Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  To their eternal credit and my considerable relief, Max and Jennifer are as warmly welcoming as they were this time last year in the aftermath of the earthquake and the tragic loss of my home. The minor episode of the Great Puke really does seem to have been forgiven. As well it might, to be fair. After all, nearly a year has gone by and we’ve all had lives to be getting on with. This includes Josh, who has since aged by nearly a sixth of his entire life. He also seems pleased to see me, although probably as a figure he can assault with stuffed toys and impunity very early in the morning. However, when I go out for a short walk of reorientation and to take advantage of a bald and sunny December day, he insists on coming along. He is heavily armed with a futuristic pistol made of Lego he has invented expressly for our defence since, he assures me, there are evil minions everywhere. My religious step-mother Laura would undoubtedly agree. We amble past Crendlesham Church and I’m pleased to see the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull is still earning her stipend by putting up notices for her parishioners. Oddly, she’s advertising for Pontius Pilates even as she’s auditioning for Three Wise Men and a Virgin. It will make for a very distinctive sort of Nativity play. And a new-looking poster pinned to her cork board announces ‘Birching and Parenting Classes’.

  ‘Why are you laughing, Gerry?’ asks Josh.

  ‘Just something on this notice that’s spelt wrong,’ I say.

  ‘Although I expect it’s really what she’d like to say.’

  ‘Gerry,’ he says in that tone that shows he has been listening only to his own thoughts.

  ‘Yes, Josh?’

  ‘Gerry, if I tell you a secret do you think it’ll make you cross?’

  ‘I very much doubt it. Why don’t you try me and see?’

  ‘But you’ve got to promise you’ll never ever tell anyone. Specially not Daddy or Mummy or Adrian. Really honestly.’

  ‘OK Josh, I promise.’ What can a child rising seven years old possibly have to confess that would make it worth breaking a promise?

  ‘Well, you know when … you remember when all those people came to dinner that night when the gorilla man came, and they all went off to hospital and Mummy said it was because of something they ate that you’d made?’

  ‘Ye-es?’

  ‘She said it was because of the mice.’

  ‘Did she? Well, that’s certainly what some people said at the time.’ Bastards.

  ‘Well, do you think it could have been my mouse?’

  ‘Your mouse? But you didn’t have a mouse, Josh.’ However, it turns out that he did. It turns out he had spotted me keeping the cadavers of the mice I’d trapped. Inquisitive little spy, he’d seen me putting them into the box in what temporarily became their mouseoleum, the fridge in the pantry that Jennifer seldom used. Thinking he’d be helpful he had secretly added the corpse of one he’d found in the potting shed. I come to a halt in the middle of the Suffolk lane. The potting shed was, of course, the place where that genius gardener had put down his squill.

  ‘You’re not cross, are you, Gerry?’ he looks up at me anxiously. ‘It wasn’t me that did it really. There was this giant minion made me do it. I morphed but my Zord didn’t work.’

  Whatever this gibberish means it only makes me laugh helplessly. I put an arm around his shoulders. ‘I’m not a bit cross, Josh. In fact I’m really glad you’ve told me. It solves a tiny puzzle I’ve had all this time. I was pretty certain I’d only caught ten mice, but I definitely prepared and cooked eleven so of course I thought I’d just made a mistake and counted them wrong. But now you’ve told me about your mouse it all makes sense. Anyway, I’m sure it wasn’t yours that made them ill, although we’ll never know now. Let’s just keep this our secret, shall we?’ Who needs to enter his eighth year guilty of manslaughter?

  ‘Not tell anyone at all, ever?’

  ‘Exactly. We’re the only two people in the whole world who know.’

  ‘Cool.’ He gives a little skip. ‘Pew! Pew!’ He picks off a brace of incautious minions sitting in a crab apple tree. ‘I bet I’ve seen more copepods than you have.’

  ‘Lots more, if Adrian has been showing you.’

  And so the most momentous confession of his young life falls away from Josh, along with discarded dinosaurs that have lost a leg and expensive toys that never worked. I, however, return to the house thoughtful and vindicated. True to my oath, I shan’t tell anyone because it will give me much deeper satisfaction to know – as I knew all along – that Samper is innocent and wronged. It won’t be a grievance to nurse so much as another small superiority to cherish.

  It is now December 14th and the première is on the 20th. Only six more days! Max invites me to sit in on the orchestral rehearsals which, on the 18th, will finally involve both chorus and soloists. On my last stay at Crendlesham I hadn’t paid much attention to the Haysel Hall. It was just a vast expanse of roof somewhere on the edge of visibility among rook-filled winter mists. I have to doff my metaphorical hat to Max and his benefactor Sir Barney Iveson, inventor of the Shangri-Loo, who has so resoundingly demonstrated the affinity of muck for brass – not to mention strings and woodwind. Looking around inside at the acres of blond new oak and beech, at the raked auditorium and the futuristic shapes of the acoustic baffles on either side of the generous stage, it is an odd thought that all this has been made possible because enough people have enjoyed having their fundaments pampered by the ‘gossamer fingers’ feature of Sir Barney’s ‘Arabian Nights’ model. Those naughty old Buddhists were absolutely right, and feeling you’re whole is deeply refreshing. And to prove it, here we have a very beautiful private concert hall in the middle of a Suffolk field. I reflect that Mozart would have been hysterically amused at the thought of defecation enabling art.

  Wearing rumpled corduroy trousers and shirtsleeves, for the hall’s heating system is turned up high, Max takes the orchestra through the overture. Marta sits nearby. My well-known sense of delicacy stops me from joining her. Watching unobtrusively from the back of the hall I find myself – against all habit – moved by the sight of that familiar figure slumped in the stalls. The music, which I’ve only ever heard on her Petrof upright or synthesizer, is dramatic and impressive with full orchestra and I can’t help a certain incredulity at the thought that these complicated, highly individual sounds all came out of that lone tousled head. I realise it’s a hackneyed reflection, but you have to have experienced it. I also take a slightly less humble pleasure in thinking it was my words that started all this, that triggered these sounds in Marta’s musical imagination. That counts for something, let me tell you, when you hear the solo trumpet softly announce the theme that will be associated with Diana throughout the opera. It’s not in any way similar to Prokoviev’s marvellous trumpet tune in Lieutenant Kizhe, being more of a leitmotiv, but it’s instantly recognisable even when it appears in different instrumental guises. Depending on its orchestration and tempo it can sound lonely, amorous, entreating or triumphant, and Marta’s use of this simple device is really inspired. Small wonder that Max is so enthusiastic about her.

  Meanwhile, the stage curtains are closed and from time to time there are muffled sounds of banging and scraping and the curtains bulge and sway as unseen stage hands shift things around. As a concert hall and recital room the Haysel naturally doesn’t have elaborate stage machinery, and any production is going to have to be kept simple with a few straightforward backdrops and a handful of props. The producer tells me that Max was toying with putting on Handel’s four hundred and fifty-fourth opera next season to compete with Glyndebourne. The whole thing was to be done in lounge suits with the stage completely bare but for an immense flat TV screen on which static pictures of appropriate scenery were to suggest ambience. But the idea was swiftly dropped on closer examination of Balbo in esilio. Its plot concerns a depressed Roman general posted to Britain and homesick for Viterbo who orders a fort built on an Iron Age site, his ‘capital of misery’, which one day will become Weston-super-Mare. Not a lot happens; and somehow the loung
e suits could only have made things worse. Nonetheless, the Haysel’s stage is well suited to minimalist productions and I am therefore all the more pleased that the production of Princess Diana is to be as elaborate as it possibly can be within the constraints of simple resources. The costumes have already arrived and are splendid, with Diana’s dresses mostly excellent pastiches of her designer originals. So I’m quite sure that the production’s flair and energy will more than make up for an overall simplicity. Plenty of time for the grand machineries of Covent Garden, where divas really can be borne heavenward on remarkably thin wires and chorusing sailors can stagger from side to side of a heaving deck onstage.

  I begin to get nervous about my own lines. As I’ve already mentioned, the role of the Duke of Edinburgh is largely silent, consisting of a few more or less tetchy pronouncements and a good deal of shotgun-polishing. Whilst writing the libretto I thought it might be fun to design the part for myself, and Marta, Max and Adrian have all unexpectedly insisted I play it for at least the opening night. Still, it’s one thing blithely to write oneself into a production and quite another to share the same stage with international stars like TS-P and Brian Tydfil. All of a sudden I’m falling prey to stage fright. I know it seems incredible: Gerald Samper, of all people, who for fifty years has played the lead in the story of his own life with such panache. How could he possibly be nervous of standing in the wings wearing lovat plus-fours and occasionally saying single lines like ‘I wouldn’t buy a used camel from a fellow like that,’ or ‘Backs to the wall, chaps, it’s that valet again.’ Not an unduly taxing role, in short, yet suddenly I’m worried I shall dry or fail to ad-lib convincingly.

  On the 17th the great Tizia Sgrizzi-Pulmoni arrives in a Rolls Royce with a moustached chauffeur straight from central casting. As an old friend of Max’s she has accepted his invitation to stay at Crendlesham rather than in a London hotel. Many white leather suitcases with gold fittings are carried up to the immense guest bedroom with its four-poster bed. Josh has been sternly bidden to be on his best behaviour but the famous diva proves quite at ease with children. When Josh and Luna the cat burst into the kitchen through the back door, both well spattered with mud, she greets him in excellent English with a smile and presents him with a very small Leaning Tower of Pisa made out of chocolate, explaining that all the First Class passengers on her flight this morning were given one. Josh is instantly won over. So am I, for it pretty soon emerges that Tizia (as she insists we call her) is anything but grande dame and has a lively sense of humour, which she is probably going to need. But I can feel myself expand. At last – the sort of company I have been craving all my life!

  With the star’s arrival things really begin to shape up and for the first time I’m required to take my place onstage. We run through the end of Act 1, finishing with the scene in Buckingham Palace in which Charles and Diana’s marital discord is finally established. In the background the Queen is pretending to read the Tatler and the Duke is merely sitting with his head in his hands while Diana and Charles are singing their closing duet:

  When they have finished the final word comes from from the Duke, who bitterly observes ‘How are the matey fallen!’ Curtain. Immediately, Tizia calls a halt.

  ‘Sorry, Max, there is something here I am not clear about. Gerry, caro, your libretto is quite wonderful, but it leaves so much to interpretation. Your Diana, we can read her in two ways, non è vero? But is she simpatica or do you laugh at her secretly?’

  ‘I agree,’ chimes in Brian Tydfil. ‘How are we supposed to be playing this opera – for laughs? Really, there’s nothing inherently funny about a married couple falling out.’

  Sententious Welsh git (but a wonderful voice). Maybe he’s a bit thick, this person from Wysiwyg, but on the other hand maybe he’s a Squidgy loyalist and this really is something of a crux. Either way it’s vital to get it out into the open and cleared up during rehearsal. In fact I’ve already had a session with Ken, the producer, about exactly this problem of how to pitch my complex work.

  ‘Can you think of anything about the royals that isn’t funny?’ I ask. But catching sight of Tydfil’s expression I think, Oh dear, she was after all the Princess of the Welsh and maybe we’re also touching a nationalist nerve here. Better back off. ‘This guy you’re singing, Brian – and very beautifully, if I may say so – don’t forget he talks to plants and probably tucks his shirt into his underpants. He’s also on record as likening himself to a tampon. “My luck to be chucked down the lavatory,” he said, “and go on and on, forever swirling round on top, never going down.” Now, you can’t tell me that’s not genius. By Windsor family standards that’s a bona fide surreal imagination. And he said lavatory rather than toilet into the bargain. I adore him. His tragedy is he can only express himself intimately over an insecure mobile phone.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ agrees Tydfil thoughtfully. ‘I see what you mean. A tragic figure really.’

  ‘But with sublime comic overtones. Don’t forget those.’

  ‘And Diana, we should play her as tragic, too?’ asks Tizia.

  ‘Certainly. Tragic, betrayed, worthy to be surrounded at the end by a quite unmerited aura of heroism as well as by tales of beatification and a probable ascent into heaven. In short, the whole operatic hog. Because while you’re doing that, both the script and Marta’s wonderful score are working to undercut it. This was a lady who spent £3,000 a week on clothes and went around the world cuddling children who couldn’t even afford underwear. It’s a hoot. Remember that Act 2 scene of yours in the Karachi slum when she’s talking to the mother? “I’d love to take your pretty chicks / For a shopping spree in Harvey Nicks”.’

  ‘But she is also spiritual.’

  ‘Exactly. Both she and Charles are. It’s hilarious.’

  Silence briefly falls as Tizia and Tydfil digest this and I’m thankful old Joan has gone into Woodbridge for the morning because I have a feeling she might raise fierce, nicotine-stained objections to my reading of her blonde heart-throb, who anyway wasn’t blonde by nature and had to spend £4,000 a year having her hair bleached. Then the divine Tizia says:

  ‘I shall sing her as simpaticissima, then, but with tragedy inside. That is my Diana.’

  ‘You’re the diva, Tizia. Whatever you do will be wonderful.’

  ‘So when in Act 2 she’ – Tizia rapidly turns the pages of her score – ‘yes, here, she sings “I feel tarty / And so party, / All disco and risko and free” and Marta has that brilliant citazione from West Side Story, Diana is going out for the evening to have fun and never mind what consequences? Even if one day they will be tragic?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Very simpatica. I shall sing her as I feel her, then. Thank you, Gerry.’

  ‘Brian?’

  ‘I think I understand what you’re getting at. I’m not sure I approve, but I’ve been hired to sing Charles and I’m taking him at face value.’

  ‘That will be perfect. The soloists should sing their parts straight, as if they were doing Puccini, while it is the orchestra, the chorus and the words that now and then undermine them with satire and mockery. I’m so sorry, Max,’ I say, turning to the conductor who, like his orchestra, has been obliged to down tools. ‘I hope I’m not encroaching on your interpretation. Ignore everything I’ve said if I am.’ But at your peril, Buster.

  ‘Not at all, Gerry. A very useful clarification. We have no disagreement. Marta’s score speaks for itself.’ He slaps his baton on the music stand and turns to his players. ‘Fine, everybody. Could we go to Act 2, please, cue 46? We’ve got to be right on top of Brian when he’s pointing out the different flowers or else it will sound ragged.’

  Ah yes: one of my favourite scenes. Charles and Diana are in their private garden at Kensington Palace, which is represented very simply on the stage by some shrubs in tubs and a heraldic pair of iron-barred gates (in front of which she will later sing ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Kensington’). As the orchestra plays softly Charles wanders about, alternately
speaking to the plants and explaining their history to Diana. ‘This mulberry was planted by George the Third.’ ‘Princess Romanovna gave us the original cutting of this Crimean rose in 1803.’ ‘These beauties were planted by my great-uncle Louis. He adored pansies.’ Meanwhile, Diana notices some children pressing their noses to the gates and exclaims: ‘Oh Charles, can’t we let them in?’ But Charles takes a stern view of intruders into his garden, like the late Sir Douglas Monteith into whose Suffolk demesne I blundered and whose bad-tempered shade probably inspired me to write this scene. ‘No!’ he exclaims. ‘They don’t understand such precious histories, / They’ll just trample over our private mysteries. / They’ve the whole damned world as their playground, / Surely we’re allowed one little compound?’ And no, none of the children at the gates bears the wounds of crucifixion, for this is no nod to Oscar Wilde’s lachrymose story of the Selfish Giant but an acknowledgement of certain people’s obdurate need for privacy and beauty – a need that is always begrudged them, especially if they are princes. As Max hints, it is a difficult scene and not merely because the orchestra needs to co-ordinate its interjections with Brian’s meanderings about the stage and his exclamations over each flower. It’s written against the grain of expectation. Charles’s music is gentle and soulful whereas Diana’s is upbeat and a little bossy. But it goes well, and by the time we break for lunch I think we’re all pleased by the way the opera’s coming together.

  *

  Come Saturday and the evening of the first performance I’m all of a doo-dah. Adrian arrived late yesterday and sat through rehearsals this morning. From the tone of his enthusiasm I can tell he had misgivings. His sudden ardour has all the hallmarks of relief, frankly, which shows how little confidence he had in me, not to mention in his illustrious brother-in-law’s musical judgement. But then of course he is a scientist and we must make allowances. Anyhow, he seems tickled pink after hearing only short and fragmentary excerpts and bets it will ‘divide the audience in an interesting way’, whatever that means. But he has to acknowledge I am at last in my element. This is what Samper was born for. Last night I sat in the kitchen at Crendlesham Hall listening to one of the world’s greatest sopranos swap reminiscences with one of its greatest conductors. Tizia was still wearing the red T-shirt she’d worn onstage in rehearsal with the slogan ‘It’s Over. Fat Lady Sings’. To think that less than eighteen months ago I was having to trail around after Millie Cleat and pretend to listen respectfully to her vainglorious blusterings! And before that I sat, glazed, while that odious little racing driver Per Snoilsson harangued me about the aerodynamics of Formula One racing cars. He later complained to my editor that I had nodded off during the interview, which was not strictly true because he had long since turned the interview into a lecture on something called – and I can remember it to this day – Computational Fluid Dynamics. Anyway, I was dog-tired as well as bored out of my tiny skull. Well, as I say, those days and that sort of company are over for good and have been decisively replaced by a scene more in sympathy with my true talents, where serious people discuss serious things like portamento and whether Tito Gobbi was incontinent onstage singing Scarpia to Callas’s Tosca at Covent Garden in 1964.