The Atlantic Ocean

by Andrew O'Hagan

  *

  The very best ironies live their lives inside other ironies. Henry VIII changed his relationship with the Catholic Church so as to enable himself to marry his chosen bride. (Sadly, something happened to her.) Five hundred years later, Prince Charles changes the date of his wedding to his chosen bride so as to attend the funeral of the head of the Catholic Church. We can be sure of only one dissimilarity between these two English royals: Henry wasn’t forced into his decision by a fear of the Daily Mail. Charles, like Henry, has come to find fame despicable, and also to find himself shadowed by the public image of a dead former wife, but unlike his Tudor forebear, he appears to have no ability to force his will, allowing every potential show of principle to appear like a fluttering of small resentments.

  It may be the chief characteristic of the Windsor dynasty, this ability to make grand things small. The Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion, wrote a poem for the wedding which rather effectively takes them out of the great tide of history and into the more local business of the heart,

  which slips and sidles like a stream

  Weighed down by winter-wreckage near its source –

  But given time, and come the clearing rain,

  Breaks loose to revel in its proper course.

  This was nicely said, more nicely said than the matter was achieved, as Charles and Camilla came down Windsor High Street to the Guildhall in the style of two people going to a Saturday morning jumble sale, their hearts not yet very obviously revelling in their proper course but still detained by the weight of year-round wreckage. As they emerged from their car, a local steel band tried to add lightness, and cover a few boos, with a rendition of ‘Congratulations’, a song once sung by Cliff Richard to remind people that happiness is a feeling constantly under threat from the songs that celebrate it. ‘Beautiful white dress,’ the woman from the BBC said.

  ‘Hardly white,’ the person beside me said. ‘She’s got two huge children.’

  ‘It wasn’t quite white,’ said Trinny, one of those women off What Not to Wear. ‘More like oyster.’

  There’s a bit of bunting round the pubs and a few grannies waving Union Jacks and eating buns. No tea-trays. No street parties. In almost every respect it was like the suburban wedding of two elderly people who got it wrong first time around. Camilla did look happy: she’s the sort of person who goes to lunch with her daughter and steals her chips and smokes her cigarettes, so she must be fine. She and Charles signed the register on a little table below a stained-glass window bearing the legend of George VI and the year 1951, when Charles was three years old and his mother was four years married, still a princess in a world before British steel bands and Cliff Richard.

  ‘Here they come,’ the BBC said.

  ‘Oh, they look a bit awkward,’ said James Whitaker, Royal Expert. ‘Oh well. Never mind. She’s finally got him in her grip.’

  ‘I don’t think I am wallowing in exuberant excitement,’ said Piers Morgan, former editor of the Daily Mirror. ‘I think there will be a sigh of relief among the public that there is now some legitimacy about this couple.’ Mr Morgan managed to be consistently polite about the royal pair, quite forgetting, perhaps, the stuff about Camilla he’d included in his recent book of diaries, The Insider. At one point in the book he describes having lunch with William and his mother. ‘Oh, Mummy, it was hilarious,’ he has William say about a television show. ‘They had a photo of Mrs Parker-Bowles and a horse’s head and asked what the difference was. The answer was that there isn’t any.’ Morgan adds: ‘Diana absolutely exploded with laughter.’

  Everybody at the royal wedding was watching everybody else to such an extent that the BBC’s female commentator, Sophie Raworth, dressed in a dutiful pea-green suit by Caroline Charles, entirely lost her footing when Piers Morgan pointed out that she was wearing exactly the same outfit as Virginia Parker-Bowles, the second wife of Camilla’s first husband. Sophie was clearly put out that something so suitable for her own foxy self should be thought appropriate for Granny Frump, and went unprofessionally silent for a while. It used to be that the British public looked on these occasions with a subject’s sense of inclusion, seeing very clearly their own role and their own station in the whole affair. Now, they watch as one might watch a freak show or a procession of soap stars, which is more or less the same thing.

  ‘Eeeeech,’ the person next to me said as the guests arrived. ‘He’s got super-posh hair! Like sparse candyfloss. Look at these people, they’re so well bred they’re practically wraiths. Look. No hips at all.’

  ‘They don’t look especially clean,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s super-posh. Like the Queen Mother, who didn’t do anything about her little brown teeth. In that respect they’re like the working-class people who love them.’

  ‘They can’t help it,’ I said.

  ‘Yes they can. They’re just out of touch. Everybody’s got fabulous teeth now. Diana had great teeth. These skinny men are all a terrible throwback.’

  ‘With bad teeth.’

  ‘Yeah. Toilet teeth. Eeeeeech! There’s Trudi Styler. She’s super-dirty. Look at her loving the camera. O, look at her. She just wants to lift up her skirt and do it.’

  During the blessing in St George’s Chapel, Grieg’s ‘Last Spring’ from Two Elegiac Melodies bled into Wordsworth’s ‘Immortality’ ode, and Camilla stood at the altar wearing a hat which briefly put one in mind of a cross between Julius Caesar and the Statue of Liberty, a combination appropriate, perhaps, to her position in the royal household. Generally speaking, however, the white suburban theme managed very well to survive the austere beauty of the fifteenth-century chapel. The groom cajoled his bride to remember her words, the young guests waved and blew kisses, the mother-in-law sat through the whole thing with a face like fizz, the buses waited outside to take everyone to the reception – ‘pragmatic, pragmatic, pragmatic’, the BBC said – and the people outside looked exactly like people who hadn’t waited outside all night for a place at the front (as people did in their tens of thousands when Charles married Diana) but, rather, as if they’d stopped for a peek on their way to Sainsbury’s. The royals walked out of the chapel to the theme-music from The Antiques Roadshow, or was it Handel’s Water Music?

  *

  Saul Bellow seemed to me to possess more moral lustre than your average pope, but then I only read him, I didn’t marry him, as five people did. The pope and Saul Bellow were enemies of nihilism in one form or another, and I would have given anything to hear a conversation between the two, the Pole so miniature in his certainties on the one side, and the novelist so grand with his Russian genes and his American talk, so large in his openness to being absolutely sure about nothing. Great writers are fonts of ambivalence, and the coverage of Bellow’s death (a subject he had covered very precisely himself) seemed allied to his greatest efforts as a maker of life on the page. Bellow was better at seeing things – the true good and the true bad in things – than the routines of politics and religions would have allowed him to be. No one said it, but he was always at his least imaginative when he offered his political opinions.

  Lying between the West and Connecticut rivers, the town of Brattleboro, Vermont, was built on modest profits from water and music. It was a resort town before the Civil War, famous for the ‘water cure’ at the Brattleboro Hydropathic Establishment, which drew on the pure springs along the Whetstone Brook. The town later produced reed organs – ‘providing music for the whole of America’ – but the once flourishing factories of the Estey Organ Company are closed now, the buildings empty in their acres, representing in that windowless way a complete view on another time.

  Saul Bellow’s funeral took place in the Jewish section of the town’s large cemetery. Brattleboro has a complicated relationship with still waters, but the rabbi made reference to them in both Hebrew and English, via Psalm 23. Bellow’s imagination was no stranger to the valley of the shadow of death; that same shadow picks out the true lineaments of Herzog or Citr
ine or Albert Corde – ‘death,’ Bellow said, was ‘the black backing on the mirror that allows us to see anything at all’. Still, it is not easy to think of Bellow’s grave, the people there putting a soul to rest whose excellence had lain in its modern restlessness.

  A friend of mine tells me there were about sixty at the grave. The rabbi explained that Bellow had asked for a traditional Jewish burial – quite spare and simple. He also said that Bellow had wanted them to finish the job, that his funeral should not be merely figurative, that each person at the graveside was to throw a shovel of dirt onto the coffin. The family went first, using the shovel, then came Philip Roth, who threw the soil into the grave with his hands. Almost everyone else went up to pick up the shovel. ‘What was remarkable,’ my friend said, ‘was that one was reminded of the sheer labour it takes to replace all that soil. For half an hour, it must have been, there was silence, as we dug into the mound and threw the earth onto the coffin.’

  In Rome, as the wind fluttered the pages of Holy Writ laid on top of the pope’s coffin, it seemed, for all the hosannas, that the coffin contained someone who had spent many years denouncing the reality of the world in favour of an elevated fiction. Yet, of the two men, of the two imaginations, who could argue that Bellow was not the real pro-lifer? It might be counted a shame, considering the size of his constituency, that the pope never saw the funny side of eternity, a side that even Bellow’s minor characters were apt to cosy up to. But still it is hard to think of all that invention and hilarity encoffined.

  Prince Rainier of Monaco believed in miracles. ‘Either prayer works or it doesn’t,’ he once said. ‘And I believe it works.’ With these words he made his way to Lourdes in the mid-1950s in the company of his personal priest, an American, Father Francis Tucker, to pray to Mary the Blessed Mother for the safe delivery to him of a good and beautiful Catholic bride. Grace Kelly was the answer to his prayers: ‘I want to thank you for showing the prince what an American Catholic girl can be,’ Father Tucker wrote to the Hollywood star, ‘and for the very deep impression this has left on him.’

  When Kelly left New York on the SS Constitution, on 4 April 1956, she was turning her back, as the newspapers liked to say, on Hollywood dreams in order to live a real-life fairy-tale. But there were more than a hundred reporters on board the ship, a fact which begins to tell you how her tale was also a nightmare. Like Anita Ekberg’s climb to St Peter’s dome, Grace Kelly’s wedding a decade earlier was a dramatic moment – a poetic moment, one might say – in the destruction of private life. In 1981, a year before she died, Kelly attended a gala event in London and stood next to Diana, the new Princess of Wales, who wept on the older princess’s arm when they went to the loo. ‘Don’t worry, dear,’ the former actress said. ‘It will only get worse.’

  Flags were tied back with black ribbons, coastal waters were off-limits to all shipping, the casinos were closed, and Monte Carlo’s manhole covers were sealed against the possibility of terrorists the day they buried Prince Rainier. The fort above the bay sent cannon fire into the empty waters and half the principality’s six thousand residents lined the road to the cathedral, the building where Rainier Grimaldi married Grace Kelly fifty years earlier and where he was soon to join her remains in the family crypt. Several of the dignitaries were suffering from Eurolag – Rome, London, Windsor, Monaco – but Monaco-Matin declared it ‘an intimate but planetary funeral’.

  The Grimaldis have brought more libel and invasion-of-privacy lawsuits than any other family in Europe. Where the cardinals in Rome had almost strutted for CNN, Monaco’s female royals hid behind black lace headscarves, crying alongside Barber’s ‘Adagio for Strings’, seemingly exhausted by loss and a lifetime’s trial by cameras. Prince Rainier got his sweet Catholic girl and people got their fairy-tale, but strangely, under the arc lights and the pageant colours signifying seven hundred years of continuous reign, the Grimaldis looked done-in, as if they had come to realise that love was not the story after all. Prince Albert stared through the mass and I wondered if that look on his face did not acknowledge the fact that his life was not his own. The funeral was not a celebration of love but another reckoning with cruel fate. ‘History is the history of cruelty,’ Herzog said. ‘Not love, as soft men think.’

  This has been an odd fortnight for the authorities. New lights have appeared in the Vatican apartments. The tombs are sealed and Cardinal Ratzinger has mounted the throne as Pope Benedict XVI. In Brattleboro, Vermont, trains trundle past the cemetery and summer visitors begin to stand in line for the Estey Organ Company Museum. The casinos are open in Monte Carlo and private boats once again take their own chances with romance and death in the clear blue of the Mediterranean. The bunting is down in Windsor High Street, and children continue to rendezvous at the doors of Burger King and up the street and round the corner at the gates of Eton College. It’s all nothing in the children’s eyes.

  The Glasgow Sludge Boat

  DECEMBER 1995

  The Clyde used to be one of the noisiest rivers. Thirty or forty years ago you could hear the strike of metal against metal, the riveter’s bedlam, down most of the narrow channel from Glasgow, and at several other shipbuilding towns on the estuary. There was a sound of horns on the water, and of engines turning. Chains unfurled and cargoes were lifted; there was chatter on the piers. But it is very quiet now. Seagulls murmur overhead, and nip at the banks. You can hear almost nothing. The water might lap a little, or ripple when pushed by the wind. But mostly it sits still.

  This quietness is broken, five days a week, by the passage of the two ships which carry one of the Clyde’s last cargoes: human effluent, sewage, sludge.

  Glaswegians call these ships the sludge boats. Every morning, they sail west down the river to turn, eventually, south into the estuary’s mouth, the Firth, where they will drop their load into the sea. By this stage of the voyage, their elderly passengers may be dancing on the deck, or, if the weather is wet or windy, playing bingo in the lounge. Underneath them, a few thousand tons of human sewage (perhaps some of their own, transported from their homes) will be slopping in the holds.

  There was a time when passengers and cargo set sail from the Clyde to New York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Calcutta and Bombay in liners equipped to carry awkward things like railway locomotives and difficult people like tea planters. And now, almost alone upon the river, this: tons of shit accompanied by an average complement of seventy old-age pensioners enjoying a grand day out, and travelling free.

  This morning it was the ladies – and several gentlemen – of the Holy Redeemer’s Senior Citizens’ Club of Clydebank who were taking a trip down the river. I’d watched them ambling on to the boat from the wharf at Shieldhall sewage works, each of them with a plastic bag filled with sandwiches and sweets. Now I could hear the party arranging itself on the deck above me, as I stood down below to watch the sludge being loaded into the ship’s eight tanks. It came from the wharf through an enormous red pipe, then into a funnel, and then from the funnel into a hopper, which channelled the sludge evenly through the ship’s basement. It took about an hour and thirty minutes to load up. As the ship filled – with wakeful passengers and tired sludge – a little fountain of perfume sprinkled silently over the hopper’s top.

  We were on board the Garroch Head, a handsome ship named after the point near the dumping ground forty miles downstream, and built on the Clyde, as was her sister ship, the Dalmarnock (named after a sewage works). The Garroch Head can carry 3,500 thousand tons of sludge, the Dalmarnock 3,000 tons. They are not particularly old ships – both were launched in the 1970s – but neither seems likely to survive the century. After 1998, the process of dumping at sea will be outlawed by a directive from the European Union on grounds of ecology and public health. And yet this quiet disposal, this burial of a city’s intimate wastes in ninety fathoms halfway between the islands of Bute and Arran, once seemed such a neat and clean solution.

  Until the 1890s, Glasgow’s untreated sewage went straight into
the river’s upper reaches, where it bubbled under the surface and crept ashore as black mud. Civic concern arose with the stench; the population was still growing in a city made by the first industrial revolution and popularly described as ‘the workshop of the world’. In 1889 the city’s engineer, Alexander Frew, read a paper on the sewage question to the Glasgow Philosophical Society, and then addressed increasingly heated questions about what was to be done. He opposed dumping at sea, and suggested instead that the sewage be spread along the banks of the Clyde, where it would come to form fine agricultural land. The city rejected this scheme, though a feeling persisted that something useful (and profitable) might be done with Glasgow’s swelling effluent; in London at that time, the Native Guano Company of Kingston upon Thames appeared to be setting a trend with this sort of thing. Glasgow’s own brand, Globe Fertiliser, was popular for a short while. But here, science was ahead of the game – or behind it – with new artificial fertilisers that were more powerful and cheaper than the processed human stuff.

  How did other cities arrange their disposal? A delegation went from Glasgow to Paris to find out, and there discovered a great tunnel on either side of the River Seine. Sewage poured out of pipes into these tunnels, which then poured into the Seine some miles from the city. The Seine, however, was clean when compared with the Clyde, because (as the delegation noted) the current carried the effluent away from the city to less fortunate towns further downstream, and then to the sea. The Clyde, on the other hand, was tidal; sewage went with the ebb and came back up with the flood – a mess that, like an unwanted stray dog, could not be shooed away. There was also another reason for the Seine’s relative purity, which perversely had to do with Glasgow’s greater progress in sanitation. Paris had 600,000 closets, or lavatories, but only a third of them were water closets; the rest were dry, their waste carried away by night-soil carts to fields and dumps. Glasgow, thanks to its climate and municipal reservoirs and pipes, had most of its lavatories flushed by water. It had wet sewage rather than dry, and much more of it to get rid of.