Amazing Disgrace Read online

  ‘I’m sorry, Millie, I’m a little slow this morning. I really have no idea what you’re talking about.’

  ‘The picture, silly. The Face, as you called it. I Sellotaped it to the wall as soon as you left and it’s been gaining power ever since. Not only does that wonderful all-seeing eye follow me around the room wherever I am, but the whole picture is surrounded by a glow. I’m looking at it at this very moment and that’s the only way I can describe it: a sort of shimmer. I’m not imagining it, you know. Debra’s been here and she recognized it immediately. She says there’s absolutely no question that it’s a sacred image. Don’t you see? It explains everything. That strange feeling I had when I must have sailed right over him without knowing he was there.’

  ‘Millie, I explained this to you,’ I break in impatiently, hoping to stem the gibberish and recognizing the name Debra as that of one of her chief groupies. ‘The Face doesn’t exist. It’s an illusion. It’s like an optical illusion, except it was caused by sound waves instead of light waves. It’s a chimera, a figment, a –’

  ‘Listen, darling,’ she breaks in earnestly, ‘you really must drop this hard-boiled pose of yours of … of …’

  ‘Brutal rationalism?’ I hazard. ‘Rationalist brutality?’

  ‘Of dismissing everything as though it can all be explained by science. On its own, science won’t get you anywhere worth getting to.’

  ‘It got you around the world and back to the Solent.’

  ‘Not just science didn’t. There was also a small matter of superlative seawomanship.’ This is more like the Millie I’m used to. ‘But there was something else, something even more fundamental and important, working through me. Call it the spirit of the sea, call it Neptune if you will.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘Now you’re being silly, Gerry. Because unless you open your mind to it you will never understand how to finish my book.’

  Ah. I see. Yes, that is a problem. Undoubtedly I must get shot of Millie and her book with all possible despatch. But I’m damned if it’s going to require me to become an acolyte in a primitive religion recently dusted off by a lot of nautical dykes under the influence of gin and heroine-worship. Mind you, at another level I can’t deny a feeling of malevolent glee. The plot is proceeding exactly as Adrian and I were hoping it would. Millie has swallowed the bait whole. Our plan, of course, is to let this intolerable and pretentious woman make a complete public ass of herself over The Face and then have some scientist – preferably not Adrian himself – stand up and announce that, sadly, Millie Cleat has allowed herself to become misled by a perfectly commonplace oceanographical phenomenon on a par with seeing faces in clouds which, presumably, no sane person these days would worship as manifestations of a Sky God, etcetera etcetera. To be followed by TV close-ups of Millie’s blushes and stammering climb-down. After which even her greatest fans will surely have to admit she’s a considerable numbskull, while Samper and the entire EAGIS team will be popping prosecco corks and throwing their hard hats in the air. That will also be the moment for giving the media the story of what really happened that night in the Canaries when an obsessive yachtsperson, the balance of her mind perhaps disturbed by solitude, dreams of victory and seabed gods, selfishly ruined a scientific mission that might have provided crucial information regarding Cumbre Vieja’s potential hazard and the vulnerability of half the northern hemisphere to a tsunami of Armageddon-like proportions … To say nothing of the money … And all backed up with photographs taken from the Scomar Explorer’s bridge clearly showing Beldame scooting across the survey vessel’s floodlit bows with inches to spare.

  ‘We really need to finish this book,’ I now tell her reasonably. ‘Otherwise it will miss the Christmas market. And that does matter because – and I hate to remind you of this – the more time that goes by, the more the image of Millie Cleat fades on the public retina. Next year it may be Rufus Rasmussen, don’t forget.’ This unkind cut gets the desired effect.

  ‘Over my dead body,’ Millie growls.

  ‘Right. So we absolutely need that Christmas slot. I propose we have a final session together tomorrow, and I’ll go home and do a week’s work on the text, and then I shall e-mail the whole lot to Champions Press and that will be that.’ An inspiration strikes me. ‘It’s your next book that will be about The Face and Neptune and the elevation of Millie Cleat to Grand High Priestess of the newest cult to sweep the globe. Don’t forget that in this business you’ve always got to have another book in the pipeline. This present volume confirms you as the world’s greatest yachtswoman. Your next will establish you as a spiritual giant, treading the world’s oceans with humility and reverence as Neptune’s avatar or whatever. That will make not only commercial but artistic sense. But for the moment we mustn’t clutter up Millie! with too much spiritual stuff otherwise it will jar with all the technical detail and steel-jawed determination. Much better keep the themes a bit separate, don’t you think?’

  And before long, of course, the plausible Samper has prevailed and Horatia Cleat is well on the way to her apotheosis as Neptunia Cleat. I can practically hear her filling the tub in her Hilton suite in order to practise walking on water. When I ring off, a little exhausted with oratory and intrigue, I’m feeling more cheerful. I shall soon be home in Le Roccie, putting the final bogus details into the text of the book, and thereafter I shall be free. I consciously squash back down the nagging creature who bobs up to say ‘Yeah – free to do what, exactly? We’re not going to be writing about world-famous conductors any time soon, are we?’ In my experience there’s no time like the distant future for listening to these bank-managerial inner voices. It’s the present that matters: the present that includes the sunny prospect of sitting in Tuscany and doing a bit of singing and cooking.

  All the same, I’m aware of some cobweb-like apprehensions hanging around at the back of my mind. It’s all very well making jocular proposals about Millie declaring herself Neptune’s avatar but there’s always the possibility she’ll take them seriously and I shall actually have to write that next book. I suppose in the last resort we will be able to expose her in time to prevent this fate, but I’ve known things not go according to plan. Still, let’s not worry about what may never happen. The thing to do now is to get home as soon as possible.

  11

  And, of course, as I drive upwards through Casoli to my eyrie my spirits lift with every metre of altitude gained. It’s always the way. There’s something about these visits to my native land from which the person of sensibility needs to recover. I don’t know what it is exactly. The boorishness? The whingeing fatalism about our bottomless decline? The ethical dereliction of the politics? My ruffled countrymen may well ask what’s so special about contemporary Italy, with its view of literacy that scarcely exceeds the ability to decipher a telephone directory and a politics with the moral vision of a nineteenth-century South American caudillo. And my reply is simple. What’s special about it is that it’s not mine. The great advantage of being an immigrant is that one never worries as much about a host country’s politics and social problems as about those of one’s native land, which even now seem paler and less significant. Perpetually foreign but persistently European, one simply cherry-picks one’s way through life, drifting hither and yon across frontiers at whim, feasting off the nice things on offer and ignoring the rest, just as people have always done. What else? For all its bathos, and in default of any serious alternative to this act of principled despair, lotus-eating is definitely the way forward.

  I peel off the road and down the short track leading to my house. The familiar roof comes into view and across the chasm to the right the bulking grey crag from behind which the distant sea furtively emerges like a satellite photo of an indiscreet act. But what is this? There is a flashy new Range Rover parked where the track forks to skirt my property en route to Marta’s shack. Walkers? They do sometimes leave their cars up here while they ramble around. On the other hand it’s not unknown for people to brin
g a car up here for less virtuous purposes and I scan the ground around it for dead Peroni cans, cigarette stubs and lust’s latex fall-out. Nothing. As I let myself through my barrier I wonder how young lovers up here before the invention of the motor car managed to escape their cavernous sooty farmhouses full of inquisitive children and eagle-eyed grandparents. Was the same recourse on offer in the horse-and-buggy era? How carnal could they have become in the lee of a looming equine backside, the black purse of its anus periodically disgorging hot wet mulch and its velvet ears swivelling back against the starlit sky like furry radar dishes? Surely they would have felt too much surveilled by that great brute witness? The close presence of a living, breathing creature periodically gusting ammonia and methane would hardly have been less inhibiting than the peeping Thomism of the parish priest himself.

  I drive in and stop beside my shuttered house. Off through the trees to my right runs the reassuring beechwood fence that demarcates my property and Marta’s. It is a fence with a history. I built it for protection against my eccentric neighbour and very nearly with my own blood when, owing to an accident with a nail gun caused by Marta distracting me, I found myself fixed to it like one of Martin Luther’s ninety-five theses, and no less eloquent of protest. Following that, my beautiful structure was torn down without permission when Piero Pacini was shooting a scene for his unfinished last film, and later replaced. Now I catch the murmur of voices from the other side. Marta!? Can it be? My expectations soar. Has the old slag returned at long last? I prepare myself to commiserate with her thumbscrew bruises and electrode burns and to welcome her home. With renewed cheerfulness I find my key to the door in the fence between us and hurriedly open it. And there, standing just outside Marta’s back door, is someone I instantly recognize and wish I didn’t: the weaselly house agent and amateur plane-spotter, Signor Benedetti. In deference to the hot weather he is jacketless in lightweight slacks and a designer version of one of those white short-sleeved work shirts affected by airline pilots and coach drivers, all epaulettes and breast pockets but tarted up with smoke-grey mother-of-pearl buttons and one of those obtrusively discreet monograms in white silk thread on the left-hand pocket. The entire shirt is a serious lapse of taste. On the other hand, not one of his woven hairs is out of place today. With him is a baggy pink man and a dumpy pink woman. Of Marta there is no sign and my expectations abruptly stall and nosedive. Benedetti is clearly both startled and disappointed to see me, making it mutual.

  ‘Good day, ingegnere,’ I say. ‘This is a surprise. I hardly dared expect the pleasure of your renewed presence up here. Really, I had no idea house agents remained so emotionally attached to properties that have so long been off their books. I suppose you must be the fond parent who can never quite let go of his children even when they’re old enough to have passed into others’ hands for ready cash.’

  ‘Signor Samper! Your exquisite fluency reminds me most pleasurably of the conversations we have enjoyed together these last few years. I’m sure you are feeling as well as you’re looking? Such youthful elegance! You wear your years as you do your clothes, with admirable lightness.’

  ‘Be that as it may, Benedetti,’ I say, cutting to the chase in my ill-bred English fashion, ‘I find myself apprehensive lest your presence here with what I take to be clients indicates that you have some firm knowledge of my neighbour’s fate.’

  ‘These are indeed potential clients,’ he says, ignoring my implied question. ‘What is more, they are countrymen of yours. May I present Mr and Mrs Baritoni?’

  Baggy and Dumpy have meanwhile been standing there sweatily with the baffled smiles of Britons waiting for all this foreign babble to blow over. They have plainly not recognized Samper as any kind of kin, which is cheering.

  ‘Apparently you’re English,’ I say to them in that language. Expressions of relief cross their glistening faces.

  ‘Oh, you too? That’s right,’ says Baggy. ‘But we’re not quite who he says we are. Not Baritoni but Barrington. I’m Chris, and this is Deirdre, my wife. I import motor mowers and she’s a dental assistant. Now you know all there is to know about us.’

  I can well believe it, but don’t say so. We Sampers don’t war gratuitously on flabby folk with estuarine vowels but neither are we prepared to soften up merely on the grounds of having a passport in common. More to the point, though, I’m not under any circumstances having them as neighbours and I’m really disappointed not to find old Marta. I introduce myself curtly.

  ‘Gerald Samper. I live in the house on the other side of this fence. Might I ask what you’re doing here?’

  It is Dumpy who answers and I have the impression that, like Wanda Horowitz, she calls the shots in this ménage. ‘We’re looking to buy a house in this area and Mr Benedetti has been kindly showing us a few to give us some initial ideas. You know – a grasp of the market.’

  ‘An odd way to go about it, given that this particular house is not for sale.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t it?’

  ‘Certainly not. Did he tell you it was? It’s lived in by a lady who happens to be away at the moment. Unless Benedetti knows to the contrary, that is.’ I turn to their tour escort and switch language. ‘Have you heard from Marta, then? Do you know what’s happened to her? Is this house on the market?’

  Some eighteen months ago this man and I had a run-in over my peculiar neighbour, and I like to think he received a severe warning from his cronies in the carabinieri for spreading vile rumours about her. At the time he unquestionably retired wounded and I really imagined we had seen the last of him up here, his rodent confidence assuredly having been dented. Evidently I was wrong.

  ‘No, signore, I have heard nothing directly. True, it is possible this house is not for immediate sale. But as we were in the neighbourhood I thought I would give Mr and Mrs Baritoni an idea of the kind of house they might find in this area in places off the beaten track. I was sure my esteemed former client wouldn’t mind.’

  An unsettling thought strikes me and I revert to English. ‘Have you been inside?’

  ‘We did have a little look round, yes,’ admits Baggy. ‘It needs a good deal of work but it’s got real possibilities.’

  ‘No it hasn’t,’ I correct him. ‘It has absolutely no possibilities whatsoever since, as I say, it isn’t for sale. And anyway, I think it’s charming as it is.’ Even as I speak I’m conscious of the irony of hearing myself defending Marta’s rural slum after a history of slagging it off as a place suitable only for the commercial-scale cultivation of toadstools. It is, after all, the house whose bedroom the great Pacini used as a set when he wanted the interior of a dirt-poor fisherman’s cottage for his film. ‘It’s outrageous that Benedetti brought you here at all. I can’t imagine what he was thinking.’

  ‘That wasn’t our fault,’ Dumpy says reasonably. ‘We’re new to the area. He’s just driving us around.’

  ‘Certainly it’s not your fault.’ I turn back to Benedetti who is now looking uneasy, as well he might. ‘I understand you have been inside this house, ingegnere, which means you must still have the key. Which also suggests that if as a matter of course you retain the keys of all the houses you sell, you still have the key to mine, too. Is this true?’

  With a little start the house agent draws himself up, his honour impugned. For a moment he looks less weaselly and more like a goosed rooster. ‘Signor Samper, I must protest! I most certainly do not possess a key to your house. If I may say so, it is a suggestion quite unworthy of you.’

  ‘On the contrary. I have a nasty suspicious mind and such a question is entirely worthy of me. So if you don’t have a key to this house, might I ask how you got in?’

  He looks me levelly in the eye. The rooster has vanished and the weasel returned. ‘The back door was unlocked.’

  This is tricky. I’m sure it wasn’t, because I would definitely have re-locked it after my last look around. But I’m not so absolutely certain that I can make a direct accusation.

  ‘Ingegnere, please al
low me to be entirely clear,’ I say. ‘In my neighbour’s absence and at her request I am acting as her caretaker here. She has naturally given me permission to enter the house and check it from time to time. So far as I’m aware she has given no permission to anyone to conduct guided tours with busloads of foreigners. And besides, even if you did find the door open, am I to suppose you have acquired the habit of just walking into houses that are obviously lived in and full of other people’s belongings?’ I turn back to my countrymen, as Benedetti was pleased to call them. ‘I don’t suppose you saw how he got in, did you? I mean, was the back door unlocked?’

  Dumpy and Baggy look at each other, trying to remember. ‘No,’ they shake their heads. ‘We followed Mr Benedetti around the house from the drive but probably a bit more slowly because we were looking at the place. By the time we got here the door was already open. Is there a problem?’

  ‘Not really. Or none that involves you. As I’ve just told him, I act as caretaker of this house and I’m just a bit unnerved to find people wandering around it when I wasn’t here.’

  Soon after this they leave, but not before Baggy confides in an aside: ‘This isn’t the first house we’ve seen with furniture and stuff, you know. Benedetti’s got a lot of keys.’

  I’ll bet he has. A regular little housebreaker, our weaselly one. The whole episode has cast something of a pall over my own homecoming. I was going to invent some irresistible delicacy to go with the prosecco on my terrace but my heart’s no longer in it. Poor Marta. Of course, I realize the Voynovian bat is nothing to do with me, and she has certainly never asked me to take the least responsibility for her house, still less to act as caretaker. But I worry all the same. I simply don’t want anything awful to have happened to her and can’t rid myself of the suspicion that despite his protestations of ignorance Benedetti might actually know something. I mean, what else would give the little turd the confidence to come and show prospective buyers over her house? Later that afternoon I call the local carabinieri, with one of whom I have developed quite cordial relations since the previous imbroglio, and mention to Virgilio that as I’m not always here it would be much appreciated if he could arrange to have the odd patrol car drop by from time to time in order to check on Marta’s house, at least until she returns. I soon learn that, alas, the carabinieri seldom find themselves free to visit such isolated houses as ours in the course of duty and I would do better to engage a private security firm such as Metronotte to carry out regular patrols. However, Virgilio would gladly pass on the word and he is sure that occasionally a patrol car can come up to check on my neighbour’s house when things are quiet and they have a bit of time to spare. I thank him and ring off. My real reason for the call is that it will automatically have been recorded; and in case there ever is a break-in at either of our houses it will be an additional piece of evidence to flourish in the face of our insurance companies.