Amazing Disgrace (11 page)

‘We really need to finish this book,’ I now tell her
reasonably
. ‘Otherwise it will miss the Christmas market. And that does matter because – and I hate to remind you of this – the more time that goes by, the more the image of Millie Cleat fades on the public retina. Next year it may be Rufus Rasmussen, don’t forget.’ This unkind cut gets the desired effect.  

‘Over my dead body,’ Millie growls.

‘Right. So we absolutely need that Christmas slot. I propose we have a final session together tomorrow, and I’ll go home and do a week’s work on the text, and then I shall e-mail the whole lot to Champions Press and that will be that.’ An
inspiration
strikes me. ‘It’s your
next
book that will be about The Face and Neptune and the elevation of Millie Cleat to Grand High Priestess of the newest cult to sweep the globe. Don’t
forget
that in this business you’ve always got to have another book in the pipeline. This present volume confirms you as the world’s greatest yachtswoman. Your next will establish you as a spiritual giant, treading the world’s oceans with humility and reverence as Neptune’s avatar or whatever. That will make not only commercial but artistic sense. But for the moment we mustn’t clutter up
Millie!
with too much spiritual stuff otherwise it will jar with all the technical detail and steel-jawed determination. Much better keep the themes a bit separate, don’t you think?’  

And before long, of course, the plausible Samper has
prevailed
and Horatia Cleat is well on the way to her apotheosis as Neptunia Cleat. I can practically hear her filling the tub in her Hilton suite in order to practise walking on water. When I ring off, a little exhausted with oratory and intrigue, I’m
feeling
more cheerful. I shall soon be home in Le Roccie, putting the final bogus details into the text of the book, and thereafter I shall be free. I consciously squash back down the nagging creature who bobs up to say ‘Yeah – free to do what, exactly? We’re not going to be writing about world-famous conductors any time soon, are we?’ In my experience there’s no time like the distant future for listening to these bank-managerial inner voices. It’s the present that matters: the present that includes the sunny prospect of sitting in Tuscany and doing a bit of singing and cooking.  

All the same, I’m aware of some cobweb-like apprehensions hanging around at the back of my mind. It’s all very well making jocular proposals about Millie declaring herself Neptune’s avatar but there’s always the possibility she’ll take them seriously and I
shall actually have to write that next book. I suppose in the last resort we will be able to expose her in time to prevent this fate, but I’ve known things not go according to plan. Still, let’s not worry about what may never happen. The thing to do now is to get home as soon as possible.

And, of course, as I drive upwards through Casoli to my eyrie my spirits lift with every metre of altitude gained. It’s always the way. There’s something about these visits to my native land from which the person of sensibility needs to recover. I don’t know what it is exactly. The boorishness? The whingeing fatalism about our bottomless decline? The ethical dereliction of the politics? My ruffled countrymen may well ask what’s so special about contemporary Italy, with its view of literacy that scarcely exceeds the ability to decipher a telephone directory and a politics with the moral vision of a nineteenth-century South American caudillo. And my reply is simple. What’s
special
about it is that it’s
not mine
. The great advantage of being an immigrant is that one never worries as much about a host country’s politics and social problems as about those of one’s native land, which even now seem paler and less significant. Perpetually foreign but persistently European, one simply cherry-picks one’s way through life, drifting hither and yon across frontiers at whim, feasting off the nice things on offer and ignoring the rest, just as people have always done. What else? For all its bathos, and in default of any serious alternative to this act of principled despair, lotus-eating is definitely the way forward.  

I peel off the road and down the short track leading to my house. The familiar roof comes into view and across the chasm to the right the bulking grey crag from behind which the
distant
sea furtively emerges like a satellite photo of an indiscreet act. But what is this? There is a flashy new Range Rover parked where the track forks to skirt my property en route to Marta’s shack. Walkers? They do sometimes leave their cars up here while they ramble around. On the other hand it’s not
unknown for people to bring a car up here for less virtuous purposes and I scan the ground around it for dead Peroni cans, cigarette stubs and lust’s latex fall-out. Nothing. As I let myself through my barrier I wonder how young lovers up here before the invention of the motor car managed to escape their
cavernous
sooty farmhouses full of inquisitive children and
eagle-eyed
grandparents. Was the same recourse on offer in the horse-and-buggy era? How carnal could they have become in the lee of a looming equine backside, the black purse of its anus periodically disgorging hot wet mulch and its velvet ears swivelling back against the starlit sky like furry radar dishes? Surely they would have felt too much surveilled by that great brute witness? The close presence of a living, breathing
creature
periodically gusting ammonia and methane would hardly have been less inhibiting than the peeping Thomism of the parish priest himself.  

I drive in and stop beside my shuttered house. Off through the trees to my right runs the reassuring beechwood fence that demarcates my property and Marta’s. It is a fence with a
history
. I built it for protection against my eccentric neighbour and very nearly with my own blood when, owing to an accident with a nail gun caused by Marta distracting me, I found myself fixed to it like one of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, and no less eloquent of protest. Following that, my beautiful
structure
was torn down without permission when Piero Pacini was shooting a scene for his unfinished last film, and later replaced. Now I catch the murmur of voices from the other side.
Marta!
? Can it be? My expectations soar. Has the old slag returned at long last? I prepare myself to commiserate with her thumbscrew bruises and electrode burns and to welcome her home. With renewed cheerfulness I find my key to the door in the fence between us and hurriedly open it. And there, standing just outside Marta’s back door, is someone I instantly recognize and wish I didn’t: the weaselly house agent and amateur plane-spotter, Signor Benedetti. In deference to the hot weather he is jacketless in lightweight slacks and a
designer version of one of those white short-sleeved work shirts affected by airline pilots and coach drivers, all epaulettes and breast pockets but tarted up with smoke-grey mother-
of-pearl
buttons and one of those obtrusively discreet
monograms
in white silk thread on the left-hand pocket. The entire shirt is a serious lapse of taste. On the other hand, not one of his woven hairs is out of place today. With him is a baggy pink man and a dumpy pink woman. Of Marta there is no sign and my expectations abruptly stall and nosedive. Benedetti is clearly both startled and disappointed to see me, making it mutual.  

‘Good day,
ingegnere
,’ I say. ‘This is a surprise. I hardly dared expect the pleasure of your renewed presence up here. Really, I had no idea house agents remained so emotionally attached to properties that have so long been off their books. I suppose you must be the fond parent who can never quite let go of his children even when they’re old enough to have passed into others’ hands for ready cash.’  

‘Signor Samper! Your exquisite fluency reminds me most pleasurably of the conversations we have enjoyed together these last few years. I’m sure you are feeling as well as you’re looking? Such youthful elegance! You wear your years as you do your clothes, with admirable lightness.’  

‘Be that as it may, Benedetti,’ I say, cutting to the chase in my ill-bred English fashion, ‘I find myself apprehensive lest your presence here with what I take to be clients indicates that you have some firm knowledge of my neighbour’s fate.’

‘These are indeed potential clients,’ he says, ignoring my implied question. ‘What is more, they are countrymen of yours. May I present Mr and Mrs Baritoni?’  

Baggy and Dumpy have meanwhile been standing there sweatily with the baffled smiles of Britons waiting for all this foreign babble to blow over. They have plainly not recognized Samper as any kind of kin, which is cheering.  

‘Apparently you’re English,’ I say to them in that language. Expressions of relief cross their glistening faces.

‘Oh, you too? That’s right,’ says Baggy. ‘But we’re not quite who he says we are. Not Baritoni but Barrington. I’m Chris, and this is Deirdre, my wife. I import motor mowers and she’s a dental assistant. Now you know all there is to know about us.’  

I can well believe it, but don’t say so. We Sampers don’t war gratuitously on flabby folk with estuarine vowels but neither are we prepared to soften up merely on the grounds of having a passport in common. More to the point, though, I’m not under any circumstances having them as neighbours and I’m really disappointed not to find old Marta. I introduce myself curtly.  

‘Gerald Samper. I live in the house on the other side of this fence. Might I ask what you’re doing here?’  

It is Dumpy who answers and I have the impression that, like Wanda Horowitz, she calls the shots in this ménage. ‘We’re looking to buy a house in this area and Mr Benedetti has been kindly showing us a few to give us some initial ideas. You know – a grasp of the market.’  

‘An odd way to go about it, given that this particular house is not for sale.’  

‘Oh, isn’t it?’  

‘Certainly not. Did he tell you it was? It’s lived in by a lady who happens to be away at the moment. Unless Benedetti knows to the contrary, that is.’ I turn to their tour escort and switch language. ‘Have you heard from Marta, then? Do you know what’s happened to her?
Is
this house on the market?’  

Some eighteen months ago this man and I had a run-in over my peculiar neighbour, and I like to think he received a severe warning from his cronies in the carabinieri for spreading vile rumours about her. At the time he unquestionably retired wounded and I really imagined we had seen the last of him up here, his rodent confidence assuredly having been dented. Evidently I was wrong.  

‘No, signore, I have heard nothing directly. True, it is
possible
this house is not for immediate sale. But as we were in the
neighbourhood I thought I would give Mr and Mrs Baritoni an idea of the kind of house they might find in this area in places off the beaten track. I was sure my esteemed former client wouldn’t mind.’  

An unsettling thought strikes me and I revert to English. ‘Have you been inside?’  

‘We did have a little look round, yes,’ admits Baggy. ‘It needs a good deal of work but it’s got real possibilities.’  

‘No it hasn’t,’ I correct him. ‘It has absolutely no
possibilities
whatsoever since, as I say, it isn’t for sale. And anyway,
I
think it’s charming as it is.’ Even as I speak I’m conscious of the irony of hearing myself defending Marta’s rural slum after a history of slagging it off as a place suitable only for the
commercial
-scale cultivation of toadstools. It is, after all, the house whose bedroom the great Pacini used as a set when he wanted the interior of a dirt-poor fisherman’s cottage for his film. ‘It’s outrageous that Benedetti brought you here at all. I can’t
imagine
what he was thinking.’  

‘That wasn’t our fault,’ Dumpy says reasonably. ‘We’re new to the area. He’s just driving us around.’  

‘Certainly it’s not your fault.’ I turn back to Benedetti who is now looking uneasy, as well he might. ‘I understand you have been inside this house,
ingegnere
, which means you must still have the key. Which also suggests that if as a matter of course you retain the keys of all the houses you sell, you still have the key to mine, too. Is this true?’  

With a little start the house agent draws himself up, his
honour
impugned. For a moment he looks less weaselly and more like a goosed rooster. ‘Signor Samper, I must protest! I most certainly do not possess a key to your house. If I may say so, it is a suggestion quite unworthy of you.’  

‘On the contrary. I have a nasty suspicious mind and such a question is entirely worthy of me. So if you don’t have a key to this house, might I ask how you got in?’  

He looks me levelly in the eye. The rooster has vanished and the weasel returned. ‘The back door was unlocked.’

This is tricky. I’m sure it wasn’t, because I would definitely have re-locked it after my last look around. But I’m not so absolutely certain that I can make a direct accusation.  

‘
Ingegnere
, please allow me to be entirely clear,’ I say. ‘In my neighbour’s absence and at her request I am acting as her
caretaker
here. She has naturally given me permission to enter the house and check it from time to time. So far as I’m aware she has given no permission to anyone to conduct guided tours with busloads of foreigners. And besides, even if you did find the door open, am I to suppose you have acquired the habit of just walking into houses that are obviously lived in and full of other people’s belongings?’ I turn back to my countrymen, as Benedetti was pleased to call them. ‘I don’t suppose you saw how he got in, did you? I mean, was the back door unlocked?’  

Dumpy and Baggy look at each other, trying to remember. ‘No,’ they shake their heads. ‘We followed Mr Benedetti around the house from the drive but probably a bit more
slowly
because we were looking at the place. By the time we got here the door was already open. Is there a problem?’  

‘Not really. Or none that involves you. As I’ve just told him, I act as caretaker of this house and I’m just a bit unnerved to find people wandering around it when I wasn’t here.’  

Soon after this they leave, but not before Baggy confides in an aside: ‘This isn’t the first house we’ve seen with furniture and stuff, you know. Benedetti’s got a lot of keys.’

I’ll bet he has. A regular little housebreaker, our weaselly one. The whole episode has cast something of a pall over my own homecoming. I was going to invent some irresistible
delicacy
to go with the
prosecco
on my terrace but my heart’s no longer in it. Poor Marta. Of course, I realize the Voynovian bat is nothing to do with me, and she has certainly never asked me to take the least responsibility for her house, still less to act as caretaker. But I worry all the same. I simply don’t want
anything
awful to have happened to her and can’t rid myself of the suspicion that despite his protestations of ignorance Benedetti might actually know something. I mean, what else would give
the little turd the confidence to come and show prospective buyers over her house? Later that afternoon I call the local carabinieri, with one of whom I have developed quite cordial relations since the previous imbroglio, and mention to Virgilio that as I’m not always here it would be much appreciated if he could arrange to have the odd patrol car drop by from time to time in order to check on Marta’s house, at least until she returns. I soon learn that, alas, the carabinieri seldom find themselves free to visit such isolated houses as ours in the course of duty and I would do better to engage a private
security
firm such as Metronotte to carry out regular patrols. However, Virgilio would gladly pass on the word and he is sure that occasionally a patrol car can come up to check on my neighbour’s house when things are quiet and they have a bit of time to spare. I thank him and ring off. My real reason for the call is that it will automatically have been recorded; and in case there ever is a break-in at either of our houses it will be an additional piece of evidence to flourish in the face of our insurance companies.

I go to bed glummish and vaguely apprehensive but wake seven hours later to a different world of morning sunshine and mountain silence that has been wheeled into place overnight by the celestial scene-shifters. I’m not clear how this happens. Solitude and fresh coffee anyway make me cheerful of a
morning
, and not being in a London flat is a further bonus. People like Derek are naturally metropolitan, of course. Like rats they live in cities at great ease. They scamper through their daily mazes with no obvious sign of boredom, amply rewarded by decent food and a good deep litter in which to pup. Not that that particular detail is much of a selling point with Derek; but there’s no doubt his monumental empress-sized bed covered in fabrics from Heal’s represents about as much comfort as
anyone
could reasonably expect when vertically separated by a mere nine feet from somebody else’s colonic irrigation. It’s the
being so much on top of everyone – or beneath them in Derek’s frequent case – I find so hard to bear in cities. That and the constant din that wears me down so that merely going out to interview a leathery yachtswoman in her Hilton suite for an hour makes me feel, by the time I’m home again, as though I’ve run a marathon (Oh, rat-man!). No, give me the fluent silence of these hills where I can hear myself think, not to
mention
cook and sing.