Amazing Disgrace (29 page)

As the day approaches I seem to be spending inordinate amounts of both time and money on what are essentially my own birthday celebrations. This feels wrong. On the other hand, having Max Christ to dinner feels right for both social and professional reasons. Once again it looks plausible to think of myself as his future biographer. Still, a mood of
brainless
bonhomie does not come naturally to me. I’m not fond of playing host at the best of times but the background rumbling of the wingèd chariot’s wheels makes it that much worse. No doubt I ought to be pleasantly surprised that anyone wishes to visit me and celebrate my birthday; but it all feels too
ironically
like being thrown a lifebelt from the deck of the
Titanic
. Consequently, I’m finding it hard to enter into the spirit of the thing. What exactly
is
the spirit of turning fifty that any
mortal
could possibly enter into with rejoicing? These days the years succeed one another like quick, identical drips from a diminishing icicle.  

But this is familiar territory to the last and most
philosophical
of the Sampers. I suppose watching one’s mother and
brother being swept to oblivion by a freak wave adds a
sobering
note to any nine-year-old’s life. But I am certain that even before that memorable incident I could never really suppress bleak thoughts, especially the most inopportune ones, a habit that has persisted. For instance: called upon to view a friend’s new-born baby, the precious bundle from which protrude adorable bits of infant anatomy, I always find myself
wondering
(even as my voice supplies the requisite pleasantries) whether it will grow up to be force-fed human excrement and drowned in a barracks latrine, as uncounted Russian Jews were in the Second World War. Or else is it destined to die of a drug overdose at seventeen, choke to death in a restaurant in its thirties or fall victim to a hit-and-run driver while walking the dog? In short, there is nothing like the sight of new life to make me wonder how it will end. This must be one of those yardsticks of a person’s basic character, like the one that
supposedly
distinguishes optimists from pessimists (is the glass half full or half empty?) Is this baby alive or merely laggard in its dying? It does add a dimension of pity to what is otherwise a flat and goofy spectacle of unapprehensive love. And I am powerless to stop it.  

I am also powerless to stop the sudden phone call that adds a new dimension to my dinner-party plans. It is Nanty Riah, and there are five days to go.  

‘See, Gerry, thing is we had this gig on Saturday, right? In Oslo, right? Turns out the Danes, or are they Swedes, are like
really
fussy about communicable diseases and they’ve
postponed
it. Prolly after Christmas, now. So what I was
wondering
, suppose we have a go at starting this book? Few sessions with a tape recorder, know what I mean?’  

‘You have a communicable disease, Nanty?’  

‘Nah, not me, just the boys. Nothing to ping off the walls about. Just a bit itchy.’  

‘How revolting. What have they got?’  

‘Scabies. I mean, whoever made a fuss about scabies? It’s like having nits, right? Which half the school kids in Britain
have got. Not me, of course. One of the few perks of alopecia. No lice, no crabs. So these Swedes or Oslogians are saying it’s an EU health directive or some bollocks ’cos scabies can lead to something else.’  

‘Like scratching?’  

‘Dunno. Anyway, are you up for this or what?’  

And before long Nanty, too, is on my guest list together with whatever of Alien Pie’s parasites are able to hitch a lift on his body. When I tell him Max Christ will be there he knows exactly who he is, which is a good sign. A few years ago he either wouldn’t have known or would have affected not to know. I think he must be taking this image facelift seriously. He can have the third room in the house. He seems
unbothered
about returning to the very place where a couple of years ago he was so terrified by imaginary UFOs that he fled to London the very next day. He says it will be all right if there are other people there besides me. This is possibly not much of a compliment but he can stay on after the others have left and see how his nerves stand up to it.  

Apparently Max’s concert is on Thursday and he will be staying that and Friday night with friends close by in Empoli, enabling him to spend a whole day free in Florence, plus most of Saturday. Then he will come on to me by car. I shall myself collect Adrian and Nanty from Pisa airport. Derek havers mysteriously over the phone and can damn well make his own arrangements. This is typical of him and I shan’t waste time worrying. No doubt I shall get an excited call from him just as we’re moving from the festive
prosecco
into the
crostini
course, saying he’s in Barcelona with this
fabulous
boy and not to worry. Worry? Me? With a birthday meal to prepare and the nightmare of arranging the roughly simultaneous arrival of at least four guests at an obscure house somewhere up a pitchdark mountainside in Tuscany? Absurd.  

But heavy sarcasm doesn’t become me. Even as I buckle to, making beds and rounding up those curious balls of dust that grow in the darkness beneath them, I have to admit I’m now
beginning to feel more chipper. I’m still registering what a huge relief it is at last to be free of Millie and her
preposterous
entourage. The thought that I shall never again have to write another book with her is a tonic to the soul. In addition – and to satisfy the inquisitive – I can reveal that I have had no further manifestations of a priapic nature and I really think my body has finally shed the last residues of Mr and Mrs ProWang’s magic toxins. I instinctively sense that the internal storms have subsided along my hormonal coastline. An uncanny peace has fallen over my ravaged endocrine
system
and my islets of Langerhans are once again sunlit offshore jewels set in an ocean of dimpling blue. Feeling that these days a tourist brochure might represent my interior more accurately than an MRI scan, I bustle about the house
making
it minimally salubrious.

Adam and Eve, the world’s first householders, had their lease on Eden rudely foreclosed and were obliged to relocate to one of Mesopotamia’s less fashionable parts, of which – then as now – there was no shortage. Eve later remarked that aside from the occasional snake Eden hadn’t been a bad place to live. ‘The fruit was fabulous. Basically, though, just too many trees. We weren’t that sorry to leave, actually. If you wanted any sort of social life, well, forget it, the place was dead. But
dead
. We couldn’t throw even the smallest dinner party for a few friends because we simply didn’t have any. There was
literally
no one else to invite apart from some old gardener with no conversation who turned nasty at the end.’  

There must be something of the old Eve in me because although Le Roccie is in many ways a paradise there is not much in the way of society up here for those rare evenings when one feels the itch of sociability. Very occasionally the mood does come upon me and I have the urge to shine a bit. Frankly, certain people are better at playing host than others and I rather fancy I have underused talents in that direction. If I can temporarily overcome my utter disdain for most of the human race I can generally enter into the spirit of the thing and lay on a memorable occasion.  

On the day of my grand dinner – yes, my birthday party if you insist – I find I am definitely in the mood, having arranged everything to perfection. My cantina is stuffed with
prosecco
and other drinkables. My larder shelves groan with edibles. The house is clean without being prim. The beds are made. And as the day progresses my guests start arriving. By means of cash, cajolery and threats the local taxis have managed to bring some; others I have fetched myself with split-second
timing. So by the time we sit down to dinner I at last feel I can relax and indulge the spirit of revelry that liberal quantities of
prosecco
have already done much to encourage. Everyone I invited is present and correct, even Derek, who has earned additional Brownie points by arriving with the celebrated Pavel Taneyev and not with some ragamuffin stranger he has scooped up en route. The
crostini
topped with the gun-dog pâté that I cannily intermingled with the ordinary liver ones have vanished with cries of rapture. I have now served the first two bottles of Chianti Classico, San Fabiano Calcinaia’s Cellole Riserva 2000, which is a superb blend of Sangiovese, Cabernet Sauvignon and Merlot grapes. With a muscular alcohol
content
of 13.5% it falls companionably into step with a robust meat dish. And so it is that I finally help myself to a sturdy portion of badger Wellington and sit down at the head of my candle-lit dinner table. I still can hardly believe it has all come to pass.  

It is a charming, even glittering, scene. I have to admit it is the first time this house has really come into its own as a
setting
for the sort of company I have always known to be my proper milieu (except for Derek). So if you detect a note of preening in my description you will have to excuse it. Picture a large farmhouse kitchen with chestnut beams and an open log fire on a raised stone hearth along one wall. Seated on my left, the world-renowned conductor Max Christ, whose startling presence made Derek’s jaw drop satisfyingly when he arrived. It was just as I’d foreseen. Taneyev is no doubt a royal card but my ace in the hole was Max, who trumped him perfectly. Neither Max nor Taneyev had known the other was going to be here so it came as a surprise to them, too, a mere couple of days after they had played the Bartók concerto together in Florence. Last night, of course, Christ stopped at Empoli (which now I think wouldn’t be a bad title for a movie). On my right is Adrian, who arrived first and has provided sterling help with the food. Derek, to his intense pleasure, is sitting on the left hand of Christ while opposite him in a miasma of
Allure is his Byronic Russian hero, whose performance two nights ago was so wildly acclaimed by the Florentines. A
daemonic
poet at the keyboard he may well be, this prodigy son of a Soviet aeronautical engineer, but at the festive board he is revealed as a solid trencherman of peasant-like proportions. I keep trying to forget that the staff at Corcoran’s know him as ‘Pauline’. As for Derek’s verdict on his hair, I can only concur. Pavel’s genes have unfortunately fated that his hair go the same way as Sig. Benedetti’s. Still, he has one great advantage over that smooth little estate agent. If someone can play
Balakirev
’s
Islamey
electrifyingly you don’t bother about his expertly tousled hair being less substantial than its dimensions pretend. On the other hand it is precisely the finicky grooming and utter ordinariness of someone like Benedetti that makes the eye zoom in cruelly on his woven web.  

Opposite me at the far end of the table is Nanty, perched on cushions to ease his gluteal zone. He is in high old form, I’d say, now and then giggling to himself or inviting Max to join him in renditions of some classic rock number from the
Sixties
. To everybody’s pleasure Max minds not at all, and having actually been alive in the Sixties (unlike Nanty, who was born in 1973) and blessed with a musical memory of stunning
accuracy
, he performs better than the boy-band leader. I imagine that after Nanty’s previous experiences in my house two years ago, when he foolishly arrived without a single
pharmacological
crutch, he has made sure on this occasion to pack plenty of mood-elevating substances. My own experience of recreational drugs is that, like drunkenness and senility, they do not encourage some startling new character to emerge. On the contrary, they simply display the same old character but in a form no longer inhibited by shame, social mores or self-censorship. If people appear to become suddenly mean in their cups or nursing home the chances are the meanness was always there, which may well make their friends and family look back with new insight. In Nanty’s case he simply
disseminates
an amiable, comfortable presence much like that of a
prolapsed old family Labrador, now following the
conversation
(and people’s forkfuls) with a sort of blank alertness, and now staring at the fire with something approaching alert blankness. I am more than ever convinced my judgement of his character is sound and that he will prove a comparative delight to work with. Compared with Millie Cleat, I mean. I shall always need to remember that Nanty is also a public figure, with the drawbacks that entails. But at the very least he has a lovable streak. Just before dinner he came downstairs with a present for me: a flat presentation box of polished walnut in which, on velvet lining, lay a bright metal disc. This turned out to be a platinum pressing of his band’s theme song, ‘Alien Pie’, which was in the charts for a near-record number of months some time ago.  

‘’Ere y’ar, mate,’ he said as he thrust the box into my hands. ‘Didn’t want you to think we’d nicked your idea without any acknowledgement.’  

‘Huh?’  

‘It was your idea, remember? It was you came up with Alien Pie as the new name for Freewayz. In the business they say it’s the most successful-ever exercise in rebranding.
Ever
, Gerry. That’s not nothing, mate. So ’ere y’ar.’  

This gift is not only touchingly useless but has the
additional
virtue of being unplayable on any audio equipment I own. But I suppose you don’t
play
platinum discs. Quite what you do with them I’m not sure. Presumably you stick them on the wall of your downstairs lavatory to intrigue and impress your guests, much as Benjy Birnbaum advertises his repute in the field of ethical latex to give nervous patients a talking point before he starts to loosen their clothing.  

As to the food on this auspicious evening, the badger Wellington is an unqualified success. The fillet is tender and delicious, the hound-and-foie-gras pâté in which it is lapped intriguingly unidentifiable and divinely rich. The only tiny deviation I have made from the stated list of ingredients
concerns
the mushrooms, which I picked in the woods myself
since absolute freshness is essential. Chanterelles are
unfortunately
nonexistent around here because it’s simply too dry for most of the year. Blewits, both wood and field varieties, are also quite uncommon. What we usually have is an
abundance
of parasols, although on my early morning ramble I failed to find a single one. But I did gather a mixed bag of woodland goodies, including a couple of small porcini or ceps and six or seven chestnut boletus – which each year grow sparsely beneath a particular group of oak trees near here. These have a delicious hazelnut flavour and I was pleased to have found them. On the way back I also spied three fresh, leggy specimens of
Panaeolus semiovatus
growing
on a mildewed lump of what may have been fox dung, and just as I skirted the grassy area Marta had once cleared for her brother’s helicopter I found two sound survivors from a deliquescing group of Liberty Caps (
Psilocybe
semilanceata
, in case you need to know). Both these last varieties are of small dimensions and somewhat hallucinogenic. I have found that when cooked together they induce a most
agreeable
euphoria combined with mild but interesting sensory disturbances which last a couple of hours or so: long enough to ensure an evening’s success. It is, of course, utterly
irresponsible
to incorporate such things into innocent guests’ badger Wellington but I trust no one has ever accused
Samper
of responsible behaviour except in identifying the fungi I pick in these woods. I never take chances. There is nothing in this dish that could cause even passing queasiness, let alone projectile diarrhoea, and still less kidney failure. Don’t worry – we country boys may be out of our depths in big cities but up here in the wilds we are in our element.  

As any good hostess knows, the presence of an illustrious guest at the dinner table can sometimes actually dampen the occasion because the other guests hardly dare strike up a
conversation
with him or her for fear of appearing either
sycophantic
or stupid. Tonight, of course, we have no fewer than three bona fide celebrities, at least two of whom easily qualify
as household names, depending on your household. This is really an advantage because none of them needs to impress anyone else so they can turn with relief to the sort of ordinary topics that make for light conversation. If Derek hoped he was going to hear gems of stage-door gossip from the two classical musicians present tonight he must be disappointed. Over the main course Max and Pavel suddenly discover each other to be Tom and Jerry aficionados. Pavel is not seriously let down by his English, the holes in which he patches with an occasional French or German word.  

‘
Non
, Max, the first is “Puss Gets the Boot” and is from 1940. The cat, he is not yet Tom.’  

‘Quite right, he’s called Jasper, and Jerry is Jinx. The
producer
was Rudolf Ising. But from the second cartoon onwards, in 1941, they were all produced by Fred Quimby until the mid-Fifties. The great years.’  

‘
Genau
. The best of
animation
, the best of
dessin
.’  

‘But what interests me,’ says Max, who is now beginning to conduct his own words with a fork and a pronged roast
potato
, ‘is the use of classical music in cartoons of that period. Right from
Fantasia
onwards, which was 1940, you get that Hollywood urge to set cartoon antics to well-known classics.’  

‘
Fantasia
is a
travestissement, ganz geschmacklos
, terrible.’  

‘Agreed. But did you ever see Bugs Bunny in “Bunny Baton”? He has to conduct Suppé’s ‘Morning, Noon and Night in Vienna’ and the matching of the music with his actions is simply wonderful, especially when a fly starts to pester him. In the space of about five minutes he parodies every conceivable “great conductor” mannerism. I tell you, Pavel, if ever I feel I’m becoming pompous in front of an orchestra I remind myself of Bugs Bunny.’  

I endeavour to punctuate this scholarly exchange with offers of stronger wine and madder badger. Substantial though my dish may be, nobody’s appetite seems to have slackened yet and everyone comes back for seconds. I pluck the gleaming brass cartridge base out of the puff pastry and begin carving
the badger’s second half with the inner glow of the host who suddenly sees his much-dreaded dinner party becoming a great success. There are other reasons, too, for pride. Like both Derek and Pavel, Max Christ has obviously been bowled over by the house and on arrival paid me some very pretty
compliments
. Coming from the owner of a grand pile like
Crendlesham
Hall such enthusiasm was doubly gratifying and made me suddenly feel that all that hard labour I put into the place when I bought it has at last been fully rewarded. And
throughout
the evening, I’ve been noticing, Max seems completely at home and at ease. I can’t
not
believe that this makes our future working partnership substantially more likely. I already
imagine
long sessions taking place in this very room, Max leaning back in his chair while I take careful notes as a tape recorder slowly twirls its spools between us. Once I’ve got Nanty’s book out of the way I can at last embark on a project I
needn
’t feel ashamed of.  

But enough of the satisfactions of the future; the good host must attend to satisfying the present. There is a good deal of merriment around the table, I notice, with bits of salacious repartee threading their way amongst the Christ – Taneyev thesis of Hollywood cartoons. There is also a moment of potential awkwardness when Derek – it
would
be Derek – finds a piece of lead shot in his meat and asks if it is usual for Italians to hunt cows. Not at this time of year, I tell him, so the pellet must have fallen out of one of the mushrooms, which Tuscans hunt assiduously in November. The moment is mercifully lost in giggles and conversation continues.