Grey Area (4 page)

The waitress carne back down towards us. She was a striking young woman. Dark but not Neapolitan, with a low brow, roughly cropped hair and deep-set, rather steely eyes that skated away from mine when I tried to meet them.

‘Yes? The boss said you wanted to talk to me – look, I’m sorry about the spillage, OK?’ She didn’t sound sorry. Her tears had evaporated, leaving behind a tidal mark of saline bitterness.

‘No, no, it’s not that. Here, sit down with us for a minute.’ I proffered my pack of cigarettes; she refused with a coltish head jerk. ‘Apparently you’re a writer of sorts?’

‘Not “of sorts”. I’m a writer, full stop.’

‘Well then,’ Gerard chipped in, ‘what’s the problem with selling your book? Is it a novel?’

‘Ye-es. Someone accepted it provisionally, but they want to make all sorts of stupid cuts. I won’t stand for it, so now they want to break the contract.’

‘Is it your first novel?’ asked Gerard.

‘The first I’ve tried to sell – or should I say “sell-out” – not the first I’ve written.’

‘And what’s the novel about – can you tell us?’

‘Look’ – she was emphatic, eyes at last meeting mine – I’ve been working here for over a year, doing long hours of mindless skivvying so that I have the mental energy left over for my writing. I don’t need some pair of smoothies to come along and show an interest in me.’

‘OK, OK.’ For some reason Gerard had turned emollient, placatory. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t, but we are genuinely interested.’ This seemed to work, she took a deep breath, accepted one of my cigarettes and lit it with a
fatale’s
flourish.

‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s set in the future. An old hospital administrator is looking back over her life. In her youth she worked for one of a series of hospitals that were set around the ring road of an English provincial town. These had grown up over the years from being small cottage hospitals serving local areas to becoming the huge separate departments – psychiatry, oncology, obstetrics – of one great regional facility.

‘One day a meeting is held of all the Region’s administrators, at which it is realised that the town is almost completely encircled by a giant doughnut of health facilities. At my heroine’s instigation policies are fomented for using this reified
cordon sanitaire
as a means of filtering out undesirables who want to enter the town and controlling those who already live in it. Periods of enforced hospitalisation are introduced; troublemakers are subjected to “mandatory injury”. Gradually the administrators carry out a slow but silent coup against central as well as local government.

‘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 – ‘

‘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.

The twins’ inseparability had resisted all their parents’ attempts to drive them apart, to wedge them into individuality. When they came home together, from their university, or their predictable travels – Inter-railing, inefficiently digging irrigation ditches for peasants, offending Muslims – their parents laughed again at the funhouse image of their young selves incestuously bonded.

‘Had you thought of putting them in the Rood Room?’ Peter flung this over his shoulder as he worked his way round the awkward curved corridor that led from the kitchen to the rest of the house.

‘Oh no, your Giselle must have the Rood Room. After all she has to have some compensation for becoming an indentured serf.’

Later that day Peter Geddes waited in his crap car for Giselle to exit from Grantham Station. There were never many passengers on this mid-afternoon stopper from King’s Cross so he knew he wouldn’t miss her. Despite this he adopted a sort of sit-up-and-beg posture in the hard, functional seat of the car, as if he were a private detective waiting to follow a suspect. He did this because he had the heightened self-consciousness of an intelligent person who has drunk slightly too much alcohol in the middle of the day.

‘Sorry,’ said Giselle, coming up on Peter unawares and hallooing in the characteristic manner of an English bourgeois.

‘Whossat!’ he started.

‘Sorry,’ she reiterated, ‘I was late and got stuck in the rear carriage. It’s taken me ages to lug this lot up the platform. I couldn’t find a porter or anyone.’

It didn’t occur to Peter to cancel out her superfluous apology with one more justified. But he did get out and load her luggage through the back hatch. There was a lot of it. Two scuffed, functional suitcases, two straw baskets that wafted pot-pourri, a rolled Peruvian blanket and so on.

They drove through Grantham. A plump man and a plump girl. Both philosophers and therefore necessarily free in spirit, yet still mundanely hobbled by avoirdupois, like battery porkers being fattened up to do metaphysics.

Peter spoke first. ‘It’s a dull little town, we hardly bother to come in here. You can get just about everything you need in Bumford.’

‘Is your house right in the village?’

‘No, it’s on the outskirts, on the Vale of Belvoir side.’

‘Oh, that must be lovely.’

‘No, not exactly. You’ll see what I mean.’

She did. The town of Grantham gave way to the unmade, unfinished countryside of South Notts. The scrappy alternation of light industry and industrial farming gave the area a sort of kitchen-where-no-one-has-washed-up feeling. The Vale of Belvoir, which was the only eminence for miles around, was little more than a yellow, rape-filled runnel, spreading out towards a hazy horizon, giving the distinct impression that all of England was a desultory plateau, falling away to the north.

‘Well, Giselle, this is your home for the foreseeable future, or at least until we can get this bloody book finished.’ Peter abruptly braked the Renault, scrunching the gravel. They sat for a moment, still in the monochrome of a dull summer afternoon, listening to an electric mower and each other’s breathing.

Even Giselle couldn’t summon up much more of a comment about the house than, ‘Ooh, what an interesting house. It must have been quite unique when it was built.’ As good an example of the enigma of the counterfactual as any.

Peter took her inside. June was off getting the twins from Stansted. He led her through the cramped rooms on the ground floor and up the back stairs. They entered the Rood Room.

‘Good heavens!’ cried Giselle. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this before. How? I mean what – ?’

‘Yes, yes, well, the Rood Room often does take people this way. I’ll give you the edited lecture, then if you want to know more you can read the pamphlet English Heritage have done on it.’

‘Is this – ?’

‘Where you’ll be sleeping, yes, that is, if you think you can cope with it?’

‘Cope with it, why, it’s beautiful.’

‘Perhaps that’s putting it a bit strongly but it is an unusual room, a characterful room. It was built by a local craftsman called Peter Horner, in the mid, seventeenth century. As you can see, the room is dominated by an outsize version of a traditional rood screen. Originally this feature would have separated the nave of the church from the chancel and been surmounted by a crucifix. Its status as a symbolic dividing off of the congregation from the priest is obvious, but here in the Rood Room the symbolism of the screen has been subverted.

‘Horner was a member of a local Manichaean sect called the Grunters. He probably built the room as a secret worshipping place for the sect. The screen itself, instead of being topped by a crucifix, is capped by a number of phalluses. Some of these descend from the ceiling, like plaster stalactites, some ascend from the screen like wooden stalagmites. The overall effect is rather toothy, wouldn’t you say?’

‘It’s astonishing. And all the carving, painting and plasterwork. It’s all so fresh and vivid.’

‘Yes, well, of course the Rood Room has been extensively restored. As a matter of fact by a team of unemployed architectural graduates working under the direction of our own dear Dr Morrison. Nevertheless it was remarkably preserved to begin with. It is without doubt the foremost example of seventeenth-century vernacular architecture still extant in England.’

‘Actually, Dr Geddes, it does seem odd . . . I mean not that I don’t want to . . . but sleeping in a place of worship – ‘

‘Oh I shouldn’t give it another thought. We’ve been living here for years, since the twins were ten, and they always slept here. And anyway, you have to consider what the Grunters’ probable form of worship was. Like other Manichaeans they believed that, as the Devil was co-eternal with God, forms of behaviour that orthodox Christians regarded as sinful were in fact to be enjoined. Hence all these rude, rather than “rood”, paintings and carvings.’

Giselle fell to examining the panels of the rood screen and Peter, remembering his more material duties as host and employer, went off to fetch her cases from the car.

Standing in front of the house Peter looked up at its facade and shook his head in weary enjoyment. It never fails, he thought, it never fails to surprise them. Had he troubled to analyse his glee at exposing the Rood Room to Giselle, he might have found it to be a more complicated and troublesome emotion. After all, shocking guests with the Rood Room was akin to a sophisticated form of flashing.

Because the exterior of the Geddes–Laughton house was so uncompromisingly Victorian – two shoeboxes of dark-red London brick, topped off with a steeply gabled tiled roof – any visitor was bound to expect its interior to correspond. But it was only a cladding, a long mackintosh that could be twitched aside to reveal a priapic core. For really the house was a collection of seventeenth-century cottages and hovels that had been cemented together over the centuries by a mucilage of plaster, wattle, daub and stonework. The only room of any substance was the Rood Room; all the others were awkward moulded cells, connected by bulging, serpentine corridors.

But Peter didn’t trouble to analyse his emotions – it wasn’t his style. It’s difficult to imagine what the interior scape of a philosopher’s mind might be like. Modern works of analytic philosophy are so arid. How could anyone hold so many fiddly Faberge arguments in his or her mind for so long? Without the drifting motes of decaying brain cells – used-up thoughts and prototypical thoughts never to be employed – beginning to fill the atmosphere and cloud the clarity of introspection with intellectual plaster dust.

To get around the problem, Peter’s mind was akilter to real time. Like a gyroscope spinning slowly, set inside another gyroscope spinning faster, Peter’s mind went on churning through chains, puzzles and tables of ratiocination, while the world zipped by him: a time-lapse film with a soundtrack of piping, irrelevant Pinky and Perky voices. And while not exactly fecund, the similes required to describe his mental processes were sterile rather than decaying. They were like three-dimensional word puzzles: propositions, premises, theses and antitheses, all were manipulated in free fall, coaxed into place with a definite ‘click’. It was if Peter’s will were a robotic claw that lanced into a radioactive interior in order to perform subtle manipulations.

But then the greatest paradox of all is that nothing is farther off from self-knowledge than introspection, and nothing more remote from wisdom than pure intellect.

On re-entering the house, Peter found Giselle in the kitchen. She was arranging some freesias in a jamjar full of water as he popped puffing through the narrow door.

‘You must let me help you with those – they’re awfully heavy.’

‘Oh no – no. Don’t worry. You sit down. Bung on the kettle if you like.’ He was already mounting the awkward steps.

Back upstairs he placed her cases and baskets by the big pine bedstead set beneath the largest window. He sat on the edge of the bed and lost himself for a while in the Rood Room’s gullet confines.

It really was an astonishing place, hardly like a room in a house at all, more of a grotto. There was one large diamond-mullioned window over the bed and another, much smaller, on the opposite wall, the other side of the rood screen. The light from these came in in thick shafts, given body by swirls of golden dust motes. But it was the ceiling that gave the room its organic feel. It was thrown over the top like a counterpane and tied down by each corner to a respective corner. The middle of the billowing roof was held aloft, over the dead centre of the rood screen, supported there by its petrified folds. Between these folds, studding the rippling walls, were hundreds of plaster mouldings.