I’m there. I’m always there. Well, invariably. Not specifically for Gunn – there are other works-in-progress at the club: first-time smack for the eighteen-year-old rent boy in the bogs; the HIV transmission a philandering journalist is going to take home to his missus (who’s at her wits’ end already, and who stands a good chance of forgetting her pill tonight – having softened the blues with Dusty Springfield, a joint and a bottle of Bull’s Blood); the waitress who knows that if she goes home with the guy in the muslin-coloured suit it’ll be her first trick, that she’ll have capitulated, made use of what she can make use of (but Elise has done it, I keep reminding her, and says she’s never looked back – the holiday in Antigua, the two-bedroomed garden flat in West Hampstead, the money, the money, the fucking money she’s sick of pretending she doesn’t want . . .); the dear, muddled, bull-necked and swede-headed bouncer, who, as far as the rest of the world knows, is single, but who in fact has an imprisoned anorexic wife whose mere existence – plus her inability to quite absorb all his fear and rage no matter how many times he beats it into her – drives him like a disease into sudden, focused strikes, while the horror and claustrophobia and hatred and rage clash like warring gods in his skull, until he’s spent, and falls to his knees babbling apologies and promises between sobs (it’s limitless, his pity, as long as he himself is its object: Why does she make me do this to her? Why? Why? Why?) – so Gunn was hardly my priority. But I’ve tended, over the years, to keep an eye on Penelope, to rootle, now and again, through the clutter of her life in the hope of being able to throw something together. Never say die, that’s my motto. And never throw anything away, that’s another. Honestly, I’m like a womble, I am. Anyway, here is Penelope, and there, on stage, is Gunn. Are you going to say anything? Penelope’s asked him, earlier. No, he’s said. It’s all bollocks. I’ll just read and get out of there.
‘You always hope,’ he begins, trying to find that elusive middle air between the devil of over-orchestrated diction and the deep blue sea of his childhood’s dusted-down Northern vowels, ‘that the person who introduces you won’t make you sound overly intelligent or talented.’ Pause. It’s a small audience, politically hand-picked by him and Sylvia. ‘Otherwise the reading’s guaranteed to disappoint.’ Some friendly titters. Penelope grinds her teeth. Gunn is speaking in a voice she’s never heard before. Accent, depth, pace: none of them has hitherto belonged to the man she loves. Loved. Loves. (Who said ‘loved’?) Nor, for that matter, have the occasional grimaces of wry self-effacement. ‘Unfortunately,’ Gunn continues, ‘Sylvia has rather foolishly made me sound both intelligent and talented. Therefore my apologies in advance.’ Polite laughter, the general mnwoaaah sound of an audience saying, Oh don’t be so amusingly modest, you old thing. ‘Anyway,’ Gunn says, taking a calculated last drag on his Silk Cut and stubbing it out on the boards, ‘I thought I’d read the beginning of the book, so’s not to give the game away to any of you rotters who’ve had the good sense not to bother reading it yet . . .’
One is tempted to conclude that there’s something genetic in Penelope’s acute allergy to dishonesty, something deep, something structural. I’d prefer to be able to explain it away by telling a tale of a disappearing dad or a compulsively fibbing first love – but I can’t. Penelope is simply one of those human beings for whom dishonesty destroys everything.
And here at this insufferably pleased with itself and overpriced club in Notting Hill, dishonesty is much on her mind, as she observes Gunn at the centre of a small group of sycophantically tittering industry girls. Oh it’s not as if he’s feeling them up or anything (I keep telling him: feel them up, for Christ’s sake feel them up); but his vanity shimmers all but luminously around him. Again she sees the unrecognizable body language, the overacting, the disingenuous well-it’s-ajob-ness of his pose. Passing, secretly, at his back, she hears him address one of the girls as ‘my dear’; it would be innocent if it weren’t for how clearly she could see what he was doing with it, namely, connoting (however subtly – and obviously not too subtly for the smirking blonde with her dark-rimmed specs and piled giggle of hair) the priapicartist-to-nubile-muse relationship, which would be tired even were he thirty years the girl’s senior, but which, given that she looks more or less his age, is both ludicrous and nauseating.
It’s not jealousy. If only it was. No. It’s just a terrible, near-annihilating feeling of threadbare disappointment. All the hours and years. His hand in the small of her back. Be true to me, she’s said, unashamed of the antique idiom, because she’s known he understands. You will stay true to me, Young Gunn, won’t you?
Meanwhile Gunn is confounding me with the firmness of his resolve: You will not do anything. He keeps affirming, watching the light on her lipstick and the little corkscrewy bits of her pinned-up hair as they jiggle and bounce around her face. You are flattered. She’s pretty (but stupid) and you’re now almost certain that you could have her if you wanted to – but you WILL NOT DO ANYTHING – DO YOU UNDERSTAND?
Much to my chagrin (blocked temptation’s like chronic constipation; not Satanic Rap – just the truth) he does understand, or so it seems. He extricates himself – No, honestly, I cried, blondie has tinnily confessed, just cried my eyes out on that last page – and heads for the gents. He knows he’s neglected Penelope. Glimpses of her on the periphery with unblinking eyes and the corners of her mouth gone trouble-coming tight. Why did he let himself drink so much? Why, in God’s name, has he just spent forty minutes so obviously flirting with Aurora? Nice tits, though, I persuade him to acknowledge at the urinal, where, in a surfeit of self-satisfaction (’. . .the poetic beauty of his imagination . . .’ Times Metro – cheers!), merely pissing in a straight line strikes him as a niggardly or unimaginative activity, and he begins slashing with a swing to his hips, accompanied by his own surprisingly tuneful version of James Brown’s ‘I Feel Good’, a performance short-sightedly premised on the notion that he’s alone in there (apart from me, obviously), shattered in mid soul-brother screech by the appearance of the literary editor of the Independent, who, not surprisingly, gives him a pained smile before hurrying out.
And just when you think it’s hopeless, just when a lesser angelic rapscallion would have called it a night (the rentboy’s rolled-up sleeve, the journo’s husky mobile call in the purple foyer, the waitress’s successful rationalization, the bouncer’s stirred hunger and gnawing fear – all in the bank), a way through the darkness opens as Aurora’s fifth gin and tonic passes her tonsils and sends its alcohol by express bloodstream delivery to her noisy and irritable brain. Well, I only need a sniff. Go on, I dare you. You know he fancies you. Not that you can blame him, because you do look the fucking business in that dress, babe. ‘You look like Nicole Kidman’ he said. (He did, too. Believes the non-sequiturial delivery of such judgements part of his newly acquired status as an artist.) Bernice said his girlfriend’s here. Fuck it. Go on – I dare you. Make a night of it.
Amazing thing is – Gunn stumbles out of the Gents only to find Aurora awaiting him on the landing, barely has time to check his flies before she sweeps up to him, takes his surprised face in her white hands, and kisses him, softly on the mouth – amazing thing is that sheer luck has Penelope spot them on her own (arrested, obviously) way to the loo. I can’t take any credit for that. That – long live the angles of chance – is absolutely nothing to do with me. She stops and stares. They don’t see her and she doesn’t hear them. Thank you very much, Gunn is saying, holding Aurora by the elbows, but I can’t do this, I’m afraid. I’ve got a girlfriend. You’re very attractive, though. I’m really flattered. Sorry. And you really do look like Nicole Kidman.