then Mr Vello arrived. He was in his Yorkshire County Cricket Club blazer, as ever. The chat-show guests passed him over their heads and then wedged him down beside me. He was still crying. ‘Why did you do it, Fein?’ he whimpered. ‘Why did you do it?’ And he was still whimpering when I buried my teeth into the leathery dewlap of his throat; still whimpering when I began to suck the life out of him.
A Short History of the
English Novel
‘All crap,’ said Gerard through a mouthful of hamburger, ‘utter shite – and the worst thing is that we’re aware of it, we know what’s going on. Really, I think, it’s the cultural complement to the decline of the economy, in the seventies, coming lolloping along behind.’
We were sitting in Joe Allen and Gerard was holding forth on the sad state of the English novel. This was the only price I had to pay for our monthly lunch together: listening to Gerard sound off.
I came back at him. ‘I’m not sure I agree with you on this one, Gerard. Isn’t that a perennial gripe, something that comes up time and again? Surely we won’t be able to judge the literature of this decade for another thirty or forty years?’
‘You’re bound to say that, being a woman.’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Well, insomuch as the novel was very much a feminine form in the first place, and now that our literary culture has begun to fragment, the partisan concerns of minorities are again taking precedence. There isn’t really an “English novel” now, there are just women’s novels, black novels, gay novels.’
I tuned him out. He was too annoying to listen to. Round about us the lunchtime crowd was thinning. A few advertising and city types sipped their wine and Perrier, nodding over each other’s shoulders at the autographed photos that studded the restaurant’s walls, as if they were saluting dear old friends.
Gerard and I had been doing these monthly lunches at Joe Allen for about a year. Ours was an odd friendship. For a while he’d been married to a friend of mine but it had been a duff exercise in emotional surgery, both hearts rejecting the other. They hadn’t had any children. Some of our mutual acquaintances suspected that they were gay, and that the marriage was one of convenience, a coming together to avoid coming out.
Gerard was also a plump, good-looking man; who despite his stress-filled urban existence still retained the burnish of a country childhood in the pink glow of his cheeks and the chestnut hanks of his thick fringe.
Gerard did something in publishing. That was what accounted for his willingness to pronounce on the current state of English fiction. It wasn’t anything editorial or high profile. Rather, when he talked to me of his work – which he did only infrequently – it was of books as so many units, trafficked hither and thither as if they were boxes of washing powder. And when he spoke of authors, he managed somehow to reduce them to the status of assembly line workers, trampish little automata who were merely bolting the next lump of text on to an endlessly unrolling narrative product.
‘. . . spry old women’s sex novels, Welsh novels, the Glasgow Hard Man School, the ex-colonial guilt novel – both perpetrator and victim version . . .’ He was still droning on.
‘What are you driving at, Gerard?’
‘Oh come on, you’re not going to play devil’s advocate on this one, are you? You don’t believe in the centrality of the literary tradition in this country any more than I do, now do you?’
‘S’pose not.’
‘You probably buy two or three of the big prize-winning novels every year and then possibly, just possibly, get round to reading one of them a year or so later. As for anything else, you might skim some thrillers that have been made into TV dramas – or vice versa – or scan something issue-based, or nibble at a plot that hinges on an unusual sexual position, the blurb for which happens to have caught your eye – ‘
‘But, Gerard’ – despite myself I was rising to it – ‘just because we don’t read that much, aren’t absorbed in it, it doesn’t mean that important literary production isn’t going on – ‘
‘Not that old chestnut!’ he snorted. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that there may be thousands of unbelievably good manuscripts rotting away in attic rooms, only missing out on publication because of the diffidence of their authors or the formulaic, sales-driven narrow-mindedness of publishers, eh?’
‘No, Gerard, I wasn’t going to argue that – ‘
‘It’s like the old joke about LA, that there aren’t any waiters in the whole town, just movie stars “resting”. I suppose all these bus boys and girls’ – he flicked a hand towards the epicene character who had been ministering to our meal – ‘are great novelists hanging out to get more material.’
‘No, that’s not what I meant.’
‘Excuse me?’ It was the waiter, a lanky blond who had been dangling in the mid-distance. ‘Did you want anything else?’
‘No, no.’ Gerard started shaking his head – but then broke off. ‘Actually, now that you’re here, would you mind if I asked you a question?’
‘Oh Gerard,’ I groaned, ‘leave the poor boy alone.’
‘No, not at all, anything to be of service.’ He was bending down towards us, service inscribed all over his soft-skinned face.
‘Tell me then, are you happy working here or do you harbour any other ambition?’ Gerard put the question as straightforwardly as he could but his plump mouth was twisted with irony.
The waiter thought for a while. I observed his flat fingers, nails bitten to the quick, and his thin nose coped with blue veins at the nostrils’ flare. His hair was tied back in a pony-tail and fastened with a thick rubber band.
‘Do you mind?’ he said at length, pulling half-out one of the free chairs.
‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘of course not.’ He sat down and instantly we all became intimates, our three brows forming a tight triangle over the cruets. The waiter put up his hands vertically, holding them like parentheses into which he would insert qualifying words.
‘Well,’ a self-deprecatory cough, ‘it’s not that I mind working here – because I don’t, but I write a little and I suppose I would like to be published some day.’
I wanted to hoot, to crow, to snort derision, but contented myself with a ‘Ha!’.
‘Now come on, wait a minute.’ Gerard was adding his bracketing hands to the manual quorum. ‘OK, this guy is a writer but who’s to say what he’s doing is good, or original?’
‘Gerard! You’re being rude – ‘
‘No, really, it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind. He’s got a point.’ His secret out, the waiter was more self-possessed. ‘I write – that’s true. I think the ideas are good. I think the prose is good. But I can’t tell if it hangs together.’
‘Well, tell us a bit about it. If you can, quote some from
