Rancid Pansies Read online

  These turn out to be much less moth-eaten than at first glance. They are, in fact, a dense jungle of mouldy willows and ground elder and dead trees held upright by straitjackets of ivy. I lean against one to scrape the mud off my boots and with an awesome groan it topples slowly and crashes to the ground. The place is a death trap. Suddenly a crotchety, fluting voice addresses me out of the jungle.

  ‘You, there! What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

  I peer into the tangle of branches and brambles. It is like one of those pictures in children’s magazines in which you’re told there are five lions hidden and can you spot them?

  ‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’

  Now I see him: a tall, gaunt old geezer wearing what looks like an ancient army battledress jacket and corduroy trousers of an excremental colour, balding about the knees. His hands, I notice, are huge: all veins and knuckles. One of them holds a pair of secateurs. He is fixing me with a glare from washed-out ceramic blue eyes half hidden like a terrier’s behind wild white eyebrows.

  ‘I’m afraid I’ve lost my way,’ I say in a pacific tone.

  ‘Pity it wasn’t your voice. I assume it was you making that infernal row just now? Sounded like pigs being castrated.’ He bends stiffly to examine the tree I have knocked over. His clothing hints at the skeleton beneath. ‘I hope you know this marvellous plant you have just vandalised was the last of its kind in Britain? Probably in Western Europe.’

  ‘What do you mean, vandalised? The thing fell down. It’s dead.’

  ‘Nothing of the kind. Allow me to know my own garden. This noble plant is a unique tree with historic connections. It was brought here by T. E. Lawrence as a sapling in 1912. He was excavating at Carchemish at the time, and the shoot was presented to him by the Emir of Aleppo, who had taken a fancy to him. They were both buggers, of course. This’ – the old man indicates the corpse with his secateurs – ‘is Commiphora byzantina, related to the myrrh tree. It flourished here for nearly a century despite its Mesopotamian origin, itself a miracle, and it bloomed beautifully each year. And now look at it.’

  ‘Obviously we’re none of us immortal,’ I offer by way of appeasement. ‘I’m sorry, but that tree is defunct. You can’t push a live tree over just by leaning against it.’

  The old man snicks at it with his secateurs and holds up a sprig. ‘What’s that, might I ask? Green, wouldn’t you say?’

  I am beginning to get impatient with this old bore. ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologise again for what I vow is the last time, ‘but I had no idea this was a garden. You must be a member of Jardins Sans Frontières.’

  ‘Never heard of ’em.’

  ‘It’s a horticultural society dedicated to abolishing fences.’

  ‘Don’t believe a word of it. You must be blind, anyway.’ The glare intensifies and a khaki-clad arm sweeps the air. ‘What do you think that is? Euphragia monocotylens. Aspergilla trades-cantii there. Dendrofolium physoloides over there. And look there – Vanessa Bell planted that Forsythia brucei with her own hands in 1937. “No idea this was a garden”, indeed. Full of rare plants. And very shortly Lytton Strachey’s hollyhocks will be coming up exactly where you’re standing.’

  I take a nervous sideways step with an apologetic glance at my feet. All I can see are nettles and ground elder.

  ‘Not there!’ comes the squeaky bellow. ‘You’re right on top of the hypericums! Duncan Grant used to paint them. He would come up from Sussex each year. He was living with Vanessa by then although of course he was a bugger, like Maynard. Are you a bugger?’

  ‘I really …’

  ‘Thought so. Can always tell. But you’re obviously no gardener.’

  ‘Tell me how to get to Crendlesham Hall and I’ll get out of your garden.’

  ‘Crendlesham? Crendlesham? That where that musical johnny lives? The conductor chappie?’

  ‘Max Christ, yes. I’m a guest of his.’

  ‘Are you just? I suppose he’s a bugger too. They mostly are. Like that Britten fellow. We once gave him an entire flowering branch of that Commiphora you’ve just murdered. Wanted it for one of his operas over at Snape. Never so much as a thank-you, of course. They’re like cats, you know. All over you until they get what they want, then just walk away.’

  ‘If you point me in the right direction I’ll do the same.’

  A ragged bony arm extends the secateurs. He looks like an illustration by Mervyn Peake. ‘Down there. Hundred yards, there’s the road. Exactly where you’d expect it to be. Turn right. Go on past the crinkle-crankle wall to the junction. Turn right again. Signposted. Only a couple of miles. I doubt even you could miss it. And mind my lizard orchids on the way out, they’re very rare in Bri— No! To your left! To your left, dammit!’

  Eventually the petulant hectorings die away behind me. God, what a place. I’m lost here. This is no longer my country and even to recall that it’s the land of my birth makes it feel like a concession to me that they still speak English and drive on the left. Get out while you can, Samper. Italy was never like this. Strange to think Ovid might have gone home after Augustus’s death and found that in his long absence Rome had become horrid and incomprehensible. He did well to die in exile; there’s nothing so disillusioning as returning to one’s native land. Crinkle-crankle, indeed. But I soon come upon a brick wall that waves in and out with sinuous curves and assume this is it. And the old sod’s instructions do prove accurate and soon I can see Crendleburgh church in the distance. But out of nowhere it suddenly comes to me, whether via Richard Strauss or this ludicrous encounter: what I’d really like to do is write an opera, commission the music and have it performed. Why have I never given this serious thought? It would so perfectly match my talents. Opera was my first love, of course, but the trouble with first loves is that one needs to pluck up too much courage to do anything more than gaze at them from afar. Still, money does wonders for self-confidence and I really think (already singing as I walk along) this is something I simply have to do.

  By now I’m well into the celebrated Buggers’ Chorus from Act 1: ‘Balls to his hollyhocks! / Uproot his hydrangeas! / Teach him some manners / To perfect strangers!’ Somewhere in my mind’s eye the curtain comes down to a storm of applause, while on the road to Crendlesham the startled pee-wits flap restlessly on all sides. It’s wonderful what a good solid sum of money will do for the spirits. But foolishly, and for quite some time, I forget a cardinal item of hard-won Samper wisdom. It is never safe to heave a sigh of relief.

  Adrian 1

  email from Dr Adrian Jestico ([email protected])

  to Dr Penny Barbisant ([email protected])

  OK, it’s not easy to spot a sick marine bivalve. But have you looked for mitotic suppression and/or nuclear polyploidization? I’m assuming you were asleep in my karyology lectures. Think chromosome set changes. You’ll find that tabulating percentage changes will give you some figures for the sub-lethal effects of pollution.

  You asked about Gerry. He is indeed the same Samper who wrote about the awful Millie Cleat (‘As told to’). More, you’ll be surprised to learn that he and I are something of an item. At least, I think we are. Nothing’s ever quite that straightforward with Gerry. I’ll certainly tell him you found his book a laff-riot: he’ll be dead chuffed, on the grounds that anyone who found it that funny will have seen what he was getting at. Almost everybody else has taken it as a kind of sporting holy writ. They’ve been especially po-faced about the boating heroine since the Sydney harbour episode. Not since the Blessed Diana was wafted to Heaven by teams of bungling French surgeons have such crocodile tears been shed. You were still at Southampton when Millie screwed up the EAGIS survey, weren’t you? (time moves so fast). Don’t worry – sooner or later it’ll all come out.

  As for Gerry, he’s just told me they’ve sold the film rights to the book for 1½ million, so he’s quids in, lucky sod. But in a funny way I’m not sure how much difference it’ll make to him underneath. I told you he’d lost his Ita
lian house? It hit him harder than he’ll admit, for all his tragic act, and he doesn’t know what he’ll do next. He really needs something extravagant for him to get his teeth into. I’ve not known him for that long but he’s obviously one of those people who need work, a project, a proper intelligent occupation. These Cleat-style biographies of his definitely haven’t filled that need, even though he’s been amazingly successful with them. Poor Gerry! For all his high jinks and sheer amusement value he can be surprisingly bleak at times. He has the habit of singing rather loud operatic arias in falsetto when he thinks he’s by himself. Personally, I’m not sure it’s possible to howl like that without imagining an audience, even just one of inner ghosts. I once asked him whether he thought stranded people, loners, rebels, might sing in the hope of being overheard and rescued? He gave a pure Gerry reply. ‘Robinson Caruso, that’s me,’ he said. Exasperating though he often is, one can’t help being drawn to him. Who else at the age of fifty would embark on a course of penile enhancement that he didn’t need & may temporarily have screwed up his endocrine system? He always claims he did it purely in a spirit of scientific enquiry, which you & I would think a likely tale, but with Gerry it really is possible. Awful thing to say about your supposed partner but in some respects he’s like a child. He really needs someone to save him from his delusions. If he had somebody living with him who could laugh at him from time to time there’s a chance some of his wackier notions might be curbed.

  How are things at Woods Hole? You must be well settled in by now. I do envy you – you’re on hallowed oceanographer’s ground in Cape Cod. Apart from the presiding ghost of Spencer Fullerton Baird you’ve got that exotic mix of stolid British-sounding places (Falmouth, Barnstaple, Yarmouth, Sandwich) cheek by jowl with those mysterious and beautiful Algonquin names like Sippewissett, Teaticket and Mashpee. I’m always struck in the US by how poetic such Indian words sound to us (Parsippany, Shenandoah) even though they usually turn out to mean the same as place names anywhere and most were anyway mis-transliterated by immigrants. Well, I hope you’re enjoying New England as much as I did. I loved my time at WHOI, as you know, and I’m already looking forward to my next visit. And what of Luke and your own domestic setup? I trust there’s more to your life than sick bivalves? Remember me to Peter Millikan.

  Cheers,

  Adrian

  PS Are you doing b-radioactivity counts on the shells? You should be.

  2

  The kitchen presents a scene of peaceful normality, though hardly of the kind that once reigned in my sweet Tuscan farmhouse, despite the heady regressive scent of baking. Jennifer is stirring something on the Aga. Luna the cat is asleep on a tea towel on the work surface next to it, her tail draped across a block of butter on a plate. Josh is sitting on the kitchen table in his underwear, licking the remains of chocolate-flavoured cake mixture out of a bowl. I notice his pants are on back to front, as so often. It’s sheer luck whether the little pest puts them on the right way round, as with his shoes: a reminder that it will be years yet before he becomes fully human. At the moment he’s really just a collection of more or less noisome valves, though at times he can be quite ornamental.

  With her back to me his mother says, ‘Max still raves about your birthday dinner, you know. He thinks that badger Wellington was superb. I’d have had you do it for this dinner, only we couldn’t guarantee to find you a badger in time.’

  ‘Alas. But there’s also the gun-dog pâté, don’t forget. That’s an essential filling. I suppose in default of Italian-style hunting accidents I could hang around the local vet’s back door and make a quick offer for the bulging bin liner even as the wailing owners retreat to their Volvo out front, leaning against one another for support. All the same, I’m none too smitten by the idea of meat containing a lethal dose of anaesthetic.’

  ‘But you are doing us an inventive hors d’oeuvre instead?’

  ‘It’s all in hand,’ I tell her loftily. ‘You specified something a little out of the ordinary and I’m working on it.’

  ‘I was quite hoping it mightn’t involve that plastic pot in the pantry fridge with things in gore.’

  ‘Very delicious, that will be. You lack faith in the Samper artistry. I’ll say no more.’

  ‘Promise me it has nothing to do with bats, Gerry,’ Jennifer-the-hostess says anxiously, turning around.

  ‘Certainly I promise.’

  ‘Eeeuwghh, bats?’ Josh looks up with gleeful horror, chocolate cake-mix glistening in his hair. Blonds really can’t afford to be careless in their eating habits.

  ‘Just carry on,’ I tell him. ‘When you’ve finished with the bowl there will still be plenty left on your face. I promise: no bats. But I did wonder for a moment whether an authentic hedgerow broth mightn’t be made by gently seething some owl pellets. Do you think? Obviously one would need to strain out the fur and the voles’ teeth; but if the Chinese can make soup out of birds’ nests held together by avian phlegm, I see no reason why owl pellets mightn’t yield an equally interesting stock. I rather fancy chanterelles and a smidgin of fresh ginger would set it off admirably.’

  ‘But pellet soup’s not on tomorrow’s menu?’

  ‘I’m afraid not. One more thing that required notice. But I had a good morning’s shopping in Woodbridge earlier.’

  ‘Finished!’ announces Josh, banging the bowl on the table. Luna stretches and her hind paw gets enough purchase on the butter to push the plate away, leaving a deep footprint.

  ‘I want to know who’s coming,’ I say, ‘but Max won’t tell me.’

  ‘Oh, you know him, Gerry. He’s just a tease. There’s the odd local we owe hospitality to, and a player from Colchester Symphony Orchestra. We’ll only be eight. I’m going to do a plain ordinary roast and to hell with it. We look to your starter to add the exotic touch. Josh and I will be off to the butcher to collect the meat tomorrow morning so you’ll have the kitchen to yourself.’

  So next morning, having ruthlessly ejected the cat, I lay out a small but highly select variety of things in plastic pots, ready for their translation into something rich and strange, like somebody’s father in that play I did for O-level. Over the years I have, of course, amassed a great number of inventions for teasing the palate, not a few of them themed. (My Men of Violence suite of starters includes Pol Pot Noodles, Somozas, Shin Fein – a divine junior cousin to ossobuco – Papa Duck, Kim Jong Eel and my celebrated Mobster Thermidor.) But today I shall stick to a mere three or four little appetisers, one of which was suggested by that wonderful book, Emergency Cuisine by Dame Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis. If one needed a glowing example of staunch British gallantry in the war years this little gem of a book would supply it, so practical in the face of adversity and so sunny and uplifting in tone. Winston Churchill’s speeches undoubtedly stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood of his people as they crouched around their sunburst-fretworked wireless sets; but Dame Emmeline would have taken both sinews and blood from novel sources and made of them novel sauces to fill their bellies with fire. The loss of her book in the recent collapse of my house, together with that equally irreplaceable volume, Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s Elements of Raj Cookery, is a blow that may yet prove serious enough to make me send in the bulldozers after all to see if they have survived.

  What Emergency Cuisine reminded me was how good field mice can be. Indeed, in the nineteenth century they received a famous accolade from Frank Buckland, who used to supplement his meagre public school diet with such delicacies. ‘A toasted field mouse, not a house mouse, makes a perfect bonne-bouche for a hungry boy. It eats like a lark.’ So for some days I set traps in the extensive stables and outhouses that surround the Hall, and these yielded ten – no, eleven on a recount – plump specimens which I kept secretly in a foil-covered pot in the little fridge in the pantry where Jennifer seldom goes. The worst job was skinning and boning them: there’s nothing more fiddly. For discretion’s sake I did it in my bathroom up in the attic. Even so, Luna must have caug
ht the enticing scent because she came miaowing at the door. The skins and entrails had to go down the lavatory. The result of my labours was what Jennifer had disparaged as the ‘things in gore’ in the fridge. It’s true that, when thoroughly unzipped, eleven field mice yield not much meat at all; but if there are only the eight of us that’s nearly a mouse-and-a-half apiece. The question is, which way to do them? One can cook the meat very gently with a little butter for a bare minute or two, add the merest dribble of mouse broth and use this delicate hash as a vol-auvent filling. On the other hand you can cream the meat with a pestle and mortar, ideally with a little goose fat and a teaspoon of the best Armagnac you can find, set out the mixture in blobs on a baking sheet and grill them quickly. These are Samper’s justly renowned Mice Krispies; and as a way of teasing the palates of visiting gourmets they are unsurpassed. They somehow manage to give off an aura of warm haylofts and hazelnuts nibbled amid stubble beneath great yellow harvest moons. For the present occasion, though, I incline towards the vol-au-vent solution which it now occurs to me could easily become vole-au-vent with a slight change of its rodent filling.

  So that’s settled. I put the tiny giblets and skeletons (how touchingly frail they are!) on to boil in a bare cup of water with a quarter of the smallest shallot I can find and a single juniper berry, and turn to the tender Cumbrian lamb I had the butcher mince up fine for me in Woodbridge yesterday. This, too, can go into puff pastry cases, enriched with tiny quantities of chocolate, à la rabbit in chocolate that the Mexicans do so well. Into the mixture go four drops of Fernet-Menta, the Branca Brothers’ bid to attract to their exquisite original product a wider public than hollow-eyed topers. A little finely chopped basil and fresh mint will add green top notes, and my betting is that Samper’s After Eight Mince will not soon be forgotten. Of course, both these little amuse-gueules are savoury. Ideally, I would like an additional dish of sweet beetles for my diners to crunch on – probably the candy-bug Scarabaeus gastromellifer that Guatemalan Indians give their boys as a reward for not crying during circumcision, an operation performed by the village shaman using his or her teeth. These yellow-spotted delicacies have the additional advantage (for a dinner party, that is) of being mildly aphrodisiac. But in default of such exotica in Suffolk I think I shall accompany my ground-breaking hors d’oeuvres with my patented liver smoothie (served with a slice of lime, a sprig of basil and a sprinkling of hundreds-and-thousands as a final touch of festive playfulness). It really is just too banal to serve nothing but unrelieved savouries before a main course. Finally – and all those years in Tuscany have clearly left their wholesome mark – some bruschette spread with my inventive haddock marmalade, which isn’t sweet but is wonderfully confected with sour cream, a pinch of cinnamon and cooked lime peel, carefully de-pithed to avoid bitterness.