‘It’s all to do with the compartmentalisation of knowledge. You see that fop’ – one of Leo’s commoner terms of abuse, not intended to suggest dandyism or effeminacy, merely irrelevance – ‘just got the right date for the Battle of Waterloo. He had the choice of 1066, 1745, 1815 and 1939. He’s probably played that thing a thousand times, and he’s tried all the other options, and he knows that the right answer, the answer that lets him carry on, is 1815.’
‘So what?’ Andrew was usually up for this sort of thing, but tonight his mind was occupied with other matters.
‘So what? So what? Don’t you see that 1815, one of the most crucial years in European, no, fuck it, in world history, has become nothing more than the answer to the question, What year was the Battle of Waterloo? All of the complex historical reality, the treaties, the lives, the pain, the power, it’s all gone. All that’s left is the simple question and the simple answer.’
‘So what?’
‘Don’t you get it? It’s the end of any kind of organic understanding of our society. All these facts are shaken loose of their true social setting and given a new context, the context of the quiz. What was the real context of the Battle of Waterloo? Revolution, the Terror, the rise of Napoleon, blahdy blah and then the restoration of the Bourbons, and the general crushing of dissent and reform up to 1848. But now how does that guy, and almost anyone else that ever comes up against the date 1815, see it?’
‘I strongly fear and suspect that I’m about to find out.’
Leo paused for a megalithic second, considered asking Andrew exactly what the fuck was the matter with him, and then compelled by the momentum of his analysis went on:
‘The setting now, the context is: which Spice Girl had the first solo number one? And, which Coronation Street character fathered an illegitimate baby in 1968? And which was the first English team to complete the FA Cup and League Double? You see, it’s all isolated fragments, cut out of their setting. That’s what trivia means. In the old days we had general knowledge, and it might have been the reserve of dullards, but at least it was all about connecting up. Now we have trivia and it’s all about …’
‘The trivial?’
‘Exactly. Look, just what the fuck is the matter with you?’
‘Me? Nothing, I’m just not in the mood to play tutorials. Save it for your students.’
‘Ah, I see. It’s chick-related. Is it still the weird girl in the office?’
‘What weird girl? There isn’t a weird girl.’
‘You know who I mean, the one you had the date with, the one with the eyes?’
Leo accompanied this question with a wiggling two-fingered gesture in front of his face, as if to suggest strange mystical powers in the organs under consideration.
Andrew, of course, knew exactly who Leo was talking about. He knew because he’d been talking about her himself for the best part of eight months.
‘It wasn’t a date, it was a disaster. And I wouldn’t call her weird. She’s just a bit …’
‘Mad?’
‘Mad? Maybe, a bit.’
‘Mad madness-of-King-George mad?’
‘God no, not madness-of-King-George mad.’
‘How boring. So you mean mad in the usual mad-woman mad way, the not getting your jokes kind of way, and suddenly saying out of the blue “why don’t we ever go to Venice” kind of way, and thinking that whenever you make a general point in an argument it’s somehow directed at them kind of way.’
‘No, no and no. She’s not mad like that. In fact the opposite. We used to have quite a laugh together, in the early days. Maybe I don’t mean mad at all. At least not in any of those ways. Maybe I just mean … strange.’
‘Ah, strange-but-interesting-mad. The most dangerous sort. They suck you in, and they can appear enchanting to begin with, and sexy as anything, but in the end the mad bit always breaks through and then they come at you with a mattock or leave dog excrementia in your pyjama pockets.’
‘No, no, Alice isn’t like that. I can’t really see her with a mattock, whatever a mattock is. I shouldn’t have said mad at all, or strange. Scratch mad and strange. It’s more that when she’s there, she somehow isn’t really there. No, I mean the other way round – it’s we that aren’t really there, or we’re sort of semi-transparent and she sees through us to the things that are really there.’
‘So far so Neoplatonic. You’ll be giving us the parable of the cave next.’
‘And she sort of says stuff, stuff that should make you laugh in her face, but you can’t because … she’s got some kind of …’
Leo did his two-fingered eye-wiggling thing again, accompanied this time by a head wobble.
‘I’m not really getting it across, am I? I’ll give you a for-instance. You know how she deals with all the science and nature stuff?’
‘I think you might have mentioned it, like about a million times.’
‘Well, we’ve got a fucking massive, and I mean massive, job on. You’ve heard of John James Audubon?’
‘Yeah, I think so. Some kind of bird-watcher fellow.’
‘Yes, but also a pretty good artist. Anyway, there’s a reclusive aristo down in the Quantocks with a copy of Audubon’s Birds of America, which is, you know, the most expensive book in the world. We’re talking five million quid here. Apparently he wants to sell, and if we can get it, then it might just be enough to stop the Americans from sacking us all. So we’re heavily into the research. As I said, it’s Alice’s area, but I’m in as well, because she’s still pretty junior, and she sort of comes under me.’ (Here Leo contemplated one of his famous leers, complete with the sound of moist membranous flesh plapping and slithering, but decided that this was not the time.) ‘We’re looking at some repros of the plates, which are about the size of a duvet. A few of the others have gathered round, because they know how hot the whole thing is. We’re looking at something called the Carolina parrot, but Alice says it’s actually a lorikeet. And, you know, although it’s not my period, or subject matter I could see it wasn’t bad – plenty of energy and panache in the execution, and certainly a notch up from the Lewis Birds of Great Britain and Ireland …’
‘Mmmnyaah,’ said Leo, drawing deeply on a phantom briar pipe.
‘Okay, I’ll get on with it. But then Alice says, and believe me it was one of those times when you didn’t know if it was going to end in us all laughing till our tonsils fell out or in a group hug and years of counselling, she says, “You know why they are so alive, don’t you, the Audubon plates?” And I thought she was going to talk about the vibrancy of the watercolours, or the grace of the line, or whatever, but she says, “It’s because Audubon painted them in death. He shot the birds and had them stuffed and mounted …”’ (At this point Leo couldn’t stop himself and about two-sevenths of a leer emerged, along with a solitary plap, but Andrew was too fervid to notice.) ‘“… and that is why they are so intense, so perfect, so alive. You see it is only because they were dead that they could be authentically, mesmerically alive.” And nobody knew what to do, and then everyone drifted off, leaving just the two of us. Thank Christ Ophelia turned up to wave her hair around, or God knows what I’d have done.’
‘You know I really think we are talking madness-of-King-George mad