My Uncle Oswald Read online

  'I was rather pleased with it myself.'

  'It's the ultimate deception.'

  'Thank you, Oswald.'

  'There's just one thing I can't fathom,' I said.

  'What's that?'

  'When he came at you like a battering-ram, didn't he take aim.'

  'Only after a fashion.'

  'But he's a very experienced marksman.'

  'My dear old frump,' she said, 'you can't seem to get it into your head what a man's like when he's had a double dose.'

  I jolly well can, I told myself. I was behind the filing-cabinets when A. R. Woresley got his.

  'No,' I said. 'I can't. What is a man like when he's had a double dose?'

  'Berserk,' she said. 'He literally doesn't know what the other end of him's doing. I could have shoved it in a jar of pickled onions and he wouldn't have known the difference.'

  Over the years I have discovered a surprising but simple truth about young ladies and it is this: the more beautiful their faces, the less delicate their thoughts. Yasmin was no exception. There she sat now across the table from me in Maxims wearing a gorgeous Fortuny dress and looking for all the world like Queen Semiramis on the throne of Egypt, but she was talking vulgar. 'You're talking vulgar,' I said.

  'I'm a vulgar girl,' she said, grinning.

  The Volnay arrived and I tasted it. Wonderful wine. My father used to say never pass up a Volnay by a good shipper if you see one on the wine card. 'How did you get away so soon?' I asked her.

  'He was very rough,' she said. 'Rough and sort of spiky. It felt as though I had a gigantic lobster on my back.'

  'Beastly.'

  'It was horrid,' she said. 'He had a heavy gold watchchain across his waistcoat which kept grinding into my spine. And a big watch in the waistcoat pocket.'

  'Not good for the watch.'

  'No,' she said. 'It went crunch. I heard it.'

  'Yes, well...'

  'Terrific wine this, Oswald.'

  'I know. But how did you get away so quickly?'

  'That's bound to be a problem with the younger ones after they've had the Beetle,' she said. 'How old is this fellow?'

  'Forty-eight.'

  'In the prime of life,' she said. 'It's different when they're seventy-six. At that age, even with the Beetle, they soon grind to a halt.'

  'But not this chap?'

  'God no,' she said. 'Perpetual motion. A mechanical lobster.'

  'So what did you do?'

  'What could I do? It's either me or him I said. So as soon as he'd had his explosion and delivered the goods, I reached into my jacket pocket and got out the trusty hatpin.'

  'And you let him have it?'

  'Yes, but don't forget it had to be a backhander this time and that wasn't so easy. It's hard to get a good swing.'

  'I can see that.'

  'Luckily my backhand's always been my strongest point.'

  'At tennis you mean?'

  'Yes,' she said.

  'And you got him first time?'

  'Deep to the baseline,' she said. 'Deeper than the King of Spain. A winner.'

  'Did he protest?'

  'Oh my God,' she said, 'he squealed like a pig. And he danced round the room clutching himself and yelling, "Celeste! Celeste! Fetch a doctor! I have been stabbed!" The woman must have been looking through the keyhole because she came bursting in at once and rushed up to him crying. "Where? Where? Let me see!" And while she was examining his backside, I ripped the all-important rubbery thing off him and dashed out of the room pulling up my trousers as I went.'

  'Bravo,' I said. 'What a triumph.'

  'Bit of a lark actually,' she said. 'I enjoyed it.'

  'You always do.'

  'Lovely snails,' she said. 'Great big juicy ones.'

  'The snail farms put them on sawdust for two days before they sell them for eating,' I said.

  'Why?'

  'So the snails can purge themselves. When did you get the signed notepaper? Right at the beginning?'

  'At the beginning, yes. I always do.'

  'But why did it say Boulevard Haussmann on it, instead of Rue Laurent-Pichet?'

  'I asked him that myself,' she said. 'He told me that's where he used to live. He's only just moved.'

  'That's all right, then,' I said.

  They took the empty snail-shells away and soon afterwards they brought on the grouse. By grouse I mean red grouse. I do not mean black grouse (black cock and grey hen) or wood grouse (capercailye) or white grouse (ptarmigan). These others are good, especially the ptarmigan, but the red grouse is the king. And provided of course they are this year's birds, there is no meat more tender or more tasty in the entire world. Shooting starts on the twelfth of August, and every year I look forward to that date with even greater impatience than I do to the first of September when the oysters come in from Colchester and Whitstable. Like a fine sirloin, red grouse should be eaten rare with the blood just a shade darker than scarlet, and at Maxims they would not like you to order it any other way.

  We ate our grouse slowly, slicing off one thin sliver of breast at a time, allowing it to melt on the tongue and following each mouthful with a sip of fragrant Volnay.

  'Who's next on the list?' Yasmin asked me.

  I had been thinking about that myself, and now I said to her, 'It was going to be Mr James Joyce, but perhaps it would be nice if we took a short trip down to Switzerland for a change of scenery.'

  'I'd like that,' she said. 'Who's in Switzerland?'

  'Nijinski.'

  'I thought he was up here with that Diaghilev chap.'

  'I wish he was,' I said, 'but it seems he's gone a bit dotty. He thinks he's married to God, and he walks about with a big gold cross around his neck.'

  'What rotten luck,' Yasmin said. 'Does that mean his dancing days are over?'

  'Nobody knows,' I said. 'They say he was dancing at an hotel in St Moritz only a few weeks ago. But that was just for fun, to amuse the guests.'

  'Does he live in an hotel?'

  'No, he's got a villa above St Moritz.'

  'Alone?'

  'Unfortunately not,' I said. 'There's a wife and a child and a whole bunch of servants. He's a rich man. Fabulous sums he used to get. I know Diaghilev paid him twenty-five thousand francs for each performance.'

  'Good Lord. Did you ever see him dance?'

  'Only once,' I said. 'The year the war broke out, nineteen fourteen, at the old Palace Theatre in London. He did Les Sylphides. Stunning it was. He danced like a god.'

  'I'm crazy to meet him,' Yasmin said. 'When do we leave?'

  'Tomorrow,' I said. 'We have to keep moving.'

  19

  At this point in my narrative, just as I was about to describe our trip to Switzerland to find Nijinski, my pen suddenly came away from the paper and I found myself hesitating. Was I not perhaps getting into a rut? Becoming repetitious? Yasmin was going to be meeting an awful lot of fascinating people over the next twelve months, no doubt about that. But in nearly every case (there would of course be one or two exceptions) the action was going to be very much the same. There would be the giving of the Beetle powder, the ensuing cataclysm, the escape with the spoils, and all the rest of it, and that, however interesting the men themselves might be, was going to become pretty boring for the reader. Nothing would have been easier than for me to describe in great detail how the two of us met Nijinski on a path through the pinewoods below his villa, as indeed we did, and how we gave him a chocolate, and how we held him in conversation for nine minutes until the powder hit him, and how he chased Yasmin into the dark wood, leaping from boulder to boulder and rising so high in the air with each leap he seemed to be flying. But if I did that, then it would be fitting also to describe the James Joyce encounter, Joyce in Paris, Joyce in a dark blue serge suit, a black felt hat, old tennis shoes on his feet, twirling an ashplant and talking obscenities. And after Joyce, it would be Mr Bonnard and Mr Braque and then a quick trip back to Cambridge to unload our precious spoils in the Semen's Hom
e. A very quick trip that was because Yasmin and I were in the rhythm of it now and we wanted to push on until it was finished.

  A. R. Woresley was wildly excited when I showed him our haul. We now had King Alfonso, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Proust, Stravinsky, Nijinski, Joyce, Bonnard and Braque. 'And you've done a fine job with the freezing,' he said to me as he carefully transferred the racks of straws with their labels on them from my suitcase freezer to the big freezer in 'Dunroamin', our headquarters house. 'Keep going, children,' he said, rubbing his hands together like a grocer. 'Keep going.'

  We kept going. It was the beginning of October now, and we went down south into Italy, looking for D. H. Lawrence. We found him living at the Palazzo Ferraro in Capri with Frieda, and on this occasion I had to distract fat Frieda for two hours out on the rocks while Yasmin went to work on Lawrence. We got a bit of a shock with Lawrence though. When I rushed his semen back to our Capri hotel and examined it under the microscope, I found that the spermatozoa were all stone dead. There was no movement there at all.

  'Jesus,' I said to Yasmin. 'The man's sterile.'

  'He didn't act like it,' she said. 'He was like a goat. Like a randy goat.'

  'We'll have to cross him off the list.'

  'Who's next?' she asked.

  'Giacomo Puccini.'

  20

  'Puccini is a big one,' I said. 'A giant. We mustn't fail.'

  'Where does he live?' Yasmin asked.

  'Near Lucca, about forty miles west of Florence.'

  'Tell me about him.'

  'Puccini is an enormously rich and famous man,' I said. 'He has built himself a huge house, the Villa Puccini, on the edge of a lake beside the tiny village where he was born, which is called Torre del Lago. Now this is the man, Yasmin, who has written Manon, La Boheme, Tosca, Madame Butterfly and The Girl of the Golden West. Classics every one of them. He is probably not a Mozart or a Wagner or even a Verdi, but he's still a genius and a giant. He's a bit of a lad, too.'

  'In what way?'

  'Terrific womanizer.'

  'Super.'

  'He is now sixty-one but that hasn't stopped him,' I said. 'He's a roustabout, a drinker, a crazy car-driver, a mad-keen fisherman and an even keener duck shooter. But above all, he's a lecher. Someone once said of him that he hunts women, wildfowl and libretti in that order.'

  'Sounds like a good chap.'

  'Splendid fellow,' I said. 'He's got a wife, an old bag called Elvira, and believe it or not, this Elvira was once sentenced to five months in prison for causing the death of one of Puccini's girlfriends. The girl was a servant in the house, and the beastly Elvira caught Puccini out in the garden with her late one night. There was a tremendous scene, the girl was sacked and thereafter Elvira hounded her to such an extent that the poor thing took poison and killed herself. Her family went to court and Elvira was given five months in the clink.'

  'Did she go?'

  'No,' I said. 'Puccini got her off by paying twelve thousand lire to the girl's family.'

  'So what's the plan?' Yasmin asked me. 'Do I just knock on the door and walk in?'

  'That won't work,' I said. 'He's surrounded by faithful watchdogs and his bloody wife. You'd never get near him.'

  'What do you suggest then?'

  'Can you sing?' I asked her.

  'I'm not Melba,' Yasmin said, 'but I have quite a decent little voice.'

  'Great,' I said. 'Then that's it. That's what we'll do.'

  'What?'

  'I'll tell you on the way up,' I said.

  We had just returned to the mainland from Capri and we were in Sorrento now. It was warm October weather in this part of Italy and the sky was blue as we loaded up the trusty Citroen Torpedo and headed north for Lucca. We had the hood down and it was a great pleasure to be driving along the lovely coastal road from Sorrento to Naples.

  'First of all, let me tell you how Puccini met Caruso,' I said, 'because this has a bearing on what you're going to be doing. Puccini was world-famous. Caruso was virtually unknown, but he desperately wanted to get the part of Rodolfo in a forthcoming production of La Boheme at Livorno. So one day he turned up at the Villa Puccini and asked to see the great man. Almost every day second-rate singers were trying to get in to see Puccini, and it was necessary that he be protected from these people or he would get no peace. "Tell him I'm busy," Puccini said. The servant told Puccini that the man absolutely refused to go. "He says he'll camp in your garden for a year if necessary." "What does he look like?" Puccini asked. "He's a small stubby little chap with a moustache and a bowler hat on his head. He says he's a Neapolitan. "What kind of a singer?" Puccini asked. "He says he's the best tenor in the world," the servant reported. "They all say that," Puccini said, but something prompted him, and to this day he doesn't know what it was, to put down the book he was reading and to go into the hallway. The front door was open and little Caruso was standing just outside in the garden. "Who the hell are you?" Puccini shouted. Caruso lifted up his full-throated magnificent voice and answered with the words of Rodolfo in La Boheme, "Chi son? Sono un poeta"..."Who am I? I am a poet." Puccini was absolutely bowled over by the quality of the voice. He'd never heard a tenor like it before. He rushed up to Caruso and embraced him and cried out "Rodolfo is yours!" That's a true story, Yasmin. Puccini himself loves to tell it. And now of course Caruso is the greatest tenor in the world and he and Puccini are the closest of friends. Rather marvellous, don't you agree?'

  'What's this got to do with me singing?' Yasmin asked. 'My voice is hardly going to bowl Puccini over.'

  'Of course not. But the general idea is the same. Caruso wanted a part. You want three cubic centimetres of semen. The latter is easier for Puccini to give than the former, especially to someone as gorgeous as you. The singing is simply a way to attract the man's attention.'

  'Go on, then.'

  'Puccini works only at night,' I said, 'from about ten-thirty p.m. to three or four in the morning. At that time the rest of the household will be asleep. At midnight, you and I will creep into the garden of the Villa Puccini and locate his studio, which I believe is on the ground floor. A window will certainly be open because the nights are still warm. So while I hide in the bushes, you will stand outside the open window and sing softly the gentle aria "Un bel di vedremo" from Madame Butterfly. If everything goes right, Puccini will rush to the window and will see standing there a girl of surpassing beauty - you. The rest should be easy.'

  'I rather like that,' Yasmin said. 'Italians are always singing outside each other's windows.'

  When we got to Lucca, we holed up in a small hotel, and there, beside an ancient piano in the hotel sitting-room, I taught Yasmin to sing the aria. She had almost no Italian but she soon learnt the words by heart, and in the end she was able to sing the complete aria very nicely indeed. Her voice was small but she had perfect pitch. I then taught her to say in Italian, 'Maestro, I adore your work. I have travelled all the way from England...' etc., etc., and a few other useful phrases, including of course, 'All I ask is to have your signature on your own notepaper.'

  'I don't think you're going to need the Beetle with this chap,' I said.

  'I don't think I am either,' Yasmin said. 'Let's skip it for once.'

  'And no hatpin,' I told her. 'This man is a hero of mine. I won't have him stuck.'

  'I won't need the hatpin if we don't use the Beetle,' she said. 'I'm really looking forward to this one, Oswald.'

  'Ought to be fun,' I said.

  When all was ready, we drove out one afternoon to the Villa Puccini to scout the premises. It was a massive mansion set on the edge of a large lake and completely surrounded by an eight foot high spiked iron fence. Not so good, that. 'We'll need a small ladder,' I said. So back we drove to Lucca and bought a wooden ladder which we placed in the open car.

  Just before midnight we were once again outside the Villa Puccini. We were ready to go. The night was dark and warm and silent. I placed the ladder up against the railings. I climbed up it and dropped dow
n into the garden. Yasmin followed. I lifted the ladder over on to our side and left it there, ready for the escape.

  We saw at once the one room in the entire place that was lit up. It was facing towards the lake. I took Yasmin's hand in mine and we crept closer. Although there was no moon, the light from the two big ground floor windows reflected on to the water of the lake and cast a pale illumination over the house and garden. The garden was full of trees and bushes and shrubs and flowerbeds. I was enjoying this. It was what Yasmin called 'a bit of a lark'. As we came closer to the window, we heard the piano. One window was open. We tiptoed right up to it and peeped in. And there he was, the man himself, sitting in his shirtsleeves at an upright piano with a cigar in his mouth, tap-tapping away, pausing to write something down and then tapping away again. He was thickset, a bit paunchy and he had a black moustache. There was a pair of candlesticks in elaborate brass holders screwed on to either side of the piano but the candles were not lit. There was a tall stuffed white bird, a crane of some sort, standing on a shelf alongside the piano. And around the walls of the room there were oil paintings of Puccini's celebrated ancestors - his great-great-grandfather, his great-grandfather, his grandfather and his own father. All these men had been famous musicians. For over two hundred years, the Puccini males had been passing on musical gifts of a high order to their children. Puccini straws, if only I could get them, were going to be immensely valuable. I resolved to make one hundred of them instead of the usual fifty.

  And now there we stood, Yasmin and I, peering through the open window at the great man. I noticed that he had a fine head of thick black hair brushed straight back from the forehead.

  'I'm going out of sight,' I whispered to Yasmin. 'Wait until he's not playing, then start to sing.'

  She nodded.

  'I'll meet you by the ladder.'

  She nodded again.

  'Good luck,' I said and I tiptoed away and stood behind a bush only five yards from the window. Through the foliage of the bush I could still see not only Yasmin but I could also see into the room where the composer was sitting because the big window was low to the ground.

  The piano tinkled. There was a pause. It tinkled again. He was working out the melody with one finger only, and it was wonderful to be standing out there somewhere in Italy on the edge of a lake at midnight listening to Giacomo Puccini composing what was almost certainly a graceful aria for a new opera. There was another pause. He had got the phrase right this time and he was writing it down. He was leaning forward with a pen in his hand and writing on the manuscript paper in front of him. He was jotting his musical notes above the words of the librettist.