But as I march across to Marta’s sty prepared to do battle I catch sight of the scarlet sports car discreetly tucked around the side among the trees. Oho, I think, that’s awkward. The last thing one wants when reading the riot act to a neighbour is for her young and probably muscular boyfriend to be present. Still, a glance across at the twenty piled corpses of my lovely and expensive beechwood panels is enough to remind me that life in this idyllic mountain eyrie is now seriously threatened and something unpleasantly firm is going to have to be said. Accordingly I give her back door a good pounding.
She flings it open and reveals the usual squalid scene within. ‘Oh Gerree!’ she cries, ‘you are home! How happy to see you,’ and before I can recoil she gives me a hug. I can feel her bangles pressing into the small of my back. Trashy stuff. Pure Benares. ‘Where are you went?’
‘Munich,’ I say briefly. ‘Now, as regards –’
‘Munich very interesting, Gerree. We have in Voynovia town is call Mjonkus. Is same name like Monaco also. It means –’
‘Fence,’ I say sternly. ‘Right now, everything to me means “fence”. What happened to it? Go on, tell me there’s been a hurricane.’
‘Oh the fence, Gerree. Is most saddest,’ and blow me if her eyes aren’t watering a little, although since she is thrusting a conciliatory glass of Fernet at me I have a shrewd idea about the likely wellsprings of her emotion. ‘Sitting please.’ And now the unscrupulous witch is pressing on me a chocolate kiss from a box of Perugina Baci.
Well, a Samper is not to be caught the same way twice so this time I feel around carefully beneath me before sitting down on her sofa. You wouldn’t believe how invasive the tip of a metronome can be.
‘What happens, Gerree: you know I am making music for film? So Piero Pacini he come one day here and say “I want to filming here but fence no good for filming so please take down now.” I say is not possible. I say is asking Gerree first because he make fence. Is his fence. But Signor Pacini is not hear me and is order to his men, “Take down this fence” and promise put up fence after filming. And after filming …’
It has happened before. There is something about Marta’s pidgin explanations that make my attention wander even though it’s a story of some consequence for me. I’m afraid things that are important to know need to be particularly well phrased to get my attention. I am also wondering where lover-boy is hiding. Probably sprawled across the bed upstairs, equally poleaxed by the effort of penetrating Marta’s tangled syntax.
‘I see,’ I say at length. ‘Let’s just get this straight, shall we? You are making a film with a world-famous film director. A few days ago he demolished my fence to improve the shot and now has failed to put it back up again. Have I got that right?’
Marta is nodding so violently she splashes her dress with Fernet. ‘Exact!’ she exclaims behind the threshing hair. What does she do to it to get it in that state? Anoint it with goose grease? ‘Oh, Gerree, I really so sorry. I am e-mail to Signor Pacini. He will come and fix. He promise me.’
‘You think Piero Pacini is going to come and re-erect my fence, Marta? The genius who made Mille Piselli and Nero’s Birthday is, of course, also a partner in that well-known firm of landscape gardeners Visconti, Bertolucci & Pacini SpA: “We Give It Our Best Shot”.’
‘He promise,’ she repeats sadly and a tear rolls down beside her nose. Good old Fernet, I think. In another moment she’s going to start one of those scenes protesting her innocence, full of Slavic keening and hair-tearing. Hysteria is to girls as barking is to dogs, take Samper’s word for it. To head her off I try a new tack.
‘I see you’ve got a new car. Congratulations.’
She looks blank.
‘The red one,’ I prompt.
‘Ah yes. Ah no. That is of Filippo, the son of Signor Pacini.’
‘He’s here now?’ I glance at the ceiling.
‘No, is in Rome. They come back soon.’
‘That’s good. We can discuss the little matter of legal action.’
But I admit this does make me think a bit. A hi-glam car like that is just what one would expect an Italian film director’s son to drive. Or, come to that, the leader of a boy band. Can it be possible I’ve been doing her an injustice all this time and she’s not quite the drunken fantasist I’ve been taking her for? Can my imagined charcoal-burner’s son actually be Filippo Pacini? But then I have another glance around and note the loudspeaker half buried beneath an avalanche of limp sheets and the electronic keyboard with a three-quarters empty bottle of Fernet Branca leaning back against the music stand like a drunk against a lamp post. Be honest, Samper: is this the workshop of a fellow professional? If we flick open Occam’s razor and give it a good whetting, would it not pare away the probability of her story to nothing? For hardly the first time in Marta’s presence I am seized with a weariness that saps my resolve to confront her. It even makes my knees limp, as I discover when I put down my glass and get to my feet. To hell with her. Do I really care what the truth is? (As the late, great Pontius Pilate might have said, thinking of a quiet beer on his terrace well away from his wife wittering on about her nightmares.)
Marta is now unsteadily on her own feet. She ferrets beneath the ambient laundry and emerges with a slip of paper. It is, incredibly, a cheque made out in euros for a sum of money representing exactly half what I’d told her the fence cost. I can feel the last of my righteous anger shrivel.
‘You see, I promise, Gerree,’ she says, kissing me with tears in her eyes before I can get out of the door.
It’s so bloody unfair, I think as I walk over to my house. The woman blames a famous film director for the destruction of my fence and now she pays me her own share of its cost so the fence is no longer mine but ours. Yet the damned thing’s still down and all my labour wasted, and where’s the justice in that? I linger mournfully by the heap of shattered panels and cement-caked posts. It’s too bad. How like Marta to muddy the water with her blarney and cheques – not to mention her Fernet and chocs.
*
The next morning I am down in Camaiore buying stationery when I catch sight of a vaguely familiar figure. Of all people it is the egregious Benedetti, the weaselly house agent who lied to me about my neighbour. A sprauncy little turd in a dove-grey suit, he is trotting along looking executive and carrying one of those fetishistic Italian briefcases made of cassowary leather or albatross skin, complete with gold fittings and monogram. I hail him squarely in the middle of the pedestrian thoroughfare.
‘Ingegnere! Buon giorno.’ He stops and pretends to be flipping through the dogeared Filofax that passes for his mind. ‘Gerald Samper,’ I help him out. ‘The Englishman who bought the house up at Le Roccie.’ His eyes flicker sideways. I’d never buy a used car from this man, I think to myself in amazement. How come I bought a used house from him?
‘Signor Samper!’ he exclaims, recovering. ‘What an unexpected delight to see you. And looking so well, too. Sempre in forma. Your wife too is well?’
‘I have no wife.’
‘Ah, wise, wise man. Blessed bachelordom! I always say it’s the sign of a superior sensibility, that’s what I always say. I also say “Donne e motori: gioia e dolore”, but I’m inclined to change that to “sempre dolore.” Haha.’
‘You always did have a way with words, ingegnere. Like when you told me my neighbour’s house up at Le Roccie was lived in for one month of the year by a mouse-quiet foreigner. Your exact phrase, I remember.’
‘Ah, that memory of yours, Signor Samper. It is a jewel. And now –’ Benedetti glances at a preposterous watch that will tell him the time in Vancouver when he is a hundred metres under water ‘– I’m afraid I’m already late for my appointment. Mustn’t keep the Chief of Police waiting.’
‘Policemen are famously never on time,’ I say, taking a tiny but significant step to one side to block his escape. ‘This won’t take long, Benedetti. I just want to know why you misrepresented the situation to me.’ Better not use a word as blunt as ‘lied’ at this stage.
‘Misrepresented, signore? Oh, I trust not. The lady in question –’
‘You know her, then? Marta?’
‘Only most vaguely. But I was assured she is scarcely ever there. She is of Russian origin, I think.’
‘I wouldn’t tell her that if I were you. She has rather strong views on Russia. All I know is she’s not at all quiet and mouselike. In fact, and between ourselves, over the last three months she has proved to be a damned nuisance in all sorts of ways. Being visited by helicopters is one of them.’
‘Helicopters?’ The weasel perks up.
‘Helicopters. Blew my pergola to shreds. Is that how you define a quiet neighbour?’
‘Not,’ he begins cautiously, ‘as such, perhaps. Not altogether.’
‘Well, I’m none too happy about it. To be honest, I’m beginning to feel you sold me that house under false pretences. I explained to you several times that being a writer I need extreme quiet for my work. But a neighbour who plays weird music at all hours and has visitors who drop by in helicopters hardly fits your description of her.’
‘O Dio.’ Benedetti makes a pout with his lips to indicate deep concern. ‘What can she be up to?’
‘Who knows?’ I ask rhetorically, suddenly finding the pent-up frustrations of the last few months venting themselves with agreeable passion. This fence business has definitely been the last straw. ‘Who knows? Che ne so io? What do I care if she’s an East European call girl? The point is you promised me peace and quiet and I have neither.’
‘Maybe there is an element of exaggeration …?’ he begins, but catches my eye. He shifts his briefcase to his left hand and with the right takes out a crisply laundered handkerchief with which he carefully mops his receding forehead. Hair weaving, I note with satisfaction. And it’s all very well to moan about women but someone irons your shirts and handkerchiefs beautifully and I bet it’s not you.
‘Allow me to observe, ingegnere, that in future you could be a lot more scrupulous about what you say when trying to induce someone to buy one of your houses. Especially a foreigner. We may be a minority but I think you will find that as a community we are not entirely without significance. Word gets around,’ I add meaningfully.
Benedetti draws himself up, plump weasel provoked. ‘I sell all my houses in the best of faith, Signor Samper. Unfortunately I cannot be held responsible for my buyers’ eventual lack of breeding. I don’t believe I gave you a written guarantee of your prospective neighbour’s hermit-like qualities?’
‘True,’ I concede, beginning to enjoy this sword-crossing as Camaiore’s citizens eddy around us with curious glances. ‘But you did give me verbal assurances whose validity a gentleman like yourself will readily recognize as scarcely less binding. At this late stage, though, I can’t see how reparations can easily be made, can you? Things are as they regrettably are. I merely thought I would inform you that Le Roccie is very far from being the nexus of bucolic harmony you painted it to me last year. Well, as I say, word has a habit of getting around. And now I believe I’m delaying you.’
We take formal leave of one another and Benedetti scurries off, plying his handkerchief once more. I take myself into a handy bar for a well-deserved mid-morning reward. I haven’t enjoyed myself so much in ages. Being able to dump on the weasel has been a pleasure I hadn’t anticipated when I drove down this morning. It won’t have done him any harm at all to feel the edge of the Samper tongue and it has done the Samper spirits a power of good. I can return home purged.