Leaning, against the wind, on the concrete brim of a water feature in the middle of the Brunswick Centre’s concrete plaza, Henson scratched his recently-bearded chin. Spray, whipped by the breeze, dotted his cheek. Honoria the Dentist was late; the film started in five minutes.
Well, the ads started in five minutes, after the lights dimmed and the screen glowed briefly, an enormous Rothko. And then there were the trailers, ten minutes after the start of the ads. Ten more minutes of trailers, then, and then the click and hum of the curtains, the pitch into blackness and the BBFC title card. The first chords. So, the film started in twenty-five minutes. Still, Honoria the Dentist was late.
He looked at where his watch should have been, then reached into his pocket for his phone. Twenty-four minutes. But then, he never felt comfortable going into a cinema once the lights were down, whether the screen was showing the first seconds of the new Bertolucci or an advert for tampons. So, four minutes.
He inspected the elbows of his brown corduroy jacket; crossed and re-crossed his legs. Scratched his beard again. Work tomorrow – down the road in Farringdon. Copy. Editing. Saving writers from themselves. Three minutes. Where was she? Henson looked across to the Renoir. Posters: A Butterfly’s Wings Blot Out the Sun. Chinese. Maoism, Taoism and peasants worrying about getting the water buffalo to market, most likely. Screen Two: Anna in October. Charlotte Gainsbourg’s erotic underbite. More, much more his thing. The story of a Parisian academic’s affair with an English novelist, the autumn after les évenèments; 1968 and all that. Messy sex to songs by Françoise Hardy. There was rumoured to be a visible erection, but he’d missed it the first time he saw the film.
Nor had he clocked the cock, as it were, the second time. Third time lucky, perhaps. He looked again at his phone. Two minutes. No Dentist. Outside Starbucks, people slurped Frappuccinos and sucked cigarettes.
He’d first seen Anna in October two weeks ago. Its first day out. On his own on a Thursday, a day off, unbooked. Scratched about on his novel in the morning – an epic about war artists written, he thought, by a piss artist – then took the tube to town for a coffee and a sandwich at the London Review of Books. Gazed in dumb awe at the Israeli PhD who worked the Gaggia with a long-limbed languor that spoke, to him, of kibbutzim and refuseniks and being nice to Palestinians. Not that it mattered – for her, he’d turn Zionist. Raised, eventually, from his rapture, he’d walked down the side of the Museum and across Russell Square. Went home after the film to read it up in Sight & Sound and go, after pasta, to bed.
One minute. No Dentist. He thought of his companion for viewing number two, last week: Carolina from the Comment Desk, a bespectacled Yank beauty with a chest. An old girlfriend who worked across the office. She’d asked if he fancied Anna in October, as no one she knew wanted to see it. They’d walked up after work; ate sushi at a chain outlet and watched the film. Both, it turned out, missed the fabled erection. Going home, Henson’s own scarcely glimpsed, once fabled erection subsided as he passed through Stockwell. The hope of sex for old time’s sake, perhaps inspired by Charlotte Gainsbourg’s exertions, had died during a stilted conversation on the walk to Warren Street.
No minutes. That was it, then. The Dentist was late and they were missing the start of the film. Damn it. Where the hell was she? Could there be that many molars in the world?
A female voice. He didn’t look up.
"Peter! Over here!"
He looked up. Holding the cinema door, waving; hooped earrings wafting in the breeze. Brown hair in a scallop-shell clip. Susannah the Mad Christian. He stared.
"Peter! Come on, we’re missing the start of the film!"
In the beginning there was darkness, and out of darkness came the truth and the light. And though it passed all understanding, Henson saw he’d made a mistake. Susannah the Mad Christian. Not Honoria the Dentist. He was seeing the film with Susannah the Mad Christian. The cataloguing system, the taxonomy, was supposed to prevent such errors. Offering a silent prayer for forgiveness – may the Dentist drill in peace, may she accidentally flick a nerve and instruct me to rinse for all eternity – he jogged over to the cinema.
"I’ve been in there half an hour, you silly," said Susannah, with a pout. Henson reflected on the use of "silly" as an honorific. "So I’ve bought the tickets. Come on!"
He trotted meekly down the stairs.
********
During the film, as Charlotte Gainsbourg argued with a German in a rumpled corduroy suit, Henson remembered the last time he dated Susannah the Mad Christian. She’d caught God – napping, presumably – in the space between their first relationship and second. He doubted there would be a third, given that the second had ended with an argument in bed, where sex, at which he knew her to be a surprisingly aerobatic adept, had been withheld. The argument was about her new-found faith. She’d asked him to respect it. He’d said he respected her, but not it. Then – he might have fought his way out of that one – he’d made his fatal mistake. Quoting Josef Goebbels, he knew now, was never a good idea. Never. In fact, selectively misquoting him ("You know, Susannah, as Goebbels said, when I hear the word ‘religion’ I reach for my gun") was probably worse. Susannah the Mad Christian had thrown on her clothes and stormed out. He’d waved goodbye from the window.
This evening had come about thanks to a meeting at a party in Clapham and the revelation that Susannah, now speaking to him again, didn’t know anyone else who would go to see a foreign film. Did he want to see Anna in October? He thought of a night in a ground-floor flat in Leytonstone, and agreed.
After the film, they walked to Tottenham Court Road so she could get back to Acton, where the missionary work was arduous. Perhaps the natives were restless, or just not particularly Baptist. In Henson’s mind, Charlotte Gainsbourg strode across the Pont Neuf, on her way to a rendezvous with the English novelist, who was played by a chap he’d seen in Richard II at the Globe. At the bottom of the escalators, Susannah the Mad Christian, whom he hadn’t dared ask about the erection, which he’d missed again, shook his hand – shook his hand – and ran off to the Central Line.
So, he thought, as the train stopped at Kennington and he joined an irritable throng on the next platform, there would now be Honoria the Dentist. He supposed there would always be Honoria the Dentist, whom he’d met at another party, the same weekend. Privately-educated, red-blonde. About six foot. Teeth like tombstones. He’d asked her out for a drink. She’d suggested the cinema: there was a film, Anna in October, which she couldn’t persuade anyone to see. He’d said he’d seen it but no, really, he’d only end up hanging about in a gallery if they didn’t. So they’d made a date – for next Thursday. Well.
********
Next Thursday, at the Renoir, Honoria the Dentist paid for the sushi and Henson got the tickets. The whey-faced student in the bullet-proof box seemed to nod in recognition; he gave her a wan smile. After the film, on the walk to Russell Square, the Dentist enthused about the German, whom Henson had recently seen playing a good Nazi in a Dutch film. As aspiring British actors did pub Shakespeare and appeared in The Bill, so their Teutonic equivalents stuck on a cap and jackboots and played Hitler with a conscience.
He took hold of her hand. For one, awful moment it hung there, lifeless. Then it dropped away and the Dentist earnestly told him that though she’d had such a good time, and had enjoyed the film awfully, they really mustn’t try to force anything, must they? He agreed and, in desperation, started cracking jokes. Tube light, he discovered under a slightly withering gaze – no, she hadn’t seen the promised erection either – was particularly harsh. The Dentist looked rather severe, here. God knew what it did to him. He could feel beads of sweat at his temples by Clapham Common, where she pecked his cheek and departed.
********
The next Monday, sitting on his concrete seat, he waited for another date. He wondered about Honoria the Dentist. She’d turned the situation, effortlessly. All he’d done was slip her hand into his, and after five minutes he’d felt like some kind of serf. Perhaps it was just as well that they were now to meet, next week, "as friends". What with bowing and scraping being so inconvenient during sex, and all.
His date, Alexia the Actress, a curvy blonde with cheekbones and problems with her father, rather surprisingly missed the erection – and looked a little shocked when he mentioned it, having missed it too. Alexia had slept with Henson once, ages ago, and hadn’t objected to his choice of film, but she spent the drink before and the sushi after asking why his friend Ben didn’t like her and removing his hand from her thigh. Three days later, Tilda the Desk Editor – much older, and Belgian – said yes, of course she’d seen the erection. Hadn’t he? Then she went home to her husband.
In the end despair won out and Henson, mindful of Anna in October’s departure to a couple of nights at the Prince Charles and then DVD, rang Meriel the History Teacher. She – two years older, two months together two years ago and occasional, rather too fraught emails since – turned up wearing a suede jacket, a corduroy skirt, sensible tights and a hopeful expression. They ate sushi. The film flicked by and Henson, slumped in his seat, mouthed along to Charlotte Gainsbourg’s final monologue. The English novelist killed himself – she wrote a bestselling sociological treatise and moved in with the German. The End. He put Meriel the History Teacher on the Circle Line at Euston Square. She cried.
********
Two weeks later, Henson’s phone rang. It was, he saw, Emma the Duplicitous Ex. A honey-haired, green-eyed beauty. Five months together five years ago, including an anatomically exhausting weekend in a cheap Montmartre hotel and ill-advised use of the word "love". She must be back from Kabul, where she’d gone shortly after they’d last had coffee on the Buckingham Palace Road. Oddly, she wasn’t the first person who, on gaining his attentions, had promptly gone to work in a war zone. Still, here she was, in the country and, evidently, not yet back in the arms of Michael the Quantity Surveyor – the boyfriend she’d had, it turned out, the whole time. He’d been in China, Henson remembered. Probably worrying about getting the water buffalo to market. Then he’d come back and Emma the Duplicitous Ex had gone to live with him. Once, playing rugby, Henson had been kicked, hard, in the testicles. That about covered it.
He pressed "answer". Emma the Duplicitous Ex asked if he wanted to go to the cinema. The Renoir, in fact.
He suppressed a groan. It couldn’t be back, could it? Anna in October? Again?
Not that. Not sushi; not another heap of dead tuna. Not another bottled beer, another ninety minutes sat next to middle-aged men in architects’ specs. Not another earnest conversation on the walk to the tube. Not – oh, please – not no sex. Again.
He’d stood at Serge Gainsbourg’s grave once, in Montparnasse. "Well, Serge," he’d said, to no one in particular. "I think I fancy your daughter almost as much as you did."
Not any more, he didn’t.
He cleared his throat. His heart sank.
"It’s a special," said Emma the Duplicitous Ex. "Pasolini’s anniversary. 120 Days of Sodom."
He arranged to meet her at seven.
© Martin Pengelly, 2008
Incurable romantic seeks filthy whore by Martin Pengelly was read by Gwynfor Jones at the Liars' League "Feast & Famine" event on Tuesday 13 May 2008.
Martin Pengelly is a freelance sub-editor and writer who spends rather too much of his free time in the Renoir and the coffee shop at the LRB. He would like to apologise to Harland Miller for stealing his title.
If you would like to read this story in print, please check out London Lies, the Arachne Press anthology in which it, and many other London-based stories from the League archives, appears.
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