‘I’m something of an intellectual myself,’ Neil had said, straightening a tie across which autonomous golf clubs roamed.
The paper was a dreadful thing. Neil wrote most of it, copying stories assiduously from a heap of other newspapers on his desk while Ralph transcribed television listings and local events. Roz, the secretary, typed them up uncertainly. The majority of its flimsy pages were occupied by local advertisers and a long classified section, with which Ralph had at first been fascinated — the things people tried to sell! On his first day he had found one which read ‘Pair of brown men’s shoes, one missing, £5’, and had made his friends laugh telling them about it — but at which now he could scarcely bear to look. The office was terribly cramped, although Neil told him that once the paper had occupied the entire third floor of the building. Since then it had been shouldered into its small corner by a more successful copywriting firm, whose suite of rooms encased behind giant plate-glass windows displayed immaculate grey prairies of executive carpet and desktop. The Holloway Journal emerged weekly from the compressed adjacent clutter, and seeing as it had little organized means of distribution — Neil had tried hiring door-to-door delivery boys, but found out that they were just dumping their consignments in the nearest bin — it was mostly touted on the pavements outside the building where Neil could keep an eye on things. Much as Ralph tried to avert his gaze from the paper during the week, he could not avoid witnessing its fortunes when he left the office on Friday evening. It pained him to see the feeble trajectory of his labours, and the fact that the scrawny boy buckling beneath the weight of his bag couldn’t even manage to give the things away — Ralph watched passersby shy from his thrusting arm, digging their hands in their pockets as he approached them — meant that he usually felt compelled to accept a copy himself and display it as proudly as he was able until he found somewhere to throw it away unseen.
Nevertheless, the pay he received, like the work he did for it, was automatic, and Ralph would feel the soothing rhythms of his stability even through its worst oppression of him. He would occasionally rise with thoughts of liberation, but feeling himself teeter dangerously on the brink of change would withdraw quickly back into the ever-knitting security of his routine. His only alternative — that of transforming the fixed nature of his work — had been removed before he had even seen out the first month of his employment. He had attempted to infuse his listings with something of his own personality, but to his humiliation Neil had routed out every flourish and confronted him with its lifeless form.
‘What’s this “seminal” lark, then?’ he had demanded once, brandishing a sheet of Ralph’s copy before him. Ralph had lovingly ascribed the term to one of his favourite French films, which was showing on television that week. ‘Is that dirty or what?’
It had been possible to accept his intransigent portion with mild amusement, and now he rarely strained beneath its strictures. His job paid him enough, and was capable, as long as he observed some restraint in his descripition of it, of standing up to the glancing attention he generally received. He did not require, for the time being at least, more than that.
The answering machine was undisturbed, and with the possibility of human intervention more or less ruled out for the evening, Ralph sat down with his beer and drew up the blind with which the distractions of his journey and return had concealed his thoughts. All week he had felt his mind leaning towards the prospect of his oncoming evening with Francine, a process which seemed so to have corralled every part of him in agreement with it that the customary position from which he saw things appeared to have altered. The ballasts of his life, he knew, were too flimsy to protect him from such slippage, and though he had tried, really there was nothing else he wanted to think about. He had negotiated with himself what he saw as a compromise, caging his wild and fluttering thoughts in the stronghold of their one agreed liaison, and he was relieved at least that he had managed to prevent his desires from running ahead to a region of fantasy where they would almost certainly perish.
He had telephoned Francine the day after their miraculous meeting — he saw it as that now, a wonderful and significant chance that had been given to him, like a golden key — and the boldness which his good fortune had inspired had seemed to round up the miscreant possibilities and force them into an orderly march in his favour. Francine had been at home, and had even answered the phone instead of Janice — whom he now treated, in his own mind at any rate, with the greatest mistrust — and he had secured their evening with such an assertion of will, such force, really, that when he had put down the phone after what he had already decided should be the briefest possible conversation, the communication which would least allow for any mistakes on his part and consequently any second thoughts on hers, he had felt quite unlike himself.
She was to come on Thursday, the day after tomorrow, to his flat. He had felt rather churlish about that, but they hadn’t been able to decide on a place to meet on the phone — he had foolishly left it up to her, thinking that was the gentlemanly thing to do, and the poor girl had been quite at a loss — and detecting the approach of a conversational abyss in which he would be bound to undo himself, he had told her to come here. They could have a drink, he said, and then decide together where to have dinner. She had agreed, although not, if he was honest, in a way which particularly betrayed whether she thought it was a good idea or not, and that was when he had commandingly ended the conversation.
He would have to decide on a restaurant in advance, of course, and then casually suggest it to her as if it was a regular haunt, but so far nothing had seemed quite right. He had no car — public transport was out of the question — and besides, after making her come to his house it would seem silly then to go to another part of London. He wrestled once more with the handful of local places he knew, coming inevitably again upon their shortcomings. He never really went to restaurants, in fact. He and his father had always eaten in pubs, and at university he had never had enough money, and now he just didn’t like them much. It was an area in which he felt even less able than usual to take controclass="underline" he disliked being besieged by choice and felt embarrassed by the waiters, not only because of the strange contract which decreed that they serve him, but because their youthful, insolent faces, their snobbery, their very apparent desire to be mastered, rendered him hesitant and effete. They would invariably find him out, too, becoming deaf when he made his order, leaning forward and saying ‘Excuse me?’ and forcing him to repeat it, always seeming to find something in the loneliness of what he had chosen for himself to eat which merited a smirk and the implication of mockery.