The Mammoth Book of New Jules Verne Adventures (12 page)

The people, however,
ardently felt otherwise. For the Prime Minister was nothing if not a man of
immense charm and charisma, whose face, not least when viewed via videophone
transmission, had a convincingly handsome and self-assured demeanour to it,
indeed a kind of saintliness which endeared it to any who set eyes on it; not
to mention his voice, which exuded a desire to be trusted and which worked on
the machinery of the soul in much the same way that a mechanic could work on
the engine of an antigravity aircraft, finding its faults and fine-tuning them
out of existence.

And so there was great
joy among the crowd of protestors when he came out from Number 10 to address
them, and even greater joy when the content of his speech was a solemn
statement to the effect that he had, after consultation with his Cabinet and
much soul-searching, decided to recant on his previous decision and not resign
after all. The joy turned to delirium when he added that he was going to
postpone the General Election which was due next year, pushing it back to the
year 2011, in order to allow greater time for his policies to take effect.

Dufrénoy strode away in
disgust, remembering the time back in 1968 when he was still a resident of
Paris and there had been unrest among Parisian students for a similar reason,
namely that both the President and the Prime Minister had tried to resign after
an adultery scandal that saw them having an extramarital affair, not in itself
unusual among French politicians, but
with each other?
While the
old-guard establishment was demanding the two men’s heads on a plate, the
radical youth of Paris urged the exact opposite, and thus was sparked off the
practice, now widespread across the world, of politicians attempting to outdo
one another in the egregiousness of their misbehaviour while still maintaining
the goodwill of the electorate. It was for that reason that Dufrénoy had
emigrated from France, thinking that surely among the sober, staid British such
temptations to flout the public trust would be at the very least resisted, if
not/

pp.
84-85

/and hard as he tried,
Dufrénoy could not halt them from entering his apartment. There were ten of
them pressing against the door, and he was but one elderly man.

“Good morning, sir,”
said the leader of the advertising troupe, proffering his card, which read
Albion Home Improvement Supplies Ltd. “We shan’t take up much of your precious
time, I promise.” As he spoke, the other members of the troupe were rapidly
setting up scenery, unfurling backdrops from suitcases and pinning them to
screw-together steel frames, and pumping air into inflatable rubber props such
as furniture and plants. In very short order they had created a kind of
impromptu stage in Dufrénoy’s living room, and divesting themselves of their
overalls, to reveal costumes underneath, they began to act.

Dufrénoy had little
alternative but to sit and watch as the advertising troupe ran through a series
of playlets, each outlining a domestic scenario which might require the
remedial application of some product or other available from Albion Home
Improvement Supplies Ltd., for instance the installation of an extra layer of
glazing in bedroom windows to prevent infants dying of hypothermia during a
savage cold snap akin to the one that gripped France for three years in the 1960s,
or the introduction of new kitchen apparatus to appease an irked wife who was
struggling to cook meals on outmoded and antiquated oven equipment. That the widower
Dufrénoy obviously lived by himself and was patently too old to have infant
children was of no consequence to the troupe, who had a job to do and did it
regardless of the status or circumstances of the person into whose home they
had barged their way. It must be added that their performance was somewhat
perfunctory and listless as a result of their having to deliver it, on average,
twenty times a day, five days a week. It had gathered, one might say, rust and
a certain unevenness of function, as will any device used repetitively,
constantly, and without thought. Dufrénoy himself remained unmoved by the
actors’ efforts, apart from a small tear of bored frustration that crept from
his eye toward the end. He would rather the gigantic billboards that covered
the side of many a tower block and dwelling complex, the videophone commercials
with their endless jabbering singsong refrains, the troubadours on the
pneumotube who strummed their guitars to commuters and extolled the virtues of
a particular brand of dentifrice or “gentleman’s invigoration pill” — anything
to this thespian intrusion into his apartment, this invasion of his living
space and his psychic space as well, that invaluable free area of the mind into
which daily the wormy efforts of the advertisers were making deeper inroads/

pp.
120-121

/lamenting that he
barely had time to compose poetry any more. He was of pensionable age but,
having worked sporadically and to little profit during his lifetime, he found
himself with scant funds to retire on, and so was obliged to eke a living by
whatever means he could. Currently this entailed a kind of literary piecework,
Dufrénoy employing his skills with pen and paper to furnish the less verbally
gifted with articulacy. In other words he was a ghost-writer, not of fiction
nor even of non-fiction but of letters,
curricula vitae,
job
applications and other such mundane communications. The working man and woman
had little need of or love for literacy and the written word, but in some areas
of life a better-than-basic grasp of language was still desirable, and that was
where Dufrénoy came in. The irony of him, an expatriate Frenchman, being more
fluent and accomplished in the tongue of Shakespeare than most Englishmen, was
not lost on him.

It was not lucrative
work, since there were many others like him who offered the same service.
Payment was low and grudgingly given because people understood that this was
something they
ought
to be able to do for themselves, and hence
furtively, resented having to hire someone else to do it on their behalf.
Dufrénoy earned pennies at a time and yet counted himself grateful. But each
hour that he spent drafting a note of complaint or a bank loan request for some
unlettered stranger was an hour he did not spend marshalling words into
sonnet-form or iambic pentameter,
rime riche
or blank verse, painting
emotion with the colours of the alphabet, expressing the agony and loneliness
of his life with all the syntactical precision and sensory honesty he could
muster, searching for new and different modes of/

pp. 137-138

/came
to him, like the shock of being doused with ice water, that
instead of the father regarding the son as a disappointment, as was commonly
the case, here the roles were reversed and the son was of the view that
everything his father had ever been or done was a source of shame.

For Jerome was now as
unlike Dufrénoy as it was possible to be. It wasn’t merely that his name was
accentlessly anglicised, for that was expectable and acceptable; the lack of
acute and circumflex, though, was symptomatic of much else. Jerome was without
distinguishing mark, nothing stood out on him, he had been planed and smoothed
to fit in with twenty-first century British life, he was reduced, whittled,
ordinary. He worked at a bank in the City, as Dufrénoy himself had once been a
bank clerk (before that terrible, embarrassing incident when he spilled ink on
The Big Book). But where Dufrénoy père had found bank work hard and
dispiriting, Dufrénoy
ills
adored it. He boarded the gun-fired Bullet
Train at Romney station each morning with the eager, carefree air of a man
going on a jaunt to the seaside, and chortled as the explosive detonation set
the train hurtling along its track on frictionless runners with near-concussing
force. The ten-minute journey to Liverpool Street was, for Jerome, an
opportunity to prepare for the tasks of the day ahead. He would get his brain
churning with some mental arithmetic, adding five-figure numbers together and
making compound-interest calculations, so that, like an athlete arriving at the
starting blocks, he would be warmed up and ready for the nine-till-five race
that awaited him when he reached his workplace.

Jerome, nearly forty,
was prospering and well on course for a junior partnership by forty-five and a
senior partnership by fifty. His life was following a perfect arc of
development, almost as if it had been designed that way by a totalizer. He had
a pretty wife and two lively children, and all of them loved him
unquestioningly. Given his upbringing, and especially the temperamental
instability of his father, it was nothing short of a miracle that he had turned
out so totemically normal.

“Then again,” Dufrénoy
mused with some chagrin, “it is always the case that we turn and become that
which our parents are not.” Jerome’s rebellion against his paternal exemplar
had seen him throwing himself wholeheartedly into the embrace of conformity,
and in/

pp. 169-171

/heatwave held sway for
the next five years. The streets sweltered and piles of urban dust silted up in
the gutters like grey-black snowdrifts. The Thames dried up and its cracked-mud
bed became a venue for sunbathers and intrepid promenaders. After a while a new
sport developed, whereby the winds that sometimes howled inland along the dead
river’s course were put to use propelling wheeled yachts. Landlubber seamen
would hoist sail and hurtle at speeds of anything up to fifty knots along the
desert-like channel, veering between the pilings of the many bridges. Meanwhile
the sun glared down on London like an eye that would not close. Even at
night-time there was a memory of its blaze in the still-parched air and the
perturbingly bright moon. Some people said the world was coming to an end,
which would have seemed feasible but for the fact that elsewhere on the planet
weather patterns remained normal. It was Britain alone that was affected by the
heatwave.

There was, naturally and
inevitably, a slow exodus to other countries that in time became a stampede.
Once a few rats were seen to abandon the sinking ship, all the rats wanted to
leave. The crops were failing, year after year, and the price of imported food
rose steeply as other nations took advantage of Britain’s desperate straits and
imposed swingeing tariffs. In the dwelling complexes like the one Dufrénoy
lived in, people started dying. Starvation was the principal cause of death but
the heat took many victims as well — the very young, the very old, the already
sick, those in general too weak to cope. The sight of corpses piled on street
corners, rotting in the heat, became so commonplace that even from the
faintest-hearted it failed to elicit so much as a wince. Rats proliferated,
bringing disease and, worse, the threat of attack, for in their hordes the
rodents became bold and would band together and pick off those solitary
individuals, usually tramps and children, who seemed most defenceless and least
threatening. London’s famous pigeons likewise turned feral, until soon
Trafalgar Square and various other landmarks were no-go zones for the capital’s
citizenry. The verminous grey birds would swoop without warning, whole flocks
of them pouncing on human prey and pecking and scratching their victims to
death, whereupon the pigeons would feast lustily and greedily on their kill. It
was a time when the natural order of things was well and truly out of kilter.
The balance of existence was wrong.

Dufrénoy survived
largely by virtue of the fact that he was inured to deprivation and suffering,
indeed this had been a characteristic of his life almost since birth, and even
in old age he was hardy and phlegmatic, a veteran of countless campaigns
against vicissitude. Jerome had taken off to France with his family, neglecting
to invite his father to join them in exile, but Dufrénoy did not hold this
against him. All too clearly, all too painfully, he understood his son’s
choice, and he respected it.

There was no let-up
during those years of Britain’s tribulation, until finally, like a ghost from
forgotten times, the rain came. The sound of its pattering was so unfamiliar
that for a while people did not comprehend what this noise portended, this
gentle hissing from the sky, the soft wet plashing of droplet after droplet
upon baked stone surfaces and dust-velveted roads. Nor did they truly fathom
why the sunlight had faded. They had forgotten what clouds were. They thought
this dimming of the day an unnaturally premature twilight. Some fancied that it
was, at last, The End.

It was certainly the end
of the drought. Down came the rain, and thunder grumbled distantly in low/

pp.
203-205

/and I shall be a living
poem,” said Dufrénoy to himself, “a testament to all that London is and has
been.”

Who is to say that his
insanity was not, in truth, the clearest-eyed sanity conceivable? Certainly, as
he clambered up the face of the billboard, Dufrénoy had never experienced such
a sense of pure, exhilarating omniscience. The higher he rose, the more
apparent the patterns of existence became to him. The city was lines, London a
vast page upon which forty million individuals wrote their life-poems, in their
hearts, inside their heads, almost without being conscious of it. Bombarded from
all sides by noise and demands on their time and their pockets, by
advertisements perpetually clamouring for their attention and the relentless
pressure to spend and buy and possess, by the panoply of capitalism arrayed in
all its chrome and gilt splendour, by messages of want that undermined their
self-confidence and made them feel incomplete,
still
they resisted,
fighting a rearguard action in the depths of their souls as they struggled to
cling on to that last vital, intact part of themselves that the moneymen and
the corrupt bureaucrats and the avaricious plutocrats so badly wished to reach
and conquer. You would not know it unless you looked deep and hard into their
eyes. Even in the dullest of gazes, the deadest of expressions, you might find
it. The Great Heat had tempered people, tested their mettle and forced them to
rediscover an inner flame which had almost, almost gone out. In Dufrénoy the
flame had continued to burn more or less constantly, although it had many a
time guttered and nearly failed, for example back at Père-Lachaise cemetery,
beside de Musset’s tomb. But it flared nonetheless, unquenchably, and now he
understood that he was not alone; and he was not a poet. He was poetry.
Everyone was poetry.