Читать книгу The Favours and Fortunes of Katie Castle - Rebecca Campbell - Страница 10
ОглавлениеThe Eurostar left at nine thirty. That meant up at six thirty, tea in bed till seven, bath till seven thirty, dress and tarting till eight fifteen, quarter of an hour to collect myself, leave at eight thirty, tube down to Waterloo, get there by five past nine, just late enough to send Penny into fits, but leaving, in the real world, plenty of time to check in and board by quarter past nine.
I dressed comfortably for travelling, in a Clements Ribeiro, and my second favourite pair of JP Todds. There was the inevitable quick panic before I left, and I had to run to the station, wrestling with my smart new Burberry. Even worse, I was forced to finish my make-up on the tube, which always makes me feel like a slut.
I met Penny by the Eurostar check-in. As usual she was sowing chaos around her, pushing where she should be pulling, gesticulating at strangers, and snapping at Hugh, who’d come along to see her off - with, I don’t doubt, a heavy sigh of relief.
As ever, her look hovered somewhere between magnificence and absurdity, generally keeping just on the right side of the border. This time she was doing her film star travelling incognito number, in dark glasses and a mad Pucci scarf, which helped to draw the eye away from the truly magnificent full-length sable coat. She had somehow inherited or otherwise acquired the coat from Hugh’s side of the family, and such was its luxuriance that nobody ever suspected that it was real. The overall effect was very Sophia Loren.
Hugh kissed me hello, and then quickly again for goodbye. Penny managed a condescending peck on the cheek, acknowledging that our Paris trips were not quite work, and not quite play.
The drama reached something of a peak on the way up to the platform. There was the usual choice between squishy lift, and jostly escalator. As the lift queue seemed to be full of Belgians, Penny decided to go for the escalator, a device she habitually shunned. Big mistake. She clung to the rail as though the escalator were a tiny ship caught in a tempest.
‘My feet, Katie,’ she cried, ‘my feet! What do I do with them? Where do they go?’
‘Just close your eyes and pretend it’s a normal stair,’ I said, colouring at the attention we were attracting. ‘O God, let me … hang on … just put that … and that one there.’
People were looking round. The Belgians in the lift queue pulled Magritte faces, and pointed with umbrellas.
And then it stopped.
Stuttered.
And then stopped.
‘We’ll asphyxiate!’ yelled Penny, illogically. ‘Come on, we must go back.’
By this stage we were halfway up, and there must have been fifty people crammed in behind.
‘Penny, we can’t!’ I tried feebly.
But Penny had switched from helpless panic mode, to all-action hero. She swept around, through, or over the hapless travellers, who were all waiting patiently for the wretched machine to get going again. She was like one of those ships that smash through the arctic pack ice on the way to pointless expeditions. First Woman to reach the North Pole without Sanitary Protection sort of thing. I followed shamefaced but, as so often with the indefatigable Penny, not a little admiring.
The lift doors opened just as we reached the foot of the escalator. Penny hesitated not one second, but barged straight in, past the bemused Belgians, waving an arm, and saying, in a tone that forbade any argument, ‘Excuse me, this is an emergency. We are designers. I am Penny Moss.’
A Eurostar lackey bowed. Honestly, he did. He may, of course, have been drunk.
Things settled down a little once we found our seats, and within twenty minutes Penny was relaxing into her second glass of champagne, as Kent or Sussex, or whatever it is, slid by in a happy green and brown blur.
I was facing the wrong way, of course. Penny always liked to see where she was going. But I didn’t really mind. I’ve always thought - and pay attention here, because this is about the only profound thought I’ve ever had - I’ve always thought that life is like facing the wrong way on the train. Because, you see, the present, the bit of countryside that’s exactly equal to where you are, is over before you know it’s there, and then all you have is the dwindling afterwards of it. And though you can guess what sorts of things are going to come rushing over your shoulder, because you can see roughly what sort of terrain you’re in, there’s always the chance of something really unexpected or scary, like a tunnel, or a field with horses, or Leeds.
Oh. I always thought it would look better when I wrote it down. Perhaps I just can’t do profound.
‘Interesting young man, that Milo,’ said Penny, between sips. In the rush I’d forgotten about her dramatic appearance at the party. ‘He said that he would also be in Paris, which was an amusing coincidence. He seemed so sensitive, so … attentive.’
‘That’s the way of the PR, Penny. He probably had you down as a potential client.’
‘Oh no, I really don’t think his interest was professional. I really am rather afraid I may have made another of my tragic conquests.’
I choked on a complimentary peanut.
‘But, Penny, you must realise that Milo …’ And then I stopped. This was really too delicious. Milo was going to love it. ‘You must know that Milo is terribly, um, confused … shy … vulnerable.’
‘Yes, I sensed it. And you feel I would be simply too much woman for him in his present state? Of course, of course. Not that I would ever stray; it’s been so long now. But there’s no law against dreaming,’ she said wistfully, her fingers pulling at the hem of her skirt. ‘And I do so feel for the poor boy, torn between the fatal intensity of possession and the emptiness of loss.’
Already the journey was living up to expectations.
Champagne for Penny was a time machine and eventually Milo was left behind and we found ourselves back in the sixties. Exactly which bit of the sixties was hard to work out, and Penny never specified, as that would have given away too much. I suspect it was a largely imaginary place, a sixties of the mind, a distillation of different times, combining late fifties debutante innocence with the lollipopcoloured, country-house drug scene of ’69.
First, of course, there were the RADA years. She seemed to have been worshipped by Albert Finney, adored by Richard Harris, and fondled by Peter O’Toole (or as I’m sure I heard it, tooled by Peter O’Fondle). In between her white-gloved carousing she flitted from voice production, to mime, to fencing (‘my sabre cuts once reduced Roy Kinnear to tears, poor lamb’), to ballet, to make-up, and back to voice. Her long-dead tutors Ernest Milton, Hugh Millar, Edward Burrage, joined us in the carriage, still graceful, fruity and fey.
She talked of nights in the Gay Hussar or the White Elephant, followed by dancing to Dudley Moore in The Basement. Satire at the Establishment always seemed to go with bizarre passes by comedians: Lenny Bruce offered to share his syringe, Frankie Howerd performed some act of dark obscenity (‘well darling, I was in drag …’).
Most of all, there were the clothes.
‘Darling, I was divine in my white piquet Mary Quant, top-stitched in black, and over it a black piquet coat with a stand away collar … and Ossie Clarke gave me a bias cream crépe with a keyhole neck … and I wore my ribbed yellow wool A-line Courrèges, with the sweetest little pair of silver-buckled Guccis.’
I sat back in my seat, drifting in and out of Penny’s monologue. Every now and then I’d snap into focus to hear her say something like, ‘… and then I looked down and Princess Margaret’s hand was on my knee …’ or ‘… I’d never seen anything like it before or since; I swear it was purple …’.
Who knows how much of it was true? Penny had a way of believing in her own creations, and that gave them a reality, a truth beyond any humdrum business of fact. But there’s something more to it with Penny. It’s as if things only ever exist when they’ve been externalised: talked about, or paraded before you. Nothing happens on the inside with Penny. What she thinks, she says, or rather she only thinks them once she’s said them. And, for all her extravagant displays of affection and loathing, I’m sure she’d have no feelings at all if there weren’t people around to observe them. I suppose that this is just another way of saying that she’s a drama queen. But drama queen is too ordinary and plebeian a concept for Penny. Perhaps drama empress comes closer. And how she loves a drama! I promise, more than once, I’ve seen her place the back of her hand across her forehead and literally swoon, generally speaking onto the first-floor ottoman, which might have been designed for such things.
I dozed and, without even noticing the tunnel bit, I found we were in France. You can always tell by the sudden profusion of small, erratically driven vans on the roads. And then the Gare du Nord. I was sent off to find a trolley, while Penny, swaying gently on the platform, defended our cases from the predatory French porters.
There are two quite distinct sides to our trips. The bad bit is the marathon trudge around the fabric stands that fill the three huge hangars, big enough for airships, of the Premiére Vision exhibition. That consumes days two and three. It’s no fun, but it’s worth it, because it buys me, us, the good bit.
The good bit is Paris itself. I don’t care how much cooler Milan and New York are; I don’t care if the food is better in London, or the weather nicer in Rome. For me Paris has always been my Emerald City, my Wonderland, my place of dreams. As a girl I used to think that if I could just get high enough in the park swings I’d be able to see the tip of the Eiffel Tower peeping over the monochrome, rain-dulled roofs of East Grinstead. I’d get Veronica to push. ‘Higher! Higher!’ I’d shout. But she was never up to the job, and I resented her for it.
And Penny is different, in Paris. Of course, she’s still a tyrant, and a bully; she still imagines that the world exists to pay her homage, or at least to make her life easy, and she still reacts with outrage when her importance is not acknowledged. But in Paris Penny manages to exude a light that warms, rather than dazzles. Somehow the hand thrust into the face of the waiter at L’Assiette charms his habitually pursed lips into obeisance. Somehow her attempts at the language, an extraordinary mixture of underworld argot, finishing-school refinement, and simple error (I once translated her instructions to a taxi driver back to her, with just the merest touch of editorial licence as, ‘Hey, fuck ears, we would be enchanted if you could direct for us your carriage to the front portal of our castle. You have the scrotum of a bat.’), is greeted with indulgent good humour by the snootiest of Parisians.
We always stayed at the Hotel de l’Université, on the Rue de l’Université in St Germain. This may surprise you, but we shared a room: it was another part of the strange intimacy of our Paris times. The payoff, the compensation to me of Penny’s gentle snoring, and to her, for my whatever it is that irritates her, is that we had the grandest room: a Neo-Classical cube of perfection. The Université could not have existed anywhere else in the world. It combined, in Penny’s words, ‘the stately grace of Racine with the panache and verve of Molière.’ The service was attentive, but restrained, and even the youngest of the doormen knew that Penny, and not I, was the one to flirt with.
Most of all, the Université was perfect for the shops. And when in Paris, boy did Penny shop. You see, she never bought other people’s clothes in London: it seemed to her too much like sleeping with the enemy. But in Paris, despite the fact that she chose the same designers that she shunned at home, it was somehow, okay. And for once there was some logic to her logic.
And so, after leaving our cases in our room, we skipped, on that first afternoon, as on every first Parisian afternoon, from Prada, to Paule Ka, to Kashiyama (not that it’s called Kashiyama any more, but Penny could never remember its silly new name, and would look helplessly at me if I used it), to Sabbia Rosa, and then back to Prada again. Leather was on the menu, and we both found something suitable; she in a rich chocolatey brown, me in camel.
Because I’m in fashion you probably think that buying clothes is something of a busman’s holiday for me. Working for fifty hours a week neck deep in the kind of clothes that ninety-nine per cent of the population can only dream about must, you surmise, dull the appetite? Wrong, so wrong. I still feel the near-erotic pleasure, the juddering, ecstatic, transforming joy of clothes. I love the foreplay: the touching, smelling, breathing of beautiful fabrics, before the sweet consummation of trying on, and the sublime climax of the purchase. I shiver still for satin-backed crêpe: cool, like a diamond, to the tongue. How thrilling it was to find out that silk velvet smells exactly as it should, of earth and leaf-mould.
It is still now as intense as the first time, that wonderful afternoon when Dad, for the only occasion in his sad life getting things exactly right, brought me home a perfect princess dress of polyester pink taffeta, studded with rosebuds, with a satin sash and a net underskirt. It was my sixth birthday. At the party Veronica spilled jelly on the dress and I pulled her hair until she cried. She was lucky I didn’t drown her in the jelly bowl.
The first evening we had dinner in a little bistro that Penny claimed to have been coming to since her honeymoon, when she and Hugh had spent a month living in a brothel. Or that was Penny’s story, and a very amusing one it was, full of comic misunderstandings of a classic French farcical kind. Hugh told me it was actually a perfectly respectable hotel, that just happened to have a lot of velvet about the place. But Penny never let truth get in the way of a good story, or, for that matter, a bad one.
The bistro was like a thousand others in Paris, although it claimed distinction by virtue of an assumed connection with an ancient guild of carpenters, or wheelwrights, or hairdressers. (Penny could never get the story straight, and it had a habit of changing depending on which of the waiters you asked, should you have the curiosity to enquire.) In honour of this association there hung from the ceiling an intricately carved something, a kind of gothic parrot cage. Again depending on the whim of the waiter, this could be a model of the vaulting of Notre Dame, a Medieval clock, or ‘une machine pour fabriquer les cigarettes’.
As usual Penny asked me what I’d like, and then ordered something else for me altogether. And as usual it was an unmentionable part of a pig, with a gizzard garnish. Before our food arrived, but well into the second glass of wine, Penny broke off from a rambling monologue on what we should look out for at Premiére Vision the next day, and gave me a long and searching look, her eyes seeming both to widen, and yet sharpen their focus. That look was one of her specialities, and perhaps her single greatest business asset. No man, and few women, could sustain eye contact with her in Basilisk mode for long. It was her complete self-confidence of course, the total absence of those goading, middle-of-the-night doubts that riddle most of us, that gave her gaze its power.
‘Katie, darling, do tell me what’s wrong.’ That was a bit of a shock. It seemed that Penny had had another of those rare, invariably cynical flashes of insight.
‘Nothing. Why?’
‘Katie my dear, I know you. I know how you are. I know your ways.’ None of those things, I must add, was true, or even nearly true. Penny knew Penny; Penny knew the fashion business; Penny may well have known how to dance the Highland Fling, but Penny did not know me. The trouble was that something was wrong. I simply couldn’t stop thinking about Liam. His face was projected onto elaborate eighteenth-century façades; his voice whispered through elegant corridors, his smile glimmered at me from the silver highlights on the grey-brown waters of the river.
‘I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.’
Penny blinked away my objection.
‘Darling, I’m here to help. I know what it is. It’s Ludo isn’t it?’
Ludo? What did she mean? There was no way she could know about anything. Unless Liam had … no, that was impossible. She was speculating, trying to lure me out. Play, I thought, the innocent which, after all, I was.
‘Ludo’s a sweetie. What could be the matter there?’
‘Katie, you’re being brave. But I know you must be in anguish on the inside.’
I wouldn’t have called it anguish. What the hell was she getting at?
‘You must be a bit tipsy,’ I said, without any malice.
‘Darling,’ she said, ignoring me, ‘you must understand that men are different from us. They have stronger … passions. You cannot blame them as individuals; it’s the species that’s to blame. I saw it on the television: their genes make them do all kinds of horrid things. We must learn to tolerate, to turn and face away. Victorian hypocrisy has something to be said for it.’
I was now completely baffled.
‘What do you mean, stronger passions? What horrid things?’ I asked. But as I spoke I began to realise what the old witch was up to. She was suggesting that Ludo was having an affair, or at least indulging in what Hugh would call, ‘a touch of oats, wild, the sowing of’. And that rubbish about not blaming. If poor old Hugh ever did anything more than flirt, she’d be at him with the pinking shears quicker than you could say ‘emasculation’. And why would she intimate that her beloved son was acting the young buck to his prospective spouse? There could be only one answer: she had not yet renounced her goal of driving us apart, of saving the family silver from the counter-jumper. I had no idea if this latest stratagem was devised in advance, or improvised on the spot. Either way, I had no intention of allowing it to succeed.
‘But Ludo hasn’t got any passions, except for the sea eagles, and socialism, and curriculum reform, and things. They are a bit boring, but I don’t really mind them.’
‘Of course there are those … enthusiasms Ludo permits you to know about, and then there are those which are secret.’
‘Penny, enough. Ludo is the most transparent, least secretive, person I’ve ever met. I’m sure you as a mother like to think of him as a roguish blade, irresistible to women, but that’s just not the way he is. I love him, but that’s because of what he …’
‘Has?’
‘No, Penny, because of what he is on the inside.’
I felt a bit stupid because of that ‘on the inside’ stuff, but I knew I had won the moral high ground: not, generally, a terrain I’m particularly familiar with, but a rather satisfying place to find oneself. In any case, Penny was silenced, although that might have had more to do with the arrival of her sole, and my snout, than my redoubtable defence of her son’s honour, and our love.
I wish I could make Premiére Vision itself sound more interesting or glamorous. Of course it’s very heaven if you’re a fabric junkie. Every important, and most unimportant, European manufacturer is there. How many? I don’t know; a thousand, maybe? Two thousand? And that’s an awful lot of luscious silk-velvet, fine wool crépe, and oh-so-wearable viscose. And so it draws the world’s designers. They come here eager for inspiration, desperate to find that look, the same and yet different from the others, strange and yet familiar, unusual enough to be a must-have, practical enough to become a must-wear.
And they come also to eye each other furtively, to chart slyly the course woven by competitors, to kiss and to smile, and to joke insincerely; to cut, occasionally, an old foe, or a new friend; to drink champagne on the terrace bar; to sneer, to snoop, to gossip, and to weep.
As soon as you negotiate your way through the surely exaggeratedly Gallic security (Penny never seems to mind the intimate body searches, offering herself up like those fish you hear about who go to special parts of the sea to be nibbled clean by other, smaller fishes) you find yourself in the first of the three colossal, hangar-like halls. Colossal and yet, because of the oppressively low roof, with its sinister girders and gantries, strangely claustrophobic.
Gliding from stand to stand, her fine head high, her step majestic, Penny was in her element. Penny Moss may only be a little company, but, with Penny in the ring, it punched above its weight. Junior assistants would be imperiously thrust aside, and factory managers summoned from dark corners, from which they would emerge brushing away crumbs and smiling meekly.
My job was to see to it that Penny made no major mistakes, ensuring that her (now irregular) flashes of brilliance were not undermined by (the increasingly common) gaffes. Who, after all could forget the Year of Lemon and Purple? The tactic, as you can probably guess, was to make Penny think that everything was her idea anyway. Flicking through the samples, she’d find something that caught her eye, and she’d make a noise, indicating pleasure or revulsion. I would join in with subtle harmonies, or really quite delicate dissonance. Either way, the right decision would emerge. There may, at some deep level, have been a knowledge that I was contributing to, perhaps even determining, our choices. But at the level of consciousness, or at least insofar as that consciousness found itself transformed into words, the job was all Penny, and my role merely that of factotum, sandwich girl, and drudge.
I was on my best behaviour, and in my worst mood. Penny’s clumsy attempt to prize Ludo from my arms had, if you’ll pardon a moment of melodrama, frozen my heart. And in Paris, of all places, where we were supposed to be friends, sisters, almost, with our shared room, and our suppers together, and the world to be won. I know that revenge is a dish best served cold, but that shouldn’t necessarily limit your range: I planned whole buffets.
But then I’d done that before, and my plans always ended up like Miss Havisham’s wedding cake. I always mean to be vindictive, but when it comes down to it I tend to forget what I was supposed to be angry about, or I just lose interest, and so I settle for a good long bitching session with Veronica. And anyway, Penny was a special case. I’d worked too hard to get where I was to risk losing it. Penny being a cow was always part of the deal.
So, over the course of the day, I let slip my plans for punishment beatings, sabotage, slander, and fraud. But, by some weird alchemical process, as these silly thoughts fell away, they left behind a strange residue. That residue solidified into the form of an Irish driver of vans. It certainly wasn’t that I decided to use Liam as revenge against Penny. Penny couldn’t possibly be hurt by that. The opposite, in fact. It would be to offer her my head on a plate. It was more a moral thing. Being treated badly by Penny made it okay to do something harmlessly wicked myself.
Towards the end of the day, as Penny was having a grappa with Signor Solbiati, a sad figure in crumpled linen, happy to escape into nostalgia with an old acquaintance, I noticed a familiar, elegant frame sliding towards me followed by a less familiar, less elegant shadow.
‘So, Milo,’ I said, ‘what did you make of Penny in the all-too-solid-flesh?’ I was expecting viaducts of archness, but I was to be disappointed.
‘She was something of a hit. Added much to the gaiety of what was becoming a rather tiresome party. After all your griping I had no idea she was going to be such a scream.’
‘So,’ I laughed, ‘she was right then.’
‘Right about what?’
‘You do fancy her.’
His reply was more thoughtful than bitchy, ‘Well perhaps if she were forty years younger and a boy. Let’s go for an ice cream. This, by the way, is Claude, Claude Malheurbe.’
I looked blankly at the middle-aged man by his side. He was profoundly unattractive, with one of those faces that looks like it’s been put on upside down. He was wearing a black silk shirt, unbuttoned to show his pale chest, tight black trousers, and a pair of disastrous black pixie boots. His hair was long, and smelled strongly of mousse.
‘Claude Malheurbe,’ repeated Milo, with emphasis.
‘Bonjour Claude,’ I said, none the wiser.
‘Deconstruction Malheurbe,’ hissed Milo.
Of course. What was it – five years ago? that fashion got hold of some wacky French ideas, and decided to make explicit the hitherto hidden fact that clothes are made, rather than whatever the alternative was supposed to be. It did this by showing seams and generally having things inside out or upside down. Malheurbe was behind it all with his book, The Hermeneutics of Cloth, the fashion world’s favourite unread book. The previously unknown philosophe was courted by couturiers, and was whisked from his provincial lycée to burn briefly as a media star. In those days he was much more beret and Gauloise, which was why I didn’t twig immediately.
His second book, Visceral Couture, which advocated wearing clothes on the inside of the body, as a way of exposing the last fallacy of ‘biologism’, that the internal organs escape the endless play of signification had, mysteriously, proved less popular than the first, and he disappeared from the fashion firmament.
There, you see. My three years in fashion college were not wasted.
‘What are you doing here, Milo?’
‘All rather secret. Really can’t tell you. It’s not as if you’re known for your discretion. I assume that’s why they call you flabby lips.’
Malheurbe sneered, or leered, or sleered, showing one brown tooth.
‘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 position of the civilised person who cannot read nature and so feels again the giddy fear, the vertigo, terror, loss, panic. I think you will find this explains your mother.
Now we go for sex please, yes?’
With the mention of sex I tore my attention away from the engrossing spectacle beyond. I looked around. Milo had disappeared, the serpent. He’d probably been looking for the chance to dump the philosopher on somebody all day.
‘Sex?’ I said a little more loudly than I intended, resulting in a couple of turned heads. I had been caught off guard, but Parisian propositions were hardly novel, and I had a coping strategy to hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m a little busy right now. Why don’t I meet you tonight?’
I named a café in Montmartre, a place to which I’d never been, nor had any intention of ever going. It’s my standard way of dealing with that sort of pass. It always works. And when you don’t turn up, they either think something poetic and tragic might have happened to you and hold you in a special place in their hearts all their lives, or they curse you for ten minutes and then forget all about it.
Penny burst forth from the wigwam. Her hair, which had been tightly and precisely coiled into a chignon had broken free, and hung raggedly across her face, with a stray clump pointing to ten o’clock. Somehow her neat knee-length skirt had revolved a hundred and eighty degrees, and the split pointed accusingly at her navel. The audience broke into spontaneous applause, and hissed the gendarmes as they laid rough hands upon her.
‘Write down, please,’ demanded Malheurbe. I scribbled something on the piece of paper he shoved at me, and he scuttled off, clearly thinking that what was said about English girls was all true. The spell was broken, and I ran towards Penny. By the time I reached the crowd I saw that I had been beaten to it. Milo, in perfect, mellifluous French, was gently soothing the gendarmes and flirting with the PV officials. Penny looked upon her saviour with eyes of Magdalenic devotion, and would, I’m sure, have washed his feet, dried them with her hair, and anointed them with fragrant oils, had the necessary equipment and sufficient privacy been available.
And that’s about it really, incident wise. No charges were made against Penny and she fortunately missed the satirical endpiece on the French early evening news. The next day was like the one before, except with more cloth, less philosophy, and a dramatic reduction in Penny-centred art installation-oriented mishaps. On Saturday morning we flicked off the safety catch and gave Paris another burst of semi-automatic shopping, and then it was Eurostar and home. And yes, I thought lots more about Liam. And yes, the idea of sleeping with him, just once, or maybe twice, if it was nice, had grown in my mind, nurtured by boredom, and Penny’s haphazard malice. But no, at that stage, constancy, faithfulness, devotion, and love had the better, just, of abandonment, concupiscence (my favourite word since ‘A’ levels, O dishy Mr Carapace, dreamy stand-in teacher of English, and inciter of teenage lust!) and revenge.
