The scene is the drawing room of Balmoral Castle, nearing teatime on a rainy afternoon around the year 1990. Present are the Queen, on her knees on the hearthrug tempting a corgi with the sort of things corgis find tempting; the Duke of Edinburgh, who is listlessly leafing through a magazine devoted to field sports; Prince Charles in a kilt, who has just found Sir Stamford Raffles’s History of Java in the Castle library and is reading passages from it aloud to a potted banana plant to make it feel more loved; and Princess Diana, a downcast presence who, as the orchestra begins its lead-in, leans back on an overstuffed sofa with her exquisite arms thrown wide along its back. It is a posture both of despair and of transcendence. Wearing an outfit by Versace, she is outstandingly the best dressed person in the room with the possible exception of the corgi, whose au naturel look is unassailable. The Duke’s wardrobe, in particular, appears to have come from a Range Rover boot sale. Diana sings:

 
DIANA: This place is gloomy as a tomb
I really feel I’m dying here
So far from London and its pleasures.
 
  Heads of dead animals everywhere
Slaughtered for the leisure
Of heavy men in heavy tweeds.
 
DUKE (speaks):
  		Oh Christ, here we go again!
DIANA: The rain outside just falls in sheets.
In darling Gianni’s clothes I shiver
And Manolo’s slingbacks melt in this rain.
 
QUEEN (speaks): One can buy perfectly good Barbours
in Ballater. Wellies also.
 
CHARLES: Oh why must you be so difficult?
Marrying me was your own choice,
No one twisted your delicate arm.
 
  You only had to raise your voice,
Put your foot down, sound the alarm.
But making history turned your head.
 
DIANA: Oh why must you be so boring?
It’s no secret that you never
Loved me, even though I shut
 
  My eyes and thought of England twice
And twice became my country’s slut
Though proud to be their mother.
 
DUKE (speaks): A nice sort of squabble for your
wretched in-laws to have to listen to! Damned
bad form, frankly. My God, this place: weak tea
and moaning women. I’m off to the gun room
for a Scotch.
[Exit]

I just thought I’d run a draft of the opera’s first scene by you to give you a foretaste of my libretto and to convey its dramatic, slightly foregone tone. Diana’s liberation is close at hand, when with her boys at boarding school and her husband busy with the organisational minutiae of shoehorning adultery into his tight ceremonial schedule she can devote herself to charity work and a fun time. No longer is she the ‘Shy Di’ of her engagement ten years earlier: the demure, biddable kindergarten teacher who innocently allowed press photographers to pose her like a Bendy Toy against the light so those 24-carat legs were outlined against the filmy white background of her dress. Now, through her amazing wardrobe (requiring two full-time staff to manage) and the confidence that cult status confers, she goes her own way, disco dancing and hobnobbing with lepers and other outcasts such as far-flung British Army units. I’m afraid I daren’t divulge the two arias I have written for her and Charles when their respective extramarital affairs become revealed via eavesdropped conversations. I’m pinning great hopes on these ‘Squidgy’ and ‘Tampax’ scenas and it would be a shame to spoil their effect by giving the game away in advance. Suffice it to say they employ a device that as far as I know is novel in opera although not in gynaecology. I’ll say no more. Marta has promised me she will devote her best energies to match the brilliant words with equally brilliant music.

Oh dear, though – there are so many good things. I long to quote them so they will send you scurrying to buy tickets before they’re all sold out. For instance, Diana’s tragicomic number on learning of her friend Gianni Versace’s death not long before her own. It begins:

and if you think you catch a whiff of banality there you must remember that the very essence of opera (not to mention musicals) is cod philosophy and stock human emotion. The words alone shouldn’t try to express anything too deep otherwise they push the music into second place, and vice versa. I’m sure you’ll remember Richard Strauss and Clemens Krauss thrashing all that out pretty thoroughly in Capriccio, based on the old parody by Casti, Prima la musica e poi le parole. In Strauss’s opera Flamand the composer and Olivier the poet are constantly trying to decide which comes first, the music or the words. This question was to remain open until decades later when the lyricist Sammy Kahn settled it by saying ‘The cheque’.

Again, I don’t want to give away too much but at the start of my final Act, following Diana’s death and just before the scenes of her dramatic apotheosis in the Vatican and beyond, the stage will be completely dark except for a single spot. A voice with piano accompaniment will sing an old ballad that she loved, the nineteenth-century folk prototype of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ called ‘Dilated Wench Inn’. This is a very moving moment and I worry about the sort of smartarses who might think it funny to make anagrams of this classic song’s title such as ‘Wild, thinned acne’, ‘Dent-chinned wail’ and things involving candles. In order to remove the temptation I have re-titled it ‘Much adieu about nothing’:  

‘Bad taste’ do I hear? The tutting of the petits bourgeois? At the risk of sounding immodest by implied comparison, I remind myself that Beethoven was shocked by Mozart’s choosing to set the libretto of Così fan tutte. The deaf prude from Bonn thought it in execrable taste. Reaching a friendly hand across the centuries to little, farting, periwigged Mozart I can reassure him that there are worse things than being accused of bad taste. Being praised for good taste, for one. And writing lyrics full of grammatical howlers for another (the Brown Dirt Cowboy please note). Oh – and as a final note for now, I’ve written a quite spare speaking role for the Duke of Edinburgh who appears in several scenes. He acts as an irascible, pithy version of a Greek chorus and is often silently onstage in one corner, cleaning a 12-bore shotgun. I confess I’ve shamelessly tailored this part for myself. As many people will know, my singing voice is rather exceptional but, alas, not professionally trained and I don’t think Donizetti-like roulades would fit well with Marta’s music, which to me sounds like an idyllic marriage between Prokoviev and Jonathan Dove. So I’ve written myself a largely silent but always expressive part in my own opera. Sometimes I think my whole life has been nothing but an overture to being onstage at last.

And prematurely onstage I already am these days, though it is causing me nothing but chagrin. L’affaire Darcie Barrington has produced world-class hysteria. Led by the Italians, the whole of Europe’s media have converged on Le Roccie these last weeks. Leo Wolstenholme’s footage of the child discovering she can see has been shown and re-shown until, like the Twin Towers standing and falling and standing and falling over and over again, it no longer feels like before-and-after so much as a permanent state of indecision. Like the pornographic freeze-frame it has become emptily iconic of nothing but itself, although for Leo and Co. it must surely be iconic of a large sum of money. Things have eased a bit now but at its worst, when the town was practically besieged by newshounds wearing some of the most abominable deodorants you ever smelt, I dared hardly stir out of the Belgian’s flat for fear of being buttonholed by complete strangers demanding I cure symptoms so disgusting I marvelled they could still be alive. For the first time ever I began to feel a sneaking degree of sympathy for the late Jesus Christ, who must have encountered similar problems – and he was operating in pre-Judaean National Health Service days. I had become so easily recognisable because Il Tirreno’s stills of me examining that Diana statuette were syndicated everywhere over absurd and lying copy claiming that the late Princess was ‘channelling’ through me which, like tunnelling through Paris, must equally be a doomed activity for her. Still, the nuns in my building drop creakily to their knees when I pass them on the stairs, and sheer embarrassment as well as noblesse obliges me to raise a hand in vague benediction.

Up at Le Roccie it became such pandemonium I put on a large pair of dark glasses and went and fetched Marta and Joan, bringing them back to the Belgian’s spare bedroom where they crammed together for a night before I found them the last hotel room in town. They stayed there a week until the worst was over. Despite all the upset and subterfuge Marta seemed oddly unperturbed. I don’t know what’s got into her: I’ve never known her so sunny. Resignation? Love? The days go by and Joan is still very much in residence with her. At least they accept their love nest has now been terminally squatted on by the huge smelly vulture of cult religiosity and are resigned to leaving for good. This has privately cheered me, as you may imagine: Marta’s reign as Queen of Le Roccie has been amusingly brief. Complete strangers with vile diseases knock at her door demanding to use the lavatory or to be healed. What they get is Joan’s tattooed, muscular forearm barring the way and some rich English naval expletives.

Yet despite all this disruption Marta’s mood remains defiantly merry. She has spent her time down here in exile reading my nearly completed libretto and now tells me it is ‘brilliant’. To be strictly accurate, what she said was ‘Gerree, never I have laughed so much. It is brilliant satjriski, yes?’ This is no less gratifying, of course, since she told me a long time ago that because of their post-war history of Soviet occupation Voynovians take satire extremely seriously as an art form. For them it always floats as a wafer-thin layer over great tragic depths, like an iridescent film of tanning oil on a fathomless ocean. I am completely certain that she recognises my opera’s fundamental high seriousness. She is, after all, a serious artist herself and would hardly waste her talents on setting anything but the best texts. And if I needed further assurance, the great Max Christ himself says that if she finishes the score in time he will première the opera next year in his own prestigious Haysel Festival. If it succeeds there it will naturally become squabbled over by Covent Garden, Glyndebourne and the Met. I draw the line at Garsington.

I should explain the origins of this festival. Some time in the past I alluded to Max and Jennifer’s early days in Crendlesham Hall when they were still in the throes of renovation. One of the reasons they chose the house was because of its immense and ancient barn about a hundred yards away known as ‘the Haysel’, one of those daft Suffolk dialect words dating from the days when the peasantry couldn’t pronounce ‘haymaking’, which is what I’m told it means. Apparently, when haymaking was finished the sunburned swains used to occupy as much of this barn as wasn’t stuffed with hay for the sort of drunken revelry that kept the local birth rate soaring. In 1521, only the other day by Suffolk standards, the bawdiness became so unbridled that Crendlesham’s rector was himself erroneously inseminated in the prickly depths of the mow. For many years thereafter an effort was made to conduct the haymaking festivities with a little more sobriety although it was noticed that the rector himself never missed a haysel, presumably in order to quell any immorality as soon as he saw it. But eventually he died and the annual celebrations in the great barn returned to their former licentiousness and according to parish records continued pretty much unchanged until twentieth-century prudery, the mechanisation of farming and the diminishing need for hay brought this venerable tradition to an end. After that the barn became little more than a shelter for rats and decaying tractors and fell into an advanced stage of decrepitude. Max’s ambition had always been to restore the huge old building with its oak timbers salvaged from tall ships down the ages. He planned it as a concert hall where he could hold a summer festival to showcase his now-famous Colchester Symphony Orchestra and introduce young composers and instrumentalists. Thus the Haysel Festival, which after a bare couple of seasons in the beautifully refurbished hall has already become a fixture in the diary of anyone who fancies themselves in touch with music. So Max’s promise to première Rancid Pansies (memo: find a proper title!) at the Haysel will ensure it the best possible launch for an international career.

Tonight I am once again behind the wheel of a Toyota Ass Vein: a ‘new second-hand’ copy of my original found for me by a minion of my insurance company, probably under a deal I should wish to know nothing about. What I do know is that it is a better bargain than if they had simply given me the cash value of my junked vehicle. I may perhaps now moderate the curses I’ve been requesting little St Bernard to call down on Dottoressa Strangolagalli. Perhaps after all boils, goitres and prolapses were a bit on the harsh side. Incurable rectal itch should do it; and I like to think of her having to squirm through meetings, business lunches and Sunday Mass with those blood-red talons unable to dig in for relief. People will think she’s harbouring widow’s mites or something.

If I gave you three guesses as to where I’m off to this evening I doubt if you would divine correctly, just as until very recently I myself would have been aghast at the idea. I am in fact going to dine at the weasel Benedetti’s own home; and what is more, his other guest is to be il sindaco himself, the mayor, which will show you the sort of circles Gerald Samper is obliged to move in these days. Not by choice, mind you. These things are about politics, and no doubt both Benedetti and the mayor would privately agree that if it weren’t for politics they themselves would have little enough incentive to fraternise with foreigners out of hours.

In idle moments over the years I have occasionally wondered what sort of house an estate agent like Benedetti would choose for himself, much as one wonders what the wife of a professional pornographer would look like. Probably quite ordinary in both cases, I have assumed. Certainly Benedetti’s house is attractive enough and not at all flamboyant. On the edge of town with a good-sized garden and a splendid view of the mountains, it’s a typical square house in the local style with grey stonework interspersed with two or three horizontal courses of bricks, all beneath a tiled roof. Probably a hundred years old, it is a handsome, solid family house spoiled only (in my view, though not according to local taste) by being surrounded by stone walls set with railings and an immense pair of electrically operated wrought-iron entrance gates. Such are de rigueur in these parts; and the old saying about an Englishman’s home being his castle, when compared with the imposing ironwork and electronic security measures with which Italians surround quite ordinary houses, acquires a certain pathos by being exposed as purely metaphorical.

Unsurprisingly, Benedetti in his leisure hours is as sprucely turned out as when he’s in his office or disguised as an English prep-school master of yesteryear. Tonight he is in a beige pair of moleskin slacks by Carisma that can’t have set him back less than €300. His borrowed Asian plumage looks as though he has coiffed it with hot asphalt, so richly black it gleams.

‘Maestro!’ he greets me with a passable display of warmth. ‘I am honoured that you have stretched your precious time to include a visit to this humble house.’

‘Who could resist an opportunity to deepen a friendship hitherto regrettably confined to office hours?’ I riposte, reclaiming my hand which now smells agreeably aromatic: Lorenzo Villoresi’s ‘Piper Nigrum’ if I’m not mistaken, revealing that the weasel has better taste in eau de toilette than I would have given him credit for. I follow him into the salotto where there is a large black retriever lying on the floor that I suspect might have been acquired to go with the Range Rover. There is also a middle-aged lady with a kindly, shrewd face whom my host introduces as his wife Bettina in a resigned sort of tone that suggests she might have been acquired to go with the house. This is someone I’ve been looking forward to meeting for some years: the unseen person who sends her husband out into the world each morning as dapper as a beetle, his shirts and handkerchiefs blindingly white and flawlessly ironed, his trousers pressed hard enough to squeeze the dye out of them, his shoes burnished. This polished man must have an equally polished partner, I thought. But Bettina is not at all in the mould I have invented for her.

‘I’ve heard such a lot about you,’ she says as we shake hands. ‘What with all the publicity I had no idea what to expect. I’ve never met a lightning conductor for sanctity before.’

‘And I’ve never been one before. The whole thing’s absurd. However, the good thing about lightning conductors is that whatever current passes through them leaves them quite unchanged.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Bettina says. ‘So I needn’t pretend to believe everything the newspapers are saying?’

With some pleasure I notice this good lady’s informal outspokenness is not going down too well with her husband. Benedetti is frowning in a way that betrays his wig’s independence from his scalp.

‘Nonetheless, cara, there are undoubtedly mysteries involved –’ he begins pompously but just then there are sounds of arrival outside and he bustles out almost at a run.

‘Have you met our mayor before?’ Bettina asks, her voice conspiratorially dropped.

‘Never. I’m just a foreign writer who until recently lived a long way out of town and spent his time quietly scribbling. What’s his name again? Orazio something?’

‘Giardini. To tell you frankly, I am not of his party and I pray daily for his arrest for the scandal of the cement at our public swimming pool. Remind me to tell you some time,’ adds this admirably indiscreet person hurriedly as male voices approach. I’m fast warming to Bettina, who seems very much my sort of gal.

The old-fashioned English phrase used to be ‘a gentleman of full habit’, but the modern epithet ‘obese’ at least starts off on the right foot when it comes to describing the man Benedetti is ushering into the room. Had his habit been any fuller he would surely explode, showering us with tripes and trouser buttons. One could with accuracy describe Mayor Giardini as terminally fat, and with assonance as mortally portly. He has hooded eyes that make one think of a corrupt Renaissance cardinal. At once I begin to wonder quite how wise it is to be doing deals with a man like this, no matter how indirectly. With a familiar weasel like Benedetti it all seemed a bit of a game but seeing in the abundant flesh exactly where this town’s buck stops is sobering.

Novelists often describe very fat men as having dainty feet and small hands, which presumably just means these appendages appear small by contrast with the bulk they’re attached to. If Mayor Giardini’s feet look quite normally sized, his hands are actually rather large. The same novelists also claim that such men move ‘with surprising lightness and delicacy’ – again, one assumes, compared with the lumbering progress one would expect. Mayor Giardini unquestionably lumbers. I vaguely recall that his last election slogan was ‘A Big Man for a Big Job’. Having greeted Bettina he turns to me and envelops my hands with a strangler’s grip. He has the politician’s trick of making it seem as though we are old friends rather than a couple of complete strangers who, left to their own devices, would never have wished to meet.

‘It was a happy day for us when you decided to take up residence in this Comune,’ he announces while ensuring that no blood is still circulating in my fingers.

Never let it be said that signor Samper can’t do the formalities. ‘It is an honour to meet you, Mayor,’ I lie.

‘Orazio, Orazio,’ he corrects me. ‘We’re all friends here.’

Bettina, who vanished briefly, reappears and announces ‘A tavola!’ As we move into the dining room I automatically translate the mayor’s name as Horace Gardens and with a shock remember this as a quiet residential road near Kingston, Surrey, where an early boyfriend of mine used to live, lo! some thirty years ago. Thirty! It seems impossible. For a moment pungent memories flood back and swamp the present so that I can’t think what I’m doing on this film set with its refectory table spread with enough food to stock a small supermarket. How did I get from Horace Gardens to Orazio Giardini? On what inscrutable, unforeseeable road? And is young Terry – well, middle-aged Terry now – at this very moment reduced by a similar social commitment to wondering whatever became of me? No, I guess not. Maybe I ought to track him down and invite him to the first performance of Rancid Pa—

– but Benedetti is graciously showing us into our baronial chairs, whose choice is wise if the alternative is the set of antique rosewood chairs ranged around the walls. Mayor Giardini’s voluminous rump would reduce any of them to matchwood. Golly, the Italians do like their dining tables massive! This one is typical: a gigantic polished slab of oak a good ten centimetres thick supported on legs the size of small tree trunks. The thing could seat twenty and must weigh half a tonne. It wouldn’t be out of place in a medieval banqueting hall where, according to Hollywood, troublesome knights were wont to ride their horses up and down the tables, trampling pewter platters and upsetting the ladies in their wimples. (For all I know this may still pass for table manners in Southern California.) But now, as the stout chair beneath the stouter mayor half stifles its well-bred moan of protest, I discover to my surprise and disappointment that only the three of us will be dining. Bettina has done her bit by spreading the table with food and withdraws to leave the menfolk to their important talk. I have encountered this before in Italy. It always seems more than merely old-fashioned and to hark back to a time when Arabs occupied Sicily and the Moslem ladies knew their place.

She has certainly done us proud. There are plates of salumi of every kind including blood pudding, a home-cured prosciutto from which Benedetti is carving wafer-thin slices to drape over oozing melon, bowls of delicatessen goodies, cheeses on wooden platters and a collection of bottles neatly ranged at the end of the table like a set of tenpins awaiting someone’s triumphal strike. There is also a huge dish of golden panzarotti so freshly fried I can hear the batter giving little squeaks and gasps as they cool. All very conventional, of course. Not a mouseburger in sight.

‘Gentlemen, you must forgive this scratch meal,’ our host says, heaping our plates with crumpled satiny rags of prosciutto. ‘But I thought we could all do with a change from formality and have a more down-to-earth evening with true peasant fare. All the meats here come from Bettina’s father,’ he explains to me, ‘who raises, butchers and cures his own products himself. You probably know him already. Nicòla the butcher, down by the fountain?’

‘The best in town,’ I say. ‘I’ve patronised him for years but I’d no idea he was Bettina’s father. This prosciutto is quite amazing.’

‘’na favola,’ says the mayor indistinctly, the compliment escaping wetly from a mouth stuffed and leaking. ‘Superlative.’

There follows some topical and local chit-chat which I recognise as the hors d’oeuvre to the main meat of the evening that is surely the reason for my invitation. I listen more or less curiously to the small talk of these small-town grandees. The mayor mentions the trouble a professor friend of his is having with an Islamic student at Pisa university. This triggers a peculiar and passionate outburst by Benedetti that reminds me of the claim he made to me of having once had priestly leanings. He suddenly puts down his fork and says, ‘It’s all wrong, Orazio, and everybody senses it. We Italians, we Europeans don’t want to be dragged back. We don’t want any more Middle East, thank you very much. It has taken us two thousand years to Europeanise our scripture: to blanch Christ a decent asparagus white and set him in Renaissance landscapes and have snow fall at his birth. We’ve had quite enough of deserts and camels and the sickening cruelties of Arabian tribalism. We’ll keep our bourgeois little Saviour and they can keep their scimitars and stonings and implacable deity baying for blood and vengeance. But we don’t want them here. I don’t mean the people. I mean their quite alien cultural beliefs.’

‘Well of course,’ the fat mayor says placatingly. ‘I’ve got churchmen in my family who would whole-heartedly agree with you. But as you know, we have Moslems in this town and if they go on breeding like rabbits they’ll soon be asking the Comune to build them a mosque. And what then? Build it, obviously. If those Testimoni di Gèova can have their “Kingdom Hall” or whatever the damn thing’s called up there by the cinema on the old Bartoli land, why shouldn’t the Moslems have their mosque? At least they’ll use it, which is more than you can say of our churches and the Catholics in this town. They’re still happily fornicating in bed while Mass is being said.’

Interesting. I had no idea such arguments raged in private in the world of Tuscan town councils. Giardini fixes me with his turtle-lidded eyes and asks me: ‘Well, Mr Samper? Are you a religious man?’

‘No.’

‘I thought not. Eros here wasn’t so certain. But then he’s more attuned to mysteries than I am. Maybe it’s the failed priest in you, eh, Rosi?’

Eros Benedetti? Incredible. Until this moment I’d no idea he even had a Christian name – not that Eros is remotely Christian. If I’m touched it must be the alcohol. This house – or I’m the proverbial Dutchman – is surely childless. No signs of toys anywhere; no rusting basketball hoop fixed to a tree outside or over the garage door; no indefinable feeling that in distant rooms upstairs small children are asleep or morose teenagers are playing computer games and doing their homework. Eros. The Greek version of Cupid. An old weasel disguised as the god of love in a gleaming black wig, pouring me yet another glass of a wonderful complex Chianti Classico (Castello di Ama’s Bellavista ’99 in case you’re interested, as you certainly should be).

‘Hard words, Razi,’ chides Benedetti, but with a distinct glitter. ‘Since you know I never became a priest you can hardly say I failed at it. My failure, if you insist on calling it that, lies elsewhere entirely. As again you know.’

I can’t read the mayor’s expression because his gaze, fixed on the food he is shovelling into a mouth as loose and capacious as the top of a Wellington boot, is hidden behind his heavy eyelids’ scrotum-like wrinkles. But something is undoubtedly going on here between these two rogues Razi and Rosi and I have the startling impression that it is Benedetti who holds more power. He turns to me apologetically.

‘You must forgive two old schoolfriends bickering, maestro. It’s the eternal problem of small towns. We all know too much about each other.’

‘But we don’t know enough about you.’ Giardini raises chill eyes to me, his chins glistening. ‘I don’t mean that inquisitively, of course, just that your presence here is bringing about certain changes and it behoves us to understand how far indebted we are to our benefactor. Our host quite naturally sees more behind these recent events – these so-called miracles – than maybe I do. The hand of God, possibly. But an earthbound creature like myself tends to be interested in the machinery rather than in the cosmic mechanic. Strictly between ourselves, then, how many of these incidents are your invention or at your instigation?’

‘None of them,’ I say firmly.

‘Don’t worry, whatever you tell me won’t change any deal you have entered into with Eros. A bargain’s a bargain. But you understand that if at some future date a piece of evidence emerges that proves you somehow engineered the Diana myth from start to finish for your own ends, this poor town of ours will become the laughing-stock of Italy, Europe, probably the entire world. As its mayor, I am not prepared to countenance that.’

Oh good Lord, how pompous and dreary these functionaries become when they try to ‘talk turkey’ or ‘lay it on the line’ or some such cliché. I didn’t agree to dine with men in suits merely so they could grill me at their leisure. I catch my host’s bland eye.  

‘How can I put it more clearly? I and some internationally distinguished guests were celebrating my fif–, my birthday up at Le Roccie when something happened that we all of us still find hard to describe. I was just serving my guests with wine – a Chianti, I think: yes, a Cellole Riserva 2000 – when I became aware of somebody standing behind the guest at the far end of the table. It was a woman in a sensational blue-grey gown. I remember noticing that her blonde hair seemed to sparkle as though dusted with frost or tiny diamonds. I ought to explain that by this stage of the meal we were none of us stone-cold sober so I wasn’t particularly alarmed. Actually, I think I forgot where I was for the moment. It was like being at a party where you suddenly notice someone hovering on the outskirts of your group and feel obliged to bring them into the circle. In my role as host I believe I said something like “Can I help you? A glass of wine?” But immediately I’d said it I recognised her. It was unmistakably Princess Diana. There was no question. What’s more, my other guests must have realised I wasn’t addressing them because one by one they broke off their own conversations and followed my gaze. I can remember the scene with the utmost clarity. There was total silence, and then Diana spoke. She said very urgently and clearly: “You must all leave this house at once. Get out now, this instant. Don’t wait.” We all heard her, and then she was gone. She didn’t gradually fade or anything. It was as though we all glanced away before focusing again and finding with a small shock she just wasn’t there. But we knew she had been and we’d all heard her speak. Even more convincingly, there was suddenly a very strong smell of “Mitsouko” in the room. Everybody smelt it and no one else was wearing anything like it that night.’

The mayor has been listening with enough attention even to suspend chewing, as evinced by a motionless sprig of watercress dangling from a corner of his mouth.

‘Remarkable,’ he says, his freezing eyes fixed on mine. ‘And in obedience to this spectral command you all immediately left the table, the food, the fireside, the warmth, and went outside on what I remember was a chill and misty winter’s night that must have been even colder up at Le Roccie. I see.’

‘That’s exactly what happened,’ I say. ‘The strange thing is how unanimous it was. No one hung back saying it was just a mass hallucination. We all felt a sense of emergency because of the Princess’s tone. And as a result we have all lived to tell the tale.’ I allow myself a gulp of wine, like a lecturer on reaching the end of a particularly dense paragraph read to a particularly dense audience.

‘And what a tale,’ observes the mayor as he resumes eating. The ignored watercress retreats into his mouth in jerks before vanishing, reminding me of a guinea-pig I once had as a child that used to eat dandelions in similar fashion. Without warning he begins to heave like magma, his face glowing furnace red from wine and high blood pressure. Suddenly we are all three helpless with laughter. It feels both surprising and inevitable. Nor is it ordinary dinner-party jollity. It has the element of hysteria that comes of ditching solemnity and breaking taboos. Anyone who can remember their schooldays will recognise it. Nothing short of Alzheimer’s will make me forget an English lesson one morning when we were doing Macbeth for A-level under a rather serious-minded, even slightly priggish teacher. Someone in our class had found an old copy of an acting edition of the play with stage directions added in a nineteenth-century hand. Those for the sleepwalking scene ran: ‘Enter Lady Macbeth with candle right upper entrance’ and ‘Exit Lady Macbeth with candle left upper entrance’. The ensuing collapse of twenty adolescent boys was so complete the class had to be suspended. The memory can still afford me pleasure at low moments. Some thirty-four years later in Italy our laughter is not quite as immoderate but we have still drunk a good deal and it’s quite a while before we sag back in our baronial chairs, wiping our eyes on our napkins, the mayor making dangerous gasping snorts. I have particularly relished the sight of Benedetti’s toupee holding itself aloof from its wearer’s shakings and heavings, noticeably detached from such worldly displays of emotion. I suddenly feel a bizarre pang of fondness for the man.

‘A most interesting account, maestro,’ says Benedetti at last. ‘Orazio needed to hear it from your own lips. Although I knew the outline of the story myself I have never heard you tell it with such a wealth of convincing detail. We’re greatly indebted to you. So indeed is the Comune. There’s no question that the late Princess did us a very good turn.’

‘And she didn’t leave it at that, either,’ I point out. ‘Don’t forget she also threw the Barringtons’ little girl over the precipice – Marcie or Darcie or whatever she’s called. A wonder the kid wasn’t killed and a wonder she regained her eyesight: two miracles for the price of one. Short of returning in person to sort out your parking crisis I can’t see what else Diana can be expected to do for this town.’

‘No, no, we mustn’t be greedy,’ says Mayor Giardini, his wattles shaking again. ‘The point to remember is that this version of events is now holy writ. The, er, gospel according to Gerry.’ He wipes his eyes. ‘Have you by any chance ever run for public office?’ he enquires.

‘Certainly not.’

‘I believe you might do it quite successfully. You seem to have grasped the vital element of fantasy. One expects the brutal calculations and the dirty tricks but one never quite bargains for the success of flamboyant untruth. No doubt it’s what Hitler meant by the Big Lie. Your present gospel is a surreal masterpiece. My worry is no longer that it will be disbelieved but that it may be actively countered in some way. Never forget the dirty tricks! I agree, Le Roccie looks well on the way to becoming a major site of pilgrimage. I gather there are already some smelly friars hanging about up there and they’re often a reliable indication that there’s money around. They’re the pit canaries of scams. In any case, you may be sure none of this will have gone unnoticed by our neighbours up and down the coast. They will enviously be trying to dream up ways of equalling or upstaging our town’s increasing celebrity. They will also have people looking to explode Gerry’s gospel. We need to be seen as a Comune that is playing host to a remarkable manifestation but in all innocence. Our story needs to be bombproof. I assume,’ the mayor adds with a brief glimpse of his old glacial manner, ‘that the other guests at your dinner party are not likely to suffer from lapses of memory?’

‘Oh no.’

‘A personal account in a London newspaper that was greatly at variance with your own would provide our enemies with all the ammunition they’d need.’

‘There won’t be one,’ I say confidently. ‘If I were you I’d be more bothered about what the Church might do.’

‘The Church?’ says the mayor scoffily. ‘Who cares what the Church thinks? By now the cult at Le Roccie surely has a life of its own.’

‘You may be right, Razi, but the maestro’s point is a good one all the same,’ says Benedetti as he gets up to pour us yet more of his fabulous wine. It is a pleasant thought that this meal must be costing him. ‘The Church still has considerable power in certain quarters, as you know very well. Our opponents would be only too happy to exploit an official denunciation if one were given. Our bishop is a notorious sceptic and supporter of the Vatican’s modern demystification policy. This is, that such popular but unverified manifestations of religious hysteria – their phrase, not ours – ought not to be encouraged. You will remember the Church authorities have recently inveighed against the craze for cutting up the late Pope John Paul’s papal vestments for sale as relics, and he is not yet even a saint. Our bishop preached a sermon last Sunday saying the Church has an urgent need to return to its doctrinal and scriptural roots and can only be weakened by “charismatic sideshows”.’

‘But surely you can have the bishop assassinated?’ I ask with a guilelessness that becomes me.

For a moment Benedetti looks genuinely shocked. The mayor merely rolls his eyes regretfully. ‘If only. Unfortunately, times have changed. Besides, he is my cousin.’

‘I don’t think, Razi, that our friend is being entirely serious. It’s that famous English sense of humour of his. It can be disconcerting until one gets used to it.’

But Benedetti’s prim caution is quite unnecessary as we all spontaneously start giggling again. Suddenly my case for the Church as a plausible threat seems absurd. When he gets his breath back our host says reflectively: ‘You know, what I like best of all about this is that nobody gets hurt and nobody loses. That’s almost unheard-of in politics.’

‘It’s not quite true,’ I say. ‘There is one loser: my poor neighbour Marta, who now badly needs another house. She was, ofcourse, a witness to Diana’s apparition,’ I add meaningfully.

‘Of course,’ Benedetti corrects himself. ‘La signora Marta. I agree, there is an injustice here. I think there’s no doubt the Comune is anxious to help her, Razi, wouldn’t you say?’

The mayor is noisily chomping pecorino and fresh figs and merely nods.

‘I bet it is,’ I observe pointedly. ‘Sooner or later you’re going to need a visitor centre up there, a souvenir shop, God knows what else. That old house of hers would be ideal, to say nothing of her land.’

‘As a matter of fact an outline planning application has already been filed for a hotel in the meadow behind her house should she decide to sell,’ admits the mayor. At this, Benedetti flashes him one of his cautionary glances and I suddenly wonder which of these two rogues put in the application.

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ I say a little untruthfully. I can’t deny I’m piqued to think that since Marta has oodles of her family’s ill-gotten gains behind her she hardly needs the tidy profit her squalid dump is undoubtedly going to net her. Typical. To those that have, still more shall be abundantly added. ‘To jump to an almost unrelated topic, dottore, might I ask how my own house is progressing?’

‘Do forgive me, maestro. I completely forgot to tell you earlier that all the services are now installed and working, except for the telephone which will be connected this week. Essentially, your spectacular new house is already habitable so long as you can make do with a telefonino until your landline is usable.’

‘I’m impressed. Also very grateful. I can’t wait to get my own roof over my head at last.’

‘Just as well,’ says the mayor around an oozing bolus of fig and casein. ‘Before I left home this evening the police rang me from Puglia to say they’ve found your present landlord’s body. So I imagine the apartment you’re living in will have to be vacated. He was a Belgian, I believe.’

Benedetti looks shocked yet again. ‘How dreadful. Whatever happened to him?’

‘Who knows? Apparently he was found floating in Taranto harbour. I believe there was severe damage to the body from ships’ propellers but he had documenti on him including his press card. He interviewed me some months ago about how I won the last election. He seemed a pleasant enough fellow, perhaps a little green. Having nothing to hide I was naturally happy to tell him everything he wanted to know. Although at the end I warned him that not everyone would feel the same way, he evidently didn’t take the hint and carried on regardless. It is the problem of the journalistic profession, especially with foreigners, as I’m sure you will agree, Gerry.’ His eyes swivel towards me with the dispassionate panning of a CCTV camera. ‘How can one ever be certain of the full implications of even the most innocently asked questions unless one knows a culture from within? In which case one would know not to ask them. Politics is a touchy subject everywhere. I’m afraid our Belgian must have been naive as well as an indifferent swimmer. Being out of one’s depth often proves fatal.’

‘You’re beginning to sound like a badly scripted noir film, Razi,’ says Benedetti. ‘Not only is the maestro here superbly experienced in his profession, he is so wonderfully at home in both our language and culture that I can never remember he is not by birth one of us. Besides, I’m sure that poor Mr Swanepoel’s death was a complete accident.’

The mayor is licking fig seeds off his fingers. ‘Even so. One can’t be too careful.’

I can’t get the hang of this evening at all. Something in the dynamics between Benedetti and Giardini remains baffling. More and more I’m convinced that of these two rogues it is the weasel estate agent rather than the mayor who calls the shots, but I couldn’t say why. With all this talk about floating corpses I can scarcely be blamed if my mind turns to thoughts of organised crime. I remember hearing someone allege that places like Lourdes and Fátima and Santiago de Compostela are run by mafias attracted by the constant stream of desperate pilgrims with money to spend on anything that might somehow be translated into miraculous cures. Maybe even here in Tuscany the racketeers are beginning to lick their lips in anticipation of a steady source of income and some fiefdoms are being staked out? Could it possibly be that beneath Eros’s shining and luxuriant wig there sits a made man, an éminence grise who helped put his fat old schoolfriend Orazio into office? It would explain how it is that a mere local estate agent has been able to do deals with me on behalf of the Comune. And most convincingly of all, how he has been able to arrange for the services of my new house to be connected in record-breaking time.

After another hour or so, and having paid my various well-feigned respects, I drive away from Benedetti’s house still puzzled about the precise purpose of the evening. However: suppose I’m wrong and it is still possible to scupper the cult up at my former home? Suppose this time the Vatican were to take more effective steps to protect itself from accusations of pandering to popular superstition by launching its own investigation, one that extends to tracking down and grilling all the guests at my birthday party on that fateful night last year? I sounded confident enough when I assured the gross mayor that my other guests would unfailingly support my gospel, but I wonder if some of them might not have their limit. For instance, Adrian has already told me that Max Christ is a Catholic and comes from a devout Bavarian family. He might well prove susceptible to Church leverage. And if a man of Max’s international eminence were to recant and admit the apparition story was untrue, a sensational exposé across Europe’s news media hinting at corruption might very well be enough to destroy the cult at Le Roccie and with it the Comune’s (or the Mob’s) plans to get rich from it. And I hate to think what the press might do to my reputation as I take up residence in a house whose acquisition has been not entirely free of rule-bending.

But this is surely mere paranoia. That’s what comes of dining with splendidly corrupt and scheming men, I think as I let myself into my deceased landlord’s flat. After an evening at Benedetti’s sumptuous place I am struck afresh by its aesthetic squalor. Somehow Mr Swanepoel’s taste in bed linen and decor foretold a sticky end. But the casual tale of his sudden demise has made its point. I vow that just as soon as I’m installed in my new house I shall never mention any of this ever again to anyone.

I spend the next few days frantically buying the basics for my new home: kitchen stoves and washing machines and beds and suchlike. For the first time in my life I have enough money not to agonise over the cost. Just get it done, Samper, is what I tell myself; then you can move in. The only thing to which I devote real care is the batterìa da cucina: the all-important pots and pans and general kitchen equipment. We artists concentrate on the things that really matter. I’m sure Picasso was far more particular when selecting new brushes and easels than he was over choosing a new girlfriend. At last there comes the wonderful moment when I can lock the late Mr Swanepoel’s door behind me, salute the last doddery nun on the stairs, drop the key off at Benedetti’s office and drive up to my very own house.

As I have intimated before, the place lacks Le Roccie’s panoramic view which now strikes me as a shade too aerial, a little too detached and godlike. The new vista of adjacent wooded hills, the town’s far-off roofs and beyond them a coastless slot of sea suddenly feels appropriate for someone who, willy-nilly, has descended to being embroiled in local politics. Yet I can still sing up here without risking the complaints of a testy neighbour. On the other hand I can also drive a mere five minutes down the road and come to an outlying alimentari for basics like flour and sugar and lavatory paper. As far as I can discover my house has no name but the site is known informally to the locals as Sciupapiedi or ‘feet ruiner’: no doubt a reference to the days when ill-shod peasants named landscapes according to the different kinds of anguish they inflicted.

How can one describe that sublime evening when one pours oneself a large g-&-t and for the first time sits outside one’s own house, looking out across a froth of olive trees over a new domain? So many dice have been cast one can no longer be bothered to think or worry about them. It’s even possible to ignore the fact that this otherwise bijou residence is still wearing a tin hat. The main thing is that Samper is finally here, at home once more, breathing juniper fumes in the sunset and hoping never again to move house until it’s time to be carried down to the local cemetery with its discreetly hidden rubbish heap of dried flowers and the empty red plastic cylinders of grave candles. Meanwhile, there’s much to be done. The one outstanding alteration to the house is the removal of its illegal top floor and the restoration of the original roof. This is to begin at once, and I have arranged for the entire upper storey to be sealed off and for the workmen to have access to it – together with their rubbish chutes and hoists – from outside at the back. It shouldn’t take long for them to demolish the unfinished walls, and putting the roof back on ought to be equally straightforward since it turns out that the speculative builder who removed it stored most of the original timbers in his yard in Lucca where they still are. The point is, I shan’t need to have workmen traipsing through the house with their bags of cement and rolls of carta catramata. A pity in a way, since from earliest childhood I’ve adored the smell of workmen: that manly, capable scent of dust and fresh sweat and linseed oil. What I don’t like are their cigarettes and transistor radios. All would be forgiven if only they smoked Egyptian rather than Virginia tobacco and listened to Haydn string quartets. But alas.

What I’m really looking forward to is fitting my kitchen up as I want it. My natural creativity has been badly frustrated over these interminable homeless months, although I have managed to concoct a modern version of humble pie that I shall try to induce the St John restaurant, down by Smithfield, to take up. There is nothing wrong with deer’s entrails, liver and heart, and the St John has a wonderful way with umbles of all kinds. However, inventing ‘thought recipes’ is simply not satisfying. I am a hands-on cook par excellence. I need to get my fingers into the ingredients; that’s when the saliva and ideas start flowing. You would think this was a most basic human pleasure but I recently learned a shocking thing: that residential flats are now being built in London that don’t have a kitchen. Can you believe this? Apparently they don’t have a kitchen because their overpaid, philistine owners eat all their meals out. One can’t even begin to guess what sort of creatures these are. Imagine delegating one of life’s great pleasures to total strangers! If you can’t be bothered with your own food, what would you take trouble over?

Two days later history uncannily repeats itself. Years ago at Le Roccie when Marta first came to call I was up a stepladder in the kitchen. So I am today, busy fixing the hood of the extractor fan above the cooker, when the door opens and that well-known squeal ‘Gerree!’ turns my blood to ice. This time, however, history has added a twist. Marta is no longer a neighbour but a collaborator in the grandest artistic project of my life. With an inward sigh I carefully balance the screwdriver and felt-tip marker on the edge of the hood next to the glass of prosecco that I find aids concentration in these fiddly DIY jobs. Then I descend the ladder while fixing a courteous smile of welcome to my face.

‘Marta!’ I exclaim. ‘Welcome to Casa Samper. And Joan too,’ for that lady is even now coming in behind her, tucking the car keys into one of the pockets of her dungarees. ‘How inspired of you both to have arrived in time for a late morning celebratory glass.’ Thank goodness the prosecco, which I’ve only just opened, is not very special. There’s nothing more galling than having to waste a really good wine on people who can barely tell it from Coke. I quickly retrieve my own glass.

‘Gerree, your house is so lovely!’ Marta is saying. She is looking far less frumpish, I notice. In particular her hair has emerged from its Struwwelpeter phase. It has been cut and styled and, most important of all, washed so it has lost that aura of pristine undergrowth that would once have made a field entomologist’s pulse quicken in anticipation. What’s more, she’s even wearing a dress instead of one of her baggy old shifts that gave her that characteristic Bedouin traffic-warden look. In fact, she appears to be dressing like the sort of girl she now regrets not having had the nerve to be twenty years ago. For the first time since I have known her Marta looks, well, practically feminine. Even Joan seems not to have brought with her the trademark reek of dogs, for which I am grateful.

‘I was forgetting you’ve never seen this place,’ I say, handing them glasses of prosecco.

‘Never, Gerree. But it is so big! I think you have many rooms here, more even than at Le Roccie with your garage together.’

‘Yes, there’s certainly ample space for little me. And a bit too much land outside, unfortunately. Three hectares of olives. But there we are.’

‘Smashing position,’ says Joan. ‘But I have to say the corrugated iron doesn’t look very Tuscan.

‘That’s all coming off in a day or two and the original roof will go back on. That’s how I managed to get this place at an affordable price, among other things.’ It’s clear the girls want to be shown around so we top up our glasses and bring them along as I give them the obligatory guided tour.

‘Once the new roof’s on it’ll be sensational,’ says Joan approvingly at the end.

I notice she seems to be smoking less and the absence of canine bouquet is quite startling. ‘Have you been back to the UK since I met you at Pisa?’ I ask. ‘And if not, how are those dogs of yours managing?’

‘I haven’t, no. Too much to do here. The dogs are fine. I rang the kennels the other day and far from pining away in my absence the rotten bastards are putting on weight. The hullabaloo at home seems to have died down and they say I could go back without getting lynched. So I may do that and bring the hounds over here.’

‘Bring them over? You’ll be staying here for longer, then? That’s good.’

‘Well,’ says Joan a little awkwardly, ‘I’ve been meaning to tell you but with all the bloody hubbub recently there hasn’t been a proper opportunity.’ She glances as Marta who … simpers. The only word. ‘Cutting through the bollocks and the lovey-dovey stuff, we’ve discovered that we’re natural shipmates. We go together like bacon and eggs, don’t we, Matti?’

Matti? I suddenly remember that Marta’s younger sister Marja called her by this childhood nickname. By now we’re sitting on the terrace under a brand new awning out of which the June sunshine is beating a textiley smell of fresh waterproofing or something. Normally these admissions of romantic partnership merely make me raise a pair of cynical inward eyebrows while maintaining a bland expression of indulgent goodwill. Couples, for heaven’s sake. Dinky little dyads. One can’t take them seriously. Whenever I read that some creature like the brindled titmouse or the Pripet vole ‘pairs for life’ I am possessed with an immediate yearning for its extinction. I’ve always assumed this is perfectly normal for single people, regardless of gender. But now the idea of Joan and Marta becoming a domestic item does actually give me pleasure, although I expect the prosecco helps. I’ve grown rather fond of old Joan, and as for Marta I’m anxious that as composer of the moment she should be as settled and contented as possible. I even go and fetch a bottle of almost-the-best champagne to celebrate.

‘Crikey, Gerry, we didn’t come here to get slewed, you know,’ says Joan when we have all toasted each other’s new houses, new romances and ageing livers.

‘Still, now that you’re here … Though I think I’d better scratch us together some lunch otherwise we’ll get completely sozzled. But what news of your own house, Marta?’

‘Ah, the mustelje Benedetti comes to me the other day and says he has a very good offer if I am thinking to move.’

‘Which you bloody well are,’ adds Joan. ‘There’s no way a composer like you can go on working up there. The place is a frigging madhouse. Honestly, Gerry, if you thought it was bad a couple of weeks ago you should see it now. A constant stream of people, cars parked any old where so Matti can’t even get out of her own drive, hymn-singing and chanting and Christ knows what else. Can you believe an actual monk in a dressing gown came knocking on our door asking for a meal and a bed for the night? A complete twat. He kept on talking about carità and flashing his rosary. I soon sent him packing and he was a lucky monk not to get a swift kick in the beads for good measure. The nerve of the bloke! I’m glad Matti was busy with her music at the time because her Italian’s wonderful and she’s so kind she would probably have invited him in and wound up giving him our bed while we slept on the floor somewhere. Talk about a heart of gold, old softy here. I’m a much tougher proposition and it certainly helps not being able to speak much of the lingo. I’ve always found saying “bugger off!” works well in any language.’

Before the champagne renders me legless I excuse myself and go in to get us some lunch. Luckily I have some homemade soup on the go – tomatoes, tarragon and nasturtium leaves, a very refined combo – so I pour it into a saucepan and set it down none too gently on the hob. Immediately, the forgotten screwdriver and uncapped marker fall off the edge of the hood and plop into the soup. Suppressing a chef’s giggle I fish them out and bin the marker, which has left some black streaks on the soup’s surface. If I allow my eyes to drift out of focus in a post-champagne sort of way it looks like one of those Second World War aerial photographs of the aftermath of a submarine sinking. I almost expect to see tiny people struggling in the slick. Behind me I hear somebody coming in from the terrace so I hastily give the soup a good stir and the black disappears. Every good cook has secrets from his guests that have nothing to do with recipes and techniques and everything to do with damage limitation. Soon we’re all eating outside under the sunshade, and with plenty of hot rolls and butter and another bottle of champagne nobody notices a thing.

‘So go on – what was Benedetti’s offer?’ I ask Marta bluntly.

‘Duecentomila. Two hundred thousand euros.’

‘Ludicrous!’

‘That’s what I said,’ agrees Joan. ‘I don’t trust that fellow, do you, Gerry? He looks like a ferret that’s been through a car wash. All gleaming and glistening, but still a sodding ferret. It’s a no-brainer. As a structure so close to a recent landslip the dear old place isn’t worth half that. In fact, it’s probably unsaleable. So if your signor Ferretti is offering two hundred thou, he’s obviously got a buyer with a specific purpose in mind, which means he’ll go a lot higher.’

‘Benedetti tells me he’s already had an offer for the land behind the house. Someone wants to put up a hotel, presumably for pilgrims and people like that ecclesiastical derelict you chivvied away.’

‘You’re a hero, Gerry. This is vital info … How did you get this lovely almondy taste in the soup?’

‘That’s a trade secret.’ I have already noticed the flavour she means, which although very pleasant has nothing to do with the official ingredients. It can’t possibly be prussic acid: they’d never allow cyanide in felt-tip ink, surely? ‘So what will your new asking price be? Half a million?’

‘Not on your nellie. A cool million but prepared to go as low as eight-fifty. I’m not having Matti taken for a ride. If they’re going to develop that site someone’s aiming to make a fortune out of it and they can ruddy well pay for the privilege.’

Marta is looking doleful. ‘Is sad. I love my house but now is impossible to work there and the music is going so well, Gerree, I think. I have just written your song “Don’t cry for me, Kensington” which is very beautiful. The audience will go away singing this. Also that little beggar girl in Pakistan who is singing to Diana “There’s not much Versace / Here in Karachi”. At the end the audience, Gerry, I promise they will be clapped out.’

‘It sounds wonderful, Marta. I can’t wait to hear it.’

‘You can if I am not longer in Le Roccie.’

‘What Matti means,’ says Joan, covering her friend’s hand with her own square-nailed paw, ‘is that we really must get out of that house as soon as we can, Gerry. It’s interfering with her composing. Renting a suitable alternative at short notice may be tricky although I shall have a go. I suppose we’re obliged to do it through signor Ferretti, dammit, since he seems to have the biggest agency in town.’

‘He does. So long as Marta’s not a Moslem,’ I add jokingly.

This provokes an outburst from Marta that reminds me very much of our first meeting when she engaged me in a passionate lecture about Voynovia’s long history of Christian resistance to godless Slavs. I was quite right about her religious affiliation. Marta’s nothing, but she’s a Moslem even less.

‘Anyway,’ says Joan, ‘in the short term she badly needs a workroom where she can put her piano. So we wondered if it would be possible to have a room here, Gerry, just as a temporary measure? You do seem to have a lot of spare space you’re not using. And as it’s your opera, too, it might be an advantage if both of you could work together under the same roof for a bit. You know, cross-fertilisation of ideas or whatever it is. It’s all a bit beyond an old sea-dog like me.’

‘Well, why not?’ I hear myself say even as a pocket of cells hiding out in a corner of my brain where the alcohol has still to penetrate is telling me I’m completely mad. Invite Marta to move in with that Iron Curtain upright of hers? Wasn’t that the very instrument of torture that first made my life hell up at Le Roccie? On the other hand this opera is a bid for international credibility and we artists often have to work in collaboration. Da Ponte and Mozart worked side by side on many occasions while The Marriage of Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte took shape. Surely Samper and Marta can follow in the same grand tradition for a strictly limited period? Especially now her new hygiene regime means my chances of catching head lice off her are much reduced? Also, of course, I’m paying her to write this music so it makes no sense to risk not getting my money’s worth. All in all, Marta’s temporary status as composer-in-residence at Sciupapiedi is one of those bullets made to be bitten.

‘Anyway, Gerree, have you yet the title? I don’t understand this “Rancid Pansies” and it does not sound to me so good.’

‘Not yet,’ I tell her a little shortly. ‘How about Dodi and Aeneas?’ To say I have forebodings about the domestic arrangement to which I have just acquiesced would be one of those ludicrous understatements like ‘Some assembly required’ or ‘Item may not accord with model illustrated’. ‘Upheaval may be expected’ pretty well sums up the future I am resignedly foreseeing.