Rancid Pansies

by James Hamilton-Paterson

‘It’s a bloody tragedy if you ask me,’ rasps Joan, and leaning sideways she slips a beefy arm around Marta’s shoulders. The anchor tattooed on her forearm glows in the sunlight from the window.

  Adrian 5

  email from Dr Adrian Jestico (ajestico@bois.ac.uk)

  to Dr Penny Barbisant (penbar@labs.whoi.ed)

  First, well-deserved congratulations on having talked your man into agreeing your new remit! A quick search tells me virtually nothing’s ever been done on seabed fauna specifically around wrecked munitions ships & certainly not at the genetic level you’re proposing. The field is yours. And what a fantastic bit of luck having a survey vessel in the area that could divert for half a day & send an ROV down to identify it. I wonder who’s still alive over there who can remember the Hattie MacAllister? When you know exactly what the Hattie M.’s cargo was & specifically what of it was damaged at the time of the sinking you’ll be able to guess what are the most likely contaminants to have been seeping out into the local chromosomes these last sixty-four years.

  Duh! Sorry, Penny – you hardly need me to tell you that. But stating the obvious is becoming second nature here at BOIS. There’s a right & a wrong way to put together reports for Defra, & the wrong way is to assume they already know some elementary facts about the environment (or food, or rural affairs). Most fatal of all is to imagine they understand anything about the sea, such as that it can both erode and deposit, even on the same tide. To be fair, as individuals with doctorates they mostly know these things, but as a Department they don’t. I suppose they need it all spelt out Janet-&-John style for the benefit of the politicians they have to show the reports to. Nothing can be too simple for them.

  News from the home front, you ask? Nothing spectacular. My illustrious conductor brother-in-law Max is in mourning for his principal clarinettist, who was arrested in an Ipswich shopping mall for patting children on the head while dressed as Winnie-the-Pooh & led off to be sectioned. The wretched fellow has a history of such episodes & at first they didn’t seem to matter, given his brilliance as an instrumentalist. A couple of years ago Max recorded the Weber clarinet concertos with him dressed as a raccoon. It was a great recording that went on to win awards, but only that morning he’d been detained in the same costume for waving his tail at a crowd of kindergarten kids & Max only just got him out in time for the recording session. Since when it has reached the point where he will only play while wearing an animal costume. Tricky, really, as there’s no mention of a dress code in the CSO’s contracts. But the sight of a panda taking its seat in the woodwind section excites comment in the concert hall, not all of it favourable. Though that being said, his example did lead Max to give a TV performance of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals where the whole orchestra wore animal costumes & it was a massive hit last Christmas. It sold I don’t know how many DVDs. But the poor man became a liability & is now obviously too ill to function. Did I tell you he was a guest at Crendlesham at our fateful dinner the night we had Gerry’s hors d’oeuvre of poisoned mice? He came dressed as a gorilla. Why? Hard to tell. Maybe he hoped it would please or divert young Josh, but the kid was actually slightly scared & who can blame him. Gossip now talks of the man having become ‘eccentric’ ever since he lost his own daughter, a cot death or something. So, sad rather than sinister. At any rate Max is quite depressed about it & goes around muttering that you can’t replace the equivalent of Jack Brymer & Karl Leister rolled into one (I gather they were ace clarinettists of yesteryear). And he’ll now be adding a dress clause to all CSO contracts.

  Gerry called me last night to announce that his ex-neighbour Marta – who, poor lady, quite unwittingly lurches between being his bête noire & the one composer he must have to write the music to his opera – is back home in Italy. But her place has been fatally compromised by the landslip and subsequent geological uncertainty about the whole of that little plateau, which I have to say is as spectacular a site for a house as I ever did see. A sort of Space Shuttle’s view of north-western Tuscany. A shame. And now of course it’s further blighted by pilgrims of this weird Diana cult. Apparently they come at all hours & hold vigils & sing hymns on the spot where, six months ago, Gerry was still hanging out his socks & boxer shorts to dry. The result is Marta is plunged into gloom because although she now has the sole surviving property up there its future is in doubt & her work is constantly interrupted. Gerry, never the most accomplished dissembler, is cock-a-hoop over her misfortune. He says it serves her right for inviting him in for coffee the other day & forcing him to eat what he describes as a diabolical Voynovian laxative made from fermenting prunes with ram’s sperm topping. He’s probably just jealous that she came up with something as inedible as one of his own inventions.

  Of course I don’t mind your asking questions about Gerry’s & my ‘relationship’, Penny. It’s just that I don’t think I can give you any satisfactory answers. I guess in that respect I’m a typical ‘guy’, as you unkindly put it. We guys tend not to ask ourselves about our relationships unless we’ve been feminised by all that dismal gay propaganda about marriage and long-term responsible blah blah. Whether he & I have any future as an ‘item’ is not something we give much thought to, I’m afraid. At least I don’t, & Gerry’s been a professional bachelor far too long to be capable of any domestic relationship with man or beast (since living with someone & not living with anybody can both become habits). Besides, as we live & work in 2 different countries & that isn’t likely to change for the foreseeable future, there’s scarcely any point in looking at things long-term. So speaking for myself I pretty much live from day to day & take things as they come. And I think Gerry does the same, except with him it’s more a matter of lurching from crisis to crisis, which suits his temperament. What does it matter in any case? Things will turn out how they turn out & in a few decades it won’t matter a damn to either of us.

  Since you ask, I think what I most admire in him is his conviction that one can only be truly light-hearted & amused in this world if one is a total pessimist and misanthrope. I still get gloomy & contemptuous about e.g. politics & our infliction of slaughter & suffering on millions of Iraqis under the pretext of replacing one man as head of state – now long dead anyway. Gerry just says I should be ashamed of such remnants of youthful idealism & ought just to laugh because ‘laughter is the whole of wisdom’ – his phrase. It’s a philosophy you’d think would make him horrid but for some mysterious reason doesn’t. Sure, he’s capable of saying mean things (especially about Marta) but they’re usually said out of wit & for momentary effect & because he likes to express himself extravagantly. In actual fact he has been rather good to her. All the time she was away in the US last year he looked after her house, fitted new locks & generally acted as a caretaker, completely unbidden & without her knowledge. Beneath the quite genuine misanthropy he’s an often kind person with that peculiar gentleness that goes with resignation. I remember him last summer reading a story about a gang of drunken British teenagers kicking an innocent passer-by to death while good citizens hurried past. His comment was ‘if you expect precisely zero from your fellow man you’ll never know disappointment’. A quintessentially Gerry remark.

  Perhaps I should now ask about you & Luke, except that we guys don’t know quite what to ask. We have to rely on you to tell us. Pathetic or what?

  Cheers,

  Adrian

  6

  Once again I imagined myself in the hot, labyrinthine corridors of the Roman Curia, this time searching for Room 21. It would not have surprised me to glimpse the shade of Franz Kafka flitting ahead. At every level there was a background susurration, very faint, as of great numbers of people talking somewhere far away. Regardless of where I went it never grew any closer, neither did it fade. I saw not a soul. All the doors I tried were locked.

  At last I came upon a janitor seated on a misericord that folded out of the dark wood panelling. He was reading a dog-eared book of Mickey Mouse cartoons. He courteously directed me up a flight of sta
irs to yet another corridor where eventually I fetched up outside a heavy oak door with the number 21 painted on it in faded gold figures. I knocked. Silence. I tried the handle. It would not turn. I stood back to look at the door in the way that one does, acting out bafflement as though for an invisible watcher. Only then did I notice the heads of large brass screws spaced regularly around the door’s periphery. It was unquestionably screwed shut.

  ‘True,’ the janitor said when I went down to tell him. He inserted a brown finger in his book. ‘It always has been like that. I have never seen it otherwise.’

  ‘You might have mentioned that.’

  ‘You didn’t ask, signore. And even if I had told you, you would still have gone to make sure. Maybe now you should try Monsignor Ricci on the ground floor.’ He smiled and resumed reading, his lips moving silently to Pluto’s repartee.

  Mgr Ricci was an iron-grey elderly man in a black soutane. His face wore the expression of slightly bitter amusement common among Italian bureaucrats whose job it is to give the same explanation to endless supplicants, an explanation that studiedly explains nothing but which needs to be given anyway. However, he was neither playing Grand Theft Auto nor reading ‘Topolino’, and the fact that his large desk was piled high with files and dossiers inspired in me a faint confidence that here, finally, was somebody who might know something. I introduced myself and told him about my visit to the room called ‘De S.S. Manifestis’ and the young priest’s redirecting me to Room 21, a piece of whimsy that now made me feel a little less warmly towards him.

  ‘He was doing his job,’ Ricci said. ‘Enquiries involving non-Catholics are always referred to Room 21.’

  ‘Which is screwed shut.’

  ‘Which regrettably is not at present open.’ He laid his reading glasses down on the text he had been studying. ‘You must understand that his office, like this one, is merely one of several dozen that all serve the Congregation for the Causes of Saints, Congregatio de Causis Sanctorum.’ Like most Italians, he couldn’t pronounce the Latin word ‘sanctorum’ without slipping a pared-down vowel sound between the c and the t. ‘As I’m sure you know, the Congregation is the part of the Curia that supervises the complicated process of canonisation, although nowadays it is admittedly simpler than it was before the late Pope John Paul II revised it. Might I enquire as to the Cause you are hoping to pursue?’

  ‘I’m not pursuing anybody’s Cause,’ I said with the confidence of a rational and sceptical outsider. ‘I am simply trying to establish the theoretical position of the late Princess Diana.’

  ‘Of course. You are following in the footsteps of’ – he broke off to uncover a desk diary – ‘Signor e Signora Barrington. A British couple who were here very recently.’

  I groaned. I might have guessed Baggy and Dumpy would have got here first again. ‘I can imagine. And you, of course, told them that the whole idea of Princess Diana being canonised was ludicrous because apart from anything else she was a Protestant. End of story, except I bet they told you some tale about an apparition.’

  ‘It wasn’t true?’

  ‘Not the way they told it, I shouldn’t think,’ I answered carefully.

  ‘I can see you know these people well,’ said the priest. ‘They were making difficult progress because they had to bring an interpreter with them but I hope I did my best to set them straight. We are dedicated to the truth in this place, the truth of Christ. We have an old saying here in the Vatican: “One vision does not make a saint”, and this I told them. As one would have expected, they were disappointed. Without presuming on your own faith, signore, I have to say it constantly grieves me to see the burden of ignorance under which so many non-Catholics labour who come to this room. I think they must long for the simple clarity that is the essence of the Mother Church. Let us pray that for many of them this may become the first impulse towards conversion. And speaking of which –’ Ricci got up and crossed over to a table where he pawed some files. ‘Here we are. I should have sent this back to the archives after their visit, but conveniently here it still is.’

  ‘Maybe the Holy Spirit knew I was coming.’

  Ricci glanced at me from beneath stern eyebrows. ‘It is not for us to second-guess the inscrutabilities of the Holy Spirit. Now, this file contains a tiny part of the evidence used for the beatification – and what must surely be the eventual canonisation – of the Blessed Teresa of Calcutta, or Mother Teresa as she is still known to millions. I do not have the authority to show it to you directly, still less give you a copy of any document in it. However, I can tell you it includes certain notes and entries in the Blessed Teresa’s spiritual diary following meetings with la Principessa Diana in the 1990s.

  ‘The gist of it is that in three private audiences Diana expressed a keen interest in converting to Roman Catholicism. It was evidently her opinion that the Church of England, far from being a spiritual entity, was nothing but a social club for the English middle classes and that it would soon die out in the United Kingdom because a majority of its members was now aged fifty or over. The Blessed Teresa expressed sympathy with this view without, of course, venturing an opinion. In her diary, though, she wrote that she rejoiced as she always did when anybody showed a longing to step from darkness into the radiance of the True Cross.

  ‘However, er’ – Msg. Ricci turned over some sheets of paper rapidly – ‘yes. The Blessed Teresa did tell Diana she should be very watchful of her own motives. She ought to guard against being seduced by the inverted glamour of charity work with slum dwellers, lepers and AIDS victims and not to forget the eye of the news camera cannot see what God sees in the heart. Above all, she must be absolutely certain in her own mind that she would not be embracing the Catholic faith in order to score off her husband Charles. It would undoubtedly make his constitutional position as potential monarch quite difficult and might even be a deciding factor for his mother the Queen never to abdicate in his favour. As you can see,’ Ricci said, closing the file, ‘the Blessed Teresa had a remarkable understanding both of the Princess and of British constitutional affairs. But then I hardly need tell you she was a quite remarkable person in her own right, as well as a handmaiden of Jesus Christ.’

  To say I was surprised at this news is not enough. I am an artist, not a journalist, and I was elatedly assessing the exciting implications for my opera. Maybe there was plausible hope of a canonisation for Diana – if not by some future pope then at the hands of Gerry Samper, librettist of genius. I was already beginning to see an ascent into heaven in Act 3: a grand finale to stir the blood and bring in its wake a tempest of applause from an audience with tears streaming down its face, standing and clapping until its hands were numb. However, we weren’t there quite yet. One or two points still to clear up.

  ‘That’s fascinating,’ I told the Monsignor. ‘So, assuming there is nothing recorded on paper to show that the Princess did convert, would it theoretically have been possible? I mean, could a woman like Mother Teresa, a nun, have secretly received Diana into the Church? Or could only a male priest do that?’

  ‘I take your point, but it is quite irrelevant in the light of Teresa’s beatification. After all, if a future saint couldn’t receive someone into the Church, who could? Diana wasn’t hoping for ordination. She showed an interest solely in converting, an interest the Blessed Teresa ultimately judged to be genuine and fervent.’ He re-tied the file with its purple ribbon and replaced it on the table.

  I couldn’t resist letting a trickle of holy water out of this urbane priest’s stoup. ‘I have heard it said that Mother Teresa’s journal also tells of her being plagued by doubts. I’m not sure the average layperson associates sainthood with doubts.’

  ‘My son,’ he responded unfazed, ‘doubts are to Christians what erections are to adolescents. They come unbidden at unwelcome moments and simply have to be lived with and dealt with as they arise. That is what we call faith. The struggle to keep this faith is part of what makes a saint. And now I must beg you excuse me. You happi
ly chanced to catch me between appointments and I see I have a meeting in a few minutes.’

  I took my leave of the Monsignor, expressing gratitude for his time. Little could he have guessed the artistic consequences of his dry summarising of archival data. Descending the building’s broad steps into the sunlit courtyard in which the cheeping of sparrows was suddenly loud I felt life streaming back into me. Even here, in the heart of the bureaucratic Vatican, I could smell espresso coffee and garlic frying. Italians have a genius for getting life’s priorities right. It is something we British completely lack.

  On my way out I passed through another courtyard with a fountain at its centre – the entirely dreadful Delfino e Fanciullo by Federico Corvo, who had only won the commission by being Pope Hadrian VII’s former catamite. It really ought to be scrapped for its bronze and replaced by something modern. Around it, clearly oblivious to its aesthetic deficiency, was gathered a disgruntled knot of arguing foreigners. From my previous visit I recognised them as the American authors in search of the Holy Grail. Since then they seemed to have banded together for mutual support. Obviously they were hardcore traditionalists and not subscribers to excitable modern theories such that the Grail was actually Mary Magdalene’s womb – which if true would surely have made the Last Supper (aka Repast Plus) a bizarre and racy occasion that only Aleister Crowley could have enjoyed. These questers had spread maps on the worn stonework and were arguing animatedly about the cost of shuttling around Europe and even into Asia Minor in their hunt. Their voices went ricocheting about the surrounding buildings’ impassive façades. It struck me that the railways of each European country ought to issue a specially reduced season ticket – I fancy it might be called a Student Grailcard – to promote such tourism, which is clearly a growth industry.

  ‘Fucking Italians,’ one was saying bitterly. He wore a jacket with a tan suede yoke over a snap-front shirt down which a string tie dangled. ‘They just give you the royal run-around here. Polite as all-get-out but they’re not about to give up a single damn piece of hard info. Nada. Zilch.’