Our dinner is a happy occasion. We have no difficulty in agreeing that Italian cuisine is immeasurably more satisfying than the last meal we had together. This was aboard the private yacht of Lew Buschfeuer, Millie Cleat’s Australian partner, when the food consisted largely of vegetation: Korean water-weed, Papuan tubers stuffed with moss, steamed sago balls. Even now I can still taste the Balinese goat-berries. Despite being hungry Joan and I dined frugally that night. The other guests seemed to eat the stuff with pleasure but I suspect they were heavily influenced by a belief that it was full of rare, cancer-targeting vitamins, plus a snobbish assumption that toasted Amazonian pitcher-plant was bound to taste better than something ordinary like cauliflower, even though it patently didn’t and soon demanded advanced techniques of sphincter control. A sense of virtue must never be brought to the table. It is the death of good eating.
Having seen Joan back to her hotel I let myself into the Belgian’s flat, whose decor as well as kitchen is seriously beginning to undermine my normally sunny disposition, and eagerly jot down some operatic notes. Our dinner conversation has triggered ideas for all sorts of new scenes. It’s amazing how a casual nudge from an external source can stimulate a surge of creativity. I have definitely reached the point where I need a name for this opera project. Most of my awful biographies of sporting heroes acquired working nicknames as I wrote them, names that predated the final title and functioned merely as handy labels for folders of notes and computer files. They tended to be ironic or just plain rude, expressing a deep disenchantment with both the subject and the job. For instance, I privately knew the burnt-out downhill skier Luc Bailly as ‘Lily’ since one anagram of his name is ‘A club lily’, which exactly described his priapic après-ski presence. Millie Cleat just became ‘Malice’ after her name yielded the entirely appropriate ‘I tell malice’. Until now I have been thinking that this opera of mine might be called Princess of Hearts, so with a nightcap of Fernet-Branca at my elbow I get to work. Some splendid phrases soon emerge. ‘I refract poshness’ seems apposite, ‘Horse-penis crafts’ rather less so, while ‘Preacher Fists Son’ has a tabloid grossness which, though I like it, is irrelevant. Poshness will do nicely as a working title; but just for interest’s sake I doodle around with Princess Diana instead and at once come up with ‘Rancid Pansies’. Oh yes! It may or may not turn out to have relevance but I can’t resist the assonance. And so to bed, where inevitably my brain refuses to shut down and spends half the night compulsively churning out anagrams. Some time after ‘Princess of Hearts’ has shuffled itself into ‘Free crap hits sons’, I at last fall asleep.
*
The day before the bulldozing is due to start I take Joan up to Le Roccie. She has expressed an interest in seeing not only where I used to live but the seat of this new Diana cult. I’ve not been up here for some time myself and there are ample signs that my old exclusive domain is well frequented. The footpath through the undergrowth that avoids the official barrier is now trampled flat and there are cigarette ends embedded in the mud. But the most telling indication is that the improvised shrine has grown considerably. Something like half a rubble igloo is beginning to take shape. Stones, rocks and the odd brick have been piled up and lengths of rusty iron secured with strategic blobs of cement support an unstable-looking sketch of a grotto roof. What it really resembles is the ruined stable in one of those Renaissance Nativity paintings where there are so many holes in the roof that the only real shelter over the subjects’ heads is provided by their haloes. The Princess’s photograph now stands on a proper little altar covered in a clean but elderly linen pillowcase. Next to it is a new vase with a spray of quite expensive plastic flowers to supplement the improvised bunches of wilting spring flowers scattered about. Propped on the altar is also an announcement in Italian, neatly printed and framed behind glass. On closer inspection it turns out to be a prayer, presumably composed by a supplicant.
‘Hey, get this,’ I say to Joan, translating it out loud as I read. ‘“O Glorious Diana, mother misunderstood and wronged, you nevertheless reached out to the unhappy and sick children of the world who laughed in your embrace. You transcended this life’s mortal stain and dwell now like a flower in the radiance of the Blessed Virgin, the archetype of all mothers. This very place witnesses that by Mary’s grace you do not forget to extend your hand to save your children from certain death. Intercede for us, we beg you, even as we pray for your matchless soul. Amen.”’
Silence. No birds sing.
‘Bleedin’ ’eck,’ Joan says at length. ‘Talk about over the top. I mean, they’re treating her as if she’s already one of their saints. But she couldn’t be, could she?’
‘Not officially. But I’d say she’s well on the way to becoming a local one, wouldn’t you? Like one of those sufi saints in Islam. Popular appeal is its own form of canonisation. Believe it or not this place is still technically my property although you wouldn’t know it. Obviously it’s already been annexed by anyone who feels he can wander up and beg heavenly favours. Look at that tree.’
Just behind the shrine is a fine old stunted pear tree that until last year supported one end of the Samper washing line and provided a hardbitten variety of fruit that became the principal ingredient of an extraordinarily delicious and subtle pear and ginger relish I perfected some years ago. It goes wonderfully well with slightly dull, crumbly cheeses like Caerphilly. One day when I’m less preoccupied and properly settled in a house of my own I’ll give you the recipe. Today I’m touched to see my old pear tree dressed in new leaves, but less so to observe that its low spreading branches are now also hung with all manner of ribbons, pieces of material, cards with messages on them, plastic necklaces and trinkets. Even a few miniature teddy bears dangle here and there like unseasonal hairy fruit.
‘And all this derives from some pleasantry I apparently exchanged with a helicopter pilot last November,’ I say. ‘You’ve got to be impressed by the seriousness of human lunacy, haven’t you? It’s easy to see how entire religions arise from hearsay. All you need is the right rural gossip at the right time and people’s superstitious desire to believe any old cock-and-bull story does the rest.’
‘What do all these say?’ asks Joan, examining the notes nearest her.
‘They seem to be the usual requests. “Gracious Princess, please cure my paralysed son and I will never doubt again.” “I beg you to let me win the Lotto or I shall be homeless. I am in despair.” “Merciful Diana, my child is dying, you are her only recourse.” Oh, here’s a good one: “My bastard neighbour Raffaele is an adulterer and a deflowerer of children and merits your sternest vengeance.” The simple outpourings of desperate people. I tell you, all human life is here. Except my own, of course,’ I can’t help adding bitterly. I turn to stand at the fluorescent tape strung behind the lip of the precipice and gaze over a panorama so familiar it could almost make me weep. Tears of sternest vengeance, naturally.
Joan joins me. ‘Hell of a spectacular place. It must have been a fantastic house.’
‘That it was. Round about there’ – I wave my hand at a patch of air some twenty feet away – ‘was the terrace where I wrote much of Millie! I’ve half a mind to post a note to Diana myself. “Kindly restore my house. Signed, a homeless admirer.”’
‘The whole damn thing simply vanished, just like that?’
‘Pretty much. First the garage with a self-contained flat above it. Then the main house. Finally the terrace. Piecemeal but effective.’
‘You can say what you like about the hand of Diana but if you ask me you were all pretty lucky to get out.’
‘Everyone says so and I don’t deny it. Yet oddly enough, if I owe my life to anybody it’s probably to Marta. She’s my neighbour. That’s her place over there behind the fence – Tuscany’s answer to the Bates Motel. The night of our party she arrived back unannounced after months in America but couldn’t get into her house because I was acting as caretaker and I’d locked it up good and tight. So she left her bags outs
ide her door and came over here. Later, Adrian and I went out to fetch her luggage across so she could stay the night with us. It was just as well we did because it was then we suddenly noticed the absence of the garage.’
‘I’ll bet you all made a hurried exit.’
‘As hurried as possible, impeded as we were by badger Wellington, alcohol, magic mushrooms and a general feeling of unreality.’
‘So this opera of yours is really about Marta in disguise.’
‘It most certainly is not.’ It isn’t often that Samper is shocked. ‘The opera I’m working on isn’t about angels flitting down from heaven to save people from death, either. It’s about this ludicrous yearning to invent religious heroes to stuff the remaining chinks of life not filled by soap opera. It’s about myth and glam. It’s about credulousness.’
‘So tell me about her.’
‘What?’ I’m distracted from an interior vision of a grand operatic scena with a choir of satirical angels all dressed by Marks & Spencer like a lightened-up version of the chorus of demons in The Dream of Gerontius.
‘This old neighbour of yours, Marta. You talked a lot about her when we first met. In fact, you seemed a bit obsessed.’
‘That’s because she was a protracted pain in the arse. For one thing, you never knew when her East European mafia family weren’t going to drop by in black helicopters. They used to land just over there beyond those trees next to her house. It was one damn thing after another when Marta was here. I couldn’t get any work done. And she was always coming over here on some pretext or other. Drink, usually. She was addicted to Fernet-Branca.’
‘You mean she wasn’t after your body?’ says Joan, I hope mischievously.
‘If you go on like this I shall faint with horror and then you’ll be sorry.’
‘Huh. In the Navy we’d just bring you round again with a bucket of seawater. Anyway, I hate to distress you further but there’s someone over by that gate there trying to attract your attention.’
And of course you win no prize for guessing who it is. The devil you talk of is frequently, I find, already present. But have I mentioned that Adrian has passed on the news that the great Max Christ himself says he would be interested to have a good look at any opera whose composer is Marta? You will see why, if she really has fallen out with her flagellistic librettist Sue Donimus, I must woo her as a potential collaborator. The idea is that together we will make wonderful music (as ingénue lovers once told each other in bodice-rippers back in the days when any insertions took place off the page). I step forward manfully to introduce Joan.
‘Gerree!’ Marta hails me from a distance. ‘I never know you’re here.’
Oh God, those tenses. Can I really face months of closerange Voynovian syntax? But the show must go on. ‘Snap!’ I call.
‘“Snap”, Gerree?’
‘It means I didn’t realise you were here either. May I introduce my friend Joan, an old yachting chum of Millie Cleat’s? Joan, Marta. Marta, Joan. Well, what a surprise.’
‘But it was you who tell me on the telephone I must come to Italy and see my house because of the earth tremble and the pilgrims to the Princess. So I’ve come. And everything you say is true. Not so good, no. But ben tornato, Gerree. I will kiss you. So! Please, you will both come in and I will offer you a little Voynovian speciality. It is the best moment of the morning.’
I was afraid of that. As soon as I saw her standing there at the gate in the fence with the spring breeze lifting the unclotted portions of her hair and she so clearly the owner of the only house for miles, I had a reflux of the memory (as one might say) and my mind went shrinkingly back to a previous episode of this ex-neighbour’s ethnic hospitality. ‘Not mavlisi?’ I ask, trying for a tone of polite anticipation but achieving one more like pleading.
‘No, I have something even better, something even more –’ and she performs that loathsome gesture of hers when she kisses the bunched fingertips of one hand and rolls her eyes up in their sockets to indicate ecstasy. She ushers us in through her back door. I feel like a child being led into the doctor’s surgery for another of those little injections they claim don’t hurt.
Marta’s kitchen is exactly as it always was. The same piles of unironed sheets dumped on chairs, the same aura of bohemian chaos. The same low-beamed ceiling and great damp flagstones. There is her old Iron Curtain upright piano, and there the electronic keyboard hitched to a dusty computer given her by the late Piero Pacini when she was writing the score for his last film. Everything is completely familiar to me, down to the cobwebbed sheaf of porcupine quills in a handleless mug on the mantelpiece above the hearth. I used to visit this place regularly in my capacity as good neighbour while Marta was in the States most of last year. The only difference I can see is that she has acquired a new fridge. This might explain the absence of the crypt-like stench that resulted from ENEL cutting off the electricity while she was away and the contents of her old fridge brewing up into something the germ warfare boffins of Porton Down would once have been proud to own.
Marta fettles up the coffee percolator and then lifts a large jug out of the fridge. Into three glass dessert bowls she pours what looks like – and I apologise for this, but one must be accurate – diarrhoea. Sloppy brown gloop with knobs and bobbles. Over the surface in each bowl she scatters multicoloured flakes and then cocks her head on one side, considering her handiwork. She adds a dollop of white substance to the centre of each bowl and actually claps her hands, for all the world a kindergarten teacher summoning her charges to elevenses.
‘This is purest Voynovian, very special,’ she announces. ‘It is made by the chef of Danubya, our first restaurant in London I tell you about, Gerree. It is our famous varminty which he makes the best outside Voynograd. Come, you will try.’
‘It looks scrumptious.’ I was very well brought up, just as I’m glumly expecting my varminty to be shortly after I’ve eaten it. I pick up my spoon like a guest at a dinner party thrown by the Borgias. I have to admire Joan. Without a moment’s hesitation she sets to with gusto.
‘Hey, this is all right,’ she exclaims. ‘Can’t put my finger on what it is but my tongue tells me it’s pretty decent stuff.’
Marta positively beams at her. ‘It is very old plums purée with salted kisi, um, cherries. It must be five years old at least in store and dark, with herbs and spices like kimunyi – I don’t know that in English. Then on top is our Easter speciality, dry ram.’
‘Well, it’s delicious,’ says Joan stoutly.
‘Dry ram.’ I toy with my spoon. ‘And in the middle?’
‘That is just plain yoghurt also from the ram.’
‘Ram’s yoghurt. I see.’ I dab the white substance with the tip of my spoon. She can’t mean …? Surely not even Voynovians would …?
‘Sheep’s yoghurt,’ says Joan.
Marta beams some more. ‘I’m sorry, yes of course, sheep. This is dried sheep on top also. At Easter we always make like this. We in Voynovia love colours.’
Unlike everywhere else that prefers monochrome, I suppose. Why do foreigners say these damnfool things? Samper may lack patience but never let it be said he lacks courage. I try a mouthful. As usual with Marta’s ‘specialities’ I have an immediate mental image of my taste buds withdrawing defensively like coral polyps when touched. It is basically very sweet and yes, I can taste the hundred-year-old plums and things and the salty knobs that might conceivably be wizened cherries. I can also taste the dyed shreds of jerked sheep impregnated with an unidentifiable spice reminiscent of turpentine. For all I know they could be flakes of desiccated jackal. The sheep’s yoghurt, to my surprise, tastes exactly like sheep’s yoghurt.
‘I can tell you, Marta,’ I say, wishing my eyes would stop watering, ‘what you call kimunyi is cumin.’
‘Oh yes, now I remember. Cumin. So what do you say, Gerree, of our varminty?’
‘Fantastic. And you brought it all the way from London?’
‘Well worth the trip, I should
say.’ Joan bangs her spoon down beside her empty bowl. ‘I haven’t tasted anything like that since I last put into Port Said. Exotic and interesting. Tiptop nosh.’
At this moment the coffee comes through and while Marta deals with it at the stove Joan surreptitiously helps me out with my varminty. What a trouper, I think; but then it occurs to me she may be doing it less for me than to avoid her hostess’s feelings being hurt. At any rate by the time Marta hands us our welcome doses of caffeine there are three empty bowls on the table.
‘So you’ve seen the Diana shrine over the fence?’ I ask.
‘Oh yes. It’s terrible, Gerree. Awful. And the people, they come all the time and sometimes they sing together. Can you believe this? How can I work when – ?’ She breaks off – tactfully, I imagine, given that she always claimed my own singing used to disturb her work to the extent that it provoked her into cruel parody in her film score. It sounds like poetic justice to me. Whatever these pilgrims sing they surely lack the artistry I lavished on Rossini and Donizetti arias. Good on them, I say. A worthy come-uppance for the last Queen of Le Roccie.
Suddenly I notice a large tear slide down beside the nose that emerges from the tangle of hair that always covers Marta’s face when she leans forward. Her cup, tilted at an unregarded angle, is also leaking coffee onto the table.
‘Oh, Gerree!’ she exclaims in woeful tones, ‘I am so unhappy. I don’t know what I shall do. Your house is gone and these singing idiots are changing everything.’ Liquidly she sniffs.
‘Poor Marta. It’s all gone wrong up here, hasn’t it?’
Rancid Pansies Page 15