Amazing Disgrace (17 page)

While she was writing her first book
? The woman is truly shameless. In fact, she’s so outrageous I can’t even feel outrage. At least it means that if she’s claiming everything I write as her own work then I can afford to make her next book really prize-winningly mediocre. If it’s to be my swan song then I intend to go out on a low note. Meanwhile, Queen Neptunia’s courtiers are goggling up at me in a suitably fishlike manner and I simper back at them, weakly.  

‘How do you mean, “translating”?’ I ask Millie. ‘Surely those weird noises can’t have been a language?’ But silent glee begins seeping into my bloodstream. Can she really have
swallowed
it?  

‘Tricia Brilov is an actual professor of languages, Gerry. You’ve probably heard of her. She’s a distinguished academic as well as a founder member of Neptune. She was the first person I thought of when you sent me that wonderful CD, her being so brilliant.’ (Really, these autodidacts’ reverence for anyone with some two-bit PhD to their name! It’s high time I began flaunting my A levels, gained at a time when they awarded them to people who could actually read and write and didn’t think ‘good’ was an adverb.) ‘She spotted at once that those apparently random noises really
are
a language. What do you think of that?’  

‘I’m amazed,’ I say truthfully. ‘But if it’s a language, who is it talking down there at the bottom of the sea? Many experts believe this is impossible.’  

‘Exactly!’ Millie cries triumphantly. ‘The answer to that question could be the most important piece of knowledge the human race has ever been given. It could be absolutely crucial to our future and to the planet’s survival. Tricia’s partner, Isolde Tammeri, is her ex-student and a visionary of genius besides being a brilliant scholar herself. She at once confirmed it. Some
kind of speech is going on down there and at the moment we can only guess at who or what might be responsible.’  

I am fascinated by this drivel, as I am by a tiny scarlet fish that blunders into Millie’s hollow thumb, turns around and bumps into a knuckle from inside. From where I’m standing the confusion of polycarbonate and Waterford crystal is such that I almost expect the animal to start swimming up the stem of the glass she’s holding and choke to death in her gin and tonic.  

One of Queen Neptunia’s courtiers is nodding, a blonde girl with a pronounced overbite and exopthalmic blue eyes. Just as I might notice a well-stuffed pair of jeans, I notice she is
sporting
a well-stuffed white T-shirt inside her black leather jacket. ‘It’s incredibly exciting what Tricia and Isolde have translated so far,’ she assures me in the tones of Roedean or Cheltenham, managing to sound cool yet flirty at the same time. ‘True, we can’t yet understand everything the voices are saying, but we’re certainly getting a sense of it. I don’t know how familiar you are with the field of logogrammatic assay, but standard linguistic techniques of bitword frequency analysis and
Junghans
semantic algorithms have yielded some really suggestive stuff – more than enough to prove there’s nothing imaginary or fake about this.’

Millie is gazing at her fondly. ‘That’s Debra,’ she explains to me. ‘She’s absolutely brilliant, too. Give Gerry a drink, Debra, and then you can read him some of the translation and let him decide for himself.’ She waves a gracious hand towards a
minibar
that might have been thrown together by the same Regency craftsman who was responsible for the TV console in the corner. From this cabinet a reassuringly generous g-&-t is conjured for me and I am offered one of the scrolled and fluted chairs. A respectful silence falls as Debra plants her feet and begins to read to us from a folder in her beautifully modulated voice.  

‘“Many, many fear and is torrential, torrents in tribe our ciderpress family beseech. Turnip flagons walls with holes
oncoming, coming on flying, flying tribe under many fear. Fear, fear, many ciderpress holes.”’ (‘We’re not yet absolutely sure “ciderpress” is right. Or “turnip”,’ she confides in a scholarly aside.) ‘Er, “Ciderpress holes push on red clouds. Veins, veins press together cider, dark mottles shot in the
bottom
. The mother many fearful lost under bottoms. Torrential fear in devoted shell-drift. Torrential bottoms over and
torments
dead tribe. Oh tubby unpushed turnips! Oh flagons family!”’

There is a pause. As is usual at moments of other people’s high seriousness I am concentrating on not laughing. What this gibberish instantly reminds me of is one of those alleged translations of the Voynich manuscript, a mysterious
document
that was probably written as a scam by an Elizabethan con-man. The Voynich’s Renaissance hand is deceptively clear and the words appear in the normal patterns of a language, yet the language itself remains unidentified despite the best efforts of scholars and linguists with all the help that computers can bring. It is almost certainly meaningless: a brilliant
simulacrum
of a text designed to trick Rudolf II into buying this apparently ancient and impenetrably mysterious book for his royal library. This has not discouraged several amateur sleuths from presenting their own ‘translations’, all of which are
precisely
the kind of nonsense that Debra has just been spouting to her respectful audience. It was the word ‘veins’ that
reminded
me of a fragment of one Voynich translation that goes: ‘It is clothed with veinlets; tiny teats they provide (or live upon) in the outpimpling of the veinlets.’ It seems to me that Tricia and Isolde’s rendering into near-English of the electronic blithering of a load of transponders shares that exact outpimpling
quality
. What is it about veins, anyway? Debra is watching me with an indulgent smile.

‘I agree, Gerry,’ she concedes. ‘At first hearing it does seem obscure. But these are spirit voices. When you’ve worked on the text and studied it and lived with it as we have, something of its true meaning starts to come through. As I said, we have
our doubts about whether we’ve read all the words correctly, especially “turnip” and “ciderpress”, and we’re not quite sure about “flagons”, either. At first sight they don’t seem to have many connections with the undersea world. Still, it’s obvious that the first sentence has to mean there is a family, a tribe,
living
in extreme fear. Fear of what? What else can “walls with holes oncoming” describe but fishing nets, probably drift nets? To underwater creatures the nets would seem to be flying through the air even as they themselves are flying – or fleeing – the oncoming nets. Now look at “The mother many fear lost under bottoms.” If you visualize the sea-creatures’ world and look upwards towards the surface, what do you see but
bottoms
? The bottoms of ships, obviously, the trawlers and
factory
ships deploying the nets that threaten the mother. Just look at her anguished face –’ and Debra nods reverently towards the picture on the wall behind Millie. ‘We think the “red clouds” might also refer to ships’ hulls, which are commonly coated with red antifouling paint. Actually, that was Millie’s own idea. It’s a brilliant insight because it makes complete sense without straining the translation. And don’t forget that a “bottom” is recognized maritime terminology for a ship, notably in the insurance business, so it’s technically right as well. And now we can understand the intense fear in the “devoted shell-drift”, which is obviously the Great Mother’s marine family who lament the “dead tribe”, meaning those billions of sisters and brothers they have lost to the brutal international whaling and fishing fleets. What we have here is an impassioned cry of anguish by the creatures of the sea who are hurting from the savage despoliation of their habitat. The kingdom of Neptune, if you like.’  

Debra pauses for breath, clearly moved by her own fervour. All eyes are on me except Millie’s. Her attention is fixed on the little glittering creatures performing aquabatics in her arm: the Great Mother smiling at her flying tribe. My
attention
is taken by something else. In an awkward compartment of my consciousness an awareness has been growing that for
no discernible reason Samper has acquired a stubborn
erection
. I take a distracted swig of gin.  

‘You don’t think there may be some wiggle-room in this interpretation?’ I venture. ‘As it stands, it seems to leave out all the difficult bits. For instance, what was that stuff about
mottled
veins being shot in the bottom? It sounds more like a bad case of piles than a complaint about fisheries.’  

‘Both Tricia and Isolde agree that sentence isn’t fully clear at the moment,’ Debra says severely. ‘Still, it’s obvious that
whatever
it means, it can’t detract from the overall sense.’  

‘That it can’t.’ Lordy! Hook, line
and
sinker. Adrian will be ecstatic. Privately, I never really imagined that, uncanny as they are, those noises from the deep would fool anyone into believing they were made by living entities holding some sort of underwater discourse. I now appreciate that as a despairing marine scientist Adrian must be pretty familiar with Deep Blue thinking. And because he was around when the
fundamentalist
wing formed itself into the Loony Neptunies he would have understood much better than I that beyond a certain mysterious point any remaining ideological content in these movements becomes swamped by its nuttier members’ sheer torrential outpimpling. Throw in a picture like The Face and suddenly Poseidon is back on his throne on the seabed
somewhere
off the Canaries, calling for an end to drift-netting with the voice of a transponder.  

‘Anyway,’ Millie says, still watching the tiny fish chasing one another in her forearm, ‘now they’ve broken the code so brilliantly the translation is coming along much faster. They hope to have the whole CD done by Christmas. But it’s already clear what it will be. Yes – it will be repetitious. Of course it will, because it’s a message to us, one that needs to be
repeated
over and over again until we arrogant humans understand it. It’s both a cry of anguish, as Debra says, and a terrible warning we ignore at our peril. If it hadn’t been for that moment of enlightenment, that sudden
satori
I was given when I was approaching the Canaries in
Beldame
, I, too,
might still be oblivious to the awful damage we are doing our chances of survival on this planet. The sea is truly our Mother. It is She who ultimately gives us life. If we wreck Her, we will perish. Luckily, She spoke to me that night and told me not to fear, She would send me good winds and I was going to break the record. But in return She made it clear that I must make Her message known. She told me about the abominable slaughter of Her dearest children by long-line fishing fleets. It’s truly appalling, Gerry. They catch all sorts of poor creatures other than fish, you know. Things like turtles and sea birds. Not even that magnificent wanderer, the albatross, is spared. Hooked, pulled under and drowned.’  

‘So you might say these long-liners were committing
albatrossities
?’  

‘
Really
, Gerry! I’m surprised at you. There’s nothing remotely funny about it.’  

Her disciples mirror Millie’s reprimand by jerking their heads slightly while making small sounds of disgust. No,
Samper
, this is not the way to win friends. You were right to
wonder
how unserious you can afford to be.  

‘I wasn’t laughing,’ I protest.  

‘You made a bad joke of it, which is much the same.’  

‘There are more ways of being serious than by being serious.’  

Millie looks at me pityingly. ‘Well, I agree it’s hard for you to break with your old ways all of a sudden, Gerry. I myself have changed so much since writing my book with you and it’s wrong of me to expect you to have done the same. But I promise the more we work together the more you will understand.’ Her attention is again caught by a tiny fish like polished shrapnel moving in her arm. I have to admire the old girl: her brachial aquarium is a real show-stopper. ‘Look at that,’ she says in a hushed whisper. ‘It’s like a flake of pure light. Sheer miracle.’  

Time for Samper to strike back. ‘Hardly that, surely,’ I say in a crotchety, rational tone. ‘Just evolution.’  

‘You sound just like a scientist, Gerry,’ says Millie. It is not a compliment.

‘Who, me? No, more of a cook, really. But thanks to you, dear Millie, in the course of
helping
you write your book I did meet quite a few scientists, so I suppose I must have picked up bits of this and that. Still, I can’t help agreeing with the
character
in Norman Douglas who found everything wonderful and nothing miraculous.’  

‘I have never heard of your Mr Douglas,’ says Millie with a touch of her former Lady Bracknell. ‘But we mustn’t be too hard. As I say, it’s early days yet and I’m absolutely certain that when you know more about the true nature of the ocean you, too, will find your scepticism dissolving and will come to understand how miraculous it is. And that is the only word for it.’ She turns to her disciples. ‘Gerry and I get on famously, of course. But just now and then he loves to be provocative. I expect it’s good for me, really, to be teased a bit. And we must none of us forget it was Gerry who introduced me to the Mother and Her message.’  

Everyone instinctively looks towards the flower-decked icon on the wall. It glowers back in an abstracted fashion, or as well as something entirely imaginary can. For the first time I notice a faint resemblance to whoever it was in Edvard Munch’s painting before he or she quite pardonably began screaming.

Civilized readers will naturally be familiar with the scene towards the end of
The Magic Flute
where Tamino is about to undergo the last part of his initiation ritual and is confronted by two men in black armour, the eighteenth-century version of Men in Black. Against the steady tread of an orchestral fugato these two guardians intone in octaves the chorale melody
Ach
Gott, vom Himmel sieh’ darein
. In this way the music calls on God to look down from heaven and be merciful while the MIBs sing, ‘He who wanders these streets deeply troubled will become pure through fire, water, air and earth.’  

This captures pretty well my mood as I escape the
Dorchester
and walk in the direction of Marylebone High Street and Derek’s flat. ‘Deeply troubled’ is about right. When Adrian and I had planned our prank with the CD up at Le Roccie it never occurred to me that my future and fortune could ever depend on writing a final book for Millie Cleat. It’s clear the prank has worked all too well. Not only has Millie been taken in, she seems entirely to have lost her
marbles
over it. I’ve never seen anything as preposterous as this superannuated old sailswoman standing there wearing a rubber dress and a false arm with fish in it, playing Queen o’ the Fathoms while acolytes read out nonsense masquerading as revelation. Bad as it was working with Millie in her role as everybody’s beloved sporting granny, it would be
inconceivable
to work with her in her newly transfigured state. A literary whore I may be, but even whores need to draw the line somewhere. So what began as a
prosecco
-fuelled joke has turned into an instance of Samper shooting himself in the foot or even, taking a cue from the Great Mother
herself
, in the bottom.

The awkwardness of my recent departure from Millie’s suite is another reason to feel troubled, although in this case only mildly. In other circumstances it might have been comic. Yet it isn’t easy for your middle-aged man of parts to get to his feet to take leave of all-female company while sporting a woody fit to poke a hole in his Stiff Lips jeans. And this, it goes without saying, without the faintest promptings of libido. It is hard to imagine a less erotic milieu than the one I have just left. No, it was a purely physiological event, like a touch of cramp, and equally hard to conceal. Not since the days of being suddenly invited by a teacher to stand up in class was it so necessary to perform odd contortions. Luckily, tonight I’m wearing a rather exquisite cashmere jacket (by Heavens To Betsy) which is long enough to have allowed crafty twitchings and drapings as I stood up. I don’t believe anybody noticed anything except the blonde girl Debra – she of the receding lower jaw and alleged linguistic brilliance. I can feel myself blushing even now at the memory of those pop eyes fixed on my
discomfiture
. Only once I had walked downstairs, run the gauntlet of the Dorchester’s liveried doormen and passed into the night did I discover that the crisis below my supple Ferragamo belt was over and things were back to normal.

It is actually a fine October early evening and rush hour has elided seamlessly into night life. There is a sense of people
hurrying
towards undisclosed pleasures. I am not one of them. I solemnly tread the streets of Mayfair, determined there shall be no ordeal by water in store for me. I really had had no idea that Millie would have changed so much in a few months. I find myself looking back almost nostalgically to her former self: the sporting superstar with the hardboiled egoism and inspired lack of irony who made my life hellish for well over a year. Retrospectively, even that persona was preferable to her present incarnation as Our Lady of the Aquarium, able via interpreters to speak for the downtrodden creatures of the sea. ‘Ciderpress holes push on red clouds’, forsooth. I’m surprised she hasn’t got her busty acolyte Debra busy on translating the
monosyllabic fish in that Regency tank of hers. No doubt she would claim they weren’t saying
ob
, but
Om
.  

No – it’s too much to swallow, and too sudden. I’m
remembering
her husband Clifford in that peculiar pub out Hendon way, surrounded by displays of cricketing weasels and saying ‘She won’t retire from the limelight if she can help it,’ adding that he dreaded to think what she might do to stay in it. I bet goddesshood would qualify as living up to his liveliest dread. But the fraudulent old amputee can’t fool me. You can’t get to know somebody well enough to write their biography without acquiring a fair sense of what they themselves think is fit for public consumption. There’s a thinnish line between a careful crafting of the facts and the invention of a largely spurious image. Millie crossed this line blithely and often enough to suggest that her current Queen Neptunia act
is
an act. I
wouldn
’t mind if in private she had the grace to confess as much, and she still may. After all, who’s she fooling? It’s all showbiz: sport, politics, war, art, religion, you name it. The times demand we all be thesps in our way. But I suspect she won’t come clean. Millie is always entirely the person she’s playing: it’s part of her single-mindedness. Whatever international
worship
accrues from her new role as the sainted figurehead of Deep Blue environmentalism, it will only intensify her
conviction
. Nor do I think she will easily be deposed from her new throne or dismissed with indulgent smiles as the Brigitte
Bardot
of dolphin sanctuaries. We might have to stake all on unmasking her as a delinquent sailor. But even this,
newsworthy
as it would be, is beginning to seem a long shot.

The question is, where does all this leave Samper, other than crossing Wigmore Street and feeling hungry? By the time I
finished
writing
Millie!
I felt compromised enough. But in order to write the sequel for much fine gold it will be necessary to resist the urge to lop off, excise and suppress, otherwise by the end there will be nothing left and I shall be like a cosmetic
surgeon
leaving the operating theatre after a long day’s work,
lugging
a pail of polyps and wrinkles. Only in this case they will
be exactly the bits the patient wanted left. I suddenly discover that I really do need the advice of an affectionate ally, which means speaking to Adrian as soon as possible and preferably seeing him. That it hasn’t occurred to me until now shows how preoccupied I am. There’s no time to lose. One way or
another
I must reach a decision before calling Queen Neptunia by the end of the week, as arranged.  

Being so close, I make a small detour to pass Wigmore Hall, recent scene of Pavel Taneyev’s recurring trichological crises disguised as Bach recitals. Judging by the notices outside, tonight’s lucky audience should be in the middle of rediscovering its rural roots in a concert called ‘The Abandoned Ploughboy’. This is described on the playbills as ‘an evening of songs by Finzi, Butterworth, Warlock and Quilter’ (poems by the usual bucolic tragedians, Hardy, Housman
et al
.), sung by the
celebrated
Welsh baritone Brian Tydfil. Pride of place in this sumptuous spread of cherry trees and proud songsters (for which Emmeline Tyrwhitt-Glamis would have given you a good recipe) is a setting by Butterworth of Hardy’s poem ‘The Knacker’s Yard’, the uplifting opening of which is
printed
on the playbill as an enticement:

All about the First World War, really, if we did but know it.

But there is something about the plangent recital even now going on inside that I know connects up with Millie and her ecobabble, if only I could work out how. I think it has to do with the Humanities bleating on about the essential humanity of nature so that art claims to speak for all the world that matters: the hapless priapism of a race constantly aroused by itself. The point about Millie is that her apparently loony position is
obviously
commonplace, even mainstream in less intellectual
quarters
.
It’s all based on agonizing about what we’re doing to the world as if we weren’t part of it, as if we didn’t have exactly equal status with bacteria, barracudas and birch trees. Adrian tells me ninety-nine per cent of all the species that have ever lived on earth are now extinct. We’re worried we’ll soon become another of them and have become gracelessly obsessed with ourselves as the chosen race with the power to make or break the planet. And none more graceless than Millie’s Loony
Neptunies
. Of course! Who cares that I stand deserted by the Men in Black with their promise of mystical enlightenment? I’m
mesmerized
by this playbill outside Wigmore Hall in which I can suddenly see a miniature version of our species’ central problem. No wonder ploughboys become abandoned, poor dears. Lesser writers than I have sometimes taken as much as ten and a half chapters to write a history of the world. Samper can do you a history of
Homo sapiens
in a mere two sentences. They go as follows: The human race made itself King of the Beasts until there were no beasts left in the kingdom. Then one day in a fit of boredom it fought itself to the death, and won.  

There, you see: a little
bonne bouche
of a fable, complete with moral sauce. That’s lit. for you. And Greens and Blues and Neptunies. Meanwhile, inside the hall I would guess the Sweet Singer of Wysiwyg (for such, one gathers, is Mr Tydfil’s birthplace) will be well into some exquisite Georgian anguish along much the same lines, but tailored to the plight of the individual. For this is a world of solipsistic lament and the tragic inconvenience of having the wrong-coloured hair. (‘
You
should be so lucky,’ I can hear Derek’s Pavel exclaiming.) Not tragedy, just genes and programmed cell death, just normal apoptosis. But Finzi and Housman don’t do apoptosis, they order up tears:

Ah me.
Eheu fugaces
. Alas, the fleeting years slip away … Which reminds me that I’m suddenly abominably hungry. I have not much confidence in there being anything of an edible nature in Derek’s sordid little flat so I head for a toothsome bistro I remember up towards Marylebone Lane, only to
discover
a demolition site in its place: a tall yellow crane with a wrecker’s ball hanging from it like an undescended testicle. Alas, the fleeting bistros slip away. Yet I’m not quite desolate because somewhere in these last ten minutes I may
unexpectedly
have taken a modest step towards an argument with which to face Millie, and therefore my immediate future. Within a minute I come upon a small restaurant pretending to seafood where I am urged by the waiter to try the squid. In due course I find myself tackling a tepid mound of fan-belt offcuts. Never mind, they also serve
prosecco
, and in between dealing with the fan belt and thinking about making my living I find that by the end I have consumed two entire bottles and feel a good deal better. My jaws aching, I pay for it all with my UK bank’s much-touted Connect Card, based on an idea by E. M. Forster. Literature has its uses.

Two days later I am in Southampton, heading on foot through Dock Gate 4 towards the
QE2
terminal but soon peeling off in the direction of the block that houses Adrian’s office in the British Oceanography Institute. I’m in high
spirits
at the prospect of seeing him, which as ever puts me in good voice. It is one of those days when lieder have it over opera hands down. Less grandiose? More private? Having just watched some very English fields speed past the window of my train from Waterloo, and doubtless still under
Wigmore
Hall’s influence, I find myself choosing my namesake Gerald Finlock’s music to express my cheerful mood. Unless it’s by Peter Quiltworth? I do sometimes confuse them.
Whoever
it’s by, ‘The Knot’ is exquisite, starting like a gazetteer and ending with a tear.

I notice some people giving me odd looks, but I’m used to the envy my voice arouses. It’s thought perfectly all right in Britain to set up a stall anywhere in public with some godawful pop music blaring from loudspeakers, but singing as you walk, as people must have done for thousands of years, is looked on as mad, bad and probably dangerous. In Italy, of course, to sing in public is thought entirely natural; but then, they have a
culture
designed for human beings.

Good question. But music banishes such nitpicking. Even as I hit that final, artfully skewed F#, I’m conscious of ambient interference. I round a corner and the building I’m heading
for is besieged. A surge of people shouting and waving
placards
is narrowly divided like the Red Sea by bovine
policemen
and steel barriers. Bona fide visitors, having established their credentials via a policeman’s radio, are evidently required to walk between these foaming protesters.
Fortunately
, Samper is blessed with aplomb, and to be denounced at close range as a murderer and a torturer is water off a duck’s nose or no skin off its back or something. How very much more offensive it would be if one were publicly accused of having bad breath or not knowing how to make a roux. I saunter provocatively towards the doors at the end of this corridor of bellowing yahoos. The jiggling placards turn my way like pallid sunflowers as I pass: Save Our Soles!, Eels
Feel!
, Hands Off Urchins!, West Sussex Thalassarians Unite!, Open The Cages!