Rancid Pansies (4 page)

Eventually the petulant hectorings die away behind me. God, what a place. I’m lost here. This is no longer my country and even to recall that it’s the land of my birth makes it feel like a concession to me that they still speak English and drive on the left. Get out while you can, Samper. Italy was never like this. Strange to think Ovid might have gone home after
Augustus’s
death and found that in his long absence Rome had become horrid and incomprehensible. He did well to die in exile; there’s nothing so disillusioning as returning to one’s native land. Crinkle-crankle, indeed. But I soon come upon a brick wall that waves in and out with sinuous curves and assume this is it. And the old sod’s instructions do prove
accurate
and soon I can see Crendleburgh church in the distance. But out of nowhere it suddenly comes to me, whether via Richard Strauss or this ludicrous encounter: what I’d
really
like to do is write an opera, commission the music and have it performed. Why have I never given this serious thought? It would so perfectly match my talents. Opera was my first love, of course, but the trouble with first loves is that one needs to pluck up too much courage to do anything more than gaze at them from afar. Still, money does wonders for self-confidence and I really think (already singing as I walk along) this is something I simply have to do.

By now I’m well into the celebrated Buggers’ Chorus from Act 1: ‘Balls to his hollyhocks! / Uproot his hydrangeas! / Teach him some manners / To perfect strangers!’ Somewhere in my mind’s eye the curtain comes down to a storm of applause, while on the road to Crendlesham the startled
pee-wits
flap restlessly on all sides. It’s wonderful what a good solid sum of money will do for the spirits. But foolishly, and for quite some time, I forget a cardinal item of hard-won Samper wisdom. It is
never
safe to heave a sigh of relief.

The kitchen presents a scene of peaceful normality, though hardly of the kind that once reigned in my sweet Tuscan farmhouse, despite the heady regressive scent of baking. Jennifer is stirring something on the Aga. Luna the cat is asleep on a tea towel on the work surface next to it, her tail draped across a block of butter on a plate. Josh is sitting on the kitchen table in his underwear, licking the remains of chocolate-flavoured cake mixture out of a bowl. I notice his pants are on back to front, as so often. It’s sheer luck whether the little pest puts them on the right way round, as with his shoes: a reminder that it will be years yet before he becomes fully human. At the moment he’s really just a collection of more or less noisome valves, though at times he can be quite ornamental.

With her back to me his mother says, ‘Max still raves about your birthday dinner, you know. He thinks that badger Wellington was superb. I’d have had you do it for this dinner, only we couldn’t guarantee to find you a badger in time.’

‘Alas. But there’s also the gun-dog pâté, don’t forget. That’s an essential filling. I suppose in default of Italian-style hunting accidents I could hang around the local vet’s back door and make a quick offer for the bulging bin liner even as the wailing owners retreat to their Volvo out front, leaning against one another for support. All the same, I’m none too smitten by the idea of meat containing a lethal dose of anaesthetic.’

‘But you are doing us an inventive hors d’oeuvre instead?’

‘It’s all in hand,’ I tell her loftily. ‘You specified something a little out of the ordinary and I’m working on it.’

‘I was quite hoping it mightn’t involve that plastic pot in the pantry fridge with things in gore.’

‘Very delicious, that will be. You lack faith in the Samper artistry. I’ll say no more.’

‘Promise me it has nothing to do with bats, Gerry,’
Jennifer-the
-hostess says anxiously, turning around.

‘Certainly I promise.’

‘Eeeuwghh,
bats
?’ Josh looks up with gleeful horror,
chocolate
cake-mix glistening in his hair. Blonds really can’t afford to be careless in their eating habits.

‘Just carry on,’ I tell him. ‘When you’ve finished with the bowl there will still be plenty left on your face. I promise: no bats. But I did wonder for a moment whether an authentic hedgerow broth mightn’t be made by gently seething some owl pellets. Do you think? Obviously one would need to strain out the fur and the voles’ teeth; but if the Chinese can make soup out of birds’ nests held together by avian phlegm, I see no
reason
why owl pellets mightn’t yield an equally interesting stock. I rather fancy chanterelles and a smidgin of fresh ginger would set it off admirably.’

‘But pellet soup’s not on tomorrow’s menu?’

‘I’m afraid not. One more thing that required notice. But I had a good morning’s shopping in Woodbridge earlier.’

‘Finished!’ announces Josh, banging the bowl on the table. Luna stretches and her hind paw gets enough purchase on the butter to push the plate away, leaving a deep footprint.

‘I want to know who’s coming,’ I say, ‘but Max won’t tell me.’

‘Oh, you know him, Gerry. He’s just a tease. There’s the odd local we owe hospitality to, and a player from Colchester
Symphony
Orchestra. We’ll only be eight. I’m going to do a plain ordinary roast and to hell with it. We look to your starter to add the exotic touch. Josh and I will be off to the butcher to collect the meat tomorrow morning so you’ll have the kitchen to yourself.’

So next morning, having ruthlessly ejected the cat, I lay out a small but highly select variety of things in plastic pots, ready for their translation into something rich and strange, like
somebody’s father in that play I did for O-level. Over the years I have, of course, amassed a great number of inventions for teasing the palate, not a few of them themed. (My Men of
Violence
suite of starters includes Pol Pot Noodles, Somozas, Shin Fein – a divine junior cousin to
ossobuco
– Papa Duck, Kim Jong Eel and my celebrated Mobster Thermidor.) But today I shall stick to a mere three or four little appetisers, one of which was suggested by that wonderful book,
Emergency Cuisine
by Dame Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis. If one needed a glowing example of staunch British gallantry in the war years this little gem of a book would supply it, so practical in the face of adversity and so sunny and uplifting in tone. Winston Churchill’s speeches undoubtedly stiffened the sinews and summoned up the blood of his people as they crouched around their sunburst-fretworked wireless sets; but Dame Emmeline would have taken both sinews and blood from novel sources and made of them novel sauces to fill their bellies with fire. The loss of her book in the recent collapse of my house, together with that equally irreplaceable volume, Maj.-Gen. Sir Aubrey Lutterworth’s
Elements of Raj Cookery
, is a blow that may yet prove serious enough to make me send in the
bulldozers
after all to see if they have survived.

What
Emergency Cuisine
reminded me was how good field mice can be. Indeed, in the nineteenth century they received a famous accolade from Frank Buckland, who used to
supplement
his meagre public school diet with such delicacies. ‘A toasted field mouse, not a house mouse, makes a perfect bonne-bouche for a hungry boy. It eats like a lark.’ So for some days I set traps in the extensive stables and outhouses that
surround
the Hall, and these yielded ten – no, eleven on a recount – plump specimens which I kept secretly in a foil-covered pot in the little fridge in the pantry where Jennifer seldom goes. The worst job was skinning and boning them: there’s nothing more fiddly. For discretion’s sake I did it in my bathroom up in the attic. Even so, Luna must have caught the enticing scent because she came miaowing at the door. The skins and entrails
had to go down the lavatory. The result of my labours was what Jennifer had disparaged as the ‘things in gore’ in the fridge. It’s true that, when thoroughly unzipped, eleven field mice yield not much meat at all; but if there are only the eight of us that’s nearly a mouse-and-a-half apiece. The question is, which way to do them? One can cook the meat very gently with a little butter for a bare minute or two, add the merest dribble of mouse broth and use this delicate hash as a vol-
auvent
filling. On the other hand you can cream the meat with a pestle and mortar, ideally with a little goose fat and a teaspoon of the best Armagnac you can find, set out the mixture in blobs on a baking sheet and grill them quickly. These are Samper’s justly renowned Mice Krispies; and as a way of teasing the palates of visiting gourmets they are unsurpassed. They
somehow
manage to give off an aura of warm haylofts and
hazelnuts
nibbled amid stubble beneath great yellow harvest moons. For the present occasion, though, I incline towards the vol-au-vent solution which it now occurs to me could easily become vole-au-vent with a slight change of its rodent filling.

So that’s settled. I put the tiny giblets and skeletons (how touchingly frail they are!) on to boil in a bare cup of water with a quarter of the smallest shallot I can find and a single juniper berry, and turn to the tender Cumbrian lamb I had the butcher mince up fine for me in Woodbridge yesterday. This, too, can go into puff pastry cases, enriched with tiny quantities of chocolate, à la rabbit in chocolate that the Mexicans do so well. Into the mixture go four drops of Fernet-Menta, the Branca Brothers’ bid to attract to their exquisite original
product
a wider public than hollow-eyed topers. A little finely chopped basil and fresh mint will add green top notes, and my betting is that Samper’s After Eight Mince will not soon be forgotten. Of course, both these little
amuse-gueules
are savoury. Ideally, I would like an additional dish of sweet beetles for my diners to crunch on – probably the candy-bug
Scarabaeus
gastromellifer
that Guatemalan Indians give their boys as a reward for not crying during circumcision, an operation
performed by the village shaman using his or her teeth. These yellow-spotted delicacies have the additional advantage (for a dinner party, that is) of being mildly aphrodisiac. But in default of such exotica in Suffolk I think I shall accompany my ground-breaking hors d’oeuvres with my patented liver smoothie (served with a slice of lime, a sprig of basil and a sprinkling of hundreds-and-thousands as a final touch of
festive
playfulness). It really is just too banal to serve nothing but unrelieved savouries before a main course. Finally – and all those years in Tuscany have clearly left their wholesome mark – some
bruschette
spread with my inventive haddock
marmalade
, which isn’t sweet but is wonderfully confected with sour cream, a pinch of cinnamon and cooked lime peel,
carefully
de-pithed to avoid bitterness.

Adrian, bless him, turns up for a conventional bread-
and-cheese
lunch. I am itching to consult him about my grand operatic plan but first he has to play dutiful uncle to Josh. He has brought his nephew a junior microscope which he sets up on the kitchen table. They look at several prepared slides of the sort of unsavoury little creatures one swallows without noticing while swimming. Then he and Josh go outside with a jam jar to sample ditchwater or a puddle and for the next half hour they peer at daphnia and paramecia and amoebae
swimming
about. Cries of delight from Josh, who is especially pleased to watch them slow down, dry out and die beneath their cover slips in the heat of the lamp. Then they examine one of Luna’s hairs. I am astonished to see Josh, whose
attention
span is normally that of a grasshopper, diverted for so long without the least sign of boredom. Is this perhaps the eureka moment when we realise we have another Richard Feynman in the making? It would obviously please his scientist uncle but it would probably please his musician father even more, Max having once confessed he wished he’d been a palaeobiologist instead of a conductor. Maybe at the age of six Richard Feynman, too, wore his underpants back to front out of sheer other-worldly brilliance.

Later, while changing for dinner, I tell Adrian about my operatic plans. However, my sketching out a grand future is halted by having to decide what to wear in order to wow these Suffolk grandees. I can’t wear my Blaise Prévert suit in
chocolate
corduroy: it had its first outing right here at Crendlesham Hall some months ago and is for ever associated with an unfortunate social gaffe I inadvertently made in the course of the evening. I also wore the same adorable suit a little later for a crucial dinner aboard an Australian billionaire’s yacht and that occasion, too, brings back discomforting memories. The upshot is that this masterly creation of Blaise Prévert’s is, through no fault of mine or his, unhappily tainted. My mohair and denim slacks by His Majesty would have done admirably, but fate arranged for me to be wearing them at my last
birthday
party. The result was that not only did they spend part of that night on a bare mountain and the rest in Marta’s sopping slum, but they were all I had left to wear for the next several days. When eventually I retrieved them from the dry cleaner in Woodbridge I realised they were beyond saving. The mud and scuffing of that traumatic night had ruined them. It begins to seem as though anything decent I buy to wear is sooner or later doomed to bring humiliation, ruin and despair upon their blameless owner. But since taking up with Adrian I have had optimism thrust upon me, and it takes more than reverses of fortune to turn a Samper into a sloven. I went to London and did some necessary shopping. Given that practically my entire worldly wardrobe was lying beneath tons of rock and earth on a mountainside high above Viareggio, it seemed a pretty good excuse for doing the January sales.

I now break out a creamy linen and merino suit by Erminio Zaccarelli so drop-dead gorgeous that even if tonight’s
assorted
bumpkins affect to be unimpressed by my financial windfall they will at least be obliged to fall properly silent before such sartorial poetry. Adrian has been wittering on in the
background
about the sort of opera libretto I might write when he breaks off suddenly.

‘Good God, Gerry, are you going to wear that suit?’

‘I am. It’s rather a masterpiece,’ I say a little stiffly.

‘I can see that. All I meant is that it’ll be like putting on tails to do the gardening. You wait till you meet the guests. Have you never seen orchestral players when they’re not in black ties in the pit? Think Oxfam. Or better, Millets.’

‘Well, I can’t help that. It’s the job of a peacock to make ordinary fowls look dowdy, and all the more so if the peacock has just sold its film rights for a quarter of a million quid. It’s very salutary for the rest of the barnyard. It pushes the bar higher even as it lowers their spirits. Anyway, what was it you were saying?’

‘About your opera? Just that I think your talents are perfect for farce, Gerry. Try this. Two newlyweds go abroad for their honeymoon. Their plane is hijacked and they’re held captive by the modern equivalent of Barbary pirates in one of those pretend countries like Mauritania. A sort of
Il Seraglio
parody but full of topical zingers. Their captors are extremely radical. In fact – yes – they’re the militant gay wing of Al Qaida,
that’s
how radical. They’re demanding th—’

‘No, Adrian. That’s not at all the sort of thing I have in mind. I’m aiming for the grand and the serious, not a satirical musical.’ I zip up my gorgeous new trousers decisively.

‘It can be called Has
Anyone Interfered With Your Bag?’

‘No it can’t. I admit that’s a great title but no, Adrian. My ideas are running more along the lines of something lofty and sad. I’m toying with the
Epic of Gilgamesh.’

‘What’s that?’

‘
What’s that?
Honestly, you scientists. Where have –’