Amazing Disgrace Read online

  Further praise for James Hamilton-Paterson

  ‘I read every word James Hamilton-Paterson writes, and he never lets me down.’ Barry Humphries, Sunday Telegraph

  ‘James Hamilton-Paterson is an exceptionally well-kept secret.’ Bella Bathurst

  ‘I love his elegant and intensely evocative style: strangeness lifts off his pages like a rare perfume.’ J. G. Ballard

  ‘A formidable literary writer.’ Patrick Ness, Guardian

  ‘No one could seriously regard James Hamilton-Paterson as typical of anything. He is a complete one-off … I would put nothing past him, or underestimate his eternal capacity to surprise those who presume to think they know him.’ Lynn Barber, Observer

  ‘His prose is always original and extremely winning.’ Michael Dirda, Washington Post

  ‘The success of Fernet Branca – deserving of the description “work of comic genius” – embarrassed him because he wrote it as a diversion at a difficult time of his life. Now, having sliced into this rich comic vein, he’s unleashed an irresistible force. Gerald. Monstrous, arch, vindictive, addictive Gerald.’ Helen Elliott, The Age

  JAMES

  HAMILTON-PATERSON

  Amazing Disgrace

  For Mark Sykes and David Pirie

  And, after more than forty years,

  high time too

  Why should I let the toad work

  Squat on my life?

  Can’t I use my wit as a pitchfork

  And drive the brute off?

  Philip Larkin, ‘Toads’

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  By the Same Author

  Copyright

  Amazing Disgrace

  1

  The trouble with sitting quietly under your pergola in splendid isolation is that before long restlessness sets in. True, the vindaloo blancmange at lunch might have something to do with that (and very good it was, too: an intriguing marriage of the incandescent and the gelid). But there’s more to it. Up here among the crags the world is oppressively silent. Drops of brilliant late-spring sunlight trickle through the vine leaves overhead and splash onto the marble table, pooling around a coffee cup and blotching a thick pile of manuscript. For some time now this gross slab of paper has come to feel like my own tombstone that I have been engraving with such lapidary skill – my own, despite its being the story of someone else entirely, a person I loathed from the start.

  The perennial problem, of course, is work. Philip Larkin famously saw it as a toad: a chill, ugly weight that squats on us all, blotting out most of our scant allowance of days. And nor is it the sort of work like fetching water and planting rice that is plausibly useful for survival. On the contrary, nearly all employment is the civilian equivalent of the sort of punishment once meted out to recalcitrant squaddies, such as digging one hole to fill another or whitewashing coal. I’m amazed we kick up so little fuss about the awesome futility of the work most of us do. Writing novels, for instance. Fictioneers, with their dim penchant for social relevance, like to dwell on such minority afflictions as love, erotic misconduct or being brought up white in Southall, while the daily work that lays waste the lives of the majority goes largely ignored. So I shall boldly break with tradition and deal with the lump of human coal I have recently and so laboriously been attempting to whitewash. Sadly, there’s nothing fictional about her.

  The personal toad beneath which I have suffocated for years requires me to write other people’s books for them. A thankless task, you will agree. Yet I can modestly claim they are artfully agreeable books about largely disagreeable people, and the one on the table I have just finished is no different. In fact, it is the odious toad’s very repetitiveness that now leads me to gaze dejectedly out over the view from my house, a view that would by rights send many a Tuscany-groupie into ecstasy. The terrace ends in space. Many miles away on the far side of an immense gulf of air the Mediterranean is visibly frittering its time away, lying glazed and inert in its bed at two o’clock in the afternoon like a teenager who has been out clubbing all night. From time to time flashes of light prickle amid the general glare along the coast as the sun catches the windscreens of unseen vehicles crawling about in the ant-heap far below. Human beings in their desultory pursuit of happiness, that archetypal wild goose chase, in default of which they will have to make do with mere wealth … Samper, Samper, whence this spleen, this ennui? The bloody sea, probably, the very sight of which these days reminds me of things I would as soon forget, such as the company I have been obliged to keep these past fourteen months. It’s hard to convey the sheer awfulness of these people I write about in order to keep my still-youthful body and raddled soul together. My latest subject has been freakish even by recent standards. Picture to yourself a nutbrown amputee in her late fifties with skin that makes Brigitte Bardot’s look like a Clinique ad and habitually deploying the vocabulary of a lesbian trucker. What, I ask you, has Gerald Samper to do with such denizens of a nether world? He of the refined musicality, the culinary inventiveness, the trim buns (if he does say so himself)? Didn’t he long ago resolve that things could not go on as they are?

  He did. Yet by a series of cruel misfortunes not a single one of my ingenious ploys designed to escape earning a living by such humiliating means has come to fruition. With what opportunistic delicacy did I arrange for the great Italian film director Piero Pacini to employ me as his biographer! My acquaintance with him, though brief, was intimate enough. I last saw him lying on a beach south of Viareggio at night, surrounded by the exploding set of his latest film, his green plastic eyeshade welded by heat to the back of his head as he was cradled by his toothsome son Filippo. (‘Call me Pippo, Gerry,’ this wonder-boy had urged me from the controls of his family’s helicopter only that afternoon.) My heart leaped up as I beheld distress rockets in the sky. This was the sort of episode any biographer longs for. Surely these pyrotechnics also presaged the start of a new era in my life when at last I would begin to move in glitzy cultural and artistic circles worthy of my talents. Only weeks later I was relieved to hear that Pacini was making an excellent recovery, albeit after a certain amount of skin grafting. And the next thing I knew, I was staring at a headline in Il Tirreno: ‘Morto il Cav. Pacini da un infarto’. And immediately there came the image of John Cleese as Basil Fawlty shaking his fist at the ceiling, shouting through clenched teeth: ‘Oh thank you, God! Thank you so very much!’ The first real chance of a break and my subject has a heart attack and dies, taking with him all the gossip and stories and malevolent asides that are so crucial to a lively biography. Typical.

  At this point it becomes clear that the recent blancmange is, in the phrase of my late mother’s late charlady, very searching. I hurry indoors and, once at ease, can’t help yet again admiring the taste and artistry with which I have redecorated the downstairs bathroom. My original scheme was a deliberate mockery of provincial British chic: call it Laura Ashley meets Imelda Marcos. This time I have done it out as a jeu d’ésprit. Walls, floor and ceiling all flat white except for the close-spaced wooden rafters overhead which are now biscuit, prolonged by stripes of the same colour and width running down the walls and across t
he floor in matching tiles. The effect is like being airily caged within light ochre bars or of being done up in a benign protective parcel. Gazzbear, my American teddy with built-in flatulence, sits on the lavatory cistern wearing his little blue waistcoat, holding his chubby arms aloft either to greet all comers or else in a marvelling gesture at the elegance of his place of confinement. I notice from the little label stitched to his groin that although his inspiration came from Pennsylvania, he was made in China. Not for the first time I find myself wondering what on earth the Chinese labouring peasantry – so recently escaped from the night-soil-haunted fields of the provinces to work in the satanic mills of industrial cities – must think of the people they make these things for. The farting teddy-bears, the mechanical masturbators, the battery-powered Jesus Christs, the transparent acrylic lavatory seats with genuine banknotes embedded in them: what do the Chinese who devise cheap ways of manufacturing these fatuous objects imagine their customers must be like? Brain-damaged aliens, possibly. One day we might learn. Probably it will turn out that they long to have such things themselves. Still, somewhere behind these thoughts a theory of cultural shame may be trying to articulate itself. After all, if we would be loath to admit to friends and family that a machine designed to plunge or suck at the flick of a switch was hidden beneath crusted towels at the back of our wardrobe, why should we be any less embarrassed that foreigners might think such things represent our national character?

  The vindaloo blancmange having made good its escape, I am now definitely in the market for a pick-me-up. Time was when a neighbour of mine could be relied on to turn up at all hours bearing a bottle of Fernet-Branca, her favourite tipple. The poor dear was pretty far gone. I have since switched to prosecco as being the only thing one can drink all day in an Italian summer and not become incapable of joined-up living. Accordingly I go to the fridge, fetch a bottle of Bisol’s admirable ‘Foie’ (which, since we are in Italy, translates as ‘lusts’; life’s about pleasure, stupid), and return to my dappled terrace. The view – distant torpid ocean, neighbouring crags silently cracking apart as the sun inserts its myriad stealthy chisels – is the same, but now the Samper spirits have some prospect of recovering in the company of a chilled bottle in its cooler and a moisture-beaded glass. I was going to explain about the tombstone manuscript on the table and why the sight of both it and the sea have the power to plunge me into gloom. I have lately been earning a living by ghosting the autobiographies of temporarily famous idiots, mainly ‘sports personalities’, to use the generic term. Luckily no one reading this book is likely also to have read Downhill all the Way!, which concerned Luc Bailly, a burnt-out skier. Nor, I trust, will they have read Hot Seat!, my recent oeuvre detailing the charmless life of the Formula 1 driver Per Snoilsson, a murderous little turd with the brains of an earwig. I’m not proud to admit that this last effort has sold appallingly well, the punters seemingly hooked by its shameless kiss-and-tell accounts of what racing drivers would like people to think they get up to after dark. Sales have depressingly confirmed the mentality of my readership.

  ‘Nice for you,’ you’re probably saying with bitter magnanimity as you regard Samper in his vine-shrouded Tuscan eyrie, sipping prosecco at two-thirty in the afternoon. And so it might be if mine were a purely humdrum job, one that – like an airline pilot’s – involved a minimum of human contact while now and then staying sober. But you’re overlooking the horrors of the task. Think about it. In order to ghost celebrities’ lives one needs to spend actual time in their company, often traipsing along with them from continent to continent in their lurchy little executive jets together with their quarrelsome but lickspittle retinue. One has to let them maunder into a tape recorder at snatched opportunities – as it might be at two o’clock in the morning in a hotel room in Kuala Lumpur, where they are grumpily smashed on Chivas Regal because they’ve had to leave their narcotics at home out of a craven fear of execution. One also has to visit obscure Swedish villages or places like Berwick-upon-Tweed to meet their families and be shown endless photo albums containing pictures of the subject as a child engaged in activities (such as sitting at the wheel of a pedal car) that will inevitably merit the weary caption ‘The shape of things to come’.

  In ways I could never have predicted and may never be able to convey to you, my latest subject has managed to be the worst of the lot. You will find it especially hard to believe this if you are already one of her millions of cretinous fans. Yes – Millie Cleat: the celebrated around-the-world one-armed yachts personality. And I can give you a sneak preview of the genealogical part of my book’s first chapter by assuring you that it really is her name, ‘Cleat’ being a felicitous instance of what New Scientist has dubbed ‘nominative determinism’. In brief, since by now most of you will know the story all too well, she taught herself to sail Albacores on Ruislip Lido in her thirties. Finally leaving her husband – a poor, shell-shocked creature – to look after their two teenaged children, this steely harridan flew to Australia ‘to get in touch with her spiritual side with an Aboriginal tribe’, as she mendaciously told the Daily Express once she had become famous. Like ectoplasm at a Victorian séance, Millie Cleat’s spiritual side only ever materializes at interviews, and with equal credibility.

  One afternoon she went swimming off Perth and lost her right arm to a petulant shark. The first lifeguard to reach her, wearing two pairs of his wife’s tights to protect him from jellyfish, had no sooner grabbed Millie than she was stung on the neck by a box jelly. It was just not her day. She survived, however, although she later ungratefully ascribed this to ‘a miracle’ rather than to excellent Australian medical care. The incident turned her into a local celebrity; she then became nationally known by announcing her intention to build a yacht and sail it solo back to England.

  By now this woman, who I suppose was not unhandsome if you like that sort of thing, was attracting admirers. One of these was a Sydney businessman with a stump fetish and a great fortune. Lew Buschfeuer offered to sponsor Millie, who gratefully accepted and spent most of the next eighteen months down at the boatyard ensuring the trimaran taking shape there was the best someone else’s money could buy. Her mentor had behind him the global resources of Vvizz Corporation, which will give you some idea of why she specified a titanium hull. By the time she was launched, Beldame had cost him nearly thirty-five million Australian dollars, much of which had gone on the hi-tech goodies with which it was stuffed. These included electrical gadgets halfway between a bosun’s chair and a Stannah stairlift to winch her painlessly up the masts for emergency repairs.

  You might well ask why a tycoon, even one erotically motivated, would pay so much to build an oceangoing racing yacht for a grandmother – for such Millie had recently become. The answer was that, to him, thirty-five million dollars was nowhere near serious money. Besides, he had detected in this weird Englishwoman a ruthlessness, as well as an armlessness, of which he stood in awe. So there came a day when Millie anointed her nose with a white splodge of factor 50 in the tribal markings of Australian sportspeople and, wearing a gimme cap and a dauntless grin, pressed the button that set the mainsail. Alone on her boat she left Sydney harbour on a ‘trial spin’ non-stop around Australia. To general incredulity she not only succeeded but did so in record time. Long before the voyage was over her progress was being followed by TV audiences well beyond Australia.

  Of course you know the story, even if you pretend otherwise. Once she had broken that record there was no holding her. She re-provisioned and, like Nelson before her, set sail for England, home and beauty. She managed this trip in record time also. By now Millie Cleat was bankable. It was natural that the husband to whom she had returned after an absence of almost three years would urge her to set off immediately on a non-stop circumnavigation of the globe. So, too, it was for Vvizz Corporation. TV audiences worldwide had become fixated on the familiar image of this one-armed granny, as brown and furrowed as a monkey left out in the rain. They were hooked on the endless intime w
ebcam pictures of her plotting her course or snatching a meal. Helicopter shots of Beldame heeling into creamy waves had become a ritual part of newscasts. The great green and gold sail across whose paunch the giant Vvizz logo blazed was iconic. The corporate slogan written across the foredeck, ‘No Worries’, was a token of faith. In the face of all this there was, as Margaret Thatcher had once famously remarked, no alternative. The ratings demanded it. Millie entered the next round-the-world race.

  And without seeming to try, she won it and broke the record, too, making the fastest-ever solo circumnavigation. After she had been setting a brisk clip for several weeks the media turned it into an epic race against time, against the elements, against human frailty, against history itself. Once ‘The Battling Granny’ and ‘Heroine of the Deep’, she now became simplified as just plain ‘Millie’. Ask ‘How’s Millie doing?’ in any pub in Britain and only the truly disenchanted would have had the nerve to respond irritably, ‘Millie Who?’ Well, disenchanted, c’est moi. Mind you, that was before I was appointed as her ghost and disenchantment turned to well-earned loathing as she stood me up for appointments, changed her story, lied, disparaged my dress sense and made other personal remarks unnecessary to repeat here. One thing I really resented was the sheer technology involved in her record. It wasn’t just that practically everything in the way of navigation, steering and sail-setting was done for her by Beldame’s computers and servo motors. No, the really sad thing was that the satellites tracking her every inch of the way made it impossible that sooner or later we would discover she had faked it, like Donald Crowhurst sailing his mad circles in mid-Atlantic in the late Sixties. Had she done that my admiration for her would have changed everything.