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Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson

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‘He goes home full of shame and has to wait several weeks before the pain in his backside has gone. But at last his old passion returns and he takes his new gun and sets off again for the wilds to avenge himself. Obviously his luck is still holding because in only a matter of hours he comes on the very bear who caused him such pain. Without giving the animal a chance he brings up his gun and fires,
pum!,
and knocks it over stone dead. “Praise be to Allah!” he thinks. “I am avenged.” But no sooner has he said this than he feels a heavy paw on his shoulder and turns to find a far bigger bear. This one is as tall as he is, three times as wide and ten times
as strong. “All right, Mr Turkish huntsman,” says this great bear. “Two choices. Either I rip your head off or you take it up the backside.” Once more the hunter decides he has no alternative. But merciful Allah! At what cost in agony and shame! This time a whole year passes before he can even walk properly again. By the end of the year, though, some of the memory has faded and his old spirit returns. He has never in his life gone without hunting for so long and besides, he has a big score to settle.

‘So off he sets again into the high mountains with his gun, full of determination. And there in the middle of a cedar forest he catches sight of the big bear which has just cost him a year of his hunting life. Since it is quite far away he takes careful aim and fires,
pum!
His beautiful gun is as accurate as ever and the beast drops in its tracks. This time when he feels a tap on his shoulder he is more resigned than surprised. He turns to find a real monster. This is a bear such as he has never dreamed of: a huge black creature straight down from the steppes of Russia, half as tall again as he is. The creature is looking at him thoughtfully as he stands there paralysed. At last it shakes its great head. “Tell me, Mr Turkish huntsman,” it says. “Do you
still
believe you come up here just to hunt?”’

For some time, overcome by his tale, Mansur goes on shaking his own head and wiping his eyes while repeating the punchline. ‘“Do you still believe you come up here just to hunt?” That’s such an Egyptian story, believe me.’

‘Because it’s anti-Turkish?’

‘Well, that too. But because it’s very wise. It has a meaning.’

This is just what Jayjay is afraid of, and something fails within him. It becomes pressing to sue for time. As though Mansur were a step ahead of him the Egyptian says equably, ‘Not tonight, then. But soon. You can find me here or else in Al Kef in
tariq
al Baladiyya. You know it? By the
suq.
Never fear, my friend. You and I can do business. For the moment we have an agreement, right? I say nothing to Mr Milo, who isn’t here, and you say nothing to your father, who isn’t here either.’

They shake hands on this and Jayjay finds himself in the noisome back streets of Suez in a state between numbness and exhilaration. This persists until he reaches his hated billet in the Caramanli. It is a large room divided into two by a curtained doorway beyond which Simpkins is asleep and audible. It is porky Simpkins who, though unconscious, exposes the essential nature of their shared living space as no more than a bare cement cave. The loudest of tonight’s awesome farts include sound frequencies that make the room briefly ring. Through the curtain drifts a disgusting and anomalous stench of burnt rubber and mutton. The intermittent blurts and squeaks and gassy blats are a wearisome reminder to Jayjay that he must tell Simpkins yet again that if he persists in eating chickpeas he may never survive to taste his mother’s cooking. Suddenly, the squalor of such living conditions reveals itself as a world he has just decided to leave, which he realises he already has half left. After barely two months he is sick of apprenticeship with its magnanimous promise of more of the same for the next forty years. A further series of gruff barks from the other room drives him out on to the small gritty balcony from where he can see the street below with its thin cats and a donkey dozing between the shafts of a cart, one of its rear feet raised and resting on the tip of its hoof. Something has happened tonight, Jayjay thinks. I can’t go back to being the person I was this morning. I won’t go back to my father’s world of ledgers and endeavour. I won’t go back to Eltham.

The stars above the ill-lit town are brilliant, trembling in the unseen heat as if the whole universe is in ferment. A tug hoots briefly in Port Taufiq. He suddenly feels adult. He has become someone who leans on a night balcony in Suez and thinks; leans on a balcony and inhales the pepper air.

A strange thing is how physically close to each other Jayjay and I have unwittingly been living these last fifteen years. Were it not for the jutting lump of forest below that prevents my seeing into the next valley, my house would have an excellent view of Il Ghibli. Our roofs could be joined by a beeline not much over a mile in length. Yet to reach his house by track and road requires twenty minutes of jolting down through the forest followed by detours around olive groves and vineyards on the lower slopes. Strictly speaking, I suppose it is not true that we were completely unaware of each other’s existence. Over the years I had heard mention of an English ‘lord’ (pronounced
lorde
)
living nearby and reputed to have a beautiful house. In turn, he had heard the odd conversational reference to an English writer living in eccentric seclusion somewhere up Sant’ Egidio – and a hand would be waved vaguely towards the top of the mountain with its crowning metal nest of relay aerials and radio masts. Only when an article about me appeared in
La
Nazione
was he able to put a name and out-of-focus face to this fellow countryman of his.

It might be supposed that two Englishmen living abroad and so close together would make an effort to meet, if only for the pleasure of deciding they despised one another. But the English are more complicated than that. It might next be thought that simple snobbery accounted for much of this exaggerated desire for privacy. But when it is so well disguised beneath self-effacing amiability it becomes anything but simple and contains equal measures of defensiveness and arrogance which foreigners generously persist in reading as a curious national reticence. Jayjay and I later acknowledged we were conscious of living on the ‘unfashionable’ side of Cortona – meaning there were so few other foreigners in our immediate area that we could claim still greater exclusivity for ourselves, this becoming a further reason for not socialising. In the earliest days of our joint project we adopted a particular tone of reminiscence for alluding to the distinguished minority status we shared. Now
Cortona
… (and one could detect the note of disdain creeping in) … We could remember a down-at-heel Etruscan hill town full of hunchbacks and slightly sinister tall, dark streets. In
those
days it had had about two hotels, one of them being the Garibaldi in Piazza Alfieri, run by those two ancient sisters now long dead. And do you remember
Il
Sozzo,
Mr Filthy, who ran that minute restaurant up at Torreone? He looked like a Charles Addams character and had maybe three tables. You gave your order and if you were unlucky he left the kitchen door open and you could see into the black and cobwebby cavern where grimy children were set to work with bundles of kindling to light the grill. But when the food arrived, my God!, unbelievably fabulous, especially the grilled
porcini
:
great thick meaty ceps drizzled with the greenest olive oil …
Il Sozzo
was dead too, of course; and anyway nowadays the place would be condemned and closed by the USL, ‘the Oozly’, the sanitary gauleiters of the new age. Really, Cortona had changed out of all recognition and was fast becoming a year-round rabble of foreigners, what with full-time American universities and German and Brit culture-groupies. And increasing numbers of them were not tourists at all but residents of one sort
or another. They were either daubing in Mediterranean primary colours or developing crackpot theories about the Etruscans or writing heartwarming accounts of how they had restored their delicious Tuscan farmhouses. And as for the
yonder
side of Cortona, between the town and Lake Trasimene, well, places like Pergo and Montanare had practically become foreign ghettoes. What we could remember as slightly sordid village streets with a small grim branch of Despar selling flyblown salami and ammonia-laced floor cleaner were now aglitter with BMWs from Munich double-parked outside delicatessens selling
Sauerkraut
and
Bauernbrot

In fact, such an account of an imaginary ice-breaking conversation between Jayjay and me would be misleading precisely because the British are so complicated. Written down cold like that it would make us sound like elderly grandees lamenting the arrival of the Johnny-come-latelys. It would also imply we were oblivious to the idea that in a stunning villa somewhere nearby might live an even older and grander foreigner who could remember mules and carbide lighting and could not distinguish between us and the latest interlopers. (And what, meanwhile, of the Italians whose land this is and who bear the whole damned lot of us with such fortitude?) But because we are more complicated, Jayjay and I had put inverted commas around such exchanges. They weren’t about Cortona at all but concerned a mode of description – self-consciously snobby, deliberately overstated – that was parodic of the type of Englishman we
might
have been, but thank God weren’t. And while this parody was going on we were sniffing each other out with antennae minutely attuned to the finest shades of accent and attitude. In fact, as it quickly turned out, we neither of us gave a damn about what went on over the next range of hills. So far as I was concerned I had been spending so much time either on my travels or writing them up that I had neither the spare energy nor the inclination to hobnob with people an hour’s drive away. Besides, anything beyond the immediate neighbourhood was too unreal. These days when I glanced up from my writing table I hardly saw the chestnut forest below without it
turning into a coco-palm plantation, even as the entire Tuscan backdrop shuffled itself chimerically into an equally familiar and fond coastline of the South China Sea. Where was I? Neither here nor there. The palimpsest of a lifetime.

Which left the puzzle of the
lorde.
The Italians, of course, are keen on titles. I don’t mean they are interested in aristocrats, especially, but their useful system of social formalities leads them to bestow ranks on half the people one bumps into while out shopping. On any day one can hear the local mayor addressed in the street as
sindaco,
a time-server in the police as
maresciallo,
an accountant as
ragioniere
and virtually anyone who can distinguish a cog-wheel from a pair of compasses as
ingegnere.
Even I, to my very British humiliation, was addressed in the Co-op as
maestro
the day after that wretched newspaper article appeared. So it never occurred to me that this English
lorde
might actually be a bona fide member of the aristocracy until one afternoon when I was inspecting the vines on my terrace for scale insects and something caught my attention down by Hawkwood’s castle at Montecchio. The castle had been restored quite recently and was lived in now and then by a Roman lady. For all its landmark position it attracted little attention so it was all the more surprising this afternoon to see the little road beneath its walls appear jammed with people, sunlight flashing off glass or chrome. Even binoculars revealed little detail beyond two glossy black limousines and some police motorcycles. A few days later gossip supplied an explanation.

‘I’m surprised you weren’t there,’ said the barman as he tamped a fresh measure of coffee into the holder and locked it into the espresso machine. ‘You being English and everything. That was your Queen Mother coming for an hour to visit our castle. The paper said she’s as old as the century and likes a drink. Good for her, I say.
Corretto
?’
He pushed my coffee across the bar and waved a bottle of spirits inquiringly over it. I shook my head and drank the coffee unlaced. ‘The paper also said she stayed the night near here, but security was tight and they wouldn’t say where. Around
here we all know she stayed with that English
lorde.
Ghezzi was in next day and his sister cleans for someone in the Valle di Chio and she said it was obvious. How often do you see Rolls Royces and
Carabinieri
outriders in these parts?’

So I assumed the
lorde
was the genuine article after all and wondered vaguely who he was. But then time passed and all this fell rapidly out of my memory. (A little local excitement. Her of all people. Well, well.) By the time I met and began working with Jayjay I had forgotten about the Queen Mother, while the
lorde
existed in quite another dimension, fuzzily in the background somewhere beyond the circle of farmers I knew in the immediate vicinity. I began to be drawn into another and quite unexpected world, that of pre-war Suez and its pornography rackets. And then one morning, after a productive session in which he was in expansive mood, Jayjay offered me a lunch-time gin and tonic before we had a bite to eat.

‘Only I can’t offer you a decent gin, I’m afraid. I dropped the Gordon’s yesterday and all I have in the house is some cheapo standby stuff I keep for impoverished hacks and scribblers such as yourself.’ And he produced a bottle whose label said ‘Lord Gin’ and displayed bogus coats-of-arms and references to London. It was enough to jog my memory.

‘Talking of fake lords, Jayjay, did you know there’s one living around here? The Queen Mother is supposed to have stayed with him a year or two ago.’

‘Really? Possibly there’s some confusion here. She certainly stayed with me.’

‘You?’

‘Right here in this house. And luckily I had plenty of undropped Gordon’s, not to mention Dubonnet. But there are always bodyguards and ladies-in-waiting to be considered. Reggie Wilcock, to name but one. Lord Gin’s quite good enough for Reggie. He was here too, of course. Page of the Presence. The one thing about the House of Windsor the tabloids always miss, bless them, is that it’s far and away the campest show in town. Did
you never read that story in Woodrow Wyatt’s diary where Reggie and Bill Tallon, the Page of the Backstairs, were a bit slow getting the Queen Mother’s evening meal up to her? She phoned down and said, “I don’t know about you two old queens, but
this
old Queen would like her dinner.” They’re a riot. Just like the Royal Yacht
Britannia
used to be in its heyday. Talk about cruising. It positively shrieked its way around the world.’

‘In any case, Jayjay,
you’re
not a lord.’

‘Of course not, no more than you are. But you know what they’re like around here. I’ve spent the last fifteen years trying to make it clear that I’m not a British aristocrat living
incognito,
so obviously that’s exactly what they think I am. I’ve made it perfectly plain that I’m as common as muck and I thought most of my more savvy local friends had realised it was one of those self-perpetuating jokes, when I suddenly found myself doing a bed-and-breakfast number for the Queen Mum. My credibility at once dropped to zero and my social status rose accordingly. I am now a
lorde
and there’s nothing I can do about it.’

‘But how come you know her?’

‘I’ve known her for years, on and off. We’re hardly intimates and she has a wide circle of friends. She really did come to see Hawkwood’s castle and I happened to be a handy bed. She is well over ninety, after all. We originally met through Anthony Blunt in the very early fifties when he was Surveyor of the King’s Pictures. Or it might just have been the Queen’s Pictures by then. I’ll tell you some time. It’s not very interesting.’

‘So you’re the
lorde.

‘How we become our own myths. Look at Jeffrey Archer. Now there’s a man for whom I have a sneaking regard.’

‘Another of your acquaintances?’

‘Oh no. No, all I meant is I recognise a fellow artist in the sense of someone who made himself up as he went along. Brilliantly, too. He has been everything: policeman, MP, novelist, baron … Call-girls and the Old Vicarage, Grantchester. All of it him, none of it him. I love it. People set far too much store by
vulgar consistency. To maintain a consistent character from one end of your life to the other takes just as much energy and subterfuge and self-deception as it does to slip into interesting roles as they’re offered. More, probably. One easily gets carried along by the sheer thrill of transgressing.’

And lo! the stews of Suez.

*

Three days went by before Jayjay ventured to look again for Mansur, three days of hesitation filled with premonitory whiffs as of bridges bursting into flame beneath him.

– Funny, isn’t it, how one believes one is carrying on a stern inward debate about whether to do something when all the while the decision has long since been taken? It must have been obvious to everyone but me that I was withdrawing from the job at Anderson & Green. I would clock in on the dot each morning, race through the work and absent myself for the rest of the day. It was only a matter of time before ‘Pusser’ Hammond or somebody more senior gave me my marching orders. And then what? I didn’t have a bean to my name other than the ridiculous salary they were paying me. Young, irresponsible and led by my hormones as I was, I nevertheless realised I had to live on something. I was just beginning to like Abroad very much indeed. I didn’t want to go home a virgin, not in any sense, and for me Eltham reeked of virginity.

– So I went back to Mansur and yes, I paid his price and no, unlike his Turkish huntsman I felt no compulsion to repeat it. Still, sixty years after the event I can admit without a blush that it was far from traumatic. And to pre-empt your two foremost improper questions (ever the stickler for detail) the answers are ‘On the Caramanli’s roof’ and ‘Brylcreem borrowed from Simpkins’. In fact it was over almost before I knew it, in true Arab style, and had I been an ‘Ouled Nail’ I could have gone back to my tent thinking I was quids in after a good night’s work. As soon as it was done I could see things were on a different footing between us. Mansur was now prepared to trust me because by the standards
of his own culture I was compromised. As the passive partner I was in a position of shame, and anything I later decided to do or say that went counter to his interests could in theory be nullified by the threat of public exposure. Now it was up to him to keep his part of the bargain, and he was as good as his word. I think he knew that I had yielded for political reasons even if curiosity and an unfocused libido had played their part. So he wasn’t obliged to despise me while claiming affection. –

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