Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘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:

  Amazing Disgrace! My best hopes brought

  To nothingness and grievings.

  An entry to Christ’s house I sought

  But fouled it with my leavings!

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

  10

  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, paren
tal 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 g
rownups’ 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:

  Amazing Disgrace! How sour the cry

  That haunts the wretched Gerry!

  His prospects low that once were high;

  Downcast, who once was merry.

  *

  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.’