‘Why?’
‘I’ll explain later — now come on.’
As we paced up St James’s Street I told him about the steward.
‘You’re having me on, it just isn’t possible.’
‘Believe me, Gerard, you were about to meet another attendant author. This one was a bit of a dead end, so I thought you could give him a miss.’
‘So the gag isn’t a gag?’ He shook his big head and his thick fringe swished like a heavy drape against his brow.
‘No, it isn’t a gag, Gerard. Now let’s stroll for a while, until it’s time for me to go to work.’
We re-crossed Piccadilly and plunged into fine-art land. We wandered about for a bit, staring through window after window at gallery girl after gallery girl, each one more of a hot-house flower than the last.
Eventually we turned the corner of Hay Hill and there we were, on Dover Street, almost opposite the job centre that specialises in catering staff. What a coincidence. Gerard was oblivious as we moved towards the knot of dispirited men and women who stood in front. These were the dregs of the profession, the casual waiters who pick up a shift here and a shift there on a daily basis. This particular bunch were the failures’ failures. The ones who hadn’t got an evening shift and were now kicking their heels, having a communal complain before bussing off to the ‘burbs.
Stupid Gerard, he knocked against one shoulder, caromed off another.
‘Oi! Watch your step, mate — can’t you look out where you’re going?’
‘I’m awfully sorry.’
‘ ‘‘Aim offly sorry”.’ They cruelly parodied his posh accent. I freed my arm from his and walked on, letting him fall away from me like the first stage of a rocket. He dropped into an ocean of Babel.
Terrified Gerard, looking from face to face. Old, young, black, white. Their uniform lapels poking out from their overcoat collars; their aprons dangling from beneath the hems of their macs. They sized him up, assessed him. Would he make good copy?
One of them, young and lean, grabbed him by the arm, detaining him. ‘Think we’re of no account, eh? Just a bunch of waiters — is that what you think?’ Gerard tried to speak but couldn’t. His lips were tightly compressed, a red line cancelling out his expression. ‘Perhaps you think we should be proud of our work. Well we are matey, we fucking are. We’ve been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmentary, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you,’ and with this the young man hit Gerard, quite lightly but in the face, ‘it’s ours, and we’re about ready to publish!’
Then they all waded in.
I was late for work. Marcel, the maître d’, tut-tutted as I swung open the door of the staff entrance. ‘That’s the third time late this week, Geraldine. Hurry up now, and change — we need to lay up.’ He minced off down the corridor. I did as he said without rancour. Le Caprice may no longer be the best restaurant in London to eat at, but it’s a great place to work. If you’re a waiter, that is.
Incubus or The Impossibility of Self-Determination as to Desire
June Laughton, a prize-winning gardener, and Peter Geddes, her husband, a philosopher no less, were having an altercation in the kitchen of their ugly house.
The house was indubitably ugly but it had an interesting feature which meant that English Heritage paid for its maintenance and upkeep. The altercation was on the verge of getting ugly — although not quite so ugly as the house. It concerned Peter Geddes’s habit of employing the very tip of his little finger as a spatula with which to scoop out the fine, white rheum from the corners of his pink eyes. This he transferred to his moist mouth, again and again. Each fingerful was so Lilliputian a repast that he required constant refreshment.
It was one of those aspects of her husband that June Laughton could stomach on a good day but only on a good day.
‘It’s disgusting — ‘ she expostulated.
‘I can’t help it,’ he retorted, ‘it’s a compulsion.’
‘Don’t be stupid. How can something like that be a compulsion?’
‘Oh, all right — I don’t mean compulsion. I mean that it’s an involuntary action, I don’t have any control over it.’
‘Sometimes I think that you don’t have any control over anything,’ and she banged the egg’ encrusted frying pan into the sink to give her judgement proper emphasis.
The action was a failure. Her husband didn’t pay any attention and the frying pan broke a glass. A glass dirtied with stale whisky that was lingering in the bottom of the aluminium trough. Naturally it was June who had to pick the fragments out, extract them from the slurry of food and cutlery that loitered around the plughole.
‘Of course, strictly speaking you could be right about that. . Mmm.’ Peter’s head was bent as he fiddled on the table top.
‘Ouch!’ June registered intense irritation and intense pain simultaneously: her husband’s edifying tone lancing up under her fingernail alongside a sliver of glass from the broken vessel. ‘Why can’t you do your own washing up? Look what you’ve done to me.’ She turned from the sink to face him, holding up her wounded paw, fingers outstretched.
Peter Geddes regarded his wife and thought: How like the Madonna she is, or Marcel’s description of the Duchesse de Guermantes, the first time he sees her in the church at Combray. He had a point, June Laughton was formidably beautiful. Behind her face bone tented flesh into pure arabesque. Her neck was long and undulant. So long that she could never hold her head straight. It was always at an angle, capturing whatever wash of prettifying light was on offer. Now, in this particular pose, with her hand spread, red rivulet running down her index finger, she was even beatified by the commonplace.
‘But, darling, that’s what Giselle is for, in part at any rate. She’ll do all the washing up.’
‘Don’t be absurd, Peter. You can’t expect a research assistant to labour at your turgid book all day and do domestic service as well — ‘
‘That’s what she’s for. That’s what she’s offered to do. Look, I know you find it very difficult to believe but I’m actually well thought of, respected, in what I do — ‘
‘What’s that you’re doing now?’
‘What?’
‘You’re writing on the table. You’re writing on the bloody table! I suppose you’re going to tell me that’s an involuntary action as well.’
‘What, this, this? H-hn, h-hn-hn, ha-hn.’ He went into his affected, fat-man’s chortle. ‘Oh no, no no. No, this is a truth table. A truth table as it were on a truth table. H-hn h-hn, insofar as when we sit at this table we attempt to tell the truth. And this, this’ — he gestured at the square grid of letters and symbols that he had inscribed on the formica surface — ‘is a truth table expressing the necessary and sufficient conditions of an action being intentional, being willed. Do you want me to explain it further, old girl?’
‘No, I don’t. I want you out of here. And that girl, research assistant, au pair, factotum or scullery maid. Whatever she is — you’ll have to pick her up from Grantham yourself in the Renault. Unless you’ve forgotten, the twins get back today.’
‘No, I hadn’t forgotten. How long will they be here for?’
‘A week or two, and then they’re off to Burgundy for the grape picking.’
‘Together?’
‘Of course.’
They cracked up in the synchronised spasm that only comes after souls have been engrafted, bonded by white rheum, cemented by dusty semen, glued by placenta. The funniest thing in their lives was the fact of their children, the non-identical twins, the girl tall and opulently beautiful like her mother, the boy short, fat, cardigan-cuddly like his dear old buffer-dad.