Rancid Pansies (14 page)

However, I can’t do anything without somewhere of my own to work in. That means finding a suitable house as
quickly
as possible. So with a sigh I pay Nico for sundry coffees and walk down the Corso to Benedetti’s office. This turns out to be in the sole charge of a love-bitten teenager who tells me his boss is out with a client and won’t be back until six-thirty. So I leave the weasel a message suggesting we look at this
property
of his in the morning. Back at the hotel I find I have been asked to call a London number which turns out to be the
Global Eyeball
office. I am speaking to somebody named – what else? – Saffron. In Marlborough tones she tells me Leo Wolstenholme is delighted I’ve agreed to be interviewed because it would be impossible to make the programme
without
me. (Like hell it would. These people are ready for all
contingencies
. They would cheerfully cobble the entire thing together out of library footage if they had to.) Unfortunately Leo’s not in the office just now but she does want to know if I can suggest someone they could contact about Millie’s
seamanship
skills, especially somebody who knew her personally. This, too, is standard procedure: to use a patsy who has already agreed to be interviewed to do some unpaid research. For a moment I contemplate sending them off to Salcombe to track down an ancient salt who might remember Millie on holiday there at the age of six messing about in boats, as she had once claimed, the lying cow. As her husband Clifford remarked to me, she hadn’t put bum to thwart in so much as a funfair rowing boat until she learned to sail on Ruislip Lido as an adult. But instead of maliciously proposing this fool’s errand to Saffron I really try to think of somebody useful.

‘It’s hard to come up with a suitable name at a moment’s notice,’ I tell her apologetically.

‘It is,’ she agrees (although what she actually says is ‘i’
is
’, with two rapid glottal stops).

But at this moment I do think of somebody: the redoubtable Joan Nugent. Joan is a hard-bitten ex-Royal Navy lady with a penchant for gaspers and pink gin who was a splendid ally to me when Millie was being drawn into the wacky world of marine mysticism. She was an old sailing chum of Millie’s who lived near her somewhere between Chichester and
Portsmouth
and was distressed to see her friend sucked into a form of extreme environmentalism that was only ever going to make her look a total idiot. Indeed, Britain’s national heroine barely scraped out of it with her reputation intact. I now think Joan will be the ideal person for this
Global Eyeball
malarkey. To counteract the inevitable sentimentality her rasping,
down-to
-earth assessments will be exactly what the programme needs.

‘I
can
think of someone,’ I now say. ‘She and her friends used to sail with Millie in the old days. Believe me, she’s just what you’re looking for. She’ll provide an alternative view.’

‘Oh wow! Sounds great. Who is she?’

‘I think I’ll contact her first, if you don’t mind,’ I tell the eager Saffron firmly. ‘It’ll be better if it comes from me.’

So I sit on the edge of the bed and call up Joan. I realise I haven’t spoken to her since Millie’s death; but although I’ve known her for less than a year she already feels like one of those rare people with whom one can be out of touch for ages without it having the least effect on the friendship. She’d been an instant ally last year when we first met aboard a yacht at a dinner thrown by Millie’s Australian partner, Lew Buschfeuer. Hitherto whenever I’ve rung Joan she has answered from a maelstrom of yapping dogs at the other end. For once, her nicotine-pickled rasp comes unaccompanied by canine bedlam.

‘Gerry!’ she cries when I’ve identified myself. ‘What makes you call this ancient mariner in her time of woe?’

‘Why woe? Poor Joan, are you still grieving for Millie?’ Well, they were old friends.

‘Not right now, no. But last night I had to do away with the Bo’sun, poor old sod.’

I remember the Bo’sun as ringleader of the doggy chorus that usually accompanied Joan’s phone calls. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say insincerely.

‘Don’t be. He was twelve. Good age for them. Kidneys packing up. Could happen to any of us and probably will.’ A mirthless, deep ochre chuckle.

‘Unfortunately no one’s going to take us to the vet for a quick, merciful end.’

‘Huh, I certainly didn’t take the Bo’sun to any vet. What do you think I am? Disgraceful idea, handing someone you love over to a total stranger to be executed. Any pet owner worth her salt ought to do it herself, and if she hasn’t the guts she oughtn’t to keep an animal. It’s the least you can do for an old friend.’

‘I see.’ I picture Joan’s stocky figure swinging a baseball bat or pouring barbiturates down the animal’s throat through a funnel.

‘Shot him with a flare pistol. A distress shell to the head, instant death, just like that. The old boy went out in a glorious blaze of red, you should have seen it. Twenty-five thousand candelas.’

‘You surely didn’t do it at sea?’ I imagine Joan and her yacht being impounded by coastguards for sending out a marine false alarm.

‘Christ no. Did it right here in the back yard. Ha, it lit things up, I can tell you, but only for five seconds. Grand show while it lasted. God knows what the neighbours thought, but sod ’em. I gave the old Bo’sun a nautical burial this morning. Sank him off Hayling Island with a fathom of chain. We’d done a lot of trips together, he was a proper shipmate, bless him. A real old sea dog. Now, what can I do for you?’

I explain about
Global Eyeball’
s forthcoming documentary about Millie and ask whether I could put Joan’s name
forward
. There is a silence.

‘Oh fuck it, why not?’ she says at length. ‘They may as well have someone on the programme who knew her and can cut through some of the crap.’

‘That’s exactly what I told them. Without naming you, of course.’

‘I really miss the old girl, you know. I didn’t say it before, Gerry, but I think you did her proud in that book of yours, even the cheeky bits. I know you never took to her much but you didn’t know her in the early days when she was so happy to get away from that family of hers in wherever it was,
Pinner
. Believe me, she was a different person then. We were all sailors together, used to have some smashing nosh-ups out there in the harbour, just us girls. All that success did go to her head a bit, though. Mind you, it’d be a pretty rare person who wouldn’t have her head turned. Talk about national adulation. It was ridiculous, really. I’m afraid she did go a bit potty towards the end, poor old girl, but of course you know that better than most. Still, what a way to go, eh? Prime-time Christmas TV, a rogue hoist and bingo! Strangled at her own masthead. By the way, did you hear the Aussies have nailed the company responsible?’

‘No?’

‘Turns out it wasn’t the boatyard’s fault. There was a
defective
batch of hoists with gears the wrong way round or
something
. The others were recalled. Curtains for that particular marine supply company, I’d think.’

‘Right.’ I’ve had enough of this boating backchat. There is a delicate Samper agenda to pursue. While Joan has been talking I’ve suddenly seen how she is exactly the person I need for some practical help. The truth is, I’m daunted by the horrid and arduous prospect of unearthing the contents of my house. It’s too much for a refined English aesthete to do on his own, no matter how sprightly and resourceful he is. Adrian can’t come because he’s apparently up to his eyes in some panic at BOIS. So I’m wondering …

‘Joan?’

‘Yup.’

‘I suppose you wouldn’t fancy a trip out to Italy would you?’

‘
Italy
? Why, when are you leaving?’

‘I’m here already. This is where I’m phoning from. This Leo Wolstenholme says she’ll come out here to film an interview with me, and it just struck me that if you were here too they could do us at the same time, maybe even both together for some of the bits. I’m sure we can wangle your air fare and expenses. A programme like
Global Eyeball
will have an exes account dribbling at the seams with cash. But also … I
hardly
like to ask this of you since I don’t really know you that well, but I’d be awfully grateful for a hand.’

I explain the problem, during which I can hear the
unmistakable
sound of Joan lighting up one of her high-tar gaspers with a Swan Vesta. She thinks lighters are effete. How is it I know all these hard-core smokers? At least she doesn’t cough like Frankie.

‘I remember now,’ she says. ‘Of course, it was all in the newspapers before Christmas, wasn’t it? About that famous conductor nearly getting killed in an Italian earthquake but you all got out of the house in the nick of time? You mean that’s
your
house still buried out there, Gerry? You poor
bugger
. Well, why not? We Service pensioners don’t get much fun. I’ll need to do some arranging, though. The dogs’ll have to go into kennels and I booked
Navy Lark
to have her hull cleaned next week. But she’ll keep.’

‘You’re a star. All your costs will be on me, of course.
Meaning
anything I can’t induce these TV people to pay.’

The next morning dawns grey but dry. After elaborate pleasantries in which Benedetti and I each vie for the preference of not being driven by the other, I find myself sitting fatalistically in the passenger seat of his late model Range Rover being whirled through ever-narrowing lanes above the town. He has not driven me since I was negotiating to buy my late lamented
house many moons ago but I haven’t forgotten his distinctive combination of competence and lack of imagination. It is not really the devilish élan that is so Italian as much as the absence of apprehensiveness. Whereas I
know
that when I hurtle around a blind corner there will be a tractor with a huge
trailer
full of logs chugging in the opposite direction, Benedetti is equally certain that the road will be empty. It simply doesn’t occur to him that it could be otherwise. Presumably he is right in at least nine cases out of ten. One’s disinclination to be with him on the tenth occasion is what is keeping my knees locked and my fingerprints imprinted in the leather of the armrest. In the breeze from his half-open window his borrowed tresses wave like weeds on a river bed. Strange to think that hanks of hair from the same Chinese peasant girl who grew them will be waving on heads all around the world at this very moment. Today, possibly in my honour, Benedetti is dressed in what the clothes shop in the centre of town calls ‘stile English
gentle-mans’
in its window displays: brushed cotton shirt with a
discreet
check pattern, grey slacks and a light tweed sports jacket with an ivory silk handkerchief tucked into the top pocket. By his own lights he undoubtedly looks convincingly ‘
snob
’, which in these parts connotes a fashionable retro Englishness vaguely associated with old leather, horses and monocles. To me the overall effect – by no means discounting the wig – is that of a slightly caddish prep-school master of forty years ago who will soon be leaving the school under a cloud. But what the hell, I’m hoping to buy a house from him, not staying behind after class. At this rate, with his refulgent brown brogue pressed so firmly on the accelerator, we may neither of us live to see the
compromesso
stage.

Yet before long, after a suicidal turn up an unmade track with small stones popping and pinging beneath the car’s fat tyres, we come to a halt in a cloud of dust. As this drifts away a view of olive trees slowly clears. We are on a level patch of weedy land of maybe an acre, behind which a steep grove of olives clings to the mountainside with bundles of orange plastic
netting tied to them. The same continues on the downward slope, falling abruptly away to a view of the town’s red roofs far below. And behind those slumps the distant sea, flat-lining across the horizon, grey and unmoving like a patient beyond resuscitation. In the foreground, amid tangled briars and
nettles
, stands what I take to be the shell of a substantial stone farmhouse incongruously capped with a corrugated iron roof.

‘No,’ I say decisively. ‘Nice position, but no. Too much work.’

‘Ah, but …’ begins Benedetti. This is his métier, of course: the salesman for whom the word ‘no’ is always equivocal and reversible. ‘Allow me, maestro, to tell you why you ought not to be hasty. For a start the position, as you have just
spontaneously
volunteered, is quite sensational. I know of no other house so close to town with a view like this, and I can assure you there is scarcely a property in this area I haven’t visited. Now, I grant that at first sight the building itself is very slightly
unpropitious
, shall we say, but first impressions can be cruelly deceptive and besides, there’s a story behind this place.’

There always is, of course. Benedetti takes a heavy stick out of the back of the Range Rover. Muffling an inward sigh I allow him to slash a way through the nettles to the back door of the house, which is unexpectedly new and solid-looking. He produces a set of keys and lets us in. He disappears into the semi-darkness to throw open some shutters and suddenly the interior gloom is dissipated and to my slight surprise I’m
looking
at a tastefully restored farmhouse kitchen. Old but re-laid and sealed
mezzani
gleam dully on the floor. Overhead the beams have been sand-blasted clean of the whitewash once
traditionally
applied to ceilings in this region. The old wood has come up the shade UK colour charts usually describe as ‘
tobacco
’ (but probably won’t for very much longer out of abject political correctness. The Italians are a good deal more robust about such things, as one can deduce from their own charts which unabashedly retain ‘
testa di moro
’ or Moor’s head, a phrase that not only translates as ‘nigger brown’ but also
denotes an old-fashioned type of bristly, rounded lavatory brush). Between paler new chestnut rafters the
mezzani
form regular strips of terracotta. A big open hearth, raised a couple of feet from the floor, dominates the rear wall. On the other side of the room an ancient door leads to a stone-flagged
passageway
. Along this to the right is the front door and across the passage is the
salone.
More brick floors and beamed ceilings.