Free Amazing Disgrace by James Hamilton-Paterson

old Dottie now, waving her underwear triumphantly over her head. Samper’s gob remains utterly unsmacked. ‘And the other thing you’re sure about?’  
    ‘Oh, just that although she might well retire from yachting she won’t retire from the limelight if she can help it. Not Millie. You know how jealous she is of her rivals, especially that Rasmussen fellow she left behind in the Atlantic. She really hates him. No, she’ll have to find something to throw in their faces. I dread to think what it will be.’  
    All this zips through my mind in compressed form as I sit on my Tuscan terrace talking to Frankie on a mobile phone. I am resigned to going over to the UK and spending as little time as possible with Millie at whatever mooring she chooses. Happily, it is more likely to be Brown’s Hotel than Pinner. I just hope it won’t be Chichester. I wonder if I will ever see Clifford again and find myself undismayed to think I mightn’t. Just another dysfunctional sporting family, the Cleats. I seem to collect them.  
    ‘I’ll call her up,’ I tell Frankie resignedly. ‘And come over. Obviously I shall have to pay the fare myself,’ I can’t helpadding in my role as poor, put-upon Samper. Completely bogus, of course. We both know perfectly well that I am paid well for these writing jobs on the understanding that I persevere until all parties are satisfied with the text. All parties but the author, that is.  
    ‘There’s a good boy,’ says Frankie.  
    But after he rings off I have to deal with something that has been nagging me ever since my after-breakfast session with the tape measure. I repeat the measurements and there’s no doubt. Only two pills to go and Samper is definitely packing more veal. Obviously this process will stop when the course finishes but all the same I’m glad the experiment is nearly over. However , it does do something for the masculine spirits. I’m beginning to wonder how I shall look in that new pair of Stiff Lips jeans I bought the other week in Florence. The last word in fashionable, of course, and they cost a fortune; but now I hear that Homo Erectus jeans are sold in Essex outlet villages it’s time to switch my allegiance. While nerving myself to call Millie Cleat in London I essay the electrifying curse that Adriano flings at Elena’s head in one of the most impassioned outbursts in nineteenth-century Italian opera. ‘A thousand tortures fall upon you! / May you carry your children to the cemetery one by one, / The Host turn to marble in your faithless mouth!’ Rattling good stuff, but unfortunately today my voice isn’t up to Ficarotta’s taxing score and I’m obliged to give up, panting. I content myself with repeating the opening phrase, Mille atroci tormenti , which little by little turns into Millie atroce Cleati . Childish, no doubt; but it puts me right in the mood for phoning her.

6
    It is not Brown’s Hotel but the London Hilton, a suite affording a glimpse across Constitution Hill into the sacred precinct of Buckingham Palace garden. I gather that when the hotel was built in the early Sixties there was one of those huge public outcries that exist mainly in the imaginations of a few noisy journalists, to the effect that our dear Queen (as she was then known) would have her privacy invaded by vulgar Americans in their skyscraper hotel spying on her from its upper floors. Since when, nothing has exceeded the vulgarity of our own home-grown press where the royal family is concerned – except that of the royal family itself, of course, whose indiscretions have seldom been conducted anywhere as tastefully secluded as a private garden. In this whole business of spying and being spied on the Brits really have been outstandingly stupid, even for them, and have lost all sense of where the demarcation might be between public and private. We have renounced our privacy with an almost audible sigh of relief, as though shedding an intolerable burden laid on us by the