The Goldberg Variations

‘Buon giorno. Sono il proprietario!’ (Good morning. I’m the owner.)

Looking at the decayed plaster, broken floorboards, exposed brickwork and glassless windows, the only response could be pity. Dad warned him he was rendering the road impassable and that the next time he saw him he would call the carabinieri, all in fluent Italian. We never saw him again. Toby and I went back later and booted a gaping hole in the door to his harem.

The region also fostered nobler forms of love. At Gradara castle we saw the room where Gianciotto Malatesta had supposedly murdered his brother and wife, Paolo and Francesca da Rimini, whose eyes and lips had met for the first and last time only an instant before the descending knife sent them to an endless embrace in the second circle of Hell. Dante was so moved by Francesca’s account of their plight, an echo of his own unsatisfied love for Beatrice, that he fainted with grief and consigned the wronged assassin to Caina, the lowest circle of all. I bought a postcard of Rossetti’s representation of the unhappy pair, their pre-Raphaelite hair flowing in an eternal, ethereal embrace, and promptly found my own Francesca on the beach. Pale amid the dark Italian girls, she was an Austrian with hair that twisted and tumbled down her back like Francesca’s in the picture. An earthy naturalness made communication with the other girls easy, with or without language, but I felt that my heroine floated on a higher plane, and I could only watch from below, in love and awe, suffering an unrequited passion she knew nothing of. Zeffirelli’s film of Romeo and Juliet had affected me the same way months previously. Devastated by the grief and suicide of Olivia Hussey’s beautiful Juliet, I’d gone to the bottom of the garden in tears and made a rather half-hearted attempt to hang myself from the swing on a triangular piece of metal.

When frustration had turned to pain I stopped going to the beach, and fell back on my favourite pastime of combat with insects. By day I fought a colony of red ants that infested a crumbling, lime-painted wall; by night I’d chase the gigantic moths that batted against the polystyrene-tiled ceiling in the bathroom and frightened my sisters. It was whilst chasing one such creature with an oar that I first noticed the little walled town in the distance, across the sloping fields at the back of our villa. To my overwrought fourteen-year-old mind it gradually acquired almost magical properties; it was a place of tranquillity and happiness immured against the woes of the world I was currently living in. One afternoon I persuaded Mum to stay behind while everyone else went to the beach, and walk there with me, cross-country, through the yellow wheat-fields to the enchanted city. After a while the sea appeared to our right, and the carbuncle coastal towns seemed safely distant. Reaching the town was the realisation of a fantasy, and knowing its name, to hold a powerful talisman. Novilara. It was only later I discovered that it was the town to which Gianciotto Malatesta had retreated after Paolo and Francesca’s murder. Men in caps and waistcoats playing boules on a freshly concreted surface, spoke what sounded like a Spanish-riddled dialect, older and different from the language ten miles away on the coast. Drinking coffee here I could smell the beans as if for the first time, my senses heightened and sharpened, finally, above the fog that had recently clouded every thought and image.

The remaining days of the holiday were spent in Dorset, where the sober climate and landscape of south-west England soon washed away the blood and grime of the Marche. Lighted cigarettes pushed through the letterbox of our cottage in Kent had combined with the threat of a housing development on the village green to make us briefly second-home-less, but by selling the film rights to his novel A Roman Marriage, Dad bought a thatched cottage in Piddlehinton, whose Victorian and Jacobean buildings merged to give the impression of a cottage loaf. We soon discovered new favourite locations for walks and tea to replace the ones in Kent, but most of our activities now centred around the house itself, specifically the drawing room. During the mornings we’d read there in silence; in the afternoons perform short homemade plays (the curtains over the French windows formed an ideal backstage area); and after supper we’d sit in front of the log fire whose perspex guard threw back other-worldly reflections that were the perfect accompaniment to the ghost stories we read by the light of its flame, sipping martinis. Not that we needed the judges and knights that haunted the pages of Bram Stoker and Sheridan Le Fanu when we had our very own nun. Just as the poltergeist at home in London seemed to have been roused by the activity of small children, so the unfortunate novice might have been disturbed by the energy of frustrated adolescents. Each night Mum was roused from slumber by banging and thumping on the bedroom ceiling, above which lay a sleeping Toby. Concerned that he’d be woken, not to say petrified, by the racket, she visualised a cross and then burned it into the ceiling, so putting a stop to these antics. Toby slept blissfully through the ritual haunting and exorcism, as did everyone else. It was only a year or so later that we discovered why the house never appeared to have been touched by the cleaner during our long absences. ‘It’s ’arnted! I feel funny in there alone,’ Mrs Rose informed us, sounding uncannily like one of the retainers that populated our fireside tales of the supernatural. ‘Oh ye-eah! It’s well known in the village. Nun used to live there, got pregnant. ’Anged ’erself up the-ere,’ she explained, widening her eyes appropriately whilst indicating Toby’s attic room.

No one seemed more disturbed by these events than Beta who was also the one that frightened most easily when the ghoul emerged from the wardrobe at the climax of a fireside reading. To Liz and Jo she was still the welcome older sister who took a share in these activities, but my attraction was growing with greater familiarity, and the slight swell of her breasts under a tight black polo-neck or the curve of her firm thigh in faded blue jeans distracted me even more than the sight of her nakedness had in Fano.

I began to wonder how far I could take things. Each evening she’d allow me to kiss her goodnight while she lay beneath the sheets, naked but for the white cotton pants I’d seen so much of in Italy, and let me run my hands under the bedclothes, right down her back, to her buttocks and thighs, her lips parting involuntarily as I did so. In my mind I allowed the action to develop, taking her tongue in my mouth, slipping my hand down her pants, sliding beneath the bedclothes and making love to her. She must have been aware that as I left her room each night my cock was straining against my pyjamas.

After one such foray I was standing in the bathroom, vainly attempting to pee whilst waiting for my alter ego to descend. Matters weren’t helped by the proximity of the loo to the airing cupboard where I knew Beta’s underwear was drying. There it stood, hovering in no man’s land when Mum pushed the door open and walked in.

‘Goodness! What an enormous genital!’

Not even being caught crucifying slugs or aroused in charge of pornographic magazines had prepared me for such a humiliation.

Next morning she took me aside.

‘Can I have a word? Beta’s been complaining. She says you keep groping her.’

My forehead felt on fire with embarrassment.

‘What a bitch!’

‘Well, is it true?’

‘I suppose. She doesn’t exactly offer any resistance.’

‘I gather she was very provocative in Italy.’

‘Really?’

‘Liz says she spent the entire time parading round the bedroom half-naked. I’d call that provocative. You know, Mark, what you need is a damn good poke!’

I shouldn’t have been shocked. While the nation was throwing up its hands in horror at the appearance of The Little Red School Book and its permissive morality and disregard for authority, Mum was out buying us all a copy – though she rather spoilt the gesture by adding her own editorial. In my annotated edition, the first sentence ‘All parents arc paper tigers’ now read ‘Some parents are paper tigers.’ It sat on my bookshelf alongside The Communist Manifesto, Das Kapital and a host of other tracts and pamphlets the Soviet regime’s heavy subsidy afforded to my pocket money. The Guardian published my letters extolling the virtues of the egalitarian comprehensive school system I was part of over the iniquitous, class-perpetuating private one I’d left, and I started producing The Marksist, a socialist monthly distributed round the family which included a news section with headlines like ‘Dustmen’s pay to rise above that of solicitors’ in order to irritate my grandmother. I joined the Young Communist League, the youth wing of the Communist Party and the even more hardline International Marxist Group, but this was spiked when a representative turned up at Holland Park Avenue wishing to speak to Comrade Mark Glanville. Peering round the staircase, intrigued to see who had called so late I heard Dad inform my fellow traveller ‘he’s our son and he’s in bed.’ I forgave him not long after when it was discovered that the IMG had helped the IRA to set up a bomb factory in Kilburn. In Man: A Critical Analysis, a book whose title was as modest as its ambition, I attempted nothing less than an explanation of the origins of culture, religion and civilisation using sources as diverse as Schopenhauer, Freud, Marx, Wittgenstein, Melanie Klein, the Koran, Nietzsche and A.J. Ayer. Unable to live and play out in the world as I would like to have done, I internalised it, picked at it and analysed it with the blunted tools of ill-formed ideas.

‘What’s ’at you got in yer bag?’ asked a classmate one day as I surreptitiously slipped a copy of Korstner’s Kant into my briefcase during a science lesson.

‘Kant.’

‘Wor, Cunt! Let’s ’ave a look!’

It was probably exactly what I should have been reading instead.

On my first outing with the Cockney Reds I was caught in no man’s land. Struggling to lever myself out of the quagmire of pseudo-accademia, I turned up in a very unstreetwise brown velvet jacket, perfect for browsing in antiquarian bookshops, inappropriate on a train carrying one of the country’s most feared crews of violent football hooligans. Their recent trip to Cardiff, with the most vicious fighting seen at a football match in years, had alerted the media, and the platform at Liverpool Street looked like a film set as the full armoury of BBC outside broadcasting descended.

Norwich was an all-ticket affair, and we didn’t have the numbers to justify a special train, instead making do with four reserved carriages. Farmers and gentry quivered or bristled as chants of ‘We have fits of mental violence’ and ‘Psycho aggro’ rent the air. At last I was among the tribe of scarred, tattooed faces that had so long fascinated me. Finding a space, I was joined by two skinheads and their greasy-haired, pockmarked companion who clambered into the empty seats around me, pushing aside my legs as they did so. I smiled at the one with the hair. He glared back.

‘You Uni’ed?’

‘’Course.’

‘’Cos this is a Uni’ed carriage.’

He looked at me in disgust, the way other passengers had been looking at them.

‘Wha’s that you go’ in yer bag?’

‘Sandwiches.’

‘Gi’ ’s one!’

I hauled my plastic bag onto the table, but before I could open it they’d grabbed it and were delving in, pulling out Mum’s carefully-wrapped packed lunch, and attacking the contents in a way that made Dad look like a finishing-school graduate.