Rancid Pansies (21 page)

Eventually some news items reach me in garbled fashion as I shave, and very disgusting one of them is, too. A grinning ninny with gelled hair says that half the target survey of people between the ages of fifty-seven and seventy-five claimed they regularly had oral sex, while 26 per cent of those polled at the ages of seventy-five to eighty-five reported having had sex with a partner in the last year. I have to rest my razor for some minutes while waiting for my heart rate to subside. What one marvels at is not the statistics, repellent as they are, but the willingness of these elderly people to answer such revoltingly intrusive questions. Have they
no
self-respect? These are just the sort of old geezers who bang on about their right to die with dignity, yet they’re perfectly content to live without it. Surely nobody of any breeding, of whatever age, would
actually
respond to these impertinent oafs with their clipboards? The only proper reaction to such questioning would be to behave like a character in a Terry Southern story, come
prancing
out in an ancient silk bathrobe and hit the oaf a stunning blow over the head with an immense black dildo the size of a vegetable marrow while exclaiming ‘Take that, sir!’ or ‘Try
this
on your pianola!’ One of several matters of pride I shall take with me to the grave is that I have never once told the truth when quizzed in the street or door-stepped. It is a rare instance of Samper’s having shown a glimmer of social responsibility.

Two hours later Joan and I are standing at the edge of a jungle some miles out of town. In front of us an excavator is snorting and rummaging about like a yellow boar in the steep slope of scree on the side of the mountain. It is one of those immense machines with a scoop at one end and a blade at the other, and earlier it had led the way here by bulldozing a trail uphill through the dense undergrowth. Behind it was a solemn convoy headed by the
Forestale’
s Fiat Campagnola. Behind that were the Comune Works Department’s Land Rover and a battered Ford Focus bearing a reporter and a photographer from
Il Tirreno
. Joan and I had brought up the rear in a cavernous hired van that already felt freighted with my misgivings about the entire venture. I had never
envisaged
this circus. I should have thought that searching for one’s personal belongings at a scene of tragedy was best
conducted
in discreet privacy, but such is not the Italian way. I suppose I ought to be thankful that so far there’s no
procession
of robed choirboys and a firework display. On the other hand it is extremely unfortunate that yesterday Leo
Wolstenholme
and her
Global Eyeball
colleagues announced their imminent arrival. If they arrive today their hotel is supposed to be directing them up here to interview Joan and me about Millie Cleat. I’m banking on their never being able to find this place. Still, I have taken care to dress in a style that might best be summed up as ‘casual rugged’: a plaid shirt and an old but beautifully cut pair of Man2Man jeans that I bought in Aspen to cheer myself up while following Luc
Bailly
in the waning but still erectile days of his skiing career. I also have on a pair of new black boots that were the only things I could find locally. I really wanted something along the lines of Doc Martens, though more navvy than chavvy. What I found, now that I’m wearing them, do have an air less of a building site than of a Seventies’ NHS orthopaedic department, being somewhat bulbous in odd places. But all in all, I daresay I cut a figure of no little masculine dash and competence that will show up to advantage on camera. I
certainly detect what must be admiring glances from the two
Forestale
men.

I don’t wish to give a misleading impression of the
mise
en
scène
here. You mustn’t imagine that we’re at the foot of a
vertical
cliff as though standing on the shore beneath Beachy Head. Hereabouts the Apuan Alps have forested lower slopes and Le Roccie is roughly a third of the way up a mountain. The section of the plateau on which my house once stood broke off and slid down a steep wooded hillside
avalanche-style
, breaking up as it went, clearing trees and everything in its path. It came to rest about a hundred metres lower than it started, in a vast moraine of boulders and mangled trees among which a few remnants of my home are still pathetically visible. As I have indicated, reaching this remote place from below required much trail-blazing on the part of the excavator and now that we’re here I quite wish we weren’t. Surveying the immense boulders, the sheer volume of stuff, I’m suddenly convinced the task is too huge to be worthwhile. Whatever lies buried has already been here a good five months, exposed to winter rains and melting snow. It seems hardly worth the effort to launch a salvage operation at this late stage and
particularly
not in front of all these inquisitive witnesses.

However, here we all expensively are and I must make the best of it. The house’s roof that had still looked vaguely intact from the helicopter has since acquired gaping holes. I borrow a torch from the crew in the Land Rover and peer around inside it, but it’s just a roof that bobbed like a bubble on the general surf of collapse and I can see nothing under it but rocks. Fifty yards away the excavator is making a start
clearing
rubble from around the rusting rump of my Toyota Ass Vein, which sticks up obscenely in the spring air as though hoping to be inseminated by its yellow rescuer in some rite of mechanical rejuvenation. The teeth on the lip of the huge bucket hook themselves delicately through the smashed rear window and with a heartfelt groan the car’s length emerges from its tomb, shedding rocks and soil.

‘Bang goes your no-claim bonus, I’d say,’ remarks Joan, lighting one of her gaspers. ‘Did you leave anything of value in it?’

‘Just the usual junk, I think.’ We walk over to look. There will be the insurance documents and log book in the glove compartment since in Italy it’s obligatory to have them to hand, but all that paperwork has now been settled, the car no longer officially exists and they’re worthless. However, I’m still not sure about the legal implications of what we’re doing today. That’s to say the San Bernardino da Siena agency did eventually cough up for both car and house, though not before
la dotoressa
Strangolagalli had fought my lawyer for every last euro. (I trust little St Bernard will one day lean out from the gold bar of Heaven and strike the crimson-clawed hag with boils, goitres and prolapses for the way her unscrupulous
company
continues to take his name in vain.) But now that I’ve been reimbursed – as much as one ever is by insurance
companies
– what happens if I manage to recover some of the items I’ve been reimbursed for? Would I effectively be stealing? Is the agency now the de facto owner of my buried property?

They’re certainly welcome to the car, whose interior smells of rotting upholstery and fresh earth. I manage to get the glove compartment undone and there are the vehicle’s papers, damp with mould, together with the sort of rubbish that collects in such places and which now looks as though it belonged to someone else. Come to that, the entire site is a reminder of how well one can get by after a few months without one’s treasured possessions.

‘There’s no way of making sense of the way the house fell, I suppose?’ Joan muses, looking up at the ragged lip of the plateau far above.

‘So we might make a reasonable guess as to where things are? None whatever. That’s why I’m afraid I’ve brought you all this way under false pretences. It’s hopeless. Anything we find will be by sheer chance.’

‘Never mind the false pretences, I’m damned glad I came.
It’s not just that if I was back in Havant I’d run the risk of being burned alive by righteous pet-owners. If I hadn’t come I doubt if I’d ever have met Marta. She’s a right shipmate, is Marta.’

‘I’ve never sailed with her but I’ll take your word for it. She’s certainly making a name for herself as a composer.’

‘She’s a genius,’ says Joan confidently. ‘She just needs
someone
to look after her and manage all the day-to-day running of a house. She’s not a practical person at all.’

Practically useless, actually. One has only to observe the bohemian squalor in which Marta habitually lives, a squalor that I suspect has to do with having become used to the
services
of the ancient family retainers her father’s clan managed to re-engage in Voynovia’s post-Soviet era. As the eldest daughter of a godfather of international crime, what need did she ever have to deal with humdrum domestic practicalities? In due course she went off to Moscow Conservatory, where no doubt they had armies of babushkas to clean up after the students. I shoot Joan a sidelong glance. She is examining the corpse of my car with an expert eye, the other being scrunched shut against the smoke from the gasper clenched between her lips. She is wearing a boiler suit faded with age that she probably inherited from the Navy and has long since rolled up her sleeves. The anchor tattoo blazes on a forearm that looks like Popeye’s. Can it be, I wonder, that this old salt is becoming broody? Or at least entertaining thoughts of domesticity? And might it turn out that Marta is receptive to this idea? At this moment Joan manages to prise open the car’s hatchback and pokes around inside. As I’ve already said, it is none of my
business
. But it might have consequences for the plan I have yet to broach with Marta, which is that she writes the music for
Rancid
Pansies
. I really must have a serious conversation with her in the next day or two.

‘The spare tyre and toolkit are probably worth saving,’ Joan is saying, hauling them out.

‘Not to me.’ I’ve already lost interest. I have also noticed
that we have acquired some unofficial spectators far above on the edge of the landslip. ‘Who do you think they are up there?’

Joan removes her fag to follow my gaze. ‘Christ knows.
Pilgrims
, I suppose. The very people who are making Marta’s life hell. With any luck they’ll fall over.’

And suddenly I realise how much I’ve been taking for
granted
. I still haven’t had a proper conversation with Marta about the story of Diana’s ghost. I merely asked her over the phone not to deny it. This is doubly remiss of me because not only can one never be certain how much Marta understands
anyway
, but time has gone by and she may already have forgotten or think it no longer matters. I remember telling Joan the story when I picked her up from Pisa airport but I have never explained to either of them the true nature of the deal I’ve done with Benedetti. Seeing the distant figures up there on the edge of the precipice reminds me that Marta is obviously going to have to move because living next to a sacred grotto is
intolerable
. I owe it to her to keep her fully abreast of the political shenanigans in the background. She could at least make the price of her silence a decent sum for her house which is, as Benedetti ruthlessly pointed out, pretty much worthless except to a local council eager to manage the site as a tourist attraction.

There and then I decide to ask Joan if she could explain the whole deal to Marta. It’s not so long ago that she proved her worth to me as a co-plotter in her friend Millie Cleat’s best interests and I suddenly think she might prove a persuasive advocate. So we sit on a boulder in the pleasant warmth of the spring sunshine and follow with our eyes the excavator’s industrious rootings as I tell her about my pact with the Comune.

‘You crafty bugger,’ says Joan at the end.

‘Hardly. I was over a barrel, wasn’t I? Anyway, I think it’s kind to pander to people’s delusions. Think how happy it makes all those credulous folk like Baggy and Dumpy to feel that from some mysterious but immanent dimension Princess
Diana is watching out for them, shielding them from life’s little landmines. I look on myself as a humble agent of good cheer.’

‘Exactly what I mean by crafty. You’ve even squared
yourself
to this monstrous fib. Well, well. I’ll tell Marta tonight, of course. The poor lamb’s got her own housing problems to worry about.’

‘Not so poor, as lambs go.’ I trust I don’t sound overly
bitter
. ‘Quite a wealthy lamb, actually.’

‘Oh, she’s told me all about her awful father. It’s not the expense of buying another house that worries her, just the upheaval of finding somewhere else and moving to it. I can see we’ve got to go along with this apparition nonsense. We all need somewhere to live and I certainly think we’ve a perfect right to make local politics work in our favour. Crazy to shoot yourself in the foot just on a matter of principle.’

‘Almost as daft as shooting your dog in the head with a flare gun.’

Joan sighs. ‘A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do. The flare gun was all I had to hand. But I agree it wasn’t very discreet.’

While we have been chatting the digger has unearthed what looks like bed sheets. Everybody converges on the trove and what might be intimate remnants of the master bedroom undergo immediate public scrutiny. Both sheets and burst
mattress
have inevitably acquired fungal stains and brownish smears of mud at which everybody stares with horrid
knowingness
like Jane Cotter, the Savoy Hotel chambermaid who gave evidence at the second Wilde trial. One of the
Forestale
officers looks me up and down in a saucy fashion and makes a remark to his colleague that I don’t catch but which I assume is opprobrious since they both laugh. They’re probably both a bit upstaged by my boots. At that moment I’m distracted by the emergence from the ground in the excavator’s bucket of what looks like a squashed orange box. I recognise it as my bedside cabinet, once a charming little cupboard from the eighteenth century that has just about made it into the
twenty-first.
I hold up my hand and go to inspect it. The giant machine waits, exhaling the purposeful scent of hot diesel and hydraulic fluid. Between us Joan and I lift out the flattened relic and carry it to one side. I can just feel the eyes of the
Fore-stale
men and the journalists waiting to pounce on titillating evidence of bachelor living. I couldn’t care less. I know there’ll be nothing incriminating in it but I’m hoping against hope that –
Yes
! My two most prized and inspirational cookbooks, my favourite bedtime reading, have survived! A little damp,
certainly
, but essentially intact.