And then I said to Nixon, ‘A narcissist is someone better-looking than you are.’” We are still in the bar car but Gore Vidal is on his second Franciacorta and perhaps his fifth epigram. Over his gently rounded shoulder — those Neapolitan tailors — I see rural France career past the curtained windows. Or at least as much of it as the indigo dusk allows. It feels an age ago when our Venice-bound Orient Express sauntered like a countess out of Gare de l’Est.
“I hear the right is still rampant,” he shivers. The Sage of Amalfi strokes his lowered face mask as you might a cravat. “I mean, I’m all for bringing back the birch, but only between consenting adults.” On the last syllable, it is Isadora Duncan of all people who spurts out a mouthful of Lombardian fizz. I was counting on this boozy danseuse and commie spendthrift to be harder to scandalise.
Holding on to pleasure in a darkening world: such is the night’s theme. No mortifiers of the flesh invited.
Class traitors and US exiles, the pair are lost in election talk (Isadora’s new beau is of voting age). A liveried steward has to all but press-gang them into the dining car. Ollie Dabbous has an amuse-bouche of white beetroot with shichimi and chrysanthemum awaiting each of us. To subvert the vintage setting, I wanted a young blade of a chef. So I lured the master of the Hide restaurant in Mayfair for the evening. My condition: all-Burgundy pairings. A Chassagne-Montrachet that I can best describe as honeyish turns up as proof of his word.
Such is the delicacy of the region’s wines that the adjectives for them must be laser instruments in their precision. Mine are blunderbusses. A friend’s shorthand, when he samples the very best, is to pronounce it a “ghost”. It is like drinking nothing at all.
To drink without a nervous choke is some feat, for Noel Gallagher, once of Oasis, is reclining opposite. He looks stunning for a man who took his nourishment in powdered form during the 1990s. My pen had hovered over the invite list — Noel or Liam? Noel or Liam? — but the melodic gift trumps the vocal as a source of beauty. And of power. No Stalin, no Pol Pot can make a tune circulate in the People’s heads against their will. Noel did it five or six times in my youth.
In that shrewd-sounding rasp, he asks Johan Cruyff, the seer of the beautiful game, to explain Total Football. The Dutch enigma says he will oblige but only when Noel tells him where “Live Forever” came from. The impasse is broken with the arrival of a steamed langoustine on tangled seaweed, and a Gobi-dry Chablis.
Johan commandeers Noel’s dish as well as his own as tactical chessmen. “A defender,” he says, sliding one forward, “steps into midfield, 4-3-3 becomes 3-4-3. But only in possession.”
“The libero,” says Noel. All is black outside the window as the train makes short work of Switzerland. “I hate that word,” says the man once known as “Pythagoras in boots”. “It implies that only one player can move around. We must all be free!”
Tell that to the feds: this is my first international travel since March. The mention of freedom has Catherine de’ Medici literally clutching her pearls, which encircle her neck and criss-cross her bonnet.
Johan, ever the Dutch anarcho-capitalist, hates the blue blood and her tenacious grip on the Valois throne. But Catherine didn’t just suppress her people. As a lavish patron of the arts, she bought them off. Portraiture, literature, dance: she spent a queen’s ransom on things of beauty. Denis Diderot even blamed her for bringing decadent cooking to no-nonsense France.
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The vigilance with which she pokes her Aylesbury duck suggests otherwise. It is glazed in black beer and wears a clump of elderberries like a crown. She is keen enough on the 2015 Latricières-Chambertin, though. If only it had less of that unBurgundian structure.
“Mr Vidal, this re . . . rep . . . ” The word makes her gag but she forces herself. “This republic of yours. Who will rule over it after November?”
“Well, half the country doesn’t vote and half the country doesn’t read the news. I just hope it’s the same half.”
Dessert is a blow-torched nectarine, gouged and stuffed with dukkah. As for the cheese course, I am busy with the Époisses when Isadora is moved to ask, “Janan, how is it that you eat such rich food but remain so sleek and attractive?”
“It’s a fair question, and well . . . ” Just then, the steward interrupts with the news that our sleeping quarters are ready. The dining car must close for a full-surface clean. Noel, foxed by the idea of a pre-4am bedtime, looks hurt. If our theme is to relish the moment — to be here now — an early night would betray it. Even Johan, with his athlete’s addiction to sleep, stays put. It takes Gore to purr into the steward’s ear and cram a percentage of the Julian royalties into his coat pocket.
The man returns with a 1989 Échezeaux and pleas not to inform his superiors. The texture of the wine is that of vaporised silk. It does not trickle down the gullet so much as whisper into it. “Now this is a ghost,” I squeal. Noel and I all but jump as the rest harmonise their reply. “Aren’t we all.”
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