‘Since you last saw her at Pisa airport.’
‘Ah no, signore. If you examine that gemlike memory of yours, you will immediately recall that I said I saw somebody who resembled her at a distance. The more I think about it, the more I doubt it was the lady in question.’
‘Well,’ I say resignedly, ‘I’m baffled.’
‘While not presuming on the depth of your relationship with her, might I suggest that she gave me the impression of very much having a life of her own?’
‘You mean, like being a prostitute?’ This is a goodly thrust, an exasperated reference to the canard Benedetti himself spread around some time ago, probably to curry favour with the local police and immigration officials but also from sheer malignant weaselry. But almost as soon as I’ve made this bitter remark I regret it. Benedetti quite properly lost a good deal of face over that incident, and that ought to have closed the matter with honour all square. Now, eager to make a debating point, I have unbalanced the ledger once more. I need to make immediate amends. Damn again.
‘I apologize, ingegnere,’ I say pacifically, noting that the rodent glitter in his eyes has intensified. Ours is clearly not destined to be one of those deep and abiding friendships. ‘I spoke hastily and out of turn and I was wrong to do so. Please accept my sincere assurance that it is purely my worry for the lady that lends heat to my words.’ Enough, Samper. There’s no need to lick the man’s highly polished shoes.
‘I accept your apology, signore,’ Benedetti says stiffly. ‘I trust that if and when you hear news of your neighbour I shall be among the first you tell.’
Mercifully, at this uneasy juncture one of the Armani boys comes whistling in to work, hair painstakingly tinted and tousled and with a considerable love bite visible on the very back of his neck. Yes, I’ve often wondered about him. Ritual greetings defuse the moment. I take my leave and head for my favourite bar for a much-needed espresso. Sometimes I emerge triumphant from these bouts with Benedetti but today I feel obscurely bested. I’m exhausted from cudgelling my brain into inventing florid insincerities in Italian, and I’ve learned absolutely nothing new. Maybe (I think as my caffeine receptors shift into overdrive), maybe that really wasn’t Marta he saw at Pisa airport all those months ago. Isn’t it more likely that in time, blood being thicker than water, she simply repented of her apparent desire to distance herself from that evilly handsome helicopter pilot brother of hers and went off to see him and her newly married sister? And maybe got picked up by Interpol along with the rest of her nefarious clan? Maybe (for under the influence of a second espresso, which has caused my caffeine receptors to go to afterburners, both heart rate and imagination are now racing), maybe after all she has swapped the shaky career of a composer for a better paid life of crime, or else is simply living on the ill-gotten gains her father had apparently been stashing away for her and her siblings in numbered accounts around the world? Perhaps even at this moment Marta is sunning herself in Barbados after extensive cosmetic surgery, a Voynovian beach bunny with a string of taut-stomached paramours in tow who don white dinner jackets to escort her to casinos after dark …
The sheer implausible vulgarity of this sub-James Bond fantasy makes me giggle. Nico the barman glances at me with raised eyebrows as though I might be calling for an impossible third espresso. He is clearly thinking that if this peculiar foreigner is going to have an infarto it would be far better if he had it off the premises. But my mirth is simply for the absurdity of my imaginative flight. Marta is not that kind of girl. Besides, the cosmetic surgeon doesn’t exist skilled enough to transform that fat, frizzy bat of forty-plus into any sort of beach bunny that didn’t look as though it had myxomatosis. No. But none of this explains what has become of her, any more than it explains why I should care as much as I so obviously do. Her house. That’s it, of course. It matters very much to me what becomes of her house. Think Wiesbaden, Winchester and Willebroek. And here we are again, come full circle.
22
And now begins what Sherlock Holmes might have called a singular concatenation of events. The first is a furious outburst of barking and a fusillade of shots early one morning. It jerks me out of bed, the raw cucumber compresses falling from my eyes, as it were. As it isn’t, actually; although ever since Benjy Birnbaum’s brutal unmasking of my age I have taken to the gentle masking of my face with horrendously expensive creams applied nightly. Quite soon the panic and vanity will wear off and I shall present to my sixth decade a brave if rugose face. It is a visage both surly and lined that I now poke around the back door to find a platoon of middle-aged men apparently making a Vietnam movie by dawn’s early light. They are all heavily armed and wearing dark olive or camouflaged fatigues girt about with bandoliers of glittering ammunition. They are high with triumph, unable to stand still and grinning madly. They pause occasionally to prod a large hunched mass on the ground with their toecaps like a prospective buyer kicking the tyres of a secondhand car. Their guns swing in all directions. They look crazy enough to turn my anger at being disturbed into an appeasing fear. Full mental jackets are what I should like to see them all safely strapped into, prior to being hauled off to the nearest Bedlam. However, this isn’t going to happen and in the meantime I recognize several members of the local boar hunt. When they spot my whey-faced presence, clad as I am in a becoming pair of Count Mara pyjamas, their killers’ grins turn to bluff bonhomie.
‘Buongiorno, Gerri,’ says Mannue’, a man of about my age but well beyond the aid of face packs and cucumbers, besides missing several teeth. As he speaks, he and his companions contrive to shuffle together so that their huddled victim is concealed behind camouflaged legs.
‘Emmanuele,’ I acknowledge with a brief nod. Some hounds are roaming about, rangy and mangy, sniffing at whatever lies behind their masters’ legs and baying excitedly. ‘What’s that you’ve killed, a cinghiale? Well inside the hundred-metre radius around a house specified by the law, wouldn’t you say?’ I add with an attempt at a proprietorial sternness.
‘Ah, no, Gerri. We shot it at least a hundred metres away but with its last energies it ran here and expired.’
‘You’re sure you didn’t all miss it and the beast simply died of a heart attack?’
The men laugh dutifully. ‘We never miss,’ says one of them. ‘Whatever we aim at dies.’
‘Well, it would, sooner or later.’ The strengthening light is beginning to reveal glimpses of stained fur on the ground between their legs. ‘Unusual looking boar, that.’
‘Ah, they come in many varieties up here. Once my father shot a –’
‘With fur?’
‘Sometimes,’ Mannue’ agrees darkly. ‘Sometimes more furry, sometimes less so. I remember –’
‘So what is it you’ve just shot in my own back yard?’
‘It was a mistake, Gerri. The light was not good and the dogs –’
Emboldened now, I move toward them on slippered feet, the dewy grass cold against my ankles. Not knowing what to do, the men fall back slightly and reveal the bloodstained corpses of a large badger and one of their own dogs, its back legs still twitching. I’m thinking how lucky I am they haven’t shot one of their own party. Not a season goes by without fatalities among Italian hunters, many of them genuine accidents. Whatever else goes wrong with my humble plans for quiet bucolic harmony up here at Le Roccie I am determined there shall be no human cadavers. It seems little enough to ask. ‘A fine tasso,’ I say. ‘Heavily protected, of course.’
‘And rightly,’ says Mannue’ virtuously. ‘They’re good animals. No one would ever shoot one deliberately, not these days. Unfortunately, up here in these wilds and woods regrettable accidents happen.’
We’ve reached the subtle part of the proceedings. As locals, these good old boys will know about the helicopters and film moguls and carabinieri who haunted Le Roccie for some months only a couple of years ago. They know I have connections and that it is theoretically within my power to cause them trouble. But they also know I won’t
because the same goes for them and it would only start a feud that would cause me greater grief in the long run. Hunters here have age-old rights and, besides, I’m an interloper in their territory. In recognition of this standoff, in which I am technically the wronged party (if one discounts the badger and the dog), they will be in a mood to be pacific.
‘Badger meat can be delicious,’ I observe. The men’s expressions soften into enthusiasm.
‘Ah, stewed, in umido, like boar.’
‘No, roast with rosemary,’ says another. ‘My wife –’
‘Even minced and made into polpette,’ volunteers a third. ‘During the war, according to my grandfather –’
‘Perhaps you would like some, Gerri?’ asks Mannue’, stepping forward and unsheathing a huge knife.
This is exactly what I want. Softly, softly, catchee badger. ‘True, a good haunch would do well in my freezer. And maybe even some of that dog, too. Meanwhile, I assume we could all do with a coffee?’
I go back into the house to put on some rugged attire suitable for breakfasting with hunters and to make the coffee. Through the window I catch occasional glimpses as they adroitly but messily skin the animals. One of the men goes off, no doubt to his parked Russian UAZ jeep, to fetch a spade and a tarpaulin. Two of them then disappear into the woods with the skins to bury the evidence while the roughly jointed carcasses, a beautiful bright red in the early sunlight, glisten in a heap on the tarpaulin. They drink the hot coffee heavily corretto with grappa and Vecchia Romagna brandy from their hip flasks and a curious peace falls over us, of death and a new day and an honourable pact. I take the cups from them and then the dripping, still warm haunches which I dump in the kitchen sink before following them to their jeeps parked haphazardly just outside my drive. I was right: three of them are UAZ and one a Land Rover. The tailgates of two are already down and covered in drying blood from a brace of small boar. I’m betting the owners will leave the blood on for a day or two as public witness to their rough-and-tough machismo. We shake hands all round and wish each other well and I return home satisfied that my relations with the locals have been further cemented. Up here in the wilds you need all the goodwill going. You never know when your car might slide off the road on a patch of ice in winter and need a tow.
It’s a bit of a shock being jerked from one’s bed in this brutal fashion, but the compensatory hunks of flesh in the sink have made it worthwhile. I have only ever eaten badger once and was impressed by its subtle, if gamey, richness. I can’t say I find dog meat over-exciting but it can be turned into wonderful pâté with the right herbs and diligence. I carefully wash, pat dry and bag both haunches and put them into the freezer. At the back of my mind is a plan to make badger Wellington as a possibly outstanding winter recipe using a meat all too rarely eaten these days. The old people around here are a fertile source of ideas for cooking badger, porcupine, squirrel, marten, hedgehog and similar woodland delicacies, although they won’t eat mole. So much of an animal’s flavour depends on its own diet (as anyone will know who has eaten puffin. I remember from my childhood that earthworms taste bitter as well as gritty, so I imagine they might well pass on this quality to the moles that prey on them.) No doubt it was only the absence of badgers in wartime central London that prevented Dame Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis from bequeathing us a toothsome way of preparing them. Her fox rissoles are a treat. In any case I believe Juri Picacs (however you pronounce him) has several fox and wolf recipes as well as sixteen ways of cooking the bears his late employer, President Tito of Yugoslavia, shot by the hundred. Picacs was Tito’s game master at Slub, and in retirement supplemented his state pension by writing an unexcelled game cookbook, although Western palates may find some of his flavours a little on the robust side, especially those involving quantities of paprika, juniper berries and slivovitz. I have long wished to get my hands on a haunch of bear in order to have a go at bear Wellington (which I suppose in Britain would inevitably become known as bear Paddington). I am encouraged by excitable accounts in Il Tirreno of European bears as well as wolves making a slow but steady comeback in mountainous regions, suggesting it is only a matter of time before they stray across to Le Roccie from Garfagnana. At which point they will inevitably wander into the grappa-blurred sights of Emmanuele and his mates and sooner or later wolf Stroganoff will once again feature on local menus. Until then, badger Wellington remains a plausible alternative.
The second of the events I mentioned earlier is a call from Adrian inviting himself to Le Roccie for my birthday which is now in a mere three weeks’ time, on December the second. I notice that this year it happens to fall on a Saturday, which gives us the weekend in which to celebrate this deeply unwelcome anniversary.
‘You surely couldn’t have been proposing to pass such a notorious milestone on your own?’
‘Forty-shmorty,’ I say bravely. ‘It’s just numbers.’
‘Fifty-shmifty,’ he corrects firmly. ‘I can add up better than you can, you old fraud.’
‘A harmless deception,’ is my attempt to laugh it off.
‘Oh, harmless, yes. Sure, harmless. I’m merely saying it wasn’t much of a deception, given that you leave your driving licence lying around. Your picture’s peachy enough, the date of birth less so. I always thought you came on a bit world-weary for a stripling of forty.’
‘Ah, well.’ I’m suddenly diffident. ‘I’ll just have to put on a stronger shade of lipstick and wear butcher jeans.’
‘Mutton dressed as ram? This I must see. Anyway, you can expect me at Pisa some time on the Friday.’
‘Good,’ I say, secretly overjoyed, although I can’t quite bring myself to say so, not without warning, not to this brisk scientist speaking from his room in BOIS with the oilskins on the back of the door, The Face pinned to the cork noticeboard and bone-white specimens of the cold-water coral Lophelia pertusa lying around. It’s hard to sound convincingly affectionate to the person who has just wrong-footed and unmasked you.
The third event is almost more marvellous. Adrian’s sister Jennifer calls on behalf of her husband: the great Max Christ is wondering whether there’s any chance of his being able to see me over the weekend of the second of December.
‘You mean in England?’ I ask, thinking, Just my luck: it would be that weekend.
‘No, there in Italy. What he’d really like to know is, is there any chance of his being able to stay the night on that Saturday? I know it’s an awful impertinence, inviting himself like that, and you must say at once if it will be too difficult, what with it being your birthday and your living out in the wilds. But he has just been asked to do a concert in Florence at short notice that week and he’s been wanting an excuse for yonks to go back there and look at a manuscript in someone’s library. Max hates hotels, so he thought he might combine it with a visit to your famous eyrie.’
‘I don’t know what to say. Oh, yes I do: how did you know about my birthday? I suppose Adrian ratted on me, curse him.’
‘Certainly he did. And why ever not? Is it a state secret, or are you just being bashful?’
‘I was, but it’s no longer worth the effort. Will you be coming as well?’
‘I can’t, Gerry, unfortunately. I’ve still got the last of the builders to supervise here, plus there’s Josh, who just at the moment doesn’t like leaving his dinosaurs. These days it’s as much as I can do to get him into Woodbridge, and when I do he’s anxious they’ll start fighting among themselves in his absence. You should see his bedroom. It’s a Jurassic theme park. On the rare occasions I go in there with the Hoover I feel like Wilma Flintstone.’
‘Did you ever get the one out of the downstairs lavatory?’
‘I don’t remember. Which was that?’
‘I’ve no idea. But there was a crisis when I came that night. I think he’d decided his stegosaur needed a poop and it had jammed in the S-bend.’
‘Good lord, we have crises like that every day at Crendle-sham Hall. At the moment I believe we’ve got plastic dinos
aur eggs in the car’s heating system. When I wasn’t watching he somehow managed to feed them into one of those swivelling-eyeball duct things, don’t ask me how. So when we put the blower on it sounds like hailstones inside. It’s completely deafening. Josh said he thought they would hatch faster where it was warm. Perfectly logical for a five-year-old. Anyway, what should I tell Max?’
‘That I shall be delighted.’
‘He’ll be so pleased, Gerry.’
‘What’s he conducting in Florence, anyway?’
‘Golly, he did say but I wasn’t really listening. Some dutiful Respighi, I think. Anyway, a largely Italian first half. Then some Chausson and Bartók Three. Taneyev’s playing that. Apparently the Italians love Taneyev – all that romantic hair and those Byron collars. Oh, thank you, Gerry. Max will be thrilled.’
She rings off, leaving me stranded somewhere between ecstasy and total panic. Christ himself up here at Le Roccie! The logistics are going to be horrendous. Food. Beds. Fetching from airports. Then it strikes me that maybe I should invite a guest of my own. Whether or not Derek will anyway be coming to Florence to hear Taneyev play (and I doubt he’s at much liberty to travel around behind his paramour, what with having to earn his crust at Corcoran’s), Samper can score maximum points by having Derek to stay that weekend. Russian pianists with rapidly thinning romantic hair, no matter how adored by the Italian concert-going public, are effortlessly outranked by a conductor of Max Christ’s stature. The casual fact of Christ overnighting in my house will not be lost on Derek, I’m happy to say, but I should like it to come as a surprise. So I phone him and suggest he might like to join a little house party I’ve decided to give on my birthday.
‘Ooh, your fiftieth, of course! Yes, that would be lovely, Gerry. I think Pavel’s playing in Florence that week and it’ll be perfect. One stone, two birds, you know.’
Oh, how I know. ‘I look forward to your gracing my humble nest with your presence,’ I say with a slight edge. Lost on him, no doubt, but I can’t go too far or else he will remind me of all the hospitality I’ve taken off him recently in London.
Amazing Disgrace Page 28