Collected Columns

by Michael Frayn

  And when will you call me back? Not, as I might have guessed, when you happen to feel like it. Not when your children have grown up and left home. You will do it as soon as you can.

  But when precisely will that be, as soon as you can? It will be when I am out, of course. So you won’t be greeted by my usual curt ‘Hello?’ You will get my answering machine. You in your turn will be treated to a torrent of eloquence, a wealth of helpful suggestions about how to proceed. You will be astonished and delighted by my proposal to call you back.

  If you’re still listening at that point. Because you may have put the phone down by then, which is what a lot of my callers seem to do. So they miss all the later parts of the message, when I’m absolutely certain I’m talking to myself, in which I agonise about my terrible sense of isolation, in spite of all my efforts to communicate, and ask myself whether it’s something about my manner that puts people off. Should I try to explain the workings of the answering machine more fully? Be more heartbroken about my inability to take your call?

  Or should I just go beep, and to hell with it?

  (1994)

  Tête-à-tête-à-tête

  ‘What do you feel about the passing of the shirt tail?’ asked my wife suddenly the other day, in a thoughtful tone of voice. If only I’d had the presence of mind to reply:

  ‘I personally – and of course you will understand that I am speaking now purely as an individual – I personally believe that the passing of the shirt tail is something deeply symptomatic of the social crisis of our times – and one to which all too little attention has been paid by the Press and the public alike.’

  If I’d managed to say that, we should at last have had the makings of a television conversation in our own home. We should have shown that it was possible for ordinary people to emancipate themselves from the old-fashioned private conversation, intended merely as a utilitarian form of communication between those taking part, and to aspire to the new public conversation, held exclusively in order to be overheard. To take an analogy from another art, we should have moved in one step from singing in the bath to the mad scene from Lucia di Lammermoor. If not farther.

  Well, it will come, it will come. And when it does, my wife can scarcely help but reply:

  ‘I think I’m right in saying, am I not, that to you a shirt which comes untucked from the top of your trousers is a very real symbol of the chaos and violence eternally present beneath the surface of life?’

  Self: Yes, I think this symbolism has been a constant theme in my work over the last 10 years – almost an obsession. To me the shirt that comes untucked is the eternal artist and rebel – the Rimbaud, the Raskolnikov – if you like, the Wild One on the beach at Margate – who breaks loose from surroundings he finds intolerably restrictive, and in so doing shows up the hollow pretensions of the trousers from which he has escaped.

  Wife: This is of course, is it not, a theme which has fascinated and inspired artists since the invention of the trouser? But what I think many people may not realise is that, paradoxically, in your personal life you yourself have made – and indeed to my knowledge still make – the most enormous, one might almost say the most gigantic, efforts to keep your own shirt tucked in.

  Self: I think this ambivalence, this one might almost say dichotomy, is very central, isn’t it, is very seminal, to what I think it was C. S. Lewis would have called the noumenon, or as Jung so expressively put it, the mandala. Or, as we know it in our own lives, the shirt tail.

  Wife: I remember – with enormous pleasure, if I may say so – the wonderful exhibition you made of yourself with an untucked shirt at Edinburgh in 1961. I hope we shall have a chance to see that performance repeated some time in the very near future.

  Self: Thank you. And now, to change the subject. It’s a far cry from shirt tails to bath-water, but all the same, it’s bath-water that we’re going to talk about now. I think we were all shocked to hear the news today that the bath belonging to our good friends Horace and Doris Morris had overflowed. Now, I believe you were in the area recently, shortly before the flooding occurred. Can you say anything which would help me to evaluate the scale of disaster?

  Wife: Well, the bathroom is about 15 ft long by 10 ft wide, with important towel-drying installations on the south side and dense clumps of toothbrush on the north. But I should imagine that the area which was chiefly affected was the floor, in which as I remember it was comparatively low-lying.

  Self: As one who knows the Morrises intimately, how do you think they will react to the situation?

  Wife: Well, knowing them as I do, and indeed as you do, I believe they will pull together – make a really tremendous united effort to get the damage repaired and put their bathroom back into commission as soon as possible.

  Self: Well, we wish them luck. From bath-water it’s but a short step to another liquid – tea. I’m going to pass you a cup of tea. Here it is – a cup of tea. Just an ordinary cup, with tea inside it. Now I want you to look at this cup of tea, at this perfectly ordinary cup, with this perfectly ordinary tea inside it, and tell me if you would like sugar in it.

  Wife: Just one lump, please, of perfectly ordinary sugar. And from a lump of sugar we move many thousands of miles northwards, from the sugar plantations of Trinidad to these rather less sunny climes – to a lump in the throat here at home. To the lump in the throat, to be precise, without which I cannot recall the time when I was single.

  Self: Perhaps I should just interrupt here, if I may, to make it clear that you are now married.

  Wife: That is correct.

  Self: And what I think is quite interesting to note – and I believe this is something you are too modest to mention – you are in fact married to me.

  Wife: Yes, I think that’s a point worth making. Anyway, as I was saying, I cannot recall without emotion the time when I was single, and had no one with whom to hold a conversation and share my inmost thoughts.

  Self: I know this is a painful question, and believe me, I would not ask it if I did not have to in order to get the answer I need to round off this unscripted, spontaneous discussion. What did you do for conversation in those days?

  Wife: I just gazed sadly into the teleprompter and talked to myself.

  Self: Mrs Frayn – thank you.

  (1964)

  That having been said

  I’ve been visiting the local Old Tropes Home.

  I’m very concerned about what happens to expressions and metaphors in their old age. They start out in life so fresh and colourful, so full of humour, so eager to please. They’re worked day in and day out over the years until they’re exhausted – then they’re brutally shoved to one side to make room for younger and more energetic expressions. I believe that they shouldn’t have to eke out their last few years of life on the streets, taking any work they can get, spurned and abused. They should be looked after among their own kind in quiet and dignified surroundings.

  In the place I’ve found the residents were obviously made very comfortable. Comfortable with and about everything, even the most appalling ideas and decisions. In fact they seemed particularly comfortable about Attila the Hun. There was a statue of him, placed somewhat to the left of the building, so that almost everything inside was somewhat to the right of him.

  The Matron who showed me round spoke very reassuringly. ‘I understand where you’re coming from,’ she said. ‘So let me just bring you up to speed. We’re very definitely state of the art here, and I don’t need to tell you which art that is – it’s the art of living. And if you’re up at the sharp end then you’ve got to get your act together and show your street cred. That having been said, what gets up my nose is that people can’t get their heads around this. I mean, what are we talking?’

  I said it sounded to me like some dialect of English.

  ‘We’re talking serious money,’ she said. ‘We’re talking megabucks. Because what are we looking at here?’

  So far as I could see it seemed to be the ancient flag
pole outside the window up which things were run to see if anyone saluted them.

  ‘We’re looking at ten grand a day,’ she said. ‘Ten K – and I do mean K. Because, make no mistake, the sky’s the limit. That said, you pays your money and you takes your pick.’

  The social range of the residents was wide. As she showed me round the Matron pointed out both the Poor Man, to whom many things here were said to belong, curiously enough, and the Thinking Man, who apparently owned much of the rest. But everyone there seemed to be terribly good value. Indeed, they were all getting increasingly better value. Because things in the Home don’t just get increasingly whatever, or more whatever. They get increasingly more whatever it is. There seems to be an acceleration involved here which bears the fingerprints of the pace of modern living.

  Some of the residents were in poor shape. Things had cost them an arm and a leg – often as a result of prices going through the roof, and the roof falling in, so that the bottom had dropped out of the market. Some of them looked as if they’d had a coach and horses driven through them.

  A very decrepit old trope called Arguably buttonholed me in the corridor. ‘In the last twenty years or so,’ he told me, ‘I have become arguably the most common word in the English language. I have arguably been responsible for making more unconfirmed statements possible than ever before in human history, and I’ve arguably saved writers and speakers more mental effort than the word processor and the dictating machine combined.’

  He thought for a little, though not very hard.

  ‘Then again,’ he said, ‘equally arguably I haven’t.’

  Couples are not separated in the Home. You can see them wandering along the corridors together, hand in hand, touchingly devoted. This Day and Age – they’re still as much in love as ever. If you see First you’re bound to see Foremost. Sick and Tired were being wheeled along in a double bathchair by Hale and Hearty. Care and Attention were being utterly devoted to all the Hopes and Fears. Though one Fear had left the family group and gone off with Trepidation. Now they’ve grown so alike that a lot of people can’t tell them apart.

  The old tropes are a remarkably lively lot, considering. ‘We have sex a great deal,’ one of them told me. I expressed surprise. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘we have it pretty well non-stop. Look through this keyhole. You see? People having every single variant of sex listed in the OED! Everything from (1) either of the two divisions of organic beings distinguished as male and female respectively, through to (2) quality in respect of being male or female – even (3) the distinction between male and female in general’!

  My informant thumbed through a greasy copy of the OED. ‘It doesn’t stop there, either,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘The OED says that this third usage is now often associated with a more explicit notion.’ He licked his lips and bent closer towards me as he read it out. ‘The sum of those differences in the structure and function of the reproductive organs on the grounds of which beings are distinguished as male and female, and of the other physiological differences consequent on these.’

  These torrid relationships and steamy romances raise the temperature and humidity of the Home so that everyone gets a little hot under the collar. The clouds of vapour given off by all this may be the mysterious yonks which so many people haven’t seen each other for.

  To take the inmates’ minds off sex there is a playing-field attached to the Home, and great efforts are made to ensure that it is a level one – though people are apparently always moving the goalposts. Efforts to organise a piss-up in the local brewery have not yet been successful. The local vicar sometimes invites inmates to the original vicarage tea-party. No one ever goes, though, because everything in the Home has been made to look like it already, even the steamiest sessions of distinction between male and female.

  In the dining-room residents were making a meal of it – and that was just for starters. Some of the dishes on the menu were out of this world. In fact they were to die for, and if they weren’t to die for they were the kind of thing you’d kill to get your hands on. So, one way or another, by the end of meals a fair number of the residents tend to be out of this world as well.

  In other words, they’d had their chips, which was just as well, because when the chips are down there’s no such thing as a free lunch. It’s not a picnic here, after all – naturally enough, since some of the inhabitants are two sandwiches short of one. In the circumstances I was not surprised to be told that most of them were quite frankly out to lunch.

  The Home is organised along military lines. I talked to inmates who were proud to belong to the Gin and Tonic Brigade and the Blue Rinse Brigade. The Green Welly Brigade have a reputation for profligacy with the brigade colours – they are always giving things a bit of welly.

  I could hear the most alarming noises of protest in the background, but the Matron explained that this was coming from the twentieth century, into which various things were being dragged kicking and screaming, entirely for their own benefit.

  I asked why some of the residents were being made to stand in silence with their faces to the wall. The Matron said that they were members of the chattering classes – people who had. had the temerity to talk about politics and other public matters that concerned them. She also pointed out a group of luvvies – actors and actresses who had ludicrously attempted to vary their slothful round of unemployment and awards ceremonies with some kind, of pretence at seriousness. They were being put down hard and sent up rotten.

  In some places there was scarcely room to swing a cat – though this was impossible to check because, as the Matron explained, the cat was in hell, and it didn’t have much chance of surviving. About as much as a snowball, she thought. Though, if the snowball managed to survive until hell froze over it would find itself in a whole new ballgame.

  They did have a handcart for going to hell in, said the Matron, if I wanted to go down that particular road, and she wished me the best of British, But before we could get the ball rolling all hell broke loose.

  An inmate in bell-bottomed trousers staggered up and flung his money around. He was not, he explained, flinging his money around like a drunken sailor – he was the drunken sailor like whom everybody else flung their money around. Very difficult to know, in that case, I suggested, how he himself was flinging his money around. Was it, I asked, like money was going out of fashion? Not at all, he replied, it was like there was no tomorrow.

  It was plainly crunch time, and the Matron cracked down hard, though she papered over the cracks as best she could. But no way could the crackdown be made to bite unless it was given teeth.

  As I left I met a new arrival, still looking relatively fresh-faced. ‘Political Correctness,’ he introduced himself. ‘I feel I’m a bit past my sell-by date. And since the whole idea of a sell-by date has gone down the tubes itself some time ago, like the tubes it went down, I thought I’d join it in here, and we could all pop our clogs together.’

  Because that said, what’s it all about, at the end of the day? What’s the bottom line? Let me spell it out to you in words of one syllable – the bottom line is this.

  (1994)

  Through the wilderness

  It is nice now that all you boys have got cars of your own (said Mother). You know how much it means to me when the three of you drive down to see me like this, and we can all have a good old chatter together.

  John: That’s right, Mother. So, as I was saying, Howard, I came down today through Wroxtead and Sudstow.

  Howard: Really? I always come out through Dorris Hill and West Hatcham.

  Ralph: I find I tend to turn off at the traffic lights in Manor Park Road myself and follow the 43 bus route through to the White Hart at Broylesden.

  Mother: Ralph always was the adventurous one.

  John: Last time I tried forking right just past the police station in Broylesden High Street. I wasn’t very impressed with it as a route, though.

  Howard: Weren’t you? That’s interesting. I’ve occasionally tried c
utting through the Broylesden Heath Estate. Then you can either go along Mottram Road South or Creese End Broadway. I think it’s handy to have the choice.

  Ralph: Of course, much the prettiest way for my money is to carry on into Hangmore and go down past the pickles factory in Sunnydeep Lane.

  Mother: Your father and I once saw Lloyd George going down Sunnydeep Lane in a wheelbarrow …

  Howard: Did you, Mother? I’m not very keen on the Sunnydeep Lane way personally. I’m a great believer in turning up Hangmore Hill and going round by the pre-fabs on the Common.

  Ralph: Yes, yes, there’s something to be said for that, too. What was the traffic like in Sudstow, then, John?

  John: Getting a bit sticky.

  Howard: Yes, it was getting a bit sticky in Broylesden. How was it in Dorris Hill, Ralph?

  Ralph: Sticky, pretty sticky.

  Mother: The traffic’s terrible round here now. There was a most frightful accident yesterday just outside when …

  Howard: Oh, you’re bound to get them in traffic like this. Bound to.

  Ralph: Where did you strike the traffic in Sudstow, then, John?

  John: At the lights by the railway bridge. Do you know where I mean?

  Ralph: Just by that dance hall where they had the trouble?

  John: No, no. Next to the neon sign advertising mattresses.

  Howard: Oh, you mean by the caravan depot? Just past Acme Motors?

  John: Acme Motors? You’re getting mixed up with Heaslam Road, Surley.

  Howard: I’m pretty sure I’m not, you know.

  John: I think you are, you know.

  Howard: I don’t think I am, you know.

  John: Anyway, that’s where I struck the traffic.

  Ralph: I had a strange experience the other day.

  John: Oh, really?

  Ralph: I turned left at the lights in Broylesden High Street and cut down round the back of Coalpit Road. Thought I’d come out by the Wemblemore Palais. But what do you think happened? I came out by a new parade of shops, and I thought, hello, this must be Old Hangmore. Then I passed an Odeon –