Rancid Pansies (19 page)

‘And all this derives from some pleasantry I apparently exchanged with a helicopter pilot last November,’ I say. ‘You’ve got to be impressed by the seriousness of human
lunacy
, haven’t you? It’s easy to see how entire religions arise from hearsay. All you need is the right rural gossip at the right time and people’s superstitious desire to believe any old cock-
and-bull
story does the rest.’

‘What do all these say?’ asks Joan, examining the notes nearest her.

‘They seem to be the usual requests. “Gracious Princess, please cure my paralysed son and I will never doubt again.” “I beg you to let me win the Lotto or I shall be homeless. I am in despair.” “Merciful Diana, my child is dying, you are her only
recourse.” Oh, here’s a good one: “My bastard neighbour Raffaele is an adulterer and a deflowerer of children and merits your sternest vengeance.” The simple outpourings of
desperate
people. I tell you, all human life is here. Except my own, of course,’ I can’t help adding bitterly. I turn to stand at the
fluorescent
tape strung behind the lip of the precipice and gaze over a panorama so familiar it could almost make me weep. Tears of sternest vengeance, naturally.

Joan joins me. ‘Hell of a spectacular place. It must have been a fantastic house.’

‘That it was. Round about
there
’ – I wave my hand at a patch of air some twenty feet away – ‘was the terrace where I wrote much of
Millie!
I’ve half a mind to post a note to Diana myself. “Kindly restore my house. Signed, a homeless admirer.”’

‘The whole damn thing simply vanished, just like that?’

‘Pretty much. First the garage with a self-contained flat above it. Then the main house. Finally the terrace. Piecemeal but effective.’

‘You can say what you like about the hand of Diana but if you ask me you were all pretty lucky to get out.’

‘Everyone says so and I don’t deny it. Yet oddly enough, if I owe my life to anybody it’s probably to Marta. She’s my
neighbour
. That’s her place over there behind the fence – Tuscany’s answer to the Bates Motel. The night of our party she arrived back unannounced after months in America but couldn’t get into her house because I was acting as caretaker and I’d locked it up good and tight. So she left her bags outside her door and came over here. Later, Adrian and I went out to fetch her
luggage
across so she could stay the night with us. It was just as well we did because it was then we suddenly noticed the absence of the garage.’

‘I’ll bet you all made a hurried exit.’

‘As hurried as possible, impeded as we were by badger Wellington, alcohol, magic mushrooms and a general feeling of unreality.’

‘So this opera of yours is really about Marta in disguise.’

‘It most certainly is
not
.’ It isn’t often that Samper is shocked. ‘The opera I’m working on isn’t about angels flitting down from heaven to save people from death, either. It’s about this ludicrous yearning to invent religious heroes to stuff the remaining chinks of life not filled by soap opera. It’s about myth and glam. It’s about credulousness.’

‘So tell me about her.’

‘What?’ I’m distracted from an interior vision of a grand operatic
scena
with a choir of satirical angels all dressed by Marks & Spencer like a lightened-up version of the chorus of demons in
The Dream of Gerontius.

‘This old neighbour of yours, Marta. You talked a lot about her when we first met. In fact, you seemed a bit obsessed.’

‘That’s because she was a protracted pain in the arse. For one thing, you never knew when her East European mafia family weren’t going to drop by in black helicopters. They used to land just over there beyond those trees next to her house. It was one damn thing after another when Marta was here. I couldn’t get any work done. And she was always
coming
over here on some pretext or other. Drink, usually. She was addicted to Fernet-Branca.’

‘You mean she wasn’t after your body?’ says Joan, I hope mischievously.

‘If you go on like this I shall faint with horror and then you’ll be sorry.’

‘Huh. In the Navy we’d just bring you round again with a bucket of seawater. Anyway, I hate to distress you further but there’s someone over by that gate there trying to attract your attention.’

And of course you win no prize for guessing who it is. The devil you talk of is frequently, I find, already present. But have I mentioned that Adrian has passed on the news that the great Max Christ himself says he would be interested to have a good look at any opera whose composer is Marta? You will see why, if she really has fallen out with her flagellistic librettist Sue Donimus, I must woo her as a potential collaborator. The idea
is that together we will make wonderful music (as ingénue lovers once told each other in bodice-rippers back in the days when any insertions took place off the page). I step forward manfully to introduce Joan.

‘Gerree!’ Marta hails me from a distance. ‘I never know you’re here.’

Oh God, those tenses. Can I really face months of closerange Voynovian syntax? But the show must go on. ‘Snap!’ I call.

‘“Snap”, Gerree?’

‘It means I didn’t realise you were here either. May I
introduce
my friend Joan, an old yachting chum of Millie Cleat’s? Joan, Marta. Marta, Joan. Well, what a surprise.’

‘But it was you who tell me on the telephone I must come to Italy and see my house because of the earth tremble and the
pilgrims
to the Princess. So I’ve come. And everything you say is true. Not so good, no. But
ben tornato
, Gerree. I will kiss you.
So!
Please, you will both come in and I will offer you a little Voynovian speciality. It is the best moment of the morning.’

I was afraid of that. As soon as I saw her standing there at the gate in the fence with the spring breeze lifting the
unclotted
portions of her hair and she so clearly the owner of the only house for miles, I had a reflux of the memory (as one might say) and my mind went shrinkingly back to a previous episode of this ex-neighbour’s ethnic hospitality. ‘Not
mavlisi
?’ I ask, trying for a tone of polite anticipation but achieving one more like pleading.

‘No, I have something even better, something even more –’ and she performs that loathsome gesture of hers when she kisses the bunched fingertips of one hand and rolls her eyes up in their sockets to indicate ecstasy. She ushers us in through her back door. I feel like a child being led into the doctor’s
surgery
for another of those little injections they claim don’t hurt.

Marta’s kitchen is exactly as it always was. The same piles of unironed sheets dumped on chairs, the same aura of bohemian chaos. The same low-beamed ceiling and great
damp flagstones. There is her old Iron Curtain upright piano, and there the electronic keyboard hitched to a dusty computer given her by the late Piero Pacini when she was writing the score for his last film. Everything is completely familiar to me, down to the cobwebbed sheaf of porcupine quills in a
handleless
mug on the mantelpiece above the hearth. I used to visit this place regularly in my capacity as good neighbour while Marta was in the States most of last year. The only difference I can see is that she has acquired a new fridge. This might explain the absence of the crypt-like stench that resulted from ENEL cutting off the electricity while she was away and the contents of her old fridge brewing up into something the germ warfare boffins of Porton Down would once have been proud to own.

Marta fettles up the coffee percolator and then lifts a large jug out of the fridge. Into three glass dessert bowls she pours what looks like – and I apologise for this, but one must be accurate – diarrhoea. Sloppy brown gloop with knobs and bobbles. Over the surface in each bowl she scatters
multicoloured
flakes and then cocks her head on one side,
considering
her handiwork. She adds a dollop of white substance to the centre of each bowl and actually claps her hands, for all the world a kindergarten teacher summoning her charges to elevenses.

‘This is purest Voynovian, very special,’ she announces. ‘It is made by the chef of Danubya, our first restaurant in London I tell you about, Gerree. It is our famous
varminty
which he makes the best outside Voynograd. Come, you will try.’

‘It looks scrumptious.’ I was very well brought up, just as I’m glumly expecting my
varminty
to be shortly after I’ve eaten it. I pick up my spoon like a guest at a dinner party thrown by the Borgias. I have to admire Joan. Without a moment’s
hesitation
she sets to with gusto.

‘Hey, this is all right,’ she exclaims. ‘Can’t put my finger on what it is but my tongue tells me it’s pretty decent stuff.’

Marta positively beams at her. ‘It is very old plums purée
with salted
kisi
, um, cherries. It must be five years old at least in store and dark, with herbs and spices like
kimunyi
– I don’t know that in English. Then on top is our Easter speciality, dry ram.’

‘Well, it’s delicious,’ says Joan stoutly.

‘Dry ram.’ I toy with my spoon. ‘And in the middle?’

‘That is just plain yoghurt also from the ram.’

‘Ram’s yoghurt. I see.’ I dab the white substance with the tip of my spoon. She
can’t
mean …? Surely not even
Voynovians
would …?

‘Sheep’s yoghurt,’ says Joan.

Marta beams some more. ‘I’m sorry, yes of course, sheep. This is dried sheep on top also. At Easter we always make like this. We in Voynovia love colours.’

Unlike everywhere else that prefers monochrome, I suppose. Why do foreigners say these damnfool things? Samper may lack patience but never let it be said he lacks courage. I try a mouthful. As usual with Marta’s ‘specialities’ I have an
immediate
mental image of my taste buds withdrawing defensively like coral polyps when touched. It is basically very sweet and yes, I can taste the hundred-year-old plums and things and the salty knobs that might conceivably be wizened cherries. I can also taste the dyed shreds of jerked sheep impregnated with an unidentifiable spice reminiscent of turpentine. For all I know they could be flakes of desiccated jackal. The sheep’s yoghurt, to my surprise, tastes exactly like sheep’s yoghurt.

‘I can tell you, Marta,’ I say, wishing my eyes would stop watering, ‘what you call
kimunyi
is cumin.’

‘Oh yes, now I remember. Cumin. So what do you say,
Gerree
, of our
varminty
?’

‘Fantastic. And you brought it all the way from London?’

‘Well worth the trip, I should say.’ Joan bangs her spoon down beside her empty bowl. ‘I haven’t tasted anything like that since I last put into Port Said. Exotic and interesting.
Tiptop
nosh.’

At this moment the coffee comes through and while Marta
deals with it at the stove Joan surreptitiously helps me out with my
varminty
. What a trouper, I think; but then it occurs to me she may be doing it less for me than to avoid her
hostess’s
feelings being hurt. At any rate by the time Marta hands us our welcome doses of caffeine there are three empty bowls on the table.

‘So you’ve seen the Diana shrine over the fence?’ I ask.

‘Oh yes. It’s terrible, Gerree. Awful. And the people, they come all the time and sometimes they sing together. Can you believe this? How can I work when – ?’ She breaks off –
tactfully
, I imagine, given that she always claimed my own singing used to disturb her work to the extent that it provoked her into cruel parody in her film score. It sounds like poetic justice to me. Whatever these pilgrims sing they surely lack the artistry I lavished on Rossini and Donizetti arias. Good on them, I say. A worthy come-uppance for the last Queen of Le Roccie.

Suddenly I notice a large tear slide down beside the nose that emerges from the tangle of hair that always covers Marta’s face when she leans forward. Her cup, tilted at an unregarded angle, is also leaking coffee onto the table.

‘Oh, Gerree!’ she exclaims in woeful tones, ‘I am so
unhappy
. I don’t know what I shall do. Your house is gone and these singing idiots are changing everything.’ Liquidly she sniffs.

‘Poor Marta. It’s all gone wrong up here, hasn’t it?’

‘It’s a bloody tragedy if you ask me,’ rasps Joan, and leaning sideways she slips a beefy arm around Marta’s shoulders. The anchor tattooed on her forearm glows in the sunlight from the window.