Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  By now young Gioachino is completely out of his depth although with compassion he recognises that Tiziana is the least-favoured girl in the village, being bandy-legged and lightly moustached, which is motive enough for her intrigue. Feeling pity but threatened by her advances, he begins to panic and tries to drown out her shouted declarations of love with stern Latin reprimands and exhortations to say innumerable rosaries in penance. Meanwhile, hearing raised voices, the village elders gather in the church just in time to see Tiziana emerge stark naked from the confessional with a beatific smile of satisfaction. Is this her brutal attempt to incriminate the lover she cannot have, or are the villagers’ coarse peasant suspicions justified that Gioachino has finally yielded to carnal temptation?

  From this point on the melodrama admittedly becomes a little crude, although Maringiotti’s score is sensationally accomplished. The solo oboe weaving around moments of spiritual tension is especially adroit in its vulgarity, suggesting the Holy Spirit’s Tinkerbell-like habit of alighting mysteriously here and there amid the hurly-burly of human affairs. Whatever you thought of the score, if you were in the audience of Il confessionale in Cremona last year you could not possibly have emerged afterwards feeling you had been short-changed dramatically. On the other hand had you been nearly a thousand miles away in Sussex you would have discovered that Handel’s Muzio concerned Mucius Scaevola, the Roman hero who penetrates the Etruscan camp but is captured while failing to kill the enemy king, Lars Porsenna. Porsenna condemns him to be burnt in a furnace but when he hears the sentence Mucius merely laughs, boasting that no Roman fears death. To show his contempt he holds his right hand unflinchingly in the flames until it is reduced to a blackened stump. Impressed, Porsenna frees him and Mucius is henceforth known as Scaevola or ‘Lefty’. This is the only dramatic scene in the opera, and needless to say it takes place off-stage. Better luck at Glyndebourne next year, you may think, when they are staging Handel’s four hundred and fifty-third opera, Physippides in Tartary, whose plot can be viewed as an early experiment in anaesthesia. Spies tell me the production will be set in Wall Street, complete with stretch limos and mobile phones: the essential furniture of twenty-first-century ennui.

  In any case, you will readily understand Samper’s predicament here as he stands before this ad hoc shrine with Baggy and Dumpy expecting him to attribute his miraculous survival to the direct intercession of Barbara Cartland’s step-granddaughter. Taking a leaf out of Gioachino’s book I assume a rapt, far-away expression.

  ‘I’m sure you can imagine how impossible I find it all to talk about. It’s just … you know … one of those intensely private things.’

  ‘But she really did warn you to leave the house and it collapsed immediately you were all out?’

  ‘We certainly got out in the nick of time.’ From their expressions of awe and devotion these two mugs are ready to believe anything I say. Despite the tragic outcome I find it hard not to smile as I recall the very unspiritual atmosphere that night last December when Adrian and I, considerably the worse for drink and hallucinogenic mushrooms, had tried to stop giggling long enough to convince our guests to forsake the warm kitchen with its log fire and hurry outside for their lives into freezing mist and pitch darkness. The only unexpected appearance that evening had been Marta, much too solid (and probably sullied) in her flesh to be anything as ethereal as an apparition, who had suddenly returned after the best part of a year in America. Even then, once we were all standing outside shivering we kept remembering essential emergency articles such as passports and overcoats that were worth dashing back indoors for in an elaborate game of ‘chicken’, daring ourselves to get in and safely out again before the steadily crumbling ground at the front of the house carried away the entire building. The effects of the mushrooms, cunningly incorporated into my award-winning badger Wellington, persisted for hours and surrounded objects with shimmering haloes. They cast a dreamy, surreal air over the entire night so that even the eventual vanishing of my house – weirdly, in near silence – seemed phantasmic and illusory. Equally so are the present activities of Baggy and Dumpy, who strike me as implausible acolytes in this particular sect. ‘But I still don’t understand what you’re doing here,’ I put to them in the tones of a magistrate still far from won over to their case.

  ‘Long story,’ says Dumpy.

  ‘Oh, we live here,’ says Baggy.

  Why is this so unwelcome? ‘You mean you live in Italy?’

  ‘Yes – right here, down the road in Greppone. Last year Deirdre and I bought a house just this side of the town. We’d been looking to move for ages. I mean, Britain has changed rather a lot, hasn’t it?’

  For the better, I should imagine, since they moved. To think: but for the providential destruction of my house I would have had this ineffable couple as neighbours a mere five kilometres away. It turns out I even know their house, down past the path leading to the cemetery. It gets very little sun after noon, especially in winter, and has an unrelieved view of a menacing mountainside opposite that looks as though it might topple forward across the dark gorge and obliterate everything. It is indeed a peculiar sensibility that could have stood on their terrace and said ‘Darling – we’re never going to do better than this.’ But then, they probably thought the same thing on the altar steps some fifteen years ago in an equally self-fulfilling prophecy.

  ‘When there were all those articles in the newspapers last year about the earthquake – which, by the way, we also felt down in Greppone – we read about how the Princess had saved your lives and we just knew, didn’t we, darling? It was meant that we should have moved to almost the exact spot where she manifested her love for her subjects. But that was Diana all over. Ridiculed and outcast in her homeland, she chose to appear abroad to rescue distressed Britons.’

  I can’t help making an exasperated inventory here. ‘Three of us weren’t Britons at all. A Voynovian composer, a Russian pianist and Max Christ himself, who is Bavarian.’

  ‘Diana spread her light equally around the world, as I’m sure you remember, Mr Samper. She was oblivious to nationality.’

  I am about to ask tartly why, in that case, Dumpy had singled my houseguests out as distressed Britons but caught myself in time. Never argue with the devout: another in my short list of axioms. After more conversation – desultory and resigned on my part, intractably fervent on theirs – I gather these two exiles are leading members of a Diana cult that is rapidly spreading among British expatriates and local Italians. The Italians always were sentimental about her, of course. On the day of her death my barber observed how tragic it was. ‘She had adorable legs,’ he said soulfully as he wound crêpe paper around my neck. But more than that, Diana was really a figure straight out of … straight out of Italian opera. Of course! Romantic, melodramatic, tragic … What a perfect, camp … No! What a perfect, tragic theme! The simple, English-rose step-granddaughter of a serial romance writer, unhappily married to a prince, cold-shouldered by her husband’s family, alternately pilloried and fawned on by the British press, adored by the afflicted and downtrodden of the rest of the world, driven for affection into the dusky arms of a foreign tradesman’s son, immolated in a Paris underpass with her lover to incredible rumours of Secret Service assassination plots … Forget the Epic of Gilgamesh. This is surely the only possible operatic subject for Gerald Samper, mischievous tragedian! Send ’em away with a tear in their eye and a faint, indefinable feeling that creeps up on them later that they may have been sent up.

  ‘You find it amusing?’ Baggy is asking, faintly aggrieved and defensive.

  ‘Absolutely not,’ I tell him. ‘Far from it. No, just an idea I’ve had. Not funny at all. In fact, I want to know more.’ An inner voice of caution is warning me that once again I’m putting my head into a noose of pure hokum. Too bad: this is an operatic gift. But right now I need to get back to town and organise a bulldozer because I want to see how much can be saved from the rubble of my former home. I leave Baggy and Dumpy unwrapping s
heaves of gladioli and preparing to dress their shrine. I suddenly feel rather cheerful. It has occurred to me that the presence of hordes of pilgrims on my land ought to remove the last vestiges of peace and quiet from Marta’s property. Truly, it’s an ill wind.

  Adrian 3

  e-mail from Dr Adrian Jestico (ajestico@bois.ac.uk)

  to Dr Penny Barbisant (penbar@labs.whoi.ed)

  Sorry about the gap, Penny. Like almost everyone else in this department I’ve become the victim of temporary institutional paralysis. We’ve had our work disrupted or suspended by the government’s sudden brainwave to dust off – yet again – their ancient plans for a Severn Barrage. So we’ve all gone into lunacy mode, with fifty-nine thousand committees trying to work out how many Environmental Impact Assessments they’ll need to cover all political eventualities. Everyone knows, of course, there can never be enough EIAs for a thing this size, or well enough done. It’s guaranteed that if the project does eventually go ahead (oh! that delicious gravy train of EU & taxpayers’ money!) somebody at the very last moment will discover a community of five specimens of something called Showalter’s Banded Snail (previously thought extinct) in the Vale of Berkeley, or a nesting pair of Gloomy Petrels or some other unknown bird of vast emotional significance to the middle classes in Notting Hill Gate, & the entire thing will grind to a halt amid recriminations & backbiting.

  I’m glad the idea of following up on Eurythenes has paid off. With those P concentrations you quote I’m willing to stick my neck out all the way & say you’ve definitely got a wreck or a dumped cargo out there. I can’t think of anything else that would come close to accounting for such quantities. Any wreck ought to show up on the GLORIA scans USGS did for the 200-mile EZ, depending on how much sediment is getting dumped out there. You might eventually have to do a search through some printouts if you can bear the tedium.

  As you say, it was probably inevitable that Gerry would return to Italy, & not just because of what happened at Crendlesham. He seemed to suffer from a kind of paralysis in the UK as though completely out of his depth: moody, on edge, generally baffled. Often not even very good company, which really is unlike him. I suppose it’s simpler to think of him as a displaced person, he’s lived so little of his adult life in Britain. In fact, he often describes himself (with some pride) as a professional foreigner.

  Quite why he’s so disenchanted with the land of his birth isn’t clear to me. I don’t think it’s anything to do with that accident at Lyme Regis when he was a kid: a freak natural event like that could happen anywhere. It’s more as if he felt let down, as though he expected England to live up to some propaganda version he inherited from his parents. The war and all that. He once told me the tiny straw in the wind that finally made him realise he would need to leave Britain permanently was the slogan ‘You Know It Makes Sense’ that the government used in one of its public campaigns. It’s over things like this I’m most aware of the age gap between us. And no, your questions aren’t improper at all – they’re highly pertinent. It’s just that I don’t know the answers. I don’t know Gerry well enough & suspect I never shall. He manages to maintain no-go areas in his private self that he polices with great subtlety & humour so you’re hardly aware they exist. It’s only later when you’re trying to explain his behaviour to somebody who doesn’t know him that you realise how little you actually understand yourself. He’s the archetypal god of the gaps. And as I know to my cost, it’s pointless trying to quiz him as part of a plaintive demand for more intimacy. One relates to Gerry on his terms or, I’m afraid, not at all.

  If you want a tale out of school, it’s something I heard him once hint at in an unguarded moment. It dates from way back in the Seventies when he was working in London as an apprentice scriptwriter for Curzon TV. (Curzon TV? You’re far too young to remember it.) All I know for certain is that it involved his friend Derek, who was at his birthday party on the night of the earth tremor & with whom Gerry maintains a strange relationship based – as far as I can see – equally on affection & contempt. (If I say Derek’s an ebullient little hairdresser you’ll get at least half the picture, but he’s also surprisingly sharp & steely underneath. Quite a street-wise creature, if you ask me.) Something happened back then & they were both quite badly burned. I get the impression they may even have narrowly escaped jail. Actually, I quite like to think of Gerry having been caught up in something fishy. It’s so much at odds with his current image as grandee aesthete. At any rate I suspect each has something on the other; & whatever it was is enough to keep their relationship going. I thought at first they were ex-lovers but they’re so not each other’s type. No, I feel sure they share a history as ex-conspirators or as the seared survivors of a scandal. It’s yet something else that shows me how little I know about Gerry but I do quite like the mysteriousness.

  Exactly how much hold he has over Derek now becomes germane. Gerry is making an extraordinary request of everyone who was present at that birthday party of his. No, not a request – more a demand. Take a deep rationalist breath, Penny, because you won’t believe this. He wants us all to back a story that we were saved from death that night by a vision of Lady Di, who is supposed to have appeared in the kitchen & warned us to get out of the house. Apparently it’s something the Italian newspapers concocted at the time & it has caught on to the extent that there’s now a sort of St Diana cult involving pilgrimages to Gerry’s land – what’s left of it – & miraculous healings & all the other stuff you’d expect them to invent.

  Well, of course we all know it’s garbage & to judge from his phone calls Gerry’s own brand of combative scepticism is unimpaired. However, it seems the local authorities are keen that nobody issues any actual denials because they sense a boost for their tourist industry. But what’s in it for Gerry, you acutely ask? Broad hints, apparently, of massive concessions over planning permission for a new house. He says he wants to stay in the area & find himself somewhere to live that is as private as his old house was (his ex-neighbour Marta aside) but not so hopelessly inaccessible. So he’s put us all in quite a fix. For his sake, how can we not go along with this bogus vision story? But for the sake of our own self-respect, not to mention reputations, how can we possibly agree to it? My brother-in-law Max Christ is extraordinarily good-natured & loyal, even though as a Bavarian he must be wondering what on earth kind of nutty English family he has married into. Despite everything he clearly has a genuine soft spot for Gerry. But I can tell he’s pretty exasperated, all the same. We had a sort of family confab last weekend at which both Max & I agreed that if asked we will simply answer any questions with a firm ‘No comment.’ However, it goes against the grain. I don’t know about you but it costs me nothing to keep quiet about things like Creationism or Intelligent Design. I’ve no more quarrel with them than I have with Santa Claus or the Tooth Fairy. But helping to maintain the fiction that you’ve seen a vision of the Princess of Wales feels like a serious cause for shame. I suspect these dilemmas only ever happen to people who associate with Gerry.

  And so back to BOIS & a meeting in half an hour with some bearded geologists moaning about erosion if the Severn Barrage doesn’t get built. Small wonder I burden you with long emails: it’s such a pleasure to be reminded there’s life outside this institution. I had a similar pleasure at the weekend introducing my young nephew Josh to tardigrades (I bought him a beginner’s microscope recently). It’s great watching a bright kid catch on to the idea that there’s so much going on in the world he can’t see with his naked eye. He now badgers anyone who’ll listen to go up a ladder & pull lumps of moss out of gutters so he can find his ‘little bears’. He’ll soon be risking his own neck but I still think it’s better than sitting inertly in front of a TV.

  I hope things with Luke are progressing satisfactorily. Even satisfyingly?

  Cheers,

  Adrian

  4

  Among the many grim things about living in a hotel is the lack of a telephone of one’s own. In terms of cost, ho
tel phones are like restaurant wines: simply the proprietor’s way of hastening his early retirement to the Virgin Islands. Mobile phones, especially abroad, are equally ruinous. Nevertheless, a mobile phone is what I am using to keep in touch with the indispensable Frankie. He calls me as I am leaving the office in the Comune where I have just received their gracious permission to engage a bulldozer to search the ruins of my house for my buried personal effects. I am now on my way to the offices of the Forestale, where I need to obtain yet another permesso, when I answer my mobile on the steps outside. A fusillade of coughs identifies the caller.

  ‘Do you know who I mean by Leo Wolstenholme?’ asks Frankie eventually.