Amazing Disgrace (25 page)

My progress northward along the east side of Beaumont Street is marked by my mellifluous rendition of this little-heard
number
. As I come abreast of a stone portico a large lady in beige appears at the top of the shallow flight of steps and hurries down, her face bruised with rage.  

‘This is a
hospital!
’ she hisses. ‘Disgraceful! Noise like that!
Private
hospital! Entitled to peace! And quiet! Certain patients! Gravely ill!’  

With some difficulty I drag myself away from the Tower of London and return to the twenty-first century.  

‘Aha,’ I say, looking up at the building’s dingy façade. ‘Isn’t this where duchesses come on dark nights to give birth to babies fathered by gamekeepers? Or am I wrong?’  

‘Disgraceful! Din! Hospital! Some people …!’  

Spirits appreciably lifted, I saunter onwards to Derek’s perfumed pad to make myself a well-deserved cup of tea.

Ten days drag by, leaving me chafing. It is all well and good that I have apparently overcome the whole costly Pow-r-Tabs
^TM
episode, but the ads – and worse – are still there each time I turn on my computer. How far have we sunk when we receive letters from total strangers beginning ‘Hey, cute dolls moan from harsh insertions. Click to hear’? Even more incredible that we now take it for granted, wearily. Apart from that, I suppose these are days of some minor importance to me since the events have direct
consequences
for the future of Samper Enterprises Inc. However, as I predicted these with flawless accuracy they lack the interest that might otherwise have compensated for my enforced stay.

First of all, stout Joan of the Sealyham terriers phones to tell me she has passed on my message to Millie about attempts being made to raise a container of mystic voices from the seabed off the Canaries. According to her, a long and
thoughtful
silence fell at the other end of the phone, as well it might. This is more than could be said for my conversation with Joan, which is sporadically interrupted by terrific outbursts of
barking
and rich naval expletives. For the life of me I can’t
understand
why the unexceptional fact of being lesbian should so often entail living in conditions of canine mayhem. It makes ordinary human intercourse so difficult. However, I’m
confident
enough of how Millie will react to Joan’s news to be
satisfied
we’ve reached a turning point. As soon as I’ve rung off I find myself extemporizing a triumphant little song:

Next, Frankie rings in some alarm to say that Brill’s agent has been in touch to draw up a contract for the boy band leader’s autobiography. I owe Frankie an apology for not having kept him abreast of developments. I pay this debt and explain that I’m ninety-nine per cent certain Millie Cleat is about to have a change of heart where her public role is concerned, and this in turn will almost certainly mean her pulling out of our book project. I commiserate with him because, after all, Frankie takes ten per cent plus VAT of whatever I earn and a
Millie!
sequel would have kept the office in paperclips for about seven thousand years, allowing for inflation.  

‘You’re sure it’s dead?’ he asks plaintively, from the sound of it coughing up live pulmonary tissue.  

‘It has to be.’ I recount what has happened. ‘Just wait, Frankie. Have faith. The old fraud’s got no alternative but to recant.’  

‘You realize
Millie!
’s selling a streak? Champions are already reprinting. Another thirty thousand in hardback and looks like building.’  

‘If we’re not careful we’ll be earning out our advance.’  

‘Didn’t I tell you? The woman’s a national institution. And this isn’t even the proper Christmas market yet. It’s
such
a pity about that sequel,’ he adds wistfully.  

‘Not to the man who was going to have to write it,
surrounded
by Neptune’s courtiers, coral huggers and people worried about whether clams might be more self-aware than limpets. I’ve already gone the extra mile for Cleat, Frankie. That chapter I added about her spiritual depth is not only a masterpiece of tactful exaggeration, it says everything that can be said about a small, ageing woman with one arm
confronting
the ocean’s grand immensity and discovering that she is a small, ageing woman with one arm. Not to mention a dysfunctional family in Pinner. Anyway, Frankie, if you ask me Nanty Riah’s a damned good prospect. I wouldn’t care to say whether Brill is more or less of a celebrity than Millie, would you?’

‘No. Different publics, but equally mega. Actually, Brill probably has the edge internationally. And he’s got the kids. I doubt if too many teenagers see a one-armed sailing granny as a role model.’  

‘There you are, then. It’s up to you to cut a deal that will keep us all in paperclips to the grave and beyond.’  

I can’t remember if it was that night or the following
morning
a shocked nation learned that on the advice of her doctors Millie Cleat was reluctantly resigning her position as the
titular
head of Neptune. She gave a careful interview to the
Guardian
in which she let slip having some mild misgivings about the direction being taken by certain younger activists working on behalf of the marine environment. She wondered (and here I could imagine a single brown forefinger laid
pensively
along her chin, another thespian gesture she’d picked up), she
did
wonder whether a small minority of the Deep Blue movement might not be risking their credibility by adopting certain controversial, even extreme, positions at a time when the urgent need was surely to unite blah-blah since only by harnessing concerned public opinion blah-blah hope to stave off disaster.  

This was adroitly done as, with the spate waters of the river of lost credibility foaming dangerously around her suddenly limping thoroughbred, Millie leaped lightly onto the broad back of an exculpatory Suffolk Punch and lumbered safely to the shore. Just in time, too. For within a day Adrian called via Inmarsat link to announce that the container had just been retrieved, its babbling contents silenced, and that a great hush had at last fallen in the water column. Thanks to Millie’s
bareback
– not to say barefaced – equestrianism, our plot to leak the Neptune-on-the-seabed story to the press is now in abeyance until I can see Adrian again and we can re-plan our campaign. However, the story’s sheer absurdity ensures it will surface sooner or later. Old Millie has done a good job of
getting
clear in the nick of time, leaving the Brilovs and Tammeris and Debras to face the general derision when it comes. I fancy
they will soon know what it feels like to cower beneath a
torrential
downpour of ciderpresses.  

Once my contract with Nanty has been drawn up and signed there is at last nothing further to keep me in London. It is now November and I have been away the best part of a month: a fact brought home to me the moment I retrieve my slightly dusty car from Pisa airport car park. Really, at that price the damned machine might as well have been lounging in the matrimonial suite of a provincial hotel on full board and room service. As usual, my mood improves as I gain
altitude
on the winding road up to Casoli and beyond. In my absence the forests have changed colour, leaves are thinning, the dark bones showing through. Another year passing,
goddamn
it. My house when I reach it glows in the afternoon sun but inside it has the dankness of a stone building that has not been aired. I bustle about, throwing open shutters and windows and laying in wood for the fire. By the time I have unpacked I need to close the windows again. At this altitude the waning afternoon sunlight is thin and there is a sharp dampness in the air outside.

The worst thing about arriving home after a trip is that it can lead to a banal and melancholy reflectiveness, as though occasionally one needed to be elsewhere the better to view one’s normal life. Our brains are mawkishly wired up and I now try to short-circuit this process by taking an inventory of something much more significant, viz., the contents of my larder and freezer. I had forgotten there is little enough. A tray of fish lollies made from a base of the exquisite
sorrel-flavoured
juice exuded by a baked halibut some months ago. An experimental sausage, salami-style, made principally from doves I bought in quantity from a man in Casoli who no longer wanted to keep them. He also wanted to be rid of his late wife’s four irksome budgerigars, so I added them to the dove meat. But just at this moment I’m not in the mood for
cold dove-’n’-budgie sausage. My minds keeps breaking off and coming to rest in recent scenes, especially those connected with health matters. That those humiliating encounters with doctors took place many hundreds of miles away ought to make them less real, mere episodes peculiar to
there
. But what with them and my imminent birthday – yes, all right,
fiftieth
birthday – the shades of recent consulting rooms wield a
psychic
heft out of proportion to their individual weight. And even as I think it, the thought strands me in a cold house in autumn on the edge of a precipice.  

I light the fire and turn up the central heating and then before it gets too dark find my torch and take a turn over to Marta’s place to give it the once over. When I unlock her back door – not forgetting to trap a cobble in the jamb – the air is actually colder inside than out. Both smell and silence are of the tomb. In the last month it has slumped from being an abandoned house to a forgotten burial chamber. No smell of corruption as such, more the breath of blind,
vegetal
things that feed on the thin amino acids corruption once left behind. Entering the kitchen I notice the family-vault smell is stronger and I remember the fridge with the great grey nodding fungus I briefly glimpsed inside during the summer. In the torchlight it looks as though the fridge door is no longer sealed completely shut. Can there be a hairline gap between the grey plastic gasket and the surround, as if some slow but implacably growing mycelial muscle is
shouldering
its way out? I resist the temptation to push the door experimentally with a fingertip, not wanting to send whirling puffs of spores up into my face. Marta’s problem, I say to myself as before. But truthfully, I no longer believe she will come back. The utter deadness of her former home is freighted with the implication that she, too, has long been in her grave. Jackals have already crunched the last marrow from her bones somewhere in the Syrian desert. Or she has been bulldozed into an anonymous pit together with others, their wrists bound behind them in the contemporary
manner
of political killings. I very much fear I have seen the last of poor Marta.  

I lock the back door behind me and as I turn towards my own house I spy a glimmering of white on the ground among the leggy brown remains of summer’s hollyhocks nearby. Had this been the Shropshire of my childhood home I would have expected a windblown scrap of paper with a message in faded biro reading ‘Two pints please’ in my mother’s hand. This being Italy forty years later, however, it is a business card: a
little
flabby with damp and with a snail’s silver tread crossing it. The print is perfectly legible. It reads: ‘Studio Benedetti. Soluzioni immobiliari’, with various phone numbers and his office address in Camaiore. Oho, so our weaseloid house agent has been back, has he? And this despite my having told him in front of Baggy and Dumpy that Marta’s house is emphatically not for sale?  

But maybe it is, I think with alarm as I close the door in the fence behind me and thread my way back through the dark trees towards my own home’s welcoming lit rectangles. Maybe this time he really does know something about Marta’s fate. Perhaps a member of that sinister Eastern bloc family of hers has already put it on the market? Which means I ought to move pretty smartly if I want to ensure my new neighbours won’t be second-home owners from Leatherhead or Linz or Liège with teenage boys eager to practise their drum kits amid the uncomplaining wilderness of these hills. By comparison, old Marta is belatedly beginning to feel like my ideal neighbour, her own occasional electronic sounds and Petrov piano noises merely the signs of a fellow
professional
at work. How well we got on together! She played and scribbled, and I scribbled and sang. And if my memories are not of complete neighbourly harmoniousness at all times, our late rapport was becoming practically conjugal. Better, actually, from my experience of most people’s marriages. All of which makes it imperative that I pay Benedetti a visit after the weekend.

In the meantime the pleasure of being home again seeps into every pore, like one of those alleged muscle relaxants you add to bathwater to soothe away aches. Friends like Derek used to express incredulity that I could ever live outside London, let alone in a place where English is not the first language. I have long since grown tired of explaining that my reasons for living here are not so much because I find Italian culture, cuisine and general approach to the art of living superior to those of
contemporary
Britain – though I do – but because it is still a place where one can affordably combine those advantages with
non-negotiable
essentials such as silence and being able to see the stars. Almost the only lights visible in the night sky in southern England are those of police helicopters and passenger jets stacked for Stansted, Heathrow and Gatwick. I doubt if the Milky Way has been visible to Londoners since the blackout during the Second World War. What kind of a place is that to live? Of what use the intellectual delights of libraries, cinemas, galleries and concert halls if one’s whole sensory apparatus is dulled and occluded, one’s pores irretrievably blocked? Tonight, it is true, I can’t actually sit out on my terrace because it is too chilly. But when I turn off the kitchen lights and sit by the window I can see a canopy of stars despite the ever-
growing
puddle of lights far below spreading to blur Camaiore into Viareggio. And I need only step outside the door to hear the night breeze finding its way through the grasses and the leaves letting go autumn’s branches. For reasons I can’t explain, such things are important to see and hear; and not just once (seen that, heard that) but as a daily constant, as necessary as my pulse. Hence my horror two or three years ago at discovering I had a fat, frizzy-haired Voynovian neighbour and my fury over Benedetti having lied to me about her when I bought this house. Now as I wash up after a scratch meal I reflect on the irony that the mere passage of time has lent him a spurious veracity. Mouse-quiet Marta certainly is these days. And as for her frizzy hair, I can’t help seeing it bowling like a pathetic fragment of tumbleweed across the dry bed of a wadi.