At this moment Adrian’s phone rings and I turn to the notice board on the wall and the increasingly flyblown image of The Face saying ‘I can see your bow thruster!!’ in the drawn-in speech bubble. As one who was recently privileged to learn professors Brilov and Tammeri’s version of what the voice of the deep is really saying, I feel the bubble ought to be amended to read ‘Watch out! Torrential bottoms over!’
‘That’s good news, anyway,’ says Adrian, hanging up. ‘We’ve got a salvage ship on charter in Gibraltar, sailing tomorrow to see if it can raise that container-load of transponders.’
‘I thought you said it wasn’t worth the expense?’
‘It wasn’t then. But we’ve since been in touch with the US manufacturers. Apparently those batteries have at least a year’s life in them and the din they’re making is going to disrupt too many equally expensive research projects. Scientifically, it’s quite a live area down there in the Canaries. So we’ve joined forces with some other oceanography centres in Germany, France and Spain and have agreed to split the salvage bill. Let’s hope it works.’
‘If it does, someone’s going to have to explain Neptune’s sudden silence to Millie and her groupies.’
‘A job perfectly suited to your diplomatic talents, Gerry,’ Adrian says with the weightless sympathy of someone wishing an old friend well at the dentist’s.
‘You’re a fat lot of help. What on earth am I to do? Not about the transponders, I mean do. About this book Millie wants written. About spending months having solemn conversations like the one I had at the Dorchester with people like the demonstrators outside this very building.’
‘That’s simple. Grit your teeth and think of the money. Then when you’re rich we can rush off to Las Vegas or Stockholm and get married and I need never work again.’
‘Be serious.’ But he is serious, it seems. Not about getting married, obviously – a nasty bourgeois business – but about gritting my teeth. I remonstrate feebly until at twelve-thirty a tall, bespectacled man in his late forties or early fifties wearing a stained tie breezes into the office. Adrian glances at his watch, springs to his feet and introduces him as Nick Vatican. He’s new to me: not one of Adrian’s colleagues I interviewed last year. True, it’s not a very memorable face but I would never forget that name.
‘Nick’s head of our Cold Ocean Sciences department,’ Adrian explains. ‘One of our senior boffins who add lustre to this establishment. Never let it be said you came down to Southampton without meeting the quality. I should have warned you we’re going out to lunch with him. He has disgusting table manners and a way with women.’
‘You’re just jealous, Adrian,’ says this newcomer. ‘You too could have table manners like mine if only you’d loosen up.’ He turns to me. ‘So you’re the writer who knows all about Millie Cleat, eh? That’s exactly what we need here, some inside information. You saw those Neptunies out front? Bastards. Hey listen, you guys, the barf-barge awaits.’
He leads the way through a warren of corridors and out the back of the building to the BOIS wharf. The breeze off the Solent buffets open our unbuttoned jackets and my nipples erect to meet the challenge.
‘This is what we’re driven to these days,’ Nick explains as we descend a ridged gangplank to a waiting motor launch. ‘There are perfectly good pubs up the road. But since the loonies took up residence outside the front it’s as much as our lives are worth to go out that way. So we use our launch to escape. There’s a very decent little pub across the water near Netley.’
I’m sorry to hear it. After the civil sobriety of the Italian bars I’m used to I’m no great admirer of British pubs. Even when they’re not actually carcinogenic with tobacco fumes they tend to have been gutted by the brewers, provided with new antique interiors in vinyl and given arbitrary and whimsical names like ‘The Leaking Marmoset’.
‘I hope you’re a good sailor,’ murmurs Adrian as we go aboard the rocking craft. ‘This onshore breeze has put up a bit of a chop. Get inside the cabin, otherwise we’ll be soaked. It’s only a few minutes.’
We wait for several more rumbustious scientists to pack aboard then cast off. Glimpsed through thick panes the bristly water thuds and scuds as it flashes astern. The small cabin flickers with crumbling shadows. For the first time in my illstarred relationship with Millie Cleat I can understand without effort the allure of moving swiftly over the sea even if the water we’re crossing is largely fresh, brought down by the River Itchen. But the smell off Southampton Water is good and briny: the restless, aerated smell of travel. For a disloyal instant I wonder how much longer I shall be content to go on living at Le Roccie, reminding me that the urge to leave home is always there and will one day climb into my coffin beside me. The discontent with contentedness sets the nibs of gurus and analysts scratching busily. Just when I was hoping it would last for ever the trip is over, we are climbing out and I must pretend to be hearty again. It’s a good job Samper is a man of parts and can dissemble. I notice that not far out in the roads an immense white motor yacht is lying – a small ship, really, lustrous from radomes to waterline.
‘A minor Saudi prince?’ hazards Nick as he ushers us into Pegleg Dandy’s, a pub whose interior is as relentlessly nautical as set-dressing can make it. The place is a riot of ship’s wheels, binnacles, bells and Navy rum barrels, no doubt job-lotted in China in the same complex of factories that runs up horse brasses and corn dollies for English country pubs and, for all I know, cases of stuffed weasels for pubs in erstwhile Middle-sex. If ever they find the Holy Grail it will have ‘Made in China’ stamped on its base. When at length we’re sitting with our obligatory pints and those strange English pies like roast Jiffy bags full of gravy, Nick asks what sort of pull I have with Millie. Adrian was quite right: Dr Vatican’s eating habits would make a hyena appear dainty. Gravy is already spattering a ring around his plate like dollops of mud around a waterhole.
‘Pull? Nil, I’d think. Except that she does want me to write another book.’ I briefly outline the deal and my misgivings while Nick steadily widens the diameter of his waterhole. ‘Why?’
‘Professional interest. Self-interest, too. I’d like to know if there’s anything we can do to get her to remove the pickets from BOIS.’
‘But I gather they’re not all hers?’
‘No. But that woman has recently acquired extraordinary clout. Practically overnight she’s become the popular face of marine environmentalism. I should think she’d accept it’s not going to do her image any good to be associated with righteous thugs showering small children with rotten blood. I must admit that until that EAGIS business I was a considerable admirer of old Millie. You know, one-armed granny sailing alone around the world and beating all comers. You’ve got to hand it to her: she was certainly different. What on earth’s got into her?’
‘I suppose what got into her were fame, fortune and Lew Buschfeuer, in reverse order. The better I get to know her, the more convinced I am he’s the key to Millie.’
‘Cherchez le Lew, you mean?’ says Adrian, rising. ‘Just as I’m about to do. Can I refill anyone on my way back?’ He collects empty glasses and disappears. Nick has been polishing his plate with the side of his forefinger and licking it reflectively. It is now empty, surrounded by a ring of bright gravy. Methodically, he begins cleaning the table top around it in the same way. I charitably assume he has spent time either in prison or a decent public school.
‘Do you know this Buschfeuer fellow, Gerry?’ he asks, scrubbing vainly at his tie with a paper napkin.
‘No. Oddly enough, I’ve never once met him. I’ve even wondered if this has been a deliberate policy of Millie’s. Still, he’s a busy tycoon.’
‘Another in the Rupert Murdoch mould, the papers say. An Aussie empire-builder. But what about her? What’s she like?’
English draught beer may taste like thin glue but there is evidently enough alcohol in my pint to encourage indiscretion. ‘Ghastly. No, perhaps not ghastly, but I can’t pretend I like t
he woman.’
‘Not like our Millie?’ says Adrian, returning with fresh pints of glue and overhearing. ‘And you a product of this sceptred isle. This is treason. All the same, it can’t be easy writing the biography of someone you don’t like.’
‘On the contrary. The more you despise them the easier it becomes, especially when you realize they’re even more venal than you are. Then you start to feel a slight affection, in a superior sort of way.’ I give Nick a thumbnail sketch of Millie’s overweening vanity, ambition and ruthlessness.
‘The thing is,’ he says thoughtfully at the end, ‘I know all about her ruining that EAGIS survey, and I know exactly what most of my colleagues think about the Deep Blues and these Neptune idiots, and as a scientist I’m a hundred per cent with them. But had we thought she might actually turn out to be the ill wind that blows some good?’
‘Radical, you see?’ says Adrian to me. ‘Our pontiff here is radical. In a moment he’ll bore you with the story about how his name comes from the Latin for the hill in Rome where the popes live. Mons vaticinius: the hill of prophecies. I do have that right, pontiff?’
‘Correct, my son. It is for my God-given abilities as a seer that Adrian here invited me to have lunch with you today. When he told me you were Millie’s biographer it made me give her some thought. After all, what she’s doing and saying impinges directly on our lives and work as marine scientists, and I guess we oughtn’t to become too knee-jerk about her. Granted, so far she’s been a bloody nuisance. But I’m just about old enough to remember the beginnings of those social movements back in the late Sixties, early Seventies: black power, gay lib, women’s lib – stuff like that. The thing they all relied on initially was consciousness-raising. Getting the inert mass of people to recognize the problem. It was in-your-face, it was embarrassing, it was humiliating. But in its messy, provocative way it worked, even though it was often on the very edge of causing a backlash. My point here is simply to wonder whether Millie mightn’t have her uses as a consciousness-raiser about the sea. We don’t necessarily have to approve her methods, but they may turn out to be effective.’
‘But isn’t the parlous state of the oceans already a daily bleat in the world’s media?’
‘Yes,’ Nick agrees, ‘and daily bleats are no more effective than a nagging spouse. You switch off, don’t you? Besides, what we’re actually doing to the oceans is disastrous and brutal beyond anything the media say. Unfortunately, though, it’s really only scientists like us who can give chapter and verse, and people tend not to listen to scientists unless we come with our hands full of miracle obesity cures or pills that will increase the human lifespan by sixty years. Then they’ll listen. But not to yet more bad news from inaccessible parts of the planet they think have nothing to do with them. Really, we’re in an impossible position: we get savaged for thinking we know too much, or we get dismissed for claiming we know too little. The fact is, we know a lot more accurately about a lot more things than most people wish to hear. Believe me, it’s hardly a pleasure for us each day to view from close up the steady decline of the oceans’ larger biota.’
Nick takes a deep gulp of beer and wipes his mouth on his tie. ‘Don’t worry, this isn’t a rant. I suppose I just wanted you to know that I’m not some wacky lone voice in this business. Adrian will bear me out when I say that virtually all marine scientists who study living things are environmentalists. And improbable as it may seem to animal-rightists, most of us come to love the creatures we study. I thought it might be worth suggesting that, even though they’re nutty, Millie and these Neptunies could still help spread the idea among ordinary landlubbers that we shouldn’t go on savaging the oceans. God knows we scientists haven’t yet got the message across. Now I’ll stop. But I will have another pint if Adrian’s paying.’
18
By the end of the week Samper is feeling emotionally unkempt, if not frankly despondent. He is sitting in one of those pointlessly expensive patisserie-cum-coffee shops that abound in Marylebone High Street, wondering how it is that espresso coffee made in England with an Italian coffee machine and using Italian coffee manages not to taste Italian. The machine’s settings? The water? One of those trivial mysteries that so often displace weightier problems.
How I yearn to be home in Le Roccie. I think. Or maybe I just long to be free of my toad, of earning a living by such stupid means. How much more sense must life make in Africa or some place where the work you do is directly related to your survival. But nobody’s working in this laid-back metropolis, not really working. Everyone’s having coffee or shopping or just walking around in the glittery late-October air. Of course there are the huddled masses in their offices, but they’re not working either. They’re not planting potatoes or setting rabbit traps. They’re gossiping as they process local authority forms, or dreaming up slogans to sell a new range of the same old chewing gum or hair lacquer, or writing drivelling speeches for the CEOs of drivelling companies. Supposedly it runs an economy but it makes no visceral sense. Deep down, we know our work is vacuous and unrelated to our survival. If we carry on we might get a small pension. If we stop we won’t come close to starving. We’ve done nothing to deserve it but here we all are, drowning in food and goodies as though to the manna born. And one morning we’re having overpriced coffee in Marylebone High Street, gazing unseeingly out at the frozen commotion of it all, and are suddenly overwhelmed by a disgusted urge to emigrate from the planet. At the same time we note the urge is not quite powerful enough to make us emigrate to Africa.
Even if I can argue myself into conceding that maybe the fatuous Millie might have her uses as a consciousness-raiser for the state of the oceans, do I really care? Of course I don’t. It merely makes her all the sillier, vapouring on about spirits on the seabed as a sort of ballsaching metaphor for our commonplace awareness of consumer-led environmental ruin. We are the tribe with machetes. We will only stop when we run out of things to hack. The changes we’ve made are already irreversible. Fine. So let us concern ourselves with serious matters, like the horn parts in the 1841 version of Schumann’s Fourth Symphony or the authenticity of the harmonium included in the posthumous edition of L’uomo magro.
What I’m really doing this morning is recovering from last night: another bizarre episode in what has come to feel like a lifetime of bizarre episodes. No sooner had I returned to London after visiting Adrian and his colleague in their scientific lair than I was summoned straight back to Southampton the next evening to see Millie and meet her Aussie mentor, the elusive Lew Buschfeuer. So wearily off I went again from Waterloo on yet another late-afternoon rail journey that gave me the opportunity to view at first hand Britons coming to terms with their chronic starvation, a sight by no means devoid of pathos. Once more I held myself aloof from the travelling rabble. It was only the second outing for my Blaise Prévert suit of chocolate corduroy and I preferred to stand and survey from a safe distance. As we set off I noticed my fellow travellers had to raise their voices to hear each other above the sudden storm of packaging being ripped frenziedly open and the tinny gunfire of ring-pulls.
Attentive readers who also take life’s little ironies in their stride may remember that Millie had bought a house near Chichester, so they won’t be amazed to learn that I was received on the very yacht we had seen at anchor from Pegleg Dandy’s the previous day, the one we had assumed belonged to a Saudi princeling. I was met at the jetty by a cutter and whisked to the sugar daddy’s personal ship, which grew in size as we approached until it towered overhead like the Titanic, although its lines were modern and so hideously unnautical it resembled nothing so much as a gigantic training shoe sitting on the water. As I trotted up the companionway of the Vvizz I was reminded of Jack Lemmon disguised as Daphne coming aboard Joe E. Brown’s yacht in Some Like It Hot. The thought made me smile in anticipation. A steward in a white mess jacket escorted me to a lounge the size of a tennis court, wood panelled and carpeted in green. What is it about chandeliers? Titanic again. But my at
tention was drawn to the twenty or so people standing around at the far end of the room in clumps. They were holding drinks and desultory conversation. I noticed some familiar faces, including that of the pop-eyed girl who had read out Brilov and Tammeri’s inspired ‘translation’ the other night and had beadily noticed my involuntary tumescence. Sandra? Debra? Barbra? Then I caught sight of Millie, who this evening was clearly regnant aboard her own royal yacht in her now established persona as Queen Neptunia.
Gone was the black rubber dress. Tonight she was sheathed in an evening gown of bridal white lurex – or anyway some material woven with a sparkly thread. This time her mozzetta cape was gold satin. From under it her transparent right arm emerged, its water now tinted blue and full of some small white nektonic larvae that twisted like corkscrews as they swam, giving an impression of twizzling activity. She was surrounded by acolytes, including several thickset trousered ladies with gin-and-fo’c’sle complexions. I noticed one of them was going bald. Millie harpooned me with a look as I approached.
‘Gerry!’ she cried in the unnecessarily declamatory voice that people at cocktail parties affect. ‘Too good of you to come all this way.’
Instead of only halfway, for instance? I shook her left hand rather than kiss the air beside her weatherbeaten old cheeks with their riot of burst capillaries like a toper’s nose. She indicated the balding lady.
‘May I introduce Lew Buschfeuer? Lew, this is the famous Gerry Samper at last. I can hardly believe you two haven’t already met.’
‘Gerry.’ His smile was friendly enough, at any rate. My having mistaken him for a moulting lesbian was explained by his being one of those men with fluffy cheeks who seem never to have shaved. Also, his way of going bald was not the traditional male pattern but an all-over thinning of wispy hair through which his sunbrowned scalp gleamed in the light of his own chandeliers. He was a stocky figure wearing plaid slacks and a blazer. For a magnate of his calibre Lew was tastefully free of gold rings and hand-crafted chronometers waterproofed to nine thousand fathoms. In fact, he looked plausibly like the captain of a victorious women’s golf team in the 1950s: confident and no-nonsense. ‘Welcome aboard.’ He gripped my hand as though trying to wring oil out of shale. ‘Congratulations, mate. Jist finished yer book. I don’t pretend to have much literary taste but I reckon you’ve done the old girl proud.’
Amazing Disgrace Page 21