Free Rancid Pansies by James Hamilton-Paterson Page B

is. I can almost hear you thinking this man’s beginning to sound like the partner from hell, and I wouldn’t blame you. To tell you the truth I don’t even know if he’s a partner at all. Partner, lover, friend, ex: how can one ever distinguish between them except over time? And I’ve only known him 18 months or so. But as I’ve said before, Gerry can be exhilarating company – totally unlike anyone else I’ve ever met. Funnier, more extravagant, determinedly incorrect, yet strangely vulnerable. I can never forget that when he was a kid his mother and elder brother were swept off Lyme Regis Cobb by a freak wave right in front of his eyes. Gone in an instant, their bodies never found. A thing like that has to have made its mark. He was left with his father, who he’s reasonably fond of, & a stepmother he detests. Who knows how relevant all this is to his character & behaviour? I’ve even wondered whether he mightn’t have been attracted to me because I’m an oceanographer, though not being a psychoanalyst I can’t imagine how that twisted logic might work. Certainly he’s got a thing about the sea. It was one of the reasons why he bought that remote house of his in Italy. He liked its distant view of the sea, he told me, because it was distant. And although he talks down his Millie! book as trash, nobody else could have written it half as well as Gerry. He showed a real feel for the maritime aspects & picked up the technical stuff on navigation & sonar surveys etc very quickly.
    I’m sorry, Penny, I’m rabbiting on and it’s not fair of me to take advantage of an ex-graduate student even though you were kind enough to ask for ‘as many details as I care to send’ – words youmay yet live to regret. What the next stage in Gerry’s life will be is anybody’s guess. He is completely unpredictable, but then after he’s gone & done something the first thing you think is ‘how predictable !’ when I suppose one really means how typical of him. But it’s always retrospective. Anyway, all I can do is be supportive & allow him all the room he wants, which he’d take in any case. I must admit I’m a bit ruffled over the other night. It’s not often you attend a family dinner with a few locals & find it turning into a medical soap with guests being stretchered off to a waiting fleet of ambulances, paramedics doing heart massage, defibrillators pinging away. And bloody Gerry worried about keeping his new suit clean. The awful thing is that now it’s over & we’ve done the funeral & everything I can see there’s an element of comedy in it. It isn’t every day you see a vomit-drenched gorilla being helped into an ambulance. I just wish Gerry hadn’t pointed this out quite so soon after the event. One might say that tact isn’t his thing. Neither is remorse, come to that.
    Glad Peter M.’s doing well.
    Cheers,
Adrian

3
    My flight is, of course, delayed (the evergreen excuse, ‘due to lateness of the incoming flight’, is trotted out by uniformed drudges too bored to care whether we think they’re lying). The upshot is that, disembarking in Pisa at twenty minutes to midnight , I have no option but to take a taxi into town and spend the night in one of the hotels near the station. A wintry rain is falling and I’m not choosy. I check into one where I know just by looking at it that the crimson-carpeted marble staircase will go up from the foyer only to where it becomes invisible behind the lift shaft, whereupon it will revert to being a cement emergency stairwell signposted with icons of a running figure pursued by flames. I surrender my carta d’identità and the night clerk returns to his under-the-counter DVD.
    Old and jaundiced – that’s what Samper is in danger of becoming, I think when I resume consciousness at six-thirty the next morning, blinking woozily at the ceiling. Time was, when waking early in a foreign hotel would fill me with the excitement of possibility. These days I know too much