‘In her description of all these events and the part she played in them, my heroine surveys the whole panorama of such a herstory. From the shifting meaning of hygiene as an ideology — not just a taboo — to the changing gender roles in this bizarre oligopoly — ‘
‘That’s brilliant!’ I couldn’t help breaking in. ‘That’s one of the most succinct and clearly realised satirical ideas I’ve heard in a long time — ‘
‘This is not a satire!’ she screamed at me. ‘That’s what these stupid publishers think. I have written this book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century English novel. I aim to unite dramatically the formation of individual character to the process of social change. Just because I’ve cast the plot in the form of an allegory and set it in the future, it has to be regarded as a satire!’
‘Sticky hitch,’ said Gerard, some time later as we stood on the corner of Old Compton Street. Across the road in the window of the catering supplier’s, dummy waiters stood, their arms rigidly crooked, their plastic features permanently distorted into an attitude of receptivity, preparedness to receive orders for second helpings of inertia.
‘Come off it, Gerard. The plot sounded good — more than good, great even. And what could be more central to the English literary tradition? She said so herself.’
‘Oh yeah, I have nothing but sympathy for her sometime publishers, I know just what authors like that are to deal with. Full of themselves, of their bloody idealism, of their pernickety obsession with detail, in a word: precious. No, two words: precious and pretentious.
‘Anyway, I must get — ‘ but he bit off his get-out clause; someone sitting in the window of Wheeler’s — diagonally across the street from us — had caught his eye. ‘Oh shit! There’s Andersen the MD. Trust him to be having a bloody late lunch. I’ll have to say hello to him, or else he’ll think that I feel guilty about not being at the office.’
‘Oh I see, negative paranoia.’
‘Nothing of the sort. Anyway, I’ll give you a ring, old girl — ‘
‘Not so fast, Gerard, I’ll come and wait for you. I want to say goodbye properly.’
‘Please yourself,’ he shrugged in the copula of our linked arms.
I stood just inside the entrance while Gerard went and fawned over his boss. I was losing my respect for him by the second. Andersen was a middle-aged stuffed suit with a purple balloon of a head. His companion was similar. Gerard adopted the half-crouch posture of an inferior who hasn’t been asked to join a table. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Andersen’s companion gestured for the bill, using that universal hand signal of squiggling with an imaginary pen on the sheet of the air.
The waiter, a saturnine type who had been lingering by a half-open serving hatch in the oaken mid-ground of the restaurant, came hustling over to the table, almost running. Before he reached the table he was already shouting, ‘What are you trying to do! Take the piss!’
‘I just want the bill,’ said Andersen’s companion. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’
‘You’re taking the piss!’ the waiter went on. He was thin and nervy, more like a semiologist than a servant. ‘You know that I’m really a writer, not a waiter at all. That’s why you did that writing gesture in the air. You heard file talking, talking frankly and honestly to some of the other customers, so you decided to make fun of me, to deride me, to put me down!’ He turned to address the whole room. The fuddled faces of a few lingering lunchers swung lazily round, their slack mouths O-ing.
‘I know who you are!’ The waiter’s rapier finger pointed at Andersen’s companion. ‘Mister-bloody-Hargreaves. Mister big fat fucking publisher! I know you as well, Andersen! You’re just two amongst a whole school of ignorami, of basking dugongs who think they know what makes a jolly fucking good read. Ha!’
Gerard was backing away from the epicentre of this breakdown in restraint, backing towards me, trying to make himself small and insignificant. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said over his shoulder. The waiter had found some uneaten seafood on a plate and was starting to chuck it around: ‘flotch!’ a bivalve slapped against the flock wallpaper, ‘gletch!’ a squiggle of calimari wrapped around a lamp bracket.
‘I’ll give you notes from underwater! I’ll give you a bloody lobster quadrille’ — he was doing something unspeakable with the remains of a sea bream — ‘this is the fin of your fucking siècle!’ He was still ranting as we backed out into the street.
‘Jesus Christ.’ Gerard had turned pale, he seemed winded. He leant up against the dirty frontage of a porn vendor. ‘That was awful, awful.’ He shook his head.
‘I don’t know, I thought there was real vigour there. Reminded me of Henry Miller or the young Donleavy.’ Gerard didn’t seem to hear me.
‘Well, I can’t go back to the office now, not after that.’
‘Why not?’
‘I should have done something, I should have intervened. That man was insane.’
‘Gerard, he was just another frustrated writer, it seems the town is full of them.’
‘I don’t want to go back, I feel jinxed. Tell you what, let’s go to my club and have a snifter — would you mind?’ I glanced at my watch, it was almost four-thirty.
‘No, that’s OK, I don’t have to clock-on for another hour.’
As we walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and turned into Haymarket the afternoon air began to thicken about us, condensing into an almost palpable miasma that blanked out the upper storeys of the buildings. The rush-hour traffic was building up around us, Homo Sierra, Homo Astra, Homo Daihatsu, and all the other doomsday sub-species, locking the city into their devolutionary steel chain. Tenebrous people thronged the pavements, pacing out their stay in this pedestrian purgatory.
By the time we reached the imposing neo-classical edifice of Gerard’s club in Pall Mall, I was ready for more than a snifter.
In the club’s great glass-roofed atrium, ancient bishops scuttled to and fro like land crabs. Along the wall free-standing noticeboards covered in green baize were hung with thick curling ribbons of teletext news. Here and there a bishop stood, arthritic claw firmly clamped to the test score.
I had to lead Gerard up the broad, red-carpeted stairs and drop him into a leather armchair, he was still so sunk in shock. I went off to find a steward. A voice came from behind a tall door that stood ajar at the end of the gallery. Before I could hear anything I caught sight of a strip of nylon jacket, black trouser leg and sandy hair. It was the steward and he was saying, ‘Of course, Poor Fellow My Country is the longest novel in the English language, and a damn good novel it is too, right?’ The meaningless interrogative swoop in pitch — an Australian. ‘I’m not trying to do what Xavier Herbert did. What I’m trying to do is invigorate this whole tired tradition, yank it up by the ears. On the surface this is just another vast Bildungsroman about a Perth boy who comes to find fame and fortune in London, but underneath that — ‘
I didn’t wait for more. I footed quietly back along the carpet to where Gerard sat’ and began to pull him to his feet.
‘Whoa! What’re you doing?’
‘Come on, Gerard, we don’t want to stay here — ‘