Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The awkwardness of my recent departure from Millie’s suite is another reason to feel troubled, although in this case only mildly. In other circumstances it might have been comic. Yet it isn’t easy for your middle-aged man of parts to get to his feet to take leave of all-female company while sporting a woody fit to poke a hole in his Stiff Lips jeans. And this, it goes without saying, without the faintest promptings of libido. It is hard to imagine a less erotic milieu than the one I have just left. No, it was a purely physiological event, like a touch of cramp, and equally hard to conceal. Not since the days of being suddenly invited by a teacher to stand up in class was it so necessary to perform odd contortions. Luckily, tonight I’m wearing a rather exquisite cashmere jacket (by Heavens To Betsy) which is long enough to have allowed crafty twitchings and drapings as I stood up. I don’t believe anybody noticed anything except the blonde girl Debra – she of the receding lower jaw and alleged linguistic brilliance. I can feel myself blushing even now at the memory of those pop eyes fixed on my discomfiture. Only once I had walked downstairs, run the gauntlet of the Dorchester’s liveried doormen and passed into the night did I discover that the crisis below my supple Ferragamo belt was over and things were back to normal.

  It is actually a fine October early evening and rush hour has elided seamlessly into night life. There is a sense of people hurrying towards undisclosed pleasures. I am not one of them. I solemnly tread the streets of Mayfair, determined there shall be no ordeal by water in store for me. I really had had no idea that Millie would have changed so much in a few months. I find myself looking back almost nostalgically to her former self: the sporting superstar with the hardboiled egoism and inspired lack of irony who made my life hellish for well over a year. Retrospectively, even that persona was preferable to her present incarnation as Our Lady of the Aquarium, able via interpreters to speak for the downtrodden creatures of the sea. ‘Ciderpress holes push on red clouds’, forsooth. I’m surprised she hasn’t got her busty acolyte Debra busy on translating the monosyllabic fish in that Regency tank of hers. No doubt she would claim they weren’t saying ob, but Om.

  No – it’s too much to swallow, and too sudden. I’m remembering her husband Clifford in that peculiar pub out Hendon way, surrounded by displays of cricketing weasels and saying ‘She won’t retire from the limelight if she can help it,’ adding that he dreaded to think what she might do to stay in it. I bet goddesshood would qualify as living up to his liveliest dread. But the fraudulent old amputee can’t fool me. You can’t get to know somebody well enough to write their biography without acquiring a fair sense of what they themselves think is fit for public consumption. There’s a thinnish line between a careful crafting of the facts and the invention of a largely spurious image. Millie crossed this line blithely and often enough to suggest that her current Queen Neptunia act is an act. I wouldn’t mind if in private she had the grace to confess as much, and she still may. After all, who’s she fooling? It’s all showbiz: sport, politics, war, art, religion, you name it. The times demand we all be thesps in our way. But I suspect she won’t come clean. Millie is always entirely the person she’s playing: it’s part of her single-mindedness. Whatever international worship accrues from her new role as the sainted figurehead of Deep Blue environmentalism, it will only intensify her conviction. Nor do I think she will easily be deposed from her new throne or dismissed with indulgent smiles as the Brigitte Bardot of dolphin sanctuaries. We might have to stake all on unmasking her as a delinquent sailor. But even this, newsworthy as it would be, is beginning to seem a long shot.

  The question is, where does all this leave Samper, other than crossing Wigmore Street and feeling hungry? By the time I finished writing Millie! I felt compromised enough. But in order to write the sequel for much fine gold it will be necessary to resist the urge to lop off, excise and suppress, otherwise by the end there will be nothing left and I shall be like a cosmetic surgeon leaving the operating theatre after a long day’s work, lugging a pail of polyps and wrinkles. Only in this case they will be exactly the bits the patient wanted left. I suddenly discover that I really do need the advice of an affectionate ally, which means speaking to Adrian as soon as possible and preferably seeing him. That it hasn’t occurred to me until now shows how preoccupied I am. There’s no time to lose. One way or another I must reach a decision before calling Queen Neptunia by the end of the week, as arranged.

  Being so close, I make a small detour to pass Wigmore Hall, recent scene of Pavel Taneyev’s recurring trichological crises disguised as Bach recitals. Judging by the notices outside, tonight’s lucky audience should be in the middle of rediscovering its rural roots in a concert called ‘The Abandoned Ploughboy’. This is described on the playbills as ‘an evening of songs by Finzi, Butterworth, Warlock and Quilter’ (poems by the usual bucolic tragedians, Hardy, Housman et al.), sung by the celebrated Welsh baritone Brian Tydfil. Pride of place in this sumptuous spread of cherry trees and proud songsters (for which Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis would have given you a good recipe) is a setting by Butterworth of Hardy’s poem ‘The Knacker’s Yard’, the uplifting opening of which is printed on the playbill as an enticement:

  ‘She’s ploughed the headlands morn to dark

  These twenty years, has this old girl,’

  The knifeman says, hiding the blade

  Along his leg. ‘We boys for a lark

  Called ’un the Mare o’ Casterbridge …’

  All about the First World War, really, if we did but know it.

  But there is something about the plangent recital even now going on inside that I know connects up with Millie and her ecobabble, if only I could work out how. I think it has to do with the Humanities bleating on about the essential humanity of nature so that art claims to speak for all the world that matters: the hapless priapism of a race constantly aroused by itself. The point about Millie is that her apparently loony position is obviously commonplace, even mainstream in less intellectual quarters. It’s all based on agonizing about what we’re doing to the world as if we weren’t part of it, as if we didn’t have exactly equal status with bacteria, barracudas and birch trees. Adrian tells me ninety-nine per cent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. We’re worried we’ll soon become another of them and have become gracelessly obsessed with ourselves as the chosen race with the power to make or break the planet. And none more graceless than Millie’s Loony Neptunies. Of course! Who cares that I stand deserted by the Men in Black with their promise of mystical enlightenment? I’m mesmerized by this playbill outside Wigmore Hall in which I can suddenly see a miniature version of our species’ central problem. No wonder ploughboys become abandoned, poor dears. Lesser writers than I have sometimes taken as much as ten and a half chapters to write a history of the world. Samper can do you a history of Homo sapiens in a mere two sentences. They go as follows: The human race made itself King of the Beasts until there were no beasts left in the kingdom. Then one day in a fit of boredom it fought itself to the death, and won.

  There, you see: a little bonne bouche of a fable, complete with moral sauce. That’s lit. for you. And Greens and Blues and Neptunies. Meanwhile, inside the hall I would guess the Sweet Singer of Wysiwyg (for such, one gathers, is Mr Tydfil’s birthplace) will be well into some exquisite Georgian anguish along much the same lines, but tailored to the plight of the individual. For this is a world of solipsistic lament and the tragic inconvenience of having the wrong-coloured hair. (‘You should be so lucky,’ I can hear Derek’s Pavel exclaiming.) Not tragedy, just genes and programmed cell death, just normal apoptosis. But Finzi and Housman don’t do apoptosis, they order up tears:

  The lads have gone from Bredon,

  And nevermore shall heed

  How they themselves are peed on

  Who once on Bredon peed.

  Ah me. Eheu fugaces. Alas, the fleeting years slip away … Which reminds me that I’m suddenly abominably hungry. I have not much confidence in there being anything of an edi
ble nature in Derek’s sordid little flat so I head for a toothsome bistro I remember up towards Marylebone Lane, only to discover a demolition site in its place: a tall yellow crane with a wrecker’s ball hanging from it like an undescended testicle. Alas, the fleeting bistros slip away. Yet I’m not quite desolate because somewhere in these last ten minutes I may unexpectedly have taken a modest step towards an argument with which to face Millie, and therefore my immediate future. Within a minute I come upon a small restaurant pretending to seafood where I am urged by the waiter to try the squid. In due course I find myself tackling a tepid mound of fan-belt offcuts. Never mind, they also serve prosecco, and in between dealing with the fan belt and thinking about making my living I find that by the end I have consumed two entire bottles and feel a good deal better. My jaws aching, I pay for it all with my UK bank’s much-touted Connect Card, based on an idea by E. M. Forster. Literature has its uses.

  *

  Two days later I am in Southampton, heading on foot through Dock Gate 4 towards the QE2 terminal but soon peeling off in the direction of the block that houses Adrian’s office in the British Oceanography Institute. I’m in high spirits at the prospect of seeing him, which as ever puts me in good voice. It is one of those days when lieder have it over opera hands down. Less grandiose? More private? Having just watched some very English fields speed past the window of my train from Waterloo, and doubtless still under Wigmore Hall’s influence, I find myself choosing my namesake Gerald Finlock’s music to express my cheerful mood. Unless it’s by Peter Quiltworth? I do sometimes confuse them. Whoever it’s by, ‘The Knot’ is exquisite, starting like a gazetteer and ending with a tear.

  From Ludlow to Church Stretton,

  From Plaish to Acton Scott,

  The pretty lads would bet on

  The first to tie the knot.

  Up spoke a lad from Haydon:

  ‘I’d sooner lie in hell

  Than meddle with a maiden

  From Ashford Carbonel.’

  We laughed and joked; but blighted,

  My hidden heart did sigh

  As one by one they plighted

  And home alone went I.

  I notice some people giving me odd looks, but I’m used to the envy my voice arouses. It’s thought perfectly all right in Britain to set up a stall anywhere in public with some godawful pop music blaring from loudspeakers, but singing as you walk, as people must have done for thousands of years, is looked on as mad, bad and probably dangerous. In Italy, of course, to sing in public is thought entirely natural; but then, they have a culture designed for human beings.

  I thought to hear their laughter

  As my own knot I tied

  And the noose beneath the rafter

  Swung dancing side to side.

  The lads who once were pretty

  Laughed from their marriage bed:

  ‘How can you write a ditty

  If you’re already dead?’

  Good question. But music banishes such nitpicking. Even as I hit that final, artfully skewed F#, I’m conscious of ambient interference. I round a corner and the building I’m heading for is besieged. A surge of people shouting and waving placards is narrowly divided like the Red Sea by bovine policemen and steel barriers. Bona fide visitors, having established their credentials via a policeman’s radio, are evidently required to walk between these foaming protesters. Fortunately, Samper is blessed with aplomb, and to be denounced at close range as a murderer and a torturer is water off a duck’s nose or no skin off its back or something. How very much more offensive it would be if one were publicly accused of having bad breath or not knowing how to make a roux. I saunter provocatively towards the doors at the end of this corridor of bellowing yahoos. The jiggling placards turn my way like pallid sunflowers as I pass: Save Our Soles!, Eels Feel!, Hands Off Urchins!, West Sussex Thalassarians Unite!, Open The Cages!

  ‘What on earth?’ I ask Adrian, who has bravely come to meet me at the door. I notice he isn’t wearing his white lab smock. Bravery has sensible limits.

  ‘Just our daily maniacs,’ he says. ‘Are you OK? Sorry, Gerry – I should have warned you. We’ve almost got used to it here, even though they’re no longer a joke. They’re getting dangerous. They tailed a junior colleague home last week and threw bags of blood over his children. It was stinking stuff they must have got from an abattoir and left to rot.’

  ‘Who are they? And why here? You’re oceanographers, not vivisectionists.’

  ‘I know. But we’ve got some animals in tanks in the labs here. One of my colleagues is working on oxygen transport in nautiloid blood so she’s got a few cephalopods in a pressure chamber. Stuff like that. And over in the other block they’re doing a lot of work on fish hatchlings so they’ve got vats of those. Essential research if we’re ever to stop catching wild fish and rely on proper sustainable farming, but you can’t tell these animal-rightists that. We’re Nazi experimenters in here. Hey, it’s great to see you. You’re looking well, I must say.’ We pass two people chatting by a water cooler and Adrian’s tone changes to breezy extrovert. ‘Still Mr and Mrs ProWang’s model patient, are we?’

  ‘Foucault’s bloody pendulum, mate.’ Heartiness seems to be natural science’s protective colouration. Adrian’s ability to make me blush is among the reasons I feel affectionate towards him. To know someone well enough to embarrass him bespeaks a certain intimacy. I don’t completely relax until we’re safely through the door marked ‘Dr A. Jestico’. I note his yellow oilskins still hanging inside. It’s nice to discover a mild fetish on the brink of forty. Over a mug of something made from a jar of brown dust we catch up on the Millie saga. I explain my predicament. ‘So you see, I just need to write this one book and then I shall be able to afford to give up ghosting. But she’s so far over the top these days I don’t see how I can write it. At the very least I should have to pretend to take this Neptune lark seriously. How can I possibly manage that? I shall be exposed as an impostor, corrosively cynical, or else as an enemy mole in their midst … Really, Adrian, this coffee is unspeakable.’

  ‘But it’s got the British Coffee Institution’s kitemark. It’s all very well being a Tuscan coffee snob, Gerry, but –’

  ‘But nothing. There’s no excuse these days. Proper ground coffee is everywhere available for ready cash. All you need is an electric ring and a little Bialetti percolator. If you can measure gas pressures in squid blood you can jolly well make decent coffee. This is not rocket science.’

  ‘I like it when you’re cantankerous.’

  ‘Surely nobody these days slurps mugfuls of Nescafé as though they were trapped in a social science department in the late Seventies?’

  ‘This is a government research department in the mid-Noughts. Why should anything have changed? We British are conservative in our tastes and proud of it. When in Rome, drink espresso. When in Southampton –’

  ‘Yes, yes, I get the message,’ I say testily.

  ‘Revenons à nos moutons, or rather à nos Neptunies, did you notice they’re well represented outside this building?’

  ‘I was too busy being insouciant but I can believe it. As a movement, they’re chock full o’ nuts. Also, had you realized they’re divinely inspired? That CD plan of yours worked too well.’

  ‘Your plan, I thought?’

  ‘Our plan, then,’ I graciously allow, and give Adrian a vivid account of the scene in Millie’s Dorchester suite the other evening. He is incredulous, which speaks well of his rationality but less so of his knowledge of the wilder fringes of human nature. Scientists can be charmingly naïve. After all, plenty of them believed Uri Geller could bend spoons by psychokinesis.

  ‘It surely never occurred to us that they would mistake those noises for actual voices,’ he says. ‘We thought it would give a vivid impression of the uncanny and the unknown in the ocean. I mean, how can you translate electronic bleeps into speech?’

  ‘Who knows? People spend their lives trying to break the codes of lost languages lik
e Etruscan and Linear B and those Easter Island inscriptions, Rongorongo or whatever it’s called. If you’re convinced from the start that transponder noises are really voices bequeathing wisdom instead of electronically generated data streams, then no doubt if you apply enough algebraic and statistical processes some sort of patterns will emerge that you can decipher.’

  ‘And if the messages are pure gibberish?’

  ‘So much the better, because they need interpreting. Think of the Sibyl. Opacity is a prime requirement of the divine.’

  Adrian muses behind his desk. ‘When do you want us to go public with our film of Millie ruining EAGIS, then?’

  ‘Oh, not yet,’ I say in alarm. ‘The book’s coming out this week and we need to rack up some sales. Besides, if Millie! does well it can only increase interest in her, even give it some depth. The higher she goes, the further to fall and all that. Much better if we wait for the most damaging moment. Don’t worry, we’ll recognize it when it comes. By the way, what news of your illustrious brother-in-law?’ (for one likes to keep more than one eye cocked to the future).

  ‘Max? He’s fine, I think. He’s in America at the moment. Concertizing, as they say over there. Boston? Chicago? Jen tells me he’ll be back shortly.’