Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘I’ll say. I’d just been lecturing her on Poseidon and Greek mythology and then I showed her the picture. It knocked her sideways. The real irony is that it was I myself who suggested her next book would be about her as the leader of a Neptune cult. Can you believe my idiocy?’

  ‘Easily. Gerald Samper, the true inspiration behind the Neptunies. If you’re very good I may keep that titbit from my colleagues, at least for the time being.’

  ‘It was only the name, for heaven’s sake. I take no responsibility for her loony followers. And now with Lew’s millions behind them they may not be so easy to debunk. Oh well, there’s always the comic side. After all, it doesn’t really matter if Millie and her disciples think there are fairies at the bottom of the sea, nor even if Cumbre Vieja does break off and drowns millions. What were those extinctions you told me about? Permian? Late Cretaceous? Not to mention little human extinctions like Auschwitz. The planet will go trundling on, with or without us. And no matter what we do to it the sea will presumably go on producing life even if there are no humans around to know how to cook it properly.’

  ‘True. So we needn’t be downhearted, need we? Meanwhile I’ll send your Cleat woman a copy of this CD. No – on second thoughts you will send it. Better if it isn’t traced back to me personally. As a thuggish reductive scientist I’m in the enemy camp. You can say it’s been sent you by a closet sympathizer under deep cover in oceanography, something like that. Invent your own story.’

  ‘Right. And when she says, “You see, Gerry? I always sensed it. There are ur-creatures down there completely unknown to us but who embody the wisdom of Gaia,” you or one of your colleagues steps in and says, “Well, actually, Millie, that noise is not one of your familiar spirits of the deep but a two-hundred-hertz whatsit, and those chirps are a ten-kilohertz tiddlypush. And so with the help of some carefully arranged media coverage and the EAGIS pictures of her trimaran cutting you up off the Canaries one night we bring her grey hairs down with sorrow to the grave. Is that the plan?’

  ‘Something along those lines. We can fine-tune it as we go along. Didn’t she once make an opprobrious remark about your bottom?’

  ‘She may have,’ I say austerely.

  ‘And your hair?’

  ‘Possibly.’

  ‘You bloody well know she did. Go on, Gerry, you owe it to yourself. Think of all that aggro and rudeness you’ve taken from her over this last year. Flat-chested, monobrachial old besom. And think of her nice gay husband you were telling me about, and their two children – abandoned in Pinner, sacrificed on the altar of her overweening ambition. No, Gerry. It’s time for the Empire to strike back.’

  I had almost forgotten how very nice it is to have some support. Being a perpetual loner can wear you down sometimes.

  ‘Incidentally,’ says Adrian, ‘to change the subject: I forgot to tell you how much Jennifer and Max enjoyed your visit to them in Suffolk.’

  A muted pang of guilt stabs me lightly in the region of the anchovy ice cream. I become guarded.

  ‘Well, obviously I very much enjoyed it too. Er … you’ve spoken to them recently, then?’

  ‘Just the other day. They wanted to be sure I’d pass on their belated thanks for the delicious present you so thoughtfully left behind that evening. I think that’s the message verbatim.’

  ‘You didn’t detect a note of irony in the way they said it?’

  Adrian looks a little puzzled. ‘No. Should I have?’

  ‘I mean,’ – I need to be quite sure about this – ‘they weren’t joking? No little edge of sarcasm?’

  ‘Of course not, Gerry. As a matter of fact they found you charming: my sister’s very word. Mind you, she’s an impressionable girl and easily charmed. She once called Tony Blair “attractive”, although admittedly that was back in 1997.’

  ‘Thank you so much.’ By now I am less than reassured. I’m reminded of my hosts’ playfulness about Swythings and Crendles that left me at a loss that evening. This is a family with a peculiar sense of humour. It is clear to me that by now they must indeed have found the hideous time bomb I left behind in their spare room, put two and two together and have decided to play with me for humorous reasons of their own. Equally clearly, Jennifer would have told her brother, which means that Adrian’s playing with me, too. This narks me considerably.

  ‘It was one of those awful accidents,’ I say stiffly, staring out into the darkness. ‘What else can I say?’

  ‘Heavens, Gerry, it doesn’t sound too bad to me. It could have happened to anyone visiting that house. The state of the place is enough to distract any sane person. I can’t think how they’ve put up with it for so long. I suppose Max is away a lot and Jen’s always been something of a boho.’

  ‘Exactly,’ I say. ‘But imagine how I’ve felt about it ever since. Having blotted my copybook in such gross fashion I don’t know how to make it up to them, especially now that so much time has gone by. That I should have done it to your own sister, of all people, and your illustrious brother-in-law …’ I hear my own voice tail off more abjectly than I wish.

  Adrian is now looking positively baffled. ‘Crikey, Gerry, it was just a bottle of prosecco. Aren’t you making rather a meal of it? Jen told me about it. When the front-door knocker came off in your hand, as it does in everybody’s, you must have put the bottle down on the step in order to try and fix it and Jen opened the door and you forgot the bottle. She found it when she got back from Woodbridge next morning after dropping you at the station. No big deal. So judging by your over-reaction,’ says Adrian acutely, ‘there must have been something else that evening. Come on, out with it.’

  Damn. Beneath that amused, handsome gaze I have no alternative but to confess the sorry saga of my faux poo. And to those who still take a Debrett’s Guide approach to social etiquette I regret to say that within a minute both of us are helpless with laughter. In my case it is very much the laughter of relief, which as we all know can quickly border on total hysteria. In fact, I would like to think the confessionals in Catholic churches just as often echo with the hilarity of disburdenings as they do with the snivellings of regret. I bet they don’t, though. Those awful stern religions of the book mess fatally with the laughter glands – on its own a good enough reason to have nothing to do with them. Adrian and I wind up leaning weakly against the balustrade at the edge of the terrace, our arms around each other for support, still shaken with giggles. So he really hadn’t known and it looks as though Max and Jennifer hadn’t, either. Apparently the spare room next to Crendlesham Hall’s bathroom is now furnished and habitable and any old lavatories have long since disappeared with the rest of the builders’ clutter. My reputation is unsmirched after all, except perhaps in the excremental and dinosaur-cluttered mind of Adrian’s five-year-old nephew Josh. I can live with that.

  The lights of Viareggio are dancing and wavering in the lenses of my involuntary tears. Down there, August goes on being the cruellest month with children of the tourist hajj playing with their Game Boys under cover of the tablecloth as their parents interminably eat weird fish dishes and talk mind-rottingly boring grownup stuff about the Priory of Sion and the Tuscan property market. Up here at Le Roccie a fresh bottle of prosecco pops like a merry firework and under its sparkling influence we shed more tears of laughter, the odd inhibition, and finally clothing. Very soon Samper is feeling considerably purged, and high time too.

  15

  Before he leaves I make Adrian promise not to tell Max and Jennifer the truth about my gaffe while I was their guest at Crendlesham Hall. This ought to bring the incident to a reasonable, if not actually happy, conclusion. Being British, it naturally never occurs to me to use the expression ‘closure’: a piece of jargon appropriate to cod psychology and bereavement counselling. To me ‘closure’ suggests unbolted stable doors and bolted horses, with maybe a stable-boy breaking down in tearful remorse. In short, the Hollywood approach to regrettable incidents. The whole point is that these things never do end completely bu
t go on echoing, often down an entire lifetime. I am proud to know I can live with this one.

  The weeks go by peacefully. I remember to post off a copy of Adrian’s CD to Millie with a covering note saying it had been sent me by some anonymous oceanographer working in the Canaries who couldn’t explain these sounds but who thought I, as her biographer, might pass it on to her out of interest.

  Derek phones me to say the owners of Josiah Corcoran, a.k.a. Blowjob, have promoted him to manage their new manicure and pedicure departments, already nicknamed Handjob and Ped-o-File, respectively, by their loyal staff. I force him to admit that ‘departments’ really refers to a small back room that until recently was used to store industrial flagons of shampoo and conditioner, but he seems ecstatic about this upturn in his fortunes. I suppose it must be some compensation for the sad mishandling of his emotional life. It would be kind to think of Derek as merely fickle, but like a good deal of kindness it would be misplaced. Some years ago he deserted a penniless but devoted lover in favour of one of his clients at Corcoran’s. The customer was a wealthy Harley Street specialist – well, not to put too fine a point on it, a proctologist – with a Lenny Bernstein mane of grey hair and a scarlet Ferrari. We all told Derek he was being a vulgar little gold-digger and no good would come of this liaison, but he replied that he liked gold and that being driven around the Côte d’Azur in a Ferrari qualified as good in his book. The doctor was clearly besotted and lavished all sorts of fripperies on him and I’m sure Derek recompensed the man in his fashion by keeping his end up. Still, we all knew this was not the love of Derek’s life. The truly devoted friend whom he’d thrown over went miserably to seed, pining in a bedsit in Palmers Green. He was a rather nice young scriptwriter whose modest fame derived from his having researched and written The Rough Guide to the Cities of the Plain, thereby scooping Lonely Planet who were still fact-gathering in Gomorrah. Meanwhile the Ferrari went, owing to a pleasantry by Derek in one of his moods to the effect that the only people who drove Ferraris were footballers and Russian mafiosi. It was replaced by a vintage Bentley Continental in which Derek sat bolt upright like a duchess with piles. The doctor, meanwhile, had successfully treated the piles of enough genuine duchesses to win a prestigious international proctology prize which the Marylebone Tattler headlined felicitously as ‘Bottom Doctor Wins Top Award’. This gave particular pleasure to those who realized the headline could be reversed without losing any meaning. Derek basked in his glow.

  But came the morning when he awoke to find the doctor stiff and stark next to him in their four-poster bed, carried off unnoticed by a heart attack in the small hours. Shortly afterwards he was dismayed to discover the true thickness of blood: the doctor had left his entire fortune to his own sister rather than to Derek, who practically overnight went from being a duchess to having to ask Corcoran’s for his old job back. He got it, but only at the cost of some painful ribaldry. He also belatedly tried going to Palmers Green to rekindle the embers of his languishing friend’s love, but in vain. Derek had revealed himself as a little too unscrupulous for comfort, and far too much so for love. Too late he learned the wisdom of Tennyson’s observation that kind hearts are more than coronaries. There were those of us who felt there was something poetic about the way he was now reduced to paying rent to an immigrant colonic irrigator in the flat above him. At the time he salved his dignity by acting bereaved, exhausting the patience of most of his remaining friends. But sooner or later the moment comes when even a grieving duchess can’t help noticing that one of the under-footmen bulges in all the right places and in due course Derek returned to his old ways, neither noticeably sadder nor wiser.

  I now rejoice to hear he has been elevated to management status at work, and that he is happy and has rung me up to tell me so. I like to keep our relationship amiable. I no longer know so many people in London and it’s useful to have Derek’s flat as a bolt-hole when I’m being pestered and grilled by clients like Millie Cleat. There could hardly be a greater contrast between their two worlds. Not that he generically dislikes sailors. Far – very far – from it. But the demon blow-drier and back-comber of Jermyn Street is not what you would call an outdoors man. Having to tend a window box of geraniums would strike Derek as dauntingly agricultural. He prefers leafing through Hello!, going to musicals and, like l’uomo magro, eating Turkish delight in bed, although unlike poor Lieutenant Gasparo Derek never puts on an ounce of weight. As a counterbalance to the world of Millie Cleat his cosy little pied-à-terre feels to me like an island of sanity even if it does smell of Joop!

  This last month I have been having a blissfully relaxed time ‘resting’, as actors euphemistically put it. It is now early October and summer’s hajjis have long returned to Dortmund and Dulwich, Cambrai and Cambridge with their rapid tans and other souvenirs to die for. As a season autumn has lately been banished by global warming, but there is nevertheless a pleasant anticipatory sense of impending winter up here among the crags with the sun-battered leaves beginning to loosen their hold on the trees. I have constructed a rather nifty woodshed well stocked with logs for those roaring winter evenings when the icy tramontana blows down from places like Siberia and Voynovia. I have also replaced the lock on my own front door entirely without mishap.

  From time to time I check Marta’s house. These days, despite having re-attached the knob to the inside of the lock months ago, I still can’t go in through her back door without first propping a brick on the threshold so it can’t slam shut. Neuroses have their value. The place is still fairly dry from the summer but I notice the first chill beginning to seep into the heavy stone walls. You can’t abandon these old houses for too long before they begin to feel unloved and derelict, and Marta’s has had a head start. I don’t quite know what I’m doing as I stand there in the musty silence. My role as good neighbour seems imperceptibly to have elided into that of museum caretaker in one of those awful places where things are kept exactly as their famous owners left them when they died, like Puccini’s claustrophobic house near here by Lake Massaciuccoli, or Cardinal Newman’s oppressive bedroom in the Birmingham Oratory. However, I can’t make my neighbourliness stretch to paying off Marta’s various bills and getting her phone and electricity connected. What’s the point without even knowing whether she’s still alive? And nor does my curatorship extend to tackling the time-bomb of her festering fridge, which must by now contain strains of bacteria toxic enough for biological weaponry.

  I have also had some builders up here for the last couple of months, fettling up the sizeable stone barn near the house that until now I’ve been using for nothing better than garaging the car. The barn turned out to be ten centimetres too low to qualify as a house, in the sense of being eligible for an official civic number. But my crafty plan has turned the upstairs into a marvellous studio or workroom. Since the building stands on the edge of the same gulf as my house the view from upstairs is nearly vertiginous, like something you might see from the window of an aircraft only without the sebum smears left by previous passengers’ noses. Downstairs I’ve added a small bathroom and kitchen unit so the whole place could serve as a self-contained annexe if need be. The conversion has practically beggared me and I doubt I shall ever use the building myself but at least now it’s finished, except for the decoration which I shall do myself with the customary Samper flair. Suddenly it’s easy to see how property empires start. I realize that if poor Marta does turn out to be dead and her house comes on the market and I can afford it, I will buy it like a shot. Yet more space I would have no personal use for, but at least I would control it. It would be forever beyond the reach of Signor Benedetti and his baggy and dumpy clients. If ever I did allow someone to come and live there they would not have a piano named Petrof, nor relatives and friends who dropped by in heli-copters at all times of day and night. A Trappist monk would suit admirably.

  But you probably don’t wish to know this. You would far prefer to hear the still more intimate details of my progress on the ProWang fr
ont. Well, it’s very human of you. As a reliable form of pleasure, Schadenfreude is second only to that which shall be nameless. Specifically, you want to know if growth has continued and whether young Adrian noticed and passed comment. The short answers are ‘yes’ and ‘yes’, although it pains me to recall his words. Naturally, I told him everything. It’s much easier to confide one’s health matters to an oceanographer than to a doctor: they’re far better scientists, for one thing. He did his best to listen gravely as I told him I’d embarked on the course of Pow-r-TabsTM entirely in a spirit of scientific enquiry. When he could speak he remarked that he didn’t believe a word of it. A little hurt, I then produced my meticulous records and demanded who, other than someone imbued with the heuristic ideal, would bother to keep such careful data? ‘Several hundred million fifteen-year-olds,’ was his reply. And when, finally, he was in a position to make a hands-on judgement for himself he merely observed that it fell ‘comfortably within the parameters of the unexceptional’. Although I believe his dispassionate appraisal was intended as reassuring, I admit my crest fell. Sighs matter, they say, even if mine went unheard. We Sampers know how to dissemble beautifully, even as we chalk up the slight as something for future score-settling. I did wonder whether oceanographers have different standards from ordinary people and within a matter of minutes was happy to discover it wouldn’t be surprising if they had.