Grey Area

A Short History of the English Novel

‘All crap,’ said Gerard through a mouthful of hamburger, ‘utter shite — and the worst thing is that we’re aware of it, we know what’s going on. Really, I think, it’s the cultural complement to the decline of the economy, in the seventies, coming lolloping along behind.’

We were sitting in Joe Allen and Gerard was holding forth on the sad state of the English novel. This was the only price I had to pay for our monthly lunch together: listening to Gerard sound off.

I came back at him. ‘I’m not sure I agree with you on this one, Gerard. Isn’t that a perennial gripe, something that comes up time and again? Surely we won’t be able to judge the literature of this decade for another thirty or forty years?’

‘You’re bound to say that, being a woman.’

‘I’m sorry?’

‘Well, insomuch as the novel was very much a feminine form in the first place, and now that our literary culture has begun to fragment, the partisan concerns of minorities are again taking precedence. There isn’t really an “English novel” now, there are just women’s novels, black novels, gay novels.’

I tuned him out. He was too annoying to listen to. Round about us the lunchtime crowd was thinning. A few advertising and city types sipped their wine and Perrier, nodding over each other’s shoulders at the autographed photos that studded the restaurant’s walls, as if they were saluting dear old friends.

Gerard and I had been doing these monthly lunches at Joe Allen for about a year. Ours was an odd friendship. For a while he’d been married to a friend of mine but it had been a duff exercise in emotional surgery, both hearts rejecting the other. They hadn’t had any children. Some of our mutual acquaintances suspected that they were gay, and that the marriage was one of convenience, a coming together to avoid coming out.

Gerard was also a plump, good-looking man; who despite his stress-filled urban existence still retained the burnish of a country childhood in the pink glow of his cheeks and the chestnut hanks of his thick fringe.

Gerard did something in publishing. That was what accounted for his willingness to pronounce on the current state of English fiction. It wasn’t anything editorial or high profile. Rather, when he talked to me of his work — which he did only infrequently — it was of books as so many units, trafficked hither and thither as if they were boxes of washing powder. And when he spoke of authors, he managed somehow to reduce them to the status of assembly line workers, trampish little automata who were merely bolting the next lump of text on to an endlessly unrolling narrative product.

‘. . spry old women’s sex novels, Welsh novels, the Glasgow Hard Man School, the ex-colonial guilt novel — both perpetrator and victim version. .’ He was still droning on.

‘What are you driving at, Gerard?’

‘Oh come on, you’re not going to play devil’s advocate on this one, are you? You don’t believe in the centrality of the literary tradition in this country any more than I do, now do you?’

‘S’pose not.’

‘You probably buy two or three of the big prize-winning novels every year and then possibly, just possibly, get round to reading one of them a year or so later. As for anything else, you might skim some thrillers that have been made into TV dramas — or vice versa — or scan something issue-based, or nibble at a plot that hinges on an unusual sexual position, the blurb for which happens to have caught your eye — ‘

‘But, Gerard’ — despite myself I was rising to it — ‘just because we don’t read that much, aren’t absorbed in it, it doesn’t mean that important literary production isn’t going on — ‘

‘Not that old chestnut!’ he snorted. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me next that there may be thousands of unbelievably good manuscripts rotting away in attic rooms, only missing out on publication because of the diffidence of their authors or the formulaic, sales-driven narrow-mindedness of publishers, eh?’

‘No, Gerard, I wasn’t going to argue that — ‘

‘It’s like the old joke about LA, that there aren’t any waiters in the whole town, just movie stars “resting”. I suppose all these bus boys and girls’ — he flicked a hand towards the epicene character who had been ministering to our meal — ‘are great novelists hanging out to get more material.’

‘No, that’s not what I meant.’

‘Excuse me?’ It was the waiter, a lanky blond who had been dangling in the mid-distance. ‘Did you want anything else?’

‘No, no.’ Gerard started shaking his head — but then broke off. ‘Actually, now that you’re here, would you mind if I asked you a question?’

‘Oh Gerard,’ I groaned, ‘leave the poor boy alone.’

‘No, not at all, anything to be of service.’ He was bending down towards us, service inscribed all over his soft-skinned face.

‘Tell me then, are you happy working here or do you harbour any other ambition?’ Gerard put the question as straightforwardly as he could but his plump mouth was twisted with irony.

The waiter thought for a while. I observed his flat fingers, nails bitten to the quick, and his thin nose coped with blue veins at the nostrils’ flare. His hair was tied back in a pony-tail and fastened with a thick rubber band.

‘Do you mind?’ he said at length, pulling half-out one of the free chairs.

‘No, no,’ I replied, ‘of course not.’ He sat down and instantly we all became intimates, our three brows forming a tight triangle over the cruets. The waiter put up his hands vertically, holding them like parentheses into which he would insert qualifying words.

‘Well,’ a self-deprecatory cough, ‘it’s not that I mind working here — because I don’t, but I write a little and I suppose I would like to be published some day.’

I wanted to hoot, to crow, to snort derision, but contented myself with a ‘Ha!’.

‘Now come on, wait a minute.’ Gerard was adding his bracketing hands to the manual quorum. ‘OK, this guy is a writer but who’s to say what he’s doing is good, or original?’

‘Gerard! You’re being rude — ‘

‘No, really, it doesn’t matter, I don’t mind. He’s got a point.’ His secret out, the waiter was more self-possessed. ‘I write — that’s true. I think the ideas are good. I think the prose is good. But I can’t tell if it hangs together.’

‘Well, tell us a bit about it. If you can, quote some from memory.’ I lit a cigarette and tilted back in my chair.

‘It’s complex. We know that Eric Gill was something more than an ordinary sexual experimenter. According to his own journal he even had sex with his dog. I’m writing a narrative from the point of view of Gill’s dog. The book is called Fanny Gill or I was Eric Gill’s Canine Lover.’ Gerard and I were giggling before he’d finished; and the waiter smiled with us.

‘That’s very funny,’ I said, ‘I especially like the play on — ‘

‘Fanny Hill, yeah. Well, I’ve tried to style it like an eighteenth-century picaresque narrative. You know, with the dog growing up in the country, being introduced to the Gill household by a canine pander. Her loss of virginity and so on.’

‘Can you give us a little gobbet then?’ asked Gerard. He was still smiling but no longer ironically. The waiter sat back and struck a pose. With his scraped-back hair and long face, he reminded me of some Regency actor-manager.

‘Then one night, as I turned and tossed in my basket, the yeasty smell of biscuit and the matted ordure in my coat blanketing my prone form, I became aware of a draught of turpentine, mixed with the lavender of the night air.

‘My master the artist and stone carver, stood over me.

“Come Fanny,” he called, slapping his square-cut hands against his smock, “there’s a good little doggie.” I trotted after him, out into the darkness. He strode ahead, whilst I meandered in his wake, twisting in the smelly skeins betwixt owl pellet and fox stool. “Come on now!” He was sharp and imperious. A tunnel of light opened up in the darkness. “Come in!” he snapped again, and I obeyed — poor beast — unaware that I had just taken my last stroll as an innocent bitch.’

Later, when we had paid the bill and were walking up Bow Street towards Long Acre, for no reason that I could think of I took Gerard’s arm. I’d never touched him before. His body was surprisingly firm, but tinged with dampness like a thick carpet in an old house. I said, trying to purge the triumph from my tone, ‘That was really rather good — now wasn’t it?’

‘Humph! S’pose so, but it was a “gay” novel, not in the mainstream of any literary tradition.’

‘How can you say that?’ I was incredulous. ‘There was nothing obviously gay about it.’

‘Really, Geraldine. The idea of using the dog as a sexual object was an allegory for the love that dare not speak its name, only wuffle. Anyway, he himself — the waiter, that is — was an obvious poof.’

We walked on in silence for a while. It was one of those flat, cold London days. The steely air wavered over the bonnets of cars, as if they were some kind of automotive mirage, ready to dissolve into the tarmac desert.

We normally parted at the mouth of the short road that leads to Covent Garden Piazza. I would stand, watching Gerard’s retreating overcoat as he moved past the fire — eaters, the jugglers, the stand-up comedians; and on across the parade ground of flagstones with its manoeuvring battalions of Benelux au pair girls. But on this occasion I wouldn’t let him go.

‘Do you have to get back to the office? Is there actually anything pressing for you to do?’

He seemed startled and turning to present the oblong sincerity of his face to me — he almost wrenched my arm. ‘Erm. . well, no. S’pose not.’

‘How about a coffee then?’

‘Oh all right.’

I was sure he had meant this admission to sound cool, unconcerned, but it had come out as pathetic. Despite all his confident, wordy pronouncements, I was beginning to suspect that Gerard’s work might be as meaningless as my own.

As we strolled, still coupled, down Long Acre, the commercial day was getting into its post-prandial lack of swing. The opulent stores with their displays of flash goods belied what was really going on.

‘The recession’s certainly starting to bite,’ Gerard remarked, handing a ten-pence piece to a dosser who sat scrunched up behind a baffler of milk crates, as if he were a photographer at one of life’s less sporting events.

‘Tell me about it, mate.’ The words leaked from the gaps in the dosser’s teeth, trickled through the stubble of his chin and flowed across the pavement carrying their barge-load of hopelessness.

The two of us paused again in front of the Hippodrome.

‘Well,’ said Gerard, ‘where shall we have our coffee then? Do you want to go to my club?’

‘God, no! Come on, let’s go somewhere a little youthful.’

‘You lead — I’ll follow.’

We passed the Crystal Rooms, where tense loss adjusters rocked on the saddles of stranded motor cycles, which they powered on through pixilated curve after pixilated curve.

At the mouth of Gerrard Street, we passed under the triumphal arch with its coiled and burnished dragons. Around us the Chinese skipped and altercated, as scrutable as ever. Set beside their scooterish bodies, adolescent and wind-cheating, Gerard appeared more than ever to be some Scobie or Brown, lost for ever in the grimy Greeneland of inner London.

Outside the Bar Italia a circle of pari-cropped heads was deliberating over glasses of caffe latte held at hammy angles.

‘Oh,’ said Gerard, ‘the Bar Italia. I haven’t been here in ages, what fun.’ He pushed in front of me into the tiled burrow of the café. Behind the grunting Gaggia a dumpy woman with a hennaed brow puffed and pulled. ‘Due espressi!’ Gerard trilled in cod-Italian tones. ‘Doppio!’

‘I didn’t know you spoke Italian,’ I said as we scraped back two stools from underneath the giant video screen swathing the back of the café.

‘Oh well, you know. .’ He trailed off and gazed up as the flat tummy filling the hissing screen rotated in a figure-eight of oozing congress. A special-effect lipoma swelled in its navel and then inflated into the face of a warbling androgyne.

A swarthy young woman with a prominent mole on her upper lip came over and banged two espressos down on the ledge we were sitting against.

‘I say,’ Gerard exclaimed; coffee now spotted his shirt front like a dalmatian’s belly. ‘Can’t you take a little more care?’ The waitress looked at him hard, jaw and brow shaking with anger, as if some prisoners of consciousness were attempting to jack-hammer their escape from her skull. She hiccupped, then ran the length of the café and out into the street, sobbing loudly.

‘What did I say?’ Gerard appealed to the café at large. The group of flat-capped Italian men by the cake display had left off haggling over their pools coupons to stare. The hennaed woman squeezed out from behind the Gaggia and clumped down to where we sat. She started to paw at Gerard’s chest with a filthy wadge of J-cloths.

‘I so sorry, sir, so sorry. .’

‘Whoa! Hold on — you’re making it worse!’

‘Iss not her fault, you know, she’s a good girl, ve-ery good girl. She have a big sadness this days — ‘

‘Man trouble, I’ll be bound.’ Gerard smirked. It looked like he was enjoying his grubby embrocation.

‘No, iss not that. . iss, ‘ow you say, a re-jection?’

I sat up straighter. ‘A rejection? What sort of rejection?’

The woman left off rubbing Gerard and turned to me. ‘She give this thing, this book to some peoples, they no like — ‘

‘Ha, ha! You don’t say. My dear Gerard’ — I punched him on the upper arm — ‘it looks like we have another scrivenous servitor on our hands.’

‘This is absurd.’ He wasn’t amused.

‘My friend here is a publisher, he might be able to help your girl, why don’t you ask her to join us?’

‘Oh really, Geraldine, can’t you let this lie? We don’t know anything about this girl’s book. Madam — ‘

But she was already gone, stomping back down the mirrored alley and out the door into the street, where I saw her place an arm round the heaving shoulders of our former waitress.

Gerard and I sat in silence. I scrutinised him again. In this surrounding he appeared fogeyish. He seemed aware of it too, his eyes flicking nervously form the carnal cubs swimming on the ethereal video screen to their kittenish domesticated cousins, the jail bait who picked their nails and split their ends all along the coffee bar’s counter.

The waitress carne back down towards us. She was a striking young woman. Dark but not Neapolitan, with a low brow, roughly cropped hair and deep-set, rather steely eyes that skated away from mine when I tried to meet them.

‘Yes? The boss said you wanted to talk to me — look, I’m sorry about the spillage, OK?’ She didn’t sound sorry. Her tears had evaporated, leaving behind a tidal mark of saline bitterness.

‘No, no, it’s not that. Here, sit down with us for a minute.’ I proffered my pack of cigarettes; she refused with a coltish head jerk. ‘Apparently you’re a writer of sorts?’

‘Not “of sorts”. I’m a writer, full stop.’

‘Well then,’ Gerard chipped in, ‘what’s the problem with selling your book? Is it a novel?’

‘Ye-es. Someone accepted it provisionally, but they want to make all sorts of stupid cuts. I won’t stand for it, so now they want to break the contract.’

‘Is it your first novel?’ asked Gerard.

‘The first I’ve tried to sell — or should I say “sell-out” — not the first I’ve written.’

‘And what’s the novel about — can you tell us?’

‘Look’ — she was emphatic, eyes at last meeting mine — I’ve been working here for over a year, doing long hours of mindless skivvying so that I have the mental energy left over for my writing. I don’t need some pair of smoothies to come along and show an interest in me.’

‘OK, OK.’ For some reason Gerard had turned emollient, placatory. ‘If you don’t want to talk about it, don’t, but we are genuinely interested.’ This seemed to work, she took a deep breath, accepted one of my cigarettes and lit it with a fatale’s flourish.

‘All right, I’ll tell you. It’s set in the future. An old hospital administrator is looking back over her life. In her youth she worked for one of a series of hospitals that were set around the ring road of an English provincial town. These had grown up over the years from being small cottage hospitals serving local areas to becoming the huge separate departments — psychiatry, oncology, obstetrics — of one great regional facility.

‘One day a meeting is held of all the Region’s administrators, at which it is realised that the town is almost completely encircled by a giant doughnut of health facilities. At my heroine’s instigation policies are fomented for using this reified cordon sanitaire as a means of filtering out undesirables who want to enter the town and controlling those who already live in it. Periods of enforced hospitalisation are introduced; troublemakers are subjected to “mandatory injury”. Gradually the administrators carry out a slow but silent coup against central as well as local government.

‘In her description of all these events and the part she played in them, my heroine surveys the whole panorama of such a herstory. From the shifting meaning of hygiene as an ideology — not just a taboo — to the changing gender roles in this bizarre oligopoly — ‘

‘That’s brilliant!’ I couldn’t help breaking in. ‘That’s one of the most succinct and clearly realised satirical ideas I’ve heard in a long time — ‘

‘This is not a satire!’ she screamed at me. ‘That’s what these stupid publishers think. I have written this book in the grand tradition of the nineteenth-century English novel. I aim to unite dramatically the formation of individual character to the process of social change. Just because I’ve cast the plot in the form of an allegory and set it in the future, it has to be regarded as a satire!’

‘Sticky hitch,’ said Gerard, some time later as we stood on the corner of Old Compton Street. Across the road in the window of the catering supplier’s, dummy waiters stood, their arms rigidly crooked, their plastic features permanently distorted into an attitude of receptivity, preparedness to receive orders for second helpings of inertia.

‘Come off it, Gerard. The plot sounded good — more than good, great even. And what could be more central to the English literary tradition? She said so herself.’

‘Oh yeah, I have nothing but sympathy for her sometime publishers, I know just what authors like that are to deal with. Full of themselves, of their bloody idealism, of their pernickety obsession with detail, in a word: precious. No, two words: precious and pretentious.

‘Anyway, I must get — ‘ but he bit off his get-out clause; someone sitting in the window of Wheeler’s — diagonally across the street from us — had caught his eye. ‘Oh shit! There’s Andersen the MD. Trust him to be having a bloody late lunch. I’ll have to say hello to him, or else he’ll think that I feel guilty about not being at the office.’

‘Oh I see, negative paranoia.’

‘Nothing of the sort. Anyway, I’ll give you a ring, old girl — ‘

‘Not so fast, Gerard, I’ll come and wait for you. I want to say goodbye properly.’

‘Please yourself,’ he shrugged in the copula of our linked arms.

I stood just inside the entrance while Gerard went and fawned over his boss. I was losing my respect for him by the second. Andersen was a middle-aged stuffed suit with a purple balloon of a head. His companion was similar. Gerard adopted the half-crouch posture of an inferior who hasn’t been asked to join a table. I couldn’t hear what he was saying. Andersen’s companion gestured for the bill, using that universal hand signal of squiggling with an imaginary pen on the sheet of the air.

The waiter, a saturnine type who had been lingering by a half-open serving hatch in the oaken mid-ground of the restaurant, came hustling over to the table, almost running. Before he reached the table he was already shouting, ‘What are you trying to do! Take the piss!’

‘I just want the bill,’ said Andersen’s companion. ‘What on earth’s the matter with you?’

‘You’re taking the piss!’ the waiter went on. He was thin and nervy, more like a semiologist than a servant. ‘You know that I’m really a writer, not a waiter at all. That’s why you did that writing gesture in the air. You heard file talking, talking frankly and honestly to some of the other customers, so you decided to make fun of me, to deride me, to put me down!’ He turned to address the whole room. The fuddled faces of a few lingering lunchers swung lazily round, their slack mouths O-ing.

‘I know who you are!’ The waiter’s rapier finger pointed at Andersen’s companion. ‘Mister-bloody-Hargreaves. Mister big fat fucking publisher! I know you as well, Andersen! You’re just two amongst a whole school of ignorami, of basking dugongs who think they know what makes a jolly fucking good read. Ha!’

Gerard was backing away from the epicentre of this breakdown in restraint, backing towards me, trying to make himself small and insignificant. ‘Let’s get the hell out of here,’ he said over his shoulder. The waiter had found some uneaten seafood on a plate and was starting to chuck it around: ‘flotch!’ a bivalve slapped against the flock wallpaper, ‘gletch!’ a squiggle of calimari wrapped around a lamp bracket.

‘I’ll give you notes from underwater! I’ll give you a bloody lobster quadrille’ — he was doing something unspeakable with the remains of a sea bream — ‘this is the fin of your fucking siècle!’ He was still ranting as we backed out into the street.

‘Jesus Christ.’ Gerard had turned pale, he seemed winded. He leant up against the dirty frontage of a porn vendor. ‘That was awful, awful.’ He shook his head.

‘I don’t know, I thought there was real vigour there. Reminded me of Henry Miller or the young Donleavy.’ Gerard didn’t seem to hear me.

‘Well, I can’t go back to the office now, not after that.’

‘Why not?’

‘I should have done something, I should have intervened. That man was insane.’

‘Gerard, he was just another frustrated writer, it seems the town is full of them.’

‘I don’t want to go back, I feel jinxed. Tell you what, let’s go to my club and have a snifter — would you mind?’ I glanced at my watch, it was almost four-thirty.

‘No, that’s OK, I don’t have to clock-on for another hour.’

As we walked down Shaftesbury Avenue and turned into Haymarket the afternoon air began to thicken about us, condensing into an almost palpable miasma that blanked out the upper storeys of the buildings. The rush-hour traffic was building up around us, Homo Sierra, Homo Astra, Homo Daihatsu, and all the other doomsday sub-species, locking the city into their devolutionary steel chain. Tenebrous people thronged the pavements, pacing out their stay in this pedestrian purgatory.

By the time we reached the imposing neo-classical edifice of Gerard’s club in Pall Mall, I was ready for more than a snifter.

In the club’s great glass-roofed atrium, ancient bishops scuttled to and fro like land crabs. Along the wall free-standing noticeboards covered in green baize were hung with thick curling ribbons of teletext news. Here and there a bishop stood, arthritic claw firmly clamped to the test score.

I had to lead Gerard up the broad, red-carpeted stairs and drop him into a leather armchair, he was still so sunk in shock. I went off to find a steward. A voice came from behind a tall door that stood ajar at the end of the gallery. Before I could hear anything I caught sight of a strip of nylon jacket, black trouser leg and sandy hair. It was the steward and he was saying, ‘Of course, Poor Fellow My Country is the longest novel in the English language, and a damn good novel it is too, right?’ The meaningless interrogative swoop in pitch — an Australian. ‘I’m not trying to do what Xavier Herbert did. What I’m trying to do is invigorate this whole tired tradition, yank it up by the ears. On the surface this is just another vast Bildungsroman about a Perth boy who comes to find fame and fortune in London, but underneath that — ‘

I didn’t wait for more. I footed quietly back along the carpet to where Gerard sat’ and began to pull him to his feet.

‘Whoa! What’re you doing?’

‘Come on, Gerard, we don’t want to stay here — ‘

‘Why?’

‘I’ll explain later — now come on.’

As we paced up St James’s Street I told him about the steward.

‘You’re having me on, it just isn’t possible.’

‘Believe me, Gerard, you were about to meet another attendant author. This one was a bit of a dead end, so I thought you could give him a miss.’

‘So the gag isn’t a gag?’ He shook his big head and his thick fringe swished like a heavy drape against his brow.

‘No, it isn’t a gag, Gerard. Now let’s stroll for a while, until it’s time for me to go to work.’

We re-crossed Piccadilly and plunged into fine-art land. We wandered about for a bit, staring through window after window at gallery girl after gallery girl, each one more of a hot-house flower than the last.

Eventually we turned the corner of Hay Hill and there we were, on Dover Street, almost opposite the job centre that specialises in catering staff. What a coincidence. Gerard was oblivious as we moved towards the knot of dispirited men and women who stood in front. These were the dregs of the profession, the casual waiters who pick up a shift here and a shift there on a daily basis. This particular bunch were the failures’ failures. The ones who hadn’t got an evening shift and were now kicking their heels, having a communal complain before bussing off to the ‘burbs.

Stupid Gerard, he knocked against one shoulder, caromed off another.

‘Oi! Watch your step, mate — can’t you look out where you’re going?’

‘I’m awfully sorry.’

‘ ‘‘Aim offly sorry”.’ They cruelly parodied his posh accent. I freed my arm from his and walked on, letting him fall away from me like the first stage of a rocket. He dropped into an ocean of Babel.

Terrified Gerard, looking from face to face. Old, young, black, white. Their uniform lapels poking out from their overcoat collars; their aprons dangling from beneath the hems of their macs. They sized him up, assessed him. Would he make good copy?

One of them, young and lean, grabbed him by the arm, detaining him. ‘Think we’re of no account, eh? Just a bunch of waiters — is that what you think?’ Gerard tried to speak but couldn’t. His lips were tightly compressed, a red line cancelling out his expression. ‘Perhaps you think we should be proud of our work. Well we are matey, we fucking are. We’ve been watching your kind, noting it all down, putting it in our order pads while you snort in your trough. It may be fragmentary, it may not be prettified, it may not be in the Grand Tradition, but let me tell you,’ and with this the young man hit Gerard, quite lightly but in the face, ‘it’s ours, and we’re about ready to publish!’

Then they all waded in.

I was late for work. Marcel, the maître d’, tut-tutted as I swung open the door of the staff entrance. ‘That’s the third time late this week, Geraldine. Hurry up now, and change — we need to lay up.’ He minced off down the corridor. I did as he said without rancour. Le Caprice may no longer be the best restaurant in London to eat at, but it’s a great place to work. If you’re a waiter, that is.