Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  I shan’t ask retaliatory questions about Luke. You can supply details or not, as you choose.

  Cheers from a BOIS that might at last be getting back to some proper science,

  Adrian

  8

  The last few months have whizzed by, and in a pleasurable way that reminds me how grim my life was for so much of this past year. From the moment Joan and Marta moved out and I had this house to myself things began to settle back into those half-forgotten routines that do so much to preserve one’s sanity. Cooking and singing, to name but two.

  The weasel (and putative capo) Benedetti found the perfect house for Marta. At least it’s perfect from my point of view, being several hillsides away from Sciupapiedi. In the light of recent experience I can now say I don’t think it’s healthy for famous collaborators to live in each other’s pockets. I can’t believe Arthur Sullivan periodically moved himself into the Gilberts’ spare room for months at a stretch, nor that mercurial Mr Procter used to burst into the Gambles’ marital bedchamber in the small hours with a brilliant new formula for soap powder. It’s true that back in June I said proximity was important when a librettist and a composer were writing an opera. But I meant availability rather than actual cheek-by-jowl propinquity, especially if the jowls are Marta’s. To be plainer still, after enough years on this planet we all of us tend to draw up lists of Things To Be Avoided At All Costs. Books whose title includes the word ‘Joy’, for example; members of Amnesty International; any product with the word ‘Team’ on it. To these I can add: sharing a house with a Voynovian composer and her nicotine-stained girlfriend.

  And yet all this being said, it has to be admitted that Marta has done brilliantly. In early August she sent Max an electronic file of her score and he began raving about it soon afterwards. Within a fortnight he had taken the decision to perform it at the Haysel in the run-up to Christmas this year. Obviously this was prompted by his impresario’s intuition that he is on to a winner but I think certain other considerations influenced him, such as his own Colchester Symphony Orchestra’s availability. There was also the unexpected slot in the otherwise tight schedule of Tizia Sgrizzi-Pulmoni. Yes! TS-P herself, one of the great sopranos of today, is to première the part of Diana in my very own opera! That at least will guarantee it gets attention. Incredible luck, really. Max’s first suggestion for the role was Dame Evelinne Cummeragunja, but I assume he was joking even though I realise she’s an old friend of his. Never mind that she’s really a contralto. The fact is that Dame Evelinne’s being squat, black and proudly Aboriginal would make her task of convincingly impersonating the late Princess of Wales unusually taxing. But TS-P, being both tall and quite slender, will be perfection. The Di is cast, one could say.

  The part of Prince Charles is written for a tenor, and Max originally tipped another old friend of his, Markus Strephon, for the role. He would have done marvellously, but within a matter of weeks a tragedy occurred that briefly turned into a major news item when he and a companion disappeared while walking in the Scottish Highlands. As you will doubtless recall, Strephon was eventually discovered after four days on the freezing, mist-shrouded slopes of Glen Gould having lost three fingers to frostbite as well as his mind and his friend. None of these has yet been recovered. It’s a real tragedy: Markus had a lovely and expressive voice with acting talent to match. He also looked wonderful in a kilt, as anyone will testify who saw him from the front stalls in the Covent Garden revival of Bruce and the Spider, let alone from the orchestra pit. Never mind: Max has managed to get Brian Tydfil instead. It’s a slight pity that this celebrated Welshman (‘The Sweet Singer of Wysiwyg’) is really a light baritone and Marta may need to modify some of the Prince’s reedier outbursts, but this can only add much-needed dignity to the part.

  Anyway, the signing-up of singers of such calibre ought to convey how seriously Max is endorsing this opera even if one hadn’t already appreciated how his opening the Haysel for a special winter season – no matter how short – is itself an extraordinary new departure. But obviously he thinks he can guarantee audiences over the festive season, which these days is increasingly turning into the restive season with secular, sated people casting about for something to do that won’t involve either children or Ryanair. When Max became so enthusiastic in August it never occurred to me that it mightn’t take at least a year before the opera was performed – if ever. I suppose I was thinking like a writer, geared to book publishers’ long lead times. But evidently producing an opera can be done in as little time as it sometimes takes to compose, always provided that enough weight is thrown behind it. So really, the five months or so between Marta’s finishing the score of Princess Diana and its scheduled first performance is ample time to ensure the production goes smoothly. The only thing Max wants changed is my hard-hitting chorus of amputee children in ‘Sing a song of jubilance / For unexploded ordnance’. He feels that apart from questions of taste (that old thing again!) it will be difficult to find enough mutilated kids who can reliably carry a tune.

  An entire autumn is plenty of time for them to put together a collection of suitable dresses for TS-P to wear, whether by scouring Oxfam shops or by running up copies. The iconic ‘Elvis dress’, as worn by my late bathroom’s statuette, is one of those that will obviously have to be copied. Luckily, la Tizia is remarkably slender for an operatic soprano so the dress need not be of dimensions more suitable for its namesake. Dame Evelinne, of course, is built like an oil barrel and I simply can’t imagine how Max could ever have considered her, no matter how fleetingly, for the part. The time will also be needed to assemble a selection of boys’ and youths’ mannequins which will play Diana’s two sons at various ages. Probably they can be borrowed from Selfridges or hired from whoever makes such things. The most realistic child mannequins I ever saw were in a Tokyo display window: just for a moment I thought they were little performance artists. But I think a William and Harry who look Japanese might be contentious. It would certainly make people wonder who their father was. Harry’s ginger hair is bad enough as it is. The two mannequins will stand in the background fetchingly dressed in school uniforms, rugger shorts, etc. as they get progressively older. Their role is to be silent, unaccusing spectators of their mother’s via crucis and, occasionally, of her via cruris also.

  It’s awful how obsessed I’ve become by production details that strictly speaking are none of my business. I wake in the night, suddenly worrying about where they’ll find all the cameras to hang around the necks of the paparazzi for their big vindictive chorus in the final act. It’s going to be highly effective because Marta has set it as Sprechgesang, as used by Schönberg and Berg, so the paparazzi neither quite sing nor speak but declaim with rhythmic menace:

  It’s as much as our job’s worth

  Not to get the pix.

  We do it for the money and

  We do it for the kicks.

  Once you’re a public figure

  You’re just fair game to us

  ’Cos people have a right to know

  What makes you scandalous.

  It’s unfortunate that only the most musically literate will notice that Marta’s orchestral bass line quotes the fugal motif Laß ihn kreuzigen – ‘Let him be crucified’ – from the St Matthew Passion. But I’m sure no one will miss the haunting sense of threat and impending tragedy. Anyway, how they’ll get hold of the paparazzis’ cameras is neither here nor there, it’s just an example of the sort of detail that occupies my sleeping as well as waking thoughts. And here I must admit that Max, Marta and Adrian have all given me stern orders not to appear in Crendlesham – and preferably not even in the UK – before December 12th at the earliest. They evidently think I might interfere and pick holes and generally faff around in a state of high anxiety and drive everyone nuts, and they’re perfectly correct.

  In the meantime I have made sure of giving Derek plenty of warning. If he is not there for my triumph on the first night I can’t guarantee to keep silent indefinitely about
certain matters. The concept of ‘for old times’ sake’ will not necessarily be proof against his treachery. He knows exactly what I mean even if it conveys nothing to anybody else. So I expect him to be present and correct at the Haysel Hall on December 20th. ‘Correct’ here means bringing the right person if he brings anyone at all. His current Mr Wonderful, the Russian pianist Pavel Taneyev, fits that bill perfectly. Some awful pick-up he’s met at work does not. My grandmother used to describe an aunt of hers using the conspiratorial code NOOTTDD. This stood for ‘Not out of the top drawer, dear’ and referred to unsuitable suitors and the like. Although it’s in Jermyn Street, Derek’s barber’s salon Blowjob attracts a certain residue of customers who most decidedly are not out of society’s top drawer. I’m sure you will follow me if I say the phrase ‘bottom drawer’ describes rather more than just their social standing, and I doubt if I’m telling unheard tales out of school if I observe that Derek has a regrettable taste for such low life. As I say, if he turns up to my première with one of those creatures on his arm he will live to regret it, but turn up he must. I don’t mind admitting his clicking with Taneyev has been a sore point with me. I mean, what on earth can a dazzling pianist of international stature possibly see in Derek, bubbly company though he sometimes can be? Well, if Derek thinks he alone has collected a free pass into the upper echelons of musical society he’s got another think coming on December 20th.

  Somehow the time goes by. Since I’m now living out of town I no longer get the paparazzi treatment myself in the way I did back in the hellish days of late spring and early summer. Not that the cult up at Le Roccie has diminished. Quite the contrary, as I discover in November when my curiosity grows too great and Joan and I drive up to take a look. Marta has already left for the UK to sort out a problem with the orchestral parts before rehearsals begin. Needing a disguise, I borrow a beret from Joan that smells of terriers and add a pair of dark glasses and a small brown moustache backed by sticky tape. This was brought me as a joke by Adrian when he came out in the summer. I think it originally came from a dressing-up set owned by Josh. It is unquestionably effective and the anonymity it confers greatly outweighs its hideousness. The complete kit makes me look like someone in a photograph taken in a Paris night club in the late 1950s: probably the man who’s supplying William Burroughs, Gregory Corso and Alan Ginsberg (at the same table) with their hashish. At any rate I don’t remotely resemble the suave and rather-too-well-known figure of Gerald Samper, the atheist who has unwittingly founded a local religion.

  In the intervening months Le Roccie has been transformed. A steel barrier has been erected right across the edge of the precipice and the ad hoc shrine has, exactly as I predicted, turned into a fully grown grotto. This is now a considerable structure assembled out of large chunks of rock, in appearance somewhere between a stylised cave and the Hollywood Bowl. Inside it is about the size of a spacious living room. There is a back-lit altar supporting a careful hierarchy of images. On a small wooden plinth is a conventional brass cross. Behind and above this is one of those all-purpose faux-Renaissance pictures of the Virgin Mary with stars around her head. And in front of the cross, lower but even more eye-catching, stands a foot-high statue of Princess Diana. She is wearing her Elvis dress and the image seems to have been inspired by that infamous Franklin Mint statuette, but with her arms extended and wearing a manic come-hither smile. This arm gesture is not easy to read. It’s less a papal-style blessing and more like something glimpsed by strobe light in a disco. However, the altar cloth is well strewn with roses – some wilted, some fresh, others costly fakes – so whatever the ensemble says to people they apparently treat it with reverence. There are some batteredlooking supplicants hanging around as though waiting for something to happen: a materialisation, perhaps, or just a voice from a cloud.

  In a prominent position on the back wall, lit by a small spot, is a rectangular gold frame containing some lines handwritten in illuminated black lettering as though on parchment and surrounded by swirls of coloured flowers and acanthus leaves. They are in English, with an Italian translation beneath. If they are not the work of Baggy and Dumpy I should be depressed to think anyone else capable of them:

  She gave us our sight back that we might all see

  The stairway to Heaven as clearly as She.

  ‘Bleedin’ arseholes,’ murmurs Joan incredulously in her forthright naval manner as we go back outside. I feel incapable of adding anything to this, not least because the sight of my old pear tree brings a lump to my throat as now being almost the only surviving landmark of my old property. Its autumn-stripped branches are even more humanly laden than before with twirling notes tied on with ribbon, fragments of cloth, cabbalistic signs, little dangling objects and mildewing stuffed toys. Gone is the stout wooden fence beyond it that I put up with my own hands a few years ago to demarcate my property from Marta’s. Thirty metres away her house, newly exposed, has acquired the faintly heroic, hectic look of a patient putting a brave face on things after a punishing course of chemo. The doors and windows have been painted dark green, the roof scraped clear of moss and some bright copper guttering fixed around it, but it still looks unmistakably like Marta’s hovel. Behind it, visible through the leafless twigs and bushes, some new concrete columns sprouting rusty tufts of steel reinforcing stand in what was recently her paddock.

  But Joan is pulling firmly on my arm to turn me away. A gaunt, bearded fellow in a stained dressing gown has just appeared in the open doorway.

  ‘That’s him!’ she says in a fierce undertone. ‘I don’t want him to recognise me. That’s the bugger I chivvied away. You know, the one I told you wanted to stay the night?’

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ I said. ‘He’s not exactly the woodcutter’s son, is he?’

  ‘What?’

  I’m forgetting that Joan is not privy to the fantasy I used to harbour about her new partner’s sex life. ‘I wouldn’t trust him an inch. Shifty-looking. Insanitary.’

  ‘He acts as though he’s in charge of the site. Bloody hell. Let’s get out of here. This place makes me feel like throwing up. When you think what it must have been like.’

  ‘I do,’ I say. ‘All the time.’

  Once I have dropped Joan off, reached home and soaked off my moustache I make a vow never to return to Le Roccie. There’s no point. My home for years has been irrevocably erased, and that’s that. Samper has moved on since those days of writing up taped interviews with dull people and turning them into books. These days he’s writing stuff that puts him in the ambit of world-renowned artists and singers, the milieu he has always known was his birthright. There’s no going back from that. I set about preparing an intriguing little dinner of buntings in savoury custard while singing Marta’s setting of ‘It’s truly a pathetic world’. This has hooks, as they say in the world of commercial music. In fact, it’s so catchy it wouldn’t surprise me if it became a single once the opera’s had its first performance. Diana sings in a fervent outburst:

  It’s truly a pathetic world

  That needs a Sloane to say

  That landmines lie in wait for years

  Before they reap their crop of tears

  And children as they play.

  Really, it is all a bit Amnesty International. But artistic reasoning dictated that at this point in the opera we needed some passion that had nothing to do with either marital breakdown or shopping, the two major themes thus far.

  Oh have you seen my little leg,

  My little eye and hand?

  A British shareholder’s rewards

  Are ploughshares beaten into swords

  And blood upon the sand.

  Awfully easy to write, this sort of stuff, and of course it will have absolutely zero impact on an audience whose own government has for years been raining fire and brimstone on the heads of ‘evildoers’ and child shepherds for dastardly threatening the peace of a realm three thousand miles away. But what else can one sing to citizens who think they permanently represen
t civilisation’s moral high ground? As I say, it’s catchy stuff and will blend painlessly into the season of peace’n’good-will. There remains, of course, the single nearly insoluble problem I’ve had as the librettist of Princess Diana. Namely, why should becoming a princess earn you tear-stained adulation merely for saying what any morally sane person knows: that it is wrong to kill innocent civilians with bomblets and that AIDS sufferers and lepers are merely ill people needing kindness and treatment? Is it because we no longer expect the slightest sign of humanity from our royals and celebs that we grovel and fawn on them for showing the most elementary evidence of decency? I describe this as a nearly insoluble problem, but I trust that between us Marta and I have successfully papered it over by means of jokes, spectacle, and some very diverting music.

  *

  More time speeds by and now at last it’s December and I’m back in Crendlesham picking up the threads of a very different life. It gives me a lurch of excitement to see the playbills posted outside Haysel Hall and all around the village, knowing the announcement will long since have been in the national press. The name of Gerald Samper is right up there with those of Max Christ, Tizia Sgrizzi-Pulmoni, Brian Tydfil and, of course, Marta Priskil. This is the first time I have seen Marta’s family name written in what must be its new international form, a spelling Joan tells me she has been obliged to adopt because the Voynovian original, Pr¸sˇkj-l, was never going to trip off many tongues. The thrill of it all means something unmistakable to me. Samper has definitely arrived!