A month or so later –
‘So that didn’t last long,’ Francis said.
‘It wasn’t a good enough idea.’
‘Not the idea. Your ma-in-law.’
‘Oh, that’s still a goer.’
‘Pity, I was hoping –’
‘Hoping what, Francis?’
But he couldn’t even be bothered to frame a lewd suggestion. We were clapped out.
He looked at his watch.
He used to look at his watch every thirty minutes. Now it was every five.
We were lunching in a new club in Soho. Clubs were like authors’ magazines – the worse things got, the more of them appeared.
After he’d checked his watch, he checked the room. We were all doing this, looking to see who else was there. Though there was no one whose company we sought, anyone had to be better than the person we were with. We were murdering time. Now was no good. What happened next had to be better. And we’d think the same about whatever happened next, whether or not anything did. Life was some place, some time, some person, else.
And if it still wasn’t to be found, it was probably on your mobile phone.
The food the same. Wherever we ate, we discussed the menu of somewhere else. No one on the planet was where he wanted to be, discussing what he wanted to discuss, eating what he wanted to eat. We’d all slipped a cog.
‘Do you have another appointment, Francis?’ I asked.
‘Sorry, sorry, God no. I’m just on edge.’
‘Me too.’
This time we both looked around the room. Everyone was on edge. People whom their dining companions didn’t want to be with were the object of greedy curiosity, even desire, on the part of people who didn’t want to be with whom they were with. We could have played musical chairs. When the music stops you change your life. It didn’t matter if you got it wrong. It would turn out shit whoever you chose.
‘You know what, Francis?’ I said. ‘I think we’re being prepared for the end of the world. We’re being broken gently into hating our lives so that we won’t feel too bad about losing them.’
‘I don’t hate my life.’
I shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him he was in denial.
We sat silently, chewing children’s food. Mince and mash. Soon it would be mashed peach and rhubarb.
‘So,’ Francis said at last. ‘You’ve met Ferber.’
‘If you can call it meeting.’
‘He’s the future, Guy.’
‘There is no future.’
‘Maybe you’re right. But he’s the future that isn’t.’
‘I’ve just been up to see my brother. He’s the future that isn’t.’
‘I didn’t know you had a brother.’
‘Jeffrey. He runs the family business.’
‘What’s the family business?’
‘Christ, Francis, I’ve written about it often enough. Fashion. We have a boutique in Wilmslow.’
‘I thought that was fiction.’
‘It was fiction, told through the false prism of truth.’
‘Then you must be ashamed of it. Why has it only ever popped up incidentally? Why haven’t you written the great boutique novel?’
‘Good question. I’m writing it now. From my brother’s point of view.’
‘What’s wrong with your own?’
See! Any minute Francis would be asking me to turn it into a memoir. ‘Based on a true story.’
‘I don’t interest myself any more. My brother does.’
‘How is he that different from you?’
‘Well, for starters, he’s gay.’
‘Who isn’t?’
‘Well, he isn’t. He’s both. Plus he’s dying. Unless he’s not.’
Francis looked around the room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, eyeing off a raddled woman with a deep ravined, wrinkled décolletage. ‘Is that what Poppy Eisenhower looks like?’ he asked.
‘It certainly is not.’
A pale perplexed waitress, from some country even further gone into hating itself than ours, wondered if we’d like to order a dessert. Jelly? Rice pudding? It was a pointless enquiry. We wouldn’t like what came. We’d be better ordering something else and not liking that.
Francis, notwithstanding, asked for Bakewell tart with ice cream, custard and double cream. He was very particular about it, as though the order mattered.
The waitress returned to tell him Bakewell tart already came with double cream, so did that mean he wanted double, double cream?
‘Yes,’ I said for him.
‘And two spoons,’ Francis added.
‘That’s not two more spoons,’ I helped out. ‘Just the one that it comes with and then an extra one.’
The waitress nodded and turned on her heel, understanding only that she didn’t understand.
‘I think I want to write about a degenerate,’ I said.
‘You were writing about a degenerate,’ Francis said. ‘You’re always writing about a degenerate.’
‘No, I mean the real thing. An actual degenerating person. Someone who fucks men and women, at the same time. Someone who drinks vodka through his eyes. Someone who lies about having a fucking brain tumour. Unless he’s telling the truth. In which case he’s an even more degenerating person.’
‘Is that all?’
‘What else is there, Francis?’
‘Abuse. Drug-running. Wife-beating. Pimping. Murder. Child rape. Sex tourism.’
‘He probably does all that too.’
‘In Wilmslow?’
‘Why not? The place is full of footballers.’
‘Excellent. Make him a footballer.’
‘A footballer! Francis, it’s all I can do not to make him a French philosopher. I don’t think you’ve grasped what I’ve been saying. This is going to be a pornographic critique of the pornography of our time, which isn’t pornography. The pornography of our time is our failure to admit the pornographic.’
He stared at me and put his fingers together. ‘OK,’ he said, or rather, ‘OKaaay.’
‘What do you mean OKaaay?’
‘I mean good, sounds really interesting, but don’t write it just yet.’
‘I’m writing it already.’
‘OKaaay, but don’t finish it just yet.’
‘Why shouldn’t I finish it just yet?’
‘Because I can’t sell it just yet.’
‘Because?’
‘Because the pornography of our time is our failure to admit the pornographic.’
‘I just said that.’
‘Which goes to show I listen.’
‘And when do you think that’s going to change?’
‘When do you think I’m going to stop listening?’
‘No, Francis – when do you think we will once again be able to admit the pornographic?’
He shrugged.
‘So what am I supposed to do in the meantime?’
‘Fuck your mother-in-law, you lucky so-and-so.’
‘For a living, Francis.’
He consulted his watch and then looked around the room.
At that moment Vanessa appeared, with Poppy on her arm.
Followed by the waitress with an apple-and-rhubarb crumble, and no cream.