Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  Luckily, some of us can fight back. It is a comfort to know that my particular accuser almost certainly thinks Caravaggio plays for Arsenal and Les Fleurs du Mal is a new cologne by Stella McCartney. Meanwhile, my original point about one’s neighbours in Tuscany remains unassailable. Unlike most British visitors, I actually live here. My house is not a second home and neither am I buying it as a canny investment (‘Bricks and mortar, mate. Can’t lose, canya?’). And thus the question of neighbours becomes paramount. Imagine finding oneself living next to Baggy and Dumpy. Inconceivable.

  I’m glad we’ve got that settled.

  I have now reserved a room at a nearby hotel for Joan Nugent, who arrives the day after tomorrow. She at least is one Briton I’m very much looking forward to seeing. I can’t tell you how supportive she was during the traumatic later stages of writing Millie! We hardly saw one another, but over several long phone conversations she managed to reassure me that not all the yachting fraternity consisted of vilely rude egomaniacs. Her nicotine-toughened vocal cords gave an edge to what at the time seemed like a lone voice of sanity. Because she had known Millie Cleat for years she was able to convey both what she loved in her and what she abhorred. At a time when abhorrence had become my dominant emotion it was good to be reminded that Millie had once been not only less loopy but nicer. Joan was refreshingly dismissive of the mystical airs and graces that the Great Helmsperson, under the influence of various groupies dedicated to Deep Blue ecological claptrap, was beginning to give herself. What with millions of devoted fans viewing her as an ocean-going combination of Donald Campbell and Mother Theresa, and my publisher bullying me to deliver a hagiography worthy of such a figure, I was often reduced to wondering if I was the only person left immune to the spell cast by this salt-stained old harpy. Luckily I then met Joan, who was even more salt-stained and proved a sterling ally.

  A few days after she arrives the bulldozer will start excavating my former home. An old though young acquaintance of mine, Silvano, who before the juvenile court’s unwarranted decision used to frequent the Piter Pan games arcade and billiard rooms on the outskirts of town, has put at my disposal a cavernous unused garage beneath his parents’ apartment. This should be amply big enough to store temporarily whatever poor relics seem worth rescuing from my previous life. Strange it is that now I’m in the process of buying another house my interest in the corpse of its predecessor has considerably dwindled. And to think that only a couple of months ago I was inconsolable … Our great advantage is that we’re such fickle creatures, our attention constantly grabbed by the ever-sliding present. Dead friends, last year’s lover, a lost recipe, long-vanished muscle tone – with a slight grinding sensation we move on as tragedy turns to seemly regret and finally flattens out into vague recollection. It very seldom calls for bulldozers. And speaking of bulldozers, you’re probably wondering why I’m not having Joan to stay with me here in the Belgian’s flat, since there is a spare room. But although we took to each other from our first meeting, she does have quite a pungent presence. I refer not merely to the aroma of dogs and fags that clings to her but more to her forceful projection. We Sampers are sensitive souls, especially first thing in the morning, and self-preservation made me reflect that sharing a breakfast table with someone whose personality seems to come through a loud-hailer might prove trying. Besides, I expect she also would prefer not to have a comparative stranger thrust domesticity upon her without consent. She must surely have had enough of that in the Navy.

  I just wish old Adrian were here as well. It would make all the difference to me to have his calm, rational support, not to mention some affectionate company between the Zsa Zsa Gabor bed linen. I do miss a bit of epidermal contact from time to time. Not that it’s primarily about sex, of course. What could be more lowering than procuring dutiful orgasms as alike as hiccups and just as irksome? Unfortunately, as far as Samper is concerned the erotic and the domestic go together about as naturally as lions and early Christians, affording pleasure only to the spectator. All my attempts at companionable domestic relationships have been frank disasters. In any case Adrian does promise to come as soon as he can, swearing he daren’t take so much as a day off at the moment. I believe him, as anyone would who knows anything about today’s academia, which Jobsworth bureaucracy has long reduced to a state of terminal paralysis. Farewell to those cinematic memories of brilliant boffins each beavering his or her way towards a revolutionary breakthrough! The sheer pathos of modern Britain can be read in the career advertisements at the back of the various professional journals Adrian takes, offering to applicants of no particular race, gender, creed, physical mobility or age an equally chimerical career in Never-Neverland.

  A creative thinker, you will be joining a highly motivated group of team players with a proven track record of consistently meeting deadlines. Championing operational excellence, you’ll thrive in a fast-moving environment where you need to think on your feet and be prepared to run with the ball. It is your models that will shape the health of Britain’s coastal systems.

  Blimey, as Nanty Riah would say. And if you did ever manage to come up with an individual idea and attempt to run with it in this zingy, jockstrap environment, you might make it as far along the corridor as the first committee room before you were tackled by the rat-faced harridan from the HSE office or the guy with no roof to his mouth from Project Funding. That is, of course, if your team supervisor hadn’t already claimed your idea as his own and gone running off with all three of your balls. But then, what else would you expect for £18,000 a year plus a discounted membership at the local Sports Village?

  Thanks to Adrian’s influence and after years of intensive research I should modestly like to announce that self-starting, out-of-the-box-thinking Gerald Samper PhD has finally established the real cause of climate change. Don’t forget when you’re drawing up your list of Nobel nominees – you read it here first! Global warming (or as we scientists know it, Big Grown Llama) is entirely the fault of Mrs Elfriede Keilberth of Lolling, Upper Austria. One fateful morning in the summer of 2002 she gave her sitting room its customary blast of fly spray. One of the windows was open and a peacock butterfly (Inachis io) innocently passing by flew through the poisonous mist and died eight minutes afterwards. It had long been known to the world-famous research laboratories of Reader’s Digest (Readiest Dregs or Dead Registers) that a butterfly flapping its wings in Europe causes typhoons in South East Asia. Had this particular peacock butterfly been allowed to flap its wings for another half hour it would in fact have brought about a record-breaking storm a year later that would have struck the Philippines with waves big enough to bring up cold water from below the Pacific’s warm surface current. What nobody knew at the time was that the ‘great ocean conveyor belt’ (as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls it) was in a critical state. By the summer of 2003 the slightest cooling effect in the surface waters of the Western Pacific could have brought this vital current system back into its 96,000-year-old equilibrium. Unfortunately, in the absence of the right typhoon at the right moment this didn’t happen, and the Earth’s ocean currents are now doomed to run amok and endanger life everywhere and it is all the fault of Mrs Elfriede Keilberth of Lolling (although she has since moved to the nearby village of Pfisting for family and erotic reasons). We only hope she feels proud of having single-handedly changed the course of the planet’s history. The rest of us, meanwhile, can go back to driving our Hummers and flying to our dive holidays in Palau with a clear conscience since there is nothing now anyone can do to reverse the trend already set in motion. We may as well enjoy our luxurious lifestyles for as long as we’re able – those of us lucky enough to have them, that is.

  *

  The instant I meet Joan at Pisa airport I am reassured that I haven’t made a sentimental mistake. She really is the sort of person one needs to have around when there’s rough work afoot.

  ‘Whew!’ she bellows as she bursts from the ‘Arrivi’ gate like a bull newly
released onto the streets of Pamplona. ‘Am I well out of Blighty! As much as I could do to get here without being lynched. Take a gander at this,’ and she thrusts a copy of the Chichester Observer into my hands and thumps a nicotine-stained forefinger onto a headline. ‘Backyard Funeral With Flair!’ it reads. ‘“Flair”, geddit? Basically, I’ve been shopped.’

  ‘The neighbours?’

  ‘The buggers. They’ve got one of those adolescent kids who spends most of his time dozing in bed, like –’

  ‘Rip Van Wankle?’

  ‘– Ha! Exactly. But that night I put down the poor old Bo’-sun, their bloody boy must have been awake long enough to go snooping and prying and now he’s claiming to have watched it all through a hole in the fence.’

  ‘You didn’t think letting off a twenty-five-thousand-candela distress flare in a suburban back yard at night was likely to catch someone’s eye?’

  ‘So? What damned business was it of his? And now look at this’ – and she produces a copy of the Portsmouth News. ‘This is today’s edition. “Flare-Up Over Pet Death”. In a few days I’ve gone from being an amusing eccentric to a dog-torturer. Tomorrow the story will go national, bet you anything. Even as we speak I presume my house is besieged by reporters trying to get a shot of me toasting kittens with a blowlamp. They won’t drop by the local kennels and check my other dogs, as friendly and well-nourished a bunch as they’ll ever have seen. Oh no. Of course they won’t; no sensation there. I tell you, I’m out of it in the nick of time. I shall have to stay here until the lynch parties turn their attention to some other blameless citizen. Anyway, bollocks to the lot of ’em. How are you, Gerry?’

  ‘All the better for seeing you, Joan,’ I tell her truthfully. By now she has blasted a passage through the mass of reunited couples shamelessly embracing so as to block emerging travellers, as well as past the usual doleful, sweaty men holding aloft squares of cardboard bearing felt-tip legends reading ‘Mr Ali Muntasser’. ‘As one exile to another, I’m happy to be able to offer you asylum. We victims must stick together.’

  ‘It’s either me or the old country that isn’t what it was.’

  ‘It’s not you,’ I tell her. Joan is possibly the last person in Europe to carry her own luggage. Not for her the wimpy little wheels and embarrassing clackety-clackety noises of suitcases that modern urbanites haven’t the strength or dignity to carry. She refuses my help and soon we are stowed in my rental car, her respiration rate unchanged. Mine, though, starts changing as soon as we’re aboard the sun-heated car and an astonishing canine bouquet builds up. But I turn the air-con on and soon we’re pounding northwards along the motorway and catching up on events since Millie’s death. Clips of her fatal attempt to shorten sail that resulted in a lengthened neck have been regularly shown on satellite TV and Internet sites. It has been prime-time for ghouls of all nations during these last months. As her friend, Joan mourns her with seemly restraint. ‘Daft old girl!’ she says fondly. ‘But you know, Gerry, it felt to me as if there was something almost inevitable about the whole thing. She had probably gone as high as she was destined to go.’

  To the masthead of her career, I think, but tastefully do not say. ‘You mean she’d peaked?’

  ‘I reckon so. And knew it, too, which was why she was so easily suckered into heading that Deep Blue caper. This around-the-world racing lark – you can only try to beat your own record, can’t you?’

  ‘Or look for novelty. The first unmarried mother to do it in a yacht going backwards. The first lone quadriplegic to do it with a parrot trained to peck at a keyboard to set the course and the sails. Stuff like that. The way all extreme sports are going, actually.’

  ‘Well, Millie did do it one-handed, bless her. But it really left her with nowhere else to go, especially as she was knocking on a bit. Late fifties. I ask you.’

  ‘But having acquired a taste for the limelight, she couldn’t bear the thought of it moving elsewhere and leaving her in the dark.’

  ‘Too right. Fame and Millie went together like vinegar and chips. But what about you, Gerry? All these film deals and things. How’s the limelight suiting you?’

  ‘Huh! I might ask you the same question. People like you and me only ever emerge from obscurity when we’re briefly lit by distress flares.’ And then, despite all my resolutions, I find I can’t resist telling her about the ghostly – or maybe saintly – apparition of the late Princess of Wales that is alleged to have saved my life and that of my guests last November. Joan reacts in reliable fashion.

  ‘A load of festering testicles.’

  ‘Of course. But all that festers is not mould, you might say. There are wheels within wheels here. Welcome to the land of plots, deals and stealthy accommodations.’

  ‘Sounds just like the Navy.’

  Then, even more against my better judgement, I add that I’m working on an opera about the Princess. To my amazement Joan turns out to be something of a Diana fan. Maybe there weren’t too many republicans in the armed forces in Joan’s day or – more likely – there could be some sort of sexual undercurrent here.

  ‘Perhaps you’ll do her a favour and leave out the crap about visions. Then you can concentrate on what made her so fascinating, poor wee thing,’ she says. ‘I tell you, me and the girls watched her progress with keen interest. You know – how she started out as a naive kid working in a nursery school who could be bullied into anything, gradually took charge of a foul marriage and ended up telling the world what it ought to be doing about AIDS victims and landmines. Bloody admirable, actually. But here’s the thing. If you wanted a visual yardstick of her progress you couldn’t do better than watch her wardrobe. I’d think that would be ideal for an opera. As she gains in confidence and becomes her own person, you could have her costumes evolve from the gauche early days of Laura Ashley and Benetton to the full fuck-off Versace kit, just as they did in real life.’

  ‘Golly, Joan, I had no idea you were so fashion-conscious.’

  ‘Just because a girl’s no clothes-horse herself it doesn’t mean she mightn’t have wanted to be,’ my companion says with what fleetingly sounds like regret. ‘I just turned out to look my best in rubberised canvas, neoprene and a diving helmet. That’s the way it was and I’ve no complaints. But I like my gals feminine, and I’ve always been interested in what they wear. Still, what the hell do I know about operas? You’re the writer, Gerry. Sorry I mentioned it.’

  ‘No, mention it as much as you like. I would never in a million years have thought of moving a story along by means of clothes. Cooking, possibly, but never clothes. It’s brilliant. A visual counterpart to her developing character … Yes, I can see it now. Oh dear, I’m afraid I’m going to have to pick your brains quite a lot in these coming days.’

  ‘Happy to be of service. Do you mind if I smoke?’

  Well, of course I do; but in the circumstances I simply boost the ventilation and put up with it. After all, the car belongs to Mr and Mrs Avis. But apart from that, I dislike the fashionable new priggishness even more than I dislike smoking, and her need plainly outweighs mine. Before long we reach town and I see Joan safely installed in her hotel. I’ll give her time to recover from the flight and adjust to her new status as Havant’s Most Hated Woman. Then in an hour or two we will have an early dinner in some nearby restaurant. I just wish I could cook for her myself. Under normal circumstances it would be the most natural thing in the world for me to devise a sumptuous and inventive dinner to celebrate our reunion. But I’m hopelessly inhibited by this Belgian’s kitchen, which would be paltry for a timeshare cottage in the Lofoten Islands. There is a three-burner stove designed for a small caravan; an assortment of cutlery that would allow two students to dine modestly out of opened tins; and a chipped pile of those egg-yellow plates, apparently made of plaster of Paris, that seem to haunt holiday homes. This is no workshop for a culinary genius.

  You may also be expecting me to add that some of my inhibition stems from what happened at Crendlesham Hall when I l
ast cooked for others. Well, it doesn’t. A misfortune out of the blue like that can strike even the greatest chef at any time. The more I think back to that evening the more I wonder whether it wasn’t an example of mass acting-up rather than mild food poisoning. It’s well known that the sight of someone being sick can induce nausea in perfectly healthy people. All it took was for that ancient turtle, Sir D. Monteith, to have a heart attack – as is perfectly normal when you’re a hundred and twenty-seven and have sent your blood pressure up by chivvying innocent walkers off your land. I’m sure I read somewhere that heart attacks can induce vomiting, and all the other guests simply followed suit out of a kind of hysterical politesse. Later, all those dim-witted Mr Plods having ‘Aha!’ moments with bottles of alleged rodent poison was just so much post-hoc rationalisation.

  And while we’re on the subject, I realise it’s a long time since I last gave the world some of my recipes that, I dare to believe, will one day ensure my name survives. However, until once again I have a kitchen of my own to play about in I can’t perfect the details; and as any cook knows it’s the exact quantities, temperatures and timings that make or break the greatest recipes. Still, creativity will out, and from time to time I divert myself with theoretical dishes, much as scientists conduct thought experiments. My current batch involves the linking of a public personality with a particular food so that it becomes associated with that person’s special glamour. If one can have Oeufs en cocotte Rossini, Peach Melba and Pavlova Cake then I suggest one can equally delight in Mutton Victoria Beckham, Stewed Ham O’Toole, Roly-poly Prescott, Thai Chicken Gary Glitter and Liver George Best (this last a new departure in offal cookery, involving a lengthy marinading in Scotch whisky). I am also toying with a Medlar Fool Blair that will be remarkable for its smoothness.