Rancid Pansies Read online

  At last they go away to interview the gardener, also taking with them all my new ‘Little Nipper’ mouse traps. And in due course it is confirmed that the bottle of red squill is indeed the culprit – or rather, the gardener is, the dear old Suffolk treasure who without telling anyone blithely put down bait laced with a banned rodenticide around a house with a six-year-old child in it. There remains the conundrum of how a poisoned mouse wound up in one of my traps. It is assumed that because squill doesn’t act instantly the luckless rodent was able to move on for a second course of excellent cheddar cheese before falling victim to an old-fashioned spring. Thus the amount of this highly emetic substance actually ingested by Crendlesham Hall’s luckless diners was very small, and fatal only to a very old man with a dicky heart. The police do not return, and things slowly revert to normal, at least on the surface. It is acknowledged that I am not directly to blame for the disaster, the gardener is fired, and in due course we all dutifully troop over to a draughty church to see Sir Douglas’s mortal remains buried beneath six feet of earth but with, we are implausibly assured by a robed comedian, the lively expectation of his eventual resurrection. The grieving Spud is plainly unreconciled to the idea that I am not guilty of his aged partner’s death. He is but distantly civil, while I do my best to express sincere regrets without implying the least degree of responsibility, like a Japanese politician when obliged to comment on the War in the Pacific. For me the most distressing part of the proceedings is being unable to wear my Zaccarelli suit. The jacket is saved but the trousers are ruined. In my urgent efforts to bring Crendlesham Hall back to normal on that fateful night I forgot I was wearing them as I knelt and scrubbed and disinfected. One cannot kneel on patches of wine-tinged vomit in linen and merino mixture without irreparable damage, as I later discovered.

  For Jennifer and Max the whole episode has been something of a social disaster in that news of a fatality at your dinner party inevitably gets around. For a while there is even some loose talk of the costermonger suing. This is mere rumour and, being friends, all the guests amiably agree to write it off as just one of those unfortunate things. Nevertheless I can’t help feeling a line of sorts has been drawn beneath my welcome at Crendlesham Hall. It simply makes still clearer a conclusion I myself have already reached: that it is high time for Samper to move on.

  I do, however, have a valedictory conversation with Marta, with whom I haven’t otherwise had a chance to swap news. She is a little pale but otherwise seems undamaged. There is stout stuff in these Voynovians. I suppose after occupation by the Soviets everything else must seem minor by contrast. In my usual guarded fashion I’m genuinely pleased to see her, although apprehensive of what new indignity I am about to suffer at her hands. I am still touched by the memory of her bedraggled state last night, her Iron Curtain finery plastered by vomit to her ample body. It gave me no pleasure to see my old neighbour so miserably reduced, poor thing.

  Yet as usual Marta manages to wither my sympathy with an artless piece of news. By one of those brutal little ironies I seem to attract, it turns out she is herself engaged in writing an opera! She is over in the UK to see her librettist, Sue Donimus, whose name makes me groan with vexation. She is a literary prizewinner who feels the world is clamouring to hear coma-inducing details of her private life, such as exactly how much she recently spent having her teeth straightened. A bullish creature in tartan trews, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature mainly because the panel was too intimidated by her to turn her down. She is most famously the author of an unusually disgusting flagellation novel, Heavily Tanned Men, a book widely seen as stylish and liberating. Overnight it made her the darling of the sort of people who have darlings, starting with herself. The only thing one can’t blame her for is writing under a pen name, since my agent Frankie has assured me the name on her passport is Wendy Marsupial. I now dread to imagine what the attraction is between Marta and this ‘doyenne of transgressive literature’ (London Review of Books).

  This news that Marta is writing an opera casts an immediate pall of doubt over my own nascent plans. Blast her! Why should her project have the least influence over mine? Especially as I assume any libretto by Sue Donimus will involve distasteful and even fashionably gross scenes onstage, whereas my own ideas are jelling fertilely around the timeless dramatic themes of love, heroism and grief. Yet at Marta’s casual announcement I feel enthusiasm for my own grand project beginning to wilt. Does this mean I have unconsciously been hoping that Marta might write the music to mine? Might I actually have wanted to lay myself open to an artistic partnership with this increasingly successful musical frump?

  But now the frump breaks into my uneasy speculations with news from Le Roccie. It seems the Italian authorities are viewing the remains of my poor house – which they laughably claim they are guarding from looters – as a potential source of pollution. They cite cooking gas cylinders that will corrode, oil and fuel leaking from my half-buried Toyota Ass Vein and a ruptured septic tank as endangering the environment and the town’s artesian water supplies. Also, the Corpo Forestale dello Stato are considering taking out an action against me for fly-tipping, would you believe, on the grounds that my protracted absence indicates ‘the intention permanently to abandon, in a protected area of the rural patrimony, unsorted debris and refuse contrary to environmental statutes currently in force’. Marta is reading this from a note she took to make sure I get the full majesty of the phraseology. I particularly love ‘unsorted’. The implication that I might be prosecuted less rigorously had I taken the trouble to separate the ruins of my house into categories as for the correct rubbish bins – paper, glass, iron, non-ferrous metals, organic waste and the rest of it – is the final ludicrous straw, given Italy’s generally cavalier way with rubbish.

  And here’s another strange thing. After my initial relief at being freed from the burdens of home ownership and personal possessions, these very things start to make a case for themselves at the back of my mind, like an exasperating lone councilman who at the last moment makes the trenchant objection that stops a motion going through on the nod. My recent experiences as a guest at Crendlesham Hall are no doubt contributing to the suddenly alluring prospect of once again having a space of my own to myself: one in which county deadbeats and jokesters in fancy dress don’t come to dinner, disgrace themselves, and lead to my being interrogated by policemen as though I were Dr Crippen or Graham Young. And for the first time since the awful night of my fiftieth birthday party, I actively begin to miss certain items buried beneath the collapsed hardcore littering a far-off mountainside. One such item is my independence.

  In short, it’s back to Italy for Gerald Samper just as soon as I can book a flight.

  Adrian 2

  email from Dr Adrian Jestico ([email protected])

  to Dr Penny Barbisant ([email protected])

  It sounds to me as if your data are fine. The chromosome set changes correspond nicely to the reported pollutant bioaccumulation. Good work. I agree the phosphorus readings are odd. You say they’ve eliminated industrial sources/outfall within range of the site. But have you considered a wreck? It’s going back a bit, but I remember hearing that quite a tonnage of US merchant shipping was sunk off the New England coast by German U-boats in WW2 and I bet it wasn’t all accurately charted. A munitions ship whose cargo is breaking up and decaying might easily account for your phosphorus levels locally. See if you can find out, if only to eliminate it. Munitions are not my thing but a few years ago someone at Aberdeen (I forget who but you can easily find out from Marine Lab.) did great work on dumped explosives in the Beaufort’s Dyke disposal site after phosphorus shells etc began washing ashore in N. Ireland & the Firth of Clyde & even as far as Islay.

  By the way – & this is just an idea – do you have figures for Eury-thenes? I know it’s not a bivalve but it’s pretty voracious even for an amphipod, & as it scarfs up practically any organic detritus that comes its way you might get higher P concentrations f
rom it & a quicker pinpoint on your grid for a possible source. Assuming a fairly constant demersal current (which of course there may not be) you might be able to establish a transect. I’m sure you’ve thought of all this & more & what do I know about it? Just a thought.

  I’m glad you’re licking Luke into shape, if that’s the correct metaphor, and that he’s turning out to be fully domesticated. I only wish I could be as cheerfully uncritical about Gerry. He’s not the flavour of the month at present, and not just with me. This follows a dinner party at my sister’s last Saturday that went badly wrong. So wrong, in fact, that it actually caused the death of one of the guests. OK, the guest in question was 93 and had a bad heart, but I thought before dinner he looked good to make his century. We were all poisoned – all of us except for Gerry, that is. What happened was that we were overcome by violent puking of a kind I’ve never experienced before. It took us completely by surprise. One minute we were tucking into Jennifer’s excellent roast leg of lamb and the next we were upchucking for Britain. What was odd was there was no real nausea beforehand, just a slight feeling of unease. Then suddenly you opened your mouth and out came vomit instead of words. When you have seven diners at the table all doing it at the same moment you’re talking major barf-fest. I’ll spare you the details. Except for poor old Dougie Monteith we’re all fine now, though it makes me a bit queasy just remembering it.

  It turned out that Gerry had prepared some ‘special’ starters of his own bizarre invention, one of which he hadn’t eaten. This was – and you’ll have to get a grip on your credulity here, Penny – field mouse vol-au-vent. He said he’d trapped the mice himself, but it seems at least one of them had already eaten bait laced with something the gardener had put down for rats. So we all spent a night in hospital, where poor Dougie succumbed from heart failure. Luckily the poison was something called squill, which comes from a plant and isn’t supposed to be toxic long-term once you’ve got it out of your system. And boy! did we ever get it out of our systems, and all of us at exactly the same moment. It was like community singing.

  Upshot: Gerry grilled by police & grudgingly exonerated of murder, manslaughter & deliberate mayhem, but his reputation has taken a severe knock. I actually feel sorry for him but I was majorly pissed off at the time. It was so typical of his irresponsibility. He’s got this anarchic streak that makes him think the ordinary laws of common sense simply don’t apply to him. His sense of humour is equally suspect. Who else helps someone tottering with nausea into an ambulance with the murmured encouragement ‘Queasy does it!’? The person who has found it easiest to forgive him, oddly enough, is my illustrious brother-in-law Max, even though he was quite poorly for a couple of days afterwards. Maybe Max has a bit of Gerry in him that I’ve never suspected before. (If my sister’s worried by this possibility she’s decent enough to say nothing.)

  Anyway, it sounds to me as though your Luke is a good deal more of a regular guy than my Gerry is. I can almost hear you thinking this man’s beginning to sound like the partner from hell, and I wouldn’t blame you. To tell you the truth I don’t even know if he’s a partner at all. Partner, lover, friend, ex: how can one ever distinguish between them except over time? And I’ve only known him 18 months or so. But as I’ve said before, Gerry can be exhilarating company – totally unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Funnier, more extravagant, determinedly incorrect, yet strangely vulnerable. I can never forget that when he was a kid his mother and elder brother were swept off Lyme Regis Cobb by a freak wave right in front of his eyes. Gone in an instant, their bodies never found. A thing like that has to have made its mark. He was left with his father, who he’s reasonably fond of, & a stepmother he detests. Who knows how relevant all this is to his character & behaviour? I’ve even wondered whether he mightn’t have been attracted to me because I’m an oceanographer, though not being a psychoanalyst I can’t imagine how that twisted logic might work. Certainly he’s got a thing about the sea. It was one of the reasons why he bought that remote house of his in Italy. He liked its distant view of the sea, he told me, because it was distant. And although he talks down his Millie! book as trash, nobody else could have written it half as well as Gerry. He showed a real feel for the maritime aspects & picked up the technical stuff on navigation & sonar surveys etc very quickly.

  I’m sorry, Penny, I’m rabbiting on and it’s not fair of me to take advantage of an ex-graduate student even though you were kind enough to ask for ‘as many details as I care to send’ – words you may yet live to regret. What the next stage in Gerry’s life will be is anybody’s guess. He is completely unpredictable, but then after he’s gone & done something the first thing you think is ‘how predictable!’ when I suppose one really means how typical of him. But it’s always retrospective. Anyway, all I can do is be supportive & allow him all the room he wants, which he’d take in any case. I must admit I’m a bit ruffled over the other night. It’s not often you attend a family dinner with a few locals & find it turning into a medical soap with guests being stretchered off to a waiting fleet of ambulances, paramedics doing heart massage, defibrillators pinging away. And bloody Gerry worried about keeping his new suit clean. The awful thing is that now it’s over & we’ve done the funeral & everything I can see there’s an element of comedy in it. It isn’t every day you see a vomit-drenched gorilla being helped into an ambulance. I just wish Gerry hadn’t pointed this out quite so soon after the event. One might say that tact isn’t his thing. Neither is remorse, come to that.

  Glad Peter M.’s doing well.

  Cheers,

  Adrian

  3

  My flight is, of course, delayed (the evergreen excuse, ‘due to lateness of the incoming flight’, is trotted out by uniformed drudges too bored to care whether we think they’re lying). The upshot is that, disembarking in Pisa at twenty minutes to midnight, I have no option but to take a taxi into town and spend the night in one of the hotels near the station. A wintry rain is falling and I’m not choosy. I check into one where I know just by looking at it that the crimson-carpeted marble staircase will go up from the foyer only to where it becomes invisible behind the lift shaft, whereupon it will revert to being a cement emergency stairwell signposted with icons of a running figure pursued by flames. I surrender my carta d’identità and the night clerk returns to his under-the-counter DVD.

  Old and jaundiced – that’s what Samper is in danger of becoming, I think when I resume consciousness at six-thirty the next morning, blinking woozily at the ceiling. Time was, when waking early in a foreign hotel would fill me with the excitement of possibility. These days I know too much about probability. Still, I’m back in Italy, and that alone is cause for rejoicing. I switch on the TV and find the BBCNN channel, which in itself shows how addled I’ve become. It immediately reminds me that what I dislike is not so much my native land but Anglo-Saxon culture in general. Between them, American and British TV broadcasters somehow manage to imply that they have a semi-divine right to interpret and mediate the world for the rest of its six billion inhabitants. This cocky assumption is immediately implicit in the familiar (not to say over-familiar) mateyness that now booms from the TV set.

  As though to share some cosmic in-joke exclusive to themselves, BBCNN newsreaders are specially trained to grin and speak at the same time, which is how they introduce their weather seers and prophets who are also grinning insanely while waving vague hands towards a map of Africa in gestures that, by the time they are half completed, cross China while a farrago of pop meteorology comes sweepin in there from the Atlantic an pushin those rain shahs ere over towards the west coaster Denmark which spells a largely sunny dye ere in Ukraine but over in Sarf America well, still a few otspots left from that depression centred on norfeast Brazil over the last few dyes … Hectic blank smiles, spastic gesturings, maps, images and symbols blinking and collapsing one after the other in wild cascade. The screen is a loony chaos of dizzying junk masquerading as information. Running straps top and bottom about sports, sto
ck exchanges, President Bush shoots himself in the foot while hunting terrorists on his Texas ranch, while in the middle of the screen two presenters made of high-impact plastic carry on their grinning knockabout act while their mouths babble about a baby polar bear born in a zoo, Guantánamo Bay, a car that runs on Coca-Cola, a small earthquake in Chile, a White House aide who fucks penguins for charity, torture, car bombs etcetera, and now it’s exactly seven o’clock Southern Pacific time and time for the News but just to keep up BBCNN’s famous irritation quotient here instead is a stream of advertisements aimed at drumming up visitors to countries no one has ever wished to visit and that thousands have died trying to escape – like Voynovia! Whirling images of travelogue guff, national costumes, sun-tanned cleavages, all-purpose Zorba-esque music, ecoparks (formerly the hunting preserves of the late dictator-for-life Bashir Mohammedov) and hotels … God, how many hotels! … those vile caravanserais of the jet set that resemble an architect’s idea of what Nero would have liked, all pools and palms and mother-of-pearl-inlaid foyers exclusively sited on yet another piece of the world’s previously unspoiled coastline, now forever ruined, the images syruped together with words supposed to convey pitiless luxury: pampered, beyond, paradise, dreams, palace, deserve, exquisite – but abruptly the screen dissolves into share prices and a Chinese-looking Dax-hound in shirtsleeves and glinting horn-rims is reading some supremely resistible information about the equities market in Bonn off the autocue and strings of figures spool across the screen in arbitrary directions and so it all rolls on and around in a great flashing blather of interglobal garrulous garbage brought to you by BBCNN 24/7 and don’t forget it’s all there too on our website and also beamed direct to your mobile phone and hearing aid and equally accessible on your prosthetic limb or electric toothbrush thanks to instantaneous XP Vista chip satellite technology because we know how important you are and how vital time is to you and how as a top executive you absolutely need up-to-the-minute information about White House aides pleasuring flightless birds because otherwise some beady-eyed bastard who’s leaner and meaner and has the world’s biggest bladder will steal a march on you while you’re away from your desk taking a leak. And yes – see what you missed when you took your eye off the ball there as that high-pressure area came pushin in from Mongolia where the Genghis Khan Nirvana Palisades Mansion awaits your exclusive and demanding custom, the first and cutest ten-star hotel ever born in captivity while nuclear crisis talks loom grinning and grinning all over your kaleidoscopic, epilepsy-inducing flickering screens, faster and faster until we whimper prayers for the failure of the global power grid and entertain fantasies of the pampering, pitiless luxury of solitary confinement and total sensory deprivation. And all we ever actually wanted, of course, was footage of the White House aide lying back in his double bed, arguing with the penguin about whose turn it is to make the coffee. That would have set us up nicely for the day.