Downriver (16 page)

But lunches also have their hierarchies. You start on your own doorstep. A sciolist, call him Sonny Jaques, with a gold stud earring, and a doctorate in Romance Languages (from, let us guess, Southampton University), sounds you out about the nearest ‘little Italian place' that takes credit cards.

‘Jaques? I suppose you pronounce that “J'accuse”?' said Fredrik, to get the ball rolling.

‘Jake-Ez, actually,' the director replied, too self-absorbed to be so effortlessly insulted.

The trattoria we located, in a backwater off the Kingsland Road, had just opened in a lather of misplaced optimism. I gave it slightly less chance than the
Titanic
. It would be an off licence within the month. Then a fire-damaged shell. Then a sealed hazard; waiting for the insurance investigators to settle the claim.

Today it was empty: salmon-pink tablecloths, freshly laundered, and sharp enough to cut you off at the knees; wild flowers; silver service; napkins erupting out of fluted wine glasses. The gaffer – in his black, open-to-the-navel blouse – leapt on Sonny, as if he was a practice manikin for a mouth-to-mouthresuscitation class. The man had packed his bags, and most of the silver. He was ready to chuck in the lease when – as his finger closed on the trigger – the BBC arrived. It had to happen. Glorious visions cut in on each other: telephone reservations, cigars, signing sessions, assignations, bankable painters doodling on the menu cards, group photographs on the walls (lavishly inscribed), talent scouts begging to be called by their christian names. He wants to join in, to proffer advice. He wants to sit on Sonny's lap, and ‘kick around' a few casting concepts.

But Sonny is going up in smoke; he is live with morbid energy.
As Fredrik soliloquizes, he angrily abuses the tiny pages of his notebook. The green pen-tip breaks the surface of the paper. He accumulates the evidence that will be held against us. ‘Right!' he enthuses, at regular intervals, banging the table; so that our host has to slide from his bench, with an apologetic smile, to catch the flower holders. Sonny glances from Fredrik to me, then back again. ‘Right? That one's a definite maybe. Excellent. It's all coming together.' But nothing is agreed, nothing is made clear: nobody has the bad manners to mention money. Lowlife anecdotes are really what turn Sonny on – but how do we translate them into the script? ‘8mm Diary footage? We can use that. Send it in for transfer. Work on textural variety. I like it.'

He is wringing our hands: the restaurateur froths with compliments and invitations, as he struggles to reinsert Sonny into a yellow pigskin jacket. Sonny assures us that we give ‘good lunch'; the project is ‘looking great'. We have to go home, stick at it, stay cool, and wait for the call. Unfortunately, by an oversight, Sonny's pack of credit cards fails to produce a valid one. No problem; Fredrik and I empty our pockets and manage to cover the bill. ‘Just put it on the chitty, boys,'Sonny says, ‘and claim a couple of taxis while you're at it.'

Now the caravan rolls on to downside Shepherd's Bush. Our table rates at least two producers. We are not substantial enough to score anyone from ‘Religious Affairs'; but we get one apiece from ‘Architecture' and ‘Literature'. Who knows what slot this thing might fit into? Why spike it for the price of a
Grade IV (Writers and Talking Heads)
binge? There's a whole cluster of modest
Nouvelle Cuisine
joints sticking bravely together in the warren, north of Addison Gardens, entirely targeted at working lunches for the Corporation. Every time the budget is slashed on ‘The Late Show', two of them go out of business. They serve minute, and beautifully arranged, portions – and charge no more than they would for a side of bloody Aberdeen Angus, with all the coronary trimmings. Everybody starves a little, and feels the glow of virtue.

The architectural producer – the one with the serious tweed jacket, who ‘used to know your friend, the poet, Eric Whatsisname' – is a man who understands the value of time. He calls loudly for a second platter of new potatoes before we've finalized our power-plays over the seating arrangements. The potatoes are dwarf hybrids, the size of slightly pregnant peas. You get five each. The serious jacket is working on a calculation of their weight by volume. He has that combative attitude so prevalent among people who spend their lives bluffing genuine enthusiasts into believing they know nothing about their own subject. And will need a sturdy lifeline from a sympathetic producer. He had been co-opted into Architecture from the London School of Economics; and – having made two films in five years – was generally held to be doing an excellent job, in not wasting public money.

The other nob is distinctly ‘Arts'; and proves it, by arriving just in time for the lemon sorbet – and still securing more than his fair share of the Austrian anti-freeze. He's one of the Nigels. The first thing people ask about them is: ‘Is he the one who made a cunt of himself with Genet?' It
always
is. Very nice fella, Nigel. Won't hear a word against him. He should worry; on £40,000 a year, and enough ‘allowed' days to bang out a novel for one of the posh houses. Some of these Nigels turn eventually into Nicks, and transfer – without fuss – to London Weekend. But this one is still, quite definitely, a Nigel. He knows how to keep the wine flowing. And we all sit in a formaldehyde line, trading blank-verse anecdotes – like late T. S. Eliot at the Edinburgh Festival. Nobody has actually said anything about the film.
What film?
We must be auditioning for the Masons. It's a quick handshake, a peppermint, and back to the office.

On the pavement, the moment before we are cast adrift, Sonny tips us the big wink. The project, he assures us, is ‘on'. We can start mapping the camera angles. Secret signals were, apparently, exchanged across the lunch table. You can read a lot into the way your neighbour turns his fork, or flashes his wine
label. We'll have a production number by the end of the month.

The feeding, from this point, falls on us. The second (working) stage belongs to kitchens. You begin to understand why notes were kept. Motorcycle messengers lacerate the city bearing triplicate summaries: within the hour, the scenes we have written are returned to us, translated into an ersatz and shifty language. A simple instruction, such as:
Camera moves from street into synagogue
, is inflated into a page of tortuous explanation. A party of school-kids is invented, so that the camera will not have to be switched on without a justification that would stand up in a court of law.

In the old days, the 1960s, it was taxis: an endless circuit of cabs with solitary cans of film, script revisions, hampers. Now there's more
gravitas
: we talk to agents who talk to agents (and charge us for the privilege); we talk ‘repeats', and we talk ‘kill fees'. We'll have to put a nine-month gestation into this script for an initial payment of – what – £200? See how that floats at the next lunch. We could be scheduled, or we could be looking at some very ‘creative' expenses.

We have come in from the cold. We have not yet taken the blood-oath, and signed the Official Secrets form, but we do have an interesting collection of phone numbers. And the promise of an actual contract.

II

‘Research' was the excuse for a day or two walking the labyrinth: markets and breakfasts. Fredrik wanted to call on Roland Bowman, an actor he had met at a party, who was restoring a house in Fournier Street. Roland had staged, in the tragic basement that once held the Hebrew Dramatic Club (scene of the 1887 false-fire panic, and death-on-the-stairs of seventeen members of the audience), a millennial version of Wilde's first play,
Vera; or The Nihilists
. He brought out the
Rose-Croix
ritual that Wilde had coded into the piece. And his own performance, as Vera, in
this all-male production, gained the unexpressed approval of his neighbours, Gilbert and George.

Roland was no card-carrying Huguenot. He had been drawn here down a track of dreams. He remembered what the house would become. It was all inevitable, and his talent lay in not opposing the current that was already carrying him along. The ruin was now a valuable property in which he camped with his mother, while he breathed life into a shell of bricks and plaster. He was living far beyond his apparently modest means in keeping faith with this vision. Market forces would conspire, in time, to expel him. But that was the nature of the place. The human element was optional.

At the back of the house was a narrow, walled garden. Roland pointed out the hops he had cultivated, as a gesture of solidarity with the earlier benefactors of this soil, and with the prevailing winds that gifted us with all the odours of Truman's Brewery: odours you can taste, Whitechapel's
madeleine
. Fredrik, of course, had a dissertation handy, culled from the journals of a Quaker brewmaster, asserting that the heady scent of the hops made men drowsy and women lascivious. He knew the Latin names of all the flowers.

We settled on a bench, all of us sharing a notion that this was slightly unreal, a posed photograph. We wanted to arrive at the story that lay ahead, but there was no way of rushing it. Roland was fascinated by his own wrists. He stroked his fingers obsessively down the length of his arm, gesturing, encircling the wrist; as if he could not believe in its delicacy. He is ageless, benign; a chaste Dorian Gray. He moves in clean lines against a plain background. Nothing is hurried. His arms are thin, but a braid of muscle bunches under the short sleeve of his matelot jersey.

He showed us the house: we eavesdropped on his private space. What we relished, we also exploited. Our brief from the Corporation insisted that each minute particular be generalized: it must stand for something, an articulated tendency. If we could not explain it, then it did not exist.

From the first-floor window I looked back over the garden, and north towards Princelet Street; and I was amazed to discover how much of this area was still covert: hidden space, old courts, outhouses, industrial yards tethered in hawsers of convolvulus, protected by hedges of thorn and nettles. The heart of Whitechapel remained in purdah, sheathed in a prophylactic neglect: from the streets there was no hint that this unexploited kingdom even existed. Had I stumbled, after all these years, on a method of painlessly visiting the past?

On the other side of the house, facing the magnificent threat of Christ Church, Roland was in the process of creating a room that would set the key for his entire scheme: the minimal decorations he had so far effected were both ritualistic and meaningful. One wall was covered with a painted backdrop; a Strindbergian victim, whose hair, and silent scream, shakes a liquid jungle of intestinal ropes and vines. She is drowning in fire. This hot flush of expressionist bravado is countered by a pale and handsome fireplace, freshly installed: on its mantelpiece is the Spy cartoon of Oscar Wilde.

Roland was ahead of us. ‘Yes, the fireplace did, in fact, once belong to Wilde,' he said. ‘And, I suppose, I like to believe that it still does. Sympathizers rescued what they could from Tite Street after the crash. The fireplace passed, for generations, among friends: who could appreciate its value, and its charms, without wishing to obliterate those qualities in a sordid monetary transaction.'Roland was making a speech, and he knew it. He floated upstage from the mantelpiece, so that he could spin, dramatically, on his heel, and allow the sunlight in the window to fluster the red in his hair. ‘I cling to the conceit,' he continued, ‘that when I've finished the job, Oscar will walk in, smoking his blonde cigarettes; ready to accept the sensational role of a character, literally unresolved between life and art. It's what he always wanted.'

Slightly embarrassed by this infusion of greasepaint, I began to shuffle a stack of books that stood alongside the framed Wilde
caricature: six mint copies of a celebrated ‘bestseller' that attributed the most peculiar properties to the local churches. The critics promised your money back if you did not die of terror as you read it. Many of the New Georgian squatters kept a copy in the close chamber, though privately decrying the thing, as a calumny on the disinterested aesthetics of Baroque Architecture. But even as a talismanic icon, I felt that six units was stronging it.

‘When Mother and I moved here,'said Roland, with the frankness that characterized his conversation, ‘and because our interests are well known, all our chums kept making us presents of that book. I haven't got around to reading it yet. Something holds me back. I couldn't
bear
to be disappointed. I liked the Wilde novel so much I wrote to the author, through his publishers, inviting him to trot along for a cup of tea, and a look at the fireplace. He never replied. And I realized afterwards, with utter shame, that my letter must have read like some terrible gauche come-on.'

‘Don't worry,' I told him, ‘the publishers probably shredded it. He's far too much of a goldmine to be interrupted with tea ceremonies.'

This prompted Fredrik – who had been silent for about two minutes, and was turning a dangerous rectal-purple colour – to vault into an improvisational theory that I soon lost track of: it concerned ‘prophetic curvatures of time', vampire-clones, and hermetic sexuality. He posited an ‘eternal return'; whereby certain figures are unable to escape the Wheel of Fate. Those cultists who look longingly on such as Wilde, Chatterton, Rimbaud, Blake, Stevenson, or Keats are themselves trapped,
as in a liquid mirror
. Obsession matures into spiritual paralysis. The cultist relives borrowed lives, is bound to gross matter; to ghosts of the undead, and the always-dying. But the created grids of energy can be consulted like a tarot pack: so that, for example, Peter Ackroyd's
The Great Fire of London
can anticipate the coming ‘heritage' triumph of
Little Dorrit
, and the shift in focus that
would make the Thames itself an assertive template from which the new London would be built. This is the confection we are now required to worship: a ‘view' by the Venetian mercenary, Canaletto.