Botticelli... Botticelli...

I'm going to tell you another story.

I seemed to spend a lot of my youthful years hanging about with aristocrats. In the late 1970s I had a girlfriend whose Russian mother was the daughter of a handmaiden to the last Tsarina of White Russia, and whose father was an Irish aristocrat from a military family who were ennobled after gallantry at the siege of Lucknow. 

Her uncle was the British ambassador to Moscow at the outbreak of WW2, and because of his Russian connections, the large family seat on the outskirts of Bath became an approved safe-house for Soviet visitors when in the area. The Soviets would only arrive in pairs and had to phone in to the Soviet embassy at least three times a day to prove that they had not defected.

I had lunch (not dinner) at the house one hot Summer day, and the guests consisted of two 50 year-old  Soviet Russian women who looked like characters from a Giles cartoon of the 1960s, the Russian mother, the father, the daughter, me and a Turkish princess called Elsa.

Conversation throughout the meal was entirely in Russian, because the only English word that the two women knew was 'makeup' and they both fell into a sort of wistful reverie as they repeated it over and over to themselves when they heard it in a rare exchange in English between me and the Turkish princess.

They knew a word in Italian though, and it was 'Botticelli' . The more wine they drank, the more they began to stare at me with lascivious smiles on their large, unmade-up faces. At that time I had long, dark hair which fell in ringlets over my forehead, and I seemed to remind them of a character from the Italian painter's repertoire of youths. They would have another pull on their red wine, look at each other briefly, turn to look at me, then murmur Botticelli... to each other in agreement.

Lunch came to a natural end when (and I am not making this up) the eccentric father fell face down into his empty dinner plate and began snoring very loudly. The two Russian women said that they would retire to their room for a siesta, and the surreal party broke up.

I was doing some work to the gutters of the big old house, so I went back out into the courtyard and climbed a very tall ladder to carry on whilst the rest of the party slept it off.

High up in the eaves of the house, I became aware of some movement in the corner of my vision. I turned slightly to see the two Russian women standing side by side at an upper window, dressed only in extremely robust brassieres and Soviet issue underpants, waving at me coyly with sleepy smiles and half-closed eyes.