by Edward Docx
‘Hello Jasper, how nice to see you again.’ She smiled and I thought for a minute she was going to offer me her hand to shake. ‘I got here way earlier than I thought. How are you? What will you have?’
‘Hi. Fine. Good.’ I was flustered. ‘You look lovely and suntanned – it must have been very hot in America. It’s been chaotic here. Did you manage to get some sleep yesterday?’
‘Yes, thanks. I think I’ve beaten the jet-lag for now.’
I eyed her glass with some trepidation. ‘Er – what are you on? I’ll have whatever you are drinking.’
‘Believe it or not, today I am drinking Pernod. It’s not particularly nice but I like the way it changes colour in the glass. And it sort of reminds me of St Tropez – not that I have ever been there. I think I was reading about it in the paper yesterday.’
‘OK. I’ll get them.’
‘No. I have a card behind the bar and I have to spend more than fifteen pounds so please –’
‘Oh right … well, I’ll have one of those. Will that do it?’
‘Probably not, but we have plenty of time.’ She stood up and gestured in the exaggerated manner of an air hostess: ‘Please, have a seat.’
I did as I was told.
The Ear Bar: frayed, louche, indifferent; rattan chairs, leather sofas, dark wood tables and cream-coloured walls – owned by a Frenchman; my favourite pre-dinner rendezvous and so called because the two lights which were supposed to close the loops of the ‘B’ of ‘Bar’ had fallen off long ago and had never been replaced … The Ear Bar was no stranger to the stray, off-duty hip-swing of the London sex symbol wandered in to escape the harrowing boredom of the Soho clubs or the relentlessly cynical appraisal of the street, but even so … As she walked across the room, it took maximum energy and concentration from everybody to wrench themselves away from watching her and back into their conversations, their drinks, their lives.
I, meanwhile, took advantage of the brief remaining me-time to hypnotize myself into believing that she was just another girl and this was just another dinner. Quietly promising them indulgence to come, I shut down my senses.
She turned from the bar and came back towards me. I ignored the new hairstyle (sort of slicked-down somehow and lending extra emphasis to the lines of her cheekbones), I ignored the clear forehead, I ignored those hazel eyes of hers, I even ignored the walk … Who cares, I said to myself? Not me. Not tonight. No sir. Shake your booty some place else, lady. I’m here to listen and learn. And that’s it. Don’t you dare try any funny business.
By the time she had sat down with the drinks, I was ready for her. ‘So, how was America?’ I enquired.
‘Interesting – as always.’ Leaning forward, she poured the water into the Pernod and watched delightedly as the liquid in the glasses clouded a sickly yellow.
‘Where were you?’
‘I was in Philadelphia.’ She handed me my drink. ‘Writing about gourmet getaways.’
‘Oh yeah, you said. Why Philadelphia?’
She sat back and I didn’t notice her cross her legs. ‘Because they like to think of themselves as the gourmet capital of the States, a sort of food-lovers’ mecca. Obviously, it’s mainly an attempt to boost tourism. But there is some truth in it. Anyway, one of the publicists flew a whole bunch of journalists out there to go see for ourselves. I guess they reckon there’s enough people in the UK market to make it worth their while. Though I can’t think who they are.’ She shook her head.
I was going to say something about real food and Europe. But I held back, mindful of the last time I set about the New World. ‘So was the food good?’
‘No idea. I never really got a chance to eat much.’
‘Right.’
She lit a cigarette and waved out the match. ‘No, it was a bit weird actually. I left the main group on the second day and ended up skipping the restaurant tour because I found a better story which I can use to hang the whole piece on.’
I relaxed another three notches. We were picking up more or less where we had left off on the barge and there was no doubt about it: in some half-cynical, half-respectful, half-amused way we were getting along as if we’d known each other a long time.
She continued, ‘Basically, it turns out that the mayor of the city has just lost three stone and is feeling really hot about his new shape. And now he wants everyone in Philly to go on a diet because he says they are all too fat.’
‘Are they?’
‘Yes. Way. So he’s spearheading this civic slimming-down initiative. He says that the city has got to lose 76,000 tonnes between them – or something like that – I can’t remember the figures. But it breaks down to be an average of one and a half stone each.’
‘Wow.’
She smiled. ‘And so everyone is sort of locked into this kind of diet war. There are all these factions: fat and proud; fat and guilty; fat and happy; fat and miserable; fat and friendly; fat and angry and so on. Plus all the health freaks and the libertarians and the environmentalists and the food lobbies and the farming interest. And they’re all fighting like itchy ferrets in a bag. In fact, the whole city is up in arms. I spent less than two days researching it and I got enough good quotes to fill an entire Sunday newspaper.’
‘Jesus.’ I had another go at the Pernod.
‘It’s obscene. The whole thing is obscene.’
‘I read philosophy,’ I said ruefully, in answer to her question, as Bruno personally refilled our glasses with the last of the sumptuous Barolo and discreetly insinuated the dessert menu on to the table. The hours had passed unnoticed and we were both a little wine-loosened. ‘Almost entirely useless … well, not completely. It teaches you how to think, I suppose. How to argue – sort of – in a remote kind of a way. But you get left with this terrible legacy of – I don’t know – of –’
‘Existential misgiving?’ She was teasing me.
‘Yes,’ I nodded, ignoring her gentle ridicule. ‘And the other problem is that you become clinically incapable of taking anything at face value; it heightens – or deepens – your sense of how other people think – or rather what belief systems they have. And how inconsistent and unthought-through they are.’
‘Does that surprise you?’
‘No. But it sort of offends me. I can’t help feeling that if you believe in such and such a thing then you have also to take a logical position on related or ancillary matters, but there’s so little coherence around. Nobody seems to notice that the positions they are taking are mutually untenable – worse than that, ridiculous.’
She reached into her bag for her cigarettes. ‘Like jogging to an anti-capitalist march in orphan-stitched running shoes.’
‘Exactly.’ I was taken aback yet again by how quickly she anticipated me. ‘Or discounting God out of hand but conscientiously arguing the case for feng shui. There’s no rigour of thought. It’s all kind of mix’n’match and unconnected. As though the waters of ignorance are rising, leaving only unconnected, isolated islands of people who actually know anything about anything. I mean, I don’t care which way you go – Virgin births or feng shui – and I freely admit that it’s all equally implausible but I get disappointed when I see that people haven’t really understood the implications of the stance they’ve taken.’ I was conscious of rambling and not for the first time in the evening, and perhaps a little too clumsily, I attempted to get us back on to her: ‘Anyway, what about you?’
She sparked a match. ‘What about me?’
‘What did you do?’
‘At college?’ She let go her first drag without inhaling.
‘Yes,’ I shrugged, ‘at college.’
‘I majored in South American literature.’ She made an earnest face. ‘But I have a résumé in my bag. I thought we could go through it together over coffee. I presume you have yours with you?’
‘Of course, and very nicely written it is too.’ She smiled and I took a sip of wine. ‘You majored?’
‘Yes. I was at university in the States.’
I thought she was going to say something more but instead she did her trick of simply looking at me and carrying on smoking. So I persevered. ‘Did you grow up there? You hardly have any accent.’
‘No – I grew up all over. My father works for the Foreign Office. He’s been in France for a while now but he was posted around the world when I was little. I went to school wherever he was sent. Every time he moved, I moved. Mostly annoying diplomats’ kids schools. But fun in some ways. Then he put me into an English boarding school which was … what it was.’
‘And your mother? What does she do?’
‘Nothing. My mother died when I was a baby.’ Almost as an afterthought, she asked: ‘Yours?’
‘Both of mine died when I was four years old. I can’t even remember them. I was brought up by my grandmother, which I think was probably better for me. I’m afraid I don’t think much of the last generation.’
‘Baby-boomers suck.’
How did it go in there? How did it go in the alcove of La Casetta, our little Italian cottage, with its whitewashed walls and a single candle and a bay tree growing in a terracotta pot in the fireplace? What did I learn? A great deal. Over zuppa di fave (for her) and caponata (for me) I discovered that she was the same age as I and that she spoke fluent Spanish; over ravioli grandi ripieni di cozze e coda di rospo con salsa di pomodori freschi san marzano (large parcels of pasta for her – heavenly tomatoes) and agnolini ripieni di selvaggina con salsa al tartufo (small parcels of pasta for me – truffle nirvana), I learnt that her favourite sort of music was jazz – but not big band, which ‘she absolutely hated’ – and that her special favourite was Oscar Peterson, about whom she was fanatically well-informed (or perhaps it was just that I knew nothing at all), and, oh yes, also anything at all featuring Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald, Billie Holiday or Ann Peebles, especially in this last case a song called ‘Tear Your Playhouse Down’ or something. Over scaloppina di vitello (was there ever a girl so nakedly carnivorous?) and branzino in padella (I felt I had to have fish by way of contrast), I found out that she had very nearly been married to a much older man when she was only nineteen and living in Buenos Aires on a year out, and that if it hadn’t been for her sister she would almost certainly have gone through with it, turned down her place at Yale and fucked her life up and ‘probably have had twelve children by now and be some kinda trailer trash’.
As for what she told me about her parents, I left it there. And I really don’t think the subject came up more than once or twice in all our time together. For my part, the exchange of family information was never a rite to which I attached the customary importance. One thing that I did notice, though, was that Madeleine was continually using my own tricks against me. More or less every time that I tried to get her to talk about herself, she would either resort to facetiousness or switch the subject back to me.
‘Whom do you usually hang around with when you’re back in London?’ I asked, dropping back into my chair after a trip to the bathroom, and immediately regretting the relative accusative pronoun. ‘Where do you normally go? Do you still keep in touch with friends from college in America?’
‘I didn’t really have any. I was very alone.’ She made a pained face.
I nodded sarcastically. ‘I suppose it’s because you went to school in lots of places as a young child and you never really learnt how to form enduring friendships?’
‘That’s it.’ She smiled.
‘And travel journalists being away all the time, I imagine that they don’t much congregate in Fleet Street or Westminster like the other hacks.’
‘No,’ she shook her head. ‘You’re right. I am tragically isolated. I have no friends. Most girls don’t. Deep down, we’re all consumed by a carefully calibrated rivalry that prevents us from forming truly meaningful relationships with one another. So most evenings I sit alone in the mess of my new flat, reading self-esteem manuals and staring tearfully into the middle distance with a bottle of wine listening to “All By Myself”.’
‘Well, if it gets tough you could pay me to call you at certain times when you think it might cheer you up or look good or whatever.’
‘That’s very kind of you, Jasper.’ She picked up the dessert menu. ‘That really was delicious food. And this looks seriously beautiful.’
‘Yes,’ I replied evenly. I had no idea whether she was referring to the writing or whether she meant the desserts themselves.
‘But I am going to pass, I think. I just want coffee.’ She looked up. ‘You?’
‘I’m not much of a desserts guy.’
She fingered out another cigarette. ‘You know, one of the saddest things about being a woman is that we starve ourselves insane so that we can look nice – partly to piss our friends off, sure, but also so that men like us and –’ I tried to interrupt but she prevented me. ‘Yes, we do. Of course we do. And it works. Men do like us when we’re thin. We starve ourselves insane and guess what our reward is? Guess what happens when everything works out and we get our much-prized man?’
‘What?’
‘He takes us out to dinner.’
I laughed.
‘It’s a farce. A woman’s life turns out to be one long diet with the sole aim of being taken out to dinners she dare not eat.’
One of the waiters came over. I ordered a couple of espressos and stole another of her cigarettes. She offered me her book of matches (from the Village Vanguard, a jazz club in New York) and we sat in silence for a while, smoking. Then, seemingly without premeditation, she asked: ‘So what’s your favourite letter then, Jasper?’
I had to conceal my astonishment. Nobody – not William, not Lucy, not Saul – had ever put that question to me before. Only my grandmother, when I was much younger – six or seven maybe – playing on the floor of our sitting room in Oxford, practising the alphabet with felt-tip pens.
‘X,’ I said, exhaling, ‘the letter X.’
‘That’s rather predictable, isn’t it?’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Because it’s the most glamorous letter.’ And then, with a stage sigh and in a deliberately breathy voice: ‘The letter of love and anonymity.’
I shook my head. This was my turf. ‘I don’t agree. The most glamorous letter is definitely Q. Both in terms of its shape – in particular the wonderful potential of the descender – the tail – and in terms of its refusal to stand the presence of any other character but U beside it. What other letter would dare such arrogance? There’s a catwalk quality to Q – pure untouchable glamour. Certainly more so than X.’
‘OK, fair enough – so why X?’
‘Well, of course there is the love and anonymity thing. But actually the reason is because it is the only letter which requires a counter stroke.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘If you imagine that the basic and most fluid line of the quill is from bottom left to top right – and the quicker the scribe works the more he wants to stay in this pattern. OK? And then think about the alphabet …’
‘Mmm.’
‘The only letter which consistently demands a stroke running against this flow is X. Discounting non-integral dots and crosses, every other letter can be negotiated. But you have to come back for the X – even when you are in full flow, as it were.’
She nodded slowly. ‘It must be weird thinking about letters all the time.’
‘It is – a bit.’ I considered for a moment. ‘The nearest I think most people get to it is playing Scrabble. You know how it is when you pick a letter out of the bag: you have an individual relationship with that letter. You think, oh great, a P, or, oh fuck, another A – you no longer think about words as the basic unit but rather letters instead. You look forward to Xs and Qs and so on and you start to think of the alphabet as twenty-six characters, each with their own personality. In fact, now I come to think of it, “characters” is a much better word than letters. It’s no coincidence the Chinese are the best calligraphers – they understand the differenc
e.’
The coffee came – hot and strong and perfectly made.
Roy Junior was outside, six doors up, baseball cap pulled down low, seated impassively at the wheel of his father’s slightly shabby Mercedes. It wasn’t quite midnight and the London night was still charging around the place like a coke addict. We were both relaxed – still not drunk exactly but at our ease. All the same, I wanted to avoid any awkwardness during those first few post-dinner seconds outside the restaurant, so often the bane of first-time, night-time, man-woman get-togethers. What to do? The questions proliferate. Suggest another drink? If so, where? And to what end? Hail a cab for her? And hope she asks you to climb in too? Come right out with it? Your place or mine? Or confirm a future meeting and bow out with good grace? Thank her for her charming company and leave her to make her own way home as she does every other night of her life? Attempt a kiss? … The pavement panics of the amateur.
I had, of course, predetermined that I would suggest a cab home (for once there was no geographical excuse not to) unless she was specific in her request to go on, in which case I knew exactly where we would go – as did Roy. My only other duty was to secure a third date, which I intended doing during the ride home. And after that job was done, my plan was to fly off chastely to my perch – unless, again, she was clearly of a different mind, in which case …
But, in the event, she drained the situation of any potential ungainliness by pre-emptively suggesting we go home before I had time to say anything. Whereupon, after some reflections on the staggering price of black cabs in London, I beckoned Roy Junior over with an apposite remark about us being lucky to get a mini-cab so quickly, and we set off.
Somewhere in between all the looming lights and the madcap traffic cavorting around Marble Arch, she said, ‘Hey, you know I was talking about jazz before?’