Amazing Disgrace

by James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘But of course, Gerree,’ she says. ‘Max and I met in Boston in April. We were sort of sharing an orchestra briefly, weren’t we, Max?’

  ‘Good God …!’ I begin but the rest is drowned by squeals of delight from Pavel, who springs from the table and flings himself into Marta’s arms. There follow some interminable Slavic endearments from which the pianist eventually emerges.

  ‘We were bestest friends in Moscow,’ he explains.

  ‘Oh, that’s right, so you were.’ It all comes back, now, her telling me about camp, gossipy times in student digs a long time ago. Gradually things calm down.

  ‘You I know too,’ Marta tells Nanty, who all this time has been beaming vacantly from the end of the table like a Labrador with its nose out of a car window, ears blown back in the slipstream. I fear he’s rather far gone. ‘I saw you on Gerree’s terrace here.’

  ‘Yah,’ he agrees. ‘You’re the one kissed that bloke from the UFO.’

  ‘That was my brother Ljuka. And it was a helicopter.’

  ‘Whatever,’ says Nanty equably. ‘You stick to your story. Don’t go away. I’ll soon need a bit of beaming up myself.’

  Meanwhile I have been trying to take stock of old Marta. In some ways she’s exactly as she was when I last saw her a year or so ago: the same frizzy mane of derelict hair that looks as though insects are probably hibernating in its depths, the same bollard-like physique like that of a bargee on the River Volga more familiar with liverwurst than liposuction. But her clothes have climbed several rungs up the fashion ladder in the interim, even if they plainly spend the night on her bedroom floor. And now there is about her a general air of easy internationalism, partly reflected by her now almost fluent English with a faint American accent. She feels less – what can I say? – Voynovian, somehow, no longer the bumpkin fresh from the steppe.

  ‘So what is this party I’ve crashed?’ she asks brightly. ‘I must apologize for coming over but I’ve only just arrived and I can’t get into my house. None of my keys will open the door.’

  Of course! I’d overlooked that. ‘Oh God, I’m sorry, Marta. I’m afraid I took it upon myself to change your back door lock, and bolt the front door from the inside. Can’t be bothered to go into it now but you remember that estate agent of ours, Benedetti? I found him sneaking around inside your house with prospective buyers. Turns out he’d kept your keys, mine too, probably, so I changed our locks. But how did you get up here?’

  ‘By taxi. I just had the man drop me, assuming I could get in. But I can’t.’

  ‘Actually it’s Gerry’s birthday party,’ Derek puts in, obviously dying to answer her question. ‘That’s why we’re all here. It’s up to you to guess his age and you’re not allowed to cheat by using radiocarbon dating.’

  ‘Gerree!’ she squeals at me, instantly reverting to olden times. ‘I’d no idea! Many happy returns,’ and she presses me to her dugs before I can evade her grasp. Out of the corner of my eye, amid psilocybin shimmers, I catch Adrian’s look of amusement.

  ‘My dear, you can’t possibly stay in your house tonight,’ I tell her when I can disentangle myself. ‘Out of the question. I was over there a week or two ago just to check on it and the place is an icebox. Apart from that your electricity has been cut off so there’s no light and no water. The phone’s off, too, and there’s a creature from another planet living in your fridge. We’ll tackle it in the morning. You must stay here tonight. We’ve heaps of room.’ (Those careless gestures of hospitality that come well before an actual counting of beds!) ‘Pull up a chair, now, and have something to eat. Vino. Where’s the vino? I’ll open some more.’

  ‘I’ve left my bags outside my house.’

  ‘It’s not raining, is it? Don’t worry, Adrian and I – this is Adrian, by the way, he’s a world-famous oceanographer – will fetch them over once you’ve had something to eat. Golly, Marta, I still can’t get over it.’

  ‘Oo, Gerree, you’re not thirty-nine again, are you?’ she asks roguishly, and Derek gives an unpleasant guffaw at which she rounds on him and says she thinks I’m ‘very youthful-looking’ and that I still have ‘a great ass’. What on earth sort of company has she been keeping this last year? But thank you, Marta; and put that in your pipe and smoke it, Derek, the man whose own ass got up and walked out on him a good ten years ago. That’ll teach you to make a mock of the birthday boy.

  And now the evening really begins to mellow. Despite my earlier misgivings I now realize Marta has actually been the party’s missing element, the absentee member of this group. All the feelings of vexation amassed over the past year’s caretaking of her house evaporate as I watch her demolish several thick slices of badger thigh and wash them down with copious draughts of Chianti. That’s certainly the Marta I remember, she of the terrifying native delicacies: the dreadful shonka sausage, dense kasha balls and a sort of satanic haggis whose name I never did learn. Also a Voynovian cheese like spreadable leprosy. Obviously a bargee’s appetite is something she shares with the poet of the keyboard sitting next to her. Maybe it’s in their east European genes, an urge to gorge themselves and store fat against the long winter months of hibernation while Siberian winds howl outside their caves and woolly mammoths trumpet mournfully in the taiga. This picture may be a little fanciful because, as I keep pointing out, I have yet to discover where Voynovia actually is. But watching them put the badger away I’m sure I can’t be far wrong. Marta’s mammary shelf is soon supporting a dandruff of puff-pastry flakes, and so authentic a reminder is this of my old neighbour that I suddenly feel immense affection for her, as for all my friends at the table who tonight have come from far and wide across the universe wearing haloes to celebrate my humble birthday. It’s so very warm and comfortable, sitting back with all my friends in this gently undulating, glowing room. A couple of logs collapse noisily in the hearth and from somewhere comes a dull rumbling, but this is exactly what one expects after eating a really good badger Wellington. Adrian is telling me the latest on the Cleat front, which is that Lew Buschfeuer has also had a rethink and has withdrawn his financial support from the Deep Blues, and the loony Neptunies have moved to California and formed a new sect, their object of worship being The Face as the oceanic Great Mother, a.k.a. the mother of all mothers. Max and Marta are reminiscing about an oboist in Boston who shot a concertgoer for blowing his nose. Derek is bent over Pavel in a shared cloud of Allure and tutting over the state of his fingernails while Nanty is apparently mesmerized by the gleaming brass cartridge cap that lately decorated the pie. With a fatuous smile he watches it slide gently across the polished table until it is arrested by a puddle of wine.

  ‘Very clever, Nanty,’ I shout down the table. ‘I saw that. You moved it just by using the power of your mind. It’s called something kinesis and it could win you a million dollars from that American magician with the beard, James Randi.’

  ‘I’ve already got a million dollars, thanks,’ says the bald pop star mildly. ‘I’ve transcended money, y’know. I shall never, never need money again. From now on I’m renouncing money.’

  ‘This is not what your biographer wishes to hear,’ I begin, but this time the rumbling noise is much louder and the glasses on the table chatter. This provokes some expressions of mild interest but by now even the appearance of the Angel Gabriel would be accepted with good-natured equanimity.

  ‘I shouldn’t worry,’ I tell them in the relaxed tones of an old hand. ‘Probably just a minor earth tremor. We get them now and again. The whole of Italy’s seismic.’

  ‘One of the joys of living in an orogenic area like the Apennines,’ Adrian comments languidly. ‘It’s the bit the estate agents tend not to mention.’ I notice he has his eyes closed as though in rapt contemplation. ‘Basically, you know, the trouble is your African plate’s sliding beneath your Eurasian plate. The whole mess dates back to Mesozoic rifting in the Tethyan areas, which foreshadowed the Mediterranean’s Tertiary and Quaternary subduction zones … I learned that from a Christmas cracker.
’

  ‘Well, thank you, Professor,’ says Derek, who has dropped Pavel’s hands and has been squeaking on and off like a true urbanite who just knows he should never have left the safety of London.

  ‘Pour yourself some more vino,’ I tell him firmly, ‘and Adrian and I will go and fetch Marta’s luggage. At the same time we’ll do a recce to convince you that this is nothing out of the ordinary. Come on, Adrian.’

  I grab a torch and turn on the porch light. Outside it is chilly, slightly misty, damp. Everything looks entirely normal if one doesn’t count the faint psychedelic rainbows. Adrian and I let ourselves through the gate in the fence and retrieve three substantial bags from outside Marta’s back door. Only as we stagger back through the gate do I become aware that something is different.

  ‘The world is truly a very different place tonight,’ agrees Adrian, dropping Marta’s luggage to urinate copiously against a lime tree. ‘Oh, very, very different. And yet, somehow, strangely the same.’

  ‘No, be serious. I mean, doesn’t the house look more, I don’t know, isolated or something? A trick of the mist maybe.’

  ‘Thanks to Max and Pavel I keep thinking we’re in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Tom is suddenly going to come flying out through the back door leaving a cat-shaped hole in the woodwork. Then he’s going to whack into this fence and become corrugated all over before he pings back to normal and whizzes back inside to carry on the chase. Or else Butch or Spike or whatever the bulldog was called will come roaring out of his kennel by the garage over there and … You’re absolutely right, Gerry. Something does look different. Where actually is your garage?’

  And it isn’t long before we’re standing not too close to the raw edge of a precipice into whose benighted depths my exgarage has entirely vanished. There is a strong smell of fresh earth and smashed rocks and popped tree roots. I say exgarage because of course since its summer conversion my old stone barn has – had – become the charming self-contained annexe in which Derek and Pavel Taneyev will shortly – would shortly have been sleeping. Suddenly the psychedelic effects dwindle and fade and an awful sobriety invades us.

  ‘That’s not terribly reassuring, is it?’ says Adrian as my house is revealed as now standing on a small, crude promontory on the edge of space. It is obvious that the moonless dark is doing us quite a favour by not revealing the full extent of the chasm on whose lip we are poised.

  ‘How safe do you think it is?’ I ask faintly.

  ‘I should say it could go at any moment,’ he replies. ‘Mind you, I’m speaking as a marine scientist and not as a professional geologist. Speaking as a human being, I’d say we’d better get everybody out, pronto.’

  Slowly, we try to run.

  24

  The room is silent. Outside the window a freezing January afternoon has darkened to invisibility a Suffolk landscape of sodden fields and bleak twigs. The bed on which I am lying is exactly beneath the pitched ceiling where two sets of oak rafters meet to form a sort of Tudor tent. A cup of tea that Jennifer brought me with kind intentions half an hour ago is cooling untouched on the bedside table. Tea. I am waiting for my six o’clock dose of opium tincture. And after that, if I can summon the energy, I am supposed to read to Josh before he goes to bed. He likes little rhymes; but although Crendlesham Hall is now gleaming and builder-free, most of his mother’s books are still in boxes. I have managed to find only a battered copy of Wordsworth’s nursery poems, Now We Are Seven, well loved by all except me and Josh, who has made it quite clear that he wants bedtime verses about dinosaurs. He is as little diverted by the doings of Pecksy Redbreast as I am:

  By a freshet of the Dove

  Young Redbreast piped his lay;

  And unseen on a branch above

  Joined in his brother gay.

  A shepherd heard their birdie song

  And tried his best to sing along …

  I mean to say. It is not much of a challenge to reconfigure this sort of thing so as to accord better with Josh’s interests and primitive sense of humour. Ad-libbing such verses on demand is now my chief form of intellectual exercise.

  Into a tree beside a stream

  Young Terry Dactyl flew.

  It was so cold his breath was steam,

  His feet and claws were blue.

  But cold or not, he had a hot

  And urgent need to poo …

  How have I come to this pathetic invalid state? I almost can’t remember. These days I can scarcely tell what is feverish memory and what pure nightmare induced by Papaver somniferum. Today, not quite four weeks later, I am still incapable of giving any further account of that appalling night up at Le Roccie. To do justice to the full horror that within minutes turned a cheerful birthday celebration into ruin and despair would require the brush of a Géricault, even though The Raft of the Medusa’s victims were clearly from an underclass accustomed to brutal reverses of fortune.

  The stampede to evacuate my sweet house, the subsequent nailbiting tiptoeings back inside it to retrieve the essentials of survival and the interminable hours spent cowering under mouldy blankets in Marta’s dank and freezing slum, ready at any moment to dash outdoors – over it all my lacerated spirit draws a merciful veil. Sometimes, while lying here in the bedroom in Crendlesham Hall that was intended for Adrian’s occasional use, I am prey to nightmare images that punctuate my laudanum-aided stupor. We were cut off in quaking mountains without even a mobile phone signal for company and because of the mist unable even to tell if the lights of Camaiore were still lit down below. Most hideous of all is the memory of standing with my huddled guests at first light, almost insensate with cold and shaking with hangover, driven in panic from Marta’s house by yet another tremor in time to see my own home disappear with an uncanny lack of noise and with – my eyes brim as I write this – a kind of jaunty dignity, the entire pergola cocking up at the last moment in ironic salute.

  Well, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. I can’t improve on the late Mr Wittgenstein’s unheeded advice to journalists.

  I thought I should never smile again. And yet a single event over Christmas has proved me wrong. With something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy it concerns Millie Cleat: the one person who, no matter how devastated my own life, reliably bobs up to hog the headlines. In this instance I can’t really complain because she has provided a spectacular distraction from my own woes – so spectacular, indeed, that had she been a fictional character one would have accused the novelist of going too far. But that’s Millie all over: too far is never quite far enough. At the same time I can’t help wondering whether she hasn’t become something of a fixation with me. From time to time I’ve thought about her obsessive quality. Has she really been very much ruder, more arrogant, more egotistical than any other of my sporting subjects? Now and then over this last month, when admittedly reduced by grief and opium to a state of profound mental weakness, I have briefly entertained the possibility that I might actually be jealous of her. Jealous? Of that one-armed old harridan? Unthinkable under normal circumstances, naturally. But when viewed from the pit of utter dejection Millie’s popularity has occasionally seemed enviable. How could it not? Wherever she has gone in the last few years people have surged to touch the hem of her rubber garments, have cheered themselves hoarse when she passed by, have flocked to become her disciples while according her practically canonized status. This has been bitter for her biographer to contemplate, lying as he is in abject obscurity in a shuttered room in the wilds of East Anglia. Had Beldame sunk beneath Millie she would at once have been presented with a bigger and better yacht, expense no object. Whereas Samper’s poor house can capsize into a ravine, taking with it all his clothes and possessions, and who cares? ‘Minor Tremors Shake Versilia,’ reported Il Tirreno heartlessly. ‘Limited Damage and No Casualties.’

  Still, survivors do sometimes have the last laugh, as the episode involving Millie on Christmas Day demonstrated. It was a piece of theatre that must surely be as seared in
to the memories of a million television viewers as it is safely stored digitally in image banks around the world. As everyone now knows, Australia decided to mark this Christmas with a huge regatta in Sydney Harbour to celebrate that country’s maritime history. The ships taking part ranged from a faithful reconstruction of a prison hulk to the latest ‘stealth’ warship built for the Department of Immigration. As a special gesture they gave Millie Cleat pride of place, deciding that Beldame with her patriotic green and gold sails should lead the grand flotilla and be first to pass beneath the famous bridge. By now most people Down Under had either forgiven Millie for being British or assumed she was Australian, just as they took it for granted she was the wife as well as the consort of the country’s best-known tycoon. As we know, she was neither Australian nor Lew’s wife, but nobody bothers with the truth on national occasions.

  In due course viewers worldwide saw Beldame approaching the magnificent span of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Should a few patriotic eyes have been failing to fill of their own accord, commentators and journalists drew attention with their customary inspiration to just how small a craft she was, how toy-like by contrast with the great fleet following in her wake, how frail and flimsy in comparison to the world’s oceans she had so gallantly traversed. It was a beautiful blue breezy day and little Beldame was nowhere near under full canvas otherwise she would easily have outstripped half the vessels behind her, especially the prison hulk which, we later learned, was leaking authentically. It was a spectacle fit to gladden the heart of the Minister for Tourism who was watching, glass in hand and tear in eye, from the Prime Minister’s residence, Kirribilli House. There were the nested white sails of the Opera House, there the fire tugs moored on either side with their cannons spraying creamy rooster tails of water into the cloudless summer sky. There were the crowds cheering and the lusty booming and wailing of a thousand ships’ sirens and hooters. The cameras zoomed in on Beldame to catch Millie alone at the helm in her best Horatia Nelson pose, her slight figure ramrod straight and her left arm held in rigid salute. I noticed her right arm, too, was equally rigid so today she was evidently wearing one of her polycarbonate versions bent at the elbow across her chest, which must have made it a nightmare trying to get into the jacket of the naval uniform she was certainly not entitled to wear.