My Uncle Oswald Read online

  Then suddenly, in the absolute stillness that prevailed, Yasmin's small sweet voice began to sing 'Un bel di vedremo'. The effect was stunning. In that place, in that atmosphere, in the dark night beside the lake outside Puccini's window, I was moved beyond words. I saw the composer freeze. The pen was in his hand against the paper and the hand froze and his whole body became motionless as he sat listening to the voice outside the window. He didn't look round. I don't think he dared to look round for fear of breaking the spell. Outside his window a young maiden was singing one of his favourite arias in a small clear voice in absolutely perfect pitch. His face didn't change expression. His mouth didn't move. Nothing about him moved while the aria was in progress. It was a magic moment. Then Yasmin stopped singing. For a few seconds longer Puccini remained sitting at the piano. He seemed to be waiting for more, or for a sign of some sort from outside. But Yasmin didn't move or speak either. She simply stood there with her face upturned to the window, waiting for the man to come to her.

  And come to her he did. I saw him put down his pen and rise slowly from the piano stool. He walked to the window. Then he saw Yasmin. I have spoken many times of her scintillating beauty, and the sight of her standing out there so still and serene must have come as a glorious shock to Puccini. He stared. He gaped. Was this a dream? Then Yasmin smiled at him and that broke the spell. I saw him come suddenly out of his trance and I heard him say, 'Dio mio come bello!' Then he jumped clear out of the window and clasped Yasmin in a powerful embrace.

  That was more like it, I thought. That was the real Puccini. Yasmin was not slow to respond. Then I heard him say softly to her in Italian, which I'm sure Yasmin didn't understand, 'We must go back inside. If the piano stops playing for too long a time, my wife wakes up and becomes suspicious.' I saw him smile at this, showing fine white teeth. Then he picked Yasmin up and hoisted her through the window and climbed in after her.

  I am not a voyeur. I watched A. R. Woresley's antics with Yasmin for purely professional reasons, but I had no intention of peeping through the window at Yasmin and Puccini. The act of copulation is like that of picking the nose. It's all right to be doing it yourself but it is a singularly unattractive spectacle for the onlooker. I walked away. I climbed the ladder and dropped over the fence and went for a stroll along the edge of the lake. I was away about an hour. When I returned to the ladder there was no sign of Yasmin. When three hours had gone by, I climbed back into the garden to investigate.

  I was creeping cautiously between the bushes when suddenly I heard footsteps on the gravel path and Puccini himself with Yasmin on his arm walked past me not ten feet away. I heard him saying to her in Italian, 'No gentleman is going to permit a lady to walk back to Lucca all alone at this time of night.'

  Was he going to walk her back to the hotel? I followed them to see where they were going. Puccini's motor car was standing in the drive in the front of the house. I saw him help Yasmin into the passenger seat. Then, with a great deal of fuss and match-striking, he got the acetylene headlamps alight. He cranked the starting-handle. The engine fired and ticked over. He unlocked the gates, jumped into the driver's seat and off they went with the motor roaring and revving.

  I ran out to my own car and got the thing started. I drove fast towards Lucca but I never caught up with Puccini. In fact, I was only halfway there when he passed me on his way home again, alone this time.

  I found Yasmin at the hotel.

  'Did you get the stuff?'

  'Of course,' she said.

  'Give it to me quickly.'

  She handed it over and by dawn I had made one hundred Puccini straws of good quality. While I was working on them, Yasmin sat in an armchair in my room drinking red Chianti and giving her report.

  'Great time,' she said. 'Really marvellous. I wish they were all like him.'

  'Good.'

  'He was so jolly,' she said. 'Lots of laughs. And he sang me a bit from the new opera he's doing.'

  'Did he say what he's calling it?'

  'Turio,' she said. 'Turidot. Something like that.'

  'No trouble from the wife upstairs?'

  'Not a peep,' she said. 'But it was so funny because even when we were plunged in passion on the sofa, he had to keep reaching out every now and again to bang the piano. Just to let her know he was working hard and not banging some woman.'

  'A great man, you think?'

  'Terrific,' Yasmin said. 'Stupendous. Find me another like him.'

  From Lucca we headed north for Vienna, and on the way we called on Sergei Rachmaninov in his lovely house on Lake Lucerne.

  'It's a funny thing,' Yasmin said to me when she came back to the car after what had obviously been a fairly energetic session with the great musician, 'it's a funny thing, but there's an amazing resemblance between Mr Rachmaninov and Mr Stravinsky.'

  'You mean facially?'

  'I mean everything,' she said. 'They've both got small bodies and great big lumpy faces. Enormous strawberry noses. Beautiful hands. Tiny feet. Thin legs. And gigantic pizzles.'

  'Is it your experience so far,' I asked her, 'that geniuses have larger pizzles than ordinary men.'

  'Definitely,' she said. 'Much larger.'

  'I was afraid you'd say that.'

  'And they make better use of them,' she said, rubbing it in. 'Their swordsmanship is superb.'

  'Rubbish.'

  'It's not rubbish, Oswald. I ought to know.'

  'Aren't you forgetting they've all had the Beetle.'

  'The Beetle helps,' she said. 'Of course it helps. But there's no comparison between the way a great creative genius handles his sword and the way an ordinary fellow does it. That's why I'm having such a nice time.'

  'Am I an ordinary fellow?'

  'Don't get grumpy,' she said. 'We can't all be Rachmaninov or Puccini.'

  I was deeply wounded. Yasmin had pricked me in my most sensitive area. I sulked all the way to Vienna, but the sight of that noble city soon restored my humour.

  In Vienna, Yasmin had an hilarious encounter with Dr Sigmund Freud in his consulting room at Berggasse 19, and I think this visit merits a brief description.

  First of all, she made a proper application for an appointment with the famous man, stating that she was in urgent need of psychiatric treatment. She was told there would be four days to wait. So I arranged for her to fill in the time by calling first upon the august Mr Richard Strauss. Mr Strauss had just been appointed co-director of the Vienna State Opera and he was, according to Yasmin, rather pompous. But he was easy meat and I got fifty excellent straws from him.

  Then it was Dr Freud's turn. I regarded the celebrated psychiatrist as being in the semi-joker class and saw no reason why we shouldn't have a bit of fun with him. Yasmin agreed. So the two of us cooked up an interesting psychiatric malady for her to be suffering from, and in she went to the big greystone house on Berggasse at two-thirty on a cool sunny October afternoon. Here is her own description of the encounter as she told it to me later that day over a bottle of Krug after I had frozen the straws.

  'He's a goosey old bird,' she said. 'Very severe looking and correctly dressed, like a banker or something.'

  'Did he speak English?'

  'Quite good English but with that dreadful German accent. He sat me down on the other side of his desk and right away I offered him a chocolate. He took it like a lamb. Isn't it odd, Oswald, how every one of them takes the chocolate without any argument?'

  'I don't think it's odd,' I said. 'It's the natural thing to do. If a pretty girl offered me a chocolate, I'd take it.'

  'He was a hairy sort of fellow,' Yasmin said. 'He had a moustache and a thick pointed beard which looked as though it had been trimmed very carefully in front of a mirror with scissors. Whitish-grey it was. But the hair had been cut well back from his mouth above and below so that the bristles made a sort of frame for his lips. That's what I noticed above everything else, his lips. Very striking, those lips of his, and very thick. They looked like a pair of false lips mad