An Irresponsible Age. Lavinia Greenlaw

while they had been living together at university – heated, high-minded exchanges he insisted were necessary and harmless. Even back then, in his twenties, he had kept copies of everything he wrote to other people and here they were. There were letters to people he wanted to sleep with or wanted to be, so finely tuned that you might think him calculating and manipulative. To Barbara he was none of these things, just frightened, driven and beyond himself. ‘You understand me,’ he liked to say and she liked to believe she did.

      

      Juliet and Carlo, with Jacob close behind, emerged from The Glory Hole into the heightened air of a cold still night. They shivered and toughened, and Juliet wondered that she could feel so distinct. Carlo whispered something to her and said goodnight. Jacob offered to put her on a bus.

      Juliet savoured these after-hour streets with their residue of drama and secrets; it was like being on stage just after a play had ended. She walked carefully beside Jacob, who led her left and right and into dead ends which turned out to be alleyways connecting places Juliet recognised but had not known to be within reach of one another.

      A heavy, anonymous door swung open and a giant in evening dress hauled in a cordon of purple rope knotted onto silver plastic bollards. Further, a dug-up pavement herded them into a cratered hallway next to a board on which two hands held out a pair of perfectly circular breasts. They negotiated the pungent, leaking binbags outside a restaurant and the heap of empty crates propped against the shuttered windows of a delicatessen. Jacob noted the charm of the boarded-up front of a fishmonger’s, which Juliet thought sad. He complained about the hard-lit, alarmed and bolted entrances of photographic agencies and film companies, and said nothing about the side-doors lined with cards and intercoms. A café, little more than a counter, served coffee to a couple wearing city suits who could not stop kissing. A pair of teenagers in pumped-up jackets and low jeans swaggered past looking flushed and lost, and Juliet watched them go with the feeling that they were carrying on something she had left off. She did not listen to their music or take their drugs, and was about to remark on this to Jacob when she realised that she could probably say the same about him, too.

      A tall, finely painted woman brushed against Jacob (deliberately! Juliet could tell) and dropped an elbow-length glove, which he leapt to retrieve. The woman said an elaborate thank-you in a crooning baritone and sailed on as if it were a hundred years ago, a time when ladies wore gloves and their dropping one meant something. Three men, arms linked, walked past with luxurious slowness, their skin wet and their breath feathering the air. A police car idled by.

      Juliet and Jacob continued on, past the all-night cinema where Carlo was fighting sleep in the back row, struggling to follow the plot of a subtitled Russian film in which a telephone kept ringing. He was there because he had a crush on the projectionist, who was also a masseur, and whose card was on the noticeboard in the cinema foyer. Jonathan Mehta. Carlo tried to concentrate on the film. No one picked up the telephone.

      A woman came in and pushed past him without saying ‘Excuse me’. Her bag knocked against his knees, but she didn’t apologise. She sat down beside him and stuck out her elbows, letting her fluffy coat spill against his arm. When her body started shaking, he turned to join in her laughter only to see that she was crying. Although she swung her head so that her slithery blonde hair covered her eyes, Carlo had seen her face, its feathering surface and the dark runnels under her eyes, and he apologised, ‘Sorry’, and standing up said ‘Excuse me’, as he left.

      

      Jacob, who had had something to say about every other building they passed, stopped talking, giving Juliet the chance to wonder: ‘So what is it you do … in your room?’

      ‘I write.’

      ‘What?’

      ‘I write.’

      ‘No, I meant what do you write?’

      ‘You are endearingly emphatic. I write on art and architecture, and about the cultural life of the city.’

      ‘Should I have heard of you?’

      ‘Yes.’

      Juliet snorted. ‘Well I have, sort of. That is I’ve got Foucault’s Egg, but I haven’t read it. I forgot it was by you.’

      ‘You didn’t know me.’

      ‘Actually, I didn’t read it because I thought I did know you, at least your type.’

      ‘And what is my type?’

      ‘You use words like “quiddity” and “ineffable” more than you ought. Your prose is awash with parentheses and you usually throw in some casual Latin and slangy French, oh and an anecdote about Goethe’s socks which makes it sound as if you washed them yourself when you haven’t even actually read him …’

      She stopped and looked at his face. He was staring at the ground with a tight smile that she took to signal amusement, especially when he said, with such dryness, ‘Do go on.’

      ‘You use cricketing terms, and refer to your “wireless”. At parties, you look ostentatiously blank if anyone refers to a television personality, but you sometimes throw in a reference to something terrifically in-touch like hip-hop or acid house.’

      ‘But who am I?’ His smiling face revealed nothing.

      ‘I only said I know your type,’ Juliet continued unabashed, ‘not you.’

      ‘And do you have a type?’ he asked, still showing no sign of annoyance.

      ‘Inevitably. Do you know it?’

      ‘I think so.’

      ‘Can you sum it up? Like I did?’

      ‘Is that what that was? The summary of a type? Well, well.’

      Juliet stumbled, feeling that the path beneath her feet was nothing more than ice and that at any moment she would plunge through and drown in her own embarrassment. ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean, it’s just that there’s so much of all that.’

      ‘All what?’

      ‘So much charm, and it works. I read that kind of stuff and I am charmed but I’m not satisfied. I don’t feel I’ve been given anything to grapple with, to grasp. It’s so mobile and non-committal. It wants to come across as modest when it’s not even shy, just unwilling.’

      ‘Unwilling?’

      ‘Unwilling to really truly absolutely say something.’

      ‘Really truly absolutely?’

      ‘I know I sound like a five-year-old; anyone who speaks with any emphasis these days does.’

      ‘I admire your energy,’ said Jacob, taking her arm.

      ‘You think I’m a child.’

      He didn’t deny it.

      

      They walked on in silence, which made her nervous so she tried again. ‘I’m sure your book’s not particularly dull but the title does put me off. Yet another so-and-so’s something-or-other.’

      ‘It refers to the pendulum.’

      ‘What have pendulums got to do with eggs?’

      ‘Foucault’s pendulum stays in the arc of its swing while the world moves round it.’

      ‘I know that.’

      ‘I’m sure you do. However, if other forces exert pressure, they disturb the pendulum’s swing and instead of tracing an arc, its path becomes elliptical, ovoid, like an egg.’

      ‘I understand the concept, but what does it mean?’

      ‘It doesn’t mean anything. It’s a record of process, a map of accumulating disturbance.’

      ‘And what’s it got to do with the city?’

      ‘How we move and think and meet – everything, really.’