Amazing Disgrace (13 page)

As I pour myself another liberal glassful I can feel the
gratifying
rush of righteous anger. After all, the entire point of my coming to live up here in majestic isolation was that I would be spared the world of suburban disruption and could get on
with some work. Instead of which, although miles from
anywhere
, I have found myself living in a crazed soap opera, trapped in a version of
Neighbours
that has clearly been scripted by one of those writers with a ponytail, trembling
fingers
and pupils like wormholes. It’s the
time
this blasted woman has caused me to waste. Most irritating of all is to have wasted it doing DIY jobs on her behalf when she might never return to benefit from them. For all I know her bleached bones may even now be emerging from a shallow desert grave as the thin wind strips the sand away, and serve her right. If there’s a passionate conviction that never fails to overtake one in the middle of a DIY job it is surely that one was made for better things.
Was it for this
? the internal cry goes up. Was it for this that I bothered to learn about the Thirty Years War (1618–1648) at school? Does a working knowledge of the ablative absolute help one fit a lock to a door? Do Wordsworth’s daffodils, fluttering and dancing in the breeze in their ineffably cretinous fashion? Does it even help to know that the very form of these questions constitutes a rhetorical trope whose name I have forgotten? No: none of it is of the slightest use. All the knowledge I laboriously acquired at those expensive schools my father sent me to (thereby excusing
himself
all parental duty for two-thirds of the year) has proved irrelevant and superfluous. In order to get by these days one needs a stretch in an establishment with its fingers firmly on the pulse – or better, the carotid artery – of the world.
Somewhere
like the Joseph Stalin School of Deportment and
Manners
in Lausanne, for instance. I have heard this establishment is very hard to get into, with a longer waiting list than either Eton or Harrow, and by no means every pupil who enters graduates. Some are never seen again. But those who emerge with the coveted
ruban noir
are assured of being more than equal to any task or situation that life has to offer. It is absolutely certain that no alumnus of the École Joseph Stalin de Maintien et des Manières would ever lock himself by
mistake
into his Voynovian neighbour’s rural slum and have to
spend the night there without supper, drinking Fernet-Branca by the light of a guttering candle. Come to that, nor would he find himself condemned to a career on a sub-literary treadmill that entails writing about nautical haemorrhoids like Millie Cleat.  

There are times when the genteelly educated who didn’t go to school in Lausanne fall prey to black thoughts in the night hours. We are overtaken by darkness of the brain as images of pointlessness and defeat crowd in and all too accurately
represent
the teeming emptiness of being alive. We think of our dead. We think of our own inexorably approaching death. We think of the paltry and arbitrary work we are obliged in the interim to perform in order briefly to feed ourselves: work that makes an ox plodding in a circle to draw water seem
rewardingly
purposeful. And then we think of the Fernet-Branca
bottle
beside the bed and discover to our surprise that it is now barely a quarter full. We pour ourselves another glass and try to pretend that we didn’t blot our copybook with Max Christ; we convince ourselves that even now he is deciding –
regretfully
, maybe, but deciding (
Muß es sein? Es muß sein!
) that since a biography is inevitable sooner or later it may as well be
written
by Gerald Samper. At least that way it will be literate and unconventional. Maybe in the rush of professional and
domestic
life at Crendlesham Hall no adult has yet noticed the stillmoist solecism lurking in the junk room next to the bathroom. Maybe if they have they will have taken it as prima faeces
evidence
of a bolshie builder making his feelings known at not being paid double overtime. Maybe pretty Adrian will be able to get his equally pretty sister to lean on Max and …? But I don’t really believe any of it. People either want their
biographies
written or they don’t. When they’re as famous and
distinguished
as Max Christ they neither need nor wish for extra publicity. And now the thought of Adrian contrives to lower my spirits even further. Why isn’t the rat here lending me
succour
and support instead of messing about on the high seas? I don’t wish to remind myself that this is the sort of contract
expected of lovers and partners rather than of just good friends. Ah well. Memo: find out tomorrow when he’s due home.  

I must have fallen asleep because something overcomes the Fernet in my bloodstream and wakes me. The candle has expired. I badly need to pee and remember that as the water’s off it would be better not to use Marta’s lavatory. I therefore resort to the time-honoured practice of rural areas and pee out of the window. No sooner have I started than there’s an anguished bellow from underneath, ‘
Dio boia!
’, a crashing noise and then a brilliant light is flashed into my eyes. This is the end. Maybe I’m still asleep? It’s pure nightmare, whatever it is.  

‘You come down out of there!’ orders a crisp voice in Italian.  

‘Who are you?’ I ask, not much less brusquely.  

‘Carabinieri. We are armed and this house is surrounded! How many are there of you?’  

‘For heaven’s sake! Just me.’  

‘Do you have a gun?’  

‘Of course not. It’s you that’s armed, not me.’  

‘He’s lying,’ I hear an unseen companion say. ‘Watch out, Albé, he’s wearing a holster.’  

A dull orange flash below is accompanied by a shocking bang. ‘See?’ the voice shouts up as a bullet screams off into the night. ‘Next time it’ll be you unless you throw your weapon down. Do it
now!
’  

My fuddled brain is doing its best but it’s like stirring
porridge
. I’m scared, all right, but I think the slight insulation from reality provided by residual sleep and Fernet prevents that little internal sac of terror hormone from bursting as it did during the raid on Millie’s Hilton suite. It’s all just a little too unreal. ‘It’s not a proper holster,’ I call down reasonably. ‘It’s for a power drill. I fell asleep wearing it. I’m Gerald Samper from the other house. I’ve been fixing a lock on this lady’s back door.’  

A pause. ‘Well, come out at once with your hands up and
we’ll see. No tricks, mind. This is a lonely place and you don’t want to cause an accident.’  

There is no mistaking the menace in this trigger-happy goon’s voice. He keeps aiming the light at me and I keep
aiming
for a tone of sweet reason.  

‘I’m sorry, I can’t come out. I know it sounds silly, well, it is silly, but I’m afraid I’m locked in.’  

‘If you got into the house you can get out again, can’t you? Who locked you in?’  

‘Um, it was sort of … I, uh, locked myself in, actually. I’ve just fitted a new lock to the back door, you see, and it locked itself and there’s no knob on the inside to let myself out, and …’ I hear my voice tailing off dismally. It’s bad enough to have been caught peeing out of a window by the person you’ve peed on; if you’ve also locked yourself into someone else’s house you inevitably look a complete prat into the bargain. Will these humiliations brought on me by my absent
neighbour
never end? How does this Voynovian witch manage to exercise her malevolent power at such a distance? Even,
possibly
, from beyond the grave?  

‘I think it’s time we radioed for reinforcements,’ I overhear one of the men below saying, and I catch the word ‘
brigatista
’. This is dire. If they really suspect I’m a member of the Brigate rosse, the Red Brigades, they are probably scared too, which means there’s a serious possibility I will be shot somewhere painful and incapacitating, possibly through the buttocks, while ‘resisting arrest’ or ‘evading capture’ before being dragged down in handcuffs for interrogation by the local agents of DIGOS.

‘Look,’ I say with my hands still up, framed by the window embrasure in the blinding torchlight, ‘I’m an English writer.
Un artista
, not
un
’
brigatista
. I live in the house over there on the other side of that fence. The thing to do is to let me out of this house and we can go over there and I will show you all my
documenti
and we’ll call up Lucchese Virgilio. He will identify me.’

There is another silence. ‘You know the
tenente
?’  

‘I do. Not well, but Virgilio has been up here before and he knows that this neighbour of mine is away. It was I who asked him to have the carabinieri drop by occasionally.’ Even as I say it the irony is not lost on me. It
would
be tonight of all nights they chose to patrol.

Muttering rises from the darkness beneath. The torch beam is still trained on me but it’s obvious these men have been thrown off balance by my mention of their senior colleague.  

‘The thing to do,’ I go on, feeling that at last Samper is beginning to take charge, ‘is for one of you to trot across to my house, which you’ll find open, and fetch the ladder hanging in the garage. I’ll have to climb out of this window. Once I’m down we can sort all this out in five minutes.’  

And this is pretty much what happens. Once I’m on the ground and they’re finally convinced I’m just some harmless foreign nutter without a revolutionary thought in his head the whole situation eases. They’re obviously as relieved as I am. It turns out there are only two of them after all, just a couple of young patrolmen who were checking on Marta’s house as an excuse for goofing off for forty minutes instead of tangling with the denizens of the night down in Camaiore. We go back to my house and I offer the fellow I peed on the use of my
distinctive
white-and-biscuit ground-floor bathroom while his colleague checks my passport and
permesso di soggiorno
.  

‘I’m awfully sorry about that,’ I say with a rueful nod in the direction of the closed door, from behind which come vigorous splashing sounds.  

‘Oh, don’t worry about Alberto,’ says his partner with a
disarmingly
merry smile. ‘Does him good to get pissed on
occasionally
. The joke is that
he’d
gone round the back of the house to do the same thing. He was standing there enjoying
una ricca pisciata
of his own when you opened up overhead. We won’t let him forget this in a hurry. But he can sit in the back of the car until he changes his uniform.’

Later, after the sound of their Alfa Romeo has died away
and I am belatedly lying in my own bed and wondering if I shall ever be able to get to sleep again, I work out that it must have been the noise the luckless patrolman made clumping around beneath the open window that had woken me. The episode ended amiably enough, and the two carabinieri could hardly have been more civil in the circumstances, given that one had had a drenching and both a bad scare. But it has all been at the cost to Gerald Samper of a great burden of
indignity
and nervous strain which, I can assure the bulging bint of Voynovia, has been faithfully entered on the debit side of her ledger. I’m still incredulous that my voluntary display of
neighbourly
goodwill should have led to such humiliating farce. I suppose I should be grateful that I’m not even now under police guard in the new hospital in Lido di Camaiore, face down as a surgeon repairs a bullet hole in my bottom, trying not to laugh behind his green mask. My stepmother Laura’s charming habit in my boyhood was to stand over me after some painful accident involving a bicycle or a new sheath knife and, even before blood or tears were staunched, to say, ‘And what lesson do we learn from this, h’m?’ Rotten
baggage
. I don’t know that there’s a lesson to be drawn from tonight’s débâcle, other than that urinating on policemen is one of those things best done sparingly. You might pass this bit of hard-won Samper wisdom on to your own son if you have one.

It takes me several days to recover my equanimity after this distressing episode. The worst of it all is that, in my own mind at least, Le Roccie is fast losing its aura of unspoilt wildness that first attracted me to it. More and more it is becoming tainted by association with the most brutal kind of
worldliness
, principally helicopters and policemen. The following day I rang my friend Virgilio in the carabinieri to apologize for the night’s events. He laughed it off, kindly but quite briskly; and if any good has come of the whole affair it is the distinct impression I have that as far as the police are concerned Le Roccie is going to be allowed to drop off their map. It must seem to them that each time they come they run the risk of
tangling
with completely loopy foreigners, visits that always end in their having to retreat in disarray or humiliation. Nothing short of the assassination up here of the Mayor of Lucca or the apparition of the late Pope Wojtyla robed in glory will readily bring the local cops to Le Roccie again. Fortunately, I can’t see either of these horrid events happening in or around the
Samper
residence which, as we all know, is a haven of non-violence as well as of profound scepticism.  

The other person I phoned that day was Dr Adrian Jestico, now back in his Southampton office after his quick flip
off-shore
. If you remember, his sister Jennifer had explained that he wasn’t able to join us for dinner that night at Crendlesham Hall because he’d been called away to deal with instrument problems aboard a research vessel. Having interviewed him and his colleagues after the EAGIS trip, I now have a
respectful
grasp of the fortune it costs each day to run these ships and understand why there’s a panic when things go wrong at sea. By a strange coincidence this particular vessel to which Adrian
flew was also working in the Canaries, although it had no
connection
with EAGIS or volcanoes. The scientists aboard the R/V
Tony Rice
had been plotting deep-sea currents to the west of La Gomera using acoustic thermometry. Something to do with global warming, apparently. Suddenly, their work was disrupted by ten-minute bursts of loud incoherent signals
coming
at irregular intervals from the seabed some way to the north of their position. Puzzled, and preferring to do some detective work before abandoning their measurements, the scientists eventually tracked down a singular train of events.

Three months earlier a freak wave had washed a
consignment
of thirty new transponders off the deck of a container ship bringing them from the United States to Rotterdam, en route for some European research department. The
transponders
were packed in a ten-foot container and the wave swept it into the Atlantic where it drifted for weeks before its seals began to degrade, water leaked in and it gradually sank. This is apparently a common enough occurrence for floating
containers
to constitute a real danger to ocean-going yachts. For a long while they remain buoyant enough to float barely
submerged
and as invisible as blocks of ice. What made this container a hazard to oceanographers was its consignment of transponders that had already been profiled to form a network for detecting seismic events. Each transponder had been set up to chirp at a different frequency so that the events could be pinpointed using triangulation. Once deployed, they would remain silent until they detected a seabed tremor, whereupon they would switch themselves on and interrogate each other for ten minutes. While their container was sinking in stately fashion to the sea floor off La Palma, the water pressure
activated
the transponders. When the container touched down on the bottom, the bump was enough to set them off in a
ten-minute
burst of activity.

Since then, each minor seismic event beneath the seabed has triggered them again, and since in that area such events happen several times a day they have made themselves heard a good
deal. There they are in their container, sending out wild bursts of data and each responding to the others’ acoustic bleeps in a recursive stream of feedback. Their chatter is unstoppable and fills the water column with the weirdest tweetings and
cheepings
. The scientists aboard
Tony Rice
have tried sending
commands
to them to turn themselves off or otherwise commit suicide, but without success. They continue to sit like a group of housewives at a coffee klatsch, compulsively gossiping down there in their little room in the dark. And there they will
continue
to gossip until their batteries run down or some method is devised of shutting them up. In the meantime they are making any further acoustical experiments in the area impossible.  

Since Adrian is in charge of the thermometry project he had to jet out to Las Palmas and be helicoptered aboard the ship to see what could be salvaged. The weather on site was unsettled and Adrian found the
Tony Rice
tossing fretfully, a state of affairs that he said applied equally to the vessel’s complement. The lost container is on the bottom in a place described as
virtually
inaccessible. The sea is very deep at that point and the seabed a chaotic jumble of volcanic detritus. The scientists have concluded there is little chance of retrieving the
container
and any salvage attempt would cost vastly more than the transponders are worth.  

All of a sudden I saw the possibilities this story of
oceano-graphical
woe offered. Perhaps my sense of grievance –
normally
the most quiescent and least visible side of my nature – had been gingered up by the awful contretemps at Marta’s house. But at once I spotted how a costly but minor maritime upset could be turned to Samper’s advantage. So I rang up Adrian and told him my plan, extracting his promise to come and visit me shortly. However, I rang off without telling him about my recent night of shame. I’m still a little nervous of his laughter, to be frank, and before recounting tales at one’s own expense one needs to be comfortably à deux and with a fair slug of
prosecco
under one’s belt. I thought it judicious to wait before making him privy to my amazing disgrace.

That was three days ago. Since then I have looked at my new chapter for
Millie!
with renewed satisfaction, confident that I have produced a recognizable portrait of one of the
outstandingly
bogus characters of our day and age, a portrait I’m certain she will read entirely differently. As I explained to her in London, it would be impossible now to alter the text throughout to make it look as if she had been motivated from the outset by her numinous relationship with the ocean deities. That is not what drives world champions, and everybody knows it. My new short chapter, though, invents some soulful moments and blows a little dust from the road to Damascus into the middle of the book. There’s no actual moment of blinding revelation, no voice from the sky talking about pricks and persecution. Instead, there’s a growing awareness on
Millie
’s part of something that only the very successful and
overpraised
need be told: that there may possibly be more to this world than their own egos. Something in the starlit nights and the hiss of phosphorescent water past
Beldame
’s three hulls succeeds in making her feel marginally uncertain about where she is going and why. A step further involves her entertaining the novel idea that treating the ocean as the mere racing-circuit on which the engrossing saga of her personal achievements has unfolded is not merely bad taste but plain sad. My aim in this new chapter is to do little more than introduce the concept of a lone yachtsperson with Doubts, and maybe scatter a few seeds of callow spirituality that, by the time a sequel comes to be written, will no doubt have grown tall and can be
harvested
as a rich crop of orient and immortal bollocks.  

I give my new chapter a final going-over and must admit it deftly strikes just the right note. As I say, Millie will read it as straight. Anyone else with more brains than a greenfly will marvel at the unseemliness of a one-armed mid-fifties
grandmother
only now beginning to wonder whether her
domineering
competitiveness may not have shrivelled the rest of her like a parched pea. I’m so pleased with it I e-mail it off at once to Frankie so that he can print it out and have it biked round to
the Hilton for Millie’s approval, which I’m confident she’ll give. She’d better if she wants to catch the Christmas market.  

That done, I can turn my attention to other things. One of these is not easy to think about because it brings back the other night’s events with too much clarity for comfort. It has to do with the spectacle I must have presented when first
transfixed
by the policeman’s blinding light and his blasphemous bellow. I have to ask myself whether my unconscious, having made sure I was woken by the policeman’s footsteps in the first place, mightn’t maliciously have driven me to expose myself at the window. For when on approaching his fortieth birthday a man suddenly finds himself packing more veal, it is possible that his unconscious might revel in it in a jock’s locker-room sort of way even as his ordinary self would cringe at so
juvenile
an urge. And of late I have found myself cringing
whenever
I remember my recent experiment with Mr and Mrs ProWang’s potent little pills. This is not so much from shame, since it’s hardly a cause for shame to wish to push back the boundaries of scientific knowledge, but from worry.
Where will it end
? That’s what I want to know. Like Topsy in
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
, it growed, and as yet shows no sign of stopping.  

The question is, at what point do I go to a doctor and
confess
what I’ve done? As an insecure nineteen-year-old one might get away with it; but at thirty-nine the confession that I’d belatedly decided I was under-vealed would be
embarrassing
, to say the least. I also doubt whether anybody would believe me (‘Yeah, yeah, a scientific experiment. I mean, come on, Mr Samper. Pull the other one’). But to admit that the
revealing
process had grown out of hand might be to invite the medical profession’s most scathing weapon, derision
illmasked
as professional sympathy. I suppose I might write to Mr and Mrs ProWang in Guangzhou – or better, c/o their internet site – and … and what? I can’t possibly complain that their pills have done exactly what they claimed they would, and more. Maybe they could start work on an antidote to arrest the process? Yet for that I would need the evidence of a
medical examination, which brings me back to that consulting room and the medic struggling to maintain his or her
imperturbability
. And he or she, of course, would be eager to
prepare
a paper for publication in
The Lancet
or the
BMJ
on this exceptional case. I can practically write it myself:  

Even cloaked in anonymity I would find this sort of thing quite grim enough without the additional irony of serving to enhance somebody else’s career by turning over all my
privately
collected data and standing around mutely wearing a paper gown. True, there are alternative possibilities, one of them being to capitalize on this personal disaster.
Think positively
(I ought to be telling myself while lighting a patchouli-scented joss stick): this is not an affliction but a benediction. We are
blessed
by our adversities … A likely tale. All I can hear is Émile Coué’s famous maxim rephrased to mock me: ‘Day by day, in every way, I am becoming bigger and bigger.’ It is a pity that freak shows have fallen victim to amniocentesis and
political
correctness, otherwise I would be able to earn my living at
fairgrounds alongside the Bearded Lady, the Fish-Scaled Boy and the Rubber Man. But one’s afflictions can still command a market value. There may be a new career opening for me as the guest star in strip clubs or those DVDs with arch titles like ‘What – The Butler’s Sore?’ Would that really be worse than writing about Millie Cleat? The answer, incredibly, is yes. I can’t even bring myself to explore possible avenues of succour on the internet by summoning up some perverted penile
helpline
designed for ghouls and insomniacs. No. I have not yet reached so low a point. I just wish I could banish from my mind’s eye an image in my school geography textbook of
fattailed
sheep in Australia obliged to tow their massive appendages in little carts. Well, the thing is not to become obsessive. I make a pact with myself that I will now take my tape measure into the bathroom only once a week, and carry on keeping a careful record. Whatever else, this is a scientific imperative. If I’m to make medical history, if not
The Guinness Book of Records,
I shall need impeccable data.  

Right now I have more important things to think about, such as producing a culinary artwork from the calves’ brains that are still sitting patiently in the fridge. Even at this altitude the weather is oppressive and I am disinclined even to think about heavy food. This is not the moment for seam-bursting winter fare. I bought the brains in Viareggio, you will remember, under the influence of my bedtime reading of Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis’s
E
mergency Cuisine
. In this book she made several pithy asides about the iniquity in wartime of eating such things as lamb or veal. Sheep and cows, she explained, were factories on the hoof and their full output was essential to the war effort. She was wholly opposed to the slaughter of any creature that had not attained decent old age unless it
happened
to be wearing a Nazi uniform, in which case it was never too young to be culled. Naturally, by today’s standards Dame Emmeline’s hard line strikes us as disgraceful. For one thing, it helped perpetuate the Protestant streak in British cookery that has done so much to earn us the pity and
contempt
of more discriminating nations. By ‘Protestant streak’ I mean the idea that it is sinful to allow notions of pleasure to contaminate the act of eating, which according to
nonconformist
zealots should serve only to refuel the machine. These people also consider it proper to maximize God’s bounty by, for example, picking broad beans only when they are leathery monsters the size of big toes, or runner beans when they are a foot long and covered in fibrous green parchment, or pears when they are weeping bombs of wasp-fodder. Dame
Emmeline
did not personally subscribe to this Calvinistic ideology. Indeed, her house in Berkeley Square became famous as a wartime haven for young naval ratings lost in the blackout, and there are ample accounts and memoirs to testify that she had no taste whatever for overripe fruit, being strongly inclined towards the invigorating hardness of comparative immaturity. Nevertheless, strictly from the point of view of wartime cooking, she did condemn as decadent the habit of slaughtering lambs and calves. In times of national emergency quantity must trump quality if it’s available at all. Citizens should eschew rack of lamb even as they lamented the lack of ram. Anywhere other than on her own settee Dame Emmeline called patriotically for less veal and more beef.