Amazing Disgrace Read online

  It was night as I sped up off La Palma. Beldame was really soaring, touching twenty-eight knots. To my dismay I could see an awful lot of lights in the water up ahead, including what looked like four gigantic Christmas trees the size of aircraft carriers in line abreast. To be honest, I had to sneak a look at the chart of the various light combinations to decode the signal they were all showing. I managed to translate it and understood they were towing gear of some sort. God knew what that meant, except that it put me in a fix. Even though the ships only seemed to be making a few knots, for me to cut across to starboard and go right around this strange strung-out fleet could lose me as much as an hour, and quite probably longer if it also lost me the current. But if I were to sneak up to port and slip through on the inside between the island and the inshore ship I could maintain my course. So, being a feisty gal and used to taking calculated risks (as only a born sailor can who is supremely confident of her seawomanship!), that was what I did. As I snuck up and overtook them I was awed by the size of the vessels. Compared to poor little Beldame they looked as big as oil rigs, chugging along slowly with all their deck lights ablaze. I’d never seen ships like these before. Their sterns were enormously wide and I noticed huge spools with cables disappearing overboard. Something mysterious connected with the world of communications, no doubt. As I overhauled the nearest behemoth I couldn’t help a feeling of pride at how efficient the millennia-old technology of simple ropes and sails and flimsy hulls still is. Modern technology has its efficiencies too, I dare say, but the heavy thudding of engines and the stinking pall of diesel smoke that marked these ships’ laborious passage seemed, well, strangely old-fashioned! Little Beldame soon showed them a clean pair of heels and the great monsters fell astern without, I suspect, even being aware of my presence. Soon their heaps of blazing lights dwindled to a faint haze on the horizon and I was past La Palma. I fervently thanked whoever was at my helm that I hadn’t lost a second by sticking to my course.

  ‘Whoever was at my helm’, my foot. Servo motors, actually, carrying out tiny course corrections from the Beldame’s computers at the rate of three every second. ‘Simple ropes and sails and flimsy hulls’, my arse, as if they had been borrowed from the Kon-Tiki or the Cutty Sark instead of being respectively polypropylene, nylon and titanium. And … but no. Why protest further? I know perfectly well what awful tosh it is. The style! The shriek marks! The clichés! Not to mention the downright disingenuousness of the whole thing – little Miss Innocent slipping by unnoticed. I know, I know: it’s grotesque. But in my defence I was being faithful to the account of her voyage that the winsome Millie Cleat (whose name can be rearranged as ‘I melt all ice’) gave me not long after I had signed the contract to write her book. In those days I was still making an effort to feel benignly towards her. In those days she hadn’t passed certain opprobrious personal remarks about my hair and one or two other things. And in those days I hadn’t yet heard the oceanographers’ accounts of her passage through the Canaries. As soon as I had, I realized how utterly pointless it would be to tackle Millie about it. It would have been akin to taxing Mother Teresa with skimping on personal hygiene. By then Millie had been beatified, remember, and sometimes when I took issue with her version in one of our sessions I thought my ears caught a restless rustle like that of a flock of vultures adjusting their plumage: the sound of lawyers’ robes billowing in the distance.

  5

  The days pass. My nicotine-stained agent Frankie rings from London to say how much he has enjoyed reading Millie! But he would say that. When has an agent ever told an author his latest book isn’t up to scratch? He isn’t paid to make discouraging judgements. He waits for the publisher’s reaction and then assumes a series of rubberized diplomatic postures calculated to mollify both parties. We’ve still heard nothing from either Champions Press or Millie herself. Ominous, I call it.

  And so whole weeks go by and June begins to steepen with the sun, which often seems vertically overhead as though Le Roccie were Nairobi. It’s hot even up here in the mountains, where for long hours nothing seems to move. One after another the days are transfixed by a blazing needle like ranks of identical blue butterflies in a cabinet. Time that manages to be static yet will not come again, etc. Terrific. Down there beyond the crags and the diminishing S-bends of the road, down among the twinkling greenhouses and windscreens on the coast, people are laughing and gossiping and smearing each other’s inaccessible parts with sun oil. Ironic self-knowledge comes with the job, so I can’t pretend I haven’t got exactly what I schemed so hard to get a couple of years ago: splendid isolation, distance from the world. And the same irony obliges me to say that sometimes I really wish old Marta were still over in her house, thumping the stuffing out of that Cold War piano of hers. Gross and preposterous though it was in so many ways, her behaviour, and not least her Voynovian cuisine, kept one on one’s toes as well as on one’s lavatory. It piques me even now to think of her traitorous theft of my private singing voice, to say nothing of her clumping seductiveness. But the other week when I went over to check her rural slum my threadbare conscience drove me upstairs to make sure that rats weren’t nesting in her mattress. Suddenly, I was taken unawares by the pathos of her silent bedroom: by the hairbrush still clotted with her dark frizzy wires and the way it brought the horrid euphemism ‘forced grooming’ to mind. I was even touched by the handful of dreadful cosmetics she must have bought off a barrow in Viareggio, all with Italian names like Hot Passion and Silken Princess. I admit that when I thought of what might even then be happening to the poor creature in some cement-block oubliette my eyes did fill, rather. Gerald Samper’s? I know; but only for a minute, until I supposed philosophically that that was what came of being born into an eastern European (I nearly said western Asiatic) mafia clan. No matter that you’re a talented composer with no interest in a life of black helicopters and Kalashnikovs, your family will always drag you down in the end. It’s nothing to do with blood being thicker than water, just that the child you were fatally haunts the adult you never quite will be. Guilty by association.

  Something has to change. I can’t go on like this. In a short while I shall have to face my fortieth birthday – inconceivable! – and there’s no way I can enter my fifth decade while still writing about sporting heroes. My books are nothing but cunningly crafted lies, yet avoid being honest fiction. But neither are they attempts at objective history since fantasy figures have no objective history. No, as befits this squirmy, relativist age they fall uneasily somewhere between. Not non-fiction so much as un-fact: the genre that encourages celebrity paste to pass itself off as diamond. One reason I think Millie Cleat is pure paste is that before beginning her book I read a little around the subject of lone yachtspersons in order to put her into some sort of historical perspective. Way beyond the call of duty for my kind of writing, of course, but one needs to alleviate the tedium of the eternal record-breaking now in which sporting heroes live. It was salutary to learn that an American, Joshua Slocum, had not only sailed single-handed around the world over a century before Millie Cleat but that he had the taste and good sense not to do it without stopping occasionally. I admit I find something simpatico in this idea of lone endeavour. But it has to be done self-effacingly, otherwise it’s like donating to charity and making sure your name gets published. You choose to set off into the planet’s great salt wastes, and your life is that odyssey. Nobody knows where you are and nor do you know how it goes with family and friends, which is how you want it. Your competence, like your life, is self-contained. It is your skill at dealing with navigation, sails, hardship and your own company that enables you to survive – or else prove unequal to the elements and disappear for ever, as Captain Slocum eventually did.

  I don’t know whether this is courageous. Maybe certain people are simply born not to be landlubbers, so the alternative of a comparatively safe life ashore never arises. Maybe they don’t need daily human bustle in order to acquire themselves. In Slocum’s days no one confront
ing the sea alone could ever be other than humble, and setting off by yourself in a sailboat was voluntarily to slip from human sight and almost from human mind as well. It is precisely the relentlessly high public visibility of Cleat and her ilk that violates this ideal – that and every item of hi-tech hardware that sails their boats for them. Far from disappearing, they are in all-too-constant touch, watched on webcam by millions around the world night and day, their position known to within centimetres courtesy of GPS, their course plotted by computer, their sails set or taken in by little motors. Undoubtedly it’s still a dangerous activity compared with pony-trekking or billiards; but then surely one ought to run some sort of risk to earn all that unstinted adulation? Being privy to an overview of la Cleat’s recent loud whizzings about the ocean has made me admire all the more the strong, silent nutters of yesteryear, bearded and lined, who did these things the hard way in rancid oilskins. My admiration (but definitely not envy) is reserved for the Shackletons of the world who achieved epic journeys with lousy or non-existent equipment, for men like Whymper or Mallory who went walking on the Matterhorn or Everest largely unwatched by the world and wearing not much more than an old tweed jacket, plus-fours and stout boots. Millie’s yacht cost thirty-five million Australian dollars; Slocum’s thirty-six-foot sloop, Spray, probably a few hundred American dollars. I rest my heavily biased case.

  Yes, the days pass. I know they do because my sixty-day supply of Pow-r-TabsTM is visibly dwindling. I wonder if this isn’t taking over from calendars as a way of keeping track of time in a pill-popping age? No more tearing off the days; one’s steady tramp towards the grave is made visible in the increasing rows of empty pockets in bubble packs. My last doses, surrounded by tattered foil, are not the only thing to make me thoughtful about what either time or Horny Goat Weed may be doing to my body. Something is having an effect, and quite startlingly so. The only thing to have shrunk is my scepticism. In my role as heroic nineteenth-century scientist I examine myself daily with a dispassionate regard for scrupulous bodily measurement, like Francis Galton and his anthropometry. Well, not quite dispassionate, maybe. Just the first feathery wisps of concern. Nothing to really worry about, of course; but all the same I go on the internet to look up this Epimedium sagittatum and learn there are quite a few Epimedium species, including E. pubescens (which sounds enticingly rejuvenating) and E. brevicornum (very much less promising). Horny Goat Weed inevitably turns out to be a Chinese herbal medicine, pronounced in Cantonese ‘yam yong fok’, which perhaps means ‘forbidden’. It ‘nurtures the kidneys, fortifies the yang, expels wind-damp-cold and improves one’s ability to resist a lack of oxygen’, so maybe Mallory and Whymper took bundles of the plant with them in their knapsacks to chew at altitude. It also improves blood flow to the penis and causes erection, which might be unwelcome while climbing Everest although it’s true I know nothing about Mallory’s later relations with Irvine. E. sagittatum also does wonders for menstrual irregularity.

  But the clincher is this guileless assertion: ‘Small amount promotes urination; large amount inhibits urination.’ As far as I’m concerned this sums up the essential vagueness at the heart of all herbal medicine. It’s not just that the effects of a single plant can be utterly contradictory but that phrases like ‘large amount’ are never explained. It’s pitiful. Just try imagining this principle applied to cookery: ‘Blend large quantity of flour with a lesser amount of butter and a number of eggs.’ Here we’re talking about potent weeds that might induce parts of the body to run amok, or just unstoppably to run. Looking at the other formulations of Horny Goat Weed on the market I can’t find any uniformity of dosage. Mr and Mrs ProWang, who make my pills and whom I now see as a hardworking Cantonese couple forever chopping dried herbs in their tiny kitchenette in Guangzhou, don’t mention any quantities at all on their label. It’s true I haven’t yet noticed any urinary irregularity but I shall be seriously displeased if I begin to have periods at my time of life. I realize that taking any pharmaceutical is a lottery but at least the stuff that doctors prescribe comes in standardized strength and dosage. Until they take the trouble to isolate a plant’s active ingredient and weigh it properly, I can’t see how herbalists can ever be certain their patients won’t see-saw arbitrarily between floods of urine and acute retention, not to mention appalling gusts of wind-damp-cold that in restaurants would give rise to long, incredulous stares over the tops of menus.

  On balance I’m inclined to dismiss Horny Goat Weed as a threat. I’m much more anxious about the ‘orchic substance’ the ProWangs are adding to their pills. A classically educated pedant like Stephen Fry would point out that orchis is Greek for testicle, but that it is also the name of a family of orchids because of the shape of their root tubers. Frankly, I would sooner know the ‘orchic substance’ I’m ingesting daily is of strictly vegetal origin. Still, maybe there’s a recipe in all this: a hitherto-untested combination of animelles with orchid roots. There’s something intriguing about the union of testicles and suburban greenhouses. Hortiball Stew? I shall have to find out if orchid roots are toxic.

  Then comes the morning when Frankie rings up with his customary salvo of coughs. People sometimes ask him if he isn’t afraid of cancer. ‘Good God no,’ says Frankie. ‘Far too obvious. No, I shall die of mortality’ – a beady glance – ‘just like you.’ Today his tone is not very breezy. Ominous, didn’t I say? As usual, Samper was right.

  ‘I’ve just had some feedback from Weetabix.’ This is our whimsical private name for my editor, Michelle Tost, a.k.a. the Breakfast of Champions.

  ‘She hates the book,’ I say gloomily.

  ‘She does no such thing, Gerry. She says it’s witty and discreet and Champions Press are honoured as always to have another title from you. No, what she says is that Millie herself wants a few changes.’

  ‘Oh God. How few?’

  ‘Oh, not a lot.’ Breezily evasive. ‘You know these people, Gerry. They make no end of a song and dance about an entire chapter and it’s often curable by removing a single sentence. Remember Per Snoilsson.’

  I remembered. The Flying Swede had thought my vivid account of how racing drivers disported themselves between races, and especially when playing the notorious ‘Pit Stop Game’, would bring him into disrepute. Disrepute! The man who charges around the world’s circuits leaving behind him a welter of skidding cars and flying wheels; the man everybody knows was responsible for the death of that sweet little French champion François Bidet at Monaco. In that instance artful old Gerry, casting a jaundiced eye over his own prose, adroitly removed the single appearance of the word ‘knickers’ from the chapter and Snoilsson passed it.

  ‘I wish not to have anything more to do with Millie Cleat,’ I say firmly.

  ‘Mm.’

  A long pause, in which we both silently acknowledge that it really doesn’t matter a row of beans what I want, provided I want to get paid for this book. That I do; and so does Frankie. Best get it over with as quickly as possible so the book will be ready in plenty of time for the Christmas market and I can embark on something worthy of my talents. Grit the teeth, Samper. ‘But I’m not having that woman in this house.’

  ‘And why should you?’ said Frankie emolliently. ‘You just need to agree between yourselves on where you’re going to meet. It may only take an hour to listen to her objections and –’

  ‘Objections? You said changes.’

  ‘Of course, that’s what I meant, Gerry. Absolutely not complaints as such. Just probably silly quibbles about matters of emphasis.’

  Vintage Frankie: just probably silly quibbles. Has anyone ever been reassured by reassurance? ‘I’ll talk to Weetabix. So where’s Millie at the moment? Brisbane?’

  ‘No, here in London,’ says Frankie. ‘Apparently Lew’s over on Vvizz Corp. biz.’

  I have a pretty good idea what that involves – not that I am about to strike moralistic attitudes. Indeed, when the hugely wealthy CEO of a multinational corporation squires a married global celeb
rity around town these days the whole starry scene transcends morality entirely. It even lends morality a faint aura of pathos as being about as relevant in the twenty-first century as a medieval chivalric code governing the correct wearing and throwing down of gauntlets. In fact, I thought how pleased Millie’s husband Clifford would be. Far from being a poor cuckold stuck in Pinner while his wife underwent transfiguration by limelight and headline, he would be mightily relieved. Clifford was the only member of the Cleat clan I liked. In the early days of researching the book he and I would slip off to a half-timbered Twenties pub that sixty-five years ago was probably spoken of as ‘that roadhouse on the way to Hendon aerodrome’. A great barn of a place now drowning in suburbia, with waves of balti houses, Chinese takeaways, shish-kebab joints and betting shops breaking against its mock-Tudor brick walls, I expected it to be full of rorty wide boys driving stolen BMWs. Instead, the saloon bar was rather quiet, bizarrely lined with glass-fronted cabinets of stuffed weasels, some of which held miniature cricket bats and wore MCC ties, and a lot of signed black and white stills from The Wizard of Oz. Oh whoops, I thought. Could it be we have fallen among the friends of Dorothy? The place was quite well patronized by people I assumed were regulars since they greeted Clifford as one of them. Presumably the hubbub surrounding his wife’s recent around-the-world record had abated by then, for I noticed nobody made any reference to her. Quite evidently Clifford was not thought of just as Mr Millie but as someone with an entirely separate identity.