What You Didn't Miss

by D. J. Taylor

  Brian, meanwhile, is heading back from the bar, the odd, puckering smile on his face signalling his conviction that he has made a hit. Brian, he remembers, was a player – is that the right word? – in import–export back in the Seventies, but most of it has gone. The stroke has left the right-hand side of his face screwed up, like a chevron. But then we are none of us what we were. Seeing him, Brian semaphores wildly, like one of those ancient PT instructors about to embark on a piece of old-fashioned physical jerks.

  ‘David, it is very good of you to have lunch with me here today.’

  ‘Brian, you know I wouldn’t miss it for worlds, what with the age we have become.’ Brian, he remembers, is a month younger than him. It is his solitary advantage. He thinks of Brian’s wife, Evangeline – those were the kind of names women had back then – and the one time they had sex, out in the jungle, going at it like monkeys on an abandoned tree-root. ‘But, Brian, why do we talk to each other in this stilted way, and why do we mention each other’s names all the time?’

  ‘David, I think it is because we are characters in a Justin Cartwright novel and our individuality is somehow subsumed into the wider creative framework. How, may I ask, is the family?’

  ‘Frankly I’m worried about Amelia. Artists should perform on paper, not in the sack.’

  ‘I haven’t seen mine in a decade. Let me tell you, you are a very lucky man.’

  Suddenly the fragrance in the room rushes to fill a space he had always thought empty, and he is out there on the karoo again, pissed out of his head on that Afrikaner termite lager, with the red ants swarming over his feet and Bootie the baboon gibbering in his ear. In the end we are all slightly mad, he thinks. Leaving the restaurant, eight hours later, he finds the ticket is in his wallet. Forty years ago a night with a friendly Soho prostitute cost seven shillings and sixpence.

  He walks fast. He wants to get to the airport.

  PARROT AND OLIVIER IN AMERICA

  PETER CAREY

  Olivier: Ah, the revolution, mon amour, with its creaking tumbrels and its picturesque effusions of sanguinariness. You may very well imagine the trauma such an inopportune conflagration inflicted upon the poor but indisputably Gallic head of moi, Olivier Roquefort Passe-partout Thermidor de la Pont d’Avignon, so delicately accommodated here with papa and mama, the comte and comtesse, in the Chateau Sal Volatile, where, ma foi, though it pains me to say, there was an exceedingly strong possibility that an event of a distressingly untoward nature was about to happen . . .

  Parrot: Me and me da was printers, down in the West Country, where we used to swim all nudey in the river like meer-mayds with our bitzes hanging all down a dingle-dangle, with skerricks of light a-snuckering over the grass in the brightsome dawn, and the rabbitses going hip-hoppity-hop . . . [continues]. But with me ever in fret lest the excise men should cob us and crib us, or my daddy should die, which of course he did, which is how I took ship for Ameriky.

  Olivier: As a child I was thought deaf, but ever could I hear the budgerigar in its cage, and if there was silence between us, still it spoke to me. Thus I determined, veritable philosophe that I was, denied so much that was indubitably mine, that I should set sail for a new world of enlightenment, and just dealings, not forgetting – plume de ma tante! – Mademoiselle Frou-Frou, to whose hospitable attentions it would have been ungracious, I assure you, not to respond.

  Parrot: He was a shy one, that Frenchie. With his bosky talk and his pale white hands, white as the riggly worms in old Mr Stumpy’s composting heap at Lostwithiel. Washed up, I was, on the boat’s quarter-deck, like a juminy-jellyfish, when he says to me: ‘At last I have the choice accomplice with whom I had entreated a capricious fate to furnish me.’ ‘What’s that Monsewer Garlick?’ I asked – my heart a-brimming like the sea itself, all gurgling through my ventricles in a briny spurt. ‘Why,’ he says, ‘is it not a fortunate chance? For we are to occupy roles of no inconsiderable importance in Mr Carey’s new romance.’ ‘And what do that mean?’ I asked him back, my hands all a shake and my posterior still flat-down on the deck.

  ‘Vraiment,’ he tells me, with a sweep of his dandy hat. ‘It is the most exquisite affair, believe me. We shall travel to America, you understand, undergo the most delightful adventures, meet the most fancifully named travelling companions – Look! There go Lord Hernia and his sister Lady Whitebait – converse in the most whimsical mock-historical dialogue ever committed to the page, savour the most exquisite amatory diversions, and yet – and this, young Parrot, even with my great knowledge of literature, I confess I do not entirely comprehend – receive the thoroughly amiable salutations of the critics, on whom Mr Carey exercises a spell of the most prodigious longevity. Are you with me?’

  Well, I had the memory of my da, not to mention sweet Dolly Brisket, with her cooey face and tottersome jubbies, all a bouncing under her pinny, and I was ripe to say him nay, when suddenly shinning down the mizzen-mast I sees my dear Mrs Miggins, not glimpsed since I were a little coney of a lad down Devon way for whom a knocking shop were just as handy as a tree to do my business behind. ‘Migsy,’ I says, ‘is it really you?’ ‘Why, Master Parrot,’ she yells, and pretty soon, a-borrowing Bosun McHearty’s cabin for the purpose, I eats her, drinks her and boils her up for breakfast as we say down Devon way, with her a shrieking like a stuck pig under the butcher’s cleaver . . . [continues for hundreds of pages].

  A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A SMILING WOMAN: THE COLLECTED STORIES

  MARGARET DRABBLE

  A LITTLE LOCAL DIFFICULTY*

  ‘One finds moral problems in the most curious environments, don’t you think?’ she said. ‘That’s right,’ he agreed. ‘Even with the insufficient lavatory paper we’re getting here, I can never work out whether it’s the manager’s fault for not supplying enough, or mine for expecting more. Blame is so difficult to attribute. And then one wonders whether the whole principle of attributing blame is defective in the first place.’

  They were sitting in the restaurant of the El-Rippova, Marrakesh’s most expensive hotel, to which their colossal joint salaries had well-nigh magnetically brought them, and the lavishness of whose décor awakened in them an agreeable sense of guilt, staring with huge embarrassment at the unordered carafe of wine that had just appeared at their table.

  ‘This is very distressing,’ he said. ‘We didn’t ask for this. There is no way of knowing whether it’s free without enquiring, which would be a humiliation. If it is free it would be a shame to waste it. But if it isn’t free it will be astronomically expensive and I shall resent having to pay for it. And then I resent even more the hesitation, that blanketing of the urge for decisive action, that the situation imposes on me. Why on earth is it so difficult to be a liberal these days, I wonder?’

  ‘It’s worse than that,’ she said. A fortnight married, they were only just beginning to discover how much they disliked each other. ‘You see, it may have been left by that nice friendly waiter you’ve been over-tipping ever since we got here, and so if we leave it he’ll be mortally offended.’

  ‘I agree, that does make it worse,’ he said, staring hopelessly at the Biba jump-suit she thought appropriate for al fresco Moroccan dining. ‘If we leave it, we shall reinforce every Western colonial stereotype to which the poor fellow is prey. Don’t you just loathe being English, and rich, and liberal and conscience-ridden and living in the 1960s? I can’t blow my nose without thinking of what the conditions must be like in handkerchief factories.’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ she said, ‘but you must remember that without people like us sensitive lady novelists would have nothing to write about. Look, why don’t we simply put the wine on the next table and let another set of guests deal with it.’

  ‘Adroit,’ he said, ‘but morally evasive, surely?’

  ‘No,’ she said, ‘just pragmatic.’ They went upstairs and had effortful, unsatisfactory sex. Later she would bear him four children, get a job on a TV arts programme, have several affairs and be mildly unhappy, But that
was what people did in those days.

  *Originally published in The Bluestocking’s Chapbook (1965)

  THE FORGOTTEN WALTZ

  ANNE ENRIGHT

  It must have been 2002. I was standing in my sister’s garden at Dun Laoghaire, a short walk from the fine house that her husband paid 700,000 euros for from a Wicklow bloodstock breeder, and kitchen tiling that a little man that only spoke the Gaelic had to be flown in from Donegal just to glaze. There I am, just back from Australia and mad – mad – for Gordon’s gin in its bright emerald bottles, Bushmills, Green Chartreuse, anything. And they are all of them there – my sister, Fiona, who I suppose is the pretty one, her husband Dermot, pulling the ring-pulls off cans of beer with his teeth like the big scream he is, the old ladies up from Roscommon the day and all.

  And there was Conor. My love. Who was late. And who I must stop writing about in short sentences. Because it is mannered.

  It is here that I see Seumas for the first time, rooting into my bag for smokes, exhaling towards the gravy-coloured Irish sea. My mother was the last smoker in Dublin, but oh such a genteel and elegant one, like Greta Garbo, and I, of course, am her daughter.

  Seumas O’Flaherty. Seumas. He is, for a moment, completely himself. Different from anyone else. Not the same. In a moment he will look round and see me, but he does not know this yet.

  This is one of the advantages of being the raisonneur in a novel. That you know things the other characters are not yet aware of. Irritating for them. But not for you. Like the staccato sentences. I remember every word of our conversation, which is convenient, or this would be a very short book.

  ‘What you have to decide,’ he says, ‘is what kind of Irish novel you want to be in.’

  ‘Is that so?’ I tell him, thinking, as you do, of my childhood in Maynooth, that first lipstick, the Tizer bottles stacking up by the outhouse door, ribbons of early-morning mist.

  ‘Right it is,’ he goes on. ‘The old comic ones with the engaging patois have gone, you understand. Even Roddy Doyle’s turned serious these days. Come home with me, Gina my love, and before you know it you’ll be falling hook, line and sinker into a bleakly ironic relationship with an older married man set against the backdrop of the failing Irish economy.’

  ‘Jaysus, Seumas,’ I say. ‘I’m not sure if I can handle that. What about me mammy?’

  ‘Oh, she dies. Keels over with a heart attack. There’s my seriously disturbed daughter to put up with too.’

  ‘Sure, isn’t life there to be lived, and all?’ I reassure him. ‘But how does it end up?’

  ‘It’s you that’s writing the novel, Gina. I won’t say that you’ll be disappointed, but I won’t say I’ll turn out to be the man of your dreams either. Now how about it?’

  Just at that moment Fiona comes up and says: ‘Did you know that the woman next door has patio heating?’

  ‘I’m not sure,’ I say, ‘that I can take this constant sub-text about modern Irish materialism.’

  ‘Fair point,’ she says. When we were teenagers she went out with Podraig McElligot, who was supposed to the best-looking boy in De Valera Street, and I never forgave her.

  Conor is elsewhere. Soon Seumas will look at me again. But not yet. This is called determinism. Like the ghosts of my old life, the short sentences march inexorably on. [Continues.]

  CHARLOTTE GRAY

  SEBASTIAN FAULKS

  Cannerley took her to the Ritz.

  ‘I hope you don’t think it’s too corny,’ he said as they stepped into the bar, ‘but we are characters in a novel about the Second World War, and frankly I don’t see why Mary Wesley should have all the fun, do you? Plus, it gives me a chance to be frightfully knowledgeable about the wine list.’

  Their table was at the side, and gave a good view across the room, which, like the novel, had an elderly air. Cannerley leaned conspiratorially towards her.

  ‘I don’t mind saying that this is a terrifically hush-hush affair. If you decide to join us, you’ll be doing a terribly difficult job.’

  She resolved not to be intimidated by his public school good looks or the stilted dialogue. ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Well, the publishers are looking for big sales, which means you’ll have to sleep with an RAF pilot and put up with lots of sentences like “When she heard him gasp, ‘No’, she knew that it was the last thing he meant as the flesh inside her fingers swelled and seized.” Then again, the author’s a bit of highbrow, so you’re going to have to mug up on Proust and that kind of thing. I won’t beat about the bush; we’ve got to get the Daily Mail and the London Review of Books on our side.’

  ‘I think I can stand it. Anything else I ought to know?’

  ‘’Fraid so, my dear. You’re going to have to wear a minutely itemised period wardrobe so that the author can show off his research.’

  Outside the mist stole down from Piccadilly in one of those haunting descriptive passages so important to break up the dialogue.

  ‘And it will give you the chance to put your French to good use. There’s always a need for fluent French speakers in English novels these days, so they can bang on about Paris and so forth and make everybody feel culturally superior.’ He paused. ‘Well, will you do it?’

  Charlotte’s lip quivered, like the loganberry mousse that had just been set before her. ‘What if it all goes wrong? What if our cover’s blown?’

  ‘No chance of that. All the reviewers have been sworn to secrecy.’

  She nodded. Together they walked out of the restaurant, through the dark, carless streets and into the Sunday Times bestseller list.

  PAST IMPERFECT

  JULIAN FELLOWES

  I had not seen my old friend – and of late embittered enemy – Peregrine Barrington-Smythe for nearly thirty-five years. Consequently it was with a certain amount of perturbation, not to say puzzlement at what the French call une situation vraiment péculierè, that I embarked upon the journey to what the more vulgar of our newspapers would probably refer to as his ‘country pile’.

  As I negotiated my automobile along the cramped Surrey lanes, now alas made hideous by the mock-Tudor habitations of parvenu stockbrokers, I considered the problem of Peregrine (‘Perry’ to his intimes although, as we knew to our cost, the intimacy was his to grant, not ours wantonly to solicit) whom, to a certain degree, I may be said to have invented.

  Although never ‘one of us’ in the accepted sense (Lloyd’s money, then as now, bearing the unavoidable taint of commerce), not even nay-saying quidnuncs could deny that he was an unmitigated success, that his fortune was titanic, his lustre undimmed, his éclat unsilenced – the latter quite immoderately so. Yet his house, I must confess, alarmed me. While not traditional in an aristocratic sense, its authenticity may be said to have remained resolutely unproven. Clipped, terraced gardens, gleaming caryatids, Lutyens-style façade, regiment of maid-servants – all these gestured at a desire for only partly concealed ostentation that . . . [continues for several pages].

  Admitted to the residence by a grovelling butler, I came upon him in his study – a faintly unreal sanctum, picturesquely furnished and revealing a spirit I had not previously associated with him – tottering by an altogether splendid piece of furniture which the uninformed would doubtless term a day-bed but I knew by its correct designation of duchesse brisée. He did not look well.

  ‘So there you are,’ he said as I advanced, stubbing my toe against a particularly fine Louis XVI commode, not dissimilar to one I had once had the pleasure of relieving myself in while dining at Apsley House. ‘And about bloody time, too.’ I saw, with an instinctive feeling of trepidation, not experienced since that day at Magdalene when the Hon. Jasper de Toffe alleged that he could not find my name on the Winchester Old Boys’ list, that Perry was Perry still. ‘I need to speak to you. You see, I’m dying.’

  ‘My dear chap,’ I said, as we proceeded to the dining-room, an oddly muted affair of William Morris-cum-Matalan dishabillé. ‘What on earth of?’

&nbs
p; ‘Terminal snobbery, I’m afraid. Picked up at Queen Charlotte’s ball in 1969. The medics say there’s nothing they can do . . . [continues endlessly].

  BRIDGET JONES: THE EDGE OF REASON

  HELEN FIELDING

  Friday 3 December

  9st 3, bank balance £2 million, no. of phone calls from publisher asking ‘where is it?’ 17

  7 a.m. Am never going to write Bridget Jones nonsense again. Feel have moved on into new phase of career. Will be significant woman novelist in manner of M. Drabble, or F. Weldon. Plus integrity v. important.

  8.30 a.m. But then is v. nice getting profiled in Vogue, Tatler, E. Standard etc. Also feel have duty to us Singletons who need advice on important things. Plus publisher is saying they have given v. big sum of money and where the bloody hell is it. Perhaps will write one more B. Jones and then become mysterious literary recluse. Or something.

  10 a.m. Problem is what to put in book.

  10.15 a.m. Ooh. Could mention friends like Colin Firth, Nick Hornby, Salman Rushdie who will then be v. pleased and give quotes for jacket.

  10.30 a.m. Other problem is what to put in after that.

  11.45 a.m. Am marvellous, am fantastic. Filled with new vigour and positive thought. Have decided to recycle old newspaper columns in Independent and Daily Telegraph. Brill. Is v. easy being successful writer, have decided. Off go. Wheee! Print out book and send to publishers.