Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  The worst thing about arriving home after a trip is that it can lead to a banal and melancholy reflectiveness, as though occasionally one needed to be elsewhere the better to view one’s normal life. Our brains are mawkishly wired up and I now try to short-circuit this process by taking an inventory of something much more significant, viz., the contents of my larder and freezer. I had forgotten there is little enough. A tray of fish lollies made from a base of the exquisite sorrel-flavoured juice exuded by a baked halibut some months ago. An experimental sausage, salami-style, made principally from doves I bought in quantity from a man in Casoli who no longer wanted to keep them. He also wanted to be rid of his late wife’s four irksome budgerigars, so I added them to the dove meat. But just at this moment I’m not in the mood for cold dove-’n’-budgie sausage. My minds keeps breaking off and coming to rest in recent scenes, especially those connected with health matters. That those humiliating encounters with doctors took place many hundreds of miles away ought to make them less real, mere episodes peculiar to there. But what with them and my imminent birthday – yes, all right, fiftieth birthday – the shades of recent consulting rooms wield a psychic heft out of proportion to their individual weight. And even as I think it, the thought strands me in a cold house in autumn on the edge of a precipice.

  I light the fire and turn up the central heating and then before it gets too dark find my torch and take a turn over to Marta’s place to give it the once over. When I unlock her back door – not forgetting to trap a cobble in the jamb – the air is actually colder inside than out. Both smell and silence are of the tomb. In the last month it has slumped from being an abandoned house to a forgotten burial chamber. No smell of corruption as such, more the breath of blind, vegetal things that feed on the thin amino acids corruption once left behind. Entering the kitchen I notice the family-vault smell is stronger and I remember the fridge with the great grey nodding fungus I briefly glimpsed inside during the summer. In the torchlight it looks as though the fridge door is no longer sealed completely shut. Can there be a hairline gap between the grey plastic gasket and the surround, as if some slow but implacably growing mycelial muscle is shouldering its way out? I resist the temptation to push the door experimentally with a fingertip, not wanting to send whirling puffs of spores up into my face. Marta’s problem, I say to myself as before. But truthfully, I no longer believe she will come back. The utter deadness of her former home is freighted with the implication that she, too, has long been in her grave. Jackals have already crunched the last marrow from her bones somewhere in the Syrian desert. Or she has been bulldozed into an anonymous pit together with others, their wrists bound behind them in the contemporary manner of political killings. I very much fear I have seen the last of poor Marta.

  I lock the back door behind me and as I turn towards my own house I spy a glimmering of white on the ground among the leggy brown remains of summer’s hollyhocks nearby. Had this been the Shropshire of my childhood home I would have expected a windblown scrap of paper with a message in faded biro reading ‘Two pints please’ in my mother’s hand. This being Italy forty years later, however, it is a business card: a little flabby with damp and with a snail’s silver tread crossing it. The print is perfectly legible. It reads: ‘Studio Benedetti. Soluzioni immobiliari’, with various phone numbers and his office address in Camaiore. Oho, so our weaseloid house agent has been back, has he? And this despite my having told him in front of Baggy and Dumpy that Marta’s house is emphatically not for sale?

  But maybe it is, I think with alarm as I close the door in the fence behind me and thread my way back through the dark trees towards my own home’s welcoming lit rectangles. Maybe this time he really does know something about Marta’s fate. Perhaps a member of that sinister Eastern bloc family of hers has already put it on the market? Which means I ought to move pretty smartly if I want to ensure my new neighbours won’t be second-home owners from Leatherhead or Linz or Liège with teenage boys eager to practise their drum kits amid the uncomplaining wilderness of these hills. By comparison, old Marta is belatedly beginning to feel like my ideal neighbour, her own occasional electronic sounds and Petrov piano noises merely the signs of a fellow professional at work. How well we got on together! She played and scribbled, and I scribbled and sang. And if my memories are not of complete neighbourly harmoniousness at all times, our late rapport was becoming practically conjugal. Better, actually, from my experience of most people’s marriages. All of which makes it imperative that I pay Benedetti a visit after the weekend.

  In the meantime the pleasure of being home again seeps into every pore, like one of those alleged muscle relaxants you add to bathwater to soothe away aches. Friends like Derek used to express incredulity that I could ever live outside London, let alone in a place where English is not the first language. I have long since grown tired of explaining that my reasons for living here are not so much because I find Italian culture, cuisine and general approach to the art of living superior to those of contemporary Britain – though I do – but because it is still a place where one can affordably combine those advantages with non-negotiable essentials such as silence and being able to see the stars. Almost the only lights visible in the night sky in southern England are those of police helicopters and passenger jets stacked for Stansted, Heathrow and Gatwick. I doubt if the Milky Way has been visible to Londoners since the blackout during the Second World War. What kind of a place is that to live? Of what use the intellectual delights of libraries, cinemas, galleries and concert halls if one’s whole sensory apparatus is dulled and occluded, one’s pores irretrievably blocked? Tonight, it is true, I can’t actually sit out on my terrace because it is too chilly. But when I turn off the kitchen lights and sit by the window I can see a canopy of stars despite the ever-growing puddle of lights far below spreading to blur Camaiore into Viareggio. And I need only step outside the door to hear the night breeze finding its way through the grasses and the leaves letting go autumn’s branches. For reasons I can’t explain, such things are important to see and hear; and not just once (seen that, heard that) but as a daily constant, as necessary as my pulse. Hence my horror two or three years ago at discovering I had a fat, frizzy-haired Voynovian neighbour and my fury over Benedetti having lied to me about her when I bought this house. Now as I wash up after a scratch meal I reflect on the irony that the mere passage of time has lent him a spurious veracity. Mouse-quiet Marta certainly is these days. And as for her frizzy hair, I can’t help seeing it bowling like a pathetic fragment of tumbleweed across the dry bed of a wadi.

  Over the weekend I find I am, after all, not remotely dismayed at losing the second Cleat contract and having signed up for Nanty’s company instead. The truth is, I rather like the fellow – a first for me when ghosting someone’s autobiography. He feels honest in a way none of the others have, Millie Cleat least of all. Nanty seems to maintain an endearing surprise at the way the cosmic lottery has plucked his number out of the hat; and although he is streetwise he is not at all worldly wise. By contrast there is something hard and opaque about Millie. I shall never know to what extent she believed in herself briefly as Queen Neptunia. The ‘aquariarm’, the claque of courtiers reverently spouting drivel, the picture of The Face bathed in hallowed light: was that the sudden, naïve awakening of a long-comatose soul? The discovery of a spirituality remarkably in tune with the Age of Aquarius and beyond? Or was it merely a convenient platform designed to keep her in the limelight, an ambition her own husband Clifford had dismally predicted?

  Speaking as the woman’s biographer, I honestly can’t say which of these alternatives describes Millie’s intentions. Maybe she inhabits that middle state peculiar to ‘personalities’, which is neither quite artless nor quite steely. Armed with a certain charm or ability, such people treat everything as a try-on. They sniff the prevailing wind, pick a direction and sail. If they find the going favourable they scud along; if not, they put about and try a different tack. But no matter how often they change course b
efore the fickle winds of public approbation, they never lose face. No setback is too damaging to be beyond repair. Like successful politicians, they have the hides of rhinoceroses. And like politicians, they have the further enabling disability of proceeding as though they will never be held accountable for anything they have said or done in the past, or for any ideological position they ever took. This is because they live in a sociopath’s world where each day starts with a clean slate. Nothing they did yesterday has anything to do with them. This attitude amounts to a conspiracy that is successfully dependent on the public’s gnatlike memory span and general credulousness. After all, these days you need not even be a ‘personality’ in your own right: merely resembling one is good enough. People who know perfectly well that the Queen’s double is not actually Mrs Elizabeth Windsor will still turn out in droves to cheer her, just as people who know that Elvis Presley is dead as mutton will scream hysterically at a lookalike from Tulsa or Tulse Hill. It is this determined fantasy that makes possible the public fortunes of the averagely untalented. True, Millie is exceptional by virtue of her prowess as a sailorette; but she is also typical in her yearning for continued limelight and the gratifying shenanigans it entails.

  By standards such as these Nanty Riah, the bald man in his thirties who dons a wig and turns into Brill to the adoring screams of the faithful half his age, is strangely genuine even though he, too, hankers for respectability and a knighthood. Underneath it all the boy from Harpenden is in some way indifferent to the fuss. He remains hotly devoted to his retarded sister and even to his wife, more or less. So it is not too hard to talk myself into almost looking forward to nailing him to the page. He will not find Samper unsympathetic even though I may be properly acid from time to time. He has, after all, chosen to live among the bubbles that continuously dance and burst above the slow, odorous churning of the public wash. It would be hypocritical of me to pretend I haven’t, too.

  On Monday morning I drive down to restock the larder and pay a call on Signor Benedetti. Camaiore exemplifies the general rule that first thing Monday mornings is not a good time for shopping in Italy. Most food shops blearily drag their shutters open at around eight, but plenty of other shops won’t do so until about four-thirty in the afternoon. I suppose it’s not unreasonable when you consider they were open to all hours on Saturday evening, but it’s still an incitement to apoplexy when you need a reading lamp or a sofa in a hurry. Estate agents like Benedetti seem to open or not, according to whim, although with the vanishing of the summer hajjis there’s little incentive to be punctual. Not a lot of people house-hunt in November. To my surprise, though, I find him in his office on the Corso reading Il Tirreno, that fascinating source of local stories concerning such things as the discovery on Saturday of an apartment in Viareggio full of Brazilian transvestites, many of them dwarves. From the neatly pomaded strands of the tangled web on his head to the single highly polished shoe cap visible to one side of his desk, Benedetti appears his usual spruce self. On my entry he folds his newspaper and civilly lays it aside with no outward sign of the displeasure he is undoubtedly feeling. We have long played a game of cloaking our mutual dislike in heavy folds of conversational brocade.

  ‘Signor Samper!’ He shakes his draperies out first and a few conventional moths flutter weakly in the bitter light cast by the computer monitor on his desk. ‘I was only just thinking this newspaper was not doing quite enough to raise my spirits this Monday morning and that exactly the right thing was lacking and lo!, in through the door you walk to personify my missing pleasure.’ His smile, which resembles that of a weasel sizing up a baby rabbit, suggests the phrase ‘Get out of that one, clever-clogs.’

  ‘Ingegnere!’ I exclaim. ‘Preoccupied as my head was with the banal reflections peculiar to Monday mornings, my feet evidently retained more sense because they have led me through the one door in Camaiore where they knew such thoughts would at once be salved and cheered.’ Not too bad an effort, I think, closing the door behind me. This baby bunny punches above its weight. I glance ostentatiously around the well-appointed office, which is entirely empty of other people. It is a pretty undercroft, barrel-vaulted with old but recently sandblasted mezzane, very pink, with fresh white walls in which a few pieces of ancient stonework have been allowed to stand forth. At a guess, the town house of which this is the ground floor is seventeenth century, maybe slightly older. I have to admit that Benedetti has created an office that is surprisingly tasteful. There are the inevitable desks with computer terminals for his absent assistants: teenaged shysters who generally wear slightly too-large Armani suits and always have a mobile phone plugged into one ear. There are the equally inevitable grey filing cabinets that bespeak active commerce. There are three of those steel and black-leather designer armchairs like the one in Benjy Birnbaum’s consulting suite. There are tasteful lights to illuminate the brick vaulting from below, and a coconut sapling is sprouting in one corner from an unhusked nut in a terracotta pot. It is a perfect set for dramatic acts of conveyancing, but just at this moment the stage is empty.

  ‘So how is business?’ I innocently ask. ‘Frankly, ingegnere, I’m surprised you ever manage to sell your houses because any prospective client, once having glimpsed these superlative premises, could scarcely covet any building other than this.’

  Benedetti, having risen punctiliously to his feet, makes an elegantly dismissive gesture with one hand. The rosy light reflected by the naked brickwork overhead cruelly picks up the pink of scalp gleaming amid the skeins of his web. I give it another year and then he’ll have to admit defeat and go for a toupee. The old warp and weft are fast disappearing and soon only an unabashed rug will suffice.

  ‘You are your customary kind self to enquire,’ he says. ‘This is, of course, early Monday morning so naturally things appear slow. But in general, I’m happy to say, business becomes steadily more propitious. True, the economic climate is gloomy, and investors everywhere are maybe not as sanguine as they were a few years ago, but – yes – I dare say that sanguine is the overall mood of my modest enterprise. I can’t, of course, speak for my competitors; but from the perspective of this office enough people, both from within Italy and from outside, seem to want to move to Versilia to keep my humble affairs here afloat. Discreetly so, but definitely afloat, the blessed Madonna be thanked.’

  ‘I hadn’t realized she took such an interest in real estate.’

  ‘That British humour of yours, Signor Samper!’ he wags an admonitory finger while smiling his rodent smile. In the usual manner of our conversations the initial brocade is beginning to wear thin.

  ‘Since you so courteously indulge it, ingegnere, might you humour me further by explaining how I have just found this lying outside the back door of my neighbour’s house?’

  He studies the muddy, snail-trailed card I hand him as though it were a mystifying artefact lately unearthed in Pompeii.

  ‘It would appear to be one of our own cards,’ he concludes cautiously.

  ‘My very own impression,’ I agree. ‘Unless of course an unscrupulous rival is counterfeiting them for his own arcane purposes. Call me credulous if you will, but I find myself assuming this to be the genuine article. In which case I further wonder how it came to be up at Le Roccie, given that on the last occasion we met I distinctly remember having told you my neighbour’s house is not for sale. Of course, my memory is not infallible.’

  ‘No, signore, your memory is as excellent as ever. “A gem” is how I describe it whenever you are mentioned. “Signor Samper is blessed with a veritable gem of a memory.” I can only hazard that I must have dropped this card on that occasion and it has lain there unnoticed ever since.’

  ‘It hasn’t.’

  ‘A hasty conclusion, surely, signore? A small puff of wind, the activities of a mouse – anything might just now have brought it out of hiding.’

  ‘Have you been up to that house since the summer?’ I ask point-blank.

  ‘No,’ he answers, equally so. For an ins
tant we stare at each other through the holes in the brocade.

  ‘Then it is indeed mysterious,’ I’m reduced to saying lamely. Damn.

  ‘Without doubt. Except of course that anyone might carry one of our cards and drop it by chance. It is not in the interests of my business to ration them. However …’ He goes into a thoughtful pose, tapping the card edgewise against the manicured nails of one hand.

  ‘However?’

  ‘However, it is conceivable that a galoppino, in the course of his researches, might have dropped such a card. These people often do carry an assortment of house agents’ cards, depending on which of us might be interested in a particular property. Yes, the more I consider it, the more likely it seems. I am, of course, as distressed as you about such promiscuous littering of that veritable paradise of yours up there in the mountains.’

  ‘I am less concerned with litter, ingegnere, than with this impression everyone seems to share that my neighbour’s house is for sale. Once again I must ask, do you know anything I don’t about Marta? To be frank, I’m now seriously worried about her.’ A galoppino, I already knew, is a man who gallops about, nosing out likely and unlikely properties for sale and passing on the information for a cut of the sale price: in effect a sort of freelance estate agent working mostly for private buyers, although he will sometimes be employed by an official agency like Benedetti’s. It is perfectly possible that a freebooting galoppino has been making his rounds even in a place as remote as ours, such is the demand for houses in this area. Isolated houses with a much-prized vista mare go at a premium, especially to those twice-a-year holidaymakers from Wiesbaden, Winchester and Willebroek.

  ‘Am I to understand, Signor Samper, that you have still heard nothing of the lady’s whereabouts?’

  ‘You are.’

  ‘I’m naturally distressed that you are distressed. But as I told you before, I have no news of la Marta.’