Amazing Disgrace (2 page)

Of course you know the story, even if you pretend
otherwise
. Once she had broken that record there was no holding her. She re-provisioned and, like Nelson before her, set sail for England, home and beauty. She managed this trip in record time also. By now Millie Cleat was bankable. It was natural that the husband to whom she had returned after an absence of almost three years would urge her to set off immediately on a non-stop circumnavigation of the globe. So, too, it was for Vvizz Corporation. TV audiences worldwide had become fixated on the familiar image of this one-armed granny, as brown and furrowed as a monkey left out in the rain. They
were hooked on the endless
intime
webcam pictures of her plotting her course or snatching a meal. Helicopter shots of
Beldame
heeling into creamy waves had become a ritual part of newscasts. The great green and gold sail across whose paunch the giant Vvizz logo blazed was iconic. The corporate slogan written across the foredeck, ‘No Worries’, was a token of faith. In the face of all this there was, as Margaret Thatcher had once famously remarked, no alternative. The ratings demanded it. Millie entered the next round-the-world race.

And without seeming to try, she won it and broke the record, too, making the fastest-ever solo circumnavigation. After she had been setting a brisk clip for several weeks the media turned it into an epic race against time, against the
elements
, against human frailty, against history itself. Once ‘The Battling Granny’ and ‘Heroine of the Deep’, she now became simplified as just plain ‘Millie’. Ask ‘How’s Millie doing?’ in any pub in Britain and only the truly disenchanted would have had the nerve to respond irritably, ‘Millie Who?’ Well,
disenchanted
, c’est moi. Mind you, that was before I was appointed as her ghost and disenchantment turned to well-earned loathing as she stood me up for appointments, changed her story, lied, disparaged my dress sense and made other
personal
remarks unnecessary to repeat here. One thing I really resented was the sheer technology involved in her record. It wasn’t just that practically everything in the way of
navigation
, steering and sail-setting was done for her by
Beldame
’s computers and servo motors. No, the really sad thing was that the satellites tracking her every inch of the way made it
impossible
that sooner or later we would discover she had faked it, like Donald Crowhurst sailing his mad circles in mid-Atlantic in the late Sixties. Had she done that my admiration for her would have changed everything.

Instead of which the whole thing became a cliché, as was inevitable given the press coverage. Almost from the first the newspapers had had to suppress the phrase ‘single-handed’, although it still slipped out now and then from journalists’
keyboards with the self-conscious qualifier ‘no pun intended’. The pillory ought to be reinstated for people who append ‘no pun intended’ to their facetious gaucheries so we could all visit them in our lunch hour and pelt them with mule droppings. If they didn’t intend the pun why did they write it, print it,
proofread
it and have it published? But I don’t wish to wear us all out with rancour. The afternoon is hot; the
prosecco
is
working
its mellow magic; and I fear that more about this
insufferable
woman must inevitably emerge as we go along. For the moment you will just have to take my word that a
chasm
extends between the persona the press and public connived to invent for Millie and the foul-mouthed Cleat whose story I have had to dig out. As she neared the Solent and the finishing line of her famous voyage, a lone journalist with enough courage and independence to suggest that her peers found her an arrogant sea cow alluded to Millie as ‘the Beldame sans merci’. I can add that from the point of view of the elementary social graces she is also a beldame sans s’il vous plaît.

Enough. It’s time to think about more important matters, such as what I shall eat tonight, bearing in mind that lunch turned out to be the gastronomic equivalent of a strip-search. Something light, then. Among the treasures waiting for me in the freezer is a little creation that only last week I finally brought to perfection: Lambs’ Lungs with Surgeon’s Fingers. I don’t know about you, but I have always thought of offal cookery as being almost the chef’s supreme challenge. It is all too easy to wind up with a plate of tubing or nodules reeking of the farmyard. I mean, look at andouillettes: suicide to eat without first checking for an all-night chemist, unless of course you’re French with the necessary antibodies. The mind becomes panicky with images of microbes and sphincters.
Rillettes
is hardly much better, coming into a similar category of jowls-’n’-bowels. They used to serve it on toast with gherkins to blue-chinned workers in French cafés: a terrible brawn
containing
shaving-brush tufts, the white gleam of cartilage, the odd broken tooth. The graphic American name ‘headcheese’
says it all. No: my dainty lambs’ lungs have nothing in
common
with such seven-franc dishes. On the contrary, they have about them a refined innocence that is positively arcadian. Nothing to do with the gamy old goat-footed god with the shaggy thighs, of course. I’m thinking more of little brown boys piping artlessly to their flocks. My dish of lungs exhales an aura of myrtle-dotted pasture and Attic sunshine redolent of herbs and dalliance. For the moment I am unfortunately going to have to keep mum about the exact technique whereby I convert the raw lungs’ pink sponginess to a texture that yields to the side of a fork. I have asked Frankie, my agent, to look into the tricky legal area where copyright law overlaps with patent law. If one can patent an industrial technique, why not a new dish or a new technique for cooking it? Could I
collect
royalties from cooks who prepare my inventions? Here we are in the province of intellectual property.

In any case, all I shall say for the moment is that Samper’s way with lambs’ lungs owes something to the ‘plastination’ technique of Dr Gunther von Hagens, whose flayed chess
players
have done so much to raise the morale of school outings all over Europe. As for my ‘surgeon’s fingers’, these are digit-thin rolls of savoury delight based on minced quinces, garlic, pine nuts and bay, all stuffed into lengths of ox artery, tied off and boiled. There is no doubt they will perfectly complement the lungs, whose preparation includes olive paste. To go with this brilliant dish a white wine is surely called for – something
lively
and with enough acidity to cut through the little organs’ big taste. A frascati, I fancy, which is what the Romans have always chosen to accompany their own offal dishes.

The reason you caught me at a low moment yesterday
afternoon
, sitting outside with a typescript, is that I had finished the text of
Millie!
only that morning and had just despatched it via cyberspace to my editor at Champions Press. Normally it’s quite nice to sit and gloat for a bit once a book is finished, but the sight of this one only made me gloomier. Today, though, I realize it’s off my hands at last and I have definitely begun to banish the megrims. So much so that as I take my daily measurements I find myself singing the exultant yet
tragic
aria the dying Giancarlo sings to Nutella, the peasant girl from the hazel forest, as he gives her the magic pill that will make her live for ever – the very pill whose daring theft from the Alchemist’s cave will guarantee his own demise. ‘
Conservare
in luogo fresco, ben asciutto e pulito,’ he implores her. ‘Do this for me, Nutellina mia, for me, for me, do this, this, this. Tenere fuori della portata dei bambini.’ His voice breaks on the word ‘bambini’ as he and the audience acknowledge the pathos of his demand that she keep his priceless gift out of the reach of children. Nutella, a hopeless innocent, is the only
person
in the opera house who doesn’t realize the purloined pill that will give her eternal life will also make her sterile. She is not the sort of person who reads about side-effects on the label. Don’t you find that at these moments of high drama you naturally become quite carried away, singing alone in the kitchen? I, too, choke on ‘bambini’ even as my stupendous top A leaves a vase on the dresser ringing in sympathy.

A couple of years ago I acquired a neighbour who secretly admired my voice, although she could never quite bring herself to admit it. Marta was from Voynovia – a composer, as it turned out, and living much too close for comfort in the only 
other house up here for miles. Perhaps out of jealousy, and with a streak of cruelty I hadn’t known was in her, Marta
caricatured
my singing and used her travesty in the score she wrote for Piero Pacini’s film. I was very put out at the time and fell self-consciously silent for months afterwards, as anyone would. But after she disappeared – victim, I am now convinced, of that disgraceful American security programme worthy of Stalinist Russia and known as ‘extraordinary rendition’ – my confidence and eventually my voice gradually returned. Since when I have occasionally sung from a kind of tarnished elation, like this morning. But these days my arias tend mostly to be sad. There was nothing I could do to discover where Marta had been taken, or by whom. She simply vanished back in
January
while I was away one weekend, leaving her house unlocked and her coffee-maker boiled dry on the hob. The gas was still alight when I found it, having burnt a hole in the
caffettiera
’s aluminium bottom. There were also unmistakable drops of dried blood on her kitchen table. I knew dear Marta’s housekeeping habits made those of a hobbit look dainty, but this was eccentric even for her. Her mouse-coloured car was still in its shed, too, implying that she hadn’t left under her own steam. Although I believed completely in her innocence there was no denying she was from a very rough-diamond Voynovian clan with connections to organized crime and no doubt with Middle Eastern links as well. I called the
carabinieri
, who came promptly enough and briefly inspected her house with the occasional incredulous snigger but refused to be alarmed. ‘Undoubtedly the lady will come back,’ an officer told me. ‘I believe she has done this before?’ Which of course was true; but on that occasion I’d known roughly where she was and why she’d gone and in any case she was back within a fortnight. It seemed to me that the police, who had got their fingers burned when they once improbably tried to arrest her as a call girl, were keen to keep Marta and her Voynovian
connections
at a distance. Not only did she surprisingly turn out to be vouched for by grandees, but I could imagine these local
policemen had concluded she might be trouble in ways they would prefer not to know about. What they wanted was a simple life followed by early retirement. ‘You must let us know if she doesn’t return, Signor Samper,’ they said, putting on their gloves again. ‘When you think she’s really missing.’

‘But she’s really missing
now
,’ I insisted, even though I already sensed it was useless to go on. At what point in a
policeman
’s imagination does an absent person turn into a missing one? Each week I phoned them up to remind them; each week I was fobbed off with bland reassurance. As a rule I am deeply resistant to conspiracy theories but I did begin to get the feeling that someone higher up had told them the case was closed. And then one day in Camaiore I ran into Signor Benedetti, the weaselly estate agent who had speciously sold both Marta and me our respective houses. After our normal exchange of florid disrespect I mentioned to him that she had disappeared. He had suffered a dented reputation for having spread malicious fables about her and surely had no reason to feel well disposed towards her, yet he told me a story I can’t believe he invented. He had chanced to be at Pisa airport one Sunday afternoon, waiting in the viewing lounge for his wife’s flight to arrive from Rome. As he incuriously watched passengers embarking on a British Airways plane down below on the stand he noticed a woman with a shock of frizzy hair who certainly looked very like
la signora
Marta being escorted by three young men to a white Gulfstream jet parked some way off on its own. But then, of course, he couldn’t be certain. The way Benedetti recounted this made me think it was only beginning to take on significance for him now I’d remarked that she had disappeared.

‘“Gulfstream?”’ I pounced disbelievingly. Benedetti merely smiled.

‘A Gulfstream V. Probably a C-37A,’ he said in a tolerant, know-all sort of voice. ‘Aircraft are a hobby of mine. There was a very small “N” registration number on the tail. Definitely not Italian. In fact, almost certainly, you know,
them
.
Military
or government.’

 ‘But good heavens, we must tell the carabinieri at once. It could be very important.’

He looked me in the eye. ‘I very much regret, signore, that I am absolutely unable to confirm my identification of the lady, so it will be impossible for me to support your story if you go to the police.’

‘Signor Benedetti,’ I said, making an effort to preserve the niceties. ‘Please tell me I am foolishly mistaken in presuming that a man of your evident truthfulness and moral courage could consider denying the eye-witness account you have just given me with your customary transparent sincerity.’  

‘Esteemed Signor Samper, you may presume what you like. I shall deny everything even though I have told you the truth. Now if you will excuse me?’

And rodent-like, he scuttered away. Cowardly bastard. Still, I was pleased to notice his hair-weave could do with
tightening
. That’s the worst of these high-maintenance cosmetic
vanities
. Since they’re essentially a form of lying there’s no going back: you just have to keep re-weaving the tangled web. But his bombshell left me with nothing to do and no one to tell. The mild paranoia that the architects of the fatuous ‘War on Terror’ have done their best to instil in us makes the law-abiding citizen markedly reluctant to become involved. Rather quaint when you think about it, that a vital piece of street wisdom for living in today’s democratic, free societies should be ‘Keep your head down’. I tried to comfort myself by reflecting that Marta always was a darkish sort of horse, what with that sinister Eastern bloc clan of hers on the loose in unmarked helicopters. I really think she did her best to keep them at arm’s length, being an artist, but who knew? The fact remains that these days I can hardly bear to think of her because the images that spontaneously crowd into my mind’s eye are not those of when life up here at Le Roccie was normal. All I can see in my imagination is poor frizzy Marta hung up by her thumbs in some bare, cement-walled shed while outsourced Middle Eastern interrogators do unspeakable things with their electrodes at the
behest of a freedom-loving government six thousand miles away. I banish these thoughts by singing, since they are of no help to her and only distress me utterly. She has been gone almost five months now. All I can do is go over to her
shuttered
house from time to time to make sure the roof isn’t
leaking
and that no one has broken in. I bought her a new caffettiera and amaze myself – given what a pain in the neck she actually was as a neighbour – by hoping against dread that one day the old girl will come back to use it. And oh, the inventive ‘Welcome Home’ cake I shall bake for us to eat amid giggles in the laundry-heaped squalor of her kitchen! But until that moment I try to put her out of my mind.

There’s something that’s nagging you, though, and it has nothing to do with Marta. It’s sharp of you to have noticed that casual little phrase I foolishly let drop about ‘taking my daily measurements’. So now that cat’s out of the bag and won’t be pushed back in I shall have to explain something embarrassing, not to say delicate. How can I best go about this? Start at the beginning. Well, it began by my being
assaulted
with spam. Each time I opened my e-mailer it was swamped with resistible offers (‘Hair Pies stuffed with Hot Meat!!’) or else with importunate messages implying (such are the dismal times we live in) that my penis could do with enlarging. Since it is fatal for any man
ever
to comment on, still more protest, any allegation with the word ‘penis’ in it, I shall simply say the extravagant claims of enlargement being made aroused my forensic curiosity. Were they even legal? How could such a thing work? ‘Which of you by taking thought can add one cubit unto his stature?’ my evangelical stepmother Laura used to quote, dumpy little number that she was. Still is, actually, and even more so now age and piety have begun to shrink her. I soon found out that taking thought is not one of the options being touted on the internet. Taking pills, yes. Taking exercise, certainly. Taking up springs, weights, pumps and even surgery, most definitely. But not thought. The competing therapies’ copywriters must be making the regular pharmaceutical
industry 
green with envy, able as they are to imply promises that directly address their patients’ anxieties. ‘Thicken Ur
DICCKY
!’ they urge. ‘Pack More Veal!’

It’s pathetic how insecure most men are on this point. Over the years many an intake of breath and murmur of quiet surprise – even of outright admiration – has led me to assume Samper is in that lucky minority who need never fear the deadly
epithet
‘average’. (As in: ‘I am average; you are understandably worried; he is the subject of an entertaining case study in
The
Lancet
.’) So it really was in a purely detached spirit of
scientific
enquiry that I sent off for a sixty-day course of the least harmful-sounding pills. Not that the ingredients of ProWang’s Pow-r-Tabs
^TM
sounded very reassuring when they duly arrived, containing things like ‘Horny Goat Weed (
Epimedium
sagittatum
)’, stinging-nettle leaves and ‘orchic substance’, which I can only assume is ground-up testicles. Whose, I wonder? Moreover, the pills themselves smell very rank, like a chapel in which a Black Mass has just been held. Nevertheless I have reserves of fortitude that people often find startling and I am now thirty-four days into the course. To my great surprise I find they do seem to be having some very slight effect after all, chiefly in the circumferential sector. A purely localized reaction, I expect: a minor local distension that is enough to get Mr and Mrs ProWang off the hook for making false claims. I have no doubt the swelling will go down the day after the pills run out. Meanwhile, I do slightly wonder what the ingredients may be doing to the rest of me, but having got so far I’m not going to stop now. I see myself in the tradition of those great nineteenth-century men of science who drank glasses of sea-snake venom to see what would happen and then wrote dispassionate monographs about it. This is
definitely
the Samper attitude, even if there is something a bit wonky about the enterprise. Onward and upward regardless of the outcome, like Longfellow’s obsessive mountaineer
carrying
his ‘Excelsior!’ banner into the alpine snows, unashamed of its grammatical solecism. Surely the pious monks of San
Bernard must have had
some
Latin and could have told him the word he’d chosen to mean ‘Higher!’ was unfortunately an adjective and not an adverb? But they were probably so shocked they decided to let him carry on up the mountain to a well-deserved fate. Anyway, if at present I had a banner it would read ‘Maior!’ or even ‘Maximus!’, and I do believe many a pious monk would welcome me with open arms.

Another thoughtful lunch on the terrace. The sky is blue, the world lies at my feet, I am preoccupied. As always when
preoccupied
I distract myself with goodies. In this case I start with a glass of chilled
prosecco
into which exactly
one
drop of Angostura bitters has been allowed to fall. On no account must the mixture be stirred, otherwise more fizz will come out of solution. The thing to do is to watch appreciatively as the smoky brown bead unravels into ruby skeins and paler wisps, is carried away by the tiny convection currents and dispersed into a uniform shade so the
prosecco
is scarcely pinker than before. Nor is the taste much different: certainly no bitterness and merely the faintest hint of something aromatic, as if the grapes had been laid briefly on a cushion of herbs before being pressed. Today this drink goes admirably with a cold collation rounded off with a chunk of sensational cheese. This is a pecorino with a history, not just a sheep’s cheese that has been racked on wooden shelves for a fortnight to harden up.
Nowadays
when everything is done at a rush, a mere month’s ageing can earn a pecorino the epithet ‘stagionato’ or ‘mature’, which is absurd. The pecorino I am now eating spent its early days on shelves, but then it was taken to a cave in the mountains of Sardinia and carried down to a particular grotto blessed with low humidity and absolute darkness. There it was racked on trestles with a ten-centimetre air space between it and its
companions
and left to contemplate its soul’s progress for seven long months in an unchanging ambient temperature of nine degrees Celsius. After that formative experience in the caseous equivalent of Purgatory it was gently reawakened by being carried back into the warmth and light of the upper world,
where it acquired the label ‘Grottino’ and in due course found its way onto Samper’s luncheon table. The rind is thick and dark and mottled with mould but the cheese inside is the
innocent
colour of raw linen, not dry, but fracturing easily into geological chunks with the consistency of a stiff but friable wax. The flavour is divine: strong and deep and with none of the mouth-burning qualities of certain elderly Cheddars. In the ever-blander world of today’s mass-produced comestibles one embraces a pedigree Grottino with the enthusiasm of, say, a lost alpinist greeting a St Bernard.