Authors: David Nobbs
' "You're in a bit of a rut, but you don't know it yet. You are not always able to distinguish between fantasy and real life. Now is a good time to make the distinction, especially early in the month. If you are made a surprising offer, you should accept it." '
We were overtaking a tube train. It looked small and bald and vulnerable outside its tunnel, like a large slug crossing a patio towards the succulent shelter of distant lettuces.
I didn't believe a word of it, but I had to admit that the magazine was giving me cue after cue. Surely even I could respond to one of them?
Speak now, man, or your life will continue to be as it has been, and that suddenly seems intolerable.
'Ange?' I began hoarsely. I wish I could pretend that I hadn't sounded so hoarse and pathetic. 'Ange . . . will you . . . er . . . will you . . .' I cleared my throat, '. . . will you have dinner with me tonight?'
'So, where are we going to eat then?' she asked. 'I mean, I don't know restaurants, do I?'
We were standing on the platform at Euston Station. All the other passengers were scurrying past us, busy ants with ordered, urgent lives.
I was astonished that she had accepted my invitation. I think she was too. I wanted to get it all fixed up before she changed her mind. Hurriedly, I suggested L'Escargot Bleu. It was the only London restaurant I could think of.
She suggested that I phoned them to make sure that they had a vacancy. I was forced to reveal that I didn't have a mobile phone. She shook her lovely head – its loveliness shone out in the functional sobriety of Euston – in sadness and shock, as if I had admitted that I had no testicles. She used her mobile to find the number of the restaurant, and I booked a table for eight o'clock. I found it ominous that there should be a vacancy at the time I suggested. Probably the restaurant had gone into terminal decline. I do have a pessimistic streak.
I wondered whether to kiss her goodbye. I felt frozen in ineptitude. She gave me a very quick little kiss on the cheek, said, 'See you later', and strode off. I watched her till she disappeared down the steps towards the underground.
I rubbed my cheek disbelievingly. A loudspeaker announced that the train to Glasgow was ready for boarding, and I fought off an irrational desire to get on to it and go far, far away.
I walked towards the station concourse. It was crowded with anxious passengers. People were hurrying in all directions. Only I didn't know what to do next. I was, after all, on my way home to Oxford. Had I time to go back home, bath, change, and catch a train back to Paddington? I didn't think so. I needed to find an hotel.
On the very rare occasions when I need to spend a night in London I use one of the cheap, impersonal hotels that abound in the vicinity of the Euston Road. I use the word 'cheap' in a specialised sense, meaning 'not as expensive as other hotels' – £79 for a box in an hotel without one touch of charm is not cheap. My friend Ashley Coldthrop would think it cheap. He works in the City. I do not. I am an academic. Don't start me off on the values of our society.
Actually, I have always liked impersonal chain hotels. I want the minimum of contact with other people, but I don't want to be the only person breakfasting on my own. With the protection of the loneliness and mediocrity all around me, I can melt into the crowd.
As I walked into the foyer of the nearest such hotel, I suddenly found myself back at school with Ashley. If I get eight sprouts on my plate, I will pass my exams in eight subjects. If there is a vacancy in this hotel tonight, she will turn up tonight. If there isn't, she won't.
There was a vacancy. The moment I discovered that, my simplistic little fantasy of cause and effect disintegrated. I deserved that. How could I, a mature and reasonably successful philosophy don, even have attempted to connect two such separate events?
I paid my bill in advance, as demanded. We are not talking about a civilised environment here. I carried my bag and briefcase over to the lift. I rode up in the lift, which had been built by Blackstone of Preston. I arrived safely. Good old Blackstone.
At the exit from the lift there were two arrows, one pointing left to Rooms 301–347, the other pointing right towards Rooms 348–393. This was not an hotel that even its brochure could describe as intimate.
I had been given room 393. Does that surprise you? Have you not formed a picture of a man who is always given the room furthest from the lift? This one will do. He won't cause trouble. He won't make a fuss. We'll give him 393.
I cannot describe the long walk from the lift to Room 393 as stimulating. It involved traversing two sides of the square building, along carpets designed not to show marks where people had thrown up on them, past forty-five identical doors to a forty-sixth, past bleak walls broken up only by eight sad paintings. In this dark, claustrophobic world, only the red fire extinguishers shone.
Nevertheless, just as I passed Room 378, my bag getting heavier by the second, I stopped dramatically, struck by a thought. If things went well this evening, I might be bringing her back here, to this. Oh God.
I tried to dismiss this wonderful, terrible thought. I couldn't possibly get that far. I had never got that far. Even with Rachel I hadn't got that far.
Especially
with Rachel I hadn't got that far. I would have had more chance of breaking into Fort Knox than of having intercourse with Rachel. I thought her knickers were welded on to her body.
I couldn't understand why I had suddenly begun thinking of Rachel after thirty years. I think now, looking back on it, that it was because Ange's loveliness brought home to me how stupid I had been to waste seventeen months of my young life in such a futile and half-hearted pursuit of an utterly sexless young woman.
I searched in my pockets for my silly little plastic room key. At last I found it. If, when I slid it into the narrow slot provided, a green light flashed briefly and the door of my room opened to reveal the ghastly sterility within, then she would come back with me that night. If, as usually happened, a red light flashed and I had to return to Reception to get the wretched thing reprogrammed, she wouldn't come.
A green light flashed, immediately signifying nothing, but
I smiled wryly as I removed the plastic from the slot, wondering if anyone
had ever used one of those bloody little keys as a phallic symbol before.
I dumped my bag on the bed. The mattress sagged and creaked. This was a bed made for sciatica, not sex.
I went into the cramped, claustrophobic bathroom. It had two cracked tiles and a bath designed for midgets. I lifted the lavatory seat, noting that it was loose, and did what had to be done. As I washed my hands – I'm fanatical about washing my hands, don't like touching money without washing them afterwards – I looked in the mirror, and saw a neglected face.
My eyebrows had been left to their own devices for far too long. My hair had never been cut stylishly. For twenty years I had gone to the same barber because he was cheap and because he didn't make conversation. My abhorrence of small talk was due entirely to the vast areas of ignorance that it exposed. Football, cricket, our dreary politicians, motor cars, pubs, foreign holiday destinations, pop music, theatre, cinema, television, animal life, bird life, insect life, gardens, DIY – you name it, I didn't know anything about it.
I recalled with horror the one time when, due to circumstances beyond my control, I found my hair being cut by a trendy young man, who said to me, 'Are we planning anything interesting today, sir?' I had only just resisted an absurd temptation to shock him by saying 'Yes, I'm going home to slash my wrists in the bath.' There hadn't been any point. He wouldn't have cared, might even have tried to sell me a razor.
Why did I think of that now? Because I was wondering what on earth I could possibly talk to Ange about. Because I was in a complete and utter panic. What on earth had possessed me to ask her out to dinner? Why on earth had I chosen, of all places, L'Escargot Bleu?
Because it was the only London restaurant I had been to in the last two years. Ashley Coldthrop had taken me there. He was the only friend I still had from my school days. All my other real friendships, all six of them, had been made at Oxford. Once every two years Ashley took me out to dinner in London. Once every two years I took him out more modestly in Oxford. His wife didn't come. It worked better that way.
I was a man so socially inept in the presence of women that my evenings with my oldest friend went better when his wife was not present. What on earth was I doing asking a darts groupie out to dinner?
Darts. That was what we would talk about. Avoid Wittgenstein, concentrate on darts, and everything would be all right. In my adolescent days, my desperate days of puberty, paralysis and pimples, I had saved my pocket money for a correspondence course on conversation! I'd soon given it up, it depressed me so much, but the one thing I remembered – I'd even tried it at the time – was to talk about what the other person is interested in. It hadn't worked very well. I would ask a question and then forget to listen to the reply, or hear half of it but miss vital clues, which would rapidly become apparent, so that I ended up looking stupid. I remember overhearing one of Rachel's radiologist friends saying, in a pub in Pangbourne, 'He's so clever, how can he always be so dim?'
I felt better, after that, for at least a minute or two. I examined my face again, wondering if she could possibly find it kissable. Well, it wasn't grotesque, just weary, just lived in. The cheeks were sunken; I had the pallor of celibacy upon me; I should have had my teeth whitened; but no, I wasn't too awful, and if I'd looked after myself I might even have seemed moderately attractive.
Then I went back into my room and unzipped my bag. Suddenly it dawned on me that I had nothing to unpack. I had no spare clothes. I hadn't expected to stay away for an extra day. I had never stayed away for an extra day in my life. I had no spare shirt, no clean socks. My underpants were grey with age – rather like me, in fact, although I had always thought that it was their dogs rather than their underpants that owners came to resemble.
I took a taxi to Regent Street, and bought a complete set of matching clothes in a suitably old-fashioned shop. It was too late to start trying to be fashionable. I needed things I would be comfortable in. The attendant was Asian but very very English. Oh, it's so
you
, sir,' he kept saying. 'It's you to a T.' I bought everything, wincing at the cost, wondering if I had taken leave of my senses. My only indecision was, in fact, over the underpants. In the end I bought jockey shorts for the first time in my life, feeling really rather bold, for I suspected that the Dashing Dane and the Mercurial Man Mountain from Merthyr would both be jockey shorts men. The attendant was utterly charming throughout, as indeed he should have been, for this must have been the easiest sale of his life.
I went back to my room, stood in the tiny bath, had a handheld shower that only trickled, washed my hair, discovered that there wasn't a hair dryer, carefully dressed myself from neck to toe in my new clothes, looked in the mirror, and saw a man who looked like a model in an advert for insurance for the senior citizen.
Any self-assurance that I still had melted away completely. I felt a sudden sickness in my stomach and an excruciating pain in my balls. 'We aren't used to this. What the hell's going on?' they were saying. I had to go and lie down.
She wouldn't come. She would. She wouldn't. I blew metaphorical dandelion heads and didn't know which I dreaded most – her coming or her not coming.
I did consider the option of not turning up myself, but I knew that I couldn't do that to her. There are things that a gentleman can't do, and, anachronistic though it was, I still thought of myself as a gentleman.
But why oh why had I asked her out?
L'Escargot Bleu was dismayingly quiet – just three tables taken. Oh, how I wished I had known of somewhere less starchy. I'd read that London was now the most exciting place to eat in the whole world. This restaurant wasn't remotely exciting. It was a relic from the past, and so was I, so it was just what I didn't need.
I got there before her, feeling very self-conscious in my new clothes. I seated myself at a little table by the bar. As soon as I sat down I realised that the jockey shorts were far too tight around my crutch and were constricting my private parts. I longed to stand up and give them a good hitch, but I didn't dare to.
My new clothes consisted of a check jacket, plain beige trousers, matching shirt, conservative plain blue tie. Oh God, was that what was 'so very
you
, sir'? I knew, the moment I entered the restaurant, that my shopping spree had been an opportunity missed – but then, if I was good at anything it was at missing opportunities. It was there that my genius resided.
I ordered a dry sherry. The moment I ordered it I regretted that I hadn't made a slightly trendier, slightly less British, slightly more worldly choice. I decided to call the barman back to change my order, but when he turned in response to my 'Excuse me . . .' I said, 'No, sorry, it doesn't matter', because I didn't want him to think that I was indecisive. I don't think I had ever felt so nervous in my life, even when taking my fourth driving test.
By this time I was convinced that she wouldn't come, I hoped that she wouldn't come, and then, suddenly, there she was and I knew in less than a second that I could hardly have borne it if she hadn't come.
She was wearing a very shiny outfit, in lurid green. On the whole I didn't think I liked the material, but my consolation was that there was very little of it. It was extremely low cut, revealing a charming cleavage, and it was also very high cut, if that is the right phrase, which I doubt, showing lots of no less delightful leg. There was also a gap in the middle, exposing flesh far too young for me. I would hate you to think I am a snob. Rachel was a snob. Jane is a snob. I am not. Nevertheless, I have to admit that I was relieved that the tattoo I had glimpsed on the train was now hidden.
She was probably the first person in the history of L'Escargot Bleu to order a pint of lager as an aperitif. The barman wanted to grin at her, but his job wouldn't allow him to. I don't usually notice things like that, but I noticed that I was noticing things I wouldn't usually notice. My senses were sharpened by her arrival, her nearness, her presence, her loveliness.
I suppose I ought to admit, in the interests of that prim mistress, Truth, that if you saw her you would probably not think her beautiful. Attractive, yes, but not beautiful. You might describe her as somewhat elfin, or what the French call gamine, but what other people might think of her is, ultimately, irrelevant.
There was she, five foot three, raising a pint glass of lager, and there was I, six foot and half an inch (I don't do metric), raising my tiny sherry glass. We clinked carefully, for fear the beer glass would shatter the sherry glass, and she said, 'Cheers, Alan.'
'Cheers, Ange.'
She smiled, and there was shyness in her smile.
'I've never been out with a philosopher before,' she said.
'I've never been out with a darts groupie,' I replied.
'I was gobsmacked when you asked me.'
It was my turn to smile shyly.
'I was
very
. . . er . . . gob . . . er . . . surprised when I asked you.'
'I wondered if you'd turn up.'
'I wondered if
you'd
turn up.'
'I'm glad you did.'
'I'm glad
you
did.'
'I bet you don't have conversations like this with your philosopher mates.'
I smiled inwardly at her use of the word 'mates'. How little she knew of my life. I didn't have any philosopher mates. The nicer philosophers that I knew were deadly rivals, the nastier were deadly enemies.
'Not quite, no,' I agreed.
An elderly French waiter, a man of the old school, collected us from the bar, placed our drinks on a tray, with a faint supercilious sniff towards the pint, and led us into the restaurant like a funeral director escorting a grieving widow into church. He had white hair and a long nose, ideal for looking down at people contemptuously. He made good use of this natural gift. As he led us, I tried to free my private parts from the constriction of the jockey shorts with a few subtle jerking movements. I was unsuccessful, and it must have looked to the other diners as if I was suffering from St Vitus Dance.
The waiter took us, as I had known he would, to the table next to the toilets. I didn't protest. It's my natural place in the scheme of things: Alan Calcutt, next to the toilets.
He handed us unfashionably huge menus and also handed me a very serious wine list which would have made the Domesday Book look like a leaflet.
'Bleedin' 'ell, it's expensive,' she said, just as I was making a similar observation to myself in slightly different words.
She studied the menu in silence, her lips moving slightly as she read, and frowning when she came to difficult words, words like darne and galantine, words which were new to her and which I only vaguely understood.
I made my choice, and turned to the wine list. There were more than a hundred clarets, ranging in price from twenty-four pounds to five hundred and twenty.
'Can I see?' she asked.
I handed it to her. She almost buckled under the weight. She turned the pages slowly. Time seemed to stand still. The waiter hovered obtrusively, but did not approach.
'They've got it,' she said. 'The one I like.'
I felt a shiver of fear. I couldn't afford five hundred and twenty pounds. But the reality was possibly even worse.
'They've put it under "rest of the world".' she said. 'That can't be right, cos it's French. Liebfraumilch.'
The waiter approached like gas across a battlefield.
'Madam,' he commanded.
'I'll have the terrine, please,' said Ange, 'and the fillet steak with pepper sauce. What does that come with?'
'On its own, madam.'
'Bleedin' 'ell, it's daylight fu . . . oops, sorry . . . king robbery. With . . . er . . . sauté potatoes, mashed potatoes, peas, cauliflower and green beans.'
'How would you like your steak, madam?'
'Well done.'
'Sir?' He could barely get the word out, such was his contempt.
'I'll have the scallops, and I'll have the pheasant with courgettes.'
'Very good, sir.'
'We'll see if it is.'
Oh God, why did I say that?
'I beg your pardon, sir?'
'You said, "Very good". I said, "We'll see if it is very good".'
'Yes, sir.'
'And . . . er . . . we'll have a bottle of . . . er . . .' I swallowed. This took courage. This went against everything I had been bred for. '. . . of the Liebfraumilch.'
He scurried off. I had not thought him capable of moving so fast.
'I've never had pheasant,' said Ange.
'It's very nice if it's well hung,' I said.
'Does that make a difference?'
'All the difference.'
'Tons Thomas must be nice to eat, then.'
I confess that this remark puzzled me, but I didn't challenge it. I knew how ignorant I was about darts. Here, though, was a convenient cue, an ideal opportunity to ask her, to draw her out, to enter the fascinating unknown world of competitive darts. Something prevented me. Jealousy towards Tons Thomas, perhaps. Anyway, I just couldn't bring myself to broach the subject. I knew that I needed to make conversation. I could hardly expect her to make the running, unsophisticated as she was, but I could think of nothing to say. It's quite hard, actually, to admit to you how inept I was that night.
'It's filling up a bit,' I said, as two more people, stuffily dressed, entered the silent temple of gastronomy. I winced. 'It's filling up a bit,' observes Alan Calcutt, once thought to be one of the bright young hopes of British philosophical thinking.
The waiter arrived with our bottle of Liebfraumilch. He held it gingerly, as if he might catch a fatal disease off it. He showed it to me. I nodded wretchedly. I wanted to be anywhere else than here. This was all a terrible mistake.
He went away, and returned a moment later with the opened bottle. As he poured me a sip to taste, Ange leant forward and said, almost in a whisper, 'Wouldn't you think of going back to Mum, Dad?'
The waiter ignored this remark so pointedly that I knew he had heard it. I sniffed the sweet wine, took a sip, nodded miserably. The waiter poured half a glass for us both and retreated hastily.
'What on earth did you say that for?' I asked.
'Bit of fun. I like fun, don't I? Cheers.'
She raised her glass. I raised mine. We drank.
'M'm. Nice.'
'No.'
'What?'
'It's not nice.'
'Well, I think it is.'
'Maybe, but, believe me, it isn't.'
'I'm not a philosopher like you, but I'd have thought that if I think it's nice then for me it is nice, whatever you say.'
'Well, yes, that's true.'
I had a sinking feeling that I was going to say 'Well, yes, that's true' a lot. I didn't have the energy for argument that I once had. There had been a time when I would even have ventured to disagree with taxi drivers. Not any more. However, I felt that I needed to make a bit of a stab at defending my position.
'When Kath Parker had her stag do in Dublin we was all knocking back the Liebfraumilch till it was coming out of our ears and we all thought it was lovely,' she said. 'How can you say we was all wrong?'
'Well,' I said, 'I suppose I would argue that if people who know a lot about wine all say that a wine isn't nice, and people who don't know much about wine all say that it is nice, the probability is that it's the people who know about wine who are actually right.'
'That's the first time tonight you've sounded like a philosopher,' she said.
I didn't know whether to say 'Thank you' or 'Sorry'.
'Were you always a philosopher?'
'I started to teach philosophy after university, yes. I went to Oxford and somehow I've never left it. It does that to you.'
I found myself chatting about myself, not asking her about her. Rachel would have said that this was typical. Oh God, why was I still thinking about bloody Rachel?
Suddenly I was talking to Ange in quite an unsuitable way, but anything was better than silence, and at least I was being myself. It was strange. I felt that I was hovering over myself, listening to myself being pretentious. I was having an out of body experience, which I would previously have said was impossible.
'I tended to see myself as a bit of a maverick when I was young, a lone philosophical wolf. Arthur Holdall once said my problem was that I couldn't decide whether to be an
enfant noir
or a
bête terrible
.'
'Arthur Holdall?'
'A colleague.'
'I bet he's a case.'
'What? Ah. Yes. Yes. He once described me as a weir over which the turbulent currents of existentialism flowed into the stagnant pools of logical positivism.'
I gave a deep sigh.
'Oh, Alan,' she said. It was the first time she'd used my name just like that, as if she'd known me for quite a while, and it sounded very pleasant, very natural. 'What an awful sigh. I can't help it if I don't understand. Wish you weren't here with me?'
Yes.
'No!'
Yes and no.
'No, Ange, I was just thinking, nobody would describe me as Holdall did nowadays. I am one of that great army of thinkers who haven't fulfilled their promise.'
Luckily the waiter arrived with our starters, interrupting this morbid self-pity. His arrival wasn't altogether lucky, though. It set her off again.
'What was it like in Pentonville, Dad? I mean the nosh. Was it any better than the Scrubs?'
The waiter's whole body stiffened. He tried to give me the terrine and her the scallops, even though he must have known that it was the other way round.
My flesh crawled with embarrassment.
'You're embarrassing me,' I said, when he had gone. 'I don't want you to say things like that.'
'Oh, Alan,' she said again. 'Who cares what a snobby Frog waiter thinks?'
Casual racial insults of that kind horrify me. There was a risk that she would think me very stuffy, that she would be hurt, that I would be pouring cold water on our evening, but I couldn't let it go. I might have done with a taxi driver, especially a big taxi driver, but not with a dining companion.
'You shouldn't refer to the French as Frogs,' I said. 'They're a very civilised nation, with a very strong cultural tradition. Have you ever heard of a man called Jean Paul Sartre?'
She thought hard, wrinkling her pert little nose. I longed to trace the curl of her nostrils with a gentle finger.
'Didn't he used to play for Arsenal?'
'He was a philosopher. He was an existentialist.'
'A what?'
How could I explain existentialism to her, without my scallops going cold? The scallops were good, but not great. The freshness of the sea had long departed from them. At that price, it shouldn't have. I munched and thought.
'Existentialism is a philosophy that is based on freedom of choice, on taking responsibility for one's own actions, which create one's own moral values and determine one's future.' I was aware that I was sounding like a text book again.
She thought about that pretty hard.
'Actually that sounds quite sensible,' she said. 'Good old Sparta.'
'Sartre. What do you mean?'
'Well, it sounds to me as though he's cracked it. Is that the answer, then?'
'The answer to what?'
'Philosophy.'
'Ah. If only it were that simple. Philosophy is a process, Ange. It explores and examines. It is, ultimately, historically, more to do with asking questions than finding answers. Existentialists found their answers. Many other people question their answers and refute them. It's an on-going process.'
'It's all a bit beyond me. Easy come, easy go, that's me. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, that's me.'