Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  You should by now have a slightly foamy glass of green nectar whose smell suggests the drowsy whir of lawnmowers on early summer evenings when the shadow of the horse chestnut begins to topple across the base line at the far end of your grass tennis court. Before you begin the roux, however, you need to liquidize the brains together with the splash of coconut milk. This is perhaps the only curiosity in this recipe. At first sight coconut milk, even in such exiguous quantity, will seem the odd ingredient out. Yet I have found by experience that although it cannot be tasted as such in the final dish it has the ability to deepen the grassy note by roughly an octave. Season the creamy pinkish matter and set it aside in a chilled bowl. Now is the time for the roux. Do not be hidebound by the idea that a roux must always be made with butter: it works equally well with olive oil although care will be needed to choose one that is not so pungent that it swamps the green flavour you are aiming for. I would recommend using nothing from further south than 43° latitude, which excludes the whole of the Iberian peninsula. Once again, a slightly grassy-tasting olive oil can deepen the overall flavour by as much as a minor sixth.

  When the sauce is ready, add the egg yolks beaten up with a little cold water, then the liquidized brains. Now carefully fold in the egg whites which you have previously whisked stiff and pour into a non-stick soufflé dish. If you bake it in a moderate oven (200°C) you should have between twenty and thirty minutes to lay your terrace table, have ready your cold bottle of prosecco and prepare yourself for a treat that would have gladdened the heart of Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis. The poor lady would bitterly have envied you the fresh eggs. Trying for haute cuisine using wartime powdered egg was as doomed as the ill-fated attempt by Simpson’s in Piccadilly to serve pemmican pie for lunch in 1944, the precise number of its victims being concealed for thirty years by the Official Secrets Act.

  1 Fischer K., Mewlings P. F. and Mufftingler A., ‘Some psychiatric and behavioural sequelae in four cases of pubertas praecox’, JAPEDA, vol. XLV, no. 14, pp.1121—7.

  14

  T. S. Eliot was wrong. August is the cruellest month, breeding Dionysiacs out of dead lands. Chianti addicts from shuttered northern Europe ebb southwards in awesome shorts. With seigneurial gestures bank managers and justices from Göttingen and Godalming, Hazebrouck and Haslemere, throw open the shutters of their Tuscan villas and farmhouses for the first time since Easter, disclosing heaps of bat guano staining the beds’ white radiance. In local towns their translucent pink children squint beneath baseball caps in the drench of sun as they trail behind their parents beneath the scattered awnings of the weekly market. It is the kids’ summer hajj: the obligatory pilgrimage through a blazing desert necessary for them to earn their reward of heavenly ice cream. Their eyes are downcast and in default of prayer beads their fingers, agile from years of devotion, skip nimbly over the buttons of their Game Boys. There is nothing for them in these markets except possibly Chinese rip-offs of Manchester United strips. They certainly don’t care about the sun hats, scarves and handbags that so intrigue their mothers and which to them look the same as the ones on sale back home. No doubt ancient Athenians two millennia ago who dragged their children off to Egypt for a highly educational tour of the Pyramids were just as irritated to find their boys crouched in a patch of shade playing with a pocket set of knucklebones.

  August is also the cruellest month because it breeds bric-à-brac out of Med lands. Models of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, packets of naughty pasta shaped like male genitalia, grappa in glass bottles of fanciful design and extreme fragility: all are crammed somehow into the back of the Volvo or the BMW, pride of place going by default to Daddy’s prized bottles of wine that he has pronounced ‘a Billy bargain’. Samper the sardonic, Samper the permanent resident, threads his way among these seasonal migrants, noting everything and saying nothing. He has given up trying not to feel superior. The truth is that since he has never had a proper five-days-a-week job he has never in his life had a holiday, either, and can’t quite imagine what it would mean. Also, he thinks, for people whose normal way of life is one of constant gratification there can no longer be much distinction between levels of pleasure. So it is hard to imagine how much of a treat it really is to be shopping in Italy instead of at home: a thought that has probably crossed the minds – if not the larynxes – of the listless Game Boy players.

  Maybe I’m being a touch disingenuous over this matter of holidays, since no sooner has Millie Cleat told Frankie that she thinks the new chapter will ‘do quite well for the time being’ (grudging cow!) than I feel as though I’m at last on holiday. Thank God that job’s over, I think, and break out carolling in my mountain retreat, causing buzzards to swerve in flight. It’s true that Millie! is only the second of a three-book deal I have with Champions Press and I’ve not the faintest idea what the third book will be, but I refuse to let it bother me in August. My hopes of writing Max Christ’s biography have faded ruefully. Such a project is obviously for the long term if it ever comes off at all. Equally obviously it would not be a Champions book. (For a moment I indulge the fantasy of submitting my biography of this celebrated conductor to Michelle Tost, my editor there. Poor old Weet-abix, she’d be completely thrown. I could claim the text was larded with world records: the slowest-ever performance of the Adagio of Beethoven’s Ninth; the record-breaking transfer fee for a piccolo player; the infamous Last Night of the Proms that resulted in three fatalities from coins, fireworks and lavatory rolls hurled from the Dress Circle by middle-class music lovers exemplifying a social process known as dumbing-up.) For the moment, though, I’m content to banish all thoughts of work and instead concentrate on having friends to stay, doing a bit of cooking and singing, and fulfilling one or two local obligations. These include translating a Camaiore restaurant’s menu into English as a favour to the proprietor. It is a pleasure to be able to produce a neat, clean rendering completely devoid of editorial adjectives like ‘mouth-watering’ and ‘succulent’. It is an even greater pleasure to eat the dinner he gives me by way of payment.

  In the middle of the month Adrian comes out for a particularly delicious week. I do like scientists. To me, Adrian’s approach to everything seems thoroughly grounded in a sensible and weighty body of knowledge, whereas I just float over life’s terrain like a gasbag or a hot-air balloon, periodically emitting loud blasts of music and invective and taking on haute cuisine ballast to keep me from drifting away completely. Maybe this is also partly the effect of living in a house perched high on a mountainside. One can overdo this business of looking down on the world. Adrian arrives already quite bronzed, having just been on a ship in mid-Atlantic for fifteen days. He is a very glamorous figure indeed, almost exotic. One evening on the terrace, in a fit of candour brought on by a good deal of prosecco, he says the same about me and I’m glad it’s dark and there’s no one else around to see the hardboiled Samper blushing. Our conversation then takes an awkwardly romantic turn, of which nothing more need be said. Unlike mishaps, shameless dalliance makes lousy and embarrassing reading. More important to the present tale is that Adrian has come bearing recent news about la Cleat, bane of my life, which plainly reveals that over these last six months while actually writing (as opposed to researching) her book, I have spent too little time keeping up with her various non-nautical doings.

  In common with most over-rewarded public figures Millie earnestly fancies that her opinions on absolutely anything are of value to the human race, and these she delivers loudly and unstintingly. So much so that, out of sheer self-defence, I have learned to let my attention drift when she informs me where America went wrong in the aftermath of the Twin Towers attack, why the current British Minister for Sport should have his or her gonads removed with a rusty bread knife, and exactly what ought to be done to violent sex offenders. She also has much wisdom to impart about the pharmaceutical industry, Australia’s cane toad problem and the right way to change a light bulb if you have only one arm. From time to time I have filtered out a good deal of her r
hetoric on the subject of Greenpeace and that mega-bore Cinderella of contemporary discourse, the environment. Adrian now reminds me that by so doing I have been missing a significant trend in Millie’s life. This is her increasing political interest in Bluedeep, a faction of sea-fanciers who broke with Greenpeace a few years ago on the grounds that the latter were a bunch of landlubbers who weren’t interested in anywhere you couldn’t plant trees.

  I can easily see why the old sea-bitch would be a Blue rather than a Green, but Adrian tells me her current position is much weirder. Apparently, despite their fervour, the Blues have also had their factional tendencies (a problem common to all parties, even those as small as when two or three are gathered together in Thy name). Accordingly, those whose approach to the oceans is more mystical than scientific have become the Deep Blues. Adrian says these are mostly cracked Atlantis seekers, animal-rightists opposed to eating anything higher in the marine chain than bladder-wrack, and followers of the Norwegian philosopher of eco-apocalypse Arne Naess. Now these Deep Blues have formed a splinter organization of their own called Neptune. This was surely an incautious choice of name since it gave the satirically minded the opportunity to dub them the ‘Loony Neptunies’, a handle that took less than twenty-four hours to catch on.

  But the amazing news is that Neptune has announced none other than Millie Cleat as its public figurehead. I am willing to bet her organization’s name owes everything to that conversation she and I had in her Hilton suite a couple of months ago. According to Adrian, Millie has publicly declared her intention of establishing Neptune as a serious ‘envirospiritual’ movement (for such is the dreadful epithet now bestowed on this brave new tendency). What is more her Australian ally, sponsor and fetishistic lover, Lew Buschfeuer, is apparently putting a great wodge of his money behind it; so much, in fact, that the Guardian has acknowledged his bottomless pockets with the page two headline: ‘Deep Lew’s To Fund Deep Blues’. In other words, even as I was inventing her as a mildly spiritual yachtsperson for that additional chapter of her book, Millie was already solving the problem of her retirement by beadily taking on a role that will presumably keep her in the public eye until she ascends into heaven. Needless to say she has never given me, her biographer, the least hint of any of this. She has played it very close to her gristly chest. Nobody’s fool, our Millie; although I’m willing to bet she also came under a lot of pressure from those pashmina’d girls down on the Solent. They must now be breaking out the Cristal to toast her elevation as the new patron saint of the sea, to say nothing of their own privileged position as her disciples.

  Apart from this news, Adrian has brought with him a CD recording which he mischievously slips into the player in my kitchen the second evening after his arrival. It’s a warm night and moonless. The french windows are flung wide onto the terrace, showing the table cleared of our main course and waiting for my patented anchovy ice cream. Suddenly the room fills with strange, ghostly noises that send a chill streaming out into the velvety Tuscan night, seeming to cool it by twenty degrees. Haunted chirpings and babblings are interspersed with occasional moans, all of it echoing as though lost in an immense void. It has the melancholy of those old warfilm soundtracks when tense-faced submariners, trapped on the bottom by depth-charging destroyers, stare upwards at the curved steel hull of what may become their coffin while the enemy’s sonar pings hollowly in the ocean around them. The sound brings me out in gooseflesh. The more I listen to it the more I hear, gradually becoming aware of a menacing twitter running softly in the background. It is like one of those conversations or monologues one occasionally thinks one overhears within a steady noise such as a boat’s engine: voices always below the threshold of intelligibility, but insistently talking. I can readily imagine that creatures from another galaxy are quietly massing to invade my kitchen, and I remember Nanty Riah’s conviction two summers ago that aliens had landed over at Marta’s house.

  Adrian turns down the volume and shoots me an amused, inquiring glance.

  ‘I assume we’re under water,’ I hazard. ‘And very chill it is.’ I have a sudden brainwave. ‘Oh, it’s not those transponder things that got washed off that ship?’

  ‘Brilliant, Gerry. That’s exactly what it is. This is what my colleagues on the Tony Rice have to hear every day.’

  Even with the sound muted the noise seems to linger, so powerful is its effect. I can almost imagine the benign summer night outside replaced by black fathoms of water, pressing inward to engulf Le Roccie while the kitchen’s very rafters transmit the mournful cacophony from no known place. Adrian turns up the volume again and gives a running commentary. For the first time I become aware of the expert skill required to disentangle one stream of these noises from another. With surprise I realize how similar it is to his celebrated brother-in-law’s ability to pick out a single clarinet or bassoon from an entire symphony orchestra, detecting a wrong note or an unwritten silence. Until this moment I have rather flattered myself on my own musical ear, but Adrian’s ability to separate out distinct voices in this grotesque deep-sea chorus is uncanny and humbling.

  ‘That sinister twittering? Those are the three-and-a-half kilohertz transponders talking to each other.’ Or: ‘Those ghostly squeaks are the ten kilohertz.’

  ‘And that ghraw-ghraw sound and those awful occasional moans? It sounds like the labour ward of Atlantis General Hospital.’

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ Adrian admits. ‘We’ve none of us been able to identify those. It’ll be some animal in the water column but it’s nothing we recognize. Not surprising, really. The oceans are full of noises we can’t identify. Lots of them we can, of course. Various cetaceans, the frying sound of snapping shrimps, the drummings and grunts and clicks of a lot of fish species. But every so often we encounter noises that are just plain baffling. Remember that when we do bathymetric or geological profiling like the EAGIS survey, we’re pumping out some incredibly powerful sounds into the water column, especially air-gun bangs strong enough to bounce off rock three kilometres below the seabed. We’re probably pissing off an awful lot of creatures down there. Quite often we get responses that aren’t echoes at all. It’s extraordinary: they sound as though something’s deliberately mimicking or even mocking our signals. We’ve heard our ten-kilohertz “fish” sending out its single bleep being answered by a double or even quadruple bleep. We’re stumped. We analyse the signals and it’s absolutely clear: they weren’t electronically generated. So what are we to think? That there are creatures down there sending us up?’

  I am getting gooseflesh again. ‘I’d no idea there’s so much noise in the sea. It’s quite widely known about, is it?’

  ‘Oh yes. But really only within the trade. Any oceanographer who’s done a few years of survey work will tell you there are things down there we haven’t a clue about. After all, nobody knows for sure why or how a mynah bird or a parrot can imitate the sounds it hears, even human speech, with such precision. And birds are right here to hand on dry land. You can study them as long as you like. You can experiment with them, you can dissect their brains. Imagine how infinitely less we know about the abilities and motives of audible marine species, most of which have probably never been identified. The oceans remain a planet-wide mystery. They’re why I became a scientist.’

  And still the soundtrack from however many leagues under the sea is filling the kitchen with its alien babble. As I lift my masterly anchovy ice cream out of the fridge I think how very appropriate to the occasion it has turned out to be: both fishy and chill. We take it out on to the terrace and indulge ourselves, from time to time pausing to gaze out speculatively towards Viareggio. On a night as dark as this the distant carpet of that town’s lights appears laid with an edge straight and abrupt enough to make one believe in the abyss beyond it, like a sparkling non-slip mat glued to the lip of a high diving board.

  ‘So, of course, a copy of that CD has to fall into Millie’s hands.’

  ‘Well, that was your own malicious little idea origina
lly but we’re certainly in agreement at BOIS.’ Adrian’s look is still mischievous. ‘We reckon it’s high time the Neptunies got to grips with the terrors of the deep.’

  ‘Obviously you’re used to those noises, but to someone who isn’t they’re actually quite scary. Or not scary, exactly, but uncanny. Melancholy? Forlorn? Inscrutable? I don’t know how to describe it but they certainly make a powerful impression. Don’t forget that when I first thought of trying them out on Millie I hadn’t yet heard them myself. By the way, who are the “we” at BOIS?’

  ‘Oh, just hard-core, unregenerate types who’d enjoy seeing that woman keel-hauled for screwing up our EAGIS data. The general public still have no idea what she did, have they? Vile seamanship, all that money wasted, several hundred scientists with ruined data and a further delay to our understanding a geological event that, if it happens, has the potential to cause havoc on both sides of the Atlantic. Trust me, Gerry, there are some very angry people at oceanographical institutions all over the world. But as time goes by and the woman is turned into a national symbol who can do no wrong, the EAGIS cock-up fades into the general hopelessness of trying to get the media to take anything scientific seriously. Some of us are thinking it’s time to fight back. Didn’t you mention “The Face” made quite an impression on her?’