Whatever it is, I Don't Like it (9 page)

I should eat fish, which is good here. But fish is for two, I always think. A bone thing. Just as pizza is too obviously for one. So I order a spaghetti marinara by way of compromise, and a glass of Chianti in memory of all the straw bottles I bought for girls to make table lamps with in the days when I never ate alone.

Minutes after my Chianti arrives a second solitary gentleman is seated at the table next to mine. It feels deliberate, as though the waiters have engineered this proximity as a sort of social experiment, much as they put recalcitrant pandas together in zoos.

The second gentleman is as sad as I am, but I am careful not to acknowledge him for fear he may be sad in a
different
way. I note his well-pressed short-sleeved shirt, his boyish blue-grey haircut, the beaten silver ring on his marriage finger, and the precise way he cuts up his
champignons
. Without any warning or preamble he turns to a woman at a nearby table and says, ‘I love your diamonds. I love the way they catch the light.'

So I am right. He
is
sad in a different way.

We eat in silence, uncomfortably aware of each other. A very tall waiter with a very small head collects our plates. ‘Yum, yum, yum, yum?' he asks my double. To me he says, ‘How was
that
?'

Neither of us replies.

‘In Sydney,' my double suddenly bursts out, ‘they tout for sex. In Melbourne they spruik for food.'

‘Well, in Melbourne food
is
sex,' I say.

He ponders that, then, inserting his ring finger into the fist which is his other hand, he says, ‘I don't think I like it.'

He orders another glass of Shiraz from the unmannerly waiter. I ask for a second Chianti. He tells me that he is in Melbourne for a conference, that he is a mathematician and a lawyer, that his soft skin and brown eyes belie his age – ‘Look at them!' he orders me – and that his brother always introduces him with the words, ‘This is David, he's got five degrees and all he thinks about is sex.'

Solitary eaters, I think. Every word of what they say about us is true.

The waiter is back with our wine. ‘Are you circumcised?' David asks him.

The waiter's sangfroid goes up in smoke. Serves you right for ‘Yum, yum, yum, yum?' I think. He starts to blurt out something about the interesting people he meets in his job, but David isn't listening. ‘I'm just a slut,' he says to no one in particular.

Once the waiter is gone again, David asks me, ‘Do you want him?'

‘I wouldn't know what to do with him,' I laugh, wondering how I can bring mention of my wife into the conversation. I may look sad but I have a wife.
Wife
. You read me?

But by now he is bored anyway. I watch him totter off into the night (to find a prostitute, he tells me), his hands in his pockets, his little blue-grey bullet head bravely erect, a man not ashamed of being out on his own.

Freed from Rage

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In Bristol with an hour or so to kill the other day, I happened upon Queen Square, recently restored to some of its Georgian glory by the removal of the dual carriageway which, in coarser times, someone in transport had thought to run through it. Perhaps he knew that before it was Queen Square it had been a rubbish dump, and so was acting as a true conservationist. But all's well that ends well, as they say. Except that something, or someone, in Queen Square, isn't remotely well.

In the middle of the square sits an equestrian statue of William III, sculpted by Rysbrack. Widely regarded as Rysbrack's greatest work, and the finest statue of a king on a horse made by any sculptor working in eighteenth-century England, it is, as you would expect of Rysbrack, classical in conception, judicious in choice of materials and, as these things go, only marginally pompous. The King rides stirrupless and carries what looks to be a roll of wallpaper but is probably his plans either for a European settlement, put into practice after his death by the Treaty of Utrecht, or for granting independence to the judiciary, as ratified by the Act of Settlement. A serious-minded king, then, seriously mounted. Carved into the pediment of the statue is the artist's name, and above that, in graffito, is, or was the other day, a startlingly naked expression of unhappiness. ‘My name is Maureer. I hate you and all you stand for.'

How long did I linger there, pondering the significance of this, measuring its hurt, fathoming its reasoning? Reader, how long is a ball of string?

The first thing I wanted to understand was why Maureer felt it to be important we knew his or her name. Does it help to get your name, as well as your hatred, off your chest? And was I reading Maureer for Maureen? Type Maureer into the Internet and it thinks the same, correcting you in that sniffy way the Internet does – ‘Do you mean Maureen?' (One of modern life's great frustrations, that the Internet can talk to you as though you are a moron, but short of typing invective into your computer, or smashing it, you have no effective redress.)

Anyway, Maureer and not Maureen it definitely was, the hand chillingly steady, inscribing the second r identically to the first. Not a Christian name I recognise, Maureer, though I know it as a surname. There's a Monsieur Maureer, for example, working on Leonardo da Vinci and chaos theory in the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, and a Christian Maureer who plays jazz saxophone in Austria, and a J. M. Maureer who is co-author (with Pugh and Pringle) of ‘The Impact of Wort Nitrogen Limitation on Yeast Fermentation Performance and Diacetyl', but none of these is associated with Bristol as far as I have been able to ascertain, nor would you think that any of them has reason to hate unseasonably, though it's always possible J. M. Maureer wished his work on worts sold better than it did.

But the more important question is not who Maureer is, but who Maureer hates. ‘You and all you stand for.' Since these words deface a statue of William III, William III has to be prime suspect. Netherlandish by birth and temperament, and subsequently a victor in the Battle of the Boyne, William III must have made many enemies of a non-Protestant persuasion. So could Maureer be a Dutch-detesting Irish Catholic? And a homophobe to boot, since rumours have always abounded – none of them substantiated, but then hatred needs no substantiation – of William's having indulged a taste for foot soldiers no less than for mistresses of the more conventional sort. A xenophobic anti-militaristic Catholic homophobe who loathes all lowlander Protestants and opposes adultery – is this who we're looking for?

Or is the sculptor Rysbrack the problem? Rysbrack beat his rival Scheemakers to the commission and this might rankle still with Scheemakers' descendants of whom Maureer Scheemakers could easily be one. And then there are the relatives of Van Oost, the flower painter, who actually made the sculpture, though Rysbrack won all the plaudits for the design. Or failing that, Maureer's hatred could simply be aesthetical. ‘I hate you and all you stand for.' That's to say classical sculpture, judicious choice of materials, pyramidal composition, and the whole lickspittle business of dressing royal personages up as Roman emperors.

So much to hate, once you start. Queen Square itself is no monument to human goodness, having housed the slave traders who made Bristol rich. Were your ancestors shackled and sold for two-and-sixpence, Maureer? And so it is us you hate – we post-colonialists who go on obscurely enjoying the fruits of a heinous trade, accepting our culpability in one quarter only to recidivate in another? Little museums and monuments all over Bristol, commemorating slavery, adding to the total of the town's attractions – here the river where the slavers sailed, there the mansions where the slavers lived it up, nice places to sit and have a heritage cappuccino now.

So much to hate, once you start. And no one telling you it's not a smart idea, not good for you, not good for your heart, let alone the peace of mind of those you hate, and everything they stand for. Not even
some
of what they stand for? Wouldn't that do, Maureer?

On an almshouse close to Queen Square, a returned seamen's poem. ‘Freed from all storms, the tempest and the rage / Of billows, here we spend our age.' Freed from rage. It seems a novel thought today, that we should welcome quiet, and not rage against whatever dares to rage at us. A blessed thing, quiet. Wherein to read, compose the mind, listen to Schubert, maybe recall the words of those who once advised we learn to love our enemies. But Maureer's storms carry the day. Maybe he is a human bomb in waiting. Why not? He who is unhappy has no choice but to hate and kill – violence is ineluctable – isn't that what we now believe?

Blubber

While the world was protecting its eyes last Wednesday, staring into buckets to watch the reflected sky go dark, I was weeping buckets of my own. You could say the two events were not unconnected: there is nothing like interplanetary activity, after all, for reminding you of your own insignificance. But insignificance wasn't the reason I was blubbering. Quite the opposite. A sudden, piercing vision of human grandeur, the immensity of our appetite for sorrow – that's what set me off. And what more cause for shedding copious tears do you need, than that you have copious tears to shed?

Call this self-indulgence if you wish – I confess I was playing old records of Caruso and Mario Lanza at the time, both of whom I turn to when I want the tears to flow – but it was the spectacle of someone else's sorrow that had softened me up the day before, when I happened to walk past a man in anguish in a doorway in Leicester Square.

Why does one person's distress speak more eloquently than another's? If you live in London you walk past a fellow creature in anguish every five minutes. Here's one who sits with his dog at his side by the cash machines all day, pleading for small change. Here's another who is in bed in his cardboard box at noon, whimpering like an abandoned baby in his sleep. And there's a third, raging the length of Shaftesbury Avenue in a filthy blanket, looking like Poor Tom from
King Lear
, houseless and unfed, biding the pelting of the pitiless storm. He must have a hundred silver studs in his face. ‘Don't come near me,' my eyes warn him. I have rehearsed what I will say to him should he ignore that warning: ‘If you're so needy,' I will hiss, ‘why don't you pawn your jewellery?'

I know, I know. But you can't feel compassion for them all. George Eliot is the person to trust in this area. ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life,' she says in
Middlemarch
, ‘we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.' I read
Middlemarch
the way others read the Bible – for enlightenment and forgiveness. ‘As it is,' she goes on, ‘the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.' Which I take to be her way of saying, ‘I forgive you, Howard.'

So yes, you, go pawn your jewellery. And no, I have no small change.

And then, quite out of the blue, you see a person sitting in silent anguish in a doorway in Leicester Square – not slumped, simply emptied of resolution – who wants nothing from you, who does not notice you are there, who does not notice anyone is there, and you hear the roar which lies on the other side of silence and your heart breaks. He isn't a refugee from the elements. He isn't unaccommodated man. From the cut of him you would say he has a comfortable house in Islington or even Hampstead. A publisher, maybe. He is handsome, dark, well groomed and well appointed in a houndstooth suit and expensive shoes, sleek as an otter. But he is sitting on the pavement, his back against a doorway, careless of himself, his eyes as sad as any eyes I've ever seen.

There is a question I must ask myself. Is it only because his fall is temporary, because he is on the street, seeking the anonymity and succour of the street, without being a street person, that I feel for him? Am I a grief snob?

I fear I may be, though I would prefer to put it differently. Of course it makes it easier on my pity that his grief is not his profession. And I am hardly the first to feel the poignancy of a man's fall from high estate to low. However communistical we may be, Lear the king moves us more than Poor Tom the beggar. But there is a further consideration which explains my preference.
Taking into account his apparent prosperity, and measuring the depth and fixity of his pain, I decide that what has poleaxed my man of sorrows is bad news from the front line of the heart. I think his hands are folded over a mobile phone. It would make sense, then, to suppose that his wife has just rung to say she is leaving. Or his mistress. I am not concerned for the morality of the situation. Let it be, for all I care, someone else's wife who rang, barely a minute earlier, while he was sauntering houndstoothed up Charing Cross Road to his sun-filled offices in Bloomsbury, to announce, ‘Enough, over, it's been wonderful, but something more wonderful has come my way. Goodbye, my darling. Pause to think of me sometimes, as I will never again pause to think of you . . .'

I am a schmaltz merchant, you see. Not all the poverty and suffering in the third or fourth or however many worlds can touch me as the story of tormented love touches me. That's why, when no one's watching, I sit listening to lyric tenors singing of their exile from romance. Even as the moon briefly cast its shadow on the sun, Caruso was
Pagliacci'
ing it on my turntable, mocking his clown-cuckold's reflection, his own light put out forever. Now it's not for me to explain the emotional motivations of others, but I do suspect that all our recent planet-watching was metaphorical. Why are we moved when one orb eclipses another? Ask Caruso. Ask the man in the doorway of the Leicester Square Hippodrome.