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Authors: James Hamilton-Paterson

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‘Congratulations!’ chirped a promotional leaflet in Italian from the bottom of my supermarket trolley where it had been callously abandoned by a previous shopper. ‘Your name has been exhaustively selected for a highly personal offer.’ I was reflecting on this concept of mass exclusivity when a distinguished-looking man leaned respectfully across my trolley and said in English, ‘You must excuse me. I have been wanting to speak to you for some time.’ My spirits lifted briefly before falling again. Evidently I stood out as much as he did, reaching up for a bottle of imported Gordon’s. Castiglion Fiorentino is a smallish town and this a smallish Co-op; scarcely an international social nexus even in summer when the Tuscany groupies arrive from Munich and London. He was a dapper figure in the old-fashioned
milor
style: white espadrilles, pale linen trousers, dark-blue lightweight jacket with a silk handkerchief pushed military-style into one cuff. I now realised I had seen him before, maybe even several times. It seemed likely that at some point in the recent past I had stood aside to wave him through the till ahead of me with
the ill-tempered gallantry one reserves for people carrying a few things awkwardly in their arms.

‘You must be the writer, surely?’ he said. ‘Even in a place as small as this one likes to be certain. Biding my time. You must excuse my breaking into your thoughts. I could see you reaching that ratty point of indecision in the
spumante
section. “Am I going to blow nearly eight thousand lire on the Riccadonna, or will the Gancia
Grand
Reale
do quite as well? After all, it’s only fizz at the end of a large meal and who’s going to notice the difference?”’ He carefully placed the bottle of gin in his own trolley and smiled easily at the shelf.

‘You’ve been here before,’ I said.

‘In every sense. It’s precisely these trivial dilemmas that go on repeating themselves. All one’s instincts are to go for the
brut
,
of course, which costs more but drinks better. Then one remembers that the ladies, although they may be impressed by the price you’ve paid, would much prefer the
dolce.
It’s cheaper, too. So: does one go for expense, palatability and social cachet, or does one opt for the cheap and cheerful which most people here secretly prefer? A very worldly little puzzle. One always solves it in the same way’ (he glanced down at the undistinguished bottle of
Gran
Spumante
Valdesino
in my own trolley) ‘but it can leave one slightly disgruntled.’

Although I had finished my own shopping and could have gone straight to the checkout I found myself waiting beside him in the delicatessen section while he bought cheese, salami and olives.

‘I might have a proposition to put to you,’ he said, sampling an olive the woman behind the counter had given him to try. ‘Of a professional nature.’ He tucked the stone discreetly into his breast pocket. ‘Although I’m sure you have a lot of work on at the moment.’

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 President; 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.’

BOOK: Loving Monsters
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