‘Fine. Really couldn’t care less anyway,’ I said. Milo knew I meant it, and panicked.
‘Oh, alright then, no need for the Gestapo treatment, I’ll tell you. You know how XXX [Milo mentioned here a terribly familiar chain, that I really cannot tell you the name of, however flabby my lips] are going down the pan? Well, I’ve been asked to help. I’m here to let it be known, subtly, that I’m working for them.’
‘But I thought Swank did their PR?’
‘Yes, they do.’
‘So what are you doing?’
‘Well, you see, I’m here to give the impression that I’m doing it.’
‘But you’re not doing it?
‘No.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘Look. It’s quite simple. What kind of image have XXX got?’
‘Worthy, dull, cheap.’
‘Exactly. And what kind of image have Smack! PR got?’
‘Pretty cool, I suppose. Exclusive. Young. A bit druggy, a bit clubby.’
‘On the head, darling, thank you. So, you see, as soon as word gets around that XXX have signed up Smack!, the whole world, by which I mean the whole world that matters, our world, is going to think that they’re revamping their image, dragging in new, younger people, all that jazz. And you know what that means for City confidence and share prices.’
‘But you’re not actually doing their PR!’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because the kind of PR I’d do would scare off the grannies once and for all. This way, those in the know think XXX are cool, and the rest just carry on buying their knickers. Inspired really.’
‘Don’t Swank mind? It doesn’t make them look too good, does it?’
‘It was Swank’s idea.’
‘What’s in it for them?’
‘They get a load of industry kudos for thinking up the scheme and hiring me. There’s awards in that kind of work. It’s exactly the kind of thing PR pros love. One day PR shall talk only unto PR.’
So here was Milo, paid by a PR firm to pretend to be doing the PR for a company whose PR was really being done by the firm who paid Milo to pretend to do their PR. Unfortunately for XXX, as I found out later, Milo told everyone who’d listen, that he was only pretending to do their PR. This, of course, was good PR for him, but bad PR for XXX. I think.
By this point we’d queued for ice cream, and I’d shelled out a hundred francs for three tiny Häagen-Dazs – Milo’s meanness in small things was legendary, an understandable, if unattractive relic of his days of penury. We went to eat them in a bleak little garden, enclosed on all sides by glass walls and staring Japanese midget-women.
I was a little unsettled by Penny’s success with Milo, and so I threw him a couple of examples of Penny’s comical linguistic misunderstandings and consequent confusion, mainly concerning the admittedly rather bemusing system of signs in the building. Milo liked to squirrel away the Penny stories I gave him which he could then, in other contexts, attach to whichever designer he felt the need to bitch about.
At the mention of ‘linguistic’, however, and even more so, ‘signs’, Claude hurriedly swallowed the last of his ice cream (omitting, however, to wipe away a chocolatey smear from his upper lip) and started to speak, his eyes fixed on a point somewhere in the air above my head, as if he were addressing a lecture theatre.
‘Ah yes, I can here explain for you your mother [MOTHER!], and her fear of the sign.’
He drew out the word ‘sigheeeeeen’ in a vaguely fetishistic way.
‘It is not just here. The whole world is now a text, a written text: everywhere there are words.’
Although I tried to listen out of politeness, Malheurbe’s voice soon took on the quality of birdsong: not unmelodious, but basically just noise. Occasionally it would float back into focus:
‘We are unconsciously, passively enmeshed in writing, in decoding and decrypting.’
Only to fade out again. Quickly bored, I looked over his shoulder and saw Penny re-emerge from her grappa with Signor Solbiati. From her excessively regal gait it looked as if it may have been some grappi (or whatever the plural is) rather than a grappa. And with that ability that people have for seeing you when you least want to be seen, she spotted our little group, waved and advanced towards us.
‘For pre-literate societies this natural impulse to comprehend the environment takes the form of a deeper engagement with the natural world. So, every physical feature has a meaning, every rock, every tree, every animal spoor, a significance, a narrative, a myth.’
Before Penny could get to the glass corridor she had to negotiate a huge art installation. There was a new one every season, and this time it was a monstrous construction called L’esprit de Tissu, consisting of a wigwam-shaped chrome frame draped with millions of tatty lengths of yarn.
‘With civilisation man loses the ability to read nature.’
Rather than walk around the obstruction (which, to be fair, would have taken a good five minutes) Penny opted, in a very Penny way, to go through it.
‘It was only with the arrival of the Romantics and the invention of the sublime, that nature could again be comprehended, albeit as something “incomprehensible”.’
I suppose the side she was facing may well have looked, to her grappa-fuddled mind, not unlike an easily-navigated bead curtain, and the installation had a certain airiness that invited an internal exploration. With barely a pause Penny thrust her way into the interior.
‘You see, when you call nature “sublime” you have substituted a single, although admittedly complex, signifier for the multiplicity of meanings that primitive man saw in nature.’
I could see Penny’s outline through the gauzy curtains of yarn. She’d become disoriented inside the wigwam and was feeling her way along the various internal planes and angles.
‘And then even the sublime goes away – who other than I now talks of the sublime? – and all we have is the simple good thing the new “nature”, which is completely benign, that thing which people with no style, no elan, walk through on a Sunday afternoon, with his ugly wife with his ugly children and his ugly dog. I’m sorry, but I hate these peoples.’
As her efforts to fight her way out became increasingly frantic I noticed with alarm that the wigwam itself began to wobble. I was not the only one: nervous officials were moving towards the L’esprit de Tissu; among them were a couple of gendarmes visibly excited by the possibility of being able to shoot an art terrorist in the act of desecrating a national monument.
‘But as the natural world has become lost to language, so our social world, and the built environment, has become, as I said, all writing. And so what happens when a person finds himself in a country where he does not speak the language (this has never, of course, happened to me: I speak all the languages)?’
The gendarmes and PV flunkies reached the wigwam but seemed reluctant to break in, despite the now precarious state of the structure which was being vigorously shaken by the one-woman earthquake within: who, after all, could know how heavily armed the terrorist might be? A fair crowd had gathered: sober-suited sales executives and flamboyant fashion junkies united in their lust for blood, and the faint but not forlorn hope that L’esprit de Tissu might implode.
‘For example your mother? I’ll tell you. She is again in the