Amazing Disgrace Read online

  ‘What gun? There is no gun, you moron! Just what the hell do you freaks think you’re up to?’

  Briskly the nearest freak pins her to the wall by the window with a forearm across her chest while he runs a huge shameless hand over her scrawny frame. He whips the telescope off her, examines it, peers through it and tosses it onto the sofa.

  ‘Your name?’ he demands, stepping back. He could hardly have asked a more welcome question. Millie draws herself up, her hand clutching at the place where her telescope had hung as though feeling for a microphone.

  ‘I am Millie Cleat!’ she bawls. ‘Millie frigging Cleat! Does that ring any bells in your tiny brain? Ocean racing? Around-the-world yachting? That sort of thing?’

  It was the pink man’s turn. ‘Er, quite true,’ he says, coming forward. ‘I can identify the lady. This is indeed Millie Cleat. And, madam, I really must apol––’

  ‘Who the hell are you?’

  ‘I am the duty house security officer. My ID.’

  The gigantic policeman studies the plastic folder incredulously.

  ‘Your name is ffitzgammon-Pithers?’

  ‘It is. Ignatius ffitzgammon-Pithers.’

  At this welcome touch of farce the scene begins to sort itself out. The testosterone and adrenaline leak rapidly away. The policemen relax and holster their pistols, leaning against the wall, sweating and trembling with reaction. It turns out that ‘a highly reliable report was made’ of a telescopic rifle sight seen behind the window of this room. ‘Naturally these windows overlooking the Palace are under constant surveillance.’ I thought he was going to add the automatic ‘for your own safety and convenience’ that today functions as a sort of amen at the end of most nannyish public announcements. After a while the police gather themselves to leave with a breezy ‘Better a false alarm than the real thing’, which in the absence of anything more penitent has to serve as an official apology. They also take our names for their incident report even though it was an incident of their own making. I suppose we should be grateful we don’t have to supply DNA samples. With admirably misplaced nerve one of the men asks Millie if she’d mind autographing the back of an envelope for his little boy. Like Medusa, she paralyses him with a glance and he has to be tugged from the room by his colleagues, mountainous in their uncouth gear, their waists thickened with innumerable pouches of ammunition and stun grenades. When I was a boy they were still public servants; these days they are swaggering lictors. It is a perfect parable of Britain’s progressive social decay – or so I think as my heart-rate subsides towards normal and ebbing panic induces an elderly querulousness (What on earth have we come to?).

  Pink Mr ffitzgammon-Pithers is also distressed as he examines the hole in the plasterboard wall made by the door handle slamming back. ‘Really!’ he says, half to himself. ‘It’s all too much. That’s the second time this week. It’s like living in Baghdad.’

  ‘Been there, have you?’ asks Millie rudely. She, too, has been badly rattled.

  ‘Oh yes,’ says the security man mildly. ‘I’m only temping here until I can rejoin my regiment. Just until the medics give me the okay. Touch of shrapnel from an IED – improvised explosive device – that’s all.’

  To my pleasure this upstages Millie even more, and only an emetic display of abject servility on the part of the day manager, who bustles in wringing his hands, brings her back to normal. Even without her telescope she becomes very haughty indeed, Lord Nelson playing Lady Bracknell. I leave halfway through the manager’s ritual self-abasement, at the point where he starts handing out free passes to the bars and restaurants and saunas within his gift and explaining that ‘the dear lady’ need not fear she will be presented with anything as unseemly as a bill when she leaves at the end of her delightful stay.

  ‘Delightful?’ queries Lady Bracknell.

  ‘It has been a great delight for us,’ the wretched man assures her mendaciously.

  As I totter off down Park Lane I realize that in its curious way the afternoon has been a bit of a delight for me, too. It’s never much fun for an author to learn that he still has work to do on a book he thought was finished, but there’s a good deal of compensation in watching his subject being mistaken for a regicide at the very moment she is laying claim to a deep spirituality. I just have to tell someone, so I flag down a taxi and manage to catch Frankie before he leaves the office. We spend a hysterical hour over glasses of the agency’s Glenmorangie dreaming up tabloid newspaper responses. ‘Millie in Sniper Drama’, ‘Panic Ahoy!’, ‘Millie Sails into Hilton Storm’. ‘A special security squad assigned to the Palace had egg on its face after a raid yesterday afternoon when it mistook for an assassin the nation’s heroine, Millie Cleat, widely tipped for a peerage in the next Birthday Honours List. The feisty granny’s response was unprintable …’

  ‘Oh dear,’ says Frankie, wiping his eyes after laughter has brought on a near-terminal coughing fit.

  ‘And this, mark you, the woman who wants me to rewrite her book so she comes across as the Mother Teresa of the high seas.’ I am not quite so crippled by laughter as Frankie. I keep remembering how absolutely terrified I was up in her room, not to mention that it is I who am going to have to do the writing.

  ‘Don’t worry, Gerry. Of course you’re not going to rewrite the book, only doctor it a bit here and there. We’ll resist on the grounds that she never made any mention in her tapes of this allegedly vital aspect of her character. That was her responsibility and if she left it out either it’s down to her own negligence or she’s just invented it. I’ll call her in the morning and tell her you’re happy to be briefed about whatever emendations she wants but that the biographical facts in the book depend on her original taped accounts, so she can’t now make radical changes without our renegotiating your fee very substantially. Also, of course, I can imply that a serious amount of work on your part would take a lot of time, in which case she might have to resign herself to missing the publication slot for Christmas. That should do the trick. If I’ve got her aright she can’t wait to see herself in print.’

  Good old Frankie. That’s exactly the stuff an author likes to hear from his agent.

  *

  Next morning I am slightly disappointed to discover that the Hilton episode has in fact earned no mention anywhere in the papers. I tell myself it has been hushed up for security reasons, which could well be true. Anything that makes the police look silly might compromise security, which makes it de facto a security matter and so it’s securely sat on. When I come to think of it I realize it is probably in Millie’s interest to keep quiet as well, just as it is in the hotel’s. When all the self-righteous protest and expostulation have died down, nobody is going to emerge looking particularly dignified. Millie will be given a new tennis-court-sized suite and told to live in it buckshee for as long as she wants just so long as nothing is said about having been roughed up on the premises in the name of security. She and Lew will be able to gorge themselves on freebie meals and become sodden in saunas for as long as they can stand it. Strange how these things only ever happen to people with so much money it’s completely immaterial to them.

  At any rate, something this morning feels different. Something has changed. Maybe that little internal sac I distinctly felt burst when Millie’s room was raided was the reservoir for a gland that anatomists have hitherto overlooked in their studies of the endocrine system? Tucked away somewhere along the rugged coastline of the thyroid isthmus, within sight of the brooding islets of Langerhans, must be the vas malevolentiae or the sump of malice which ruptured yesterday afternoon and has flooded me with electrifying ill-will. I have had Millie Cleat up to here, and beyond. The woman is nothing but black trouble. In his relentless efforts to look on the bright side Frankie thinks it will just be a matter of adding a nifty sentence here and there throughout my text to satisfy Millie’s claims to be taken seriously as a deep and mystical human being. But I know Millie, and yesterday I read the signs. Something or someone has got to her in th
ese last six months; and the pared-to-the-bone, ruthlessly competitive sailor has begun to give way to something more grandiose and complex. You can’t fool an old hack like Samper. Somebody has been putting ideas into the woman’s head: alien imports that, unless quickly rooted out, will run riot and destroy the defenceless native ecology of her tiny brain. That question I asked her husband Clifford last year has become more pertinent than ever: What do you think she’ll do now that she’s getting too old for competitive sailing? Obviously, I don’t give a stuff what the answer is except insofar as it affects getting this book off my hands.

  7

  Certain people – since axed from my Christmas card list – have hinted that my frequently voiced exasperation over the subjects of my books arouses a similar degree of exasperation in them. ‘So what is it you would like to write about?’ they ask a little fretfully. ‘And why don’t you go and do it?’ All very well to be fretful, I reply, offering them a disarming plate of scrumptious deep-fried mole crickets from the Philippines, but it’s not that easy. True, it’s no doddle wringing a book-length story from a monosyllabic tennis player whose brain’s two hemispheres consist of clay and grass. But millions of people know the player and tens of thousands want to buy the book as a Christmas present for a sedentary relative, and several hundred may actually want to read it. This makes for quite a decent living for G. Samper. The people I should vastly prefer to write about tend to be more than halfway intelligent and connected with the arts. However, books about art command rather small sales: generally speaking, the higher the art the lower the sales. Sometimes they don’t sell at all, although it helps if the high artist had a low life. Coffee-table books can be the exception, and Genital Decorations of the World – part II: Equatorial Africa in Thames & Hudson’s authoritative photo-essay series is tipped to do well this Christmas. This is not what I have in mind, though, being notoriously a person of intellectual refinement.

  Marta, the wild-haired Voynovian composer who was my neighbour at Le Roccie until indefinitely detained by the Powers of Darkness, claimed to have been at Moscow Conservatory with the fabulous Russian pianist Pavel Taneyev. I once thought I might have a lot in common with him as a potential biographee – he is unmarried, for a start. But although Marta would have been the ideal person to introduce us, the indolent old bag never got around to it. Shortly afterwards events in our respective domestic lives became so hectic that I never pursued the idea. I have often regretted this failure bitterly, and never more so than when signing the contract with Millie Cleat. As far as I’m concerned Taneyev is a god of the keyboard, not by any means one of those post-Soviet vulgarians who help poor, naïve Scarlatti along with extra notes, fatuous rubatos and general editorializing. A bit in the Richter mould, perhaps, he produces wonderfully cool and limpid Shostakovich preludes and fugues but does occasionally let rip in the grand manner with an old warhorse like Balakirev’s Islamey. His account of Prokofiev’s Eighth Sonata is a dream.

  Extending the phrase ‘connected with the arts’ to its absolute maximum of looseness, I did begin to be professionally involved with the boy-band singer Nanty Riah, a.k.a. Brill, late of Freewayz and now lead singer of Alien Pie. The circumstances in which we met were so bizarre I shall not trespass on your credulity by recounting them here. The fact is, young Nanty as good as commissioned me to write an account of his life that would transcend his temporary idolization by millions of teenagers and eventually lift him into the ranks of those seamy old pop musicians who survive long enough to be knighted for services to themselves. It was Nanty’s ambition to become one such and to be numbered among those raddled rockers who fondly believe they are respected for their views on ballsaching things that serious people don’t want to waste their time thinking about such as Africa, the drug problem and rainforests. Accordingly, we hatched a plot to write an account of his life to date that would give him some credibility on the long and winding road towards knighthood. Indeed, I had already begun to sketch an outline of the book when, as you will recall from last year’s media frenzy, Nanty was shot during an art theft in which three Van Goghs were stolen from his private Lear jet on the tarmac in Rome. Not fatally shot, I’m glad to say, because I’ve grown quite fond of him; but the idol of millions was nonetheless soundly perforated in one or two fundamental places and had to lie in a pool of his own gore on the Wilton rug in his plane’s cabin while the thieves took their time unscrewing the pictures from their frames on the bulkhead. Since when the poor fellow has apparently made a good recovery from the gunshots, but the incident has done nothing to improve his mental stability and the book we were supposed to be working on is on indefinite hold. Worse, it has proved impossible to induce him to sign a contract, and my agent has sternly forbidden me to write another word of his story until he does. ‘The richer they are,’ Frankie said from his bottomless supply of folk wisdom, ‘the more the buggers want something for nothing. Not another word, Gerry.’

  So that project has stalled, too. And now I’m ready to answer the question of who, ideally, I should choose to write about. Currently, I think that would be Max Christ, who for my money is the greatest orchestral conductor since Toscanini. Still only in his forties, his meteoric career has included his extraordinary move from the Berlin Philharmonic to Colchester, where as everyone knows he famously built up a symphony orchestra to be the perfect vehicle for his sound. Today the CSO is one of the finest orchestras in the world, and their accounts under Christ of Schumann’s symphonies, in particular, are quite simply the best ever and completely give the lie to those who thought Schumann’s orchestral writing was inept. Cretins, in short.

  Ah, Christ, you say, because even you (with your secret preference for ‘world music’ and its banal fusion of Hopi hip-hop, Moroccan rockin’ and Papuan rappin’), even you have heard of Max Christ, pronounced to rhyme with ‘wrist’ and almost as glitzy as his legendary namesake. And I agree; because when you say ‘Ah’ in that tone it implies that, dazzling though Samper’s prose so obviously is, he may not have either clout or qualifications enough to write the Max Christ Story. No one is more aware than I that a world-famous conductor in search of a biographer is unlikely to enlist the services of a sports writer whose track record consists of books about track records. He naturally fears his life story might wind up being called Hot Podium! or just plain Christ! He also fears that the English-speaking world of letters doesn’t know that the German name for the pale Galilean is ‘Christus’ and will ignorantly tarnish him with impiety. My uphill task will be to convince this great man that Samper is eminently qualified for the job – that his sporting biographies are merely an aberration, the enforced and temporary prostitution of a talent really saving itself for marriage to a subject worthy of it. I am not entirely without hope, for I have been concealing the fact that I do have a way into Max Christ, as they say: tenuous, but definitely a link. You many remember my mentioning that I interviewed all those EAGIS oceanographers whose seismic studies in the Canaries Millie Cleat comprehensively ruined. There was something in the appearance of one of them when he was in his Southampton office trying on a bright yellow suit of oilskins while I interviewed him that drew us into a closer rapport. Indeed, young Adrian Jestico is now one of the rare, regular guests whom I’m happy to receive up at Le Roccie. In a casual conversation he asked me about a watch I had recently bought in Germany, and I said I had found it at a branch of Christ’s in Frankfurt – Christ being a well-known chain of jewellers and watchmakers with shops all over Germany and Switzerland. ‘Oh,’ said Adrian casually, ‘my sister Jennifer’s married to one of them. You may have heard of him, the conductor Max Christ?’

  Just like that. I couldn’t believe my ears. When I could, I gathered the couple had met when Max was starting to knock the Colchester Symphony Orchestra into shape. Jennifer Jestico was a young violinist good enough not to have to pose in a wet T-shirt on the front of her first CD or peer from behind a curtain of blonde hair with slightly parted glossed lips as though auditioning
for a garage calendar. A propos, it surely can’t be long before we are given the first nude performance of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto at the Proms. I mean, what is the point of prolonging this pretence that the whole of Western culture isn’t drifting inexorably towards a generalized state of pornography, its true bottom line finally revealed? The first all-nude account of the St Matthew Passion should likewise be not too far away, with the entire orchestra, choir, soloists and conductor in the buff (‘Convincingly seemly’ – The Gramophone. ‘The reminder that we all stand naked before God was deeply moving and added yet another layer of meaning to Bach’s protean masterpiece’ – Music & Musicians. ‘St Matt’s Nude Passion’ – Sun). According to Adrian, Prokofiev’s second violin concerto brought his sister Jennifer and Max Christ together, and together they have remained. Adrian has assured me it wouldn’t be hard to arrange an introduction to this fabulous conductor, who has risen to the top by virtue of sheer overwhelming talent. Without having had to remove a stitch of clothing, or conduct in trademark pink tails, or wear so much as a diamond nose stud, Max Christ has become acknowledged as arguably the greatest conductor under the age of eighty. In my typically shy and retiring way I have so far done no more than drop a discreet hint to Adrian that I would be forever in his debt were he to make it known on the family grapevine that Max Christ’s ideal biographer is only a phone call away. We can all dream. Anyway, in the prosaic meantime I have to rid me of this troublesome Cleat. And overnight the inspiration for a little mischief has occurred to me.

  I now call up Dr Adrian Jestico at BOIS, the British Oceanography Institute in Southampton, and ask him if he would send me a copy of a strange picture I had noticed pinned to a board in his office when I originally interviewed him. It was a grainy, black and white outline of a face, caught three-quarters on and staring out with a bulging eyeball beneath a partially eroded thatch of hair. It was cavernous, mournful and demonic. Its blurred features, all of which could be read in so many ways, conveyed a peculiar charismatic power. Adrian said that he and his colleagues knew it as ‘The Face’, and that it was an artefact of a side-scan sonar map of the bed of the Pacific Ocean somewhere near Hawaii. He explained that the seabed had been more than three thousand metres below the survey vessel and that the apparent face was simply an illusion created by the sonar impulses striking the geological features on the bottom, forming light areas and shadows according to the angle at which the echoes were reflected. Everything depended on this viewing angle, as was proved by an adjacent track of the survey that partially overlapped the same outcrop and revealed nothing but random rocks. It was exactly like one of those faces one can see in outline on a mountain range that disappear if viewed from a different standpoint. In fact, there was an analogous example in the famous case some years ago of the ‘Face on Mars’ which, as soon as a subsequent probe flew closer and photographed it from another angle, was revealed as an ordinary flat-topped mesa. Naturally, this didn’t stop devotees going on believing it was a giant sculpture or a sacred icon placed there by a lost Martian civilization or some such nonsense. It’s really pathetic what people will believe in their scramble to ditch reason and embrace blah.