‘But you let me understand …’
‘Well, one has one’s pride.’
‘You mean?’
‘I mean he said he had an early start the next day. Paris, Copenhagen, wherever. Book tour. You know.’
‘The headache excuse.’
‘Precisely.’
‘Well,’ said Jane, trying to hide a sudden surge of jauntiness, ‘I’ve always believed that writers get more out of things going wrong than things going right. It’s the only profession in which failure can be put to good use.’
‘I don’t think “failure” exactly describes my moment with John Updike.’
‘Of course not, darling.’
‘And you are, if you don’t mind my saying so, coming on a little like a self-help book.’ Or like you sound on Woman’s Hour, brightly telling others how to live.
‘Am I?’
‘The point is, even if personal failure can be properly transformed into art, it still leaves you where you were when you started.’
‘And where’s that?’
‘Not having slept with John Updike.’
‘Well, if it’s any consolation, I’m jealous of him twinkling at you.’
‘You’re a friend,’ Alice replied, but her tone betrayed her.
They fell silent. Some large station went by.
‘Was that Swindon?’ Jane asked, to make it sound as if they weren’t quarrelling.
‘Probably.’
‘Do you think we have many readers in Swindon?’ Oh, come on, Alice, don’t get huffy on me. Or rather, don’t let’s get huffy on one another.
‘What do you think?’
Jane didn’t know what to think. She was half in a panic. She reached for a sudden fact. ‘It’s the largest town in England without a university.’
‘How do you know that?’ Alice asked, trying to appear envious.
‘Oh, it’s just the sort of thing I know. I expect I got it from Moby-Dick.’
They laughed contentedly, complicitly. Silence fell. After a while they passed Reading, and each gave the other credit for not pointing out the Gaol or going on about Oscar Wilde. Jane went to the loo, or perhaps to consult the minibar in her handbag. Alice found herself wondering if it were better to take life seriously or lightly. Or was that a false antithesis, merely a way of feeling superior? Jane, it seemed to her, took life lightly, until it went wrong, when she reached for serious solutions like God. Better to take life seriously, and reach for light solutions. Satire, for instance; or suicide. Why did people hold so fast to life, that thing they were given without being consulted? All lives were failures, in Alice’s reading of the world, and Jane’s platitude about turning failure into art was fluffy fantasy. Anyone who understood art knew that it never achieved what its maker dreamt for it. Art always fell short, and the artist, far from rescuing something from the disaster of life, was thereby condemned to be a double failure.
When Jane returned, Alice was busy folding up the sections of newspaper she would keep to read over her Sunday-night boiled egg. It was strange how, as you aged, vanity became less a vice and almost its opposite: a moral requirement. Their mothers would have worn a girdle or corset, but their mothers were long dead, and their girdles and corsets with them. Jane had always been overweight – that was one of the things Derek had complained about; and his habit of criticising his ex-wife either before or shortly after he and Alice went to bed together had been another reason for finishing with him. It wasn’t sisterliness, more disapproval of a lack of class in the man. Subsequently, Jane had got quite a bit larger, what with her drinking and a taste for things like buns at teatime. Buns! There really were a few things women should grow out of. Even if petty vices proved crowd-pleasing when coyly confessed into a microphone. And as for Moby-Dick, it had been perfectly clear to all and sundry that Jane had never read a word of it. Still, that was the constant advantage of appearing with Jane. It made her, Alice, look better: lucid, sober, well read, slim. How long would it be before Jane published a novel about an overweight writer with a drink problem who finds a god to approve of her? Bitch, Alice thought to herself. You really could do with the scourge of one of those old, punitive religions. Stoical atheism is too morally neutral for you.
Guilt made her hug Jane a little longer as they neared the head of the taxi queue at Paddington.
‘Are you going to the Authors of the Year party at Hatchards?’
‘I was an Author of the Year last year. This year I’m a Forgotten Author.’
‘Now, don’t get maudlin, Jane. But since you’re not going, I shan’t either.’ Alice said this firmly, while aware that she might later change her mind.
‘So where are we off to next?’
‘Is it Edinburgh?’
‘Could be. That’s your taxi.’
‘Bye, partner. You’re the best.’
‘So are you.’
They kissed again.
Later, over her boiled egg, Alice found her mind drifting from the cultural pages to Derek. Yes, he had been an oaf, but one with such an appetite for her that it had all seemed not worth questioning. And at the time Jane didn’t appear to mind; only later did she start to become resentful. Alice wondered if this was something to do with Jane, or with the nature of time; but she failed to reach a conclusion, and went back to the newspaper.
Jane, meanwhile, in another part of London, was watching television, and picking up cheese on toast with her fingers, not caring where the crumbs fell. Her hand occasionally slipped a little on the wine glass. Some female Euro-politician on the news reminded her of Alice, and she thought about their long friendship, and how, when they were on stage together, Alice always played the senior partner, and she always acquiesced. Was this because she had a subservient nature, or because she thought it made her, Jane, come across as nicer? Unlike Alice, she never minded owning up to weaknesses. So maybe it was time to admit the gaps in her reading. She could start in Edinburgh. That was a trip to look forward to. She imagined these jaunts of theirs going on into the future until … what? The television screen was replaced by an image of herself dropping dead on a near-empty train coming back from somewhere. What did they do when that happened? Stop the train – at Swindon, say – and take the body off, or just prop her up in the seat as if she was asleep or drunk and continue on to London? There must be a protocol written down somewhere. But how could they give a place of death if she was on a moving train at the time? And what would Alice do, if her body was taken off? Would she loyally accompany her dead friend, or find some high-minded argument for staying on the train? It suddenly seemed very important to be reassured that Alice wouldn’t abandon her. She looked across at the telephone, wondering what Alice was doing at that moment. But then she imagined the small, disapproving silence before Alice answered her question, a silence which would somehow imply that her friend was needy, self-dramatising and overweight. Jane sighed, reached for the remote, and changed channel.
At Phil & Joanna’s 2: Marmalade
IT WAS THE KIND of mid-February which reminds the British why so many of their compatriots chose emigration. Snow had fallen intermittently since October, the sky was a dull aluminium, and the television news reporting flash floods, toddlers being swept away and pensioners paddled to safety. We had talked about SAD, the credit crunch, the rise in unemployment and the possibility of increased social tension.
‘All I’m saying is, it’s not surprising if foreign firms operating here fly in foreign labour when there are piles of job-seekers at home.’
‘And all I’m saying is, there are more Brits working in Europe than Europeans working here.’
‘Did you see that Italian worker giving the finger to photographers?’
‘Yes, I’m all for importing foreign labour if it looks like that.’
‘Don’t give her any more, Phil.’
‘Without sounding too much like the prime minister or one of those papers we don’t read, at the moment I think it should be a case of British jobs for British workers.’
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‘And European wine for British wives.’
‘That’s a non sequitur.’
‘No, it’s a postprandial sequitur. Amounts to the same thing.’
‘As your resident alien –’
‘Pray silence for the spokesman of our former colony.’
‘… I recall when all you guys were arguing about joining the single currency. And I was thinking: what’s their problem? I’ve just driven to the middle of Italy and back using a single currency and it’s called Mastercard.’
‘If we joined the euro the pound would be worth less.’
‘Surely, if we joined the euro –’
‘Joke.’
‘You’ve got the same colour passports. Why not cut to the chase and say you’re all Europeans?’
‘Because then we wouldn’t be allowed to make jokes about foreigners.’
‘Which is after all a central British tradition.’
‘Look, go to any city in Europe and the stores are more or less the same. At times you wonder where you are. Internal borders hardly exist. Plastic’s replacing money, the internet’s replacing everything else. And more and more people speak English, which makes it even easier. So why not admit the reality?’
‘But that’s another British trait we cling to. Not accepting reality.’
‘Like hypocrisy.’
‘Don’t get her started on that. You rode that hobby horse to death last time, darling.’
‘Did I?’
‘Riding a hobby horse to death is flogging a dead metaphor.’
‘What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile, by the way?’
‘Marmalade.’
‘Which of you two is driving?’
‘Have you made yours?’
‘You know, I always spot the Sevilles when they first come in and then never get around to buying any.’
‘One of the last fruit or veg still obedient to the concept of a season. I wish the world would go back to that.’
‘No you don’t. You’d have turnips and swedes on the trot all winter.’
‘When I was a boy, we had this big sideboard in the kitchen with deep drawers at the bottom, and once a year they’d all suddenly be full of marmalade. It was like a miracle. I never saw my mum making it. I’d come home from school, and there’d be this smell, and I’d go to the sideboard, and it was all full of pots. All of them labelled. Still warm. And it had to last us the whole year.’
‘My dear Phil. Cue rheumy tear and violins. This was when you were stuffing newspaper into your shoes as you trudged to your holiday job at t’mill?’
‘Fuck off, Dick.’
‘Claude says this is the last week for Sevilles.’
‘I knew it. I’m going to miss out again.’
‘There’s a pun in Shakespeare on “Seville” and “civil”. Not that I can remember what it is.’
‘You can freeze them, you know.’
‘You should see our freezer already. I don’t want it to become an even greater repository of guilt.’
‘Sounds like those damn bankers – repositories of gilt.’
‘They don’t look very guilty.’
‘I was trying to make a pun, sweetie.’
‘Who’s Claude?’
‘He’s our greengrocer. He’s French. Actually, French Tunisian.’
‘Well, that’s another thing. How many of your traditional shopkeepers are English any more? Around here, anyway. A quarter, a third?’
‘Speaking of which, did I tell you about the home bowel-screening kit the government kindly sent me now I’m officially an old git?’
‘Dick, must you?’
‘I promise not to offend, though the temptation is glittering.’
‘It’s just that you get so potty-mouthed with booze.’
‘Then I shall be demure. Prim. Leave everything to the imagination. They send you this kit, with a plasticky envelope in which to send back the – how shall I put it? – necessary evidence. Two specimens taken on each of three separate days. And you have to fill in the date of each sample.’
‘How do you … capture the sample? Do you have to fish it out?’
‘No, on the contrary. It must be uncontaminated by water.’
‘Then …’
‘I have promised to restrict myself to the language of Miss Austen. I’m sure they had paper towels and little cardboard sticks back then, and probably a nursery game called Catch It If You Can.’
‘Dick.’
‘That reminds me, I had to see a proctologist once, and he told me one way to check my condition – whatever it was, I deliberately forget – was to squat down over a mirror on the floor. Somehow, I thought I’d rather risk whatever it was I might be getting.’
‘Doubtless some of you are wondering why I raised the subject.’
‘It’s because you get potty-mouthed with booze.’
‘A sufficient but not a necessary condition. No, you see, I did my first test last Thursday, and I was just about to do the next one the next day until I realised. Friday the 13th. Not an auspicious day. So I did it on the Saturday instead.’
‘But that was –’
‘Exactly. St Valentine’s Day. Love me, love my colon.’
‘How often do you think that happens, Friday the 13th followed by Valentine’s Day?’
‘Pass.’
‘Pass.’
‘When I was a boy – a lad – a young man – I don’t think I sent a single valentine or got one. It just wasn’t what … people I knew did. The only ones I’ve had have come since I’ve been married.’
‘Joanna, aren’t you worried by that?’
‘No. He means, I send them.’
‘Ah, sweet. Indeed, schweeeet.’
‘You know, I’ve heard of your famous English emotional reticence, but that really does set the bar high. Not sending valentines till after you’re married.’
‘I read that there was a possible link between Seville oranges and bowel cancer.’
‘Did you really?’
‘No, but it’s the sort of thing you say when it gets late.’
‘You’re funnier when you don’t strain so much.’
‘I remember one of the first times I went into a lavatory stall and read the graffiti, there was one that said, “Do not bite the knob while straining.” It took me about five years to work it out.’
‘Is that knob as in knob?’
‘No, it’s knob as in doorknob.’
‘Changing the subject entirely, I was in a stall once and taking my leisure when I noticed something written down at the bottom of the side wall at a sort of slant. So I bent over until I could read it, and it said, “You are now crapping at an angle of 45 degrees.”’
‘I would just like to say that the reason I mentioned marmalade …’
‘Apart from its link to bowel cancer.’
‘Is because it’s such a British phenomenon. Larry was saying how we’re now all the same. So instead of saying the Royal Family or whatever, I said marmalade.’
‘We have it in the States.’
‘You have it, in little pots in hotels at breakfast. But you don’t make it in your homes, you don’t understand it.’
‘The French have it. Confiture d’orange.’
‘Same thing applies. That’s just jam. Orange jam.’
‘No, it’s French to begin with, it comes from “Marie malade”. That Queen of Scotland who had French connections.’
‘FCUK. They were here already?’
‘And Mary, Queen of Scots, or Bloody Mary, or whoever it was, was ill. And they made it for her. So Marie malade – marmalade. See?’
‘I think we were there already.’
‘Anyway, I’ll tell you why we Brits will always remain British.’
‘Don’t you hate the way everyone says “the UK” or just “UK” nowadays? Not to mention “UK plc” and all that.’
‘I think Tony Blair started it.’
‘I thought you blamed everything on
Mrs Thatcher.’
‘No, I’ve switched. It’s all Blair’s fault now.’
‘“UK plc”’s just honest. We’re a trading nation, always were. Thatch just reconnected us to the real England that is for ever England – money-worshipping, self-interested, xenophobic, culture-hating. It’s our default setting.’
‘As I was saying, do you know what we also celebrate on February the 14th, apart from St Valentine’s Day?’
‘National Bowel-Screening Day?’
‘Shut up, Dick.’
‘No. It’s also National Impotence Day.’
‘I lurv your Breedish sense of yumor.’
‘I lurv your Croatian accent.’
‘But it’s true. And if anyone asks me about national characteristics, or irony, for that matter, that’s what I tell them: February the 14th.’
‘Blood oranges.’
‘Let me guess. Named after Bloody Mary.’
‘Did you notice a few years ago they started calling blood oranges “ruby oranges” in supermarkets? Just in case anyone thought they might really contain blood.’
‘As opposed to containing rubies.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Anyway, they’re just about coming into the shops, so they’re overlapping with Sevilles, and I was wondering if that happens as often, say, as Friday the 13th precedes Valentine’s Day.’
‘Joanna, that’s another reason I love you. You’re able to impose narrative coherence on the likes of us at this time of night. What could be more flattering than a hostess who can make her guests imagine they’re sticking to the point?’
‘Put that on next year’s Valentine, Phil.’
‘And does everyone agree tonight’s blood or ruby orange salad was fit to set before a queen?’
‘And the neck-of-lamb stew fit to be set before a king.’
‘Charles the First’s final request.’
‘He wore two shirts.’
‘Charles the First?’
‘On the day he was beheaded. It was extremely cold, and he didn’t want to start shivering and have Ye People believe he was frightened.’
‘That’s pretty British.’
‘All those people who dress up in period costume and fight Civil War battles all over again. That’s very British too, I always think.’