Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

and revenge.
    As we approach familiar terrain the air becomes hazier until it is almost foggy. The town itself is shrouded in a muffling grey sea mist. Or mountain mist? Adrian would know. But it is familiar enough at this time of the year to be nostalgic. I experience a pang of pleasure immediately swamped by melancholy . It is three months since I was last here and the sheer familiarity of the wet mountain smell coming through the driver’s window feels like homecoming. Ordinarily, I would stop here and lay in provisions suitable for some astounding and inventive dishes before heading out past Mosciano and up to Greppone, beyond which is my private eyrie. But today I view the place through a grey lens of sorrow, brimming with the irony of a homecoming without a home to come to. Unavoidably adding to my rue, I have the taxi stop outside a hotel. Nothing feels quite so wrong as checking into a hotel in one’s home town. Owing to a bizarre set of circumstances I once had to stay overnight in a hotel at Liverpool Street station and couldn’t rid myself of the idea that, because I was a Briton living and working in London, I ought to have been able to stay there for free, or at least pay a fraction of what it was costing foreigners and outsiders. As I disembark on the pavement the taximeter shows exactly €90, strangely enough, and I wonder if my gum-chewing chauffeur hasn’t fixed it somehow. However , I derive a certain bleak pleasure from staying within my role. Many years ago Nubar Gulbenkian, on a whim, commissioned  Rolls Royce to build him a London taxi. ‘I’m told,’ he famously observed, ‘that it will turn on a sixpence. Whatever that may be.’ In this same spirit I now hand my driver €120, saying ‘Do keep the change. You might find a use for it.’ Everyone ought to allow himself a little vulgarity now and then, and the driver’s expression makes it all worthwhile.
    Once checked in and my bag dumped, I head off along the Corso to my favourite bar. It feels both inevitable and right that before I can reach it I nearly collide with a misty figure briskly rounding the corner and suddenly I’m face to face with my old Moriarty, signor Benedetti, the dapper, shifty little estate agent who sold me my house some years ago. Because he had assured me that my sole neighbour was almost never there and was anyway mouse-quiet, I bought the house from him without a qualm. More fool I. When I tell you that the neighbour turned out to be a piano-bashing Voynovian in permanent residence – to wit, the egregious Marta – you will understand why relations between Samper and Benedetti have at best been distantly civil over the years. It turned out that the unscrupulous little rodent had told Marta exactly the same thing about me and it was not long before she was countering my polite remonstrations about her piano playing with gratuitous remarks about my singing: an impasse that led to all sorts of unpleasantness. Ever after, the difficult civility that Benedetti and I have maintained has been based on a kind of parody of elaborate Renaissance manners such as Castiglione’s ideal courtier would have approved. On my side it has also been inspired by the enjoyment I get from watching his losing battle with male pattern baldness, a field on which noblesse and chivalry are sadly powerless. Benedetti’s startling new tactics in his trichological campaign are, in fact, the first thing I notice as we courteously side-step before recognising one another as old foes. Gone is the old hair-weaving ploy. In its place, exactly as I predicted, is a glossy, shameless rug. It’s a very good rug, and must have cost him a lot of money. It reminds me that this man ought really to be cherished for thegaiety he brings to our lives. I had similar feelings about Jerry Falwell, the late American evangelist. Anyone who can accuse one of the Teletubbies of being homosexual, and do it with a straight face, is a priceless asset to the human