a sports hero. But where to go? What to do?

  And bang on cue, another call from Frankie. He is a three-packs-a-day man with a Low Tar voice to match, and this morning he is so gravelly and super-laconic with dramatic news I have to ask him to repeat himself.

  ‘I said “one and a half million”, Gerry. The film rights for Millie! Proper pounds, that is, not wincy little dollars.’

  ‘Good God.’ I lean weakly against the Aga, which sends a comforting glow through my areas of contact. Then, getting to the point, ‘What’s my cut?’

  ‘If you remember, we agreed the splits with Millie’s agent when we did the book deal. All quite regular. We’ve got a twenty per cent share of the sale of film, TV and allied rights in the Cleat life story as told by you. So your take is, um, three hundred thousand, minus this agency’s fifteen per cent plus VAT. Haaargh haaargh’ (hideous coughs shake his phlegm-clogged alveoli and I superstitiously hold the receiver a little away as though a spray of pulmonary flecks might spatter my ear) ‘wuuurgh call it a shade under a quarter of a million.’

  ‘For me personally? Golly. And right on the day when I’m feeling at my most irresponsible.’

  ‘Oh, we’re all agreed in the office that it couldn’t have happened to a less responsible person, Gerry. Congratulations. But before you go out and do something to merit arrest, I’m afraid you have to make some decisions.’

  ‘Make them for me, Frankie. You’re my agent,’ I say, suddenly distracted by a strong smell of singeing. I discover that the back hem of my natty and elegant jacket has been overlapping the only one of the range’s hobs not to have its lid down. Damn. I douse it with the kettle. Never mind, it’s only Armani. Cooking couture.

  ‘I can’t,’ Frankie is saying, and again coughs as though trying to uproot his bronchial tree. ‘Only you can, Gerry. It’s you to decide if you also want to write the screenplay.’

  ‘Are you serious? Of course I don’t. Not in a million years.’

  ‘More dosh, mind you.’ Frankie does not like to see money slipping away from his ochre-stained fingertips.

  ‘I don’t need more dosh. Look, Frankie, if you remember I swore to have nothing further to do with that ocean-going old poseuse, and I’m sticking to it. I think we should take the money and run.’

  ‘Fine, if that’s what you want.’ Nevertheless he sounds wistful. ‘Still, my antennae are telling me there’s yet more money to be made out of Millie Cleat. There was quite a feeding frenzy towards the end of the film rights bidding, you know. All the big studios were biting. An international sports personality whose dramatic life was followed by a super-dramatic death live on worldwide TV? And, of course, the news that she was going to be Damed in the New Year’s honours list but had to be scratched at the last minute because they don’t award civil honours posthumously. Can’t go far wrong with all that as a story. But have it your own way. Hucka. Hucka. Harraargh. Now to another matter. There’s still one more book to do for Champions, according to our contract.’

  ‘Oh, convert it to a two-book deal or something. Or buy it up, I don’t care. Because today is the day I sever for ever any connection with the world of sport. That’s it, Frankie. Samper has spoken. I have ghosted my final biography. I have made my very last effort to extract an intelligible thought from creatures festooned with Nike swooshes. The full beauty of this hasn’t yet sunk in, but when it does I shall indulge in epic celebration.’

  This first day of the rest of my life (as we born-again atheists say) has begun so brilliantly I simply have to tell somebody. Unfortunately Max is in a recording studio in London today, while Jennifer and Josh are doing mother-and-child things in Colchester. For some reason the person in whose face I find I really want to wave my quarter-million windfall is Marta, and I actually start looking up her number before deciding she might think it vain of me or identify it quite correctly as vulgar gloating. In any case, someone whose gangster father has secreted heaps of money for her in numbered accounts around the world isn’t going to be overly impressed by a mere quarter of a million pounds. You have only to look at her to realise she’s oblivious to the stuff. If you have oodles of the readies you only dress like a bag lady and live in a mildew hatchery if you’re a Voynovian composer in your forties.

  Not for the first time I reflect on what a peculiar person she is, and yet again speculate about her erotic life. I once entertained the fantasy that under cover of darkness a simple but husky woodman’s son would occasionally emerge from the forest like a soiled faun to park his axe by her back door and, omitting to remove his boots, leave her bed covered in twigs, leaves and seed. But then she began keeping the company of a glamorous Italian film director’s son who was admittedly worth more than a second glance, and I began to think it wasn’t rough trade she was after. However, Filippo eventually took me for a spin in the Pacini family’s helicopter and I noticed him giving my exquisitely cut Homo Erectus jeans a knowledgeable once-over, as well he might. After that it became impossible to imagine him fancying a middle-aged woman with the dress sense of a moose. To say nothing of the physique. Meanwhile, Marta’s erotic leanings remain as opaque as ever. I suppose we must assume she takes the odd lover prophylactically, much as people put studs in their earlobes to keep the holes from closing.

  So instead of Marta I call dear Adrian in his laboratory at BOIS. He is satisfactorily bowled over.

  ‘That’s terrific,’ he says when he has recovered from the shock. ‘I’ll just trot along to the Director’s office and hand in my resignation. The ocean will just have to get along without me as best it can. I’ve always wanted to be kept.’

  ‘I’m not keeping you, you mercenary old poof,’ I tell him sternly. ‘The very idea. Anyway, I shall need the money myself. I’m planning great things. But I shan’t mind lashing out and buying you a new set of oilskins.’

  ‘Huh, I shall expect bespoke ones, you know. None of your off-the-peg rubbish. We’re talking Savile Row oilskins here … Heavens, Gerry, what a lot of money. I won’t say “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person” because it might have happened to me.’

  ‘No it mightn’t. Who’s going to pay one and a half million quid for the film rights of your book? Just tell me that.’ It is true, Adrian does actually have a book to his name: an expanded version of his doctoral thesis called Trophic Interactions among Post-Spring Estuarine Communities of Pseudodiaptomus hessei Copepods. This is not what the book trade calls a selling title, so it’s small wonder that if you ask for it in Waterstones they look at you waggishly and say without even consulting their computers, ‘Oh, I believe we’ve just sold our last copy of that. We’ll have to re-order for you.’

  ‘You just don’t realise how full of high drama and low cunning the life of a copepod is, Gerry. Brutal and disgusting, too.

  Show it on the big screen and you’d have people stampeding for the exits.’

  ‘Yes, to get their money back from the box office. And now I think your nephew and sister have just come in. Do you want a word with Jen?’ I hand him over to her with an
aside as she stands there shedding scarf and gloves. ‘Your brother.’

  For the next few days I go about cocooned in a warm feeling that an immense problem in my life has been solved. Had I been back in Italy I have no doubt I should have broken into song and invented an expressive dish that would take its place in the annals of celebratory cuisine. But being in this great house with such kindly people leaves me unaccustomedly inhibited. If you share living space with one of the world’s greatest conductors you don’t spontaneously break into song. This is a man who is on first-name terms with the two tenors. Nor do you artlessly commandeer your hostess’s Aga for culinary experiments unless she asks, particularly when she has a dinner party of grandees slated for this coming weekend. I have now been on my best behaviour for the past nine weeks and the strain is killing me, but I shall have to keep it up for a little while yet.

  Until two or three months ago I would have allowed a blacksmith to extract my eye teeth with a chisel in exchange for the chance to shine at one of Max Christ’s dinner parties. After years of exile in the intellectual wastelands where sports personalities and celebrities dwell I felt like Ovid, banished by Emperor Augustus in AD 8 to what is now Constant¸a on the Black Sea, separated from his beloved Rome by a thousand miles of howling barbarian tribes. That my biographees ate muck planned for them by private dieticians rather than real food was their own business. That they drank electrolyte sports drinks instead of decent wine was their loss. But that they knew nothing about anything interesting had me yearning for the company of people who had read, and looked, and listened, and thought, and lived. Naturally this was not snobbery on my part, merely the innate discrimination that draws all species to the company of their kind. Breeding will out, which is why arranged marriages often work so well while those of the ill-bred fall apart. As I say, time was when I longed – and very recently, too – for the society of like minds. But lately even this has become a casualty of a new-found impatience. Despite this, I find I still have pathetically lingering hopes that this imminent dinner party won’t disappoint with mere farty glitterati. Max tells me ominously that he is inviting a surprise guest for me so, Samper, good grace. Thankfully, Adrian has promised to come up from Southampton. And yes, of course everybody at the table will dutifully rejoice over my piece of good fortune when it is inevitably mentioned. But the truth is these people already have money and simply take it as read that everyone else they know has, too.

  So it’s really not such a big deal for them that this mysterious, cultured and amusing friend of Adrian’s has suddenly come into a bit of cash. How could it be? They never had to spend months trying to extract usable biographical data from harridans like Millie Cleat for a living. They were never invited to shower with Luc Bailly, the legendary downhill skier, as the price of an interview. This came about ostensibly because it was the only spare time he had. In reality he wanted me to observe for myself what had made him legendary. For Luc had the Lyndon Johnson syndrome. The late American president would sometimes shame visiting male dignitaries into swimming naked with him in his Texan pool in the sure knowledge that faced with his monstrous appendage they would be reduced to shrivelled inferiority. It was a bad error to try the same trick on Samper. Bailly had never had to learn the defensive – and offensive – shower techniques that come naturally to someone who has been to a decent English public school. From the moment we undressed I relentlessly grilled him about his relations with his mother, and it was he who shrivelled at the stinging brunt of it as the water hammered down and the steam billowed up. He soon turned his back and mumbled evasively into the suds. After that he was as good as gold.

  The point is that these delightful denizens of the East Anglian arts set have no idea of the awful things I have had to do these last twenty years simply to earn a crust, and what they will inwardly dismiss as just a handy bit of extra cash is in fact my exit visa out of the land of servitude.

  The inner excitement provoked by my sudden change in fortune fills me with energy that demands to be dissipated. Since I need to plan my future and have always found walking a great aid to thought, I set off from Crendlesham Hall in an arbitrary direction. Ever since my first visit here, when efforts were made to bamboozle me with obscure Suffolk place names, I have been chary of asking the way. But I have an uncanny sense of direction, as well as the foresight to keep the wonky spire of Crendleburgh church at my back. Pevsner or somebody rated its rood screen; I value its landmark qualities. I passed it the other day: a great pale barn of a place with a notice inside the lychgate posted by the incumbent, the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull. She was informing her parishioners that ‘Pilates is at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays’. Obviously the good though ungrammatical Daphne must be planning a Passion-tide play and is auditioning for the role of Pontius, a personal hero of mine. I’m amazed they’ve still heard of him in these illiterate, happy-clappy times. It’s cheering for an exile to return to his native land and find that not everything has gone to rack and ruin.

  But never mind East Anglicanism; I have my own future to think about. I hop over a stile and set off across a field. As I was adding the final, highly artistic, untruths to my portrait of Millie Cleat I had two other possible assignments lined up. One was to write a biography of my glittering host, Max Christ. When I broached this idea with him he promised to give it his earnest consideration, but that was months ago and he is probably hoping I will have forgotten. Really, he is too distinguished to care about such things, and anyway, at forty-seven he’s still too young for anything as retrospective as a life. In fact, Christ is the polar opposite of the sports heroes I’ve been writing about, who tend to become geriatric at thirty and whose ‘stories’ have to be told before they’re old enough to have done any real living. I have always thought it would be far more revealing to write these people’s lives when they are sixty or so. I suspect very few would avoid a sorry saga of decline. Sometimes they linger on as commentators or run a chain of sports shops, and sometimes they invest in one of those night clubs where fights break out at night and guests are rushed to A&E with uncomfortably lodged snooker balls. But for most of them it’s a long twilight of drink and flab and self-pity, which makes me feel that there may, after all, be some justice in this uncaring universe.

  My other project was something I have already made a small start on. This is the biography I mentioned earlier of Nanty Riah, aka Brill, the leader of Alien Pie. Doubtless you will remember how his buttocks were riddled with bullets during an art theft from his private jet – it was top of the world’s news stories for at least a week. I’ve grown quite fond of old Nanty, largely because there’s no side to him – other than, of course, his backside with its little perforations that so dominates his conversation. Unlike most pop stars he’s under few illusions about his social and artistic value, as opposed to his financial worth which is indeed immense. There’s something touching about his Harpenden background, his total alopecia, his devotion to his retarded sister and his sporadic faithfulness to his wife. However, as I tramp along one of the few Suffolk hedgerows that hasn’t yet been grubbed up by agrivandals I don’t feel any great enthusiasm for ghosting Nanty’s story. My finances have improved too dramatically. He can wait, I say to myself; and this liberating thought is enough to break the spell of silence that living with Adrian’s in-laws has forced upon me, for I am by nature a singer.

  I don’t know whether you’re familiar with Richard Strauss’s comic operetta Wienerparodien? It was a little essay in nostalgia he wrote while waiting for Hitler and his SS to blow over and has some terrific stuff for a Heldentenor in the Richard Tauber mould – exactly, as it happens, in the Samper mould too. The dashing but irascible captain of horse, Fechter (a demon with the sabre and whimsically known to his comrades as the Knight of the Long Knives), is about to marry Ernestine, Count Schütterbart’s daughter. On the night before the wedding the Count takes his future son-in-law aside with some well-meant but inept advice couched in an aria that generally brings the house down (‘N
ach Anbruch gut verschließen! Trocken and kühl lagern!’). Fechter takes offence and is on the verge of challenging this repulsive old man to a duel. Instead he contains himself with a struggle and makes a bitter riposte with an aria that generally brings the house to its feet. It is a virtuoso tirade. ‘Bei sachgerechter Lagerung,’ he begins sarcastically, ‘mindestens haltbar bis wann? Wann?’ before hitting his triumphant top C on ‘Siehe Prägung!’ Then, their honour restored, the two sit down to a platter of Viennese cream cakes while the orchestra plays a Rosenkavalier-ish waltz.

  Such is my vocal verve that I notice plovers three fields away taking hurriedly to the air with black-and-white wingbeats. Good: Samper is definitely back on form, even though unwillingly back in the land of his birth. However, amid this tense musical concentration I seem momentarily to have lost my bearings. I look in vain for Crendleburgh church on its low hill – not that there are any other kinds of hill hereabouts. Nothing but a horizon of wintry stalks with some moth-eaten woods nearby. I have an impression of telephone poles beyond a distant hedgerow disappearing behind the wood, which suggests a road. Also, between the trees a vague patch of pale something that might just be a house but will probably turn out to be a swag of old man’s beard. Anyway, there’s nothing else to aim for so I head towards it, taking a short cut through the woods.