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 –’
But at this moment there’s a hooting from the drive down below. We go to the window and glinting in the porch light is the roof of a taxi. Standing next to it is a mountainous man in furs, one arm thrust through the driver’s window. When he turns to go into the house the light from the open front door falls on his face, revealing him to be wearing a full gorilla suit. When eventually I fly downstairs to make sure my hors d’oeuvres will be in readiness – it being elementary etiquette that one does not keep gorillas waiting for their food – the creature is sitting at the kitchen table with a gin and tonic in his furry fist, chatting with Max. Josh is in his dinosaur pyjamas by the Aga, his arms entwined in its chrome rail for safety, one pink foot standing on the other, nervously entranced. Max introduces me to the man in the ape suit, who is a clarinettist with the Colchester Symphony Orchestra that Max has so brilliantly built up to be one of the world’s best by luring just such instrumentalists away from the Berlin Phil. and elsewhere. When you’re in the market for the best available talent it doesn’t pay to be overly fussy if it turns out eccentric.
‘Nice suit,’ the gorilla says to me, raising his glass. His mouth looks obscenely wet, like that of a bearded man.
‘Thanks. Ditto.’ One tries to be civil to these wind players.
‘I was telling Max that I’ve just been molested by my taxi driver. He wanted to feel my perineum.’
‘Ah. If he was a Pakistani it was the same fellow who drove me out here last year. He suggested we stop and explore the local scenery, which he pretended to know intimately.’
‘Khurshid,’ says Jennifer from the stove. ‘So he should. He was born in Suffolk, which I imagine is more than any of us in this room can claim. His parents were from east Pakistan as was, which I suppose makes him a Bangladeshi by descent. But he’s entirely East Anglian. I know all this from the local paper. He did six months in Colchester for feeling men’s bottoms, or similar. But he’s a good reliable driver, for all that he’s a fantasist about the landscape hereabouts. He told Gerry that a low hill on the way here is known as “the Crendle” and was where they used to execute horse thieves. Something like that, wasn’t it?’
‘Exactly that,’ I say. ‘Whereas when I arrived you told me the Crendle was a stone monument that figures in one of Constable’s paintings.’
The gorilla empties his glass. ‘According to him just now, the hill is named after an Anglo-Saxon monster who lives underneath it in a huge cave, sleeping until the sea rises to wake him, which this driver seems to think will be soon, what with global warming.’
‘East Anglia must be the sort of landscape that begs you to invent stories about it in order to give it some interest.’
‘Mummy,’ interrupts Josh, who is tying himself in embarrassment-displacing knots while hanging from the Aga’s rail, ‘why does this man feel men’s bottoms?’
‘What a good question,’ I breathe, with all the insouciance of one not obliged to answer.
But at this moment there’s more banging on the front door and Jennifer hustles her son off to bed. His question floats with piercing clarity on the air behind him like a waft of Chanel Number Five or some other equally identifiable scent. Max takes the ape off into the sitting room so I can get on with some serious dishing-up. I’m beginning to worry about my mouse vols-au-vent. It’s hard to know when to transfer them to the top oven: they can so easily dry out. At this moment a stocky workman wearing a faded blue boiler suit wanders in.
‘Evenin’,’ he says. ‘Name’s Spud. Did the missus tell you where she’d left me beer and butties?’
‘Beer and …?’
‘Me sandwiches. Corned beef, usually.’
‘Corned beef? Are you quite sure you’ve come to the right …? I mean, I doubt if … Corned beef?’ I repeat faintly. Even in dear Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis’s recipe book, penned as it was in the depths of wartime, there is not a single mention of this substance. Maybe like pemmican and biltong it retains a sort of gritty chic among the unshaven adventurer set as they fan up the camp fire to keep the jackals at bay. There again, there is a Protestant continuum in Britain and her ex-colonies – including the United States – in which a perverse pride is taken in elevating crisis fare to the status of national delicacy. Baked beans spring to mind. Salad cream is another example, bearing the same relation to gastronomy as Bryl-creem does to hairdressing. At this nonplussed moment Jennifer returns.
‘Oh, hullo, Spud,’ she says. ‘I didn’t realise you’d arrived. I was just getting Josh to bed.’
‘Evening, Mrs C. I’ll be getting out of your way.’
‘There’s a crate of your favourite in the cellar, if you wouldn’t mind? And I’m afraid we may be out of corned beef. Can you make do with cheese and pickle? And onions?’ And soon Spud is settled at a table in the scullery with bottles of Greene King ale and enough bread and cheese for a gang of ploughmen with tapeworms. Producing a rolled-up tabloid newspaper from a deep pocket in his boiler suit he looks all set for an intellectual evening with the Sun crossword.
‘Who on earth?’ I ask Adrian sotto voce when he comes in for some olives, and nod towards the scullery.
‘Spud? He’s Dougie Monteith’s driver. Or factotum. Partner, really. They’ve been together thirty years at least. Spud’s a Wykehamist, as I expect you could tell. He’s only ever called Spud, but I imagine he must have had a surname at school. You’ll meet Dougie shortly. He’s Sir Douglas Monteith, Bart. A real baronet, ancient family, total black sheep. Passed over for Lord Lieutenant of the county, probably for cohabiting with a Winchester man and much, much more.’
‘And Spud doesn’t eat with us?’
‘No, no. He doesn’t do formal. He lives quite happily in garages and sculleries and garden sheds and, we presume, used to make himself available in the master bedroom before Dougie got too old.’
‘Golly. So that’s what Lord Chatterley got up to that drove his wife into a gamekeeper’s arms.’
‘Presumably. It’s pure Suffolk. One foot in the twelfth century and the other in the thirteenth. One day someone’s going to wander into one of these villages and find them drawing up a list for a children’s crusade. How are your hors d’oeuvres?’
In deference to my artist’s temperament Adrian hurries off to get everyone to the table while I briefly finish off my precious savouries in the top oven.
There is something about the magic moment when one enters a dining room bearing fuming dishes of one’s latest creation that can never quite be equalled. Alone, we artists know what it is to make an entrance. The great pianist who walks impassively through a heavy shower of applause towards his waiting instrument; the superbly starved supermodel who sets off down the catwalk, her eyes bright with cocaine; the actress who stalks imperiously from the wings in time for the Act 5 dénouement: all relish their professional moment of glory. But tonight I dare say Samper gives his public that little bit extra when he sails into the Christs’ dark-panelled dining room wearing Erminio Zaccarelli’s linen and merino suit and with a huge tray of original masterpieces. Which, I may say, I come within an ace of dropping when for the first time I have a look at tonight’s guests. Even though I know he will be there, the sight of a gorilla sipping a pre-dinner sherry is still disconcerting, and all the more so because the man inside the suit is making no concessions and is evidently prepared to dine with his costume’s head on. And the rangy aristo in the moth-eaten Norfolk jacket is … good God! … that appalling old buffer who only a few days before so rudely drove me out of his jungle domain full of Bloomsbury plants. Tonight his faded blue eyes hold not the least sign of recognition as he fixes his gaze on my crotch while politely inclining his head to hear his neighbour, who is … Marta! I don’t believe this. What is the frowsty old buzzard doing here, if not come to torment me with crowings over my fallen nest?
‘Gerree!’ she cries from her perch at the far end of the table. ‘You’re looking so much better than when I last saw you. And what a lovely suit!’
This disarms me, of course, just as she intended. Crafty as ever, that’s our Marta. ‘Marta, darling,’ I greet her. ‘You’re looking wonderfully well. I’ve so missed you this last couple of months.’ I begin distributing the dishes. As I do so Max gets to his feet and introduces me graciously as a friend of the family and the author of the recent bestseller, Millie!, whose subject died so dramatically at Christmas aboard her yacht in Sydney harbour. He also mentions that the film rights of his book have been sold for ‘a substantial sum’. He then sits down and people make obligatory clapping gestures. I expect I blush prettily.
‘This substantial sum of yours,’ observes a man with a costermonger’s face and a dreadful gold Rolex, ‘I’d hang onto it with both hands if I were you. Otherwise old Max here will have it off you toot sweet.’
Amid sycophantic laughter Adrian introduces the costermonger to me as yet another knight: Sir Barney Iveson, who seems to have been the CSO’s principal financial benefactor and all-round good fairy while Max was building up the orchestra. I suppose transfer fees are high these days and I wonder how much Max had to fork out to lure the ape away from the Berlin Phil. or wherever he talent-scouted him. ‘You know Barney’s the inventor of the Shangri-Loo?’ Evidently my expression conveys bafflement because as I hand around the last glasses of liver smoothie Adrian explains to the barrow boy that I’ve been living abroad in Italy for years, otherwise I would surely be familiar with the huge success story of the Shangri-Loo, the exotic lavatory that has become an indispensable part of the modern British bathroom. ‘The new millennium’s equivalent of the jacuzzi,’ he finishes, provoking in my imagination images not wholly compatible with gourmet dining.
An ape, a lavatory manufacturer, a nonagenarian black sheep and Marta: is this really the dazzling gathering of intellectuals with whom I was hoping the Samper wit might cross swords? And Adrian was spot-on about my being overdressed. If the lavatory king’s trousers aren’t polyester I need my eyes testing. Even old Marta seems to have forgotten what little dress sense she acquired in America and has reverted to her old babushka chic, being bundled up in a shapeless frock of midnight blue netting sewn all over with glass beads and sequins. She looks like the wife of a Communist Party official on holiday at a Black Sea resort in the 1960s. I feel I should write a note to Signor Zaccarelli apologising for his beautiful suit’s exposure to such ignominious slumming. And as I finally take my seat I’m further annoyed to find I must have miscounted somewhere and have no mouse vol-au-vent of my own. Presumably I’ve given somebody two by mistake since I seem to have two After Eight Minces. It’s in the nature of things that chefs often never get to eat their own creations and must rely on less discerning palates to learn how successful they are.
The full irony of this last statement only becomes apparent some twenty minutes later when the second course, two magnificent roast legs of lamb, is well under way. Beneath the influence of my brilliantly inventive starters, whose ingredients I refuse to divulge despite all entreaties, conversation has been animated and convivial. Given the peculiar and ill-assorted company, however, it has been less than intellectually dazzling. The creaky old baronet who chivvied me off his patch of Eden has been giving Marta some detailed reminiscences of his Bloomsbury friends of seventy years ago, and serve her right. Judging by overheard snippets of the Bart.’s conversation his set were people of excruciating inconsequence and I can’t imagine Marta has the vaguest idea who they were, any more than we would be familiar with the leading lights of Voynovia’s Vorticist movement in the 1930s. But having to listen to the old buffoon with a semblance of interest will be good for her manners. Meanwhile, the Samper etiquette has itself been under strain as the costermonger tells me exactly how the Shangri-Loo ‘Dream’ model differs from the carbon neutral ‘EcoTwirl’ model, not to mention the ‘Arabian Nights’, whose ‘gossamer fingers’ feature pursues hygiene entirely too far for any dinner table.
Over the last five minutes I have noticed the general conversation flagging somewhat, doubtless on account of my informant’s graphic descriptions of advanced sanitation techniques. People are eating more slowly and with increasingly thoughtful expressions. I am just trying to think of a way to shut the costermonger up when the Baronet decisively puts down his knife and fork and is clearly about to hold forth. All the better: he has the immunity of old age and can be as rude as he likes. Abruptly his huge gnarled hands clutch the edge of the table as though to push himself to his feet. As he rises, he begins ‘I …’, but his sentence is cut off by a sudden hawser of blue-brown vomit that stretches wide his mouth and hurtles across the table, hitting a Wedgwood bowl of roast potatoes at least four feet away. He collapses back on his chair and heaves again, this time swamping a pot of mint jelly. And as if this were the trigger that releases everybody else’s inhibitions, the others promptly follow suit. Stomach contents empurpled with Max’s superb ’97 Bolgheri Sassicaia and launched at projectile speed knock over wine glasses and even salt cellars. Several diners retain enough control to attempt to stem their torrents with hasty wads of napkin, but such is the force that subsidiary jets spurt out at the sides, in one case upwards into the diner’s own hair, in another into a neighbour’s neck. In a matter of seconds a perfect dinner table is splattered with liver-coloured lumps and froth, the reeking air full of the sound of retching. Not since the grosser feasts of Ancient Rome can there have been such a scene of mass gastric ejaculation. Gleaming strands now bow down the innocent spring flowers that comprise Jennifer’s charming centrepiece, drool joining the snowdrops’ heads to the drenched tablecloth. I notice the gorilla is particularly under the weather. Presumably the costume’s designers overlooked the possibility that its wearer might be overcome by violent regurgitation. No doubt the mouth wouldn’t open widely enough and the inner contours of the moulded plastic must be redirecting a good portion of the flow internally. This would explain the lumps of sick pouring from both eyeholes and the luckless clarinettist’s frantic but blind attempts with his paws to find the Velcro straps that will release his head.
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”.’
‘That was before I knew they were lethal. Also before I’d tasted the liver smoothie. God, no. I don’t even want to think about that.’
Here, Max shambles in with a couple of policemen and shambles out again to go to bed. The great maestro appears to have aged overnight. He complains of feeling too weak to go into a recording session, which he has had to cancel. That will cost somebody something. The policemen politely but firmly refuse my offer of coffee, no doubt thinking it will be laced with arsenic or strychnine, and things quickly become very boring indeed. Their ponderous opening sally sets the tone. ‘Obviously, the death of Sir Douglas Monteith has made this a very tragic affair, sir. There is not the slightest suspicion of anything other than a terrible accident, but you will understand why we need to ask you a few questions, sir, as the person who prepared the food but who alone was unaffected by the poison.’ And much in the same vein, with undercurrents of forensic menace. Oh, what am I doing in this benighted land? Why am I not still up in the blissful seclusion of Le Roccie? And why is my house there not still standing? What malign fate has had all this in store for me?
So I go over it yet again and show the policemen the outhouses where I set the traps. I describe how I made all three starters, concealing only the exact quantities from them. One doesn’t give priceless recipes away to the police, especially not to men philistine enough to express incredulity when I describe the dishes. Suddenly, I’m very relieved that in the general excitement of my financial windfall I clean forgot to mention my inauspicious first meeting with the Baronet. I had intended to tell Adrian about my encounter in Monteith’s jungle, but by the time he arrived with Josh’s microscope there were more pressing things to think about. Now I realise how important it is that the police never find out that Sir Douglas and I exchanged tense words some days ago, even if the addled old buffer appeared not to recognise me last night. Certainly I don’t wish to give the police the least impression that as far as I’m concerned, the Bart.’s demise is one of those human tragedies that make one’s sides ache. Now, in the course of our explorations, we come across the potting shed where the Christs’ gardener – whom Jennifer describes as ‘a treasure’ – has his lair. Here the policemen poke about and become excited over an ancient bottle with a corroded cap on a shelf. The label reads ‘Squillo-Death’ and has a faded picture on it of a rat in terminal agony. Using plastic gloves they drop the bottle into an evidence bag.
‘And you say you’ve never seen this bottle before, sir?’
‘Absolutely not. In fact, I’ve never even been into this potting shed. The kitchen garden is not somewhere I visit frequently.’
At last they go away to interview the gardener, also taking with them all my new ‘Little Nipper’ mouse traps. And in due course it is confirmed that the bottle of red squill is indeed the culprit – or rather, the gardener is, the dear old Suffolk treasure who without telling anyone blithely put down bait laced with a banned rodenticide around a house with a six-year-old child in it. There remains the conundrum of how a poisoned mouse wound up in one of my traps. It is assumed that because squill doesn’t act instantly the luckless rodent was able to move on for a second course of excellent cheddar cheese before falling victim to an old-fashioned spring. Thus the amount of this highly emetic substance actually ingested by Crendlesham Hall’s luckless diners was very small, and fatal only to a very old man with a dicky heart. The police do not return, and things slowly revert to normal, at least on the surface. It is acknowledged that I am not directly to blame for the disaster, the gardener is fired, and in due course we all dutifully troop over to a draughty church to see Sir Douglas’s mortal remains buried beneath six feet of earth but with, we are implausibly assured by a robed comedian, the lively expectation of his eventual resurrection. The grieving Spud is plainly unreconciled to the idea that I am not guilty of his aged partner’s death. He is but distantly civil, while I do my best to express sincere regrets without implying the least degree of responsibility, like a Japanese politician when obliged to comment on the War in the Pacific. For me the most distressing part of the proceedings is being unable to wear my Zaccarelli suit. The jacket is saved but the trousers are ruined. In my urgent efforts to bring Crendlesham Hall back to normal on that fateful night I forgot I was wearing them as I knelt and scrubbed and disinfected. One cannot kneel on patches of wine-tinged vomit in linen and merino mixture without irreparable damage, as I later discovered.
For Jennifer and Max the whole episode has been something of a social disaster in that news of a fatality at your dinner party inevitably gets around. For a while there is even some loose talk of the costermonger suing. This is mere rumour and, being friends, all the guests amiably agree to write it off as just one of those unfortunate things. Nevertheless I can’t help feeling a line of sorts has been drawn beneath my welcome at Crendlesham Hall. It simply makes still clearer a conclusion I myself have already reached: that it is high time for Samper to move on.
I do, however, have a valedictory conversation with Marta, with whom I haven’t otherwise had a chance to swap news. She is a little pale but otherwise seems undamaged. There is stout stuff in these Voynovians. I suppose after occupation by the Soviets everything else must seem minor by contrast. In my usual guarded fashion I’m genuinely pleased to see her, although apprehensive of what new indignity I am about to suffer at her hands. I am still touched by the memory of her bedraggled state last night, her Iron Curtain finery plastered by vomit to her ample body. It gave me no pleasure to see my old neighbour so miserably reduced, poor thing.
Yet as usual Marta manages to wither my sympathy with an artless piece of news. By one of those brutal little ironies I seem to attract, it turns out she is herself engaged in writing an opera! She is over in the UK to see her librettist, Sue Donimus, whose name makes me groan with vexation. She is a literary prizewinner who feels the world is clamouring to hear coma-inducing details of her private life, such as exactly how much she recently spent having her teeth straightened. A bullish creature in tartan trews, she was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature mainly because the panel was too intimidated by her to turn her down. She is most famously the author of an unusually disgusting flagellation novel, Heavily Tanned Men, a book widely seen as stylish and liberating. Overnight it made her the darling of the sort of people who have darlings, starting with herself. The only thing one can’t blame her for is writing under a pen name, since my agent Frankie has assured me the name on her passport is Wendy Marsupial. I now dread to imagine what the attraction is between Marta and this ‘doyenne of transgressive literature’ (London Review of Books).
This news that Marta is writing an opera casts an immediate pall of doubt over my own nascent plans. Blast her! Why should her project have the least influence over mine? Especially as I assume any libretto by Sue Donimus will involve distasteful and even fashionably gross scenes onstage, whereas my own ideas are jelling fertilely around the timeless dramatic themes of love, heroism and grief. Yet at Marta’s casual announcement I feel enthusiasm for my own grand project beginning to wilt. Does this mean I have unconsciously been hoping that Marta might write the music to mine? Might I actually have wanted to lay myself open to an artistic partnership with this increasingly successful musical frump?
But now the frump breaks into my uneasy speculations with news from Le Roccie. It seems the Italian authorities are viewing the remains of my poor house – which they laughably claim they are guarding from looters – as a potential source of pollution. They cite cooking gas cylinders that will corrode, oil and fuel leaking from my half-buried Toyota Ass Vein and a ruptured septic tank as endangering the environment and the town’s artesian water supplies. Also, the Corpo Forestale dello Stato are considering taking out an action against me for fly-tipping, would you believe, on the grounds that my protracted absence indicates ‘the intention permanently to abandon, in a protected area of the rural patrimony, unsorted debris and refuse contrary to environmental statutes currently in force’. Marta is reading this from a note she took to make sure I get the full majesty of the phraseology. I particularly love ‘unsorted’. The implication that I might be prosecuted less rigorously had I taken the trouble to separate the ruins of my house into categories as for the correct rubbish bins – paper, glass, iron, non-ferrous metals, organic waste and the rest of it – is the final ludicrous straw, given Italy’s generally cavalier way with rubbish.
And here’s another strange thing. After my initial relief at being freed from the burdens of home ownership and personal possessions, these very things start to make a case for themselves at the back of my mind, like an exasperating lone councilman who at the last moment makes the trenchant objection that stops a motion going through on the nod. My recent experiences as a guest at Crendlesham Hall are no doubt contributing to the suddenly alluring prospect of once again having a space of my own to myself: one in which county deadbeats and jokesters in fancy dress don’t come to dinner, disgrace themselves, and lead to my being interrogated by policemen as though I were Dr Crippen or Graham Young. And for the first time since the awful night of my fiftieth birthday party, I actively begin to miss certain items buried beneath the collapsed hardcore littering a far-off mountainside. One such item is my independence.
In short, it’s back to Italy for Gerald Samper just as soon as I can book a flight.