Paul Murray - The Mark and the Void

‘By watching waitresses on a spycam?’

‘Before you dismiss it, just ask yourself, what do we want from love? We want to be in a story, right? Isn’t that how you put it to me? It’s like a book: we want to be immersed in detail, pulled along by a narrative, intimately involved with profound or beguiling characters. At the same time, when we’re reading a book, we don’t actually want to be in the story. We don’t want a bunch of reanimated dinosaurs actually chasing us around a theme park, for instance. And that’s where I realized we went wrong with Ariadne.’

I am confused. ‘You think the relationship would have been more successful if I had never tried to talk to her?’

‘Exactly!’ he says. ‘When are we most in love? It’s almost always at the start, right? Sometimes before you’ve got to know the other person at all. There are two reasons for that. First, once you know them better, you realize there’re all kinds of downsides and negatives to their personalities you never imagined. They’re drunks, they’re Nazi sympathizers, they have husbands, whatever. Second, as soon as you get something, you automatically stop wanting it. It’s human nature. New shoes, new phone, new love, it’s all the same. Think of Marcel in In Search of Lost Time . He spends about a thousand pages running around after Albertine. But the minute he gets her, he loses interest.

‘You see, when it comes to love, the relationship has always been the weak link in the chain. The gap between the person you imagine and the reality that time reveals. In the beginning you’re in a story, then you find yourself in the truth, with all of the problems that you were trying to escape in the first place. But thanks to modern technology that doesn’t need to happen any more. You can experience the most intimate details of another person’s life, without ever having to speak to her. You can preserve the illusion — you can stay in love — for as long as you want. It’s like your own personalized, never-ending novel!’

‘You are saying that your twenty-first-century concept of love does not involve a relationship at all?’

‘Well, of course there’s a relationship. You’re there relating to her, through your computer, feeling all kinds of very passionate and intense emotions — but without the fear of those emotions being compromised by the kind of irritating details that derail analogue or legacy relationships. It stays pure. It’s actually very romantic! And that’s something I only started to realize when I talked to you. Myhotswaitress isn’t just for lonely weirdos. Everyone has a secret crush they’d like to get closer to. Men and women, young and old. It doesn’t just have to be waitresses either. Already we’re thinking about how to carry out surveillance on nurses, air hostesses, shop assistants —’

‘Weren’t there some legal issues with this?’ I say, increasingly troubled by the thought that I have played some part in unleashing it.

‘The law will change,’ Paul says firmly. ‘If it’s what the people want, the law can’t stand in their way. This is the future. We’re not going to stop until we’ve turned the boring old world into a sexy, fun MyHotsWorld. All we need is a small initial injection of capital.’

His last sentence seems to hang in the air between us, glinting and turning like a fishing lure, and then he says, ‘Well, here we are.’

It appears that we have reached our destination; above the portico I see a promising-looking star.

‘I asked for a table with a canal view … ?’ Paul tells the maître d’.

‘Certainly, sir. This way.’ He leads us to our table and tells us the waiter will be with us shortly. From the window I can see swans drifting lazily through the water; around us, there is a pleasant buzz of well-heeled conversation. I feel my mood lift.

‘Anyhow, that’s enough shop talk,’ Paul says. ‘Here, why don’t you choose the wine.’ He hands me the list, and as I make my way through the familiar names he sits back expansively, surveying the room.

The waiter arrives and asks us if we would like to order a drink; I am thinking of a Pernod — but then I see Paul’s face. He is staring at the waiter as if some great offence has been committed. ‘What?’ he says.

‘A drink, sir?’ the waiter repeats. ‘Or some water?’

‘What’s going on?’ Paul demands.

The waiter, a slender young man in his early twenties, is understandably startled. ‘Sir?’

‘Who are you? Where’s the girl?’

The waiter’s eyes flicker over to me, but I am equally baffled. ‘If you need more time, sir …’

‘We don’t want more time! We want the girl! We want Ludmila! Where is she?’

‘Ludmila’s not working today, sir,’ the waiter quavers.

‘But she always works Thursdays!’ There is a note of appeal in Paul’s voice now. ‘Tuesday, Thursday, Friday, then she does the split-shift with Michaela on Saturday —’

‘Michaela’s away on Sunday,’ the unfortunate waiter tells him, evidently too scared to question Paul’s seemingly intimate knowledge of the restaurant’s work roster. ‘So Ludmila’s covering for her and taking her day off today instead.’

This news falls on Paul like a hammer blow; the furious colour drains from his cheeks, and he slumps back leadenly in his chair. ‘Oh,’ he says.

‘Would you like someone else to serve you, sir?’

‘No, no,’ Paul says defeatedly.

‘We do not have to stay,’ I offer, although I still don’t understand what is wrong.

‘No, it’s fine,’ he says. ‘Let’s just get this over with. You go ahead and order, Claude. I’ll have the same as him,’ he tells the waiter, who raises his order pad with a trembling hand.

I duly select for both of us; a moment later, a different waiter arrives at the table with our wine, which he carefully presents and then pours without making eye contact.

‘Is everything all right?’ I ask Paul, who is listlessly prodding the wicker bread-basket with his fork.

‘Yeah, yeah,’ he says.

‘Who is this Ludmila?’

‘Who is Ludmila.’ The thought of her rouses him. ‘Tall, elegant, refined, with a perfect size-ten figure and distinctive ash-blonde braids, Ludmila Trotyakova is one of the most enchanting figures on the Dublin restaurant scene. Don’t be misled by her efficient service; Ludmila is happy to stay and chat with diners about her interests, which include mountain-climbing in Slovakia, the work of the Slovakian composer Ján Levoslav Bella, and the history of the tenth-century duchy of Moravia, later Slovakia.’ He shakes his head. ‘She would have been right up your street. Damn it, when Igor rang up pretending to be her uncle they told him she’d be here! Now we’ve come all this way for nothing, and it’s going to cost me a damn fortune.’

‘So that’s what this lunch is about,’ I say, as the original waiter scurries past, dropping off our starters with an inaudible blur of words. ‘All the talk of friendship and catching up was just a trick. You wanted to dangle this waitress in front of me, so I will invest in your website.’

‘No, Claude, no!’ Paul reaches across the plates to seize my hand. ‘Okay, I admit I wanted to give you an idea of how Myhotswaitress might work. But I also wanted to show you that there are other waitresses out there. You don’t have to give up on love just because it didn’t work out with Ariadne!’

‘I don’t think that coming to a restaurant to ogle the staff can be described as “love”.’

‘Believe me, if you’d seen Ludmila, you wouldn’t say that. Ogling her is a transcendent experience, like the piano sonatas of Ján Levoslav Bella.’ He presses his lips together contritely. ‘Look, I know I wasn’t entirely upfront with you. But try and see things from my perspective. Do you know what it’s like out there for the entrepreneur at the moment? The banks are all on the point of going bust, it’s impossible to get any credit! All I’m looking for is a little leg-up. If you don’t want to invest, the very least you could do is set up a few meetings with some of your clients.’