Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  In all, I spent several evenings in his company and far preferred it to that of his wife. I flatter myself that this was true for him, too. Not that there was much self-flattery involved, since if the marriage Clifford described to me had been made in heaven it bespoke a heaven with quite a malign sense of humour. Millie had been three or four years older than Clifford when at twenty-three he abandoned a career in the Navy to marry her in 1979. ‘Stupidest thing I ever did,’ he said disarmingly. ‘Not that I’m not fond of the kids, don’t get me wrong. They’re great. But Millie and me, well, I suppose we weren’t cut out to be shipmates. I was having certain, um, problems in the Navy at the time, plus I wanted to come home. I was born pretty much here, you see, just over in Kenton. I’m a Middle-sex man, Gerry. In every sense.’

  Ah yes. Enter Dorothy, discreetly, wearing mufti. But I liked the way an ancient county, once the eponymous home of the Middle Saxons and brutally zoned out of existence in the mid-Sixties, still lingered to define something that persisted just beneath the surface, even close to the heart.

  ‘When I married her I liked her spirit. We were good chums, really. Not a lot of the other, if you get my drift.’ Clifford stared intently into his beer. ‘We were neither of us much on that sort of thing. Well, it was four years before Pauline was born, then Jack a couple of years later. Millie was thirty plus by then. And then – ironic, really, when you think about it: it was me introduced her to sailing. Basically, I was happy to get her out of the house. All that stuff in the papers about her being a seawoman born and bred is a load of bollocks. I’m not saying she didn’t take to it like a duck to water and it wasn’t long before she outgrew poor old Ruislip Lido. But bred to it she wasn’t. I doubt if she’d ever put bum to thwart in so much as a rowing boat until she met me. From then on, though, she was bloody unstoppable. Always off sailing, she was. I did most of the kids’ upbringing myself. Not that I resent any of it, it was just the way things turned out. I suppose it’s the same for all of us in one way or another. We always wake up too late to who we really are, and by then we’re stuck with living a life belonging to someone else entirely.’

  I could sense Dorothy sidling closer. ‘And from then on Millie just drifted further away each year?’ I suggested, not much caring but being professional all the same: an author temporarily stuck with someone else’s life entirely.

  ‘Drifted, my arse. She’d set her course and headed off over the horizon. She knew where she was going, all right. Not even that Aussie shark could stop her.’

  ‘Lew Buschfeuer?’

  ‘Now, now. I’m referring to the brave animal that lunched off her arm. Better man than I am, Gunga Din, and all that. I wouldn’t have had the nerve. You probably haven’t heard Millie swear? I mean, really have a go? We used to sound off a bit in the Navy but we were just kids compared to Millie. I bet that shark’s ears are still ringing. Like I said, you’ve got to admire the woman’s spirit. She’s way beyond all this, now.’ Clifford’s gesture took in himself, the cricketing weasels, the entire pub and its encroaching tide of eateries, as well as a large tract of north-west Greater London. ‘You know she’s got a new house near Chichester? She did ask if I wanted to move down there, which was nice of her, but to be frank I’d sooner die. Poncy lot. Weekend sailors and the pink-gin set in designer yachting caps. Either that or wearing more wool than the average sheep. They look like extras from a film about Dunkirk.’

  ‘So what do you think she’ll do now? She can’t go on with this long-distance yachting caper, surely? Not at her age. And anyway, she’s already broken the only record that matters.’

  ‘Christ, Gerry, don’t let her hear you say that. There are dozens of other records, and to people like her they all matter. But you’re right – even she can’t go on for ever. I’ve asked her, naturally, and so have the kids, because obviously we worry about her. When you think about it, it’s ridiculous, really, a one-armed grandmother sailing around the world. But she’s always vague about the future. I don’t think she knows herself. Two things I’m certain about, though. One, she’s never going to come home to Pinner, and between you and me I can live with that because she’s not the only one to have a life of her own.’ He shot me a complicitous glance. ‘You must meet Terry sometime.’

  Nothing discreet about old Dottie now, waving her underwear triumphantly over her head. Samper’s gob remains utterly unsmacked. ‘And the other thing you’re sure about?’

  ‘Oh, just that although she might well retire from yachting she won’t retire from the limelight if she can help it. Not Millie. You know how jealous she is of her rivals, especially that Rasmussen fellow she left behind in the Atlantic. She really hates him. No, she’ll have to find something to throw in their faces. I dread to think what it will be.’

  All this zips through my mind in compressed form as I sit on my Tuscan terrace talking to Frankie on a mobile phone. I am resigned to going over to the UK and spending as little time as possible with Millie at whatever mooring she chooses. Happily, it is more likely to be Brown’s Hotel than Pinner. I just hope it won’t be Chichester. I wonder if I will ever see Clifford again and find myself undismayed to think I mightn’t. Just another dysfunctional sporting family, the Cleats. I seem to collect them.

  ‘I’ll call her up,’ I tell Frankie resignedly. ‘And come over. Obviously I shall have to pay the fare myself,’ I can’t help adding in my role as poor, put-upon Samper. Completely bogus, of course. We both know perfectly well that I am paid well for these writing jobs on the understanding that I persevere until all parties are satisfied with the text. All parties but the author, that is.

  ‘There’s a good boy,’ says Frankie.

  But after he rings off I have to deal with something that has been nagging me ever since my after-breakfast session with the tape measure. I repeat the measurements and there’s no doubt. Only two pills to go and Samper is definitely packing more veal. Obviously this process will stop when the course finishes but all the same I’m glad the experiment is nearly over. However, it does do something for the masculine spirits. I’m beginning to wonder how I shall look in that new pair of Stiff Lips jeans I bought the other week in Florence. The last word in fashionable, of course, and they cost a fortune; but now I hear that Homo Erectus jeans are sold in Essex outlet villages it’s time to switch my allegiance. While nerving myself to call Millie Cleat in London I essay the electrifying curse that Adriano flings at Elena’s head in one of the most impassioned outbursts in nineteenth-century Italian opera. ‘A thousand tortures fall upon you! / May you carry your children to the cemetery one by one, / The Host turn to marble in your faithless mouth!’ Rattling good stuff, but unfortunately today my voice isn’t up to Ficarotta’s taxing score and I’m obliged to give up, panting. I content myself with repeating the opening phrase, Mille atroci tormenti, which little by little turns into Millie atroce Cleati. Childish, no doubt; but it puts me right in the mood for phoning her.

  6

  It is not Brown’s Hotel but the London Hilton, a suite affording a glimpse across Constitution Hill into the sacred precinct of Buckingham Palace garden. I gather that when the hotel was built in the early Sixties there was one of those huge public outcries that exist mainly in the imaginations of a few noisy journalists, to the effect that our dear Queen (as she was then known) would have her privacy invaded by vulgar Americans in their skyscraper hotel spying on her from its upper floors. Since when, nothing has exceeded the vulgarity of our own home-grown press where the royal family is concerned – except that of the royal family itself, of course, whose indiscretions have seldom been conducted anywhere as tastefully secluded as a private garden. In this whole business of spying and being spied on the Brits really have been outstandingly stupid, even for them, and have lost all sense of where the demarcation might be between public and private. We have renounced our privacy with an almost audible sigh of relief, as though shedding an intolerable burden laid on us by the centuries. (Such are the insights afforded a jaded exile b
y a view from the forty-third floor, or whichever this is.)

  Millie is herself also standing at the window with the short, thick telescope she carries everywhere, a prop too naff for further comment. It is three o’clock in the afternoon and she is wearing a garment that only plebeian queens like Noël Coward ever affected, a sort of cross between a housecoat and a dressing gown all in crimson Chinese silk with dragons rampaging over her knobby little chest. The empty sleeve is pinned up to the shoulder with a dramatically large safety-pin. Thespian, that’s what she is, I realize with surprise. I haven’t actually seen her these past six months, owing to my having been busy writing her pestilential story, and in that time she has changed. Gone is the plucky grandmother from Pinner. The creature standing at the window languidly surveying her domain is, good Lord, queenly.

  ‘Gerry darling,’ she cries, turning and coming forward to gather my two hands in her one. Where did she learn that? How can she possibly avoid a guest-star appearance at Chichester Rep’s next Christmas panto? She leans down to pat the thick folder of manuscript sitting prominently on a coffee table. ‘Your book! So wonderful. So naughty, too. The things you so nearly say. Delicious. Now sit down and tell me all about yourself. It’s been an age.’ The telescope hangs from a lanyard around her chicken-skin neck and bounces heavily off the dragons as she sits down. I notice scurf on the shiny brown shins that gleam beneath the hem.

  Numbly I grope for a chair. Am I going to have to play Miss Mapp to Millie’s Lucia? Or worse, Georgie Pillson? I decide resolutely to remain the last of the Sampers.

  ‘Millie! You look like Lord Nelson got up as Somerset Maugham. All you need is an admiral’s hat and a cigarette holder.’

  At this she frowns slightly, reminding me that she dislikes levity unless it’s her own. ‘Same old Gerry,’ she says with a glint. Too late it occurs to me that she may never have heard of Somerset Maugham and probably dares not ask in case the truth is even worse than she suspects. Some West Country delicacy, perhaps, like a Cornish pasty or Devon cream, only more disreputable?

  ‘Well,’ I reply cautiously, ‘the same old Gerry has gathered that, kind as you are about his book – our book, your book – you feel there’s the odd bit of re-jigging still to be done. I’m sure you’re right. When one bakes a beautiful cake it’s essential to get the final artistic details of the icing absolutely spot-on, don’t you think? Decorations are vital. The least sign of sloppiness can have a subtly discouraging effect on the mind of the person eating the cake and can actually change its taste. Finally, everything comes down to where you put your little silver balls. Like life, really.’

  (Here I am going to employ a technique that is wholly novel in modern British writing and leave it up to the reader to supply Millie’s foul language. From this point on and throughout the rest of the book you should simply pepper her sentences with the sort of expressions that make you feel jaded and slightly ill to see in print.)

  ‘It’s not your little silver balls I’m thinking of,’ says the raddled yachtsdiva tartly. ‘Although in my opinion quite a few have found their way into your cake. Now, all the stuff I told you in those long conversations we had with your tape recorder – you know, about my family, my accident, how Beldame came to be built and so on – all that stuff’s okay, obviously. No – I’m talking about your fantastic stories, how I only learned sailing in my thirties on Ruislip Lido, that sort of thing. Those are definitely not okay. I can’t imagine who the hell you’ve been gossiping with. It wasn’t bloody Clifford, was it? I warned you not to believe half of what that man tells you. He likes his yarns – it’s something he picked up in the Navy. Not the only thing he picked up in the Navy, as a matter of a fact, but unfortunately I didn’t know about that until well after we were married. Anyway, the facts speak for themselves: I’m a seawoman born and bred, everyone knows that. So those bits will have to go. But more than that, Gerry, what really bothers me is the way you manage to make me sound like somebody who’s just another around-the-world sailing legend. And I’m a lot more, as we both know, and as the British public knows.’

  Strewth. If I flatter myself – and it has happened now and then – it is because, almost alone in this hack trade of mine, I have a reputation for making two-dimensional sporting heroes seem briefly three-dimensional despite everything they can do. Take that downhill skier, Luc Bailly. When I first met him he was nothing but a crippled priapist in his late twenties with a factory making hideous sportswear and a private round-the-clock team of deft-fingered nurses. But by the time I’d finished with him he was Monsieur Renaissance Man. Even the group sex orgies, the clysters in Klosters, had been airbrushed into something hazy and artistically stylized, like one of those huge brown old canvases of the Rape of the Sabine Women.

  ‘I’m mortified to hear about the book’s shortcomings, Millie,’ I tell her dangerously. ‘Perhaps if you will be a bit more specific we can pump up the portrait accordingly. Is there any particular aspect of your fascinating personality you would like elaborated? Your maternal qualities? Cookery skills? Kindness to animals? Sense of humour?’

  Surely this time I have gone too far and I fully expect her to give me one of her nautical tongue-lashings for impertinence, facetiousness, etc., but she just looks thoughtful.

  ‘I’m thinking more that you haven’t taken me seriously as a spiritual person,’ she waves her hand at the incriminating folder on the coffee table. ‘As your version stands, our heroine gets bitten by the long-distance sailing bug and goes for gold, driven by her extraordinary determination, competitiveness and raw courage. Do you really think that’s me, Gerry? After all the time you’ve spent with me?’

  ‘You’re saying you’re not determined, competitive and courageous?’ I grope, flummoxed by her having spent the best part of a month last winter telling me she was exactly all those things.

  ‘Of course not,’ she snarls, reverting reassuringly to type. ‘How could I possibly have become world-record holder and the most successful yachtswoman in all history otherwise? But I’m other things as well, you must have noticed that? Really, Gerry, wake up! You’re missing the whole point, if I may say so. Perhaps it’s because you’re a man. Sort of. Sort of because you’re a man,’ she adds quickly.

  Yeah, and packing more veal, is what I’d like to retort. My ex-analyst, who retired badly bruised after only three sessions many years ago, would have been interested to learn that what pops into Samper’s mind at this instant is a vision of himself wearing his new jeans, the crotch distressed beyond the designer’s intentions. And over in Guangzhou an elderly couple look up from their tireless chopping and bundling and beam with pride. But I don’t want things to degenerate still further. I want to get briefed, go away and amend the book and then get the hell out of Millie Cleat’s life for ever and ever. Samper knows when to swallow his pride. I notice the sun has broken through the London overcast outside. Millie notices, too, with her weather eye. She gets up and goes to the window with her engorged telescope and resumes her Horatia Nelson act, scanning far horizons.

  ‘I had a dream, Gerry,’ she says loftily. Goodness gracious; forget Nelson, it’s Martin Luther Queen. ‘I’m quite certain I must have told you. Even in Pinner the sea was calling me. It was never to do with winning races, you know. It was something almost, well, mystical. About being alone, just me and the elements. About being blown on my way to an unknown destination. Unknown to me, I mean. But perhaps not unknown to the wind … I wonder if you can understand? Feeling one’s life is on course for the grandest voyage of all?’

  This claptrap is punctuated by the reassuring sounds of London normality filtering through the double glazing from outside: the growl of buses and the sudden familiar bray of a police siren. I am not an urbanite but I find myself nostalgically pleased to hear them. Sometimes the silence up at Le Roccie can become oppressive.

  ‘I assure you this is the first time you’ve ever mentioned this, Millie,’ I tell her. ‘And what’s more I have all your tapes to prove it
. Obviously, had you made it clear that this side of you is so important I should have written about it. Of course. But you never did.’

  Horatia Queen half turns from the window and gives a pitying little smile. ‘Men,’ she murmurs.

  I do some more pride-swallowing. ‘Then what you and I need to do is arrange to have a session in the next day or two when you can give me all this new stuff properly and I shall ingeniously incorporate it into our text. Not in lumps, I mean, but properly spread throughout. I’m sorry, Millie, but I never asked you about your religious views because you never gave the slightest hint that you had any.’ Quite true. And anyway, it’s not the sort of thing one asks people these days for fear they’ll tell you.

  ‘Very well, Gerry. Since I can see you’re taking notes you might scribble a reminder to yourself to ask me about the Canaries. Just write Can—’

  With a deafening crash the door bursts open, slamming back into the wall, and four immense policemen wearing black flak jackets irrupt into the room with drawn pistols. One kicks open the bedroom door and yells ‘Clear!’, then does the same to the bathroom beyond. The others fan out and cover us, shouting ‘Freeze-freeze-freeze!’ Into the room behind them trots a breathless pink man in a suit. For a moment everything does freeze. Tableau.

  ‘You with the ’scope!’ shouts one of the men to the pop-eyed Millie, paralysed by the window. ‘Where’s the weapon? The gun, the gun!’

  Everything in the room becomes treacly, as though slowed by a rising tide of testosterone and adrenaline that has already reached our waists. I find I can’t move my legs. In this instant of total fear I feel something like a small sac burst somewhere inside me and hot liquid run down. To her credit Millie snaps out of her paralysis first.