Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  My instructions are to get a station taxi to Crendlesham Hall, ‘a little out of town towards the Crendle and Swythings’, whatever they are. Am I right to detect something excluding, even mildly hostile, about these opaque directions? When we finally arrive in Woodbridge the sauce-spattered horde pours out onto the platform with me in their midst trying to hold myself poised and aloof, like Liszt’s St François de Paule marchant sur les flots. The result of his stately passage is that by the time he reaches the taxi rank St François finds himself fresh out of transport. When at last he gets a cab it is five past eight and he is already late for this crucial dinner. The driver is not some ancient Suffolk dunce but a young Pakistani or something, very swift and civil. I implore him to hurry still more. ‘It can’t be far,’ I tell him to reassure myself.

  ‘About twenty minutes with luck, sir,’ he says.

  ‘Twenty minutes? “A little out of town”, they said,’ as if by quoting this I could magically shrink the distance. ‘And what’s a Crendle? Or Swythings, come to that?’

  ‘The Crendle’s a hill where they used to execute horse thieves, sir. Rough lot they were in those days. You don’t want to hear how they did it.’ He is watching me in the driving mirror.

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Ah. Well, what they did was stuff the fellow as full as they could with freshly grated horseradish root, at both ends, sir, if you follow me, and in his eyes. That would be dreadful agony, as you can imagine if ever you’ve taken a tiny bit too much with your roast beef. All ablaze and choking, he’d be. And then they’d peg him down to the ground and have a Suffolk Punch sit on him. That’s one big mother of a shire horse, you know, sir. Weighs over a ton. They say the horseradish would shoot out of him, oh, twenty feet or so, even his eyes, too, sometimes, pop-pop. There wasn’t much horse-thieving around these parts. That’s the Crendle over there now, sir.’ He nods towards a low crepuscular hill. Again I catch his gaze on me. ‘Would you care to stop, sir?’

  ‘Stop? Absolutely not, I’m late as it is. You can’t go too fast. Pardon my saying so, but you’re amazingly well informed.’

  ‘For a Pakistani or for a taxi driver, sir?’

  ‘Just very well informed,’ I say warmly but warily. ‘For a Briton.’ I am not about to have my multiracial correctness quizzed. ‘And Swythings?’

  ‘They’re what we call a particular area down by the Deben. That’s the river here. Swythings is an old dialect word meaning “quick to mow”. Probably peasant humour, sir, since the land there was so often flooded.’

  He’s much too knowledgeable to be a mere unlettered local; he’s obviously an autodidact. I muse on this and forget about the time and suddenly we’re turning into a lane – no, a drive – and pulling up outside a large half-timbered, barn-like building. A naked bulb hangs over the porch and its light, together with that of the rapidly deepening dusk, illuminates an immense heap of sand, a cement mixer and various wooden pallets of materials shrouded in polythene. Can this be right? Does the world’s greatest young conductor throw dinners at a building site? It’s a hopeful sign of eccentricity for a potential biographer, if a little discouraging to a potential diner. I pay the driver, who gives me a card and hopes that I enjoy my evening. Right now the chances feel slim. Because Adrian flew off to join his ship before I had a chance to ask him, I’m still unsure exactly what he has told his illustrious brother-in-law about me. As the front door knocker comes away in my hand I reflect on the awkwardness of being invited to dinner by total strangers unless there’s some pretext that everyone acknowledges. So it is reassuring that the woman who answers the door is recognizably Adrian’s sister. ‘You must be Gerald,’ she says, taking the immense horseshoe from my hand. ‘Don’t worry, it’s always coming off – it’s just something temporary we rigged up. As you can see, we’ve got the builders.’

  ‘Inside as well as out.’ The house looks immensely old, such of it as is visible between dust covers and sheets of plasterboard leaning up against the wall.

  ‘Yes, I must apologize. We ought really to have met in London after all. I’m afraid I’ve got so used to it that I forget what a pigsty this place is. Oh, and the lavatory in the cloakroom here is kaput. Josh has put one of his dinosaurs down it so I’m afraid you’ll have to go upstairs like the rest of us. To your left at the top of the stairs.’ Jennifer waves a hand towards a broad wooden staircase while leading the way to the kitchen, which is a welcoming womb of warmth and light and delicious cooking smells. And there, sitting reading a newspaper beside the immense Aga range, is Christ himself with a cat on his lap.

  ‘I’m so sorry I’m late,’ I say. ‘The train took hours and hours.’

  ‘We’re quite used to it,’ says the celebrated man, getting to his feet and apologizing to the cat, which lands on the pale brick floor looking blank and cross like a suddenly woken child. The great Max Christ turns out to be surprisingly small, with greying curly hair that could use some of Derek’s attention. ‘They’re doing something to East Anglia’s signalling system or something. Everyone’s late all the time.’ His English is impeccable.

  We shake hands and I’m about to hand over the prosecco to Jennifer when I discover to my horror that I must have left it in the taxi. My hosts make light of this and press a deeply welcome gin and tonic into my apologetic hands. ‘The driver gave me his card so maybe I should ring him up and ask him to leave the bottle at the station,’ I say lamely. I find I don’t care much because now they both know I brought something it has already served its purpose. Still, £15.99, a grotesque price. ‘A pretty odd sort of driver,’ I add. ‘He told me all about the Crendle being a hill where they used to execute horse thieves. Asked me if I wanted to stop there, if you please, at twenty-five past eight at night. A Pakistani, he said he was.’

  Jennifer and her husband exchange glances. ‘So Khurshid’s out again, is he?’ says Max. ‘I wonder if it’s remission or probation this time? He’s just a harmless sex offender. Perfectly polite and non-violent. Sometimes he stops when he has a lone gentleman in the cab. You were quite safe. Rather a gifted man. Certainly very inventive. He makes up stories about the places he drives past.’

  ‘Horse thieves, indeed,’ says Jennifer, lifting a shoulder of mutton out of the oven. ‘The Crendle’s actually a stone monument near a crossroads about two miles from here. Nobody knows quite what it commemorates. It’s so weathered it’s a complete blank on all its faces. You can just recognize it in one of Constable’s paintings.’

  ‘Ach, Quatsch, Hannele!’ says Max. ‘Don’t listen to her.’ He urges me towards the plain scrubbed kitchen table laid with an assortment of ancient cutlery with yellowed handles that looks as though it was assembled from local junk shops. ‘Jennifer’s as bad as Khurshid when it comes to making things up.’

  ‘Well, what are Swythings, then?’ I ask her, a little bemused. ‘Khurshid said it meant “easy to mow” or something.’

  ‘What nonsense! It was a medieval land tax system. People could graze their cattle on “swithen” land for nothing, although they did have to donate a cow each Christmas to the Bishop of Bury St Edmunds.’

  ‘You’re such a liar, my dear,’ Max tells his wife fondly.

  I can’t get the measure of any of this, like the victim of an obscure practical joke. I’m tired and hungry, too, what with the nervous strain and late arrival, although the g-&-t is working its customary magic. I suppose I was expecting something more along the lines of a formal dinner with maybe one or two household-name glitterati trying to be witty by candlelight. The sort of company where at last I could be myself and feel at home, maybe even shine a little in my modest way. Instead here we three are, sitting at the kitchen table, tucking into a large and succulent mutton roast. I should think that after a good searing this piece of friendly old sheep we’re eating must have gone into one of the cooler bottom ovens at around two o’clock this afternoon. In that enormous iron casserole with water in its sunken lid to keep the contents moist it would have been just about
ready by seven. Max (as he insists I call him) has produced some bottles of Donnafugata’s’02 Tancredi, a sumptuously glowering Sicilian red that looks almost black in the glass and makes me want to weep it’s so good, although that may be partly due to the gin that preceded it. I can feel myself beginning to relax a little, especially when Jennifer compliments me on my suit. My exquisite corduroy sheathing, expressly designed to go with silver and heavy linen and august company, has actually been contributing to my unease in a subliminal sort of way. One does not take onto a building site seven hundred pounds’ worth of Blaise Prévert’s dark chocolate corduroy (or cordureine, as Derek ungrammatically and gratuitously called it this morning, jealous faggotino, he of the absentee bottom who couldn’t wear a suit like this in a million years). On every surface in this house one risks the contagion of plaster dust and worse. But now after a glass or two of the Tancredi I find to my surprise that I have begun to view the suit as having something in common with my late lamented bottle of prosecco in that it is proof of my taste and good intentions, and whatever its physical fate it has already made its point.

  A further surprise is Max’s apparent disinclination to talk about music. This seems not to be the bluff, Elgarian defensiveness that insists on discussing horse racing while the avoided topic broods like a thundercloud above the table. Max’s attitude is more that of the man who doesn’t wish to consider work outside office hours. This is awkward, since I am naturally eager to establish my own musical credentials, such as they are; although I dare say there are not too many people who can sing most of L’uomo magro from memory, to say nothing of I froci di Firenze. So I tell Max how wonderful I think his Schumann symphonies are, trying to sound thoughtful rather than fulsome. I say I am particularly impressed by his going back to the autograph of the Fourth in its 1841 first version, which is so much more spontaneous and transparent in texture than Schumann’s overworked later version with its thick wind doublings.

  ‘Oh,’ Max says modestly through a mouthful of mutton (though I can tell he is pleased), ‘I was only following the trail blazed by Nikolaus.’

  Harnoncourt, I presume, and am about to carry on with what Brahms said about these two versions of the d minor symphony when Max abruptly changes the subject.

  ‘You know the person I really admire?’

  ‘Celibadache?’ I hazard.

  ‘Sergiu, yes, of course; but I was thinking of Adrian. My brother-in-law. I always wanted to be a palaeobiologist, did you know that? I realize Adrian’s an oceanographer, which is rather different, but he manages to do a lot of field work. I’m envious.’

  ‘When you say you always wanted …’ I prompt, with a glance at his wife to see how she is taking this. Is this to be another joke at the expense of their earnest, overdressed guest? But she is unconcernedly helping herself to mint sauce from a child’s porringer at the bottom of which some merry bears can be glimpsed cavorting dimly beneath the vinegar. It reminds me how easily my stomach can sometimes be upset by acidic food, and my new trousers do suddenly feel remarkably tight.

  ‘I mean it was what I always wanted to be as a child,’ says Max. ‘Only alas! my talents were all musical. When I was seventeen and already at the Conservatory I met this marvellous American scientist, Valeriy Bogdanov, who had been on a joint expedition to what was then Soviet Siberia to investigate the prehistoric animals buried intact beneath the permafrost. He was a scientist, all right, but he told me that at the time he’d really gone more as a clandestine missionary for one of those weird American sects – Jehovah’s Adventists or Seventh-Day Witnesses or whatever they are. But he became so fascinated by the perfectly preserved remains they found that he gave up hoping to spread his gospel and instead concentrated on the beautiful science.’

  ‘Ye cannot serve God and mammoth,’ I venture. ‘It’s well known. It says so in the Bible.’

  ‘We’re still in touch, you know. Professor Bogdanov’s very eminent these days but he still gets out to do field work. He’s offering to take me to a place he himself discovered in Siberia quite recently which is a real mammoths’ graveyard. And do you know how he found it? By his nose,’ says Max, tapping his own as though I might have forgotten what it was called in English. ‘He was going along offshore in a rubber boat looking at these low cliffs and suddenly he smelt this terrible stink of decay. So he went in and found an inlet with permafrost banks about ten metres high. Only the permafrost was melting, and all the ancient frozen animals were thawing out and decaying. Global warming, you see. Extraordinary, don’t you think, to smell an animal decaying that has already been dead fifteen thousand years or so? I’d love to see them for myself. Red hair and long tusks. Valeriy says he has actually eaten woolly mammoth steaks from a frozen specimen.’

  ‘A classic case for Aga cookery,’ I say. ‘Stewed very slow with big juicy onions, I should think.’

  ‘Adrian tells me you’re a brilliant cook,’ Jennifer puts in.

  ‘Not brilliant, perhaps,’ I concede, ‘but interested. I like inventing things, although not all of them are necessarily edible. Sometimes one gets tired of the old tried-and-trusted, don’t you think? The obligatory British meat and two veg?’ Oh, well done, Samper! Like leg of mutton with mint sauce is a new culinary departure? ‘At other times, of course, a classic like this fabulous roast is exactly what one needs,’ I add firmly.

  ‘I’m afraid we find ourselves regressing a bit these days,’ admits Jennifer. ‘It’s what comes of living on a building site with a five-year-old. Kids are conservative anyway, and just at present with hardly a properly habitable room here Max and I seem to need reassuring food. When he’s away on foreign tours he usually has a grim diet – you know how awful protracted hotel and restaurant eating becomes. You long for a simple bacon sarnie. Anyway, I did think of having veal tonight but Max said you probably have all the veal you want. Living in Italy, I mean.’

  ‘No lack of veal there,’ I agree feebly, hoping I’m not blushing.

  ‘Adrian tells us you’re also a brilliant writer.’ Max is refilling my glass from deep down the second bottle of Tancredi. ‘I apologize that I’ve not yet read any of your books.’

  ‘Keep it that way!’ I cry in alarm. ‘No, really, I mean it.’ In case this sounds like false modesty disguised as jocularity, I add: ‘Not unless you’re interested in sporting heroes. What can I say? It’s a living. For now.’

  ‘Quite a good one, I should think. We hear you’re writing about that yachtswoman at the moment – what’s her name, Hannele? – Millie, that’s right. Millie Cleat. So what’s she like? As a person?’

  ‘One-armed.’

  ‘Oh, you don’t have to be tactful,’ says Jennifer eggingly. ‘Adrian’s already told us about what she did in the Canaries. They’re all still hopping mad at BOIS. Though I suppose competitive sport is a ruthless business these days. Presumably it doesn’t much matter what you do so long as you win.’

  ‘The people who believe that are the ones who keep parroting that history is written by the winners. Unfortunately, it’s history’s least interesting and significant version.’ I can feel myself on the edge of becoming sententious, which will never do since I really don’t give much of a toss who writes history so long as it’s readable. I’m afraid alcohol has that effect on me and I must be careful lest too much Tancredi writes Samper’s future as a loser. For even now I’m aware of something else making itself felt that may be due partly to the wine but mainly to a combination of nerves and mint sauce: one of those internal crises the malicious fates send to afflict anxious dinner guests in strange houses. Something I have eaten or drunk is proving to be searching to the point of unabashed interrogation. The waistband of my Blaise Prévert trousers, recently so snug, now feels definitely constricting. I am, I fear, going to have to leave the table briefly.

  Normally, of course, I feel not the least diffidence about such things, which anyway are much less embarrassing in Italy where physical functions are treated matter-of-factly and in a way that cheerf
ully acknowledges that we all share a human common denominator notorious for making forceful demands at inconsiderate moments. In the Britain of my childhood public lavatories were often euphemistically signposted as ‘public conveniences’ as though they were just rather handy things to have around instead of Meccas of desperation. But circumstances tonight are not by any means normal. I still haven’t the least clue as to whether things are looking hopeful for me or not. I can’t make out if these civilized, amiable people are merely indulging me as someone wished on them by an absent member of the family or toying with me as part of a testing procedure. I don’t even know if maestro Christ wants his biography written by anybody, let alone by me. For that reason I’m reluctant to leave the table at all because I can’t bear to think what they’ll be saying once I’m out of the room. On the other hand I recognize that if I don’t go now I shall precipitate rather more than a mere career setback. So I excuse myself and get to my feet in a clenched sort of way.