Amazing Disgrace (4 page)

‘Nothing here, either. We’re going to lose it on radar any moment now. Your hull’s about to screen it from us.’

By now others in the ships’ radio rooms were trying to raise the mysterious craft on a variety of channels but without success.

‘Ought we to send the chopper up?’ Each ramform carried a helicopter which could be launched fairly quickly in
emergencies
. But this was the middle of the night and at a moment when every waking person’s attention was focused on the
survey
. Did a tiny blip on the radar overhauling them at a rate of twenty knots constitute an emergency and justify putting a helicopter with two men into the air? It all had to be balanced against the requirements of COLREGS. Survey ships are as rigidly bound by the International Maritime Organization’s collision regulations as any other vessel, but ramform skippers
have better reasons than most for being reluctant to abide by them. Apparently if a ramform stops suddenly its streamers begin sinking and may easily be lost.

While they were dithering, others were outside on the port wing of the
Explorer
’s bridge with night-vision binoculars
trying
to see the interloper’s navigation lights, but without
success
. It was a moonless night, and the various lights on nearby La Palma and some inshore fishing vessels in the lee of the island further confused the issue. Suddenly from the bridge came Valerie’s cry, ‘For Christ’s sake, now
we’ve
lost him – he must be right on top of us. Use the searchlight.’ The light came on, swerved about the sea off the port bow, flashed over
something
billowy and lurched back to illuminate the immense green and gold sails of a trimaran yacht below them and shockingly close, a mere eighty metres away and heading straight across the ship’s bows. Collision seemed inevitable (this phrase is now out of copyright). On the bridge there was a burst of incredulous profanity as someone overrode the autopilot, spun the tiny helm hard to starboard and sent the engines to Full Astern. The Collision Imminent alarm whooped deafeningly until someone turned it off. The starboard
searchlight
came to life and caught the yacht barely scraping past the ship’s forefoot with centimetres to spare. The profanity became a chorus as other alarms went off and warning lights flashed, telling everybody what they already knew: that the ramform’s course had been irretrievably corrupted and the leg once again ruined. Valerie was still on the radio to the
Scomar Navigator
.

‘Can you
believe
this idiot?’ she was raving. ‘No lights, no radio, and he’s totally screwed us. Have you got him on
visual
? If he’s going to try and race you too he isn’t going to make it, Patrice. He’ll go slap across your streamers. You’ll sink him with your buoys.’

It had been explained to me that each streamer had at least one navigation buoy halfway along its length as well as a tail buoy at the end. These were towed along on the surface and it
seemed impossible even for a yacht with a draught as shallow as that of a trimaran to cross twelve lines of streamers without colliding with one or more of the sundry solid objects hissing along behind the survey vessel. Whoever had the
Navigator
’s helm also had a matter of seconds to decide what to do. He decided to go hard a-port, hoping to turn the ramform inside the yacht’s oblivious course and shield it from the equipment it was towing.

Unfortunately, when a ship towing many tons of cable and equipment goes abruptly to Full Astern the equipment carries on under its own inertia for a while. And if the towing vessel just as violently changes course at the same time, the carefully maintained spaces between each towed streamer become chaotic. As it happened, the yacht did implacably maintain its course and the
Navigator
’s turn probably did save it from ploughing through the lines of streamers and being sunk. But the cost to the EAGIS survey was fatal. At least one searchlight followed the green and gold sails as the trimaran rapidly
disappeared
.

‘
Beldame
,’ read somebody with a pair of binoculars. ‘Isn’t it that goddam lone yachtsgranny, whatsername, Millie Thing?’

‘Cleat! Sodding
Cleat
!’

But they had more urgent things to worry about than
Millie
Cleat. For even as
Explorer
and
Navigator
skilfully
avoided
colliding, their combined twenty-four streamers and towing cables fouled one another in a gigantic spaghetti-like tangle four kilometres long. God alone knew how many hours it would take to sort out and carefully retrieve the monstrously expensive equipment. So God alone knew how much penalty time it was all going to add to the ships’ hiring. But it was already clear that a final and vital part of the volcano’s geological structure would remain unknown. This survey would be incomplete, with Cumbre Vieja just beginning to appear even more menacing than had been feared. Dawn found the EAGIS fleet’s crews sullen with disappointment and rage.

By the time the scientists had salvaged their equipment and reached the Bay of Biscay on their delayed homeward course to Rotterdam, Millie Cleat had arrived off the Solent to an ecstatic national welcome. The shark-pruned brown figure dwarfed by her bellying viridian sails had easily broken the world record for a solo non-stop circumnavigation. From now on and for an indefinite period she could do no wrong. ‘When I picked up that wind off Africa I just knew I was going to do it,’ she told the cameras. ‘It was as if some wise power had taken over the
Beldame
’s wheel.’

‘
Wise power
?’ the EAGIS scientists yelled as they watched her on satellite TV aboard their four ramforms. ‘No lights, no radio, no warning, clear breach of COLREGS’ Rule 18 by cutting straight across the bows of a vessel “restricted in her ability to manoeuvre” and clearly marked by its lights as towing gear, plus causing Christ knows how many thousand pounds’ worth of damage, and that’s a
wise power at the wheel
?’ Furious as they were, it was already quite obvious to them that no amount of official remonstration on their part would make the slightest difference or, indeed, would even be listened to. For the foreseeable future the woman who had ruined their survey was untouchable. As much good expecting water to flow uphill as to denounce Millie Cleat for abysmal seamanship.

If ever you were mean enough to suggest that Samper makes a fuss about nothing, I submit the previous chapter as evidence of the bizarre worlds I’m required to come to grips with in order to write these ludicrous books. Any masochists among you who read
Hot Seat!
will realize that I needed to become marginally au fait with many indigestible mechanical details of Formula 1 engines. And now, too, for
Millie!
I was obliged to scrape acquaintance with a lot of maritime technology I never knew existed. Part of the deal, I’m afraid, so I’m not ashamed of having to pass it on. Never let it be said that my books lack an educational aspect, even if it does concern knowledge one could live exquisitely without. On the other hand I do owe some reasonably abject apologies for the occasional pulp-
fictional
tone of the narrative just related. As already explained, I thought it safer to stick as closely as possible to my
transcripts
of the twenty-three scientists’ own accounts when I tracked them down some months later. Vastly entertaining as many of these characters turned out to be – and in one case quite amazingly attractive in oilskins – they are mostly not the sort of people who express themselves in polished dialogue.

I have already intimated that any sea story without alcohol is like a kiss without a moustache, as the Saudis say, and I don’t believe a single one of the oceanographers I met was a closet
teetotaller
. Naturally, therefore, my own bottle of
prosecco
has long since been swallowed in the retelling of this shameful
maritime
incident and I am now in urgent need of something else to take the taste away. I’m afraid we’re not yet quite done with this little contretemps in the Canaries. In a spirit of fairness and
balance
normally quite alien to me but temporarily forced upon me by Britain’s Palaeolithic libel laws, I will present
la
Cleat’s own
version of the story. But not yet. It can wait until tomorrow. Right now, an early gin and tonic on the terrace is imperative and then, I think, will be the
moment juste
for the unveiling of a marine speciality of my own humble devising whose ingredients are unwittingly awaiting their apotheosis in the fridge. Since posterity demands that I bequeath it the recipes of my more inventive dishes, I shall jot this one down right now on the
terrace
, in between tinkling sips of g-&-t when ice cubes jostle the upper lip to produce a sensory satisfaction almost unknown since one left off being breast-fed.  

Before that, though, a brief word about mood and food. I have never yet read a cookery book that attempts to match dishes with one’s emotional state. Insofar as the TV cheffies’ latest productions exhale an affect of their own, it is invariably one of breezy intimacy, as though the hair-gelled oiks who wrote them had stepped through the screen and were right there in your kitchen, filling it with blokeish bustle and
yo-dude
matiness. Any suggestion that one might like to devise a dish to harmonize with one’s emotional state would go unheard in flurries of exclamation marks. ‘What gets me all excited is real down-to-earth nosh!’, they bawl, banging down pots and pans with the licensed abandon of someone whose old friend Giovanna has been making home-made pasta in her little Umbrian village ever since she was tall enough to roll it out on the kitchen table. ‘Nothing poncy, nothing fancy, but hey!’ Whatever it means, this swamping patter claims that the best cooking is dead simple, the implication being that if
something
is good enough for canny old peasants like Giovanna it’s surely good enough for Essex boys like us. Well, I am a
Shropshire
Samper and think only an idiot would pretend that all the best dishes are simple, just as only an oaf believes cooking must always be quick and
fun
, as opposed to interesting and complex and hard work to get right. Sometimes one’s mood requires a reflective silence in the kitchen, broken only by the snicking of a knife through vegetables as one works one’s way towards a dish that carefully expresses the moment.

My point about food is simply that one occasionally wants something that has its own aura of high seriousness (offal), or faint melancholy (rhubarb), or earnestness (lobster). (
Synaesthetes
, who never agree about any of their associations, should block their noses when I tell them that for me, dishes involving these particular three foods come to the table in the keys of D flat, b minor and F sharp, respectively). One’s emotional state surely has everything to do with what one wishes to eat. If I’m in frivolous mood I don’t want to eat haggis, and if downcast I don’t want spring rolls or, for that matter, anything with a single bean sprout in it.  

It seems there must once have existed a British tradition of the colour co-ordination of food and mood. The manuscript of William Blake’s ‘Jerusalem’ refers quite legibly to England’s ‘dark Satanic meals’, but owing to a typographer’s error he has been misquoted ever since. In any case this ancient and
sensitive
style of cuisine died out in England although it thrived
fitfully
on the Continent, particularly during the Age of Decadence. A well known example is the black dinner that Des Esseintes throws in
À rebours
as a funeral banquet in memory of his own virility, ‘lately but only temporarily deceased’. The guests at this extravagant caprice are waited on by naked Negresses ‘wearing only slippers and stockings in cloth of silver embroidered with tears’. This is not only silly but much too extravagant for a mood that is merely downcast. Besides, there is nothing wrong with the Samper virility that naked Negresses could possibly cure. No, tonight this whole Millie business has left me feeling
spiritually
dark-hued, so my dinner will match it:  

Death Roe

Ingredients

 

450 gm cod or similar roe (but not sturgeon)

16 ml squid ink

½ aubergine

Bottarga

Black rice

Blackcurrants

1 whole nutmeg

1 lime

1 tbsp olive oil

Squid ink is easily bought in 4 gm sachets as
nero di seppia
. Bottarga is the second-greatest thing ever to have come out of Sardinia, only narrowly edged out by sardonicism, the
convulsive
laughter ending in death that the Greeks said was induced by eating a particular Sardinian plant. Tying for third place come Grottina pecorino sardo and sardines, especially fresh ones eaten straight off an insanitary griddle in a
Mediterranean
port (it’s important to keep our antibodies frisky).
Bottarga
is the dried roe of either tuna or the flat-headed grey mullet,
Mugil cephalus
. The original Arabic word for salted roes,
batarikh
, became adopted and mispronounced all over the Mediterranean; but the Sardinian version of the thing itself is a refinement of the crude original. To make bottarga you hand-massage the roes to expel all the tiny pockets of air that might harbour bacteria and make them go bad. This takes hours. Then you salt them thoroughly and press them between wooden planks heaped with marble weights. This takes a week. Finally you dry them in the sun, which takes up to two months. You are left with a sublime hard substance that can be grated over dishes, especially pasta, to make them redolent of sun and sea. A good bottarga is the marine equivalent of
truffle
and has the power to scent things even in small quantities. Tuna bottarga is sharper, saltier and more pungent than
mullet
bottarga, which is subtler and sometimes has an almost almondy aftertaste.  

Black rice is a variety originally grown in China and comes accompanied by that slight frisson of taboo that often goes with gourmet Chinese food. We understand this is because it would once have cost us our head to eat it unless we were
royal. Black rice was, predictably, so incredibly rare and hard to grow it was reserved for the Emperor and inevitably became known as ‘forbidden’ rice, along with forbidden
monkey-picked
Tie Guan Yin green tea and forbidden hundred-
year-old
pickled panda labia. Undaunted, the Italians have simply taken up growing black rice in Piedmont, where Principato di Lucedio sells it as
Venere riso nero
. Quite what it has to do with Venus escapes me; but then the same thing goes for that reliable human activity known as
Venere solitaria
which keeps us sane and thankfully has nothing to do with anything as transient as love. Black rice takes a lot of cooking, sometimes up to 45 minutes, and comes out of the pan a deep purplish black and smelling of freshly baked loaves.

So if we summarily switch off the winsome TV cheffies in mid-grin it will leave the limelight and work space to Gerald Samper as he prepares his gloomy masterpiece, Death Roe. We start by taking the fresh roes (do not on any account remove their outer membranes) and immersing them for 19 minutes in a simmering mixture of the squid ink with the juice and zest of a medium lime plus just enough water. Once the roes are seething put the black rice on and start slowly grilling half a well-oiled, large, unsalted aubergine. When it is done, scrape the pulp out and set aside. Its delicious seared and wrinkled skin must also be reserved. When the roes are ready, remove their outer membrane. You will find that despite it the squid ink will have penetrated and turned them black to their hearts. Using a fork, blend the aubergine pulp with the roes and a tablespoon of olive oil. As you work it, gradually incorporate a small quarter of a nutmeg that you have previously
pressure-cooked
. There,
that
would have wiped the indulgent smiles off the cheffies’ faces. It would simply never have occurred to them to pressure-cook a nutmeg. This is because they have less imagination and curiosity than a stick of celery. After 45
minutes
of slow pressure-cooking a nutmeg changes intriguingly from being as chewable as teak into something that crumbles dryly while still retaining wonderful aromatic properties. You
will find that the water it cooked in is barely discoloured and scarcely even smells of nutmeg. Whatever the chemical changes that take place, they do so inside the nut; and while it remains identifiably nutmeggy in flavour it is now mellower, less aggressive, more brooding. A small quarter of this cooked nut should now be crumbled and blended with the roes, aubergine pulp, oil and a sparing benison of grated bottarga. This process must be done by hand. If you use a mechanical blender you run the risk of winding up with a peculiar stiff taramasalata looking like a dollop of bitumen. Ideally, the individual fish eggs should remain intact.  

Death Roe is clearly one of those dishes whose presentation is everything. The Samper way is to get out his precious
mattfinish
black Wedgwood trencher and heap the crumbled roes in the grilled aubergine skin at the centre of a bed of black rice. A few blackcurrants scattered artistically not only look well but constitute tiny land-mines of unexpected flavour. It is a sable meal for a discoloured mood, and may be further set off by being eaten with a sharp and dazzling white yoghurt. As you eat it on a terrace in the company of a bottle of chilled, slightly acidic Valpolicella, you may pleasurably imagine the cheffies’ expressions as they creep off home to put something safe in the microwave, probably deep-frozen pizza. They are also going to need quantities of reassuring pudding, achingly sweet and intensely lemon-flavoured. But then, they never were fit company for adults with adult moods.

This morning I am definitely chirpier. There’s something
calming
about these matutinal rituals: coffee on the terrace, doing my measurements, planning revenge. A pair of buzzards revolves around an early rising thermal, no doubt looking for a tastily rotting carcass, the raptorial equivalent of coffee and croissants. Even in May up here in the mountains the early sunlight smells of ozone: an invigorating smell that makes me want to stretch and brings to mind long-ago summer holidays
I spent in shorts trying to catch lizards. I was very fond of the smell of my bare knees and forearms in the sun. How sad are these childhood memories! The internal record is still vivid and intact but it has become buried beneath the years’
accumulating
ordure.