Jomier sits in the reading room of the London Library. He has come here, as he does every week, to escape from Maria as she cleans his house and washes his clothes. The reading room is like the libraries of the nearby London clubs – the Reform, the Travellers’, the Athenaeum. It has deep leather armchairs in which members may read or doze. The subscription is expensive; Jomier could buy the books he borrows at less cost through Amazon or AbeBooks, but that would mean knowing in advance what books he wanted to read. In the London Library he can wander through the labyrinthine stacks to look at books he does not know had been written. Novels by forgotten novelists. The memoirs of unremembered diplomats and statesmen. The reminiscences of obscure old princes and divas who once had their day in the sun – the celebrities of yesterday and the day before and the day before that. It is like walking through a cemetery with little tombstones that one can pull out of the ground to learn about the deceased.
He would confide as unto trusted friends
His secrets to his notebooks; turn there still
Not elsewhere, whether faring well or ill.
So that the old man’s whole life lay revealed
As on a votive tablet.
Horace. From Horace in the first century bc to Jomier in the twenty-first century ad, a fraternity of diarists leave their lives to posterity in words – tablets, papyrus, scrolls, parchment, books, memory sticks. Epitaphs on gravestones are mere markers: De Profundis says much more about Oscar Wilde than the lip-marks of venerating gays on his tombstone in the Père Lachaise. There is more to Marx than ‘Workers of All Lands Unite’ chiselled on to his tombstone in Highgate Cemetery. But for every De Profundis or Kapital there are ten thousand books by forgotten authors. Transient vanity? Perhaps. ‘Vanity of vanities, all is vanity’ – Ecclesiastes. ‘All that me, me, me . . .’ – Updike. His judgement on contemporary fiction. And his own? Will Updike’s novels one day be stacked unread by future generations like those of Nobel Prize-winners such as Bjørnson, Eucken, Carducci, Benavente, Reymont, Deledda, Heidenstam? Who now reads Sully Prudhomme, Romain Rolland or Roger Martin du Gard? Is each generation doomed to T. S. Eliot’s ‘provincialism of the present’ – the spin-off from a belief in Progress; the assumption that we are more humane and enlightened than our forefathers; that each generation builds on the knowledge of the one that has gone before; that art like science is progressing towards an endgame of total enlightenment when mankind will have created all that is worth creating and knows all that it needs to know?
It is ten to one. Jomier leaves the London Library and walks across St James’s Square in the spring sunshine towards the Athenaeum on Pall Mall where he is to lunch with his friend Theo. The Athenaeum is almost empty. So too was the London Library. It is officially a workday but most workers are not working: they have already left London for the bank holiday weekend. Theo is not displeased. He clearly enjoys having the club’s waiters and flunkeys at his beck and call. As they drink dry sherry, Jomier teases his friend. Should a devout Christian be quite so happy to be served rather than serve? Theo: the best form of charity is employment. It provides not only a livelihood but also self-respect. How much better that Andro the Croatian, Bekim the Albanian, Clarita the Filipina should serve Theo and Jomier in Pall Mall than loiter unemployed on the street corners of Zagreb, Tirana or Manila. (And better, thinks Jomier, that the Brazilian Maria should now be ironing his shirts than selling her body on the streets of Rio de Janeiro.)
Jomier admires Theo for the clarity with which he assesses the good and the evil of the smallest actions in everyday life. How much more enjoyable is lunch at the Athenaeum when one knows that each mouthful is, in some small sense, a good work. Theo has not only expressed these views to Jomier but to a wider audience through talks to the Oxford Newman Society and articles in the Telegraph, the Spectator and the Salisbury Review. They enrage his Catholic co-religionists who, since the Second Vatican Council, have put all their eggs in the basket of social reform. Their Jesus is a Nye Bevan of antiquity; his curing of lepers a pilot for the National Health Service; his feeding of the Five Thousand a dry run for the UN’s World Food Programme. They do not like to hear Theo’s message that it is better to buy a flat-screen TV made in China than sign a standing order for Christian Aid.
As they eat their lunch, Jomier tells Theo that when in Venice at Christmas he and Judith went to midnight Mass at St Mark’s Basilica. Theo listens but does not put any follow-up questions. He does not ask about Judith. Though he was happy to be a shoulder to cry on at the time of Jomier’s divorce, he prefers not to know about Jomier’s extra-marital amours. What was the position of Thomas Aquinas on sex with a post-menopausal woman? Is it the ontological equivalent of buggery or ejaculating into a condom? Jomier does not ask. He listens to Theo hold forth on Venice – a maritime empire built on trade – a prototype for the British Empire and, like the British Empire, brought down by its involvement in wars in its hinterland – for Britain Flanders, for Venice the Valley of the Po.
Jomier is used to Theo’s lack of curiosity about his private life. Or any other aspect of his life. Theo has no interest in people as such. His interests are on the one hand financial – markets, probabilities, risks – and on the other theological – eschatology, ethics, exegesis. He takes particular pleasure when the two combine. From the decline of Venice he moves on to the fissure between Latin and Orthodox Christianity that runs through the Balkans with Islamic enclaves left by the retreating Ottoman Turks – hence the different religious affiliations of Andro the Croatian (Catholic) and Bekim the Albanian (Muslim) – and ends over coffee with the hypothesis that thanks to idiotic altruism one or other would soon be out of a job.
How so? Theo explains. Well-meaning dirigistes in the US have encouraged banks to provide mortgages for poor people who have now defaulted on their loans. The loans had been sold on in packages to other banks and no one knows which are good and which are bad. ‘Imagine,’ says Theo, ‘a huge balloon held up by a thousand little helium-filled party balloons.’ A delinquent toddler has pricked some of the little party balloons with a pin. They start to lose their buoyancy. The big balloon begins to sink. It is difficult to sift the pin-pricked party balloons from the undamaged party balloons. Can it be done before the big balloon hits the ground? Probably not. No one now wants to put their party balloons beneath the canopy of the big balloon. Can it be kept afloat by more party balloons provided by the taxpayer? Perhaps, but even so the big balloon must shed ballast. Factories will close. Businesses fail. Hedge funds will go under. Jobs will be lost. Belts will be tightened. Inessential expenditure curtailed – holidays, restaurants and subscriptions to London clubs.
Theo sits on the committee of the Athenaeum. He fears that there will be cancelled subscriptions and a consequential need to prune the staff. Andro, Bekim and possibly Clarita may be dismissed – all because the well-meaning Democrats could not leave well alone. Will Theo be affected? No, quite to the contrary. Theo is ahead of the game. He is ‘shorting’ a number of banks. He advises Jomier to put any assets he might have into cash.
Jomier returns home in a gloomy mood. He turns on his computer and checks his emails. There is one from Henry. ‘Louisa and Jimmy are coming to London next week. Can you meet them at Heathrow and take them to the Hampton Clinic?’ Jomier replies: ‘Yes.’ There is another from a building society announcing that interest rates are to go down on their online accounts. That expects no reply. Take it or leave it, sucker. We lured you into depositing your money with us with the promise of a high rate of interest and now we are lowering it little by little because we know you can’t be bothered to shop around for a higher rate and open yet another account. Correct. But if Theo is right, it is not the interest that he is getting on his bank deposits that should worry Jomier but the fall in value of his funds. Jomier fights through a thicket of account numbers, passwords and customer IDs to access his bank accounts, pension funds and ISAs. The funds are all down – some more, some less. Clearly the fund managers paid by Jomier to care for his money have lacked Theo’s perspicacity. Jomier is enraged. Why pay fees to these supposed masters of the universe if they do no better than anyone else? He does not trust them. He suspects that they dump the worthless stocks of their prime clients like Max onto their sub-prime clients like Jomier. All Jomier’s rancour against the bankers and oligarchs that went into abeyance when he fell in love is now reignited by the idea of a shrinking pension fund and diminishing income.
Jomier must retrench. He must economise. He must cut his coat according to his shrunken cloth. But where are the cuts to be made? Jomier rarely travels or buys smart clothes or goes to the theatre or eats in restaurants other than the weekly Indian with Judith. Judith! Judith clearly is an expense or, if no great expense as such, a potential for expenditure drift. He thinks back to the cost of Christmas in Venice. True, she had paid her share, albeit a discounted share; but the ill will with which she had paid it – the brisk grumpiness with which she had written out the cheque – made it clear to Jomier that she had not expected him to take up her offer to pay her way. And Jomier had learned his lesson. He now always pays for the movies and Indians. He says ‘we’ll settle up later’ but that later never comes.
And there is the Viagra. Jomier punches the figures on the rubbery buttons of his electronic calculator. Two capsules a week means £250 a year! Add extras for holidays and he should budget for an annual expenditure on Viagra of around £300. Judith does not offer to make a contribution to that expense; he pops the pill discreetly; it is never mentioned; the fiction is maintained that he is aroused by the scent and sight and touch of this desirable woman. But as he looks at the number 300 on his calculator, Jomier asks himself whether Judith who, to judge from the sounds of pleasure that she emits as the rhythmic undulations of her well-tuned body gather pace, and the ecstatic cries as she arrives at her perfectly calibrated climax, does not in fact get more out of sex than he does? Indeed, does Jomier get anything much from sex any more beyond dubiously pleasurable sensations and the reassurance that he is still up to it – that he is still a man?
A year of Viagra: £300
A year of Indians: £1,500
A year of movies: £700
Future holidays: £3,500
Gifts: £300
Miscellaneous: £300
These estimates suggest that Judith will cost Jomier £6,600 over twelve months or, with tax at 20p in the pound on his investment income, a gross sum of more than £8,250 a year! And that is just ‘above the line’. More worrying for Jomier, as he thinks about the effects of the global credit crunch on his personal finances, is the possibility that this expenditure on Judith is just the start. If he and Judith were to share a house, would she share the costs? Would she pay half the Council Tax? Half the utility bills? Or would she take the same ‘How unromantic. How unchivalrous. How ungallant. How bourgeois. How penny-pinching’ attitude that she had shown when he had presented her with the Venice spreadsheet? Was Jomier about to fall yet again for the age-old confidence trick perpetrated by women on men? Is he, for Judith, anything more than a cashpoint, handyman and perambulating vibrator?
Tilly: you know the cost of everything and the value of nothing. Had she been right? Was he repeating the same mistake with Judith? How can you measure the cost-effectiveness of love? Has it not always been incumbent upon the male of the species to cherish his chosen partner, and has not cherishing always involved some expense? And what if he had fallen for a woman whose self-esteem depended on eating at the Ivy, the Wolseley or the Café Anglais? Jomier should be grateful that no more is expected of him than stumping up for tofu and seaweed when they shop together at Whole Foods, paying for cinema tickets, and footing the bill for their weekly Indian.
Jomier dines with his friends the Richards – Adrian, the parvenu Eurosceptic, and Mary, the granddaughter of an earl. He does not take Judith just as Judith does not take him to dinner with some of her yogic friends. As a couple they remain semi-detached. It has been tacitly accepted that each should occasionally see old friends on their own. So far the convention has worked well: Judith has assured Jomier that he would be bored by Raphael and Madge Samuelson; Jomier that Judith would detest the Richards. He has described their reactionary views and explained their continuing friendship on the grounds that he and Adrian ‘go back a long way’.
Would the Samuelsons be bored by Jomier? Would the Richards detest Judith? Is this implicit in the choice of friends whom they see as a couple and those they see alone? Put another way, would the Samuelsons invite Judith to their organic evenings in Islington if she had Jomier in tow? And would the carnivorous super-polluting Richards invite Jomier to dinner if they knew that the grungy Judith would come too? Jomier cannot answer for the Samuelsons but he knows the way the minds of the Richards work. He is also aware of his value to Mary as a single man. She does much entertaining: bankers, actresses, MPs, even government ministers. Almost everyone is someone but there is an occasional spinster cousin who has to be matched with a man in which case a no one like Jomier will do.
Jomier knows where he stands. He does not mind. Dining in a large elegant house in Kensington makes him feel that he still has a toehold on the right side of Shepherd’s Bush. And after weeks of eating food that is either raw or steamed or poached, he looks forward to the thick mayonnaise on the lobster and the grease dripping from the joint. He enjoys the ice-cold vintage Krug, the mellow Chateau Très Cher 1986 and the plump Cohiba cigars. He likes the glittering candlelit table furniture, the crisp linen napkins, the silver knives and forks. If the price to be paid is making conversation with the spinster cousin, so be it. He is happy to pay it for the fare, and for the sharp conversation between movers and shakers which he sometimes joins in. He likes to think that in the corridors of power in the Palace of Westminster a junior minister might say to a senior minister: ‘This interesting barrister I met at the Richards’ had an excellent image for the sub-prime mortgage crisis – a lot of party balloons filled with helium holding up the bigger balloon of the American economy, some of which have been pricked with a pin by a delinquent toddler . . .’
Jomier also likes entering an account of dining with the Richards in his digital journal the next morning. He does not write with posterity in mind but this record of exchanges between significant people gives some weight to what might otherwise be judged another Diary of a Nobody. He may not be a Chips Channon or Woodrow Wyatt, but his thumbnail sketches of the different guests could possibly be of some historical interest in the future were Jomier’s journal ever to see the light of day.
On the following Saturday night, over an Indian, Jomier tells Judith about the dinner with the Richards, every now and then making a mental note of something he has failed to enter in his journal. Judith listens. Jomier can sense that there is something in his narrative that seems to annoy her. She says nothing and, when he has finished, tells him about her week – an overnight visit by Tim from Devon to ask her to arrange an exhibition for Tamara’s pottery in London (‘Why does he think I have those kind of contacts: there’s Karl’s gallery but he won’t want to show Tamara’s folksy junk; Tim should ask his father for help, not me’) and then (‘inevitable . . . it had to happen sooner or later’) fetching Ophelia from Islington police station after she had been arrested for driving Judith’s Peugeot while drunk.
Jomier thinks Judith’s difficulties with her two children are trivial compared to his anxiety about Louisa. He tells Judith that his daughter is apparently growing weaker and thinner and the specialists in Buenos Aires are at a loss. Judith listens. She sympathises. Her tone of voice becomes solicitous and feminine but Jomier can see that it requires an effort for her to show an interest in the suffering of someone she does not know. She feels for Jomier, her lover, not this piece of baggage from his past. She says: ‘poor you’, not ‘poor Louisa’. She wonders if Louisa’s illness may not be caused by eating too much meat. She tells Jomier that the per capita consumption of beef in Argentina is more than three times that of Britain – an absurdly extravagant use of potentially arable land but also, because of the need to cultivate soybeans to feed the cattle, the cause of deforestation which, together with the flatulence of so many animals, is a major contribution to global warming; and the eating of so much meat is a major cause of colon cancer and, no doubt, fatal diseases such as mad cow disease which they cover up to protect their exports. ‘Has she been tested for Creutzfeldt–Jakob’s disease?’ Judith asks Jomier.
‘I’m sure,’ says Jomier. ‘Anyway, the problem is with her blood, not her brain.’
A pause in the conversation as they await the bill. Then Judith says: ‘I’d like to meet the Richards.’
‘You’d hate them.’
‘You seem to have enjoyed yourself at their dinner party.’
‘Perhaps, but it’s not your sort of thing.’
‘You shouldn’t presume that you will always know what is my sort of thing. And if Mary Richards is the daughter of Lord Atterton, then she must be some kind of cousin.’
‘Granddaughter,’ says Jomier.
‘A cousin, then, two or three times removed.’
Jomier is aware that the egalitarianism that is bundled with Judith’s liberal beliefs has not done away with a measure of self-identification with England’s upper class. She concedes that her views are not those of the Richards’ but feels that there will be a deeper affinity because of the Atterton connection. Jomier pays the bill; he waves away Judith’s offer to split it, but it is clear that this gesture of mini-munificence is not sufficient to change her worsening mood. Judith is starting to think that Jomier does not want to introduce her to the Richards; that he will somehow be embarrassed by her despite her bona fide credentials as a cousin of Mary albeit two or three times removed. Is it her looks? Her age? Her views on capital punishment or global warming? Jomier knows that these thoughts are passing through her head but dare not nip them in the bud by admitting the true reason behind his reluctance to introduce Judith to the Richards – viz. that, if he becomes half of a couple rather than a single man, Mary Richards will cross him off her list.
They return to Judith’s house in Wandsworth. They make love but their hearts are not in it. A mental estrangement detaches them from the action of their bodies. Judith is thinking that Jomier’s reluctance to introduce her to his grand friends the Richards means that at some level he is ashamed of her. Jomier is thinking that Judith may not only destabilise his finances but will also deny him any independence. They nuzzle and kiss before turning out the light but both are acting; they fall asleep thinking treasonous thoughts.
The thoughts persist at breakfast – for Judith muesli and herbal tea, for Jomier coffee, a poached egg on wholemeal toast and Waitrose honey-roast ham. They unpack the Observer. Jomier reads the news, Judith a feature on binge-drinking by young women. ‘What am I to do about Ophelia?’
Jomier looks up. He does not want to think about Ophelia: he wants to return to what he is reading about the impending recession. ‘There’s probably not that much you can do. What’s done is done.’
‘What do you mean – what’s done is done?’
‘You can’t un-divorce. You can’t reconstitute a happy home.’
‘You think it’s that? My fault, in fact . . .’
Jomier shrugs. ‘Not your fault as such but it seems likely that the divorce is the cause; the attempt to anaesthetise her unhappiness with alcohol the effect.’
‘But you divorced and your children aren’t alcoholics.’
‘Or dropouts. No. Clearly behaviourism is not an exact science. And Tilly . . .’ Jomier’s voice tails off.
‘Tilly what?’
‘Well, once she married Max, she did provide them with a stable home.’
‘And I did not?’
Jomier shrugs again. ‘I don’t know. Perhaps if you had stuck with Alfredo or Giles or whoever . . .’ He waves his hand as if the list is too long to be remembered. ‘It must be disturbing for a child not knowing who she is going to find in bed with her mother when she gets up in the morning.’
Judith stands. She goes to the window of her kitchen. ‘I’ve just had bad luck, that’s all.’ Jomier suspects that she is crying.
‘I’m sorry,’ he says. ‘I’m not saying that you’re to blame, merely that causes have effects.’
‘I’m sure they fucking do,’ says Judith, ‘and no doubt you were the cause of Louisa choosing to live as far from her fucking father as she could.’
‘Quite possibly,’ says Jomier, looking back at the paper.
‘And now she’s dying from mad cow disease from eating all that meat!’
Jomier does not answer.
‘Which she wouldn’t have eaten if she hadn’t gone to live in Argentina, and she wouldn’t have gone to Argentina if she hadn’t had such a cold, calculating, stingy, snobbish, heartless father! Cause: you! Effect: the death of your daughter!’
Jomier puts down the Observer. He can see Judith’s shaking shoulders. He can hear her sobs. Should he cross the room to comfort her? Or should he turn on his heel, leave the house and return to Hammersmith? Turning on his heel and leaving the house is not really an option because he is still wearing pyjamas and a dressing gown. His clothes are upstairs in Judith’s bedroom; his shaving kit and toothbrush are in Judith’s bathroom. If he had dressed before breakfast, he could have written off his pyjamas and shaving kit: with what he would save on the Indians and Viagra, he could buy new silk pyjamas, a gold-plated razor and an ivory-handled pure badger-bristle shaving brush. Jomier thinks these thoughts but he does not act on them. He is not a cold, calculating, stingy, snobbish, heartless brute. Louisa did not go to live in Argentina to get away from her father but because she fell in love with Jimmy. Nor does Louisa have mad cow disease. She is not dying. Jomier is so confident of all this that he is able to stand and cross the kitchen to Judith – embrace her, comfort her, trade apologies, make up.