Rancid Pansies (2 page)

That day the Samper misanthropy was in full spate and bursting its banks. How detestable to be in a majority! The ideal I aim for is to cultivate an attitude of
impassioned
detachment
. I was certainly feeling impassioned, so to achieve detachment I went to sit morosely in Jennifer’s car rather than
accompany her and Josh to the garden centre’s tea room where Josh had been promised a reward for good behaviour. Some reward he was in for, I thought to myself. It was too easy to imagine the fifty varieties of herbal teas, all of them tasting of stewed twigs and fruit but just about the only things on the menu not containing rolled oats or molasses. I could already see the Bizarre Bakery Selection featuring rolls
containing
oats and lupin seeds, inferior species of wheat that sound Biblical and hence spiritually wholesome – spelt, emmer, wild einkorn, Khorasan – or else flapjacks made of oak galls and molasses (‘Traditional Love-Offerings on
pre-Christian
Lesbos!’). I could foresee the horrid middle-classness of it all, the self-pleased obsession with physical health and spiritual harmony.

I admit I can’t easily explain why a mere visit to a garden centre should have had such a curdling effect. It was just that the place seemed to combine a whole series of pet hates I never realised I had been nurturing until there they all were, one after another, somehow a part of my former self as a Briton back in the years before I took the cheerful, lightening step of becoming a renegade and a foreigner. In a mysterious manner Jennifer’s memo board in Crendlesham Hall’s kitchen seems like a palimpsest which, if I rub hard enough through the
layers
of her half-erased scribble, might reveal my own mother’s identical scrawls to herself that were equally a part of my own childhood. ‘Floor pol.’ ‘Tea.’ ‘Order Cash’s name tapes.’ ‘Pay Sanders Friday.’ So I stand alone in this kitchen, staring through the window, trying to resist being dragged back and suddenly dismal with a sense that it is all up with Samper, that the act of living has slipped out of my hands and into those of Adrian’s in-laws.

And then one morning a phone call from my agent Frankie reminds me that I could have a pretty good life of my own somewhere out there well beyond the plovers. In these
withdrawn
periods of recuperation we artists forget how much we need these voices from over the horizon. (Had her moated
grange been on the phone, Mariana need never have become so run down. At the very least she could have sent out for a pizza.)

Frankie brings me the news that although I may be minus a house, my latest book
Millie!
is selling prodigiously, and worldwide at that. It was always likely to sell well in the UK in the run-up to Christmas since its subject, the appalling
one-armed
yachtswoman Millie Cleat, was a heroine who had ‘sailed her way into the nation’s hearts’ (
Sun, Mirror, Daily Express, Daily Mail,
et al.). In the normal course of events sales would have dropped off quite a bit in the dead season
following
New Year. But her spectacular televised death in
Sydney
on Christmas Day had done both my spirits and my book an immense favour. I am now, Frankie assures me, on my way to becoming modestly well off, especially if the film deal
currently
being negotiated in Hollywood comes through.

Thus it is that one day I awake and
know
that Samper is back to his old self. I open my eyes and an inner zippiness
easily
neutralises the grey Suffolk light seeping in from outside. Remember those derring-do novels that always compelled the reader to picture the reality of their flabby old authors? Their heroes, refreshed by ninety minutes’ sleep after spending the night hanging by their fingertips from a windowsill to avoid SMERSH agents with poison-dart guns, bounce out of bed in their Mayfair bachelor apartments. To demonstrate their rugged hardihood, ease their bruises and melt the tension out of cramped muscles, they first shower with water as hot as they can stand and follow that with an ice-cold drench, ‘
laughing
at the stinging brunt of it’. After which, luxuriating in a buzz of superb animal fitness, they do a hundred quick
press-ups
on their fingertips, tuck a towel around their brown whipcord torsos and go into the kitchen to make themselves a breakfast of six eggs, a pound of toast and several pints of Blue Mountain coffee. Well, it was never thus in the Samper household, I can tell you, and nor is it at Crendlesham Hall. Nobody laughs in the shower here except nervously, taken by surprise by one of young Josh’s inventive montages involving
a baby ichthyosaur peering quizzically out of a loofah. But on this particular morning I do leave the squash-court bed singing a sprightly aria from the opera the English pronounce as
Donkey Hoaty.

As I shave, one of my all-time favourite quotations pops into my mind: ‘Feeling you’re whole is deeply refreshing.’ Many years ago I overheard a Buddhist make this
astonishingly
frank confession on a BBC World Service programme called
Words of Faith
(broadcast on 31/8/95, if you’d care to check), and it has been with me ever since. I hadn’t realised that
Buddhists
, too, indulged such furtive pleasures. It makes them seem quite like the rest of us. Anyway, today I discover I am myself deeply refreshed, yearning to be up and doing, full of energy. It is like being in my twenties again: a sense that there’s nothing I can’t do, nothing and no one to stop me. And
suddenly
– yes! – I’m glad not to be a householder with a life organised by fridge magnets. I am also happy that I no longer have to worry about a lump of property a thousand miles away. I am newly relieved of the burden of a lifetime’s
accumulated
possessions. In short a novel, simplified Samper begins here. Above all, a Samper determined never to write another book for a sports hero. But where to go? What to do?

And bang on cue, another call from Frankie. He is a
three-packs
-a-day man with a Low Tar voice to match, and this morning he is so gravelly and super-laconic with dramatic news I have to ask him to repeat himself.

‘I said “one and a half million”, Gerry. The film rights for
Millie!
Proper pounds, that is, not wincy little dollars.’

‘Good God.’ I lean weakly against the Aga, which sends a comforting glow through my areas of contact. Then, getting to the point, ‘What’s my cut?’

‘If you remember, we agreed the splits with Millie’s agent when we did the book deal. All quite regular. We’ve got a twenty per cent share of the sale of film, TV and allied rights in the Cleat life story as told by you. So your take is, um, three hundred thousand, minus this agency’s fifteen per cent plus
VAT.
Haaargh haaargh
’ (hideous coughs shake his
phlegm-clogged
alveoli and I superstitiously hold the receiver a little away as though a spray of pulmonary flecks might spatter my ear) ‘
wuuurgh
call it a shade under a quarter of a million.’

‘For me personally? Golly. And right on the day when I’m feeling at my most irresponsible.’

‘Oh, we’re all agreed in the office that it couldn’t have
happened
to a less responsible person, Gerry. Congratulations. But before you go out and do something to merit arrest, I’m afraid you have to make some decisions.’

‘Make them for me, Frankie. You’re my agent,’ I say,
suddenly
distracted by a strong smell of singeing. I discover that the back hem of my natty and elegant jacket has been
overlapping
the only one of the range’s hobs not to have its lid down. Damn. I douse it with the kettle. Never mind, it’s only Armani. Cooking couture.

‘I can’t,’ Frankie is saying, and again coughs as though
trying
to uproot his bronchial tree. ‘Only you can, Gerry. It’s you to decide if you also want to write the screenplay.’

‘Are you serious? Of course I don’t. Not in a million years.’

‘More dosh, mind you.’ Frankie does not like to see money slipping away from his ochre-stained fingertips.

‘I don’t need more dosh. Look, Frankie, if you remember I swore to have nothing further to do with that ocean-going old poseuse, and I’m sticking to it. I think we should take the money and run.’

‘Fine, if that’s what you want.’ Nevertheless he sounds
wistful
. ‘Still, my antennae are telling me there’s yet more money to be made out of Millie Cleat. There was quite a feeding frenzy towards the end of the film rights bidding, you know. All the big studios were biting. An international sports personality whose dramatic life was followed by a super-dramatic death live on worldwide TV? And, of course, the news that she was going to be Damed in the New Year’s honours list but had to be scratched at the last minute because they don’t award civil honours posthumously. Can’t go far wrong with all that as a
story. But have it your own way.
Hucka. Hucka. Harraargh
. Now to another matter. There’s still one more book to do for Champions, according to our contract.’

‘Oh, convert it to a two-book deal or something. Or buy it up, I don’t care. Because today is the day I sever for ever any connection with the world of sport. That’s it, Frankie. Samper has spoken. I have ghosted my final biography. I have made my very last effort to extract an intelligible thought from creatures festooned with Nike swooshes. The full beauty of this hasn’t yet sunk in, but when it does I shall indulge in epic celebration.’

This first day of the rest of my life (as we born-again atheists say) has begun so brilliantly I simply have to tell somebody. Unfortunately Max is in a recording studio in London today, while Jennifer and Josh are doing mother-and-child things in Colchester. For some reason the person in whose face I find I
really
want to wave my quarter-million windfall is Marta, and I actually start looking up her number before deciding she might think it vain of me or identify it quite correctly as vulgar gloating. In any case, someone whose gangster father has secreted heaps of money for her in numbered accounts around the world isn’t going to be overly impressed by a mere quarter of a million pounds. You have only to look at her to realise she’s oblivious to the stuff. If you have oodles of the readies you only dress like a bag lady and live in a mildew hatchery if you’re a Voynovian composer in your forties.

Not for the first time I reflect on what a peculiar person she is, and yet again speculate about her erotic life. I once
entertained
the fantasy that under cover of darkness a simple but husky woodman’s son would occasionally emerge from the forest like a soiled faun to park his axe by her back door and, omitting to remove his boots, leave her bed covered in twigs, leaves and seed. But then she began keeping the company of a glamorous Italian film director’s son who was admittedly worth more than a second glance, and I began to think it wasn’t rough trade she was after. However, Filippo eventually
took me for a spin in the Pacini family’s helicopter and I noticed him giving my exquisitely cut Homo Erectus jeans a knowledgeable once-over, as well he might. After that it became impossible to imagine him fancying a middle-aged woman with the dress sense of a moose. To say nothing of the physique. Meanwhile, Marta’s erotic leanings remain as opaque as ever. I suppose we must assume she takes the odd lover prophylactically, much as people put studs in their
earlobes
to keep the holes from closing.

So instead of Marta I call dear Adrian in his laboratory at BOIS. He is satisfactorily bowled over.

‘That’s terrific,’ he says when he has recovered from the shock. ‘I’ll just trot along to the Director’s office and hand in my resignation. The ocean will just have to get along without me as best it can. I’ve always wanted to be kept.’

‘I’m not keeping you, you mercenary old poof,’ I tell him sternly. ‘The very idea. Anyway, I shall need the money myself. I’m planning great things. But I shan’t mind lashing out and buying you a new set of oilskins.’

‘Huh, I shall expect bespoke ones, you know. None of your off-the-peg rubbish. We’re talking Savile Row oilskins here … Heavens, Gerry, what a lot of money. I won’t say “it couldn’t have happened to a nicer person” because it might have
happened
to me.’

‘No it mightn’t. Who’s going to pay one and a half million quid for the film rights of
your
book? Just tell me that.’ It is true, Adrian does actually have a book to his name: an expanded version of his doctoral thesis called
Trophic
Interactions
among Post-Spring Estuarine Communities of
Pseudodiaptomus
hessei
Copepods
. This is not what the book trade calls a selling title, so it’s small wonder that if you ask for it in Waterstones they look at you waggishly and say without even consulting their computers, ‘Oh, I believe we’ve just sold our last copy of that. We’ll have to re-order for you.’

‘You just don’t realise how full of high drama and low
cunning
the life of a copepod is, Gerry. Brutal and disgusting, too.

Show it on the big screen and you’d have people stampeding for the exits.’

‘Yes, to get their money back from the box office. And now I think your nephew and sister have just come in. Do you want a word with Jen?’ I hand him over to her with an aside as she stands there shedding scarf and gloves. ‘Your brother.’

For the next few days I go about cocooned in a warm
feeling
that an immense problem in my life has been solved. Had I been back in Italy I have no doubt I should have broken into song and invented an expressive dish that would take its place in the annals of celebratory cuisine. But being in this great house with such kindly people leaves me unaccustomedly inhibited. If you share living space with one of the world’s greatest conductors you don’t spontaneously break into song. This is a man who is on first-name terms with the two tenors. Nor do you artlessly commandeer your hostess’s Aga for
culinary
experiments unless she asks, particularly when she has a dinner party of grandees slated for this coming weekend. I have now been on my best behaviour for the past nine weeks and the strain is killing me, but I shall have to keep it up for a little while yet.