David Szalay - London and the South-East

‘You all right, Murray?’ Paul says. Murray nods. Paul starts to tell him about Mr Bannerjee. He does not seem interested — though he murmurs occasionally, he obviously isn’t listening.

Leaving the pub at ten past two, they make their way back through Lincoln’s Inn Fields, its massive trees, and the noise of Kingsway. The afternoon passes slowly (though less slowly than it would were he sober) until, when it is starting to get dark outside, just when he is standing up to go to the smoking room, feeling in his jacket pocket for fags and lighter, his phone rings.

It is Eddy Jaw.

‘Hello — Rainey?’ his blunt voice says.

‘Yeah.’

‘Where the fuck were you?’

The Old Cheshire Cheese is on Fleet Street, halfway from the High Court to Ludgate Hill. It is possible that Shakespeare frequented the old pub (it was rebuilt in 1667, following the setback of the previous year), a possibility somewhat oversold on the sign outside. It was, however, Dr Johnson’s local, and Dickens knew its dark, creaking, wooden interior and cramped stairs. More recently, from the end of the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth — until they decamped to less dear offices where the docks used to be — it was usually full of journalists. Now the only newsmen are from Reuters, over the road; the others have been replaced by investment bankers from Goldman Sachs, and lawyers from the Middle Temple, and tourists — lots of tourists — and salesmen.

Entering the narrow brick passageway where the pub’s entrance is — under a huge old lantern with ‘Ye Olde Cheshire Cheese’ in Gothic letters on its milky glass — Paul remembers, with some nostalgia, how he and Eddy Jaw used to work together in offices nearby, the offices of Northwood Publishing, and themselves spend long afternoons in the Chesh. That was some years ago, and it came to a sudden end when the contract they were working on was withdrawn. Which was a shame, because things had been very prosperous — ‘fucking dial-a-deal’ in the argot of the salesmen — and pushing open the pub’s broad door, Paul smells again, in the distinctive woody scent of the interior — similar to that of a Wren church — the spectacular success that the withdrawal of the contract had interrupted.

He remembers where they used to sit, in the square, skylit room — himself, Eddy, the Pig, Murray and the others. This part of the pub, he is disappointed to see, has been divided into smaller spaces, now full of people, so he makes his way to where the wooden stairs go down, and steadying himself with a hand on the low ceiling, descends to the vaulted rooms below — the former cellars — and down yet more stairs, stone this time, into the loud, high-ceilinged basement bar. It is half past five and every part of the pub is packed. Eddy is not there, so Paul goes back upstairs to his favourite place, the snug on the other side of the panelled entrance hall from the Chop Room restaurant (which does not seem to have changed much since the late eighteenth century, except that the waiting staff are now mostly Antipodean), where there is a fireplace with orange coals in a black grate, and a muddy painting of a man wearing a wig, and a window of thick, imperfect glass — he used to while away whole afternoons under that window — and wealthy American bankers talking shop. He decides that he should settle somewhere, or he and Eddy will spend the whole evening wandering through the pub, saying ‘Sorry, excuse me, sorry’, without ever seeing each other, so he goes back downstairs to a sort of mezzanine between the two subterranean levels, where a few small tables are squeezed into the painted brick alcoves formed by the ceiling vaults. One of these tables is vacant, and there he sips his pint of Ayingerbrau, lights a cigarette, and looks over the laminated menu, as if it were something utterly mysterious.

‘You’re not going to eat, are you, Rainey? That would really fucking throw me.’

Eddy Jaw has not changed. Stooping more than necessary under the low vault, he is wearing, as he always used to, a three-piece Hugo Boss suit with very short, stubby lapels — he looks buttoned-up, encased in olive cloth. His big face is perhaps fleshier than it used to be, but it was always fleshy. His hair is blond and cropped. ‘All right, Eddy,’ Paul says.

‘How the fuck are you, Paul?’

‘I’m all right. How are you, Eddy?’

‘I’m fucking brilliant. Do you want anything from the bar, another one?’ Paul glances at his three-quarters-full pint glass. ‘Course you do. What are you drinking?’ Eddy smiles significantly. ‘Prinz, is it?’

‘No, it’s Ayingerbrau.’

‘For fuck’s sake! What’s the matter with you?’

‘I’ll have the same again.’

‘No you won’t. You’ll have a fucking Prinz.’

Paul smiles, for a moment sincerely happy. ‘All right then.’ And Eddy’s broad back disappears down the stairs into the clamour of the bar. It is strange to see him again. He looks full of himself, thriving — very different from how he looked when Paul saw him last. Excluding Friday, that is. It was a few months after Northwood had lost the contract with International Money Publications in the summer of ninety-seven — they had all scattered, at the height of that summer, and gone their separate ways. Eddy had come to Murray’s barbecue, but after that he had disappeared, and none of them knew what had happened to him. Then, one wet November morning, Paul had seen him in Tottenham Court Road tube station. On his way to work at Archway Publications, Paul had been on the up escalator, and Eddy, a desolate face in the crowd, on the down, so it had been impossible to speak to him, and he had not noticed Paul. Paul has always remembered that sudden apparition of Eddy’s face in the crowd, the undisguised wretchedness of its expression, as the escalators shunted them past each other. It had been a low point in Paul’s own life — perhaps the lowest — and on the basis of nothing more than that glimpse, he has always assumed that for Eddy too that dank winter had been some sort of nadir. Perhaps it had not, but for Paul there is nevertheless a sense of shared experience — a sense sharpened to poignancy by their presence here in the Chesh; ensconced underground, unaware of the dark November evening above and able instead to imagine Fleet Street on a fierce July day. The taste of Prinz super-strength lager — unpleasantly spirituous and metallic — intensifies this effect. It was what they always drank then — except Eddy, of course. A Bacardi Breezer in his big fist he sits down opposite Paul, and clinks the neck of the bottle peremptorily on his pint glass. ‘Good to see you, Paul,’ he says.

‘Yeah, good to see you, Eddy.’

From his long-cheeked face, Eddy’s small eyes peer out, pale blue and smiling warily. Eddy is bluff and coarse, even brutal, but there is something else in his eyes — a slyness, for sure. Even an unexpected intelligence. He sits hunched forward, surrounding the Bacardi Breezer with his hands. ‘Sorry about lunchtime, by the way,’ Paul says. ‘I completely forgot about that.’ Eddy smiles. ‘I thought you might, state you were in Friday.’

‘Yeah, fucking hell …’ Embarrassed, Paul sips Prinz. ‘I don’t think I’ve been here since we left Northwood,’ he says.

‘No, me neither.’ Eddy looks around. ‘Those were the days, eh?’

‘They were.’

His smile widening, Eddy says, ‘Fucking dial-a-deal.’

‘Yeah, right.’ And for a few minutes they unshutter a friendship with familiar stories about people they both know — Murray, Simon, who was their boss, the Pig — and about Northwood, the small company where they worked for a few summer months, and where everything seemed easy and exhilarating. Paul finds it strange that they worked there for only a few months. It seems like longer.