Amazing Disgrace Read online

  Adrian is delighted to oblige, bless him. In due course this frame of the original scan appears as an e-mail attachment and The Face glares back at me from my computer screen as though daring me to call the bluff of its non-existence. It is quite a startling image until you know how it was made, and all the better for not being the amended version I had seen in Adrian’s room which had a facetious speech bubble drawn in felt-tip coming out of its mouth saying ‘I can see your bow thruster!!’ Scientists’ humour. I pop round to Frankie’s, blow the picture up, borrow the office printer and make a good hard copy the size of a small poster. I also contact Millie to make a date to see her so she can brief me on the spiritual angle of her character from which she now wishes to be viewed. I suddenly realize that mine is to become the art of the side-scan biographer, expected to conjure up a different portrait by viewing her from a different slant and tinkering with light and shadow. She agrees to see me later in the week when she has ‘prepared her thoughts’. Mine are already prepared, but I prepare them still further with a few hours’ research in the London Library.

  *

  Inevitably, my session with Millie Cleat turns out to be an anticlimax. She really hasn’t anything much to add after all. She is absolutely typical of virtually all my clients, few of whom know what they want, most of whom give me the authorized version of their story, and all of whom think I have got the facts completely wrong when they read the final draft. It is true that in Millie’s case I did rely on her husband Clifford for some background stuff, especially as regards her introduction to sailing. Not having been born yesterday I even took the trouble to find an old boy who had given her lessons back in her Ruislip Lido days. Now Millie wants me to write that her parents used to take her on holiday to Salcombe, where she began to mess about in boats from the age of three. I’ve no doubt it’s all baloney, and tell her frankly that we don’t have the time to track down some octogenarian Devonian skipper who might remember her and give a plausible Cap’n Birdseye performance. I shall incorporate this wholly uncorroborated claim as part of the gospel according to Cleat. No skin off my nose, after all. I’ve long since given up hoping I shall never knowingly have to lie in print.

  As for her alleged new spiritual side, Millie’s not much help in documenting this, either. What it looks like to me is that some time over the last year she has been taken up by a clique of worshippers who see in her everything she sees in herself, and then some. I get an impression of grizzled ladies with cabin cruisers and small, irritable dogs who spend a lot of time in chandlers’ shops looking at galley stoves and stout clothing. With them are younger ladies, busily shedding ill-advised marriages and struggling for self-expression. Swathed in pashminas, they bring a New Age soulfulness to the gin-and-gaspers ethos of their older companions. All of them adore Millie Cleat. They think she is a total heroine because she has scorned the elements, triumphed over anno domini, shaken a fist at losing an arm, risen above family life and forged an intimate private relationship with the ocean such that something of the divinity of nature has rubbed off on her. I now suspect Millie has become quite dependent on these admirers to bolster her view of herself. It’s one of the great pitfalls of celebrity: terrific for the ego but dealing a death-blow to both intelligence and a sense of humour. I gather there is an authoress whom similar fawners have convinced she is practically a reincarnation of Shakespeare. Poor Millie may be becoming equally delusional.

  Admittedly this theory is my own invention, based simply on trying to read between the lines she spouts with a faraway look in those sun-bleached eyes of hers. We are sitting in her new Hilton suite – this time with a view over nothing more sensitive than the rooftops of Mayfair. I notice her telescope has vanished and with it her Horatia Nelson persona. Today she is rather plain and earnest, rambling on without coming up with any new information. She merely repeats that on her record-breaking voyages she has often felt as though she were in the hands of a benign, powerful force. This is not much in the way of grist to the mill of a malign, powerless biographer, but we work with what we’re given.

  ‘The Canaries,’ I say when at last there’s a lull. ‘The other day you asked me to remind you to mention the Canaries. What was that about?’

  ‘Oh yes. You know I told you that on the last leg I sometimes felt it was like somebody else’s hand on the helm?’

  ‘Um,’ I say cautiously. ‘As I understand it, Millie, for most of the time you didn’t exactly have your own hand on the tiller anyway. Wasn’t it under computerized control?’ The next thing we know, she’ll start hoping to see her Autopilot face to face / When she has crost the bar.

  ‘There you go again, Gerry. I don’t literally mean I felt something had taken over the steering. More that it felt as if my fate was out of my hands.’

  ‘Or hand, to be precise,’ I stopped myself from saying. ‘And this happened around the Canaries, is that it?’

  ‘To the south. About a day before I reached La Palma. I suddenly felt we could do no wrong, me and Beldame. We’d picked up the wind just where I’d predicted and we were really beginning to fly. It was as if the wind and the sea had joined forces just to get us to the Solent quicker than I could ever have managed on my own. Really. But there, I’ve always been super-sensitive to the ocean’s living principle. You see, Gerry, I’ve absolutely no doubt that the sea is alive in some mysterious way. A sentient entity with a mind of its own. And I think that we, the human race, are committing the utmost folly in the way we are rubbishing the oceans, polluting them with chemicals and noise and trashing the animal life for our own selfish and short-sighted ends. I’ve always believed this, Gerry, and it’s missing from your book. It’s a vital part of what makes me the world’s best. When I sail, I sail with humility and respect. And it pays off. The ocean knows I’m on its side.’

  Golly, what hubristic poppycock! How right I was! The old girl’s been got at. A year ago it was all ‘She’ll be right!’ and blistering curses she must have picked up from Antipodean friends and boatyards. Now it’s ‘the ocean’s living principle’ and ‘a sentient entity’: the pashmina phrases of people who have dabbled their fingers in the Age of Aquariums. ‘We, the human race.’ Blimey.

  ‘Okay,’ I say in the brisk and businesslike tone of the cosmetic wordsmith called in to advise on a difficult case, ‘we can fix that. But can you give me any idea of when you first felt this coming on? I remind you that you never mentioned it last year. It’s all new to me.’

  ‘If I never mentioned it in so many words, Gerry, it must be because it’s so much a part of me. There never was a moment when I “felt this coming on”, as you put it. I just am by nature a spiritual person and always have been. I can’t help it.’

  ‘Fine. Well – I’m thinking aloud here – how would it be if, instead of my trying to shoehorn little reminders of your native spirituality into the book as it stands, we were to write an entirely new short chapter about it and stick it in the middle? Something with gravitas and weight to give stability to the rest of the text? Like lowering a centreboard,’ I add with the offhand ease of a master of metaphor. Maybe after all it is G. Samper who is the reincarnation of W. Shakespeare.

  ‘Brilliant, Gerry!’ exclaims Millie, and would have clapped her hands. ‘That’s a marvellous solution. A chapter all about my soul and its relationship with the sea, and let that speak for the rest of the book. Good. How soon can you do it?’

  You may be thinking that, despite wanting to get shot of Millie and her wretched book in the shortest possible time, I am letting myself in for far more work. Surely writing an entire new chapter will be much more laborious than inserting snippets here and there? No, actually. It could take for ever to add soulful asides without doing grave damage to the overall tone, which is one of ghastly can-do breeziness masking a steely determination. It will actually be far easier and more plausible to change gear radically somewhere in the middle to invoke a different Millie, a hitherto unsuspected Millie, a Millie full of spiritual rapport with th
e oceans she sails over. It matters not that I can feel my breakfast borne upwards on a surge of gastric reflux at the thought of the piffle I shall have to write. This is the professional’s way forward. And it is also part of Samper’s master plan.

  ‘You know, Millie,’ I say in a tone somewhere between earnest and deeply moved, ‘maybe you and I have more than a little in common after all. Tell me, do you believe in Neptune?’

  ‘Wasn’t he the ancient god of the sea?’

  ‘Quite right. Neptune was the name the Romans gave the much older Greek god Poseidon. When the universe was divided up between his brothers and sisters, Poseidon was given the sea to rule. He was also the god of the winds and earthquakes and was notoriously temperamental. When in a good mood he made the sea calm and commanded new land to emerge from it. In bad moods he would strike the land with the gigantic trident he carried, causing earthquakes, storms at sea, shipwrecks and drownings. He lived in a palace on the seabed off the biggest of the Greek islands, Evvoia, where he kept his chariot and a stud farm for breeding horses.’

  ‘Seahorses?’

  ‘Not at all. The real things. Poseidon seems to have been the god of horses as well, and he certainly identified with them. When he wanted to have sex with his sister Demeter she turned herself into a mare in the hopes of thwarting his advances. She should have known her brother better because he simply changed into a stallion and advanced all the same. Some time later she gave birth to a foal. They led complicated lives in those days.’

  Millie is giving me a puzzled look. ‘Why are you telling me this, Gerry?’

  ‘Because if you’re interested in the sea being, um, sentient and divine, mightn’t you want to reflect on your own feelings having ancient roots common throughout pre-Christian history? Maybe those are what you’re tapping into now. A sort of Jungian thing. Of course, I’m only throwing this out as an idea for bulking out this new chapter I have to write. A different Millie and so on, in touch with primordial deities.’

  Now she becomes a bit more animated as the implications begin to dawn on her. ‘But that’s marvellous, Gerry darling. It means I didn’t imagine it and that people have always felt like me. I can relate to that, all right. I don’t mean the palaces on the seabed stuff, obviously, though I know lots of people who believe in Atlantis.’

  I bet she does. ‘Most of them probably think Atlantis is an archaeological site they hope will be found one day. A sort of drowned city where a fabulous civilization once lived. No doubt the very looniest are expecting there to be people in togas strolling its streets beneath two thousand fathoms of water. Forget Atlantis, Millie. It’s a complete red herring.’

  ‘Right. Of course I don’t believe myself in people walking about on the seabed. But the idea of Poseidon being some sort of …’

  ‘… Gaia figure …?’

  ‘… Gaia figure, exactly, Gerry. A spirit of the deep, a sacred principle of the sea. And those with the right sensitivity can harmonize with it. And that’s what happened to me off the Canaries. That’s why I broke the record. It was the strangest sensation.’

  ‘Well, anyway,’ I say, thoroughly disgusted with myself but thinking that several pages of wacky discourse along these lines will enable me to polish off this new chapter in fairly short order, ‘I’ll just leave you with these thoughts. Oh, and with this as well,’ and from my briefcase I produce my rolled-up printout of ‘The Face’. Without unrolling it I say: ‘This is a picture taken from a sonar scan of the seabed off the Canaries. It was made during an oceanographical survey that was taking place as you passed through. Remember – in the book you thought the ships you saw might have been cable-laying vessels? They were actually doing a big seismic and bottom-profiling survey. On one of the passes they made they saw this on the seabed over a thousand metres down.’ This is, of course, a lie: the scan came from somewhere off Hawaii. But what the hell, what I need is the effect. With quiet drama I unroll the poster and hold it up. And I must admit that even I feel a curious chill as the creature’s eyeball and haunted gaze stare out across Millie’s Hilton suite with its baleful charisma. ‘Strange, isn’t it? It’s just an artefact of the technology – a trick of the way the sonar pulses were scattered around the rocks on the bottom. I can’t remember the scale offhand but that image will be several hundred metres across, maybe even half a kilometre. Anyway, I’ll leave it with you and see you again in a few days’ time when you’ve had a think about things.’

  On this disreputable mixture of cod mythology and half-truths, exit G. Samper.

  8

  You catch me in sunny mood today. Not only do I not have to see Millie Cleat but Adrian has called to say I shall soon be able to meet the great Max Christ. His sister Jennifer has promised to arrange a dinner either in Suffolk or up here in London at their pied-à-terre. The mere prospect of meeting Christ makes my knees suddenly weak. I fear I may not be worthy of him. It’s preposterous. Can you imagine Gerald Samper in a crisis of confidence? The man whose Norman ancestors, on encountering British cuisine for the first time at Hastings, earned the name ‘Sans Peur’? Nevertheless, I’m fearful of my own anxiety. I’m anxious to make a good impression and for my professional life to take a steep upward turn, and there’s nothing more potentially disastrous than wanting something too badly. I do hope Jennifer lets me know in good time where our dinner will be because I shall have to go shopping first. The one thing one learns from living in Italy is the paramount importance of clothes. It’s not that they say anything important about you, but that people believe they do.

  While in London I’m staying with Derek, a complete slut and old friend who works in Josiah Corcoran’s, the Jermyn Street hair salon so fashionable that people wait for months for an appointment, by which time heavy-duty scissorwork is necessary. For all that Corcoran’s trades behind discreet gold lettering as befits the generally austere, bespoke dignity of Jermyn Street, it is informally known to its employees and certain of its customers as ‘Blowjob’. Derek’s life is seriously haywire and most of the time I have his flat to myself, where with my customary kindness I carry out the basic maintenance and DIY work he’s utterly incapable of. Last night he stayed out, no doubt to bump uglies, so this morning I can take my measurements in the bathroom without fear of interruption. By some magical synchronicity today also happens to see me rupture the very last hymen of silver foil on the very last bubble pack of ProWang’s Pow-r-TabsTM. I should never live it down if Derek were to burst into the bathroom at this critical juncture: it would simply confirm his fantasy that I’m vain. Mind you, anybody wanting to maintain a minimal presentability would appear vain to Derek. We’re much the same age, give or take, but to be brutally honest you would hardly know it to look at him. It surely can’t just be genetic. It must have something to do with our respective lifestyles: his in the fleshpots of the metropolis and mine in the pure outdoor spaces of a Tuscan mountainside. I once lent him a pair of my treasured Homo Erectus jeans when he wanted to cut a dash, poor lamb, and instead of their denim contours filling nicely with the accustomed trim Samper posterior they just hung on him so that his buttocks looked like a couple of grapes in a paper bag, creases and crinkles everywhere. Being one of nature’s diplomats I assured him he looked marvellous, and off he pranced to Wimbledon Common or Hampstead Heath or somewhere too dark for it to matter. Somehow Derek seems to have reversed the old adage and has managed to use it and lose it. But he’s good company in small doses and I now think he should seriously consider a course of silicone shots in his bottom.

  These light-hearted thoughts grow a little heavier as I ply the tape measure and suddenly become relieved that my own course has ended. Since I have conducted this scientific experiment on my own behalf and not on yours I decline to give exact figures. I will say, however, that overall growth has been consistent and still shows alarmingly few signs of slowing down. I should emphasize that things were perfectly satisfactory in the first place and it was only sheer curiosity that induced me to try out the Chinese co
uple’s miracle pills. Like all people of sensibility I’m a great believer in the aesthetic appeal of perfect proportions. One has one’s new Stiff Lips jeans to think of, and enough veal is enough. I’m content to settle for the happy medium, or Epimedium in this case. It’s the orchic substance that’s worrying. I think it may have set off a storm along that endocrine coastline of mine. I can all too vividly picture the waves of hormones breaking along the grim cliffs of the thyroid isthmus, the islets of Langerhans now hidden behind scudding curtains of spray. For the first time I’m wondering if there’s an antidote.