‘The miniature gaiety of seasides,’ he said. ‘Larkin.’
‘I can’t believe you’re still going on about that.’
‘Surely I’m allowed to quote him aren’t I?’
‘All right,’ she said longsufferingly. ‘Go on then.’
‘Steep beach, blue water, red bathing caps, Elena. The small hushed waves’ repeated fresh collapse. What’s wrong with that? I used to quote him before.’
‘I can’t believe you’re bending over for her. For Phoebe Phelps.’
‘How am I bending over for Phoebe Phelps?’
‘By letting yourself get…bedevilled. It was such an obvious attempt to spook you. And it worked. Look at you, you’re cooperating, you’re collaborating with that mad bitch…And all that was years ago.’ (It was eighteen months ago: September 12, 2001.) ‘It’s why you’ve been so quiet, so…’
‘Mm.’
This was true and it was a grief to him. Elena, he guiltily noted, had taken to ending many of her declarative sentences with a plaintive don’t you think? or wouldn’t you say? or, more simply, right? It was a gentle and a just reproach. He too was exasperated by it: why this silence, why this unwelcome seclusion? And it was worse than unfriendly. It was unhusbandly. But it was real.
‘I’m very sorry. A temporary condition, and it’s lifting. I don’t feel quiet today.’ No, in fact he felt uncontrollably garrulous. Realising this, he jumped to a new conclusion: So now I’m bipolar…His relationship with his sanity was becoming self-conscious, or going back to being self-conscious – the way it was in his teens. ‘I’m feeling talkative, and I’ll tell you for why. I’m thinking of starting a smirk novel.’
‘What’s a smirk novel?’
‘A novel of self-congratulation, of unalleviated self-congratulation. There aren’t many of them but they do exist – smirk novels. The one I read gloried in the author’s literary fame and stupendous success with women. We’re in the land of the scowl novel. Le roman de grimace. Just the place to get going on a roman de…What’s French for smirk?’
She considered. ‘I don’t think they have a word for smirk. It would be something like un petit sourire suffisant.’
‘Really? Not just smirque with a q? All right. A roman de petit…’
‘Sourire suffisant.’
‘A roman de petit sourire suffisant. A smirk novel. Now what the fuck is all this?’
Their pace had slowed – in forced deference to an unusual concentration of pedestrians. Unusual demographically, that is. One often saw children en masse, but Martin wondered if he had ever seen such an army, such a serried host of seniors. These ancient parties, these Decembrists, were inching their way along the narrow strip between the housefronts and the kerbside barriers. All this was clearly going to take a very long time. He said,
‘How’d it happen? We stepped out for a simple – an honest – cup of coffee. And now we’re trapped in this incredible operation with all these elderly.’
Yes, his Concise Oxford Dictionary was behind the game with elderly, confining itself to ‘adj. old or ageing’; future editions would be forced to add ‘n. (pl. same) an old or ageing person’. In America nowadays they confidently used elderly as a noun: The guy freaked out in the hospital, for example, and gunned down three elderly.
‘I want my cappuccino,’ said Elena. ‘And I keep wondering how old I’m going to be when we get there.’
‘Me too. But you, you’ll still be reasonably young. I’ll be an elderly.’
It could have been worse – much worse. Martin wasn’t ninety-three, he wasn’t eighty-three, he wasn’t seventy-three, he wasn’t even sixty-three, not yet; he was fifty-three (a slightly vampiric fifty-three to Elena’s forty-one), and just crossing the line, just turning the corner and beginning to make out, in the grey twilight, the shapes and forms of what lay ahead of him. Sensory adjustments to the new order of being were already well under way. For some time he had been aware that, in his outward guise, he was physically undetectable by anyone under the age of thirty-five. In the year 2000, in Uruguay, he walked around a crowded nightclub (in search of a young cousin) and he realised something: he was the Invisible Man.*3
The young had stopped seeing him; and now, in dubious recompense, he saw afresh that hitherto invisible population, the seriously old.
‘I encountered Jed Slot,’ she said as they stood there waiting.
‘So did I.’ Jed Slot was the mystery-man writer at Le Méridien. ‘When I saw him I thought his huge bestseller must be about computers or video games. What was he doing when you saw him?’
‘Being interviewed. By an incredibly brainy-looking old lady with a lorgnette. What was he doing when you saw him?’
‘Being interviewed. By two incredibly brainy-looking students or post-grads.’
‘His book’s fiction, Mart, and it’s not just a bestseller. It’s a succès d’estime.’
‘I’m sorry to hear that. Nah. Good luck to Jed. All power to Slot. He seemed nice enough…Jesus, c’est incroyable, ça – these old wrecks!’ He said, ‘Mark it well, kid. The future is going to look like this. In twenty years or so. And I don’t just mean me. They say it’s the gravest demographic change of all time. The silver tsunami.’
‘I’m preparing myself for it. That’ll be when all you filthy baby boomers get sicked on us.’ She smiled. ‘You’re the crap generation.’
The continuing struggle for coffee
Nothing had changed.
‘What we’re in’, he said, ‘is no longer just an emergency. It’s a humanitarian crisis. A deepening humanitarian crisis. I want my coffee.’
‘I want, I want my coffee,’ sang Elena (to the tune of ‘I Want My Potty’). ‘I want my coffee. I’ve just thought. If Robinson was North Korea, what’s Hitch?’
‘Good question. Suggest somewhere.’
‘Israel.’
‘I was going to say Israel. Yes, like Saul in a way, Hitch is Israel. He has chosen the most difficult position. And the most difficult position for him – for him in particular. An anti-Zionist who turns out to
