‘You look incredible,’ I said.
‘That’s how I feel,’ she said. ‘You look tired.’
‘That’s not how I feel.’
We smiled opaquely at each other. We were circling. Few people can be more distant than estranged intimates.
‘How’s your week been?’ I said.
Before she could answer, Guido was back to make a ritual presentation of her Campari and soda, a large ruby for the Queen of Sheba. He fussed and Jan graciously accepted his fussing.
‘My week?’ she said, as Guido left. ‘Unbelievable. You know we closed last night?’
‘Sorry?’
‘The restaurant. We closed down last night. For renovations We’re getting far more business than we can handle. We’re extending the restaurant into the coffee-lounge. Even then things’ll be tight.’
I didn’t mention that all of this was a surprise to me, because perhaps that was my fault. If you’ve been down in a diving-bell for over a month, you can’t expect to keep up with the news. But her failure even to hint at it, previously, suggested to me not accident but deliberate policy.
‘I would’ve thought,’ I said, ‘that the obvious night to close down would be a Saturday. This way, you’re losing the two best nights of the week.’
‘Oh, we can afford it. It’s been going unbelievably well. The reason for closing Thursday. You know what it is? We wanted to prepare the place for one last thrash before the decorators move in. Tomorrow night we’re throwing a party. All the people who’ve helped us and some of our regulars. We’re making the biggest Boeuf Bourgignon in the world. It’ll be some night. You must come.’
Her invitation had all the intimacy of a business-card.
‘What about you?’ she said.
She leant towards her Campari, as if she needed a prop, and I noticed a sudden stillness in her. She was staring at the table. The defencelessness of her posture gave me a glimpse of the vulnerable woman behind the glamour, renewed the intensity of my feelings for her in an instant. Jan had once said to me after making love, ‘You make me frightened of me.’ I had known what she meant, for I felt the same way. Those moments we had shared defied pragmatism and were therefore difficult to accommodate in the light of day. I had a feeling that was difficult to accommodate now. I would have rather we had each other on the metal-topped table than go through these charades. She glanced up and we were sharing a look directly for the first time since we had met tonight. Our eyes were a mutual confession: we are a joint compulsion. The acknowledgement made her defensive again. She looked away.
‘What about you?’ she said. ‘Have you sorted things out?’
‘I’m trying.’
‘Oh, not still that.’
‘Still that.’
She lifted her drink and stared at it and sipped and looked round the room. She had moved away from the admission our eyes had made. She had remembered there were conditions to it I still hadn’t met.
‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘Meantime, some of us have to live.’
‘I suppose we’re all trying to do that.’
‘I mean live in the daily world. You’re so unrealistic.’
I found that an interesting observation. I respected the difference of Jan’s life, the validity of her personal preoccupations. But I wasn’t quite prepared to concede that running a successful restaurant made you expert in the nature of reality.
‘The world moves on, Jack,’ she said.
‘Aye. But where to? That’s what’s worrying me.’
She took another sip of her drink and smiled at the passing Guido and became a busy, successful woman again. The passionate look we had exchanged might have been between an attractive scuffler in the street and a sophisticated woman, while her Daimler was stopped briefly at the lights. She opened a menu.
‘Nice Campari,’ she said.
Any evening has its motifs. Those were ours, evasive mannerisms and an impulse to strip each other in the restaurant. During the meal, we tried to talk seriously about our lives but the conversation remained somehow oblique. We seemed incapable of meeting in no-man’s-land. We just kept checking the other’s position and reinforcing our own. We were outmanoeuvring each other so effectively, I wondered if we would ever connect.
I asked, ‘How’s Betsy doing?’
‘Better than you would like,’ Jan replied.
Jan said, ‘You seem to have been talking a lot to Morag Harkness.’
I said, ‘That’s because she answers the phone.’
I said. ‘Barry Murdoch been around much?’
‘Barry Murdoch’s always around,’ Jan said. ‘So what? I know some people who aren’t.’
‘You’re a bit too vehement about Anna,’Jan said. ‘You sure you haven’t got a thing for her?’
‘I have,’ I said. ‘It’s called a Gatling gun.’
And so it went on through the jolly meal, a cross between a minuet and a sword dance, where you had to watch where you stepped in case you found you were bleeding. What I think we were doing, really, was devoting an entire evening to one of those long, askance looks lovers sometimes give each other in their minds, that could roughly translate into what-the-hell-am-I-doing-with-this-one? Our lack of contact had perhaps emphasised to each the difference of the other. Sometimes Jan would look at me as at something surprisingly quaint, as if she were thinking, ‘I never noticed that you had two noses before’. Sometimes, for sure, I must have been doing the same.
What Jan was realising about me, I suppose, was that my relationship with her hadn’t smoothed my edges as much as she had hoped. I could order Pinot Grigio with the food, right enough, but while we drank it I still talked about the streets and swore occasionally. I might mention Shakespeare’s name but it might well be linked with that of Meece Rooney or Frankie White. That had always bothered Jan about me. I refused to pigeonhole my nature into separate social identities. I was the same person whatever room I entered. I would make adjustments out of consideration and politeness, like trying not to swear in front of someone I knew it would offend or not using a big word to someone I thought wouldn’t understand it. But there would be no pretence of being who I wasn’t.
Jan and I had argued about that a lot. Once I put the question to Tom Docherty when we were drinking. I didn’t connect it with Jan. I just posed it as a generality. Tom related it to writing, as he does with a lot of things.
Another of the shorter sayings of Chairman Tom: ‘It’s like literary criticism. It’s nearly all about register. There’s a lot of po-faced crap that gets highly praised because of its tone of voice. “I’m serious, I’m cultured,” it’s telling you all the time. Bollocks. The serious and the cultured don’t even have to mention the fact. It’s coming out their pores already. They just do it, they just create. Often laughing and swearing as they go along. Same with people. “There are things you say, things you don’t say, times to say it, and times not.” Some more bollocks. The idea of register in language is mainly just fences shutting out most of the reality we should all be sharing. There’s only one serious human register and it accommodates everybody: truth, in the most generous form you can find it.’
That would do me. Maybe that was why I was a policeman who read philosophy. I could understand both Albert Camus and Matt Mason. I had better. They were both telling me important things about the way we live. They were both part of the same world. It was my world, too. It had to be. There was only the one world to choose from.
What I was realising about Jan, I suppose, was how alien this attitude was to her. There was a time she had been more tolerant of the wind off the streets I had often brought into her life. But lately she seemed to be waiting more and more impatiently for me to close the door on its blowing. That wouldn’t happen. Tonight she seemed to understand that. She listened with a weary silence to the things that were concerning me. So I stopped talking about them.