‘Hey, lemme tell you it’s no better in Malta,’ said another. ‘Those Templar Knights of the Grand Doo-Dah, whatever? Those bastards wouldn’t –’
‘Look, what it is, it’s a conspiracy, okay? It’s simple. These Europeans are in it together. It’s a conspiracy aimed at the heart of American literature.’
*
It turns out the Forestale and even the Comune’s Department of Works insist on sending representatives to attend the excavation of my collapsed home, so this event has been further delayed by several days. Joan doesn’t care a hoot, not least because she has phoned her brother and learned that she did indeed hit the national press for a single edition. Apparently she is suspected of conducting satanic rituals in her back yard in Havant that have resulted in the death of at least one dog. A neighbour claims to have seen her kneeling with a gun and when the gun went off the whole yard was bathed in unearthly red light that was visible from as far away as Warblington. He also saw naked figures dancing around the corpse of the dog. The RSPCA are investigating.
A yet better reason why Joan seems in no hurry to leave Italy is – well, to put it bluntly – Marta. To say they have hit it off would be an understatement. To say that Joan has already moved out of her hotel and into Marta’s hovel up at Le Roccie would be a good deal more informative. This is a wholly unexpected turn of events and I’m still trying to work out the possible consequences for G. Samper. It would never have occurred to me to imagine they have anything in common other than a taste for varminty. Can it be that my fantasies about Marta’s nocturnal visits from the simple woodcutter’s son with his hefty chopper were wide of the mark? I’m astounded; I don’t normally get things like that wrong. I now have to imagine rather different scenes taking place in that attic bedroom of hers with the iron-framed peasant letto matrimoniale in which I once, in dreadful error, woke up next to its owner with the mother of all hangovers. But let’s not go there. I absolutely must see Marta to talk about the opera but I haven’t wanted to intrude. It just never seriously occurred to me that she … I mean, I swear she used to leer at me in a way that … Naturally it’s none of my business. It’s absolutely of no consequence to me what two grown ladies do in their spare time. Why should I care? It’s not even interesting, for heaven’s sake. I just hope if the woodcutter’s son ever finds himself at a loose end, it’s mine.
*
Today is excavation day and I am up bright and early. Searching the Belgian’s TV for a weather forecast that can tell me what to expect, I hit the ineffable BBCNN where a generic tart is doing aerobic exercises in front of a map of the Caribbean. Her whirling arms and jabbing gestures are supposed to show the course of Hurricane Rupert, sweepin in there an just clip-pin the toppa Haiti while over ere in suvvun Europe these ot winds from Africa are drivin up Italy an there’ll prolly beesum thunderstorms developin later over the Hapennines though the picture over in central Mongolia ere is very different with these cooler winds pushin dahn from Russia an easin those igh temperatures, thirty-eight, look, forty-four over there in Riyadh so take plentya sunblock there, any of you travellin in that, er, region. It’s already Thursday nah in Australia, so …
Eventually some news items reach me in garbled fashion as I shave, and very disgusting one of them is, too. A grinning ninny with gelled hair says that half the target survey of people between the ages of fifty-seven and seventy-five claimed they regularly had oral sex, while 26 per cent of those polled at the ages of seventy-five to eighty-five reported having had sex with a partner in the last year. I have to rest my razor for some minutes while waiting for my heart rate to subside. What one marvels at is not the statistics, repellent as they are, but the willingness of these elderly people to answer such revoltingly intrusive questions. Have they no self-respect? These are just the sort of old geezers who bang on about their right to die with dignity, yet they’re perfectly content to live without it. Surely nobody of any breeding, of whatever age, would actually respond to these impertinent oafs with their clipboards? The only proper reaction to such questioning would be to behave like a character in a Terry Southern story, come prancing out in an ancient silk bathrobe and hit the oaf a stunning blow over the head with an immense black dildo the size of a vegetable marrow while exclaiming ‘Take that, sir!’ or ‘Try this on your pianola!’ One of several matters of pride I shall take with me to the grave is that I have never once told the truth when quizzed in the street or door-stepped. It is a rare instance of Samper’s having shown a glimmer of social responsibility.
Two hours later Joan and I are standing at the edge of a jungle some miles out of town. In front of us an excavator is snorting and rummaging about like a yellow boar in the steep slope of scree on the side of the mountain. It is one of those immense machines with a scoop at one end and a blade at the other, and earlier it had led the way here by bulldozing a trail uphill through the dense undergrowth. Behind it was a solemn convoy headed by the Forestale’s Fiat Campagnola. Behind that were the Comune Works Department’s Land Rover and a battered Ford Focus bearing a reporter and a photographer from Il Tirreno. Joan and I had brought up the rear in a cavernous hired van that already felt freighted with my misgivings about the entire venture. I had never envisaged this circus. I should have thought that searching for one’s personal belongings at a scene of tragedy was best conducted in discreet privacy, but such is not the Italian way. I suppose I ought to be thankful that so far there’s no procession of robed choirboys and a firework display. On the other hand it is extremely unfortunate that yesterday Leo Wolstenholme and her Global Eyeball colleagues announced their imminent arrival. If they arrive today their hotel is supposed to be directing them up here to interview Joan and me about Millie Cleat. I’m banking on their never being able to find this place. Still, I have taken care to dress in a style that might best be summed up as ‘casual rugged’: a plaid shirt and an old but beautifully cut pair of Man2Man jeans that I bought in Aspen to cheer myself up while following Luc Bailly in the waning but still erectile days of his skiing career. I also have on a pair of new black boots that were the only things I could find locally. I really wanted something along the lines of Doc Martens, though more navvy than chavvy. What I found, now that I’m wearing them, do have an air less of a building site than of a Seventies’ NHS orthopaedic department, being somewhat bulbous in odd places. But all in all, I daresay I cut a figure of no little masculine dash and competence that will show up to advantage on camera. I certainly detect what must be admiring glances from the two Forestale men.
I don’t wish to give a misleading impression of the mise en scène here. You mustn’t imagine that we’re at the foot of a vertical cliff as though standing on the shore beneath Beachy Head. Hereabouts the Apuan Alps have forested lower slopes and Le Roccie is roughly a third of the way up a mountain. The section of the plateau on which my house once stood broke off and slid down a steep wooded hillside avalanche-style, breaking up as it went, clearing trees and everything in its path. It came to rest about a hundred metres lower than it started, in a vast moraine of boulders and mangled trees among which a few remnants of my home are still pathetically visible. As I have indicated, reaching this remote place from below required much trail-blazing on the part of the excavator and now that we’re here I quite wish we weren’t. Surveying the immense boulders, the sheer volume of stuff, I’m suddenly convinced the task is too huge to be worthwhile. Whatever lies buried has already been here a good five months, exposed to winter rains and melting snow. It seems hardly worth the effort to launch a salvage operation at this late stage and particularly not in front of all these inquisitive witnesses.
However, here we all expensively are and I must make the best of it. The house’s roof that had still looked vaguely intact from the helicopter has since acquired gaping holes. I borrow a torch from the crew in the Land Rover and peer around inside it, but it’s just a roof that bobbed like a bubble on the general surf of collapse and I can see nothing under it but rocks. Fifty yards away the ex
cavator is making a start clearing rubble from around the rusting rump of my Toyota Ass Vein, which sticks up obscenely in the spring air as though hoping to be inseminated by its yellow rescuer in some rite of mechanical rejuvenation. The teeth on the lip of the huge bucket hook themselves delicately through the smashed rear window and with a heartfelt groan the car’s length emerges from its tomb, shedding rocks and soil.
‘Bang goes your no-claim bonus, I’d say,’ remarks Joan, lighting one of her gaspers. ‘Did you leave anything of value in it?’
‘Just the usual junk, I think.’ We walk over to look. There will be the insurance documents and log book in the glove compartment since in Italy it’s obligatory to have them to hand, but all that paperwork has now been settled, the car no longer officially exists and they’re worthless. However, I’m still not sure about the legal implications of what we’re doing today. That’s to say the San Bernardino da Siena agency did eventually cough up for both car and house, though not before la dotoressa Strangolagalli had fought my lawyer for every last euro. (I trust little St Bernard will one day lean out from the gold bar of Heaven and strike the crimson-clawed hag with boils, goitres and prolapses for the way her unscrupulous company continues to take his name in vain.) But now that I’ve been reimbursed – as much as one ever is by insurance companies – what happens if I manage to recover some of the items I’ve been reimbursed for? Would I effectively be stealing? Is the agency now the de facto owner of my buried property?
They’re certainly welcome to the car, whose interior smells of rotting upholstery and fresh earth. I manage to get the glove compartment undone and there are the vehicle’s papers, damp with mould, together with the sort of rubbish that collects in such places and which now looks as though it belonged to someone else. Come to that, the entire site is a reminder of how well one can get by after a few months without one’s treasured possessions.
‘There’s no way of making sense of the way the house fell, I suppose?’ Joan muses, looking up at the ragged lip of the plateau far above.
‘So we might make a reasonable guess as to where things are? None whatever. That’s why I’m afraid I’ve brought you all this way under false pretences. It’s hopeless. Anything we find will be by sheer chance.’
‘Never mind the false pretences, I’m damned glad I came. It’s not just that if I was back in Havant I’d run the risk of being burned alive by righteous pet-owners. If I hadn’t come I doubt if I’d ever have met Marta. She’s a right shipmate, is Marta.’
‘I’ve never sailed with her but I’ll take your word for it. She’s certainly making a name for herself as a composer.’
‘She’s a genius,’ says Joan confidently. ‘She just needs someone to look after her and manage all the day-to-day running of a house. She’s not a practical person at all.’
Practically useless, actually. One has only to observe the bohemian squalor in which Marta habitually lives, a squalor that I suspect has to do with having become used to the services of the ancient family retainers her father’s clan managed to re-engage in Voynovia’s post-Soviet era. As the eldest daughter of a godfather of international crime, what need did she ever have to deal with humdrum domestic practicalities? In due course she went off to Moscow Conservatory, where no doubt they had armies of babushkas to clean up after the students. I shoot Joan a sidelong glance. She is examining the corpse of my car with an expert eye, the other being scrunched shut against the smoke from the gasper clenched between her lips. She is wearing a boiler suit faded with age that she probably inherited from the Navy and has long since rolled up her sleeves. The anchor tattoo blazes on a forearm that looks like Popeye’s. Can it be, I wonder, that this old salt is becoming broody? Or at least entertaining thoughts of domesticity? And might it turn out that Marta is receptive to this idea? At this moment Joan manages to prise open the car’s hatchback and pokes around inside. As I’ve already said, it is none of my business. But it might have consequences for the plan I have yet to broach with Marta, which is that she writes the music for Rancid Pansies. I really must have a serious conversation with her in the next day or two.
‘The spare tyre and toolkit are probably worth saving,’ Joan is saying, hauling them out.
‘Not to me.’ I’ve already lost interest. I have also noticed that we have acquired some unofficial spectators far above on the edge of the landslip. ‘Who do you think they are up there?’
Joan removes her fag to follow my gaze. ‘Christ knows. Pilgrims, I suppose. The very people who are making Marta’s life hell. With any luck they’ll fall over.’
And suddenly I realise how much I’ve been taking for granted. I still haven’t had a proper conversation with Marta about the story of Diana’s ghost. I merely asked her over the phone not to deny it. This is doubly remiss of me because not only can one never be certain how much Marta understands anyway, but time has gone by and she may already have forgotten or think it no longer matters. I remember telling Joan the story when I picked her up from Pisa airport but I have never explained to either of them the true nature of the deal I’ve done with Benedetti. Seeing the distant figures up there on the edge of the precipice reminds me that Marta is obviously going to have to move because living next to a sacred grotto is intolerable. I owe it to her to keep her fully abreast of the political shenanigans in the background. She could at least make the price of her silence a decent sum for her house which is, as Benedetti ruthlessly pointed out, pretty much worthless except to a local council eager to manage the site as a tourist attraction.
There and then I decide to ask Joan if she could explain the whole deal to Marta. It’s not so long ago that she proved her worth to me as a co-plotter in her friend Millie Cleat’s best interests and I suddenly think she might prove a persuasive advocate. So we sit on a boulder in the pleasant warmth of the spring sunshine and follow with our eyes the excavator’s industrious rootings as I tell her about my pact with the Comune.
‘You crafty bugger,’ says Joan at the end.
‘Hardly. I was over a barrel, wasn’t I? Anyway, I think it’s kind to pander to people’s delusions. Think how happy it makes all those credulous folk like Baggy and Dumpy to feel that from some mysterious but immanent dimension Princess Diana is watching out for them, shielding them from life’s little landmines. I look on myself as a humble agent of good cheer.’
‘Exactly what I mean by crafty. You’ve even squared yourself to this monstrous fib. Well, well. I’ll tell Marta tonight, of course. The poor lamb’s got her own housing problems to worry about.’
‘Not so poor, as lambs go.’ I trust I don’t sound overly bitter. ‘Quite a wealthy lamb, actually.’
‘Oh, she’s told me all about her awful father. It’s not the expense of buying another house that worries her, just the upheaval of finding somewhere else and moving to it. I can see we’ve got to go along with this apparition nonsense. We all need somewhere to live and I certainly think we’ve a perfect right to make local politics work in our favour. Crazy to shoot yourself in the foot just on a matter of principle.’
‘Almost as daft as shooting your dog in the head with a flare gun.’
Joan sighs. ‘A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. The flare gun was all I had to hand. But I agree it wasn’t very discreet.’
While we have been chatting the digger has unearthed what looks like bed sheets. Everybody converges on the trove and what might be intimate remnants of the master bedroom undergo immediate public scrutiny. Both sheets and burst mattress have inevitably acquired fungal stains and brownish smears of mud at which everybody stares with horrid knowingness like Jane Cotter, the Savoy Hotel chambermaid who gave evidence at the second Wilde trial. One of the Forestale officers looks me up and down in a saucy fashion and makes a remark to his colleague that I don’t catch but which I assume is opprobrious since they both laugh. They’re probably both a bit upstaged by my boots. At that moment I’m distracted by the emergence from the ground in the excavator’s bucket of what look
s like a squashed orange box. I recognise it as my bedside cabinet, once a charming little cupboard from the eighteenth century that has just about made it into the twenty-first. I hold up my hand and go to inspect it. The giant machine waits, exhaling the purposeful scent of hot diesel and hydraulic fluid. Between us Joan and I lift out the flattened relic and carry it to one side. I can just feel the eyes of the Fore-stale men and the journalists waiting to pounce on titillating evidence of bachelor living. I couldn’t care less. I know there’ll be nothing incriminating in it but I’m hoping against hope that – Yes! My two most prized and inspirational cookbooks, my favourite bedtime reading, have survived! A little damp, certainly, but essentially intact.
This find thoroughly redeems the day after all. These two volumes are quite irreplaceable. The older is as much an adventure book as a cookbook: Major-General Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s Elements of Raj Cookery (1887), printed in Hyderabad. How very much more readable the recipe books of today’s winsome TV cheffies would be if they included detailed instructions on how to catch the ingredients, as well as asides on the language and grosser habits of the natives in the area where the ingredients once thrived! The one thing the Major-General seldom did was go around the local market hoping to find interesting cuts of bandicoot, although he would regularly send his batman down to the bazaar for fresh spices. ‘“The animal we know as the bandicoot,”’ I read out aloud to Joan, ‘“the Teloogoos call pandi-kokku or pig-rat, and a deuced intelligent little beggar he is, too, often requiring quite a measure of ingenuity to trap. It is almost as if he knew that his own flesh, lightly seethed in the juice of green mangoes, attains a delicacy as perfectly suited to the discernment of a crowned head as to a rough-and-ready camp fire repast. In truth he is fit for any table although it has proved best to conceal his true identity from the Memsahibs by means of harmless misdirection. Trubshawe, our Colour Sergeant, informs me that the phrase ‘Malabar Mutton’ passes muster and has never yet been enquired into closely. To take Master Bandicoot you must lay your springes well before dusk and bait them with new leaves of khati-sakhi, which he has little enough mind to resist. Your artificer having also procured you an ounce of ordinary black powder …” Oh, you’ve no idea how many times I’ve read myself to sleep with old Aubrey’ – and in an unbridled moment I kiss the book’s mildewed cover. ‘It’s brilliant to have him back.’ I notice the onlookers now gazing at me in surprise and disappointment. No normal man goes into ecstasies over a mouldy old book, per carità, not even the Bible (although possibly a woman might). At the very least they were hoping for one-handed magazines depicting criminal acts or even a box full of gold watches and other heirloom trinketry. Old books simply don’t hack it. Losing interest, they start to move away.
Rancid Pansies Page 17