England, England Page 6

  Parenthesis: (The mystery of the female orgasm, once hunted like some rare species, the narwhal or sea-unicorn. Was it out there, in the impenetrable seas, on the frozen tundra? Women hunted it, then men joined in the chase. The squabble for ownership. Men, for some peculiar reason, seemed to believe it belonged to them, and could never have been found without their help. They wanted it dragged in triumph through the streets. But they had lost it in the first place, so it was right to take it away from them now. A new mystery was necessary, a new protectionism.)

  She recognized the signs. She felt the increasing tenseness of his body, heard the strangulated noises: deep ones, like faecal straining; lighter ones, like trying to free blocked ears on an aeroplane. She offered her own contribution, the dulcet protests and raucous approval of one being sweetly stabbed; and then, in the same time location but in different sectors of the universe, he came and she came.

  After a while, he murmured, ‘Enjoy?’

  It was probably a joke, but it still made him sound like a waiter. Safe behind the ambiguity of words, she replied, ‘I had a good time.’

  He chuckled. ‘Don’t tell me, tell your friends.’

  Where were the swear words when you really needed them? The trouble was, most of them referred to what she’d just done. Either that or they weren’t strong enough. She’d even heard his glib line before, somewhere along her route. Actually, she probably would: she would tell, though doubtless not in the way he imagined. A little about this night, and this partner; but more about the lilting, lifting, soaring, floating, sweet fucking power of deception.

  THE FINEST TAX-DEDUCTIBLE MINDS were brought in to address the Project’s Co-ordinating Committee. The French intellectual was a slight, neat figure in an English tweed jacket half a size too big for him; with it he wore a pale blue button-down shirt of American cotton, an Italian tie of flamboyant restraint, international charcoal wool trousers, and a pair of tasselled French loafers. A round face tanned by several generations of desk lamps; rimless glasses; receding hair cut close against the skull. He carried no briefcase and hid no notes in the cupped palm. But with a few suave gestures he drew doves from his sleeve and a line of flags from his mouth. Pascal led to Saussure via Laurence Sterne; Rousseau to Baudrillard via Edgar Allan Poe, the Marquis de Sade, Jerry Lewis, Dexter Gordon, Bernard Hinault and the early work of Anne Sylvestre; Lévi-Strauss led to Lévi-Strauss.

  ‘What is fundamental,’ he announced, once the coloured scarves had floated to the ground and the doves had perched, ’what is fundamental is to understand that your great Project – and we in France are happy to salute the grands projets of others – is profoundly modern. We in our country have a certain idea of le patrimoine, and you in your country have a certain idea of ’Eritage. We are not here talking of such concepts, that is to say we are not making direct reference, although of course in our intertextual world such reference, however ironic, is of course implicit and inevitable. I hope we all understand that there is no such thing as a reference-free zone. But that is by the by, as you say.

  ‘No, we are talking of something profoundly modern. It is well established – and indeed it has been incontrovertibly proven by many of those I have earlier cited – that nowadays we prefer the replica to the original. We prefer the reproduction of the work of art to the work of art itself, the perfect sound and solitude of the compact disc to the symphony concert in the company of a thousand victims of throat complaints, the book on tape to the book on the lap. If you are to visit the Bayeux Tapestry in my country, you will find that in order to reach the original work of the eleventh century, you must first pass by a full-length replica produced by modern techniques; here there is a documentary exposition which situates the work of art for the visitor, the pilgrim as it were. Now, I have it on authority that the number of visitor minutes spent in front of the replica exceeds by any manner of calculation the number of visitor minutes spent in front of the original.

  ‘When such discoveries were first made, there were certain old-fashioned people who expressed disappointment, even shame. It was like the discovery that masturbation with pornographic material is more fun than sex. Quelle horreur! Those Barbarians are within the gates once more, they cried, the fabric of our society is being undermined. But this is not the case. It is important to understand that in the modern world we prefer the replica to the original because it gives us the greater frisson. I leave that word in French because I think you understand it well that way.

  ‘Now, the question to be asked is, why is it that we prefer the replica to the original? Why does it give us the greater frisson? To understand this, we must understand and confront our insecurity, our existential indecision, the profound atavistic fear we experience when we are face to face with the original. We have nowhere to hide when we are presented with an alternative reality to our own, a reality which appears more powerful and therefore threatens us. You are familiar I am sure with the work of Viollet-Le-Duc, who in the early part of the nineteenth century was charged with rescuing many of the crumbling chateaux and forteresses of my country. There have traditionally been two ways of looking at his work: first, that he was seeking as far as possible to save the old stones from total destruction and disappearance, that he was conserving them as best he could; second, that he was attempting something much more difficult – to re-create the edifice such as it had been when originally built – a task of the imagination which some judge successful and others the contrary. But there is a third way of approaching the matter, and it is this: Viollet-Le-Duc was seeking to abolish the reality of those old edifices. Faced with the rivalization of reality, with a reality stronger and more profound than that of his own time, he had no choice, out of existential terror and the human instinct for self-preservation, except to destroy the original!

  ‘Permit me to cite one of my fellow-countrymen, one of those old soixante-huitards of the last century whose errors many of us find so instructive, so fruitful. “All that was once directly lived,” he wrote, “has become mere representation.” A profound truth, even if conceived in profound error. For he intended it, astonishingly, as criticism, not praise. To cite him further: “Beyond a legacy of old books and old buildings, still of some significance but destined to continual reduction, there remains nothing, in culture or in nature, which has not been transformed, and polluted, according to the means and interests of modern industry.”

  ‘You see how the mind may proceed so far and then lose courage? And how we may locate that loss of courage in the movement, the degeneration, from a verb of neutral description, “transform,” into one of ethical disapproval, “pollute.” He understood, this old thinker, that we live in the world of the spectacle, but sentimentalism and a certain political recidivism made him fear his own vision. I would prefer to advance his thought in the following way. Once there was only the world, directly lived. Now there is the representation – let me fracture that word, the re-presentation – of the world. It is not a substitute for that plain and primitive world, but an enhancement and enrichment, an ironization and summation of that world. This is where we live today. A monochrome world has become Technicolor, a single croaking speaker has become wraparound sound. Is this our loss? No, it is our conquest, our victory.

  ‘In conclusion, let me state that the world of the third millennium is inevitably, is ineradicably modern, and that it is our intellectual duty to submit to that modernity, and to dismiss as sentimental and inherently fraudulent all yearnings for what is dubiously termed the “original.” We must demand the replica, since the reality, the truth, the authenticity of the replica is the one we can possess, colonize, reorder, find jouissance in, and, finally, if and when we decide, it is the reality which, since it is our destiny, we may meet, confront, and destroy.

  ‘Gentlemen and ladies, I congratulate you, for your enterprise is profoundly modern. I wish you the courage of that modernity. Ignorant critics will no doubt assert that you are merely attempting to re-create Olde Englande, an expre
ssion whose feminine endings are of particular interest to me, but that is another matter. Indeed, if you will permit, it is a joke. I say to you, in conclusion, that your Project must be very Olde, because then it will be truly novel and it will be modern! Gentlemen and ladies, I salute you!’

  A Pitco limousine took the French intellectual to central London, where he spent part of his fee on waders from Farlow, flies from House of Hardy, and aged Caerphilly from Paxton and Whitfield. Then he departed, still without notes, via Frankfurt, to his next conference.

  THERE WERE MANY different opinions about Sir Jack Pitman, few of them compatible. Was he villain and bully, or born leader and force of nature? Inevitable and gross consequence of the free-market system, or a driven individual who nevertheless kept in touch with his essential humanity? Some ascribed to him a deep, instinctive intelligence which gave him equal feel for the tidal fluctuations of the market and the susceptibilities of those he dealt with; others found him a brute and unreflecting junction between money, ego, and lack of conscience. Some had watched him put calls on hold while he proudly showed off his collection of Pratt ware; others had taken calls from him in one of his favourite negotiating positions, athwart his porphyry toilet, and heard their impertinences treated to ripostes of colonic wrath. Why such conflicting judgments? Naturally, there were divergent explanations. Some thought Sir Jack simply too big, too multi-faceted a being for lesser mortals, often of an envious aspect, to fully grasp; others suspected that a tactical withholding, which deprived the scrutineer of key or consistent evidence, lay behind his technique of dominance.

  The same duality afflicted those who examined his business dealings. Either: he was a chancer, a gambler, a financial illusionist who for that brief and necessary moment convinced you that the money was real and before your eyes; he exploited every laxness of the regulatory system; he robbed Peter to pay Paul; he was a mad dog, digging each new hole to use the soil for filling in the hole he had just left behind him; he was, in the still-echoing words of an Inspector from the Department of Trade and Industry, ‘unfit to run a whelk-stall.’ Or: he was a dynamic merchant venturer whose success and energy naturally incited malice and rumour among those who thought business was best transacted between small, dynastic firms playing by the venerable rules of cricket; he was an archetypal transnational entrepreneur working in the modern global market, who understandably minimized his tax liabilities – how else could you hope to remain competitive? Either: look at the way he used Sir Charles Enright to gain entrée to the City, fawned on him, flattered him, then turned round and chewed him up, dumping him from the board the moment Charles had his first heart attack. Or: Charlie was one of the old school, decent enough but frankly a bit off the pace, the firm was due for a damn good shake-up, the pension offer was more than generous, and did you know Sir Jack put Charlie’s youngest through school at his own expense? Either: no-one who worked for him ever had a bad thing to say about him. Or: you have to admit Pitman’s always been a master of the gagging writ and the secrecy clause.

  Even something as seemingly unambiguous as the twenty-four storey, steel-and-glass, beech-and-ash architectural fact of Pitman House yielded to variant readings. Was its location – in an enterprise zone reclaimed from green belt to the north-west of London – a canny piece of cost-cutting, or an indication that Sir Jack was bollock-scared of mixing it with the City’s heavy hitters? Was the hiring of Slater, Grayson & White a mere kowtow to architectural modishness, or a clever investment? A more basic question was: did Pitman House even belong to Jack Pitman? He may have paid for the building of it, but there were stories that the last blip of recession had caught him badly overstretched and he’d had to go cap in hand to a French bank for a sale and leaseback. But even if this were true, you could take it one of two ways: either Pitco was undercapitalized or Sir Jack was one step ahead of the game as usual, and aware that tying up capital in the wasting asset of flagship offices was what mugs did.

  Even those who loathed the owner (or lessee) of Pitman House agreed that he was good at getting things done. Or at least, good at getting others to get things done. Here he stood, beneath his chandelier, turning slightly to different members of his Co-ordinating Committee, tossing out orders. Profilers, especially those from his own newspapers, frequently mentioned how light on his feet he was for such a big man, and Sir Jack was known to profess an unfulfilled desire to learn the tango. He also, at such moments, compared himself to a gun-slinger, turning to outdraw the next uppity young pup on the block. Or might he rather be a lion-tamer snapping his whip at a semi-circle of brawling cubs?

  Martha, sceptically impressed, now watched him instruct his Concept Developer. ‘Jeffrey, survey please. Top fifty characteristics associated with the word England among prospective purchasers of Quality Leisure. Serious targeting. I don’t want to hear about kids and their favourite bands.’

  ‘Domestic? Europe? Worldwide, Sir Jack?’

  ‘Jeffrey, you know me. Worldwide. Top dollar. Long yen. Poll the Martians as long as they’ve got the price of the entrance ticket.’ He waited for the appreciative laughter to subside. ‘Dr Max, I want you to find out how much people know.’

  He was turning again, middle finger notionally tapping holster, when Dr Max cleared his throat. The Official Historian was a recent appointment, and this was Martha’s first sight of him: trim, tweedy, bow-tied, and languidly pert. ‘Might you be a little more spe–cific, Sir Jack?’

  There was a heavy pause before Sir Jack rephrased his command. ‘What they know – find it out.’

  ‘Would that be, well, Do–mestic, Europe, or Worldwide?’

  ‘Domestic. What Domestic doesn’t know the Rest of the World won’t be shagged to find out.’

  ‘If you don’t mind my saying so, Sir Jack,’ – though Martha could already tell from their employer’s melodramatic frown that, yes, he minded very much – ‘it seems rather a b–road b–rief.’

  ‘That is why you receive a rather broad salary cheque. Jeff, hold Dr Max’s hand, will you? Now, Marco, you are going to have to live up to your name.’ The Project Manager knew enough to wait for Sir Jack’s meaning. Sir Jack chuckled before he made the hit: ‘Marco Polo.’

  Again, the Project Manager, as if instructing Dr Max, replied with no more than a blue-eyed, cheeky-yet-subservient gaze. Sir Jack then moved across to what he called his Battle Table, thus announcing a new phase of the meeting. With a mere inward flex of a fleshy hand, he gathered his troops around him. Martha was closest, and he laid fingers on her shoulder.

  ‘We are not talking theme park,’ he began. ‘We are not talking heritage centre. We are not talking Disneyland, World’s Fair, Festival of Britain, Legoland, or Pare Asterix. Colonial Williamsburg? Excuse me – a couple of old-style turkeys roosting on a picket fence while out-of-work actors serve gruel in pewter plates and let you pay by credit-card. No, gentlemen – I speak metaphorically, you understand, since in my grammar the masculine embraces the feminine, as I seem to be doing Miss Cochrane – gentlemen, we are talking quantum leap. We are not seeking two-penny tourists. It is world-boggling time. We shall offer far more than words such as Entertainment can possibly imply; even the phrase Quality Leisure, proud though I am of it, perhaps, in the long run, falls short. We are offering the thing itself. Der Ding an sich. You are looking doubtful, Mark?’

  ‘Only in the sense, Sir Jack, that as I understood it from our French amigo the other day, isn’t it … I mean, his thing about preferring the replica to the original. Isn’t that what we’re up to?’

  ‘God, Mark, there are times when you make me feel less than English, though England is the air I live and breathe.’

  ‘You mean’ – Mark struggled with some schoolroom memories – ‘something like we can approach the real thing only by means of the replica. Sort of, Plato?’ he added, for himself as much as in appeal to the others.

  ‘Warmer, Marky-Mark, tootsies getting toastier. Can I perhaps help you the final few yards down the track? Let
me try. You like the countryside, Mark?’

  ‘Sure. Yes. I like it. I like it enough. That’s to say, I like driving through it.’

  ‘I was in the countryside quite recently. In the countryside, I stress that. I do not wish to pull rank, but the point of the countryside is not to go through it but to be in it. I make this point every year when I address the Ramblers’ Association. Even so, Mark, when you go through it, presumably, in your modest, inattentive way, you like the way it looks?’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Project Manager, ‘I like the way it looks.’

  ‘And you like it, I suppose, because you think it an example of Nature?’

  ‘You could put it that way.’ Mark wouldn’t have done so himself, but he knew he was now enlisted in his employer’s more bullying version of the Socratic dialogue.

  ‘And Nature made the countryside as Man made the cities?’

  ‘More or less, yes.’

  ‘More or less no, Mark. I stood on a hill the other day and looked down an undulating field past a copse towards a river and as I did so a pheasant stirred beneath my feet. You, as a person passing through, would no doubt have assumed that Dame Nature was going about her eternal business. I knew better, Mark. The hill was an Iron Age burial mound, the undulating field a vestige of Saxon agriculture, the copse was a copse only because a thousand other trees had been cut down, the river was a canal, and the pheasant had been hand-reared by a gamekeeper. We change it all, Mark, the trees, the crops, the animals. And now, follow me further. That lake you discern on the horizon is a reservoir, but when it has been established a few years, when fish swim in it and migrating birds make it a port of call, when the treeline has adjusted itself and little boats ply their picturesque way up and down it, when these things happen it becomes, triumphantly, a lake, don’t you see? It becomes the thing itself.’