Italy Knows Val Once Again «

Italy Knows Val Once Again

Friday 8th August 2014

I will commit if the veal for the vitello tonnato is hard. This may be the last you’ll hear from me for some time.

Would Italy ever see Val again? Only ten days ago he was lost. But he has been here all week and tomorrow returns to our Northern Capital from the South. Prince Dmitri bought a priest calendar in Siena today. Each month is a new priest. It has been one of those glorious days of high summer, a hard, dry, absolutely consistent heat. We lunched in Siena, quite well and then had ice cream at Nannini’s. All very slimming.

Val is concerned with St Veronica’s towel, and the difficulty of knowing what kind of towel it was – whether tea, bath or beach. At dinner on Tuesday he recalled Mother’s Pride, which was the housewife’s favourite sliced bread in the 1960s. ‘Steam-baked?’ I suggested, as we probed its horror. ‘Yes,’ Val declared, ‘by the Chorley Wood method, not to be confused, of course, with the Bretton Woods Method.’ This last, if you don’t know, is the system of monetary exchange between great nations established in 1944.

It is clear that Val must execute a fresco cycle of his own life on returning to London. ‘Val passing the mantle of camp moments with Joan Crawford to St Catherine of Siena’ will be one scene, to echo the great depiction of ‘Schubert handing the mantle of Classic Song to Brahms’. Val and Prince Dmitri have been poring over Joan Crawford’s first ever TV interview, where she says that you could call a young actor ‘ a lovely boy …. but it wouldn’t be nice.’ Another set piece will be the ducks re-materialising from the air after Val’s 25th birthday. That was because, after boning so many ducks for Duck Galantine and then boiling down their bones for the glaze, the duck aroma was so intense and essential in his flatti that he who was later to become a theatre critic for a national newspaper said that surely the birds would re-form from the air.

Otherwise, Val’s Italian has been as well-laundered but more operatic than the Queen’s French. The big disappointment though was that when the cleaner mimed ‘Is anyone asleep upstairs? (i.e. Can I fling a cloth about?) Val had esprit d’escalier and failed to respond ‘Nessun Dorma.’ Ever since he has been trying to work in opera phrases at every opp.

I’ll Commit if It’s Hard: The Veal for the Vit Ton. Val says, ‘The Veal’s Your Problem’. He’s i/c the Ton Sauce Which Has Been Declared Supreme by Him