Jomier sleeps badly. Jomier always sleeps badly after drinking more than one glass of wine. Jomier knows this and would like to drink less or nothing at all but cannot endure a dinner party without a drink. The immediate effect of the first drink is to undermine his resolve not to have a second. Alcohol enters his bloodstream. He becomes eloquent. He laughs as if amused. He flirts. He responds to flirtation. He makes foolish suggestions: ‘I’ll rewrite the letter and ask you out.’ ‘What about an email?’ Six hours later, at five in the morning, he lies wide awake. What had possessed him? He has made a commitment. He has raised expectations.
In the morning, as he eats his breakfast, the exasperation at his own folly persists. Here before him are the elements of perfect happiness – the morning newspaper, a cup of coffee, a slice of toast, an empty day – nothing to do but transcribe the past from his handwritten notebooks and enter the present into his digital journal – his blog. His toilette out of the way – shaving, defecating, vitamin pills, making his bed and taking a short walk around the block – Jomier goes to his desk, switches on his computer and loads Microsoft Word. He opens the document ‘Journal – current’. He writes an account of what he did yesterday – Ruth’s dinner party, Judith, the kipper pâté. He then opens the document ‘Journals 1950–1970’ and searches for ‘Judith’ but the search item is not found. He tries ‘Lucy’ and up comes Lucy Harding, the neighbours’ daughter. It is 1958. He reads and remembers. A teenage party. The Harding parents away. Dancing to music from a gramophone – the early days of LPs. The lights go out. Couples sidle to sofas or fall on the carpeted floor. Kissing. Fumbling. Heavy-petting. Lucy leads him into her father’s study – his den. They tumble onto the leather sofa. He slides his hand down the front of her dress and, with the index finger of his right hand, fiddles with a nipple. ‘A crystallised cherry on a plate of junket.’ That dates it. No one eats junket now.
Jomier scrolls down with the wheel on his mouse. Another party where he manages to put two fingers beneath the elastic of Lucy’s knickers and feel moist, squidgy, bristly flesh. They go no further: he is still only sixteen, Lucy fifteen, and other couples are necking and petting in the same room. The holidays end. Jomier and Lucy go back to school and, when Jomier presses ‘Find Next’, the cursor leaps forward six years to ‘The Hardings come to lunch. Lucy brings a friend.’ Some months later: ‘Get the address of Lucy’s friend’; then ‘Back from Greece. Write to Lucy’s friend’; then finally, her name. ‘Jydith engaged to Beresford Grant. Tear up the letter.’
Jomier corrects the spelling of the name of Judith, searches again for ‘Jydith’ to see if the same typo occurs elsewhere and, after a search lasting a microsecond, is informed that the item was not found. He reads on. He seems to have been unaffected by the engagement to Beresford Grant of Jydith-Judith. There are more fish in the sea than ever came out of it. Is that the expression? Jomier has a careless memory – for sayings, proverbs, lyrics, hymns. It had irritated Tilly. Other fish. More crystallised cherries on junket, on jelly, on blancmange. Jomier is both the participant and detached observer. ‘C. When she is sexually excited she puffs like a pair of bellows.’ Who was C.? Catherine? Or Clare? The Clare who had turned down Marco? ‘A foreigner. And almost certainly queer.’
Did Jomier only write in his journal about his encounters with girls? If, instead of leaping through his life in microseconds with the search facility, Jomier scrolls down the pages of ‘Journals 1950–1970’ he sees that there are long, and now tedious, passages about politics. Jomier and Marco decide to right the wrongs that prevail in the world. They have a one-word solution. Revolution! They are both Communists – not party members but fellow-travellers. Marx: ‘Our aim is not to understand the world but to change it!’ Jomier and Marco see themselves as Left Bank left-wing intellectuals with Gauloises dangling out of their mouths – Sartre, Camus, Aragon. But both are cautious. At the great demonstration against the war in Vietnam outside the American Embassy, they stand at the back of the crowd, ready to retreat to Claridge’s. Jomier cannot serve the proletariat as a lawyer with a conviction for a breach of the peace. And Marco dislikes physical proximity with the masses: throughout the fracas in Grosvenor Square he covers his nose with a handkerchief soaked in eau de cologne.
Jomier is now more embarrassed by his socialistic past than his fingering of young women’s private parts. Marx, Lenin, Mao, Castro were his heroes. Even Stalin! Without the industrialisation of the Soviet Union in the 1920s, he explains in his journal, there would have been no T-54 tanks to defeat the Germans on the Kursk salient. Hitler would have been victorious. An Auschwitz-Birkenau would have been built in England’s green and pleasant land.
Jomier reads on. The Russians were right to crush the Hungarians in 1956. And the Czechs in 1968. Without Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe, all the old casus belli would be revived. The Sudetenland. The Danzig corridor. It was the only way to kill off German revanchism once and for all.
Jomier keeps reading his journal of 1968, not to find references to the historical Judith but to keep the twenty-first-century Judith out of his mind. But she cannot be ignored. There is her card next to his keyboard on his desk. Judith Grant. Yoga teacher. grant.j76@absmail.com. He closes both his journals and opens Outlook Express. He clicks ‘addresses’ and enters her details. There are no other Judiths. Now as soon as he writes the letters j u d his computer will know who he means. grant.j76. A digital label for a woman of flesh and blood. Days pass. Jomier postpones sending an email to Judith. He has it in mind. He means to do so. He writes ‘email Judith’ on his list of ‘things to do’. There are other items on the list. Putting things on the list is the first step towards doing what Jomier knows he must do. He waits patiently for the time to be right: for the day, the hour, the minute when he will feel up to making the call, writing the email, reading the book. Other things are postponed which do not even make it to the list: articles in periodicals which look interesting and will be read in due course – the New Yorker, the TLS, Prospect, the New York Review of Books. Jomier is minded to return to them but is deterred by the dense mass of words in those columns of print. How much easier to switch on the radio or the television. Particularly the television. Jomier likes to watch films – not just the black-and-white film noirs but Hollywood blockbusters in which Bruce Willis, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Steven Seagal triumph over evil incarnate in Lee Van Cleef, Robert Shaw or Alan Rickman. He has seen them all before – the sequels and prequels, the Die Hards, Terminators, Under Sieges – but thanks to his age he only remembers the plot when he reaches the last reel.
Jomier avoids the main channels at prime time with their inane quiz shows and documentaries about menstruation or obese Siamese twins; nor does he watch afternoon made-for-TV Hollywood movies about the travails of lesbian mothers with autistic sons interspersed with ads to appeal to the retired or the unemployed – conservatories, double glazing, incontinence pads, personal loans. He also hates romantic films with happy endings; or erotic films with misty, tasteful takes of heaving buttocks, groaning and grunting on the soundtrack, which make him think of Tilly with Max but also that it would be good to be hugged and caressed by a warm woman. Judith. Should he try for one last throw of the dice?
Ten days after Ruth’s dinner party Jomier sends Judith an email suggesting that they meet up to go to a movie. She accepts. ‘I’d love to.’ They agree on a film – French, enigmatic, thrillerish but not a thriller, starring Daniel Auteuil rather than Jean-Claude Van Damme. It is showing in Chelsea – midway between Wandsworth and Hammersmith. Jomier buys the tickets and waits for Judith in the foyer. She arrives – controlled, calm; dressed stylishly but not dressed-up; a little folksy; low-heeled shoes. She smiles. He smiles. They go in.
Jomier finds it hard to understand the film. Is it intentionally obscure? Or is he slow on the uptake? He is distracted by thoughts about her low-heeled shoes. Does she wear them because she is tall? She is no taller than Jomier but, with higher heels, would tower over smaller men. Height is an under-acknowledged factor in sexual attraction. Women like men to be taller than they are. A small man does not trigger the impulse to reproduce. There are no glandular secretions, however handsome the shrimp, unless he is a world-historical genius like Napoleon or a successful actor like Daniel Auteuil. Are the low heels to increase Judith’s chances? To reduce the height of potential lovers by two or three centimetres and so enlarge the pool? Would Judith have accepted Jomier’s invitation to go to the movies if he had been 5´4” rather than 6´1”? Would he have asked her if she had been 6´1” and he 5´4”? Does the historical conundrum posed by Pascal about the shape of Cleopatra’s nose apply to the feelings of two English divorcees sitting in a cinema on the King’s Road?
On-screen Daniel Auteuil is having sex with a beautiful girl. She murmurs. She gasps. She is acting. Can a frigid actress simulate orgasms? Or a virgin? Or must she draw on her own experience? Can the husband of an actress ever know if his wife’s response to his caresses is sincere? Or any husband? Jomier thinks back to Tilly. Was she pretending? Or was she thinking of Max?
The film ends. They come out on to the King’s Road. It is dark but still warm. People sit at tables on the pavement. They might be in Rome. Judith tells Jomier that she liked the film. Jomier is glad of her forthright opinion. He has no view about the film but, being a barrister, argues against the position she has taken, saying that the director’s intentions were obscure. Gently, tentatively, she suggests pointers in the plot that Jomier has missed.
They eat at Pizza Express. Judith asks for a tomato and mozzarella salad with dough balls; Jomier an American Hot, a side salad; they share a bottle of house wine. They continue to talk about the film. Jomier attacks the hypocrisy of ‘art house’ films which purport to be superior to Hollywood blockbusters but invariably rely for their appeal on a pretty actress at some point in the drama removing her clothes.
‘Do you object to that?’ asks Judith in the gentle tone of a psychotherapist.
‘It makes one complicit in voyeurism.’
‘And voyeurism . . .’ She hesitates.
‘What?’
‘Is wrong?’
‘It’s demeaning.’
Judith smiles. ‘You are puritanical . . .’
‘My ancestors were Huguenots.’
‘But you’re not a Calvinist?’
‘Far from it.’
‘Then what is wrong with enjoying the spectacle of Emmanuelle Béart’s naked body?’
‘Was it Emmanuelle Béart?’
‘No. I meant only . . . Let’s say Brigitte Bardot.’
‘Because it provokes desires that it cannot fulfil.’
‘The fulfilment comes afterwards when all those young couples go back to their flats and make love.’
‘Not all moviegoers have lovers.’
‘That’s true. But the celibate moviegoer, as you say, must know what to expect and can therefore stay away.’
‘Or . . .’
She knows what he means. Masturbation. The love that dare not speak its name.
The waiter brings the bottle of wine. Jomier fills their two glasses. He proposes a toast. ‘To old friends.’ Jomier clinks his glass against hers. She repeats what he has said. ‘To old friends.’
The mozzarella, the sliced tomatoes, the dough balls, the American Hot pizza are all eaten; the bottle of wine is drunk. Jomier asks for the bill. When it arrives, Judith takes a purse out of her bag, meaning to pay. Jomier will not allow it.
‘But you paid for the tickets –’
‘It’s a generational thing. I would feel emasculated . . .’
She smiles and gives in. Jomier wonders how a man can be emasculated when his cojones were long since removed – by Max the surgeon, Tilly the nurse. Yet he used the word. Why does he still feel that on a date the man should pay for the woman? A faulty signal to the brain like a twinge in the toe of an amputated leg? Or a necessary first step in the ritual of courtship – an assertion of strength, an implicit promise to provide for and cherish and protect?
Jomier walks Judith to her car – an old Peugot 305. She turns. ‘That was lovely.’ They kiss – not mouth to mouth but pursed lips on cheeks. A last look under the eyelashes and a smile that says: ‘I am sure we will progress from cheeks to mouth but we must take things slowly – step by step, date by date. This may be the last throw of the dice.’