All the Hopeful Lovers (6 page)

He washes up his coffee mug, then climbs the stairs once more to the top of the house. There he resumes work building the steading for the bath. As he works, he pictures Meg’s face.

You can tell a lot from a face. Her face is a real face. When she looked at me she saw me.

Matt works away steadily, forming a frame of two-by-fours, cutting the joins to fit neatly even though the structure will be concealed behind plywood panels.

A new shower shouldn’t take too long to install. Alan won’t mind if he takes a day out to squeeze it in some time next week.

From where he sits in the basement conference room Alan Strachan can see the feet and ankles of the people passing by on the street outside. Before him on the black glass table is spread an array of pastries and muffins, two jugs of coffee, one of which is decaffeinated, and a teapot filled with hot water. Jane Langridge, his producer, drinks only hot water. She sits on his right hand side, simultaneously attentive to a copy of his screenplay, a thick wad of notes, and her BlackBerry. This is a script meeting and etiquette prevents her from sending out messages on her BlackBerry; but she feels it’s acceptable to receive.

‘The dog is brilliant, Alan,’ she says. ‘We all adore the dog.’

Jane smiles as she speaks. She’s beginning the meeting as is traditional with a garnish of praise. She opens her eyes very wide and leans towards Alan, as if to imply that her enthusiasm borders on sexual desire. She’s a slender woman in her late forties, still very beautiful, but hollowed out by a combination of insincerity and dieting. Her close-cropped shiny black hair guards her like a helmet.

‘The dog is the star,’ echoes Ben Nokes. He sits facing Alan with a laptop open before him. Alan likes Ben Nokes, he’s intelligent and self-effacing. Unfortunately he’s entirely powerless in the process.

‘Is the business of brainwashing the dog true?’ says Jane. ‘I mean, does it really happen?’

‘Yes, it happens,’ says Alan. ‘A friend of mine had it done to stop her dog chasing sheep.’

‘They put the dog in a pen with a sheep?’

‘With a nursing ewe. The ewe will go for any dog, however big, to protect her lamb.’

‘Isn’t nature wonderful?’ says Jane, reading a message on her BlackBerry.

‘A sheepdog that’s frightened of sheep,’ says Ben Nokes. He chuckles encouragingly and taps a note into his laptop.

On the fourth side of the table sits a very young, very pretty girl called Flora, writing rapidly in profound silence. At the end of the meeting Flora will type up this record of the meeting twice, in full form and in a brief digest. Both versions will be circulated to all concerned, none of whom will read a word. Beside her is a stack of screenplays, each with the same title written in black marker pen on the edge: SHEPHERD. The letters are formed on the paper-ends. If the screenplay were to be unclipped and the sheets separated, the title would fragment and cease to exist; a process that Alan feels is already taking place before his helpless gaze.

‘This time round you’ve really dealt with Hector’s passivity,’ says Jane. Hector is the hero of
Shepherd
. Jane has worried over Hector’s passivity through two earlier drafts. Alan can’t help feeling that this is a criticism of his own passivity. ‘You’ve transformed him.’

‘Firing on all barrels,’ says Ben Nokes.

‘My only question is …’ Jane wrinkles up her white face as if searching for the right words. Alan can see her glancing over the studio notes, where the right words are to be found. ‘My only question is – have we lost some of our sympathy for Hector? Do we
like
Hector?’

‘He is very angry,’ says Ben Nokes.

Alan’s heart sinks.

‘I thought maybe the anger energized him,’ he says. ‘You did say he lacked energy.’

‘Just a question,’ says Jane, pouring herself a cup of hot water. ‘Just something to throw into the mix as we move forward.’

Alan watches the shoes click by on the pavement outside and wants it all to be over. The only good page in the third draft is the outpouring of rage he put into his hero’s mouth. There was something from the heart. But who needs the writer’s heart?

He first pitched the idea for
Shepherd
over a year ago, when high-fliers in the City were making obscene amounts of money. A simple story of an investment banker who gives up his millions to become a shepherd on the South Downs. He had meant it to be an exploration of the roots of happiness. In his first bittersweet draft, the draft that delivers his original idea, the banker’s experiment fails and he’s forced by financial need to return to the City. There his colleagues tease him with baa-ing noises, which he takes with good grace. He has emerged with a new hard-won equilibrium. Every weekend he goes back to the quiet of the Downs.

This first draft, received with ecstasy, was considered a little too dark for a mainstream audience. In the second draft the hero leaves the City as before, and makes a success of being a shepherd. This was said to lack conflict in the third act. To resolve this, and to meet a perceived lack of lighter moments, in the third draft the hero gets a sheepdog who is afraid of sheep. Now, as Alan faces work on a fourth draft, the context of his story has changed. Banks are failing. Bankers have become villains.

Does any of this matter? Is any of it real? Somewhere round the third draft Alan lost all grip on the sense of the story he was writing. Now he responds to production notes and banks the cheques.

What was that Jane Langridge just said? ‘The mix as we move forward.’ There’s a phrase worth deconstructing.
The mix
: my work of imaginative fiction reduced to ingredients that can be changed as thought necessary.
We
: the work is communal, no one to blame, no one to praise, no one’s individual voice.
Move forward
: the distant echo of revolutionary rhetoric is not accidental, bringing to mind as it does the virility of an armed uprising. Kick off the shackles of the past. Take no prisoners. There’s a new dawn breaking.

Oh, hell. Can I bear it all over again?

‘Okay.’ Jane Langridge puts down her cup of hot water and squares the notes on the table before her. Now action is to be taken. ‘We love this project, Alan. We’re all passionate about it here.’

‘Passionate,’ echoes Ben Nokes.

‘We love the concept. We love the topicality. We love the humanity. We love the dog.’

Alan runs his hands through his unruly hair and sighs. He feels like one of the followers of Kerensky who found their zeal for reform upstaged by Lenin. However profound his commitment, however dazzling his talent, the game has moved on.

‘But is it time to take a fresh look at our approach?’

Apparently it is.

‘Obviously,’ says Alan, not wanting to appear pointlessly defensive, ‘times have changed.’

Jane turns to Ben Nokes.

‘Why don’t you try Alan with your idea, Ben.’

‘Sure thing,’ says Ben. ‘I was just kicking it around to see what came loose. This is the bad version.’

This is the bad version
. A widely-used opening by production executives. Partly it’s a disclaimer: don’t judge me on this, I’m not a writer. Partly it’s an expression of respect: you’re the writer, you’ll do this so much better than me. And partly it’s the sugar on the pill: let’s all pretend we’re buddies sharing crazy ideas, but actually, pal, this is an order.

‘What we started with is Hector as a banker deciding to throw it all away for the simple life. He becomes a shepherd. Okay. Now we have bankers losing their jobs in their thousands, it doesn’t look noble any more. It looks like plain old failure.’

‘Double failure,’ says Jane. ‘He fails as a banker. Then he becomes a shepherd.’

‘Right. But we all love the shepherd idea.’

Oh no, thinks Alan. Don’t let this go the way I think it’s going.

He tries to recall the terms of his contract. There’s three more payments to come, good-sized payments: for the delivery of the first draft, and for commencement and delivery of the second draft. The last three drafts he has handed in have all been stages in the evolution of the first contractual draft. Everyone in London agrees that the screenplay should not be shown to the studio in Los Angeles until it’s in its best possible form, thus generating ‘momentum’. And until the studio receives a contractual draft, the next payment is not triggered.

‘So here’s my wild idea,’ says Ben Nokes. ‘How about we reverse the shift? We keep every single element, we keep the central concept, we just flip it.’

‘I did try this on Nancy,’ says Jane. ‘She loves it.’

Nancy is the one person who has to love it. Nancy is in LA. So there’s a message.

‘Flip it?’ says Alan.

‘Right. We start with a shepherd. He becomes a banker. He turns out to be brilliant.’

‘All the shepherding skills translate into the world of the City,’ says Jane. ‘Maybe he even brings his dog with him.’

‘And,’ says Ben Nokes, patting Alan on the arm as if to imply that this is the bit that will please him most, ‘
and
we keep the whole dog brainwashing sequence you created. Which we all love.’

‘Great work there, Alan,’ says Jane.

Alan says nothing. What is there to say? He’s caught in a trap of his own making. This is how the film business works, and he has chosen to offer his talents to the film business. No one ever pretended to him that they wanted his distinctive vision as a writer. They’re paying for a reservoir of ideas into which they can dip their little tin cups. When the reservoir runs dry there are others waiting, proffering their taps.

‘Can I think about that one?’ he says. ‘It’s a big change.’

‘Not as big as it seems at first glance,’ says Jane.

‘You think we should try this before Nancy sees anything?’

‘Absolutely,’ says Jane.

So we’re still working on the first draft.

Alan watches the shoes go by on the street. I have to get out of this business, he thinks. This can’t go on. I’d rather go back to teaching. Except that for this one screenplay they will one day pay him a sum that would take him five years of teaching to earn.

Maybe none of it matters. Reality is not as straightforward as it seems. The plumber currently at work putting a new bathroom in their house has a shed at the bottom of his garden where he plays the violin. The
Guardian
has a story this morning about a teacher sacked for telling her class Santa Claus doesn’t exist. The head teacher reassures the nation: ‘The children are unscathed and back on the right track thanks to the professionalism of our resident staff and the lovely snow we experienced last week.’

A shepherd goes to work in Canary Wharf. Super-modern high-rise glass-walled testosterone-fuelled trading floor. And a sheepdog.

Is that hilarious? Is it insane? Can I tell the difference any more?

They sit facing him, side by side, husband and wife; he a leathery little man in his fifties, she at least ten years younger, hair dyed, face heavily made up. They are called Lazarus, a name that casts the consultation in a surreal light. The surgeon, neat in pinstripe suit and humorous tie, a design of flying toasters, gives them his full attention.

The wife does the talking.

‘My husband is a saint, Mr Redknapp. He should be in heaven with the angels. He works like a dog all day. You can’t imagine the trouble I had to get him to come here. And he worries about me so. He’s a saint and a darling.’

She throws her husband a fond smile. The saint sits silently studying his shoes.

‘He says it’s a waste of money and I’ll probably die under the knife.’ She laughs merrily at this notion. ‘He’s such a joker. But it is your money, darling’ – this to the husband – ‘and I do so want you to be happy about this too.’

The surgeon does not intervene. His job at this early stage is to listen.

‘Harry thinks I don’t need any work done,’ says Mrs Lazarus, ‘but I tell him, You don’t come shopping with me, darling. You try finding clothes that fit top and bottom. And if you can do something about it, well, why not? We’d all like to stay a little younger a little longer.’

Tom Redknapp nods and smiles. He’s not humouring Mrs Lazarus, his agreement is genuine. Just because she’s willing to subject herself to unnecessary surgical procedures to satisfy her vanity, the surgeon will not judge her. He has seen so many cases of this sort, and knows how subtle are the threads that link vanity and generosity, appearance and confidence, self-belief and self-love. For all he knows this is the way Mrs Lazarus seeks to show her husband how much she values him, and looks forward, beyond the transforming touch of the scalpel, to the renewed blessing of his love.

‘So what do you have in mind?’

‘Well, a little more here would be nice.’ Her hands move in the air before her breasts. ‘And I said to Harry, in for a penny, in for a pound.’ She pats her cheeks, her chin, her neck. ‘Why not go for this too?’

The surgeon nods, writing swift notes in a flowing longhand.

‘I’ve looked in your brochure,’ says Mrs Lazarus. ‘I believe it’s called Facial Rejuvenation Package. Breast Augmentation.’ She raises her voice, a little nervous at naming these professional terms. ‘And I’ve shown Harry what it costs.’

The saint nods silent assent.

‘Guess what he said? He said, I don’t care about the money. I just don’t want you to be hurt. He never thinks of himself. But you do know, darling’ – she touches his knee - ‘I’m doing this for both of us.’ She turns back to the surgeon. ‘It’s our Christmas present to each other.’

A gift. An act of love. Tom Redknapp thinks how little outsiders know of the profound emotions with which he engages daily. Sometimes at dinner parties he comes up against the old distaste for cosmetic surgery, offered up by decent people who are not stupid but have never thought seriously about the matter. Most times he smiles and lets it go, accepting that they see him as a mercenary, a traitor to the caring ethos of medicine, who disfigures helpless women for his gain. Sometimes he teases out the discussion a little further. Do you believe that you must accept the body you were born with, and do nothing to improve it? Would you operate on a face scarred by disfiguring burns? Do you allow the use of make-up? of hair dye? Do you diet and exercise to stay slim? Ah, so it is acceptable to want to manage our body shape so that we look our best. The only area of debate is where we draw the line, and why.

Over the years he has learned humility. He respects his patients even when he thinks he understands their motives better than they do themselves. The relationship between body image and self-esteem is so profound. He’ll give Mrs Lazarus bigger breasts. She’ll feel more sexually confident. Mr Lazarus will be surprised and grateful. She’ll be proud and happy.

We all long to be objects of desire.

No, none of this causes the surgeon a moment’s doubt. And yet all is not well. In recent weeks questions of quite a different order have begun to torment him. Absurd to be kept awake at night by what amounts to philosophical imponderables, but certain concerns have lodged in his brain and will not be dismissed.

What is it that his clients want? Deliverance from shame? The restoration of normality? But he knows there is no normality. So many examinations over the years, so many women standing, trembling, exposed, naked in his office: he more than anyone knows the commonplace oddity of the human body. If only they could see what he sees, the shame would evaporate. But instead they see this fantasy called beauty: a fantasy because no single individual believes they have it, but all believe others have it. Beauty is a state that is always just out of reach. Or you could say there’s no such thing as beauty. We define it so variously that it doesn’t exist. What does exist, what remains constant, is our feelings about beauty: what we seek is a certain feeling about ourselves which is stimulated by the perceptions of others. The entire process actually happens in the mind, in our own minds and in the minds of the people round us. Beauty turns out to be a group delusion. So much is obvious. The plastic surgeon operates on the minds of his patients. So why stop there? What else is illusion? My value as an individual? The meaning of my existence?

The consultation proceeds. The surgeon understands that his client has already made up her mind. After all, it takes courage to come into the office of a stranger and speak openly of your body and its limitations, let alone show that body. She will have scoured the Internet, studied brochures, talked to friends. Now she is fired up and ready to go. Nevertheless, he must take her through the risks: infection, allergic reaction, pulmonary embolism, everything up to and including death.

‘But they’re rare, aren’t they?’ she says. ‘I mean, I’m more at risk driving my car, right?’

She laughs and touches her husband’s knee, to reassure him.

‘That’s true,’ says the surgeon. ‘But it’s important that you’re fully informed.’

He hears the nervousness in her laugh, and feels as always a wave of protective tenderness. Beneath the make-up, behind the quick bobbing glances at her husband, there lies such bravery. All these women were once girls in school, dreading the weekly swimming lesson where they would have to expose their awkward bodies to the cold blue light.

‘Now,’ he says, ‘I think the next step is the examination.’

Mr Lazarus stands up.

‘You’re very welcome to stay, Mr Lazarus. It’s entirely as you and Mrs Lazarus wish.’

Mr Lazarus looks to his wife.

‘Stay, darling,’ says Mrs Lazarus. ‘It’s not like you’re going to get any surprises.’

Her husband sits down again.

‘He’s the one gets the surprises,’ she says, nodding at Tom Redknapp.

The surgeon smiles.

‘Not any more,’ he says. ‘In my business you get to see what people really look like, thank God, not the touched-up fake version.’

‘So hey-ho,’ says Mrs Lazarus, her voice bright. ‘I suppose this is where I take my top off.’

When he first saw Meg naked she covered her breasts with her hands, out of shame.

‘Don’t you wish they were bigger?’ she said.

‘I don’t want any part of you different to the way you are,’ Tom replied.

Does that make me a better man than Mr Lazarus? Not at all. We both act in obedience to our desires.

Here lies the terrible possibility: that my existence only becomes meaningful in the short highly-charged interval between the birth of a desire and its satisfaction. That this is
what the struggle of my days is directed towards. That this
is all there is.

After the consultation he catches up on his paperwork. Then he calls Meg’s office and learns she’s out for the rest of the day. He tries her mobile and reaches her in her car.

‘I was thinking of looking in about six-thirty. If you’re going to be in.’

‘Of course I’ll be in.’

‘I’ll only have half an hour or so.’

‘All right. See you then.’

He attends a management meeting of the hospital board. The planned extension from twenty-five to fifty beds is proceeding on schedule, with the new floor expected to be ready by February. However, bookings are down.

‘December’s always a slow month,’ says Vernon, the finance manager. ‘But we have to assume current financial conditions will affect business going forward. We may not experience the usual mid-January pick-up.’

Tom Redknapp plays very little part in the discussion. His mind is on the mystery of desire.

I desire because I am desired.

A man can have a fine opinion of himself bred in him by a loving family and all the privileges of his class; he can go to a fine university and build an enviable career; he can do all these things and never for one moment believe himself to be desirable.

We’re talking about sex, of course. But does that make it any less significant? There’s nothing shallow about sex, nothing superficial. Marriage, if you like, you can call that superficial: a social arrangement, a bargain struck at a certain moment in time. But sexual desire goes to the very core.

Looking back over his life he realizes that he has always believed in his own desire but never in theirs. Not the desire of the women. He always suspected in them, more than suspected, assumed in them an ulterior motive. The man wants sex and baits it with the chance of commitment. The woman wants commitment and baits it with the chance of sex. So far, so obvious. Except that there are casualties here that lie unremarked on the field of combat: the death of female desire; the loss of men as sexually desirable beings.

We collude. I collude. So frantic in my twenties in the pursuit of sex by any means I fed the hope of something more. Why else would she oblige me? Then the parting, the accusation of betrayal, the guilt. You lied to me! You didn’t love me! After a while the act of lying itself comes to be sexually charged, or at least the intensity of the sexual excitement seems to be contingent on the level of the moral transgression. We collude in the lie that sex is an early way station on the road to love. Even our bodies collude in the lie, because always after the sex comes the revulsion, the sense of worthlessness, the self-accusation: was it for that that I lied?

No, not for that. Not for the short shudder of bliss. For the gathering storm that preceded it, for the rolling thunder that begins low and far away and comes ever closer until it fills the sky and drowns the world. For desire.

‘You’re very quiet, Tom,’ says Vernon.

‘Why aren’t we talking about low-season discounts?’ says Richard Graves.

‘We can’t advertise discounts,’ says Vernon. ‘That’s an inducement, and inducements are illegal.’

‘Bloody stupid if you ask me,’ says Richard Graves. ‘So how are we going to pay the bills when we’ve doubled in size and halved our bookings?’

‘Maybe,’ says Tom, who hasn’t been listening and so says what they’ve all been thinking, ‘maybe we shouldn’t go ahead with the expansion.’

‘But we’ve built it!’

‘So? We don’t have to equip it, staff it, heat it.’

‘That is a legitimate option,’ says Vernon cautiously, looking round the table.

‘So what do we do with it?’

‘I don’t know. Put it to sleep. Wait for better times.’

This precipitates an explosion of disagreement. Tom withdraws once more into his own thoughts. He’s indifferent to the outcome one way or the other. What’s the worst that can happen? The hospital goes bust. He’s a shareholder, he loses his stake. So what? He has a marketable skill. Life goes on.

So I have no ambition any more?

In some strange way he feels as if he’s started his life over again. This time round there’s no drive to achieve, no deferring of pleasure in the interests of later gain. This time, the pleasure.

Yes, she said. Of course I’ll be in.

The other day she asked for a picture of him when he was young. He showed her the photograph his friend Olly took of him dancing at his twenty-first. He’s always liked it because he looks happy though in fact he wasn’t.

‘Oh, you’re so gorgeous!’ Meg said when she saw it.

Looking through her eyes he saw a sweet-faced boy with shaggy hair, a lithe body. It was as if he was looking at a stranger. His own memory is of physical awkwardness, sticky-out ears, narrow chest, freckles, eyes that plead and look away. The musty odour of desperation.

Now, of course, thirty years later, three stone heavier, balding, cheeks sagging, eyes bagging, he can no longer be called gorgeous. But it’s now that he’s desired.

The meeting comes to a conclusion. The hospital expansion will proceed. A new marketing drive will aim to lift patient numbers. Vernon undertakes to brief the marketing team and Pegasus, the retained PR company.

As they leave Richard Graves murmurs to Tom, ‘I should have thought you’d have more to say, with your new-found interest in marketing.’

Meg is in marketing.

‘I leave that to you youngsters,’ says Tom. Richard Graves is at most ten years his junior. ‘In my day only the charlatans advertised.’

‘Oh, the charlatans are advertising, all right,’ says Richard. ‘Any quack can offer cosmetic surgery these days. That’s why we have to get out there, make our case, save the suckers from their own stupidity.’