ha! You don’t say. My dear Gerard’ – I punched him on the upper arm – ‘it looks like we have another scrivenous servitor on our hands.’
‘This is absurd.’ He wasn’t amused.
‘My friend here is a publisher, he might be able to help your girl, why don’t you ask her to join us?’
‘Oh really, Geraldine, can’t you let this lie? We don’t know anything about this girl’s book. Madam – ‘
But she was already gone, stomping back down the mirrored alley and out the door into the street, where I saw her place an arm round the heaving shoulders of our former waitress.
Gerard and I sat in silence. I scrutinised him again. In this surrounding he appeared fogeyish. He seemed aware of it too, his eyes flicking nervously form the carnal cubs swimming on the ethereal video screen to their kittenish domesticated cousins, the jail bait who picked their nails and split their ends all along the coffee bar’s counter.
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
