Amazing Disgrace (18 page)

‘What on earth?’ I ask Adrian, who has bravely come to meet me at the door. I notice he isn’t wearing his white lab smock. Bravery has sensible limits.  

‘Just our daily maniacs,’ he says. ‘Are you OK? Sorry, Gerry – I should have warned you. We’ve almost got used to it here, even though they’re no longer a joke. They’re getting
dangerous
. They tailed a junior colleague home last week and threw bags of blood over his children. It was stinking stuff they must have got from an abattoir and left to rot.’  

‘Who are they? And why here? You’re oceanographers, not vivisectionists.’  

‘I know. But we’ve got some animals in tanks in the labs here. One of my colleagues is working on oxygen transport in nautiloid blood so she’s got a few cephalopods in a pressure chamber. Stuff like that. And over in the other block they’re doing a lot of work on fish hatchlings so they’ve got vats of those. Essential research if we’re ever to stop catching wild fish and rely on proper sustainable farming, but you can’t tell these animal-rightists that. We’re Nazi experimenters in here. Hey, it’s great to see you. You’re looking well, I must say.’ We pass two people chatting by a water cooler and Adrian’s tone
changes to breezy extrovert. ‘Still Mr and Mrs ProWang’s model patient, are we?’  

‘Foucault’s bloody pendulum, mate.’ Heartiness seems to be natural science’s protective colouration. Adrian’s ability to make me blush is among the reasons I feel affectionate towards him. To know someone well enough to embarrass him bespeaks a certain intimacy. I don’t completely relax until we’re safely through the door marked ‘Dr A. Jestico’. I note his yellow oilskins still hanging inside. It’s nice to discover a mild fetish on the brink of forty. Over a mug of something made from a jar of brown dust we catch up on the Millie saga. I explain my predicament. ‘So you see, I just need to write this one book and then I shall be able to afford to give up ghosting. But she’s so far over the top these days I don’t see how I can write it. At the very least I should have to pretend to take this Neptune lark seriously. How can I possibly manage that? I shall be exposed as an impostor, corrosively cynical, or else as an enemy mole in their midst … Really, Adrian, this coffee is unspeakable.’  

‘But it’s got the British Coffee Institution’s kitemark. It’s all very well being a Tuscan coffee snob, Gerry, but –’  

‘But nothing. There’s no excuse these days. Proper ground coffee is everywhere available for ready cash. All you need is an electric ring and a little Bialetti percolator. If you can
measure
gas pressures in squid blood you can jolly well make decent coffee. This is not rocket science.’  

‘I like it when you’re cantankerous.’  

‘Surely
nobody
these days slurps mugfuls of Nescafé as though they were trapped in a social science department in the late Seventies?’  

‘This is a government research department in the
mid-Noughts
. Why should anything have changed? We British are conservative in our tastes and proud of it. When in Rome, drink espresso. When in Southampton –’  

‘Yes, yes, I get the message,’ I say testily.  

‘Revenons à nos moutons, or rather à nos Neptunies, did
you notice they’re well represented outside this building?’  

‘I was too busy being insouciant but I can believe it. As a movement, they’re chock full o’ nuts. Also, had you realized they’re divinely inspired? That CD plan of yours worked too well.’  

‘Your plan, I thought?’  

‘
Our
plan, then,’ I graciously allow, and give Adrian a vivid account of the scene in Millie’s Dorchester suite the other evening. He is incredulous, which speaks well of his
rationality
but less so of his knowledge of the wilder fringes of human nature. Scientists can be charmingly naïve. After all, plenty of them believed Uri Geller could bend spoons by psychokinesis.  

‘It surely never occurred to us that they would mistake those noises for actual voices,’ he says. ‘We thought it would give a vivid impression of the uncanny and the unknown in the ocean. I mean, how can you translate electronic bleeps into
speech
?’  

‘Who knows? People spend their lives trying to break the codes of lost languages like Etruscan and Linear B and those Easter Island inscriptions, Rongorongo or whatever it’s called. If you’re convinced from the start that transponder noises are really voices bequeathing wisdom instead of electronically generated data streams, then no doubt if you apply enough algebraic and statistical processes some sort of patterns will emerge that you can decipher.’

‘And if the messages are pure gibberish?’  

‘So much the better, because they need interpreting. Think of the Sibyl. Opacity is a prime requirement of the divine.’  

Adrian muses behind his desk. ‘When do you want us to go public with our film of Millie ruining EAGIS, then?’  

‘Oh, not yet,’ I say in alarm. ‘The book’s coming out this week and we need to rack up some sales. Besides, if
Millie!
does well it can only increase interest in her, even give it some depth. The higher she goes, the further to fall and all that. Much better if we wait for the most damaging moment. Don’t worry, we’ll recognize it when it comes. By the way, what news
of your illustrious brother-in-law?’ (for one likes to keep more than one eye cocked to the future).  

‘Max? He’s fine, I think. He’s in America at the moment. Concertizing, as they say over there. Boston? Chicago? Jen tells me he’ll be back shortly.’  

At this moment Adrian’s phone rings and I turn to the notice board on the wall and the increasingly flyblown image of The Face saying ‘I can see your bow thruster!!’ in the drawn-in speech bubble. As one who was recently privileged to learn professors Brilov and Tammeri’s version of what the voice of the deep is really saying, I feel the bubble ought to be
amended
to read ‘Watch out! Torrential bottoms over!’  

‘
That
’s good news, anyway,’ says Adrian, hanging up. ‘We’ve got a salvage ship on charter in Gibraltar, sailing tomorrow to see if it can raise that container-load of transponders.’  

‘I thought you said it wasn’t worth the expense?’  

‘It wasn’t then. But we’ve since been in touch with the US manufacturers. Apparently those batteries have at least a year’s life in them and the din they’re making is going to
disrupt
too many equally expensive research projects.
Scientifically
, it’s quite a live area down there in the Canaries. So we’ve joined forces with some other oceanography centres in
Germany
, France and Spain and have agreed to split the salvage bill. Let’s hope it works.’  

‘If it does, someone’s going to have to explain Neptune’s sudden silence to Millie and her groupies.’  

‘A job perfectly suited to your diplomatic talents, Gerry,’ Adrian says with the weightless sympathy of someone wishing an old friend well at the dentist’s.  

‘You’re a fat lot of help. What on earth am I to do? Not about the transponders, I mean
do
. About this book Millie wants written. About spending months having solemn
conversations
like the one I had at the Dorchester with people like the demonstrators outside this very building.’  

‘That’s simple. Grit your teeth and think of the money. Then when you’re rich we can rush off to Las Vegas or Stockholm
and get married and I need never work again.’  

‘Be serious.’ But he is serious, it seems. Not about getting married, obviously – a nasty bourgeois business – but about gritting my teeth. I remonstrate feebly until at twelve-thirty a tall, bespectacled man in his late forties or early fifties wearing a stained tie breezes into the office. Adrian glances at his watch, springs to his feet and introduces him as Nick Vatican. He’s new to me: not one of Adrian’s colleagues I interviewed last year. True, it’s not a very memorable face but I would never forget that name.  

‘Nick’s head of our Cold Ocean Sciences department,’
Adrian
explains. ‘One of our senior boffins who add lustre to this establishment. Never let it be said you came down to Southampton without meeting the quality. I should have warned you we’re going out to lunch with him. He has
disgusting
table manners and a way with women.’  

‘You’re just jealous, Adrian,’ says this newcomer. ‘You too could have table manners like mine if only you’d loosen up.’ He turns to me. ‘So you’re the writer who knows all about Millie Cleat, eh? That’s exactly what we need here, some inside information. You saw those Neptunies out front?
Bastards
. Hey listen, you guys, the barf-barge awaits.’  

He leads the way through a warren of corridors and out the back of the building to the BOIS wharf. The breeze off the Solent buffets open our unbuttoned jackets and my nipples erect to meet the challenge.  

‘This is what we’re driven to these days,’ Nick explains as we descend a ridged gangplank to a waiting motor launch. ‘There are perfectly good pubs up the road. But since the loonies took up residence outside the front it’s as much as our lives are worth to go out that way. So we use our launch to escape. There’s a very decent little pub across the water near Netley.’  

I’m sorry to hear it. After the civil sobriety of the Italian bars I’m used to I’m no great admirer of British pubs. Even when they’re not actually carcinogenic with tobacco fumes they tend
to have been gutted by the brewers, provided with new antique interiors in vinyl and given arbitrary and whimsical names like ‘The Leaking Marmoset’.  

‘I hope you’re a good sailor,’ murmurs Adrian as we go aboard the rocking craft. ‘This onshore breeze has put up a bit of a chop. Get inside the cabin, otherwise we’ll be soaked. It’s only a few minutes.’  

We wait for several more rumbustious scientists to pack aboard then cast off. Glimpsed through thick panes the bristly water thuds and scuds as it flashes astern. The small cabin flickers with crumbling shadows. For the first time in my
illstarred
relationship with Millie Cleat I can understand without effort the allure of moving swiftly over the sea even if the water we’re crossing is largely fresh, brought down by the River Itchen. But the smell off Southampton Water is good and briny: the restless, aerated smell of travel. For a disloyal instant I wonder how much longer I shall be content to go on living at Le Roccie, reminding me that the urge to leave home is always there and will one day climb into my coffin beside me. The discontent with contentedness sets the nibs of gurus and analysts scratching busily. Just when I was hoping it would last for ever the trip is over, we are climbing out and I must pretend to be hearty again. It’s a good job Samper is a man of parts and can dissemble. I notice that not far out in the roads an immense white motor yacht is lying – a small ship, really, lustrous from radomes to waterline.  

‘A minor Saudi prince?’ hazards Nick as he ushers us into Pegleg Dandy’s, a pub whose interior is as relentlessly nautical as set-dressing can make it. The place is a riot of ship’s wheels, binnacles, bells and Navy rum barrels, no doubt job-lotted in China in the same complex of factories that runs up horse brasses and corn dollies for English country pubs and, for all I know, cases of stuffed weasels for pubs in erstwhile
Middle-sex
. If ever they find the Holy Grail it will have ‘Made in China’ stamped on its base. When at length we’re sitting with our obligatory pints and those strange English pies like roast
Jiffy bags full of gravy, Nick asks what sort of pull I have with Millie. Adrian was quite right: Dr Vatican’s eating habits would make a hyena appear dainty. Gravy is already
spattering
a ring around his plate like dollops of mud around a
waterhole
.  

‘Pull? Nil, I’d think. Except that she does want me to write another book.’ I briefly outline the deal and my misgivings while Nick steadily widens the diameter of his waterhole. ‘Why?’  

‘Professional interest. Self-interest, too. I’d like to know if there’s anything we can do to get her to remove the pickets from BOIS.’  

‘But I gather they’re not all hers?’  

‘No. But that woman has recently acquired extraordinary clout. Practically overnight she’s become the popular face of marine environmentalism. I should think she’d accept it’s not going to do her image any good to be associated with
righteous
thugs showering small children with rotten blood. I must admit that until that EAGIS business I was a considerable admirer of old Millie. You know, one-armed granny sailing alone around the world and beating all comers. You’ve got to hand it to her: she was certainly different. What on earth’s got into her?’  

‘I suppose what got into her were fame, fortune and Lew Buschfeuer, in reverse order. The better I get to know her, the more convinced I am he’s the key to Millie.’  

‘Cherchez le Lew, you mean?’ says Adrian, rising. ‘Just as I’m about to do. Can I refill anyone on my way back?’ He
collects
empty glasses and disappears. Nick has been polishing his plate with the side of his forefinger and licking it reflectively. It is now empty, surrounded by a ring of bright gravy.
Methodically
, he begins cleaning the table top around it in the same way. I charitably assume he has spent time either in prison or a decent public school.

‘Do you know this Buschfeuer fellow, Gerry?’ he asks, scrubbing vainly at his tie with a paper napkin.

‘No. Oddly enough, I’ve never once met him. I’ve even
wondered
if this has been a deliberate policy of Millie’s. Still, he’s a busy tycoon.’  

‘Another in the Rupert Murdoch mould, the papers say. An Aussie empire-builder. But what about her? What’s she like?’

English draught beer may taste like thin glue but there is
evidently
enough alcohol in my pint to encourage indiscretion. ‘Ghastly. No, perhaps not ghastly, but I can’t pretend I like the woman.’  

‘Not like our Millie?’ says Adrian, returning with fresh pints of glue and overhearing. ‘And you a product of this sceptred isle. This is treason. All the same, it can’t be easy writing the biography of someone you don’t like.’