Rancid Pansies (17 page)

The first steps of the purchase are now going ahead.
Provided
all the usual legal stuff about the seller’s right to sell is as straightforward as Benedetti promises, the
compromesso
and the
contratto
ought both to be routine. What isn’t routine is a document he is drawing up to the effect that I will be bound not to recant the Diana story the moment the house is mine and I’m safely installed. I’d already thought of that possibility, of course, and had expected him to insist on formalising our deal in some way. Somehow I’m not surprised to discover that Benedetti is a qualified lawyer as well as an ordinary
ingegnere
. All this document will stipulate is that I don’t repudiate the official account. I shall have a perfect right just to remain silent. The Comune has also drawn up an agreement to buy up the rest of my land at Le Roccie ‘for reasons of public safety’. If their hopes are fulfilled and some sort of tourist industry based on pilgrimages does flourish, I’ll bet they’re planning to build an official shrine up there. I envisage an Apuan version of Lourdes (‘Dr Louse’), complete with a grotto. For some
reason
grottoes seem to be an essential part of Marian cults: some nonsense that elides mothers, the earth and wombs, no doubt. I’m sure a Diana cult will require a similar mise-en-scène. Of course if they do develop the site they may even make a bid for Marta’s house, itself dark and damp enough to be a grotto without much in the way of fundamental alteration. With luck this will give the old girl a chance to sell it dear when in normal market terms it’s virtually worthless. I feel a sudden burst of generosity towards her since no matter what she does, she will never again be a neighbour. The nearest house to mine is four hundred metres away, and that’s as the crow flies across olive groves and jungly crevasses. But my experience of living cheek by jowl with her over the last few years (my cheek, her jowls) surely justifies caution, even though a horror of neighbours is
sometimes taken as particularly British and can even lead to accusations of stand-offishness.

In fact, you will scarcely credit that a few months ago a
critic
in London’s
Independent on Sunday
described me as ‘an insufferable snob’. I can’t imagine why. Some remark in
Millie
!,
maybe, that he wilfully misunderstood? At any rate it’s rather a wounding thing to see in print about oneself and I ought really to take such an accusation seriously and consult my old friend Patrick Little of Little, Gidding LLP of Lincoln’s Inn. A charge of snobbery certainly has a sting to it, especially when made by a member of the British press, a respected and high-minded body of people famously indifferent to stories involving royalty, the rich and the fleetingly famous. Still, one admires the way their democratic credentials sometimes oblige them bravely to overcome their nausea and deal with the
aristocracy
. After years of consistently lampooning the late Princess of Wales as a thicko Sloanie scrubber who couldn’t scrape up a single O-level, it took them less than twenty-four hours after her death to discover that she was actually the Princess of Hearts, an icon of selflessness and purity suddenly sacred to the British public.

Luckily, some of us can fight back. It is a comfort to know that my particular accuser almost certainly thinks Caravaggio plays for Arsenal and
Les Fleurs du Mal
is a new cologne by Stella McCartney. Meanwhile, my original point about one’s neighbours in Tuscany remains unassailable. Unlike most British visitors, I actually
live
here. My house is not a second home and neither am I buying it as a canny investment (‘Bricks and mortar, mate. Can’t lose, canya?’). And thus the question of neighbours becomes paramount. Imagine finding oneself living next to Baggy and Dumpy. Inconceivable.

I’m glad we’ve got
that
settled.

I have now reserved a room at a nearby hotel for Joan Nugent, who arrives the day after tomorrow. She at least is one Briton I’m very much looking forward to seeing. I can’t tell you how supportive she was during the traumatic later
stages of writing
Millie!
We hardly saw one another, but over several long phone conversations she managed to reassure me that not all the yachting fraternity consisted of vilely rude
egomaniacs
. Her nicotine-toughened vocal cords gave an edge to what at the time seemed like a lone voice of sanity. Because she had known Millie Cleat for years she was able to convey both what she loved in her and what she abhorred. At a time when abhorrence had become my dominant emotion it was good to be reminded that Millie had once been not only less loopy but nicer. Joan was refreshingly dismissive of the mystical airs and graces that the Great Helmsperson, under the influence of
various
groupies dedicated to Deep Blue ecological claptrap, was beginning to give herself. What with millions of devoted fans viewing her as an ocean-going combination of Donald
Campbell
and Mother Theresa, and my publisher bullying me to deliver a hagiography worthy of such a figure, I was often reduced to wondering if I was the only person left immune to the spell cast by this salt-stained old harpy. Luckily I then met Joan, who was even more salt-stained and proved a sterling ally.

A few days after she arrives the bulldozer will start
excavating
my former home. An old though young acquaintance of mine, Silvano, who before the juvenile court’s unwarranted decision used to frequent the Piter Pan games arcade and
billiard
rooms on the outskirts of town, has put at my disposal a cavernous unused garage beneath his parents’ apartment. This should be amply big enough to store temporarily whatever poor relics seem worth rescuing from my previous life. Strange it is that now I’m in the process of buying another house my interest in the corpse of its predecessor has considerably
dwindled
. And to think that only a couple of months ago I was inconsolable … Our great advantage is that we’re such fickle creatures, our attention constantly grabbed by the ever-sliding present. Dead friends, last year’s lover, a lost recipe,
long-vanished
muscle tone – with a slight grinding sensation we move on as tragedy turns to seemly regret and finally flattens
out into vague recollection. It very seldom calls for bulldozers. And speaking of bulldozers, you’re probably wondering why I’m not having Joan to stay with me here in the Belgian’s flat, since there is a spare room. But although we took to each other from our first meeting, she does have quite a pungent presence. I refer not merely to the aroma of dogs and fags that clings to her but more to her forceful
projection
. We Sampers are sensitive souls, especially first thing in the morning, and self-preservation made me reflect that sharing a breakfast table with someone whose personality seems to come through a loud-hailer might prove trying. Besides, I expect she also would prefer not to have a comparative stranger thrust
domesticity
upon her without consent. She must surely have had enough of that in the Navy.

I just wish old Adrian were here as well. It would make all the difference to me to have his calm, rational support, not to mention some affectionate company between the Zsa Zsa Gabor bed linen. I do miss a bit of epidermal contact from time to time. Not that it’s primarily about sex, of course. What could be more lowering than procuring dutiful orgasms as alike as hiccups and just as irksome? Unfortunately, as far as Samper is concerned the erotic and the domestic go together about as naturally as lions and early Christians, affording pleasure only to the spectator. All my attempts at companionable domestic relationships have been frank disasters. In any case Adrian does promise to come as soon as he can, swearing he daren’t take so much as a day off at the moment. I believe him, as anyone would who knows anything about today’s
academia
, which Jobsworth bureaucracy has long reduced to a state of terminal paralysis. Farewell to those cinematic
memories
of brilliant boffins each beavering his or her way towards a revolutionary breakthrough! The sheer
pathos
of modern Britain can be read in the career advertisements at the back of the various professional journals Adrian takes, offering to applicants of no particular race, gender, creed, physical
mobility
or age an equally chimerical career in Never-Neverland.

Blimey, as Nanty Riah would say. And if you did ever
manage
to come up with an individual idea and attempt to run with it in this zingy, jockstrap environment, you might make it as far along the corridor as the first committee room before you were tackled by the rat-faced harridan from the HSE office or the guy with no roof to his mouth from Project
Funding
. That is, of course, if your team supervisor hadn’t already claimed your idea as his own and gone running off with all three of your balls. But then, what else would you expect for £18,000 a year plus a discounted membership at the local Sports Village?

Thanks to Adrian’s influence and after years of intensive research I should modestly like to announce that self-starting, out-of-the-box-thinking Gerald Samper PhD has finally
established
the real cause of climate change. Don’t forget when you’re drawing up your list of Nobel nominees – you read it here first! Global warming (or as we scientists know it, Big Grown Llama) is entirely the fault of Mrs Elfriede Keilberth of Lolling, Upper Austria. One fateful morning in the summer of 2002 she gave her sitting room its customary blast of fly spray. One of the windows was open and a peacock butterfly (
Inachis io
) innocently passing by flew through the poisonous mist and died eight minutes afterwards. It had long been known to the world-famous research laboratories of
Reader’s Digest (Readiest Dregs
or
Dead Registers)
that a butterfly flapping its wings in Europe causes typhoons in South East Asia. Had this particular peacock butterfly been allowed to flap its wings for another half hour it would in fact have brought about a record-breaking storm a year later that would have struck the Philippines with waves big enough to bring up
cold water from below the Pacific’s warm surface current. What nobody knew at the time was that the ‘great ocean
conveyor
belt’ (as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change calls it) was in a critical state. By the summer of 2003 the slightest cooling effect in the surface waters of the Western Pacific could have brought this vital current system back into its 96,000-year-old equilibrium. Unfortunately, in the absence of the right typhoon at the right moment this didn’t happen, and the Earth’s ocean currents are now doomed to run amok and endanger life everywhere
and it is all the fault of Mrs Elfriede Keilberth of Lolling
(although she has since moved to the nearby village of Pfisting for family and erotic reasons). We only hope she feels proud of having single-handedly changed the course of the planet’s history. The rest of us, meanwhile, can go back to driving our Hummers and flying to our dive holidays in Palau with a clear conscience since there is nothing now anyone can do to reverse the trend already set in motion. We may as well enjoy our luxurious lifestyles for as long as we’re able – those of us lucky enough to have them, that is.

The instant I meet Joan at Pisa airport I am reassured that I haven’t made a sentimental mistake. She really is the sort of person one needs to have around when there’s rough work afoot.

‘Whew!’ she bellows as she bursts from the ‘
Arrivi
’ gate like a bull newly released onto the streets of Pamplona. ‘Am I well out of Blighty! As much as I could do to get here without being lynched. Take a gander at this,’ and she thrusts a copy of the
Chichester Observer
into my hands and thumps a
nicotine-stained
forefinger onto a headline. ‘Backyard Funeral With Flair!’ it reads. ‘“Flair”, geddit? Basically, I’ve been shopped.’

‘The neighbours?’

‘The buggers. They’ve got one of those adolescent kids who spends most of his time dozing in bed, like –’

‘Rip Van Wankle?’

‘– Ha! Exactly. But that night I put down the poor old
Bo’-sun
,
their bloody boy must have been awake long enough to go snooping and prying and now he’s claiming to have watched it all through a hole in the fence.’

‘You didn’t think letting off a twenty-five-thousand-candela distress flare in a suburban back yard at night was likely to catch someone’s eye?’

‘So? What damned business was it of his? And now look at this’ – and she produces a copy of the
Portsmouth News
. ‘This is today’s edition. “Flare-Up Over Pet Death”. In a few days I’ve gone from being an amusing eccentric to a dog-torturer. Tomorrow the story will go national, bet you anything. Even as we speak I presume my house is besieged by reporters
trying
to get a shot of me toasting kittens with a blowlamp. They won’t drop by the local kennels and check my other dogs, as friendly and well-nourished a bunch as they’ll ever have seen. Oh no. Of course they won’t; no sensation there. I tell you, I’m out of it in the nick of time. I shall have to stay here until the lynch parties turn their attention to some other blameless
citizen
. Anyway, bollocks to the lot of ’em. How are you, Gerry?’

‘All the better for seeing you, Joan,’ I tell her truthfully. By now she has blasted a passage through the mass of reunited couples shamelessly embracing so as to block emerging
travellers
, as well as past the usual doleful, sweaty men holding aloft squares of cardboard bearing felt-tip legends reading ‘Mr Ali Muntasser’. ‘As one exile to another, I’m happy to be able to offer you asylum. We victims must stick together.’