Amazing Disgrace (7 page)

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 these 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.

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.  

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.