Rancid Pansies (6 page)

My first instinct was naturally for the safety of my Zaccarelli suit, and I sprang up and backed away from the table even before my costermonger neighbour exploded into the gravy boat and beyond. I reflect that it’s all very well making a private
fortune out of bringing dernier-cri luxury to the nation’s lavatories if you’re then reduced to publicly blowing chunks into a bowl of perfectly braised leeks. It is a tribute to my
self-confidence
as a cook that even now it doesn’t immediately occur to me to suspect my own handiwork behind all this. Nonetheless, I do seem to be the only person unaffected, although the sight and sound and smell are making it likely that if I stay I, too, will shortly succumb. Leaving behind a chorus of groaning and splashing I dash for the kitchen with some vague idea of fetching paper towels and pitchers of cold water. Off to one side I glimpse Spud in the scullery munching stolidly on a doorstep of bread and cheese.

‘How’s it going, then?’ he calls, banging crumbs off his newspaper.

‘Equivocally.’ Carefully I remove my lovely jacket and hang it out of harm’s way. Over the roar of tap water I add: ‘I think we may have problems. The phrase “throwing a dinner” has just acquired a new level of meaning. Perhaps you’d better come, if you wouldn’t mind.’

By now the possibility that Samper might somehow be to blame is beginning to sink in and provides yet another reason for my reluctance to return to the dining room. Not for the first time while dining in Crendlesham Hall I feel a real urge to sidle out of the front door and start running. But my Norman forebears were not called ‘Sans Peur’ for nothing and anyway a gentleman must take responsibility for his actions, no matter how well-intentioned. So back I go with a large jug of water and a roll of kitchen paper, albeit not with any real
enthusiasm
. I can hear Spud’s heavy footsteps and jaunty workman’s whistle behind me. Little does he know.

The scene is awesome, the smell worse. A few, their worst spasms over, are struggling weakly to their feet. Marta looks as though she has been at the epicentre of a cataclysm
involving
industrial quantities of porridge. I think her outfit may have intercepted some of her neighbour’s early heaves. Her great, sodden, muslined bosoms sparkle in the lamplight, 
though the sequins are dulled. Max, too, is on his feet, leaning heavily on the table and occasionally spitting. The ape is now headless, and the small gingery face of the clarinettist within glistens with mucus and clots beneath thin plastered hair. The fur on his chest is matted and dripping.

‘Bleedin’ Nora,’ says Sir Barney Shangri-Loo feebly, also beginning to stir. ‘What the hell was
that?
’ To judge from one side of his coat he appears to have taken much of Jennifer’s liver smoothie in his left ear. And yes – the way things are
sliding
and plopping off his jacket confirms that it, too, is
polyesterous
. It’s odd what secrets these little crises throw up. Meanwhile, over on the far side of the table it seems from Spud’s hoarse cries of ‘Dougie!’ that all is far from well with his baronet, who is slumped back in his chair with his eyes shut.

‘Don’t just stand there,’ Spud throws at me as he feels the old man’s neck. ‘Get an ambulance, quick! Get ten! They’ll all have to go to hospital, the lot of them.
Now!
Get your skates on!’

The clear, incisive tones of Winchester suddenly give him the authority he lacked as a boiler-suited Man Friday. Obediently I go out into the hall and dial 999, stressing that the house is that of the world-famous conductor Max Christ and that he himself is one of at least six other victims. Back in the dining room I find that everyone bar the Baronet is now walking wounded. I open the French windows and let in some welcome cool night air. People totter out to the terrace with glasses of water and there comes the sound of much gargling and rinsing and spitting. Jennifer comes back in and leadenly begins
stripping
the cloth and its gastric load off the table.

‘Leave that, Mrs C,’ Spud tells her. ‘It’s evidence. You’ve all been poisoned. They’ll want to know what it was. Help me get Dougie on the floor, if you can. I need to do heart massage.’

Standing here amid the debris of what until only five
minutes
ago was a staidly tasteful dinner party, the discrepancy between my intention to pull off a culinary coup and the awful
outcome is too huge to be plausible. It still feels like nothing to do with me. ‘What hath God wrought!’ was the phrase Samuel Morse sent to congratulate God on having invented the first practical telegraph. I am inclined to employ the same phrase right now, the whole thing clearly being God’s doing and not Samper’s. My insufferable pious stepmother Laura once told me that Morse had borrowed the phrase from the Bible, which being itself the Word of the Lord makes it just the sort of
self-praising
utterance the Almighty favoured. I feel very strongly that if He could take credit for the Morse code, He can jolly well do so for this carnage in Crendlesham. As to whether
anyone
else will agree is another matter. The coroner, for instance, I think as I snatch a glance at the ancient Baronet who, flat on the floor with Spud pumping on his chest, looks as though he may already have gone the way of T. E. Lawrence’s myrrh tree.

Perhaps because like his sister he is young, Adrian seems over the worst. In the kitchen he grabs a tea towel and douses his head under the tap. Then, drying his hair, he pushes me none too gently into the comparative privacy of the scullery.

‘Okay, Gerry,’ he says. ‘You’ve done it this time. Out with it! What did you put in the starters? And don’t fool around, we haven’t time. As it is, Dougie may not make it, he’s
ninety-three
or something. They’ll need to know in A&E. What was it?’

‘Scout’s honour,’ I say, ‘I’ve no idea. I bought most of the stuff in Woodbridge.’

‘“Most”. What was the rest?’

‘Er – just the odd field mouse. Good fresh country fare.’

‘We’ve just eaten field mice?’

‘Quite small ones. Eleven of them. I trapped them myself.’

‘You’re sure they were all trapped?’

‘Honestly, Adrian.’

‘Using what for bait?’

‘Cheddar from the fridge.’

At this moment – and welcomely interrupting the sort of cross-examination one scarcely expects from a lover twelve
years one’s junior – the first ambulance arrives and Dougie with Spud in attendance is swiftly removed and whisked off into the night with flashing lights and braying sirens. A second ambulance comes after five more minutes. In addition to its two-man crew this one carries a medic with a mobile phone.

‘They say it looks like food poisoning, right? I need to know: were there mushrooms in any of the food?’

‘None in my dishes,’ I say, and Jennifer equally firmly says no.

‘Okay, then, no mushrooms. Is there anyone
not
affected?’

‘Well, er, me I suppose.’ How is one expected to say this with regret?

‘What didn’t you eat that the others ate?’ the doctor asks me while busy assuring himself that the rest of the guests will live, at least in the short term, before they are led off to the waiting vehicle.

‘Just one of the starters,’ I say. With tedious inevitability the subject of mice crops up once more. Obviously this unpleasant young medic fancies himself as a bit of a thesp and grossly overdoes the ‘registering incredulity’ bit.

‘You’ve been eating
field mice?’

‘Yes, yes,’ I say wearily. ‘Why not? People said they were delicious. It so happens that –’ But what’s the use? I needn’t go into further details of being quizzed by a succession of people wearing uniforms of one sort or another who sooner or later strike attitudes of morbid rectitude. Honestly, the dim
moralism
of the British! The various sufferers are meanwhile carted off to hospital for ‘observation’ after I’ve promised Jennifer faithfully that I will look after her son. ‘You’d better,’ Adrian adds quite unnecessarily. At last silence falls and here I am, in sole charge of Crendlesham Hall and its other human
occupant
, Josh, who has presumably remained blissfully asleep throughout the various comings and goings.

By tradition, survivors at a scene of tragedy either howl
hysterically
or sit listlessly. Neither is the Samper way. I direct my energies into clearing up the mess. The tablecloth, heavy with
evidence, has been removed in a plastic sack, ditto the greasy oven tray in which the mouse vols-au-vent were baked.
Samples
have also been taken of the liver smoothie and the After Eight Mince: I only hope that whatever analysis the scientists contrive will not enable them to filch the recipes of my
still-unpatented
masterpieces. Even in the absence of all these items there is no lack of things to purge, quite apart from the
washing
up. If atonement is supposed to afford humiliation on top of decent apology, then doing the washing up at Crendlesham Hall on this night of the Great Puke has to be reckoned
atonement
at its most abject. By the end, the dining room looks more or less its old self and no longer like the Augean Stables after a prolonged bout of equine flu, although the faint scent of disinfectant lingers in the air from where I had to scrub the carpet. Incredibly, I even found a pea stuck to the panelled wall at shoulder height and there may yet be others. The kitchen, too, is back to normal.

I promised Jennifer I would look in on Josh in case he woke and was frightened to find no one about. I don’t feel much like sleep myself but on my way up to the attic I find Josh
wandering
with the crushed, drugged look that woken children have. I gather he’s thirsty and wants his mother to bring him some water
now
. I explain that everyone got a bit ill suddenly and had to go to hospital for a few hours but that they’re quite all right really and will be back in the morning. So for the moment we two men are in charge of the house and the cat. He says he had a bad dream about gorillas and I assure him the gorilla is also in hospital and there are absolutely no
gorillas
on the premises. Seeing he is unconvinced, I reluctantly agree to his proposal that he share my bed upstairs while I keep any stray apes at bay. So he brings along his favourite stuffed dinosaur, who is apparently deadly to gorillas, and is soon asleep in a distant corner of my vast attic bed in which at length I also manage a few hours’ oblivion.

My many weeks of being a guest at Crendlesham Hall have, in Josh’s eyes at least, accorded me the status of a member of
the family, or at least someone he can feel free to whack with a stuffed dinosaur at six in the morning because he’s hungry. Why anyone
elects
to be a parent I can’t imagine. So we are both long up and about when, at seven-thirty, the first
taxi-load
arrives with people wearing clothes still spattered with dried flecks of the evening meal. It is nice to be able to hand Josh back into his parents’ charge, but not much else is a
pleasure
. I have been dreading this moment from the instant I was bullied awake. It had always seemed inevitable that there would be some quite nasty recriminations, but it turns out that things are even worse. Sir Douglas Monteith is now recumbent in a mortuary freezer, the result of a massive overnight heart attack brought on by convulsive vomiting, which in turn was due to …

‘… but you get my drift,’ Adrian ends grimly. ‘However you look at it, Gerry, last night you murdered a baronet in the
dining
room of Crendlesham Hall. And the rest of us have had a fucking awful time. Anyway, the police will be here shortly and you can try bad-taste Cluedo jokes on them if you like.’

I am contritely brewing coffee as a peace offering and I must admit this news upsets me to the extent that I allow the milk to boil over, something I haven’t done in years. Jennifer, bless her, comes to my rescue and is a good deal more conciliatory than her brother.

‘Come on, Adrian, be fair. Gerry didn’t
deliberately
poison anyone. It was obviously a horrible accident.’

‘Well, okay, I know that,’ my loyal lover grudgingly
concedes
. ‘But all the same, you’ve got to admit there’s something about it that’s typically Gerry. Extravagant, irresponsible and just generally misplaced. Even Josh would have had more sense.’

‘Might somebody kindly explain what this poison is that I’m supposed to have administered?’ I ask with commendable quiet dignity but inevitably sounding like a defendant at the Nuremberg trials. ‘In my irresponsible and generally
misplaced
way?’

‘They think it was rat poison,’ Jennifer explains, ‘but they won’t know for certain until they’ve done more tests. But they do say the symptoms are a good pointer.’

‘Specifically,’ her brother adds with his not very charming air of technical omniscience, ‘they said it was probably red squill, which is extracted from the bulb of some plant or other. It works on rats because they can’t vomit. Luckily for us we can, as you may have noticed. That is, if “lucky” is an
appropriate
description for what happened to poor Dougie,’ he adds.

‘But it makes no sense,’ I protest. ‘Obviously I don’t have any of this stuff. I caught all my mice using ordinary
mousetraps
and cheese. So where did the poison come from? It might have been in any other part of the food last night. I don’t see why everyone immediately suspects me and treats me like someone in an Agatha Christie novel.’

‘Think “probabilities”,’ says Adrian. ‘The entire meal, apart from your contribution, was perfectly standard fare. Yours was most definitely not. I can’t speak for the rest of us, but
personally
I’m finding the time-honoured way of trying to
pinpoint
exactly what gave me food poisoning isn’t working in this case.
All
the starters seem nauseating in retrospect.’

This is deeply wounding. ‘Others, including yourself, were full of praise at the time,’ I point out with some asperity. ‘I seem to remember you called my little hors d’oeuvres “
inventively
sublime”.’