Transit(49)

Eloise was listening with a sympathetic expression on her face.

‘Was he all right?’ she said. ‘Did you have to take him to hospital?’

He was shocked and upset, I said, and he had a big lump on his head, but he didn’t need to go to hospital.

She was silent for a while, her hands clasped in front of her, her eyes downcast. She wore numerous delicate silver rings on her fingers, and the big dazzling gem Lawrence had given her as an engagement ring.

‘You don’t regret it, though, do you?’ she said. ‘It must have been right, or you wouldn’t have done it.’

I said I had no answer to that, because I still didn’t know precisely what it was I had done.

She gave a mischievous little smile and peeped up at me from beneath her short pale lashes. She had been meaning to introduce me, she said, to some of her single male friends. There was one in particular she had in mind – he was very good-looking and very, very rich. He had the most stunning flat in Mayfair – he was an art collector – as well as a house on the C?te d’Azur. Lawrence, who had by now sat down beside us, groaned.

‘Why are you always trying to palm Freddie off on your female friends?’ he said. ‘He’s an absolute lout.’

Eloise pouted and gave a little sniff.

‘All that money,’ she said. ‘At least it would be going to a good cause. It seems such a waste.’

‘Not everyone cares about money as much as you do,’ Lawrence said.

Eloise didn’t seem offended by this remark. Instead she laughed.

‘But I didn’t care about it,’ she said. ‘That’s the whole point.’

Lawrence had served everyone with slivers of foie gras surrounded by little balls of choux pastry.

‘What’s in here?’ Eloise’s older son called out, holding one up in his fingers.

‘Bone marrow,’ Lawrence called back unrepentantly.

He had become increasingly interested in cooking, he told me, and had even started growing things in the garden – rare herbs, esoteric vegetables – that were difficult to find locally. This transformation had occurred after he had been sitting in his office one day mechanically eating a cheese sandwich he’d bought from a shop, and the realisation had struck him that he could have been eating something better. That was about eighteen months ago, he said, and it had had some interesting consequences, one of which had been his experiencing an intense craving – after six months or so of eating finer foods – for the very cheese sandwich that had caused him to forswear mindless eating in the first place. He had become so used by then to reading the subtle impulses of his own desires – often not eating at all if he couldn’t lay his hands on the very thing he wanted – that he automatically set out to act on this one, regarding it as some kind of pun or beau geste his now more sophisticated appetite had thought to come up with. He had gone to the same shop and bought the same sandwich, and out on the street, as he opened his mouth to take a bite, he was suddenly overwhelmed by sense-memories: of the malty dustiness of the sliced bread, the tang of the processed cheese, the thickness and whiteness of the mayonnaise coating the shreds of lettuce. My mouth, Lawrence said, was literally watering. In those seconds he went further, into the memory of biting and chewing the sandwich, of swallowing it and feeling an obscure relief momentarily flooding his system. Then, Lawrence said, I put the whole thing back in its package and threw it in the bin.

What he had realised, he said, standing there on the street, was that he was in a process of shaping his own desires, of harnessing them with thought, and it was only when he had found himself momentarily in the grip of the old sensory impulses that he had realised this process was, ultimately, about discipline. He did not, in other words, desire his lunch of smoked duck with the same mouth-watering blindness with which he had desired the processed cheese sandwich. The former had to be approached consciously, while the latter relied on the unconscious, on needs that were never examined because they were satisfied by mere repetition. He had to decide to be a person who preferred smoked duck to processed cheese: by deciding it, he by increments became it. What the cheese sandwich had represented was comfort, and once he had looked at it that way the whole can of worms was well and truly opened.

‘At least he doesn’t eat worms,’ Eloise said, resting her small hand devotedly on his big one. ‘Or not yet, anyway.’

‘What kind of world is it,’ Lawrence said, ‘where comfort can be found in a mass-produced sandwich? What kind of person am I, that that’s what I think I deserve?’

He sat and looked around the room, at the table and the people sitting at it, as if for an answer.

He had come to the conclusion, he went on, that up to a certain point his whole life had been driven by needing things rather than liking them, and that once he had started interrogating it on that basis, the whole thing had faltered and collapsed. But the question of liking was, as he had already said, more complex than that: people would swear that they needed things because they liked them, or that what they needed they also liked. He had felt such guilt, for instance, after leaving Susie that it sometimes felt almost as if he wished he could return to her. He was used to being with her: once she was gone he was left with a need that could not satisfy itself, because the cycle of repetition had been broken. But he had started to realise that what he called need was actually something else, was more a question of surfeit, of the desire to have something in limitless supply. And by its very nature that thing would have to be relatively worthless, like the cheese sandwich, of which there was an infinite and easily accessible number. To desire something better required self-control, required an acceptance of the fact that you might not have it for ever and that even if you did you would never feel full to bursting on it. It left you alone with yourself, that desire, and when he thought about his life he saw it as a series of attempts to lose himself by merging with something else, something outside him that could be internalised, to the extent that he had forgotten for long periods that he and Susie were separate people.