Clerihew was caught off balance, but only for a moment. “I enjoy a joke as much as anyone, but I don’t quite understand the humor of getting a fellow’s name wrong on purpose, Andy. No doubt,” he said, looking meaningfully at Dorothea and also, as Andrew suddenly realized, at Oakley himself, who’d just appeared, “you’ve got your reasons. And I’m equally sure that you know my objection is not to meat, per se, but to the hideous industrial effluent that is all too often passed off as the real thing. Mrs. Oakley’s table, I can confidently assert, always carries the finest wholesome organic produce. There is simply no other way it could taste as good as it does.”
Andrew detected from a slight tremble from one of Dorothea’s wattles that the main organic produce on offer here was bullshit, but he could hardly start insulting her now via an exposure of Clerihew. He mentally doffed his cap to his opponent for the slick move. He then mentally took out a Kalashnikov and splattered his guts over the back wall.
“I’ve just been talking to a young man who, I understand, is your friend,” said Oakley, in a way that strongly suggested to Andrew that no good was about to come from this conversation.
“Oh, Leo? Yes, he’s a live wire. Brilliant academic. One of the leading minds of his generation.”
The leading what of his what? Not for the first time, Andrew had the feeling that his words were being written by a truly bad playwright. No, it was worse than that: a hack librettist translating a Bulgarian folk opera from the period just before the—
“He was talking about Noddy.”
“Noddy?”
As soon as he said Noddy, Andrew realized he should never have said Noddy. It was impossible to say Noddy without sounding like an idiot. Especially if all you said was Noddy in a single-word sentence, given a rising intonation to turn it into a question.
“Noddy. The historical Noddy,” continued Oakley, with an expression midway between curiosity and revulsion, like someone who’s found a complicated-looking foreign body up his nose. “Apparently he’s doing some research on the subject. Says the standard view was that the Noddy character was based on a Scandinavian wood sprite, the Nodal, known for playing humorous and often explicitly—well, sexual, tricks on woodcutters and so forth. Went into considerable detail on the sort of tricks. But then there was also a Viking, named in some Icelandic saga, Nodrum Ninefinger, who—oh, well, can’t quite remember. But this friend of yours, Leo, his view was that Blyton was in love with some chap called Lord Nodderington, who was killed in the trenches in the Great War.”
Clerihew shook his head seriously, as if they’d been discussing the discovery of a cancerous polyp on Andrew’s colon.
So, Leo was on that one. But of course it wouldn’t just be Noddy. He looked around and finally caught sight of Leo surrounded by an assorted group of experts and others. They wore the mixed expressions of amusement and shock that Leo always attracted when he was on fire, and Andrew cursed himself again for the folly of inviting him. Once Leo was spotted, Andrew managed to focus in on where he’d reached in his rant.
“. . . classic Oedipal conflict,” he could just hear. “Father figure wants to drive the ‘son’ out of the family unit; the ‘son’ wants to kill the father to gain access to the females.” Leo was talking with complete authority and didn’t seem too pissed, which meant that something might be salvaged from the evening.
“But that’s insane,” replied one of the cleverer young experts, an antiquarian map man called Cartwright. Andrew had been meaning to pal up with him for a while. “Isn’t it a chicken hawk? It doesn’t want to fuck the hens, it wants to eat them.”
“You’re confusing your Foghorn Leghorn episodes . . .”
“All very perplexing,” resumed Oakley, and Andrew had to switch back rapidly. “I hardly had the chance to tell him that I’m a collector of the early Blyton stories, and of course they do very well at auction, before he launched into an extraordinary tirade about commerce being such a monstrous thing. Altogether a very perculiar performance and a very strange sort of person to bring along to a—to a—to bring along.”
“Mmmmm,” said Clerihew, who’d been waiting for an opportunity to contribute something. “I was rather wondering why you brought someone like that along. Unless, Andrew—oh, I’m sorry, is he your partner? I really wouldn’t have . . . if I’d known.”
“Oh, fuck off, Cuthbert. I brought him because Colin suggested we all bring someone, and Leo’s about the most amusing and intelligent person I know. I thought it might be an interesting social experiment.”
There was a pause, just long enough for Andrew to realize what a serious mistake it had been to tell Clerihew to fuck off. Bound to add to the general view that he wasn’t a team player but rather some kind of reckless maverick, the sort of person who would, in fact, bring a Noddy-obsessed anarcho-syndicalist lunatic to a sedate gathering of book experts and their decent, God-fearing, property-respecting, hatchet-faced, sensibly knickered spouses.
“Well, it—your experiment—doesn’t seem to be going very well at the moment, young man,” said Dorothea Oakley, whose presence Andrew had managed, with some effort, to forget. For no good reason that Andrew could see, this was treated by the assembled sycophants as a putdown of Wildean brilliance.
Looking for an escape route, Andrew saw Alice chatting with a tall, slender woman at one of the tables. “Excuse me I must—um, just . . .” he said, and pushed his way through the throng to them, wishing all the time he’d thought of something wittier than “I must—um, just” to leave them with. He was only marginally cheered up by recalling his joke about never remembering the phrase esprit d’escalier until it was too late.
Alice saw him coming. He looked like one of the miraculously unhurt survivors of a train crash.
“How’s it going?” she said. “This is my friend Odette.”
“I see you made the wise decision to bring someone normal and not a . . . well, a Leo.”
“How do you know I’m not a Leo?” said Odette, looking a little puzzled. “I mean, I’m not. I’m a Sagittarius, not that I believe any of that, but still. What are they supposed to be like, that you’re so sure I’m not one?”
Andrew and Alice exchanged smiles, which annoyed Odette. Andrew saw the annoyance and started babbling. “Oh, God, no, it’s not the star thing. It’s my friend. He’s called Leo. The name, Leo. That’s what he’s called. I’m sure that whatever good things there are about Leos, the star sign Leos, then you’d have them. I mean you’ve got them. All of them. Fuck. Where’s that rent in the space-time continuum when you need it?”
The babble, as he knew it would, made everything all right.
“Leo’s the one I was telling you about,” said Alice to Odette. “And this is Andrew, whom we’ve already done to death.” She smiled at him to show that this was intended as a compliment.
“Leo sounds like a very interesting character,” said Odette to Andrew, also smiling, her lips neatly together.
“Yes. And sometimes interesting is exactly what you want.”
“And sometimes not?”
“Well, no. I suppose sometimes what you want is interesting and safe, but Leo’s interesting and lethal. Looks like he might well be on his way to ruining my beautiful career. I blame myself.”
“That’s big of you”—Alice laughed—“given that it is entirely your fault for inviting him. Why don’t we extract him from the morass over there and let him loose on Odette. My bet is she takes some of the wind out of his sails—she’s world class when it comes to deflating egos and seeing through people and all that sort of thing.”
“I think that’s a bit harsh on Leo. Whatever else he is, he certainly isn’t a fraud. He just—well, several things, really. He says things for effect, but usually also to test them out. And he says things that other people only think. And although he spends all his time upsetting people, he isn’t malicious. He reserves his real hatred for himself. I’ll go and get him.”
On his way back toward Leo, Andrew wonder
ed if he’d reached his Marxist analysis of Sesame Street yet. The Noddy/Foghorn-Leghorn/Sesame Street material began life as a series of lectures Leo used to give to undergraduates to help explain the various interpretive approaches open to literary critics, but he’d found them to be useful ways of annoying the kind of people who ought to be annoyed and amusing those who deserved amusing. Andrew was secretly relieved that he hadn’t come up with something worse. Just as he reached the group, he noticed that Clerihew was among the onlookers. There seemed to have been some exchange between him and Leo. Clerihew had said something that had shut Leo up in mid-sentence. In his own way the roly-poly turd could be quite effective. It would be like him to make some veiled allusion to Ophelia’s earlier comments. Leo caught Andrew’s eye and threw him a wink. Oh, dear, thought Andrew. Oh, dear. Leo then moved a foot closer to Clerihew and said something quietly to him. The onlookers stopped laughing. Leo then swayed back, a movement exaggerated, Andrew could see, by a drunkenness that was approaching saturation point.
“Clerihew, Clerihew,” said Leo, very loudly and very clearly. “You really are as . . .”
At that instant Andrew knew what was coming, and it wasn’t funny and it wasn’t clever. About a month before, he and Leo had been discussing the difficulty in saying anything truly offensive. The various reproductive and excretory terms had been neutered by overuse. Even the dreaded C-word had been rendered relatively benign, although it still topped the tables.
“What we need is a modifier. Something that uses what’s left of the shockability in cunt, but magnifies it.”
That, regrettably, had been Andrew.
“Yes,” replied Leo. “That’s it. We need a metaphor. As something as a something something cunt.”
Between the two of them, they had hit on a phrase that they were confident would (a) offend 95 percent of those who heard it and (b) be flexible enough to be used in a variety of different contexts. And what would it be now? wondered Andrew. As rank as? As fat as? As loose as? As flabby as?
“You really are,” said Leo, “as slack as an old whore’s cunt.”
Oh, Lord. Andrew began to have an out-of-body experience, floating about three feet above himself before psychic gravity hauled him back in.
Yes, it was the whore’s that did it, giving it a Jacobean, no, a Restoration feel. At least their scientific approach to the subject was demonstrated to be the right one. Scanning the faces from Clerihew to Pam, encompassing the full range of Enderby’s employees and including, Andrew now saw, the Slayer herself, he perceived everywhere that the phrase had done its work well. Shock was there, and now surely the outrage would follow, led, the clever money predicted, by Clerihew, camping it up for all he was worth.
But what was this, Clerihew smiling? Sadly shaking his head. Walking away. And the others. Also walking away. And then Leo was alone in the middle of the crowded pub, surrounded by a penumbra of contempt.
Andrew sensed that the Slayer’s eyes were on him. He’d never met her, but she’d certainly seen him on her occasional commando raids into Books territory. If Andrew walked away he could probably—no, not probably, only possibly—get away with the debacle. If it had been probably, perhaps his decision would have been different, but at possibly there was no contest. He went up to Leo, put an arm around his shoulders, put his fist against his cheek, and rubbed it hard.
“If I didn’t love you, I’d kill you. Might kill you anyway. As it is, there’s a top chick to meet.”
Leo looked at him blearily. “Have I misbehaved?”
“Oh, yes.”
“How badly?”
“You know that time when you spent the weekend with me up in Nottingham at my parents’, and you got up drunk in the night and went for a piss, and then my dad put the light on because you were in their bedroom?”
“That bad?”
“Worse.”
“Andrew, I’m sorry. It was that girl. Ophelia. She was so close, I mean soooooo close to being my absolute personal ideal. I mean the Platonic perfect form. And then. I know I should be used to it by now, but Jeeeesus. Andy, I’m in no stit fate—what did I say?—no fit state to meet people. Jus’ gonna go home.”
Alice came to meet them. “Oh, dear, Leo, you don’t look very well. I’m sorry I missed the fireworks over there. I’m sure you were being very funny. They’ll all be talking about Andrew’s brilliant friend tomorrow in the office.” Usually so alert, Alice missed the for-God’s-sake-cut-it hand signals Andrew was giving her.
Leo twisted, without violence, away from Andrew and came close beside Alice. “There something important to tell you. This man here is reality. The real. The world. Your robber baron down in the country: just a trashy fantasy, a bit of Walter Scott whimsy. And,” he said, coming closer still, “your boy, your Dead Boy, he’s art. Nothing but art.” He spat the word out as if it were poison. “And you know what Plato said about art? Art is a lie.” He staggered away toward the door.
Andrew was about to follow him when he saw Alice’s face. “What’s wrong? What did he say?”
“You told him. You told him about . . . you told him about my—who else did you tell, Ophelia? Clerihew?”
“Oh, Christ. Nobody. Look, I had to tell Leo. He’s my best friend. I needed to . . .”
Alice was crying. Odette appeared. They murmured together for a while, with Andrew looking on helplessly.
“I’m putting her in a taxi,” said Odette to Andrew.
Andrew’s ears were ringing. Was this the worst night of his life? How could it all have gone so wrong? He looked around. At least no one was paying any attention to this latest fiasco, unless you counted Clerihew, who never missed anything, and Andrew had no intention of counting Clerihew. He went back to the bar. To his surprise he found Ophelia there. She smiled at him pleasantly.
“I wasn’t expecting much from this evening, but I’ve rather enjoyed myself,” she said.
“Yeah, me too.”
It was all Ophelia’s fault, the whole nightmarish fucked-up catalog of disasters—no, not a catalog, this was more impressive; this was like one of those great eighteenth-century compendiums, with teams of scholars working for years, or just one solitary madman devoting his life to the project. An Encyclopédie of disasters, a Johnson’s Dictionary. But still, her fault or not, she had a minute smudge of lipstick on her teeth, something he’d never seen on her before, a blemish. It made his balls hum with electric desire.
OUTSIDE, ODETTE FOUND a taxi. Alice forbade her to share it.
“No, no,” she sobbed, “it’s the wrong way. Please, I need to do this alone.”
Odette understood. It was still quite early and there were plenty of cabs around. As she waited for another, she saw something hunched over the gutter across the street. She crossed.
“Are you okay?” she said to Leo. He looked up at her through his fingers.
“Do I look okay?” he said, with effort.
“Why don’t I put you in a taxi,” Odette replied, matter-of-factly. “It’s what I’m doing today. Which way do you go?”
“Notre Dame. It’s not on the tube.”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Country Pleasures
THE JOURNEY was now almost familiar to Alice: the train slowly rattling under gray skies; the ragged lines of hedgerows swelling into scrubby copses; the occasional flash of strutting pheasant; the cows staring like voyeurs; the scarecrows not scaring crows; the horse in a field of thistles, breaking into a frantic gallop; the Asian family across the aisle, sharing out samosas and poppadams and Mars Bars.
She was still angry and upset at Andrew’s betrayal. For all his protestations, she was sure he and Leo must have been laughing about her; after all, it’s what they did about everything. On the Monday following the Friday drink, she’d played it cool, determined he should not know how much she had been hurt but equally determined to withdraw from the relative intimacy of their relations. She’d been scrupulously polite when they met but said no thanks to the offer of tea.
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Whatever punishment she had in store for him, however, soon paled in comparison with the general office reaction to the Friday happenings. One or two of the younger people came up and slapped him on the back, congratulating him on livening up what had promised to be a very dull evening. Andrew looked embarrassed, stammering something about not expecting his friend to go quite so far over the top. And then at ten-thirty Oakley appeared and asked him to step into his office. Alice, and everyone else, could hear the barking through the opaque plate glass. Andrew emerged entirely drained of color. The tail of his shirt was, not untypically, flapping slightly from his trousers, which, by giving the unfortunate impression that he’d been to see the headmaster for a thrashing, lent a certain amount of comedy to the affair.
Alice didn’t feel inclined to offer any sympathy, despite the injustice of it: Could Andrew be blamed because Leo got so drunk? Really, it was Ophelia’s fault. To her surprise, Ophelia came over to commiserate, although after a couple of minutes it became clear that she meant to bring home the enormity of the offense (“Yes, they’ll probably remember this forever; you know what they’re like”).
The whole thing was capped by Clerihew. He marched up to Andrew, thrust out his hand, and said, “No hard feelings, old man, let’s shake and forget it.”
Andrew, startled, didn’t quite know what to do. After four seconds of dithering, he took Clerihew’s hand, but somehow the impression was given that he had yet again acted in a mean-spirited way. Alice looked toward Oakley’s office and saw him standing at the door, watching.
BY WEDNESDAY, ALICE had forgiven him enough to ask about Leo.
“Oh, I haven’t seen or heard from him. Don’t blame him. Think I might punch him if he did show up. Not really. What did you make of him?”
“I actually rather liked him. Can’t say he was particularly comfortable company, but he was . . . interesting.”
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