‘No. Who’s he?’
‘It’s a she. Leonora. Pretty famous here in the UK. Lots of tabloid interest in her various affairs, a boob operation that went wrong, etcetera, but best known as a regular presenter of Global Eyeball. No?’
‘No.’
‘TV investigative series a bit like Panorama used to be but much less political, harrucka-rucka-rucka errgh, as befits the twenty-first century. Long on personalities and short on theory. They’re doing a series of occasional programmes about sports heroes and the economics of commercial endorsement. Quite good, actually. I saw one they did about that golfer, Justin McPeach. Now there’s a shit, incidentally. You did well not to write about him. What Wolstenholme wants is for you to take part in a programme about Millie Cleat.’
‘Oh Christ, Frankie, not her again? I’m still relishing her demise.’
‘I’m afraid you’re considered as the world’s leading Millie expert, Gerry. Just about everything anyone knows about her comes from your book. And now the film rights have been bought she’ll go on being news for quite a time yet, at least until someone still older and missing more limbs breaks her records. Trust me, Gerry, you should do this interview. Leo’s very popular and it’ll help the book. And talking of which’ – here he interrupts himself with another coughing fit so explosive that the tinny clacking the mobile makes as I hold it safely away from my ear actually causes a passing shopper to glance up in surprise – ‘Champions want to bring out a new edition of Millie! and they want an Afterword from you to take in her death and the investigation in Sydney. They also want you to concoct some kind of summing up. Her legacy, and all that. It needn’t be long: fifteen hundred words at the most.’
‘For heaven’s sake, Frankie.’ But I’ll do it, and we both know I will. If I’m going to be buying a house shortly I shall need all the dosh I can earn. Movie deal or no, the book’s an important part of my exchequer for as long as it can be made to last. A new edition’s like a re-tread tyre. One takes something that’s basically clapped-out and with judicious tweaking ekes out some more mileage. In the meantime I suppose I shall have to take part in this TV thing for much the same reason. According to Frankie this Leo creature is still ‘putting it all together’, doing preliminary research and getting some ‘core interviews’ lined up. Thanks to my brief long-ago stint in television I know this means that a team of baby research assistants and PR flackettes with names like Sappho and Poppy will be doing it for her in their slangy posh-cockney drawls. Frankie tells me Leo’s quite happy to fly out and interview me here if I’m not planning on being in London. I tell him to relay the proviso that they may have to do it in snatches while a bulldozer turns up precious relics from my former home.
‘She’ll love that. She’s got an Action Woman reputation to keep up. She doesn’t like studios, they’re too tame. She’s always on location. The more shells whistling overhead and pillars of oily smoke in the background the better. I realise you won’t be providing those, but how many authors does she film pulling chests of drawers full of their underwear out of a Tuscan landslide? Knocks studio shots of talking heads for six, ditto tubby old ex-pats wearing panama hats slumped in a deck chair, maundering on about I Zingari and their cricketing heydays.’
‘Oh, and Frankie,’ I say before he can ring off or a pulmonary seizure supervene, ‘I need a contact number for Marta. She’s supposed to be in London at the moment working with the awful Sue Donimus. No doubt in Voynovia they’re still using pigeon post but after last year in the States she may actually have a mobile by now. Might you see what you can do, please?’
‘H’m. Someone else I thought you never wanted to see again.’
‘Unfortunately she’s got something I want.’
‘I’d rather not know.’
‘No, it’s an almost impossible ambition. I want her silence.’
Hours pass, during which I succeed in obtaining my permesso from the office of the Forestale. Faintly incredulous, I’m beginning to wonder whether Benedetti may not after all be putting in a word for me in various quarters. Generally speaking, the norm when applying for even the most trivial piece of paper in an Italian bureaucrat’s office is that after queuing for an hour one will be sent smartly away for not having brought one or more of the following: a notarised copy of one’s late mother’s birth certificate, one’s passport, one’s permesso di soggiorno, one’s medical records translated into Italian by a certified translator, one’s codice fiscale, half a dozen passport photos, a sheet of carta bollata (from the nearest newsstand), one’s inside leg measurement as taken not more than three months ago and duly attested by the Carabinieri, and anything else the bureaucrat can think up on the spur of the moment. In the good old days before the ‘Clean Hands’ initiative of the Nineties that tried to do away with the bribery of officials, the only known way of getting anything out of chronically underpaid Italian bureaucrats was to turn up with a mazzetta: a ‘bunch’ of banknotes or similar. I found a bottle of Chivas Regal would generally ensure the processing was over in a medium jiffy. True, they would still require you to return in three months to collect the relevant permesso (‘Alas, the dossier has to go to Rome, signore, and you know what Rome is like’ – hands spread in an expressive gesture of amused resignation), but at least the worst was over. In this brave new post-Chivas Regal era, though, bureaucrats are still underpaid and there’s no knowing what vital document you may have left behind. (‘But naturally, signor Samper, we require a notarised copy of your parents’ marriage certificate.’ ‘In order to be connected to the town’s sewerage system?’ ‘Of course, signore. It is the law.’ And that’s another hour’s waiting down the chute.) All of which explains why native supplicants in Italian government offices wisely come armed with bulging portmanteaus containing every conceivable document detailing their family’s history and activities back through several generations. Even so, the chances are they’ll be sent away again for forgetting to bring a post office counterfoil proving they have already paid €31.83 for the permesso they’re still months away from getting.
So the effortless speed with which I have just cleared the bureaucratic hurdles required before I can go digging in the remains of my own home makes me wonder if the weasel’s paw may not be behind this. Over the years I have deduced that Benedetti is very well connected in this town. I imagine it’s impossible to be an estate agent in a place this size without being in touch with the movers and shakers, not to mention the makers and shovers. After all, he was probably at school with half the town council, if not the mayor himself. Come to that, I dare say I am myself not wholly without friends in the sort of places that count; so maybe our humiliating plot can be made to prosper long enough to see Samper once again ensconced in a suitable house, with grounds spacious enough to sing in and a kitchen designed for radical creativity. Cheered by the thought, I ring up a bulldozer man of my acquaintance and book his services in three weeks’ time, which is the earliest he can manage.
And finally, now armed with her mobile number, I call up Marta in London from a bar where for old times’ sake I am cautiously sipping a Fernet-Branca.
‘Gerree!’ comes that familiar cry that only a little over a year ago used to make my blood run cold practically daily.
‘I hope I’m not interrupting a work of high art?’
‘Not so.’ She giggles. ‘I am eating my lunch in the nude here.’
Oh God. ‘You’re fading, Marta. I didn’t catch that?’ ‘… in Danubya. Danubya’s a new Voynovian ristoran. The first in London, it opens only last year. The shonka is mm! but not so good as ours from home. The manager and chef they are city men from Voynograd and do not understand country food so well. Do you remember mavlisi?’
Do I ever? Marta once called these ‘national delicacies’ the Voynovian equivalent of Florentines, but having eaten them I can emphatically state that this description is far more misleading than helpful. True, both are pastry-based, but thereafter all similarity ends. One variety of mavlisi rese
mbles testicles on the half-scrotum: a pigeon’s egg pickled in spearmint, nested in a milky jelly and cupped in a wrinkled shell of dough. Another kind is like a tiny jam tart spread with a mulch of capers ground up with lavender. A third is a deep-fried ball about the size of a marble stuffed with chillies, garlic and horseradish. It explodes in your mouth like a depth charge and leaves your head hanging by a hinge for the rest of the day.
‘My poor Gerree, you were so fast to eat them! There is a right way for eating mavlisi, very special and historic. The mavlisi of Danubya here are very mm!, as good almost as those of Mrszowski’s in Voynograd. When I eat them I have tears in my eyes.’
When I ate them even my underwear became damp, but I assume she is talking about tears of homesickness in her passionate, Slavic way. Frankly, Marta’s a bit of a puzzle to me. Despite having had our misunderstandings in the past, affording both of us a fair old laugh from time to time, I can never quite disabuse myself of the apprehension that in her sly, peasant way she may be after my body. I know, I know – it sounds immodest. I’m hardly one of those men who delude themselves that they cause every woman they meet to go into a permanent state of rut, even though I’ve met no end of ladies who have been far from impervious to the urbane, artistic type. I must be a welcome change from business boys with boxer shorts and Boxster cars whose gift for music comes into its own on the terraces of Tottenham Hotspur. But I did give Marta a good deal of neighbourly help and generally took pity on her, and such things can be misinterpreted by romantically inclined girls. She was a stranger in a strange land who initially spoke no Italian and a brand of English that only I could understand. And frankly, no one could have been more sympathetic than I towards her drink problem and her weight problem and the fact that she comes from a family of millionaire racketeers based in the Carpathians – or wherever Voynovia is, I’ve still not looked it up in an atlas. As a Shropshire Samper whose family roots go back to Norman times it is hard not to view Marta as basically of gypsy stock. In a society like hers which surely sets great store by making upwardly mobile marriages, it’s impossible to overlook that someone like myself with a proper pedigree would represent a considerable catch.
Small wonder, then, that I’m a little nervous. As friends were kind enough to remark on my fiftieth birthday (although not Derek – failure noted), I could easily pass for forty, being blessed by good fortune with one of those enduringly trim physiques that seem never to get badly out of shape (unlike, for example, Derek’s). But poor Marta is really nothing but a great lump with hair that makes her look like Struwwelpeter’s sister. When in her cups she has a habit of leering suggestively and becoming tactile in a way that quite frankly rather puts the wind up one. Unfortunately I now need her connivance. The importance of her going along with the Diana story outweighs everything else.
‘The reason I’m calling,’ I tell her after an emboldening slug of Fernet-Branca, ‘is to say that I’m really worried about your
lovely house.’ ‘You are saying the ground is still moving, Gerree?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. Structurally, it’s fine.’ For a mildewy old barracks, that is. ‘I’m talking about the visitors up there. You must have noticed them when you were there after Christmas?’
‘Sure. Rubber knickers.’
I was forgetting her year in America. ‘But these people aren’t just rubberneckers, Marta. They’re pilgrims. It’s hard to explain over the phone. They are going to grow in number and soon they’ll make it impossible for you to work in peace. They’ll be up there all the time. And once they discover you were at my birthday party that night they won’t leave you alone, I promise you. They’ll be banging on your door in a constant stream. Believe me, Marta, your days of quietly working at your music up at Le Roccie are numbered.’
‘No, Gerree, I can’t believe this. Surely they just want to see the place where your house fell over. I would, if I am them.’
I’ll bet. ‘No, Marta, they want a lot more than that. You’ll have to come out and see for yourself. And it’s not just the value of your house as a retreat that is dropping. So is its market value, according to Benedetti.’
‘He is a mustelje, that man. A what do you say?’
‘Weasel. Of course he is. We’ve both known that for years. But he’s an expert weasel when it comes to local house prices. Look, will you come? I really think you should. Besides, I’ve a great favour to ask you and I can’t easily explain it over the phone.’
She perks up. ‘A favour, Gerree? What is that?’
I thought that would get her interest. Expecting Marta not to rise to the idea of having me indebted to her for a change would be like imagining Dracula walking past a blood bank without salivating. ‘We need to pretend that we escaped from my house before it fell over the cliff because the ghost of Princess Diana warned us to leave. I know it sounds silly … For God’s sake, it is silly … But it’s terribly important that you don’t tell anybody it’s untrue.’
‘But nobody says it is true, Gerree.’
‘Not over there in London, no. But they do here. These people who’re ruining your house’s peace and quiet believe that’s what happened. They’re religious maniacs and there are sound political reasons why we mustn’t deny the story. I’ll explain it all when you come over. I promise you, Marta, it’s in both our interests. Even financial interests.’
‘Well, if you say, Gerree. But I don’t believe in ghosts.’
‘Neither do I. But if anyone asks you if it’s true that the ghost of Princess Diana saved our lives that night you must just lie and say yes … Oh, I wish you were here. It’s so difficult explaining from a thousand miles away. Incidentally, how is work with Ms Donimus going?’
‘I think perhaps Sue and me, we are washing up.’
‘I thought you were writing an opera together?’
‘That was our plan. But it’s not going so good.’
‘Washed up? Oh, you mean the project’s over?’
‘She is very violent, that one. There is much whipping even in Act 1, Gerree. I cannot write music for whipping. We in Voynovia have enough tortures when the Soviets were occupying us. I want loving, Gerree! I want to write passion! I do not want to write people in pain from their vudel parts whipping and burning. We’re talking wall-to-wall S&M,’ she ends surprisingly in Bay Area leather-bar style.
Crikey, what kind of an opera is that? It sounds like a cheap way of evoking those staples of classical tragedy, pity and terror. Maybe it’s a comic opera, a sort of upmarket musical tailored to suit the degraded tastes of modern Britain? After all, the common horde is for ever having holes drilled in its vudel parts in order to insert rings and studs and pins. And not just there, either. Also in its nasal, labial and auricular regions. We have finally become the sort of people National Geographic photographers used to go to Papua New Guinea to record, allegedly for anthropological purposes. Tattooed, pierced and infibulated, Britain’s tribespeople are now the vanguard of a new Stone Age. So possibly this Sue Donimus libretto would admirably suit Glyndebourne (Nun orgy bleed, One bulgy nerd, Nylon bee drug or – as I often refer to her among operatic friends – Beryl Dungeon).
‘Poor Marta. That doesn’t sound at all like your sort of thing. Apart from that, is the lady hard to work with?’
‘She is like many writers, Gerree. She has no music. It is the concept she likes, the idea to make an opera so many people will give her claps.’
‘Applaud her.’
‘Oh yes. Applaud she likes very much.’
‘Well, look, if you come out here I think you’ll find there’s a perfect story just waiting for you. Do you remember when we first met you told me you admired the British royal family?’ (What she had actually said was ‘I love you British queens and kings tradition’, a phrase that stuck in my mind as an indication that this was someone not destined to become a soul mate). ‘This story has high romance, high farce, high tragedy and absolutely no whipping. It’s made for you.’
‘I may
go back to the States, Gerree. Perhaps Max is trying to commission me.’
‘It’s your life, Marta. But it’s also your house and I urge you at least to pay a visit to Italy before you run off to America again.’
With that I leave her to the joys of the cuisine in London’s first (and I’d bet last) Voynovian eatery. Such has been the strain of conversing with her that I seem to have consumed rather more glasses of Fernet-Branca than I’d intended and my thoughts have taken on that floating quality I normally associate with early afternoons in Italy. I idly wonder what sort of a place the Danubya is. I can readily imagine its kitchens might surprise a health inspector by their lack of mice and cockroaches. What mightn’t cross the inspector’s mind is that these creatures are probably essential ingredients in the plats du jour and are therefore not allowed to go to waste. Still, as students of the Samper philosophy of food will know, any adventurous cook should indeed think seriously about rodents and insects. The industrialised world is only gradually waking up to the ecological soundness of tapping food sources that are plentiful and require no ‘food miles’, in the current cant expression. Above all, in a grotesquely overpopulated world I think we should definitely be looking speculatively at our own species as offering real gastronomic potential. I am sorry that pioneering German gourmet, Armin Meiwes, is unjustly languishing in jail for an entirely consensual culinary act, although if I may say so it was a blunder to sautée his friend’s vudel part with garlic, salt and pepper. No wonder its owner found it too tough to eat. It would obviously require slow, juicy cooking as cock au vin. However, these are mere details. Anthropophagy would definitely be a small but decisive gesture towards dealing with the population explosion. We could start by putting environmentalists into the pot. They are multiplying at an alarming rate and are easily outbreeding and endangering more traditional natural science species. ‘Eat up your Greens!’ could once again become a nursery injunction.
Although nobody would feel sentimental about environmentalists, let alone miss them, it’s possible the old taboo against cannibalism might occasionally deter even venture-some diners. And it is here that modern science will shortly come to the rescue. If culturing stem cells will enable us to grow new body parts, then it is surely only a matter of time before slabs of boneless human meat can be grown in great vats: meat that was never part of any individual and so required no slaughter. This opens up all sorts of possibilities. The alimentary raw material could be grown from the diner’s own stem cells, heralding a glorious new era of autophagy. Better still, at really expensive restaurants it would become possible to dine off the famous. Fans could eat steaks cultured from the film stars of their choice. Flushed with hero worship, young groupies could bite into hamburgers whose patties were made from the vudel parts of their pop idols and favourite sports personalities, drawing an ancient superstitious strength from the idea of incorporation … At this point, however, the thought of facing a plate of Millie-and-chips makes me come all over faint and I’m obliged to retire to my hotel for a lie-down, much as the late W. G. Sebald was always doing in his books.
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