by David Nobbs
The waiter took us, as I had known he would, to the table next to the toilets. I didn't protest. It's my natural place in the scheme of things: Alan Calcutt, next to the toilets.
He handed us unfashionably huge menus and also handed me a very serious wine list which would have made the Domesday Book look like a leaflet.
'Bleedin' 'ell, it's expensive,' she said, just as I was making a similar observation to myself in slightly different words.
She studied the menu in silence, her lips moving slightly as she read, and frowning when she came to difficult words, words like darne and galantine, words which were new to her and which I only vaguely understood.
I made my choice, and turned to the wine list. There were more than a hundred clarets, ranging in price from twenty-four pounds to five hundred and twenty.
'Can I see?' she asked.
I handed it to her. She almost buckled under the weight. She turned the pages slowly. Time seemed to stand still. The waiter hovered obtrusively, but did not approach.
'They've got it,' she said. 'The one I like.'
I felt a shiver of fear. I couldn't afford five hundred and twenty pounds. But the reality was possibly even worse.
'They've put it under "rest of the world".' she said. 'That can't be right, cos it's French. Liebfraumilch.'
The waiter approached like gas across a battlefield.
'Madam,' he commanded.
'I'll have the terrine, please,' said Ange, 'and the fillet steak with pepper sauce. What does that come with?'
'On its own, madam.'
'Bleedin' 'ell, it's daylight fu . . . oops, sorry . . . king robbery. With . . . er . . . sauté potatoes, mashed potatoes, peas, cauliflower and green beans.'
'How would you like your steak, madam?'
'Well done.'
'Sir?' He could barely get the word out, such was his contempt.
'I'll have the scallops, and I'll have the pheasant with courgettes.'
'Very good, sir.'
'We'll see if it is.'
Oh God, why did I say that?
'I beg your pardon, sir?'
'You said, "Very good". I said, "We'll see if it is very good".'
'Yes, sir.'
'And . . . er . . . we'll have a bottle of . . . er . . .' I swallowed. This took courage. This went against everything I had been bred for. '. . . of the Liebfraumilch.'
He scurried off. I had not thought him capable of moving so fast.
'I've never had pheasant,' said Ange.
'It's very nice if it's well hung,' I said.
'Does that make a difference?'
'All the difference.'
'Tons Thomas must be nice to eat, then.'
I confess that this remark puzzled me, but I didn't challenge it. I knew how ignorant I was about darts. Here, though, was a convenient cue, an ideal opportunity to ask her, to draw her out, to enter the fascinating unknown world of competitive darts. Something prevented me. Jealousy towards Tons Thomas, perhaps. Anyway, I just couldn't bring myself to broach the subject. I knew that I needed to make conversation. I could hardly expect her to make the running, unsophisticated as she was, but I could think of nothing to say. It's quite hard, actually, to admit to you how inept I was that night.
'It's filling up a bit,' I said, as two more people, stuffily dressed, entered the silent temple of gastronomy. I winced. 'It's filling up a bit,' observes Alan Calcutt, once thought to be one of the bright young hopes of British philosophical thinking.
The waiter arrived with our bottle of Liebfraumilch. He held it gingerly, as if he might catch a fatal disease off it. He showed it to me. I nodded wretchedly. I wanted to be anywhere else than here. This was all a terrible mistake.
He went away, and returned a moment later with the opened bottle. As he poured me a sip to taste, Ange leant forward and said, almost in a whisper, 'Wouldn't you think of going back to Mum, Dad?'
The waiter ignored this remark so pointedly that I knew he had heard it. I sniffed the sweet wine, took a sip, nodded miserably. The waiter poured half a glass for us both and retreated hastily.
'What on earth did you say that for?' I asked.
'Bit of fun. I like fun, don't I? Cheers.'
She raised her glass. I raised mine. We drank.
'M'm. Nice.'
'No.'
'What?'
'It's not nice.'
'Well, I think it is.'
'Maybe, but, believe me, it isn't.'
'I'm not a philosopher like you, but I'd have thought that if I think it's nice then for me it is nice, whatever you say.'
'Well, yes, that's true.'
I had a sinking feeling that I was going to say 'Well, yes, that's true' a lot. I didn't have the energy for argument that I once had. There had been a time when I would even have ventured to disagree with taxi drivers. Not any more. However, I felt that I needed to make a bit of a stab at defending my position.
'When Kath Parker had her stag do in Dublin we was all knocking back the Liebfraumilch till it was coming out of our ears and we all thought it was lovely,' she said. 'How can you say we was all wrong?'
'Well,' I said, 'I suppose I would argue that if people who know a lot about wine all say that a wine isn't nice, and people who don't know much about wine all say that it is nice, the probability is that it's the people who know about wine who are actually right.'
'That's the first time tonight you've sounded like a philosopher,' she said.
I didn't know whether to say 'Thank you' or 'Sorry'.
'Were you always a philosopher?'
'I started to teach philosophy after university, yes. I went to Oxford and somehow I've never left it. It does that to you.'
I found myself chatting about myself, not asking her about her. Rachel would have said that this was typical. Oh God, why was I still thinking about bloody Rachel?
Suddenly I was talking to Ange in quite an unsuitable way, but anything was better than silence, and at least I was being myself. It was strange. I felt that I was hovering over myself, listening to myself being pretentious. I was having an out of body experience, which I would previously have said was impossible.
'I tended to see myself as a bit of a maverick when I was young, a lone philosophical wolf. Arthur Holdall once said my problem was that I couldn't decide whether to be an enfant noir or a bête terrible.'
'Arthur Holdall?'
'A colleague.'
'I bet he's a case.'
'What? Ah. Yes. Yes. He once described me as a weir over which the turbulent currents of existentialism flowed into the stagnant pools of logical positivism.'
I gave a deep sigh.
'Oh, Alan,' she said. It was the first time she'd used my name just like that, as if she'd known me for quite a while, and it sounded very pleasant, very natural. 'What an awful sigh. I can't help it if I don't understand. Wish you weren't here with me?'
Yes.
'No!'
Yes and no.
'No, Ange, I was just thinking, nobody would describe me as Holdall did nowadays. I am one of that great army of thinkers who haven't fulfilled their promise.'
Luckily the waiter arrived with our starters, interrupting this morbid self-pity. His arrival wasn't altogether lucky, though. It set her off again.
'What was it like in Pentonville, Dad? I mean the nosh. Was it any better than the Scrubs?'
The waiter's whole body stiffened. He tried to give me the terrine and her the scallops, even though he must have known that it was the other way round.
My flesh crawled with embarrassment.
'You're embarrassing me,' I said, when he had gone. 'I don't want you to say things like that.'
'Oh, Alan,' she said again. 'Who cares what a snobby Frog waiter thinks?'
Casual racial insults of that kind horrify me. There was a risk that she would think me very stuffy, that she would be hurt, that I would be pouring cold water on our evening, but I couldn't let it go. I might have done with a taxi driver, especially a bi
g taxi driver, but not with a dining companion.
'You shouldn't refer to the French as Frogs,' I said. 'They're a very civilised nation, with a very strong cultural tradition. Have you ever heard of a man called Jean Paul Sartre?'
She thought hard, wrinkling her pert little nose. I longed to trace the curl of her nostrils with a gentle finger.
'Didn't he used to play for Arsenal?'
'He was a philosopher. He was an existentialist.'
'A what?'
How could I explain existentialism to her, without my scallops going cold? The scallops were good, but not great. The freshness of the sea had long departed from them. At that price, it shouldn't have. I munched and thought.
'Existentialism is a philosophy that is based on freedom of choice, on taking responsibility for one's own actions, which create one's own moral values and determine one's future.' I was aware that I was sounding like a text book again.
She thought about that pretty hard.
'Actually that sounds quite sensible,' she said. 'Good old Sparta.'
'Sartre. What do you mean?'
'Well, it sounds to me as though he's cracked it. Is that the answer, then?'
'The answer to what?'
'Philosophy.'
'Ah. If only it were that simple. Philosophy is a process, Ange. It explores and examines. It is, ultimately, historically, more to do with asking questions than finding answers. Existentialists found their answers. Many other people question their answers and refute them. It's an on-going process.'
'It's all a bit beyond me. Easy come, easy go, that's me. Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die, that's me.'
'That's epicureanism.'
'It is?' She was delighted.
'Well, broadly, yes.'
'Get that! I'm an epicureanist!'
I smiled, thrilled by her delight. For many years I had been feeling that I smelt stale. Not horrid. Not sweaty. I didn't have BO or halitosis. I just smelt stale. My breath, when it came back to me off a mirror, my armpits, my shirts – vaguely stale.
I was conscious of that now, and I suppose, therefore, that I already knew, deep down, that this girl could wash my staleness away.
'I hope I don't sound patronising, Ange,' I said, 'but if you have any questions, any time, about philosophy or indeed about anything, please don't hesitate to ask.'
The waiter cleared away our plates lugubriously, standing a bit away from the table and reaching for them.
'Was your terrine all right?' I asked.
'Yeah. It was good. Very garlicky, I'm afraid.'
If she was worried about the garlic, she expected us to end up close to each other. I shivered with a mixture of apprehension and excitement. I couldn't say, now, which was the stronger. Probably I couldn't have said it then either.
'There is one question,' she said.
'Yes. Yes. Good. Excellent. Fire away. I'll do my best.'
'If you hate bananas, how come you had one in your briefcase?'
'What? Oh, I see. Ah. Well, my hotel in Manchester, if you're well known, they put a bowl of fruit in your room. I'm innately mean, and cannot bear to leave what is free.'
'Are you well known then?'
Her amazement wasn't flattering, but I wasn't offended. In fact it amused me.
'Not really. Not outside my field, my very narrow field, but I was in Manchester to speak at a conference, and I think they classify all the speakers as celebrities.'
'What's your other name again?'
'Calcutt. Alan Calcutt.'
'No. Sorry. Never heard of you.' She gave me a quite lovely smile, childlike, affectionate, kind. It took away all the abruptness of her remark. 'Is that as incredible as you never having heard of Tons Thomas?'
'Probably not. I think that in the world at large he's probably more widely known than me. Sadly. So what's your other name?'
She looked a little embarrassed, for the first time.
'Bedwell.'
Our eyes met. I was terrified that I was going to blush. I didn't, but the effort of not doing so left me feeling limp and exhausted.
'Here's another one,' she said, changing the subject hurriedly, and I must say I was very relieved to find that she too was capable of embarrassment.
'Good. Good. Fire away.'
The waiter was returning with our main courses. This might be my chance to impress him.
'Name three fish that begin and end with K.'
It wouldn't be my chance to impress him.
'Er . . . oh, I've no idea, I really haven't.'
'Try.'
The waiter put her plate down in front of her. Her fillet steak looked like a tiny burnt offering in the middle of its huge white plate. The pepper sauce was dribbled over the plate so artistically that I felt that it would look better hanging in the Tate.
'Kipper begins with a k. Haddock ends with a k,' I said. 'Sorry, that's about the best that I can do.'
My pheasant was barely more substantial than her steak.
'Give up?' she said.
'Yes.'
'Killer shark. Kwik-Save deep frozen smoked haddock. Kilmarnock.'
'Kilmarnock?'
'Well, it's a place.'
Her laugh rang out through that silent temple of gastronomy like a fart in a cathedral. The waiter took her plate of vegetables from a minion, banged it down beside her steak, placed a dish with seven slices of courgette beside my pheasant, and hurried off, shaking his head.
'It looks lovely,' she said, 'but you don't get a lot for the money, do you?'
'The more you pay, the less you get,' I explained. 'It's called refinement. That's why the plates are now so huge in fashionable restaurants – to make the food look small and banish any possible charge of grossness.'
I didn't really know about such things, but it was what Lawrence had said once, in a posh restaurant outside Abingdon, in an attempt to upset Jane.
'Is your pheasant nice?' asked Ange.
'Very.'
'The way they've served it, you can't see if it's well hung.'
