Amazing Disgrace (10 page)

‘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 cheerfully 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.  

‘Up the stairs and to the left, I think you said?’ I drop my napkin beside my empty plate with frantic languor.  

‘Shall I come and show you?’ asks Jennifer, the perfect host. ‘It’s all a bit chaotic and some of the lights are dodgy. They promise it’ll all be over by November but I have my doubts.’  

‘No, no, it’s quite all right. I’m used to building sites. Don’t forget I live up a mountain. For a long time I would offer guests a spade and show them the great outdoors.’ By now I am halfway out and heading at a fair clip for the stairs, which at least are well lit. At the top is a sort of gallery off which leads a beamy corridor. Almost immediately to my left there is a half open door through which I glimpse the
unmistakable
welcoming gleam of porcelain. And not a moment too soon. The light doesn’t work and the door won’t close completely but by now I am beyond caring about such trivia. It is a lavatory, and that’s all that matters. Within seconds Blaise Prévert lies around my ankles and after a Homeric
detonation
I realize Samper is saved. As I sit there catching my breath and blissfully suffused with relief I keep a wary eye on
the slightly open door’s strip of light. I think I glimpse a small figure flit silently past on little pink feet but for the moment I’m still too much under the influence of Tancredi and
easement
to care. Enough light filters in for me to realize that their bathroom, too, is a building site. There is a step ladder propped next to the lavatory and several buckets with distemper brushes in them are ranged nearby. From next door comes the sound of flushing and the little pink feet whisk past the door again. That’s odd, I think, as I cast around for the toilet roll, my hand patting the bare wall to either side. Why would anyone have two lavatories so close togeth–? And then it sinks in. I rock experimentally on my throne and my worst fears are confirmed. This lavatory bowl is not plumbed in. This lavatory bowl is either waiting to be plumbed in or has just been removed from the bathroom next door, it hardly matters which. Well, well, Samper: by far your greatest social move to date. The perfect dinner guest who dumps at random in holes and corners about the house and then wonders if his illustrious host would like him as a biographer.  

For a long moment it is uncertain whether I am going to sit there in frozen misery and maybe begin to cry, or else start laughing. Actually, it’s not really much of a choice for the last of the Sampers, and I’m soon rocking with desperately stifled hysteria on – and over – my illicit stool. It’s when things can’t get any worse that real hilarity begins. When at last I wipe my eyes I can make out that by the merciful dispensation of fate there is across the room an industrial-sized roll of paper towelling such as builders might use to clean their brushes. I duck-waddle across bent double, trying to hold Blaise Prévert off the dusty floor, and avail myself of it in liberal handfuls. I finish off by stuffing wads down the bowl on top of the evidence, which I’m hoping is trapped in the deep
S-bend
behind. Another wad at the unplumbed end ought to tamp it in. My eyes having adjusted to the semi-dark, I can now see that not only is the lavatory further out from the
wall than normal but at a slight angle to it. However, these helpful giveaway details were rather too little and much too late. As I adjust my dress before leaving (as public notices used to urge gentlemen) I’m aware that I now have a delicate decision to take. Do I go down and confess all? That would obviously be the decent, manly thing to do. But I have always found decency and manliness dragging their feet when all instinct is screaming at me to keep quiet and get the hell out. Just
go
as soon as is humanly possible; give up the whole doomed enterprise as one bad job brought on by another. After all, sporting heroes aren’t really so awful. Their own behaviour is mostly reassuringly atrocious, plus they pay top whack and anyway, who honestly cares a row of beans whether Schumann doubled the woodwind in his revised
version
of the Fourth symphony? Well, actually,
I
do; but
perhaps
not enough to conduct a shamefaced confession downstairs in front of the Aga like a child who has had an accident. I can feel the thought rising hotly that it wasn’t my fault, dammit. It wasn’t my fault I had to flounder around an unlit building site to find a usable lavatory. What kind of a way is this to treat a guest? Why couldn’t we have had a
perfectly
civilized, businesslike evening together in London instead of enduring this hideous farce in darkest Suffolk, a county clearly full of idiotic dialect and perverted taxi
drivers
? Was it for this I spent seven hundred pounds of my
hardearned
money on a suit, not to mention £15.99 on a wasted bottle of
prosecco
and practically a week’s wages for a rail ticket granting me the generous privilege of standing in a train for three hours? Why did I ever leave the quiet sanity of Le Roccie?  

But even as the protests surge through my brain I know it’s just rhetoric. Jennifer is Adrian’s sister and I most definitely wish to remain friends with Adrian, and sooner or later the thing will get out and oh! what a tangled web, etc. The adage ‘least said, soonest mended’ clearly doesn’t apply to a dinner guest who has copiously mispooped in the spare room.

So, quietly leaving the scene of the crime I go downstairs like a child prepared to own up. My opening phrase, ‘I’m afraid I’ve just done an awful thing’ is ready and waiting as I enter the kitchen and see the table is now laid with a large bowl of syllabub, a deliciously crumbly-looking Stilton wrapped in a cloth and yet another bottle of Tancredi. Before I can utter a word, Jennifer says:  

‘You found your way all right? Incidentally, Gerry, I forgot to say we’re taking it for granted you’ll stay the night.’  

‘Oh, no. No, really.’ I am prepared to confess, but then to scuttle away into the decent absolving darkness. A taxi ride, a late train and many, many miles placed between myself and the time bomb upstairs. ‘You’re very kind but I can’t possibly.’  

‘But neither can you possibly go,’ she says reasonably. ‘It’s far too late. I don’t even know if there are any trains from Ipswich after midnight at present, thanks to the work they’re doing on the line. No, you must certainly stay here, Gerry. Besides, Adrian would never forgive me. I know you’re used to roughing it and all that but I’ve made you up a bed anyway.’  

And because my confession has been thwarted –
confessio interrupta
as the pious monks of San Bernard probably knew it – it has now become utterly impossible to make it. The right moment, once past, is irrecoverable. By half past midnight I find myself, freshly sponged but still unshriven, in bed in my underwear in Max’s study at the end of the upstairs corridor. There are ceiling-high shelves of scores and all sorts of musical memorabilia but I’m too emotionally exhausted to inspect them. As I lie in the dark I am thankful only that I’m not having to sleep in that room next to the bathroom, which I now think of as Ground Zero. That would have been rough justice indeed. As I start to drift off there comes into my mind a lugubrious hymn my stepmother Laura used to sing around the house, only tonight with words supplied by my own bruised and self-pitying ego:

I confess I am not greatly looking forward to the unmasking the morrow must inevitably bring.

Not enough hours later, something that takes its time re-
congealing
into Gerald Samper awakes to the creak of the
bedroom
door and the sound of breathing. Then there is a diminishing patter of footsteps and a piercing child’s voice in the distance announcing: ‘Mummy, there’s a man in Vati’s study.’ A sleep-sodden mutter of adult voices, then: ‘I
said
I won’t go in, didn’t I?’ More approaching pattering, more breathing, more retreating feet. ‘He’s still there. He looks funny.’  

My watch tells me it is five past six. My heart tells me King Herod was one of history’s underrated heroes. My brain tells me very little, except to convey a vague presentiment of disaster. Then last night’s events come back with a rush and I remember exactly why I don’t wish to be in Crendlesham Hall in deepest Suffolk this Saturday morning. Through the half-open door comes the sound of heavier, parental footsteps, a gasp and the muffled expletive ‘Heagood!’ of a Bavarian who has trodden in bare feet on a plastic stegosaur. Evidently Christ has risen, and with any luck he’ll put some coffee on. Okay, Samper: the order of the day is to get the hell out as soon as you can. These are thoroughly nice people, much too nice for the likes of you. It’s too late to make a confession now. We have entered that
arrested
, umbrageous world of adult mores where things are simply presumed not to have happened.  

Seven thirty finds me downstairs in the kitchen with a cup of coffee, talking with Max Christ the world-renowned
conductor
who is standing by the Aga in a puce dressing gown scraping cat food out of a tin with a clotted fork while the cat stands on its hind legs, mewing. ‘An Guadn!’ says Max
kindly
, plonking the saucer down on the floor, and the cat tucks
in. ‘You know I’m not keen on anyone writing my
biography
?’ he turns to me apologetically. ‘I don’t like any of this personality-cult business. I’m really only interested in doing my work as well as I can. Nothing beyond that. Of course it’s nice when things go well and turn out successfully. I’m happy when people are pleased, and I’m delighted about Colchester because now the orchestra’s got a life of its own and will go on quite happily if I drop dead tomorrow. But even when I’m on tour I’m counting the days when I can come home. I’m a family man, Gerry. I know this place looks chaotic at the moment and hardly like anyone’s home. But I think it will be very nice when it’s done. There’s a barn out at the back that we’re converting to a studio big enough for small chamber concerts and with good enough acoustics for instrumental recordings. I’m planning on travelling much less in three or four years’ time. I’d like to do more work with the CSO and encourage people to give masterclasses and recitals here, a bit like Britten did at Snape. Truthfully, Gerry, I’ve no
interest
in seeing stuff published about myself. I frankly dislike all that commercial myth-making. You know, like the way RCA built up Horowitz as the world’s greatest pianist when he was nothing of the kind. Amazing technique, no question about that, but so often incoherent and vulgar in his
interpretations
. Just think of those awful blind octaves he added at the end of Chopin’s b minor Scherzo to make it sound flashier.’  

‘Although the late Scarlatti recordings were surprisingly modest and good.’  

Max nods. ‘But perhaps by then he occasionally tired of his own shallowness, not to mention that of his awesome wife. She was Toscanini’s daughter, as you know. I had to call on them once,’ he says reminiscently. ‘I was just a kid in New York doing some semesters at the Juilliard and I was
summoned
to the Horowitz apartment. They kept me waiting until after two a.m. I say “they” because Wanda – what’s the expression? – wore the trousers in that household. Given the
chance, Vladimir would definitely have worn a dress.’ Max sips coffee and smiles at the memory.  

‘Well,’ I say after a pause for some silent cursing, ‘I do understand. Anybody sane and serious is reluctant to go along with the celebrity rigmarole. I just regret, as a professional writer, that your stories may go unrecorded.’ Now, careful here, Samper. Don’t connive too easily at your own rejection. ‘But you know how things are, Max. Sooner or later interest in certain public figures reaches the point where biographies get written willy-nilly, with or without the subject’s consent. And even, well,
family
men as you describe yourself don’t always come off lightly. You know: trouble with lovers, mothers,
others
,’ I wave a hand suggestive of juicy scandals. ‘Would it not be preferable to have the process more under your own control? It’s true that unofficial biographies tend to imply sensational revelations while official biographies suggest ponderousness, even hagiography. But in my experience’ (this is a complete lie) ‘there’s a happy medium to be struck where the subject has control over much of the factual stuff and the writer preserves the editorial independence to give the whole thing an
individual
flavour.’ Awful nonsense, this, but probably not bad for eight o’clock on a Saturday morning.  

‘I shall give thought to this, Gerry,’ Max says. ‘I promise. You may well be –’  

But at this moment a small figure wearing dinosaur pyjamas bursts in followed by Jennifer, ravishing in a black silk-
and-cashmere
dressing gown by Zoran, surely the ultimate in Jackie Onassis chic on a building site.  

‘Hä, Joschi, mogsd wos dringga?’ Max asks his son, who nods violently while gazing at me.  

‘Max! Will you please stop talking Bairisch to him? At least let him learn Hochdeutsch.’  

‘Okay. But what about you, Hannele? Deaf i Dia a Bussl gem?’  

‘No, not until you’ve shaved. Good morning, Gerry. I hope you got some sleep? I’m sorry our resident tyrant woke you at
that unearthly hour. Actually, we were all lucky this morning. He usually starts at about five.’  

Family life, you see? Absolute death to an orderly existence. It’s at moments like these that we bachelors smugly count our blessings.  

‘If you can wait a bit I’ll give you a lift into Woodbridge,’ Jennifer offers. ‘Josh and I have to go in to do some shopping, don’t we, Josh?’  

They come and go, gradually putting clothes on in a
piecemeal
sort of way, eating bowls of cornflakes and slices of toast while leaning against the comforting warmth of the Aga. This is, after all, an English summer.  

‘Where’s Luna?’ Josh demands.  

‘She’s had breakfast and gone out,’ his father says.  

‘I bet she went to do a poo.’  

‘In that case it was kind of her to go outside for a change.’

Suddenly I’m aware of this child’s bright blue eyes fixed on me with accusatory confidence.  

‘Why did you do a poo in the dark room?’ the little bastard asks.  

‘Josh!’ his mother warns. ‘Now don’t be silly, please.’  

‘But why did he?’  

‘That’s quite enough. Come on, now, eat up and put your shoes on.’  

‘But he
did
, Mummy. I heard him. And it smells of poo in there.
Eeuwgh!’

‘Of course you didn’t hear him. Poor Gerry! I expect you had a dream, Josh. And if it smells in there it’s probably Luna. She doesn’t like to go out if it’s raining,’ this explanation being added for my benefit as Jennifer glances at me apologetically. Not for the first time in this madhouse I’m hope I’m not
blushing
. The child is still staring at me with a tilted spoon in his fist from which milk is running up his sleeve. Serve him right.  

‘Dino’s gone down the Klo,’ he announces. ‘But he’s still there.’ Is there no getting this diminutive sod off the topic of lavatories?

‘I’m sure Gerry doesn’t want to know that,’ his mother tells him, but Josh is not about to relinquish his favourite subject so easily.  

‘He wanted to do a poo and I was helping him and he fell in. Mummy, will they get him out today?’  

‘I doubt it, darling. It’s Saturday and the builders don’t come on Saturday, do they? We’ll ask Mr Baldock on Monday.’  

‘The fat one? Will he get Dino out?’  

‘I’m sure he will. Now come on, Josh, quick! Gerry here wants to catch a train and you and I have to go to the
bookshop
to see if Orlando’s come in yet, remember? The big
marmalade
cat?’  

God’s teeth and knuckles, the little pest is obsessed! He’s a positive fecal freak. My last chance has obviously gone of making an intimate confession and apology to Jennifer on the way into Woodbridge. There is absolutely no way I am introducing any topic remotely touching on defecation in front of this child. So be it. I take my leave of Max, who shakes me warmly by the hand while promising me again that he’ll ‘think very carefully about the whole matter’. Josh is firmly strapped into a kiddy-seat in the back of the car, although for some
reason
his mother omits to gag him, and off we set for
Wood-bridge
. And all I can think of is an unplumbed toilet bowl and its festering contents that each turn of the wheels is leaving
farther
behind us. On the station forecourt Jennifer gives me a brief hug and I thank her for a delightful evening while I notice Josh’s clear gaze fixed on me, silently telling me that I can carry on with such grownups’ mummery all I like but it doesn’t fool him. He
knows
. Shortly afterwards, the train’s wheels are beating their retreat-from-Moscow refrain:

It takes me the entire weekend to recover, if only partially, from this ordeal. I found myself in a state of extreme frailty in which I could easily have been stunned by a falling
moonbeam
. The prevailing social climate nowadays is heartless and bruising. There was a time when it was considered perfectly proper for traumatized members of the intellectual classes to retire to darkened rooms with sal volatile, laudanum and an anodyne book. Fainting, swooning, pining and paroxysms of uncontrollable grief were all considered perfectly normal in the sensitive from time to time. They were merely evidence of a fine but overburdened soul. These days, of course, nobody has a soul, fine or otherwise, and any such behaviour is
stigmatized
either as ‘acting out’ or else as a ‘symptom’. A Samper naturally scorns a pharmaceutical crutch, unless it contains derivatives of the poppy, but he doesn’t say no to darkened rooms, soft music and sympathy. He does not expect an old friend like Derek to corpse over the account of his dark night of the soul in Suffolk and to refer to it as my Waterloo, a
particularly
heartless phrase in the circumstances. I’m sorry to say there’s a cruel streak in Derek; and while we all know that virtue is its own reward he would do well to remember that the utterly callous do not go unrepaid, either.  

But thanks to my splendid mental constitution Monday morning finds me just about strong enough to cope with
Millie
Cleat, who when last heard from was clamouring to speak to me.  

‘Oh, Gerry darling, thank goodness it’s you,’ she bawls down the line as if she were reviewing the Fleet at Spithead in the days before they invented semaphore. ‘Gerry, I can’t
tell
you what a difference you’ve made. You’ve changed my life, do you realize? You can’t deny it now: you’re definitely
channelling
. The spirit is working through you.’  

‘I’m sorry, Millie, I’m a little slow this morning. I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

‘The picture, silly. The Face, as you called it. I Sellotaped it to the wall as soon as you left and it’s been gaining power ever since. Not only does that wonderful all-seeing eye follow me around the room wherever I am, but the whole picture is
surrounded
by a glow. I’m looking at it at this very moment and that’s the only way I can describe it: a sort of shimmer. I’m not imagining it, you know. Debra’s been here and she recognized it immediately. She says there’s absolutely no question that it’s a sacred image. Don’t you see? It explains everything. That strange feeling I had when I must have sailed right over him without knowing he was there.’  

‘Millie, I explained this to you,’ I break in impatiently, hoping to stem the gibberish and recognizing the name Debra as that of one of her chief groupies. ‘The Face doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. It’s like an optical illusion, except it was caused by sound waves instead of light waves. It’s a chimera, a figment, a –’  

‘Listen, darling,’ she breaks in earnestly, ‘you really must drop this hard-boiled pose of yours of … of …’  

‘Brutal rationalism?’ I hazard. ‘Rationalist brutality?’  

‘Of dismissing everything as though it can all be explained by science. On its own, science won’t get you anywhere worth getting to.’  

‘It got you around the world and back to the Solent.’  

‘Not
just
science didn’t. There was also a small matter of superlative seawomanship.’ This is more like the Millie I’m used to. ‘But there was something else, something even more fundamental and important, working
through
me. Call it the spirit of the sea, call it Neptune if you will.’  

‘I won’t.’  

‘Now you’re being silly, Gerry. Because unless you open your mind to it you will never understand how to finish my book.’  

Ah. I see. Yes, that is a problem. Undoubtedly I must get shot of Millie and her book with all possible despatch. But I’m damned if it’s going to require me to become an acolyte in a
primitive religion recently dusted off by a lot of nautical dykes under the influence of gin and heroine-worship. Mind you, at another level I can’t deny a feeling of malevolent glee. The plot is proceeding exactly as Adrian and I were hoping it would. Millie has swallowed the bait whole. Our plan, of course, is to let this intolerable and pretentious woman make a complete public ass of herself over The Face and then have some
scientist
– preferably not Adrian himself – stand up and announce that, sadly, Millie Cleat has allowed herself to become misled by a perfectly commonplace oceanographical phenomenon on a par with seeing faces in clouds which, presumably, no sane person these days would worship as manifestations of a Sky God, etcetera etcetera. To be followed by TV close-ups of Millie’s blushes and stammering climb-down. After which even her greatest fans will surely have to admit she’s a
considerable
numbskull, while Samper and the entire EAGIS team will be popping
prosecco
corks and throwing their hard hats in the air. That will also be the moment for giving the media the story of what
really
happened that night in the Canaries when an obsessive yachtsperson, the balance of her mind
perhaps
disturbed by solitude, dreams of victory and seabed gods, selfishly ruined a scientific mission that might have provided crucial information regarding Cumbre Vieja’s potential hazard and the vulnerability of half the northern hemisphere to a tsunami of Armageddon-like proportions … To say nothing of the money … And all backed up with photographs taken from the
Scomar Explorer
’s bridge clearly showing
Beldame
scooting across the survey vessel’s floodlit bows with inches to spare.