Rancid Pansies (3 page)

Until two or three months ago I would have allowed a blacksmith to extract my eye teeth with a chisel in exchange for the chance to shine at one of Max Christ’s dinner parties. After years of exile in the intellectual wastelands where sports personalities and celebrities dwell I felt like Ovid, banished by Emperor Augustus in
AD
8 to what is now Constant¸a on the Black Sea, separated from his beloved Rome by a thousand miles of howling barbarian tribes. That my biographees ate muck planned for them by private dieticians rather than real food was their own business. That they drank electrolyte sports drinks instead of decent wine was their loss. But that they knew nothing about anything interesting had me
yearning
for the company of people who had read, and looked, and listened, and thought, and lived. Naturally this was not
snobbery
on my part, merely the innate discrimination that draws
all species to the company of their kind. Breeding will out, which is why arranged marriages often work so well while those of the ill-bred fall apart. As I say, time was when I longed – and very recently, too – for the society of like minds. But
lately
even this has become a casualty of a new-found impatience. Despite this, I find I still have pathetically lingering hopes that this imminent dinner party won’t disappoint with mere farty glitterati. Max tells me ominously that he is inviting a surprise guest for me so, Samper,
good grace
. Thankfully, Adrian has promised to come up from Southampton. And yes, of course everybody at the table will dutifully rejoice over my piece of good fortune when it is inevitably mentioned. But the truth is these people already have money and simply take it as read that everyone else they know has, too.

So it’s really not such a big deal for them that this
mysterious
, cultured and amusing friend of Adrian’s has suddenly come into a bit of cash. How could it be?
They
never had to spend months trying to extract usable biographical data from harridans like Millie Cleat for a living.
They
were never
invited
to shower with Luc Bailly, the legendary downhill skier, as the price of an interview. This came about ostensibly because it was the only spare time he had. In reality he wanted me to observe for myself what had made him legendary. For Luc had the Lyndon Johnson syndrome. The late American president would sometimes shame visiting male dignitaries into
swimming
naked with him in his Texan pool in the sure knowledge that faced with his monstrous appendage they would be reduced to shrivelled inferiority. It was a bad error to try the same trick on Samper. Bailly had never had to learn the
defensive
– and offensive – shower techniques that come naturally to someone who has been to a decent English public school. From the moment we undressed I relentlessly grilled him about his relations with his mother, and it was he who
shrivelled
at the stinging brunt of it as the water hammered down and the steam billowed up. He soon turned his back and
mumbled
evasively into the suds. After that he was as good as gold.

The point is that these delightful denizens of the East Anglian arts set have no idea of the awful things I have had to do these last twenty years simply to earn a crust, and what they will inwardly dismiss as just a handy bit of extra cash is in fact my exit visa out of the land of servitude.

The inner excitement provoked by my sudden change in
fortune
fills me with energy that demands to be dissipated. Since I need to plan my future and have always found walking a great aid to thought, I set off from Crendlesham Hall in an arbitrary direction. Ever since my first visit here, when efforts were made to bamboozle me with obscure Suffolk place names, I have been chary of asking the way. But I have an uncanny sense of direction, as well as the foresight to keep the wonky spire of Crendleburgh church at my back. Pevsner or somebody rated its rood screen; I value its landmark qualities. I passed it the other day: a great pale barn of a place with a notice inside the lychgate posted by the incumbent, the Rev. Daphne Pitt-Bull. She was informing her parishioners that ‘Pilates is at 10 a.m. on Wednesdays’. Obviously the good though ungrammatical Daphne must be planning a
Passion-tide
play and is auditioning for the role of Pontius, a personal hero of mine. I’m amazed they’ve still heard of him in these illiterate, happy-clappy times. It’s cheering for an exile to return to his native land and find that not everything has gone to rack and ruin.

But never mind East Anglicanism; I have my own future to think about. I hop over a stile and set off across a field. As I was adding the final, highly artistic, untruths to my portrait of Millie Cleat I had two other possible assignments lined up. One was to write a biography of my glittering host, Max Christ. When I broached this idea with him he promised to give it his earnest consideration, but that was months ago and he is probably hoping I will have forgotten. Really, he is too distinguished to care about such things, and anyway, at
forty-seven
he’s still too young for anything as retrospective as a life. In fact, Christ is the polar opposite of the sports heroes I’ve
been writing about, who tend to become geriatric at thirty and whose ‘stories’ have to be told before they’re old enough to have done any real living. I have always thought it would be far more revealing to write these people’s lives when they are sixty or so. I suspect very few would avoid a sorry saga of decline. Sometimes they linger on as commentators or run a chain of sports shops, and sometimes they invest in one of those night clubs where fights break out at night and guests are rushed to A&E with uncomfortably lodged snooker balls. But for most of them it’s a long twilight of drink and flab and
self-pity
, which makes me feel that there may, after all, be some justice in this uncaring universe.

My other project was something I have already made a small start on. This is the biography I mentioned earlier of Nanty Riah, aka Brill, the leader of Alien Pie. Doubtless you will remember how his buttocks were riddled with bullets
during
an art theft from his private jet – it was top of the world’s news stories for at least a week. I’ve grown quite fond of old Nanty, largely because there’s no side to him – other than, of course, his backside with its little perforations that so
dominates
his conversation. Unlike most pop stars he’s under few illusions about his social and artistic value, as opposed to his financial worth which is indeed immense. There’s something touching about his Harpenden background, his total alopecia, his devotion to his retarded sister and his sporadic faithfulness to his wife. However, as I tramp along one of the few Suffolk hedgerows that hasn’t yet been grubbed up by agrivandals I don’t feel any great enthusiasm for ghosting Nanty’s story. My finances have improved too dramatically. He can wait, I say to myself; and this liberating thought is enough to break the spell of silence that living with Adrian’s in-laws has forced upon me, for I am by nature a singer.

I don’t know whether you’re familiar with Richard Strauss’s comic operetta
Wienerparodien
? It was a little essay in
nostalgia
he wrote while waiting for Hitler and his SS to blow over and has some terrific stuff for a Heldentenor in the Richard
Tauber mould – exactly, as it happens, in the Samper mould too. The dashing but irascible captain of horse, Fechter (a demon with the sabre and whimsically known to his comrades as the Knight of the Long Knives), is about to marry Ernestine, Count Schütterbart’s daughter. On the night before the
wedding
the Count takes his future son-in-law aside with some well-meant but inept advice couched in an aria that generally brings the house down (‘
Nach Anbruch gut verschließen! Trocken and kühl lagern!
’). Fechter takes offence and is on the verge of challenging this repulsive old man to a duel. Instead he contains himself with a struggle and makes a bitter riposte with an aria that generally brings the house to its feet. It is a virtuoso tirade. ‘
Bei sachgerechter Lagerung
,’ he begins
sarcastically
, ‘
mindestens haltbar bis wann?
Wann?
’ before
hitting
his triumphant top C on ‘
Siehe Prägung!’
Then, their honour restored, the two sit down to a platter of Viennese cream cakes while the orchestra plays a
Rosenkavalier
-ish waltz.

Such is my vocal verve that I notice plovers three fields away taking hurriedly to the air with black-and-white wingbeats. Good: Samper is definitely back on form, even though
unwillingly
back in the land of his birth. However, amid this tense musical concentration I seem momentarily to have lost my bearings. I look in vain for Crendleburgh church on its low hill – not that there are any other kinds of hill hereabouts.
Nothing
but a horizon of wintry stalks with some moth-eaten woods nearby. I have an impression of telephone poles beyond a distant hedgerow disappearing behind the wood, which
suggests
a road. Also, between the trees a vague patch of pale something that might just be a house but will probably turn out to be a swag of old man’s beard. Anyway, there’s nothing else to aim for so I head towards it, taking a short cut through the woods.

These turn out to be much less moth-eaten than at first glance. They are, in fact, a dense jungle of mouldy willows and ground elder and dead trees held upright by straitjackets of
ivy. I lean against one to scrape the mud off my boots and with an awesome groan it topples slowly and crashes to the ground. The place is a death trap. Suddenly a crotchety, fluting voice addresses me out of the jungle.

‘You, there! What the hell do you think you’re playing at?’

I peer into the tangle of branches and brambles. It is like one of those pictures in children’s magazines in which you’re told there are five lions hidden and can you spot them?

‘Do you realise what you’ve done?’

Now I see him: a tall, gaunt old geezer wearing what looks like an ancient army battledress jacket and corduroy trousers of an excremental colour, balding about the knees. His hands, I notice, are huge: all veins and knuckles. One of them holds a pair of secateurs. He is fixing me with a glare from washed-out ceramic blue eyes half hidden like a terrier’s behind wild white eyebrows.

‘I’m afraid I’ve lost my way,’ I say in a pacific tone.

‘Pity it wasn’t your voice. I assume it was you making that infernal row just now? Sounded like pigs being castrated.’ He bends stiffly to examine the tree I have knocked over. His clothing hints at the skeleton beneath. ‘I hope you know this marvellous plant you have just vandalised was the last of its kind in Britain? Probably in Western Europe.’

‘What do you mean, vandalised? The thing fell down. It’s dead.’

‘Nothing of the kind. Allow me to know my own garden. This noble plant is a unique tree with historic connections. It was brought here by T. E. Lawrence as a sapling in 1912. He was excavating at Carchemish at the time, and the shoot was presented to him by the Emir of Aleppo, who had taken a fancy to him. They were both buggers, of course. This’ – the old man indicates the corpse with his secateurs – ‘is
Commiphora
byzantina
, related to the myrrh tree. It flourished here for nearly a century despite its Mesopotamian origin, itself a miracle, and it bloomed beautifully each year. And now look at it.’

‘Obviously we’re none of us immortal,’ I offer by way of appeasement. ‘I’m sorry, but that tree is defunct. You can’t push a live tree over just by leaning against it.’

The old man snicks at it with his secateurs and holds up a sprig. ‘What’s that, might I ask? Green, wouldn’t you say?’

I am beginning to get impatient with this old bore. ‘I’m sorry,’ I apologise again for what I vow is the last time, ‘but I had no idea this was a garden. You must be a member of Jardins Sans Frontières.’

‘Never heard of ’em.’

‘It’s a horticultural society dedicated to abolishing fences.’

‘Don’t believe a word of it. You must be blind, anyway.’ The glare intensifies and a khaki-clad arm sweeps the air. ‘What do you think that is?
Euphragia monocotylens. Aspergilla
trades-cantii
there.
Dendrofolium physoloides
over there. And look there – Vanessa Bell planted that
Forsythia brucei
with her own hands in 1937. “No idea this was a garden”, indeed. Full of rare plants. And very shortly Lytton Strachey’s hollyhocks will be coming up exactly where you’re standing.’

I take a nervous sideways step with an apologetic glance at my feet. All I can see are nettles and ground elder.

‘Not there!’ comes the squeaky bellow. ‘You’re right on top of the hypericums! Duncan Grant used to paint them. He would come up from Sussex each year. He was living with Vanessa by then although of course he was a bugger, like
Maynard
. Are you a bugger?’

‘I really …’

‘Thought so. Can always tell. But you’re obviously no
gardener
.’

‘Tell me how to get to Crendlesham Hall and I’ll get out of your garden.’

‘Crendlesham? Crendlesham? That where that musical johnny lives? The conductor chappie?’

‘Max Christ, yes. I’m a guest of his.’

‘Are you just? I suppose he’s a bugger too. They mostly are. Like that Britten fellow. We once gave him an entire flowering
branch of that
Commiphora
you’ve just murdered. Wanted it for one of his operas over at Snape. Never so much as a
thank-you
, of course. They’re like cats, you know. All over you until they get what they want, then just walk away.’

‘If you point me in the right direction I’ll do the same.’

A ragged bony arm extends the secateurs. He looks like an illustration by Mervyn Peake. ‘Down there. Hundred yards, there’s the road. Exactly where you’d expect it to be. Turn right. Go on past the crinkle-crankle wall to the junction. Turn right again. Signposted. Only a couple of miles. I doubt even you could miss it. And mind my lizard orchids on the way out, they’re very rare in Bri— No! To your left! To your
left
, dammit!’