‘When you say you’re trying to sort it out,’ says Andrew, ‘do you mean you’re trying to stop it?’
‘No,’ David says meekly. ‘I’m trying to start it.’
The first traces of doubt are visible on Andrew’s face now.
‘How d’you mean?’
‘Oh, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you another time.’
‘Right.’
There is a long, long silence.
‘Who wants to eat?’ Cam says.
Here is a list of the people that Andrew and David have hitherto regarded as talentless, overrated, or simply wankers: Oasis, the Stones, Paul McCartney, John Lennon, Robbie Williams, Kingsley Amis, Martin Amis, Evelyn Waugh, Auberon Waugh, Salman Rushdie, Jeffrey Archer, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, William Shakespeare (although to be fair they despise the comedies and some of the history plays only), Charles Dickens, E. M. Forster, Daniel Day-Lewis, the Monty Python team, Gore Vidal, John Updike, Thomas Harris, Gabriel García Márquez, Milan Kundera, Damien Hirst, Tracey Emin, Melvyn Bragg, Dennis Bergkamp, David Beckham, Ryan Giggs, Sam Mendes, Anthony Burgess, Virginia Woolf, Michael Nyman, Philip Glass, Steven Spielberg, Leonardo DiCaprio, Ted Hughes, Mark Hughes, Sylvia Plath, Stevie Smith, Maggie Smith, the Smiths, Alan Ayckbourn, Harold Pinter, David Mamet, Tom Stoppard, of course, all other contemporary playwrights, Garrison Keillor, Sue Lawley, James Naughtie, Jeremy Paxman, Carole King, James Taylor, Kenneth Branagh, Van Morrison, Jim Morrison, Courtney Love, Courteney Cox and the entire cast of Friends, Ben Elton, Stephen Fry, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and all contemporary male tennis players, Monica Seles and all female tennis players throughout history, Pele, Maradona, Linford Christie, Maurice Greene (‘How can a sprinter who’s faster than anyone else be overrated?’ I asked once, despairingly, but I received no satisfactory reply), T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, Gilbert and Sullivan, Gilbert and George, Ben and Jerry, Powell and Pressburger, Marks and Spencer, the Coen Brothers, Stevie Wonder, Nicole Farhi and anyone who designs fucking suits for a living, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss, Johnny Depp, Stephen Sondheim, Bart Simpson (but not Homer Simpson), Homer, Virgil, Coleridge, Keats and all the Romantic poets, Jane Austen, all the Brontës, all the Kennedys, the people who made the film of Trainspotting, the people who made the film of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Madonna, the Pope, anyone they were at school or college with who is now making a name for themselves in the fields of journalism, broadcasting or the arts, and many, many others, so many others, too many to list here. It is easier, in fact, to write down the people in world history that they both like: Bob Dylan (although not recently), Graham Greene, Quentin Tarantino and Tony Hancock. I can’t remember anyone else ever receiving the double thumbs-up from these two guardians of our culture.
I got sick of hearing why everybody was useless, and ghastly, and talentless, and awful, and how they didn’t deserve anything good that had happened to them, and they completely deserved anything bad that had happened to them, but this evening I long for the old David—I miss him like one might miss a scar, or a wooden leg, something disfiguring but characteristic. You knew where you were with the old David. And I never felt any embarrassment, ever. Weary despair, sure, the occasional nasty taste in the mouth, certainly, flashes of irritation almost constantly, but never any embarrassment. I had become comfortable with his cynicism, and in any case, we’re all cynical now, although it’s only this evening that I recognize this properly. Cynicism is our shared common language, the Esperanto that actually caught on, and though I’m not fluent in it—I like too many things, and I am not envious of enough people—I know enough to get by. And in any case it is not possible to avoid cynicism and the sneer completely. Any conversation about, say, the London mayoral contest, or Demi Moore, or Posh and Becks and Brooklyn, and you are obliged to be sour, simply to prove that you are a fully functioning and reflective metropolitan person.
I no longer understand very much about the man I live with, but I understand enough to know that this evening is almost bound to throw up a decisive moment, a moment where David’s new-found earnestness, his desire to love and understand even the most wayward of God’s creatures, will be met with blank incomprehension. As it turns out, the wayward creature turns out to be the outgoing President of the United States, and it is Cam, not Andrew, who is on the receiving end of David’s terrifying sincerity. We’re talking—as best we can, from a position of almost fathomless ignorance—about the US primaries, and Cam says that she doesn’t really care about who the next president is as long as he keeps his thing in his trousers and doesn’t monster young interns, and David shifts in his seat and eventually wonders, with a patent reluctance, who we are to judge, and Cam laughs at him.
‘I mean it,’ says David. ‘I no longer want to condemn people whose lives I know nothing about.’
‘But… that’s the basis for all conversation!’ says Andrew.
‘I’m tired of it,’ says David. ‘We don’t know anything about him.’
‘We know more than we want to.’
‘What do you know?’ David asks him.
‘We know he puts it about.’
‘Do we? And even if he does, do we know why?’
‘What?’ says Cam. ‘Society is to blame? Or Hillary? I don’t believe this, David.’
‘What don’t you believe?’
‘You’re sticking up for Clinton.’
‘I’m not sticking up for him. I’m just sick of all the poison. The drip drip drip of slagging off and cheap cracks and judgements of people we don’t know and the endless nastiness of it all. It makes me want to have a bath.’
‘Be our guest,’ says Andrew. ‘There’s a clean towel up there.’
‘But Bill Clinton!’ says Cam. ‘I mean, if you can’t be rude about him, who can you be rude about?’
‘I don’t know the facts. You don’t know the facts.’
‘The facts? The most powerful man in the world—the most powerful married man in the world—gets a blow-job off a twenty-something-year-old and lies about it afterwards.’
‘I think he must have been a very troubled and unhappy man,’ says David.
‘I don’t believe this,’ says Andrew. ‘You used to e-mail me filthy Clinton and Lewinsky jokes all the time.’
‘I wish I hadn’t,’ David says with a vehemence that causes visible bafflement on a couple of the faces round the table. We all concentrate very hard on our tricolore.
I venture an entirely positive opinion on our hosts’ newly renovated kitchen, and we are happy for a while, but it clearly occurs to all of us simultaneously that there are very few subjects which offer that kind of harmony, and every now and again one of the three of us slips up, as if we are suffering from cultural Tourette’s. I make a disparaging remark about Jeffrey Archer’s literary ability (a passing observation—not even an observation, more a simile—buried in the middle of an otherwise unexceptionable exchange about a TV programme) and David tells me that I have no conception of how hard it is to write a book. Cam makes a joke about a politician who has recently been jailed for embezzlement, a man who has become a byword for untrustworthiness, and David makes a plea for forgiveness. Andrew has a little sneer about Ginger Spice’s role with the UN and David says it is better to do something than nothing.
In other words, it is impossible: we cannot function properly, and the evening ends in confusion and awkwardness, and very early. There is a consensus in our particular postal district that people like Ginger Spice and Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Archer are beyond the pale, and if someone goes around sticking up for them then that consensus fails, and all is anarchy. Is it possible to want to divorce a man simply because he doesn’t want to be rude about Ginger Spice? I rather fear it might be.
9
The party invitations have been sent out, and most evenings now David and GoodNews lock themselves away in David’s study to finesse their plan of attack. I attempted to use that phrase humorously the other day, but the generals concerned just looked at me blankly—not just because they react to most attempts at humour in that way, but because they really do see this as a military campaign, a crusade in the original, eleventh-century sense. Our neighbours have become infidels, barbarians; GoodNews and David are going to batter their doors down with the heads of the homeless.