Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Adrian, bless him, turns up for a conventional bread-and-cheese lunch. I am itching to consult him about my grand operatic plan but first he has to play dutiful uncle to Josh. He has brought his nephew a junior microscope which he sets up on the kitchen table. They look at several prepared slides of the sort of unsavoury little creatures one swallows without noticing while swimming. Then he and Josh go outside with a jam jar to sample ditchwater or a puddle and for the next half hour they peer at daphnia and paramecia and amoebae swimming about. Cries of delight from Josh, who is especially pleased to watch them slow down, dry out and die beneath their cover slips in the heat of the lamp. Then they examine one of Luna’s hairs. I am astonished to see Josh, whose attention span is normally that of a grasshopper, diverted for so long without the least sign of boredom. Is this perhaps the eureka moment when we realise we have another Richard Feynman in the making? It would obviously please his scientist uncle but it would probably please his musician father even more, Max having once confessed he wished he’d been a palaeobiologist instead of a conductor. Maybe at the age of six Richard Feynman, too, wore his underpants back to front out of sheer other-worldly brilliance.

  Later, while changing for dinner, I tell Adrian about my operatic plans. However, my sketching out a grand future is halted by having to decide what to wear in order to wow these Suffolk grandees. I can’t wear my Blaise Prévert suit in chocolate corduroy: it had its first outing right here at Crendlesham Hall some months ago and is for ever associated with an unfortunate social gaffe I inadvertently made in the course of the evening. I also wore the same adorable suit a little later for a crucial dinner aboard an Australian billionaire’s yacht and that occasion, too, brings back discomforting memories. The upshot is that this masterly creation of Blaise Prévert’s is, through no fault of mine or his, unhappily tainted. My mohair and denim slacks by His Majesty would have done admirably, but fate arranged for me to be wearing them at my last birthday party. The result was that not only did they spend part of that night on a bare mountain and the rest in Marta’s sopping slum, but they were all I had left to wear for the next several days. When eventually I retrieved them from the dry cleaner in Woodbridge I realised they were beyond saving. The mud and scuffing of that traumatic night had ruined them. It begins to seem as though anything decent I buy to wear is sooner or later doomed to bring humiliation, ruin and despair upon their blameless owner. But since taking up with Adrian I have had optimism thrust upon me, and it takes more than reverses of fortune to turn a Samper into a sloven. I went to London and did some necessary shopping. Given that practically my entire worldly wardrobe was lying beneath tons of rock and earth on a mountainside high above Viareggio, it seemed a pretty good excuse for doing the January sales.

  I now break out a creamy linen and merino suit by Erminio Zaccarelli so drop-dead gorgeous that even if tonight’s assorted bumpkins affect to be unimpressed by my financial windfall they will at least be obliged to fall properly silent before such sartorial poetry. Adrian has been wittering on in the background about the sort of opera libretto I might write when he breaks off suddenly.

  ‘Good God, Gerry, are you going to wear that suit?’

  ‘I am. It’s rather a masterpiece,’ I say a little stiffly.

  ‘I can see that. All I meant is that it’ll be like putting on tails to do the gardening. You wait till you meet the guests. Have you never seen orchestral players when they’re not in black ties in the pit? Think Oxfam. Or better, Millets.’

  ‘Well, I can’t help that. It’s the job of a peacock to make ordinary fowls look dowdy, and all the more so if the peacock has just sold its film rights for a quarter of a million quid. It’s very salutary for the rest of the barnyard. It pushes the bar higher even as it lowers their spirits. Anyway, what was it you were saying?’

  ‘About your opera? Just that I think your talents are perfect for farce, Gerry. Try this. Two newlyweds go abroad for their honeymoon. Their plane is hijacked and they’re held captive by the modern equivalent of Barbary pirates in one of those pretend countries like Mauritania. A sort of Il Seraglio parody but full of topical zingers. Their captors are extremely radical. In fact – yes – they’re the militant gay wing of Al Qaida, that’s how radical. They’re demanding th—’

  ‘No, Adrian. That’s not at all the sort of thing I have in mind. I’m aiming for the grand and the serious, not a satirical musical.’ I zip up my gorgeous new trousers decisively.

  ‘It can be called Has Anyone Interfered With Your Bag?’

  ‘No it can’t. I admit that’s a great title but no, Adrian. My ideas are running more along the lines of something lofty and sad. I’m toying with the Epic of Gilgamesh.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘What’s that? Honestly, you scientists. Where have –’

  But at this moment there’s a hooting from the drive down below. We go to the window and glinting in the porch light is the roof of a taxi. Standing next to it is a mountainous man in furs, one arm thrust through the driver’s window. When he turns to go into the house the light from the open front door falls on his face, revealing him to be wearing a full gorilla suit. When eventually I fly downstairs to make sure my hors d’oeuvres will be in readiness – it being elementary etiquette that one does not keep gorillas waiting for their food – the creature is sitting at the kitchen table with a gin and tonic in his furry fist, chatting with Max. Josh is in his dinosaur pyjamas by the Aga, his arms entwined in its chrome rail for safety, one pink foot standing on the other, nervously entranced. Max introduces me to the man in the ape suit, who is a clarinettist with the Colchester Symphony Orchestra that Max has so brilliantly built up to be one of the world’s best by luring just such instrumentalists away from the Berlin Phil. and elsewhere. When you’re in the market for the best available talent it doesn’t pay to be overly fussy if it turns out eccentric.

  ‘Nice suit,’ the gorilla says to me, raising his glass. His mouth looks obscenely wet, like that of a bearded man.

  ‘Thanks. Ditto.’ One tries to be civil to these wind players.

  ‘I was telling Max that I’ve just been molested by my taxi driver. He wanted to feel my perineum.’

  ‘Ah. If he was a Pakistani it was the same fellow who drove me out here last year. He suggested we stop and explore the local scenery, which he pretended to know intimately.’

  ‘Khurshid,’ says Jennifer from the stove. ‘So he should. He was born in Suffolk, which I imagine is more than any of us in this room can claim. His parents were from east Pakistan as was, which I suppose makes him a Bangladeshi by descent. But he’s entirely East Anglian. I know all this from the local paper. He did six months in Colchester for feeling men’s bottoms, or similar. But he’s a good reliable driver, for all that he’s a fantasist about the landscape hereabouts. He told Gerry that a low hill on the way here is known as “the Crendle” and was where they used to execute horse thieves. Something like that, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Exactly that,’ I say. ‘Whereas when I arrived you told me the Crendle was a stone monument that figures in one of Constable’s paintings.’

  The gorilla empties his glass. ‘According to him just now, the hill is named after an Anglo-Saxon monster who lives underneath it in a huge cave, sleeping until the sea rises to wake him, which this driver seems to think will be soon, what with global warming.’

  ‘East Anglia must be the sort of landscape that begs you to invent stories about it in order to give it some interest.’

  ‘Mummy,’ interrupts Josh, who is tying himself in embarrassment-displacing knots while hanging from the Aga’s rail, ‘why does this man feel men’s bottoms?’

  ‘What a good question,’ I breathe, with all the insouciance of one not obliged to answer.

  But at this moment there’s more banging on the front door and Jennifer hustles her son off to bed. His question floats with piercing clarity on the air behind him like a waft of Chanel Number Five or some other equally identifiable scent. Max takes the ap
e off into the sitting room so I can get on with some serious dishing-up. I’m beginning to worry about my mouse vols-au-vent. It’s hard to know when to transfer them to the top oven: they can so easily dry out. At this moment a stocky workman wearing a faded blue boiler suit wanders in.

  ‘Evenin’,’ he says. ‘Name’s Spud. Did the missus tell you where she’d left me beer and butties?’

  ‘Beer and …?’

  ‘Me sandwiches. Corned beef, usually.’

  ‘Corned beef? Are you quite sure you’ve come to the right …? I mean, I doubt if … Corned beef?’ I repeat faintly. Even in dear Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis’s recipe book, penned as it was in the depths of wartime, there is not a single mention of this substance. Maybe like pemmican and biltong it retains a sort of gritty chic among the unshaven adventurer set as they fan up the camp fire to keep the jackals at bay. There again, there is a Protestant continuum in Britain and her ex-colonies – including the United States – in which a perverse pride is taken in elevating crisis fare to the status of national delicacy. Baked beans spring to mind. Salad cream is another example, bearing the same relation to gastronomy as Bryl-creem does to hairdressing. At this nonplussed moment Jennifer returns.

  ‘Oh, hullo, Spud,’ she says. ‘I didn’t realise you’d arrived. I was just getting Josh to bed.’

  ‘Evening, Mrs C. I’ll be getting out of your way.’

  ‘There’s a crate of your favourite in the cellar, if you wouldn’t mind? And I’m afraid we may be out of corned beef. Can you make do with cheese and pickle? And onions?’ And soon Spud is settled at a table in the scullery with bottles of Greene King ale and enough bread and cheese for a gang of ploughmen with tapeworms. Producing a rolled-up tabloid newspaper from a deep pocket in his boiler suit he looks all set for an intellectual evening with the Sun crossword.

  ‘Who on earth?’ I ask Adrian sotto voce when he comes in for some olives, and nod towards the scullery.

  ‘Spud? He’s Dougie Monteith’s driver. Or factotum. Partner, really. They’ve been together thirty years at least. Spud’s a Wykehamist, as I expect you could tell. He’s only ever called Spud, but I imagine he must have had a surname at school. You’ll meet Dougie shortly. He’s Sir Douglas Monteith, Bart. A real baronet, ancient family, total black sheep. Passed over for Lord Lieutenant of the county, probably for cohabiting with a Winchester man and much, much more.’

  ‘And Spud doesn’t eat with us?’

  ‘No, no. He doesn’t do formal. He lives quite happily in garages and sculleries and garden sheds and, we presume, used to make himself available in the master bedroom before Dougie got too old.’

  ‘Golly. So that’s what Lord Chatterley got up to that drove his wife into a gamekeeper’s arms.’

  ‘Presumably. It’s pure Suffolk. One foot in the twelfth century and the other in the thirteenth. One day someone’s going to wander into one of these villages and find them drawing up a list for a children’s crusade. How are your hors d’oeuvres?’

  In deference to my artist’s temperament Adrian hurries off to get everyone to the table while I briefly finish off my precious savouries in the top oven.

  There is something about the magic moment when one enters a dining room bearing fuming dishes of one’s latest creation that can never quite be equalled. Alone, we artists know what it is to make an entrance. The great pianist who walks impassively through a heavy shower of applause towards his waiting instrument; the superbly starved supermodel who sets off down the catwalk, her eyes bright with cocaine; the actress who stalks imperiously from the wings in time for the Act 5 dénouement: all relish their professional moment of glory. But tonight I dare say Samper gives his public that little bit extra when he sails into the Christs’ dark-panelled dining room wearing Erminio Zaccarelli’s linen and merino suit and with a huge tray of original masterpieces. Which, I may say, I come within an ace of dropping when for the first time I have a look at tonight’s guests. Even though I know he will be there, the sight of a gorilla sipping a pre-dinner sherry is still disconcerting, and all the more so because the man inside the suit is making no concessions and is evidently prepared to dine with his costume’s head on. And the rangy aristo in the moth-eaten Norfolk jacket is … good God! … that appalling old buffer who only a few days before so rudely drove me out of his jungle domain full of Bloomsbury plants. Tonight his faded blue eyes hold not the least sign of recognition as he fixes his gaze on my crotch while politely inclining his head to hear his neighbour, who is … Marta! I don’t believe this. What is the frowsty old buzzard doing here, if not come to torment me with crowings over my fallen nest?

  ‘Gerree!’ she cries from her perch at the far end of the table. ‘You’re looking so much better than when I last saw you. And what a lovely suit!’

  This disarms me, of course, just as she intended. Crafty as ever, that’s our Marta. ‘Marta, darling,’ I greet her. ‘You’re looking wonderfully well. I’ve so missed you this last couple of months.’ I begin distributing the dishes. As I do so Max gets to his feet and introduces me graciously as a friend of the family and the author of the recent bestseller, Millie!, whose subject died so dramatically at Christmas aboard her yacht in Sydney harbour. He also mentions that the film rights of his book have been sold for ‘a substantial sum’. He then sits down and people make obligatory clapping gestures. I expect I blush prettily.

  ‘This substantial sum of yours,’ observes a man with a costermonger’s face and a dreadful gold Rolex, ‘I’d hang onto it with both hands if I were you. Otherwise old Max here will have it off you toot sweet.’

  Amid sycophantic laughter Adrian introduces the costermonger to me as yet another knight: Sir Barney Iveson, who seems to have been the CSO’s principal financial benefactor and all-round good fairy while Max was building up the orchestra. I suppose transfer fees are high these days and I wonder how much Max had to fork out to lure the ape away from the Berlin Phil. or wherever he talent-scouted him. ‘You know Barney’s the inventor of the Shangri-Loo?’ Evidently my expression conveys bafflement because as I hand around the last glasses of liver smoothie Adrian explains to the barrow boy that I’ve been living abroad in Italy for years, otherwise I would surely be familiar with the huge success story of the Shangri-Loo, the exotic lavatory that has become an indispensable part of the modern British bathroom. ‘The new millennium’s equivalent of the jacuzzi,’ he finishes, provoking in my imagination images not wholly compatible with gourmet dining.

  An ape, a lavatory manufacturer, a nonagenarian black sheep and Marta: is this really the dazzling gathering of intellectuals with whom I was hoping the Samper wit might cross swords? And Adrian was spot-on about my being overdressed. If the lavatory king’s trousers aren’t polyester I need my eyes testing. Even old Marta seems to have forgotten what little dress sense she acquired in America and has reverted to her old babushka chic, being bundled up in a shapeless frock of midnight blue netting sewn all over with glass beads and sequins. She looks like the wife of a Communist Party official on holiday at a Black Sea resort in the 1960s. I feel I should write a note to Signor Zaccarelli apologising for his beautiful suit’s exposure to such ignominious slumming. And as I finally take my seat I’m further annoyed to find I must have miscounted somewhere and have no mouse vol-au-vent of my own. Presumably I’ve given somebody two by mistake since I seem to have two After Eight Minces. It’s in the nature of things that chefs often never get to eat their own creations and must rely on less discerning palates to learn how successful they are.

  The full irony of this last statement only becomes apparent some twenty minutes later when the second course, two magnificent roast legs of lamb, is well under way. Beneath the influence of my brilliantly inventive starters, whose ingredients I refuse to divulge despite all entreaties, conversation has been animated and convivial. Given the peculiar and ill-assorted company, however, it has been less than intellectually dazzling. The creaky old baronet who chivvied me off his patch of Eden has been giving Marta som
e detailed reminiscences of his Bloomsbury friends of seventy years ago, and serve her right. Judging by overheard snippets of the Bart.’s conversation his set were people of excruciating inconsequence and I can’t imagine Marta has the vaguest idea who they were, any more than we would be familiar with the leading lights of Voynovia’s Vorticist movement in the 1930s. But having to listen to the old buffoon with a semblance of interest will be good for her manners. Meanwhile, the Samper etiquette has itself been under strain as the costermonger tells me exactly how the Shangri-Loo ‘Dream’ model differs from the carbon neutral ‘EcoTwirl’ model, not to mention the ‘Arabian Nights’, whose ‘gossamer fingers’ feature pursues hygiene entirely too far for any dinner table.

  Over the last five minutes I have noticed the general conversation flagging somewhat, doubtless on account of my informant’s graphic descriptions of advanced sanitation techniques. People are eating more slowly and with increasingly thoughtful expressions. I am just trying to think of a way to shut the costermonger up when the Baronet decisively puts down his knife and fork and is clearly about to hold forth. All the better: he has the immunity of old age and can be as rude as he likes. Abruptly his huge gnarled hands clutch the edge of the table as though to push himself to his feet. As he rises, he begins ‘I …’, but his sentence is cut off by a sudden hawser of blue-brown vomit that stretches wide his mouth and hurtles across the table, hitting a Wedgwood bowl of roast potatoes at least four feet away. He collapses back on his chair and heaves again, this time swamping a pot of mint jelly. And as if this were the trigger that releases everybody else’s inhibitions, the others promptly follow suit. Stomach contents empurpled with Max’s superb ’97 Bolgheri Sassicaia and launched at projectile speed knock over wine glasses and even salt cellars. Several diners retain enough control to attempt to stem their torrents with hasty wads of napkin, but such is the force that subsidiary jets spurt out at the sides, in one case upwards into the diner’s own hair, in another into a neighbour’s neck. In a matter of seconds a perfect dinner table is splattered with liver-coloured lumps and froth, the reeking air full of the sound of retching. Not since the grosser feasts of Ancient Rome can there have been such a scene of mass gastric ejaculation. Gleaming strands now bow down the innocent spring flowers that comprise Jennifer’s charming centrepiece, drool joining the snowdrops’ heads to the drenched tablecloth. I notice the gorilla is particularly under the weather. Presumably the costume’s designers overlooked the possibility that its wearer might be overcome by violent regurgitation. No doubt the mouth wouldn’t open widely enough and the inner contours of the moulded plastic must be redirecting a good portion of the flow internally. This would explain the lumps of sick pouring from both eyeholes and the luckless clarinettist’s frantic but blind attempts with his paws to find the Velcro straps that will release his head.