The two of us paused again in front of the Hippodrome.
‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘where shall we have our coffee then? Do you want to go to my club?’
‘God, no! Come on, let’s go somewhere a little youthful.’
‘You lead – I’ll follow.’
We passed the Crystal Rooms, where tense loss adjusters rocked on the saddles of stranded motor cycles, which they powered on through pixilated curve after pixilated curve.
At the mouth of Gerrard Street, we passed under the triumphal arch with its coiled and burnished dragons. Around us the Chinese skipped and altercated, as scrutable as ever. Set beside their scooterish bodies, adolescent and wind-cheating, Gerard appeared more than ever to be some Scobie or Brown, lost for ever in the grimy Greeneland of inner London.
Outside the Bar Italia a circle of pari-cropped heads was deliberating over glasses of caffe latte held at hammy angles.
‘Oh,’ said Gerard, ‘the Bar Italia. I haven’t been here in ages, what fun.’ He pushed in front of me into the tiled burrow of the café. Behind the grunting Gaggia a dumpy woman with a hennaed brow puffed and pulled. ‘Due espressi!’ Gerard trilled in cod-Italian tones. ‘Doppio!’
‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian,’ I said as we scraped back two stools from underneath the giant video screen swathing the back of the café.
‘Oh well, you know . . .’ He trailed off and gazed up as the flat tummy filling the hissing screen rotated in a figure-eight of oozing congress. A special-effect lipoma swelled in its navel and then inflated into the face of a warbling androgyne.
A swarthy young woman with a prominent mole on her upper lip came over and banged two espressos down on the ledge we were sitting against.
‘I say,’ Gerard exclaimed; coffee now spotted his shirt front like a dalmatian’s belly. ‘Can’t you take a little more care?’ The waitress looked at him hard, jaw and brow shaking with anger, as if some prisoners of consciousness were attempting to jack-hammer their escape from her skull. She hiccupped, then ran the length of the café and out into the street, sobbing loudly.
‘What did I say?’ Gerard appealed to the café at large. The group of flat-capped Italian men by the cake display had left off haggling over their pools coupons to stare. The hennaed woman squeezed out from behind the Gaggia and clumped down to where we sat. She started to paw at Gerard’s chest with a filthy wadge of J-cloths.
‘I so sorry, sir, so sorry . . .’
‘Whoa! Hold on – you’re making it worse!’
‘Iss not her fault, you know, she’s a good girl, ve-ery good girl. She have a big sadness this days – ‘
‘Man trouble, I’ll be bound.’ Gerard smirked. It looked like he was enjoying his grubby embrocation.
‘No, iss not that . . . iss, ‘ow you say, a re-jection?’
I sat up straighter. ‘A rejection? What sort of rejection?’
The woman left off rubbing Gerard and turned to me. ‘She give this thing, this book to some peoples, they no like – ‘
‘Ha, ha! You don’t say. My dear Gerard’ – I punched him on the upper arm – ‘it looks like we have another scrivenous servitor on our hands.’
‘This is absurd.’ He wasn’t amused.
‘My friend here is a publisher, he might be able to help your girl, why don’t you ask her to join us?’
‘Oh really, Geraldine, can’t you let this lie? We don’t know anything about this girl’s book. Madam – ‘
But she was already gone, stomping back down the mirrored alley and out the door into the street, where I saw her place an arm round the heaving shoulders of our former waitress.
Gerard and I sat in silence. I scrutinised him again. In this surrounding he appeared fogeyish. He seemed aware of it too, his eyes flicking nervously form the carnal cubs swimming on the ethereal video screen to their kittenish domesticated cousins, the jail bait who picked their nails and split their ends all along the coffee bar’s counter.
The waitress carne back down towards us. She was a striking young woman. Dark but not Neapolitan, with a low brow, roughly cropped hair and deep-set, rather steely eyes that skated away from mine when I tried to meet them.
‘Yes? The boss said you wanted to talk to me – look, I’m sorry about the spillage, OK?’ She didn’t sound sorry. Her tears had evaporated, leaving behind a tidal mark of saline bitterness.
‘No, no, it’s not that. Here, sit down with us for a minute.’ I proffered my pack of cigarettes; she refused with a coltish head jerk. ‘Apparently you’re a writer of sorts?’
‘Not “of sorts”. I’m a writer, full stop.’
‘Well then,’ Gerard chipped in, ‘what’s the problem with selling your book? Is it a novel?’
‘Ye-es. Someone accepted it provisionally, but they want to make all sorts of stupid cuts. I won’t stand for it, so now they want to break the contract.’
‘Is it your first novel?’ asked Gerard.
‘The first I’ve tried to sell – or should I say “sell-out” – not the first I’ve written.’
‘And what’s the novel about – can you tell us?’
‘Look’ – she was emphatic, eyes at last meeting mine – I’ve been working here for over a year, doing long hours of mindless skivvying so that I have the mental energy left over for my writing. I don’t need some pair of smoothies to come along and show an interest in me.’
‘OK, OK.’ For some reason Gerard had turned emollient, placatory. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t, but we are genuinely interested.’ This seemed to work, she took a deep breath, accepted one of my cigarettes and lit it with a fatale’s flourish.
‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s set in the future. An old hospital administrator is looking back over her life. In her youth she worked for one of a series of hospitals that were set around the ring road of an English provincial town. These had grown up over the years from being small cottage hospitals serving local areas to becoming the huge separate departments – psychiatry, oncology, obstetrics – of one great regional facility.
‘One day a meeting is held of all the Region’s administrators, at which it is realised that the town is almost completely encircled by a giant doughnut of health facilities. At my heroine’s instigation policies are fomented for using this reified cordon sanitaire as a means of filtering out undesirables who want to enter the town and controlling those who already live in it. Periods of enforced hospitalisation are introduced; troublemakers are subjected to “mandatory injury”. Gradually the administrators carry out a slow but silent coup against central as well as local government.
‘In her description of all these events and the part she played in them, my heroine surveys the whole panorama of such a herstory. From the shifting meaning of hygiene as an ideology – not just a taboo – to the changing gender roles in this bizarre oligopoly – ‘
‘That’s brilliant!’ I couldn’t help breaking in. ‘That’s one of the most succinct and clearly realised satirical ideas I’ve heard in a long time – ‘
‘This is not a satire!’ she screamed at me. ‘That’s what these stupid publishers think. I have written this book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century English novel. I aim to unite dramatically the formation of individual character to the process of social change. Just because I’ve cast the plot in the form of an allegory and set it in the future, it has to be regarded as a satire!’