Amazing Disgrace (31 page)

‘Well, thank you, Professor,’ says Derek, who has dropped Pavel’s hands and has been squeaking on and off like a true urbanite who just
knows
he should never have left the safety of London.  

‘Pour yourself some more vino,’ I tell him firmly, ‘and
Adrian
and I will go and fetch Marta’s luggage. At the same time we’ll do a recce to convince you that this is nothing out of the ordinary. Come on, Adrian.’  

I grab a torch and turn on the porch light. Outside it is chilly, slightly misty, damp. Everything looks entirely normal if
one doesn’t count the faint psychedelic rainbows. Adrian and I let ourselves through the gate in the fence and retrieve three substantial bags from outside Marta’s back door. Only as we stagger back through the gate do I become aware that something is different.  

‘The world is truly a very different place tonight,’ agrees Adrian, dropping Marta’s luggage to urinate copiously against a lime tree. ‘Oh, very, very different. And yet, somehow, strangely the
same
.’  

‘No, be serious. I mean, doesn’t the house look more, I don’t know,
isolated
or something? A trick of the mist maybe.’  

‘Thanks to Max and Pavel I keep thinking we’re in a Tom and Jerry cartoon. Tom is suddenly going to come flying out through the back door leaving a cat-shaped hole in the woodwork. Then he’s going to whack into this fence and become corrugated all over before he pings back to normal and whizzes back inside to carry on the chase. Or else Butch or Spike or whatever the bulldog was called will come roaring out of his kennel by the garage over there and … You’re absolutely right, Gerry. Something does look different. Where actually
is
your garage?’  

And it isn’t long before we’re standing not too close to the raw edge of a precipice into whose benighted depths my
exgarage
has entirely vanished. There is a strong smell of fresh earth and smashed rocks and popped tree roots. I say
exgarage
because of course since its summer conversion my old stone barn has – had – become the charming self-contained annexe in which Derek and Pavel Taneyev will shortly –
would
shortly have been sleeping. Suddenly the psychedelic effects dwindle and fade and an awful sobriety invades us.  

‘That’s not terribly reassuring, is it?’ says Adrian as my house is revealed as now standing on a small, crude
promontory
on the edge of space. It is obvious that the moonless dark is doing us quite a favour by not revealing the full extent of the chasm on whose lip we are poised.  

‘How safe do you think it is?’ I ask faintly.

‘I should say it could go at any moment,’ he replies. ‘Mind you, I’m speaking as a marine scientist and not as a
professional
geologist. Speaking as a human being, I’d say we’d better get everybody out, pronto.’  

Slowly, we try to run.

The room is silent. Outside the window a freezing January afternoon has darkened to invisibility a Suffolk landscape of sodden fields and bleak twigs. The bed on which I am lying is exactly beneath the pitched ceiling where two sets of oak rafters meet to form a sort of Tudor tent. A cup of tea that
Jennifer
brought me with kind intentions half an hour ago is
cooling
untouched on the bedside table.
Tea
. I am waiting for my six o’clock dose of opium tincture. And after that, if I can
summon
the energy, I am supposed to read to Josh before he goes to bed. He likes little rhymes; but although Crendlesham Hall is now gleaming and builder-free, most of his mother’s books are still in boxes. I have managed to find only a battered copy of Wordsworth’s nursery poems,
Now We Are Seven
, well loved by all except me and Josh, who has made it quite clear that he wants bedtime verses about dinosaurs. He is as little diverted by the doings of Pecksy Redbreast as I am:

I mean to say. It is not much of a challenge to reconfigure this sort of thing so as to accord better with Josh’s interests and primitive sense of humour. Ad-libbing such verses on demand is now my chief form of intellectual exercise.

How have I come to this pathetic invalid state? I almost can’t remember. These days I can scarcely tell what is feverish
memory
and what pure nightmare induced by
Papaver somniferum
. Today, not quite four weeks later, I am still incapable of giving any further account of that appalling night up at Le Roccie. To do justice to the full horror that within minutes turned a
cheerful
birthday celebration into ruin and despair would require the brush of a Géricault, even though
The Raft of the Medusa
’s victims were clearly from an underclass accustomed to brutal reverses of fortune.  

The stampede to evacuate my sweet house, the subsequent nailbiting tiptoeings back inside it to retrieve the essentials of survival and the interminable hours spent cowering under mouldy blankets in Marta’s dank and freezing slum, ready at any moment to dash outdoors – over it all my lacerated spirit draws a merciful veil. Sometimes, while lying here in the
bedroom
in Crendlesham Hall that was intended for Adrian’s occasional use, I am prey to nightmare images that punctuate my laudanum-aided stupor. We were cut off in quaking
mountains
without even a mobile phone signal for company and because of the mist unable even to tell if the lights of Camaiore were still lit down below. Most hideous of all is the memory of standing with my huddled guests at first light, almost insensate with cold and shaking with hangover, driven in panic from Marta’s house by yet another tremor in time to see my own home disappear with an uncanny lack of noise and with – my eyes brim as I write this – a kind of jaunty dignity, the entire pergola cocking up at the last moment in ironic salute.  

Well, whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. I can’t improve on the late Mr Wittgenstein’s unheeded advice to journalists.

I thought I should never smile again. And yet a single event over Christmas has proved me wrong. With something of the inevitability of a Greek tragedy it concerns Millie Cleat: the one person who, no matter how devastated my own life,
reliably
bobs up to hog the headlines. In this instance I can’t
really
complain because she has provided a spectacular distraction from my own woes – so spectacular, indeed, that had she been a fictional character one would have accused the novelist of going too far. But that’s Millie all over: too far is never quite far enough. At the same time I can’t help wondering whether she hasn’t become something of a fixation with me. From time to time I’ve thought about her obsessive quality. Has she
really
been very much ruder, more arrogant, more egotistical than any other of my sporting subjects? Now and then over this last month, when admittedly reduced by grief and opium to a state of profound mental weakness, I have briefly entertained the possibility that I might actually be jealous of her.
Jealous
? Of that one-armed old harridan? Unthinkable under normal
circumstances
, naturally. But when viewed from the pit of utter dejection Millie’s popularity has occasionally seemed enviable. How could it not? Wherever she has gone in the last few years people have surged to touch the hem of her rubber garments, have cheered themselves hoarse when she passed by, have flocked to become her disciples while according her
practically
canonized status. This has been bitter for her biographer to contemplate, lying as he is in abject obscurity in a shuttered room in the wilds of East Anglia. Had
Beldame
sunk beneath Millie she would at once have been presented with a bigger and better yacht, expense no object. Whereas Samper’s poor house can capsize into a ravine, taking with it all his clothes and possessions, and who cares? ‘Minor Tremors Shake
Versilia
,’ reported
Il Tirreno
heartlessly. ‘Limited Damage and No Casualties.’  

Still, survivors do sometimes have the last laugh, as the episode involving Millie on Christmas Day demonstrated. It was a piece of theatre that must surely be as seared into the
memories of a million television viewers as it is safely stored digitally in image banks around the world. As everyone now knows, Australia decided to mark this Christmas with a huge regatta in Sydney Harbour to celebrate that country’s
maritime
history. The ships taking part ranged from a faithful reconstruction of a prison hulk to the latest ‘stealth’ warship built for the Department of Immigration. As a special gesture they gave Millie Cleat pride of place, deciding that
Beldame
with her patriotic green and gold sails should lead the grand flotilla and be first to pass beneath the famous bridge. By now most people Down Under had either forgiven Millie for being British or assumed she was Australian, just as they took it for granted she was the wife as well as the consort of the country’s best-known tycoon. As we know, she was neither Australian nor Lew’s wife, but nobody bothers with the truth on national occasions.  

In due course viewers worldwide saw
Beldame
approaching the magnificent span of Sydney Harbour Bridge. Should a few patriotic eyes have been failing to fill of their own accord, commentators and journalists drew attention with their
customary
inspiration to just how small a craft she was, how
toy-like
by contrast with the great fleet following in her wake, how frail and flimsy in comparison to the world’s oceans she had so gallantly traversed. It was a beautiful blue breezy day and
little
Beldame
was nowhere near under full canvas otherwise she would easily have outstripped half the vessels behind her,
especially
the prison hulk which, we later learned, was leaking authentically. It was a spectacle fit to gladden the heart of the Minister for Tourism who was watching, glass in hand and tear in eye, from the Prime Minister’s residence, Kirribilli House. There were the nested white sails of the Opera House, there the fire tugs moored on either side with their cannons spraying creamy rooster tails of water into the cloudless summer sky. There were the crowds cheering and the lusty booming and wailing of a thousand ships’ sirens and hooters. The cameras zoomed in on
Beldame
to catch Millie alone at the helm in her
best Horatia Nelson pose, her slight figure ramrod straight and her left arm held in rigid salute. I noticed her right arm, too, was equally rigid so today she was evidently wearing one of her polycarbonate versions bent at the elbow across her chest, which must have made it a nightmare trying to get into the jacket of the naval uniform she was certainly not entitled to wear.  

Given her trademark amputee image, I wondered why she had decided to strap on a false arm at all for this occasion. I was idly speculating about such things as her indomitable
vanity
and Lew’s enthusiasm for prosthetic limbs when the extraordinary event took place. She was still a hundred yards short of the bridge when
Beldame
heeled slightly beneath a clout of breeze. Millie evidently decided she would shorten sail or something and we glimpsed her reaching for the various electronic controls with which the yacht was festooned. Another lurch of the boat threw her against the base of the mast. In an instant she was seen to be bodily hoisted off her feet and carried briskly at an awkward angle to the top of the mast where there was some sinister floundering and thrashing. Even as we watched it happen I surmised the automatic hoist she had had installed for carrying out masthead repairs in
midocean
must somehow have malfunctioned, snagged her false arm and run away with her. Maybe it will turn out that the gearing had recently been repaired and wrongly reassembled – only the inevitable inquiry will reveal such details. In any case it was the shocking speed of the transition that stayed in the mind. Within a matter of seconds Horatia Cleat at full salute was whipped a hundred feet skyward as a flailing marionette, her cap falling off and twirling down into
Beldame
’s wake.  

Taken by surprise, the cameras did their best to follow her in close-up but by now the yacht was in the bridge’s shadow and viewers were left with a confused impression of Millie’s left hand waving – or was it trying to reach a halyard? It had all happened so fast that most people assumed this
unconventional
manoeuvre was planned, an extra piece of drama
designed to heighten the triumphal pageantry. They were
mildly
intrigued to see what would happen next when the trimaran emerged on the far side of the bridge. Perhaps Millie was going to lead the regatta from her masthead? It was a gesture that would surely transcend mere pluckiness and reach the level of the heroically dotty.  

From his vantage point in Kirribilli House the Minister for Tourism, despite his reactions being lightly retarded by
Bundaberg
rum, must surely by now have had a blurred
premonition
of disaster. For when the cameras picked Millie up again, once more bathed in brilliant sunshine, it became apparent to everybody that something had gone badly wrong and that the uniformed figure who appeared to be kissing the mast at a cramped and unnatural angle might be beyond making gestures of any kind. Before the cameramen had the presence of mind to jump back into long focus viewers had the impression that Millie was actually pinned by the neck to the hollow titanium mast by a wire rope; but amid the blurred confusion of rigging it was impossible to be sure. We now know, of course, that she was already dead. While the commentators slowly caught on to the fact that this good old Millie they were still chuckling over and praising for her cheeky sense of drama was in fact a corpse, the cameras continued to follow her. The last thing viewers saw in close-up was the slogan on
Beldame
’s foredeck: No Worries. Thereafter it took several minutes for a police launch to summon the nerve to officially spoil the regatta’s
dignity
. It ran alongside the yacht while men in orange life jackets swarmed aboard her. One took over the empty helm while others wrestled with the fused machinery in a vain attempt to bring down the grotesque figurehead. In the event there was nothing for it but to tow the yacht to shore. This was done and a crane jib was extended over her from which dangled a man with cutting equipment. Even now something else went wrong. Before he could get a sling around the defunct mariner the harness of her prosthesis finally snapped and her released body tumbled all the way down to the deck leaving her bent
right arm dangling aloft, trailing straps. All in all, the passing of Millie Cleat lacked solemnity.  

In fact, the gross and global outburst of mawkishness that ensued has made it impossible to view Millie’s demise other than as high comedy. Adrian tells me many of his BOIS
colleagues
phoned to interrupt each other’s family Christmas, eager to ensure that all had heard the news and seen the footage and to urge the opening of yet more champagne. ‘That’ll teach her to ignore COLREGS’ was the general tone, and plans were made for the prompt release to the media of the film of Millie’s near collision in the Canaries to
counterbalance
the lying and fawning obituaries. Heartless it might sound; but as her biographer I am in a much better position than you, dear reader, to know how frightful she really was. And if the flippant among us choose to see the hand of the Spirit of the Deep in her downfall, I would be the last to
dissuade
them. If you will elect to pollute the stately ocean with torrential ciderpresses and mottled mothers shot in the bottom, it’s your own lookout. Neptune is not mocked.  

As for Millie’s own malicious maxim that it is an ill wind that blows somebody else more luck than her, I can only agree it has held true. For the same ill wind that sent
Beldame
heeling
in Sydney Harbour and hanged its skipper from her own masthead has puffed billowing life into my own sales. I have always said that in my line of business a really dramatic and punctual death can do wonders for a book and
Millie!
, having sold very briskly in the two months before Christmas, has now taken off like mad. I gather Champions Press have cudgelled their holidaying printers back to work and are rushing out another hundred thousand copies. The most unlikely countries are at this very moment struggling to translate my prose into their motley languages to catch the tide.