Читать книгу Madame Depardieu and the Beautiful Strangers - Antonia Quirke - Страница 22

Glyn Maxwell has written some fine poetry and some bewilderingly wonky plays, but when Jim found out that there would be free drinks after a production of a new Maxwell play at the Battersea Arts Centre he decided to tag along. As we were leaving the paper an ad-boy laughed at the idea of Battersea.

‘Your drinking's changed, mate,’ he said to Jim.

‘It's not my drinking that's changed. It's your non-drinking. You might have stopped; I'm just carrying on as normal.’

At the interval Jim said he was going to leave and I tailed after him to the box office where he was demanding his money back and the girl was refusing to give the refund. He loomed over her like one of the inquisitors in Dreyer's film of Joan of Arc.

‘I can only refund you if you found it offensive in some way,’ she said.

‘I found it offensive in every way. It was shit.’

‘I can't refund you for that. Did you think it was sexist?’

‘No, it was just fucking terrible, and I'm going now and I would like my money back.’

‘Did you think it demeaned any minority group?’ the girl said. She was trying to open a pathway to a compromise. ‘Did it offend you racially?’

‘It offended the entire fucking human race. Is that good enough?’

Jim's aggressiveness felt to me like something from an earlier time, when people were rougher and less touchy, when less offence was taken and given, when people were less proud of the masks that they wore. It seemed that Jim's aggressiveness almost relieved him of the burden of goodness – it was his good manners, doing you the courtesy of withholding nothing. Or perhaps I was making excuses for him. As he sailed down Lavender Hill in his yellow coat, leaving his disdained wake behind him, I hurried after, raising my voice to ask if this behaviour usually got him anywhere with women.

‘Yeah, lots – some fantastic ones, actually. Sometimes they let me fuck them. But usually they just want to tell me about their suicide attempts.’

What a horrible man! He crouched down to do up a shoelace and, since he was briefly my height, with his tongue half out of his mouth in a bite of concentration, I stepped forward and put my mouth around it.