Loving Monsters Read online

  I thought of my approaching deadline, of the pile of manuscript lying stalled at about the halfway mark. ‘Scribblers are always in the market for propositions.’

  ‘Quite. By the way, my name’s Jerningham Jebb. You might as well call me Jayjay right away. You will eventually, in any case.’

  In this way I was invited to tea. In due course I followed his car a few hundred metres up the Valle di Chio to a farmhouse among olive terraces. If you craned your neck you could just see Sir John Hawkwood’s (or Giovanni Acuto’s) castle at Montecchio standing on its little hump in the distance. Il Ghibli turned out to be a charming house, though I would hardly have expected otherwise. A pergola, a terrace, lots of greenery in terracotta pots, thick doors and slabby refectory tables, twisted ironwork, chestnut beams and mezzane. Standard vernacular stuff. Mr Jebb (or was it Mr Jerningham-Jebb?) began to rattle about in the kitchen. I followed him through the house at a more inquisitive pace. Nosy, actually, nosiness being the best-polished weapon in a writer’s armoury. I already had him tagged as a bachelor who had a local woman in twice a week to do the housework. Stone flags gleaming with a burnished patina like dirty ice; dust-free bookshelves, a scrolltop desk with – but what’s that? House of Lords Library letterhead peeping out, sandwiched at a slant between two books that look as though they’re currently being read. Is he still safely putting kettles on? Yes. A quick nudge so the top book slides over enough to reveal the text of the letter.

  Saturday p.m.

  Dear Jayjay,

  Of course, this note would be quite impossible had you not confided in me the other day.

  Proctoscopy is not something one wishes to dwell on. So please accept my gratitude for your concern and kind wishes.

  Yours ever, Margaret

  And that, if I was not mistaken, was the Baroness’s own handwriting. I nudged the book back to where it had been and joined my host in the kitchen.

  ‘Lovely place,’ I remarked.

  ‘Yes,’ he said with a swift gaze up from the teapot as if disappointed by such a conventional remark. ‘I suppose it is, really. Not bad, at any rate.’

  Could he have seen me reading his correspondence? No, I was quite sure of myself. He was just being politely disenchanted with the old shack. The syndrome was common enough in these parts: Britons feeling they ought to be slightly embarrassed at being caught with a house in Tuscany, having heard it all before. I took the tray out to the terrace and he followed with the pot. We sat and watched the swallows flash and swerve among the olive trees, busy with such flying ants as had not shed their wings around the holes in the ground from which they had emerged that day. I fell to banal and silent reflection about ephemera, about the gift of wings that either fell off as soon as the insect hatched or else bore their owner straight up to the swift beaks sieving the air overhead.

  ‘I’m embarrassed to say this, James,’ he murmured, ‘but you’re probably going to write my life. I know how presumptuous it sounds – and vain, and so on – but I really do think that’s what you will end up doing. I’ve had rather an exotic life, actually, and I don’t believe you’ll be bored. I’ve read enough of your books to have an idea what might appeal to you. I may be wrong. I’ll pay you, of course.’

  ‘Vanity publishing?’

  ‘Oh no. That’s why I chose you. You will produce something a publisher will pay for in the normal way. I’m just sweetening the deal.’

  ‘Just at the moment –’

  ‘– you’ve a lot of work on? Surely. Of course you have. But there’s no rush. Not yet,’ he added, watching the birds with cup and saucer held against his chest.

  ‘You certainly seem to have decided.’

  ‘Not at all. How could I? It all depends on you. If you mean I seem very sure of myself, I am. It’s a characteristic that has enabled me to live my peculiar life.’

  ‘“Exotic” was the word you used.’

  ‘Peculiar, exotic, erotic. Not run-of-the-mill, perhaps.’

  My host drifted off into a reverie, the forgotten cup sagging in his hand and slopping tea into the saucer. I did not draw his attention to this. Something about him reminded me uncomfortably of myself: the private, slightly abstracted manner of a person accustomed to living on his own, neither needing nor welcoming an outsider’s well-meant attempts to smarten up his habits. He would tell me in his own good time what his life had been and why he called it peculiar. An ex-diplomat, I wondered? The area around Cortona, a neighbouring hill town a few kilometres from here down the Perugia road, was stiff with retired diplomats of sundry nationalities. Maybe after years of grim postings interspersed with fallow periods back home in an administrative capital like Brussels, Bonn, London or Grottawa (as a Canadian diplomatic friend calls it) there was something restful and civilised about Etruscan hill towns. The entire landscape was reassuring. Its terraced hillsides, cypresses, umbrella pines, olives and vines posed a calm counter-argument to the panicky eco-disaster discourse of the times. Here was a landscape that had been completely moulded by the hand of man for the last three thousand years, and far from being ruined was in its way a work of art. Indeed, one saw daily and at every turn scenes that could have formed the background of any Renaissance painting. It was a visible reminder that human activity could, if it chose, produce startlingly graceful vistas for the eye’s beguiling, even as the mind knew they had been fertilised with uncounted gallons of blood. An urbane feast for the eyes of old diplomats in retreat from the punishing world of Realpolitik, in that case. A fine omelette of a landscape from which the passage of so much time had erased all memory of broken eggs.

  A visit to my host’s downstairs lavatory more or less clinched my guess for me. Propped on a shelf with just the right degree of offhandedness, partly hidden behind a stack of hand towels, was a signed portrait of Henry Kissinger. Who but a diplomat would have such a thing? Unless, of course, it was the celebrated surgeon Mr Jerningham Jebb sitting out there on the terrace drinking tea: the one man who had proved capable of bringing Henry relief from his embarrassing ailment. Yet he did not feel to me like a medic. I should need to browse his bookshelves for additional clues. No time for that now; but there was a pile of books by the lavatory for defecational reading, mainly the preposterous stuff that ensures a smile before beginning the day. Here was ‘a bold and fearless indictment of Prussianism’ published in 1918 by Robert Blatchford and entitled General von Sneak. Here also a book by the astrologer Leonardo Blake, dated 1939 and called, with some assurance, Hitler’s Last Year of Power. There was a signed copy of One Hour of Justice by Cecil Alport, described on the dust jacket as ‘a sharp denunciation by a British doctor of the present treatment of the Egyptian peasant’ and dedicated to ‘the twin gods of Decency and Justice’. There was even a copy of Elise Pumpelly Cabot’s splendid Arizona and Other Poems, signed in biro by Peggy Guggenheim. ‘Into the giant saguaro brave birds have bored their way to safety.’

  ‘Did you size the joint up?’ he asked as I resumed my seat.

  ‘If you mean did I poke and pry, then the answer is no. Still, one can tell a lot about a person from his lavatory. For a start, it’s reassuring when it doesn’t flush blue. And then, of course, few people have portraits of Henry Kissinger tucked away in their smallest room.’

  ‘Oh, you spotted him, did you? Yes, poor old Henry. Without wishing to be disdainful, because I grew quite fond of him in a limited way, his picture is hardly the sort of thing one can keep out in the open, is it? I’ve always found that the great and the good function as a cultural giveaway. The British don’t much care for having such things on display. It strikes us as immodest. Not only that, but celebrities are generally so two-dimensional – “famous for being famous” as the fellow said – and it would be awful to think a visitor might suppose one was in any way serious about them. Have you ever been in houses where grand pianos are used as display cabinets? Massed ranks of signed photographs in silver frames? One behind the other, like toast in a rack. The homeowner teeing off with the Pr
esident; guffawing with a starlet; being urged by a Kennedy not to forget Aspen in eighty-nine; caught at a table overlooking Lake Tahoe with Frank Sinatra and assorted mafiosi. I am whom I’m known by. That sort of thing.’

  ‘You seem quite interested in fame.’

  ‘Oh, I am. Yes, very. It’s a fascinating thing. I’m always intrigued by what people want from their lives, how they use this little seventy-year flicker of daylight in the middle of aeons of nothingness. Nearly eighty, now, in my case. How best to spend rationed time. What to be. Yes, very interesting. The onlý interesting thing, one might almost say. The amazing lengths to which people will go in the foredoomed quest to put their thumbprint on eternity. Don’t you feel the same?’

  ‘Perhaps more from the opposite tack of those who refuse to compete in the first place. No sooner are you born than they start threatening you with what will happen when you die. You know – Judgement Day, wall-to-wall cherubim, science-fiction fauna with too many wings. Faced with the whole baroque Book of Revelations scenario, what does mortal man do? He sits inside, jerking off to porno videos or watching re-runs of The Muppet Show. I like that: it shows chutzpah. If I were the Creator, the defiant bleak wilfulness of the human race would send me slinking back to the cosmic drawing board to reconsider whether the deal I was offering wasn’t in fact quite intolerable. My heart goes out to people who opt to live in a world of TV soaps and mail-order catalogues.’

  ‘Unseduced by the sirens of fame?’

  ‘Precisely. It shows an instinctive grasp of the true nature of the deal. The gift of time comes from an Indian giver.’

  My host put down his cup. ‘Many years ago you worried about being thought cynical?’

  ‘I’m an admirer of Lily Tomlin. “No matter how cynical you get, it’s not cynical enough.”’

  ‘I think you and I will probably get on. We may even turn out to be surprisingly alike in some ways. Given that we all have to construct ourselves from scratch, you seem to have done it on paper while I chose to do it by inventive living. There isn’t much difference.’

  This had been an entirely unforeseen meeting and I was becoming conscious of the deep-frozen seafood frittura mista steadily defrosting in the Co-op carrier bag in my car. Past experience suggested I would already have to scrub the floor mat with bleach to neutralise the raw octopus juice which invariably seeped through the welds in the bag. Otherwise it would brew up in the Mediterranean heat into a reek of corruption that would yet again bring to mind a journey I had once made across Manila in a hearse with broken air-conditioning when we were trapped for six hours in a series of traffic jams.

  ‘You must excuse me, Jayjay,’ I said. ‘This has been a most intriguing meeting and there are a million things I want to ask you. Clearly we’re going to meet again.’

  ‘Of course we are. It has been very good of you to give me your time. A total stranger, just out of the blue like that.’

  He led me courteously through the house. I found his well-filled bookshelves reassuring, especially the healthy mixture of older volumes and brighter modern paperbacks. These last ranged from (snatched glance) Aldo Busi and Primo Levi in Italian to James Ellroy in Southern Californian. Plus half a yard of Patrick O’Brian, which somehow sat comfortably with my preconceptions of my host. My eyes also fell on a strange object that lay like an ornament on a bookshelf. A battered piece of metal about the size of a child’s sock, it was nevertheless brightly polished and obviously silver. That anything so flattened and creased should be carefully preserved suggested it was a curio.

  ‘There’s a story behind that,’ he said, observing my curiosity. ‘Now, then, your writer’s imagination to the fore: guess what it is. Or was.’

  ‘As a matter of fact I recognised it at once. It’s one of the king-sized silver-foil toothpaste tubes specially made for John Jacob Astor. This one must have been recovered from the wreck of the Titanic, having been crushed by the extreme pressure on the seabed. How did you get it, if you don’t mind my asking? Surely not from Bob Ballard? He would die rather than remove anything from that ship.’

  ‘Oh, bravo! Most inventive for the spur of the moment.’ He flashed me an amused glance in which there was – what, exactly? Thoughtfulness? Complicity, perhaps? ‘The truth is, however, even stranger than your fiction. In 1847, when Lady Amelia Dance set off on her courageous mission to inspect Janissary prisons, she took with her two silver dildos modelled from Disraeli’s cock. It was well known that her marriage offered her few satisfactions. Indeed, she famously wrote that “Poor Dance would be well engulph’d by a candle-snuffer”, which made things pretty clear. I have her Diary here, by the way. So she put herself in the hands of Arcangelo Viotti. Viotti was an immigrant silversmith from Cremona who had set up in Cheapside and quickly earned a reputation for such skill and discretion that he became patronised by society. You can imagine the sort of thing. Some feckless blood would pop a priceless heirloom to settle his gambling debts at Oxford and urgently need a first-rate copy to fool his family until he could buy back the original. Viotti would do it and keep silent. So Lady Amelia went to him and explained her requirement and Viotti arranged to have an impression taken from Disraeli during a poker session in Grosvenor Square. Don’t ask me how: it’s one of those historical mysteries one likes to speculate on in the bath. He made two identical objects in sterling silver to her design. They were hollow and the bottom part – what she called “the orbs and follicles” – was threaded and formed a stopper. Several days after leaving London on her journey – I think she had got as far as Karlsruhe, I’d have to check – she confided to her diary the discovery that there were “ever more refinements of phantasie” to be had from filling one with iced hock and the other with hot soup “such as will long retain and most readily transmit its chearful glow”. In fact, she had just made the same discovery about soup that Gladstone did some years later, that it keeps hot appreciably longer than mere water. I’m sure you’ve heard that splendid old BBC Archive recording of Gladstone’s manservant remembering that the old statesman used to fill his hot-water bottle with soup for exactly that reason? Anyway, long story short, poor Lady Amelia was eventually captured by the Cadi of Smyrna, mistaken for a nobleman’s son, and had a most unfortunate end. Her baggage, of course, was ransacked and the dildos vanished. However, one of them came to light when it appeared at Christie’s so-called “black auction” in 1972, the famous occasion when Napoleon’s phallus also came under the hammer. It is now one of the reserved items in the Gilbert Collection and bona fide scholars can examine it if they make a special request. Its companion is here.’ Jayjay picked up the battered piece of metal and handed it to me.

  ‘Pardon my scepticism, but how do you know?’

  ‘The hallmark. It’s identical to the one in the Gilbert Collection. Both have Viotti’s monogram.’

  ‘And why does it look as though it had been sat on by an elephant?’

  ‘Ah, that we shall never know. I acquired it in Vienna. I like to think some outraged Customs official there had confiscated it from a collector as obscene and laid it on the rails as the Orient Express pulled out, but one shouldn’t embroider historical facts to suit one’s own fantasies.’

  I kept a thoughtful silence until we reached the car.

  ‘You have me at a complete disadvantage, Jayjay. You do at least know who I am, whereas I haven’t the remotest idea who you are, what you’ve done, why there are signed portraits of Henry Kissinger in the house. Never mind flattened dildos.’ I managed not to add to say nothing of notes from Margaret Thatcher. ‘Not a clue. You shouldn’t be either surprised or insulted, though. People think of me as a recluse. They are always amazed by what I don’t know. So you might at least help me decide why I should want to become your biographer. I’ve got you down as a retired dip., incidentally, but I don’t suppose you are.’

  He was watching me with a mischievous smile. ‘I assure you, you have nothing to apologise for, and I everything. It was most discourteous. I should hav
e made it clear from the start. There is no earthly reason why you should have heard of me. I told you quite truthfully that I consider fame to be fascinating but it is also true that I myself have always shunned it. You might say I rely on quiet recognition at most. What I am, you see, is a professional impostor.’

  *

  For long afterwards I could not shake the idea that our meeting had not been fortuitous but carefully engineered. Surely Il Ghibli had been most artfully set-dressed, the hook so discreetly baited that even the least greedy and most discerning of fishes (for like everybody, I fancied myself as such) would have taken a cautious nibble? But then I would promptly reject this as pure vanity. Why should anyone go to such elaborate trouble to put a straightforward business proposition to a mere writer? The following week I would be de-convinced anew. I would argue that he must have arranged the whole thing, having long before ascertained my habit of shopping in the Co-op on that day and at that time. Not only had he baited the hook but he had fully intended me to appreciate it. For some as yet unknown reason it was not just any old writer this professional impostor wanted, but me.

  Inevitably, I ran into him again before I could make up my mind. This time it was in the Co-op car park. He had just replaced his trolley in the steel shelter where its fellows were nested and was clearly miles away, standing paused by his car door, though he might have been contemplating the word fica someone had spray-painted in black on the shelter years ago.

  ‘I’m still thinking,’ I told him.

  ‘Think on,’ said Jayjay sunnily. ‘There’s no real hurry. Only bear in mind I shan’t be giving you my entire life. Nothing so conventional. I shall only be telling you the interesting bits. I don’t know if you agree with me but in my opinion all the really important stuff happens quite early on. The first thirty years of one’s life are lived; the remainder is dreamed. I’m convinced we have an inbuilt sense of time that gives undue weight to our youthful years, the reason being that for nearly all mankind’s existence a life span probably averaged forty years, which is very much what you still see in the harshest societies today. After that the clock’s increasingly bamboozled and accelerates as though searching out its end, which is why the older one becomes the more time seems to speed up. You yourself have already noticed this, of course. Indeed, I remember at our very first meeting you said that the gift of time comes from an Indian giver. So you ought to bear in mind that I’m not one of those people who find old age a matter of increasing and rather wonderful serenity. You will find – or you would find if you decided we had a deal – that I shall be skewing my life very much in favour of its first half. The second half has really been little more than a series of increasingly flavourless recapitulations, although the great conspiracy requires that I claim to be having the time of my life. Which of course I am, as you can see, shopping at the Co-op in Castiglion Fiorentino and wondering why a graffiti artist would bother to spray a word like that over there when people obviously don’t even care enough to scrub it off. It must be very disheartening to a rebel adolescent to have aroused so little reaction.’