THE BALLAD OF THE SOLITARY EATER

Feel for me. I’ve just been stood up.

When were you last stood up? I’m sorry if you find the question painful, but as a comic novelist (I think I’ve told you how much I hate that job description) I am bound to consider the benefits of rejection. Life-coaches (I think I’ve told you how much I hate that job description) say that rejection is good for us if we look it squarely in the eyes. It saves us from the sin of grandiosity. As a comic novelist I think it’s only good for us if it’s happening to someone else.

I consult my watch every three minutes and my phone every five. Finally, I leave the restaurant to see if the person I am supposed to be dining with is loitering in the street, lost, confused, lying under the wheels of an e-scooter or an f-bike, or for some reason reluctant to come any further than the restaurant entrance.  No sign.  No blood on the pavement.   The street’s deserted.  It’s lunchtime on a busy weekday in central London and there’s not a soul about.  You’d think no one wants to be seen coming to have a lunch with me, or even to be suspected of coming to have lunch with me.  I have emptied London.

I saunter up and down and then walk to the corner.  Still no sign.  I check my phone for messages.  There are none.  While I have my phone in my hand I look for the original exchange of emails.  Which restaurant.  What hour.  What day.  What week.  What year even.  At the best of times I am clumsy with my phone.  My fingers hit the wrong keys.  This makes my typing slower and more deliberate but it’s one of the laws of phone-typing that the more careful you are the harder the phone finds it to recognise a word you type.  This is why a six-month old baby who sits on the phone is more likely to post a comprehensible message than I am.  But because I am irritated I make more mistakes still and can’t locate that original exchange of emails.  I’m now beginning to wonder if there ever was one.

I’ve seen black and white films about people who are made to doubt their sanity because someone has rearranged the street furniture, closed the pawn shop where they sold a watch which they now need to retrieve, sold their house from under them overnight, persuaded their children to disavow all knowledge of them. Gaslighting, its called. Have I been gaslit?

Though I say I have been ‘stood up’, which is the language of dating, this isn’t a date.  It’s a friendly catch up with someone I know a bit and haven’t seen in a while.  It was his idea we meet for lunch.  That makes me more aggrieved.  He wanted this and now he’s not here.  The b*****d.  I say this to myself.  I don’t just mean he’s a b*****d, I mean the street’s a b*****d, the restaurants a b*****, life’s a b*****d.  I type the word into my phone for the relief of it. You b*****d! It decides I mean ‘barmaid’. You barmaid!

I had left the restaurant promising I’d be back in a few minutes once I’d found my lunch companion.  Rather than return empty handed I’d like not to return at all, but I don’t feel I can honourably do that.  By the time I do go back, the restaurant has given my table away.  Did they know I was not going to find who I was looking for?  Are they in on it? Are they the gaslighters?

An officious maitre d’ with a suspect French accent offers me a table outside and when I decline he says he’ll have to take the cost of my meal off my credit card.  ‘But you’ve given away the table I booked,’ I protest.  ‘Only because you left it,’ he says.  ‘But I’ve returned and now you’re declining my business.’  ‘No, we are not.  We are offering you a lovely table on the street.’  I espy another empty table inside, next to the one I’d vacated fifteen minutes before and I wonder why I can’t have that.  ‘It’s for two people,’ he tells me.  ‘I am two people,’ I reply.  He answers with a sneer - ‘I don’t see the other one…’

What a barmaid!

This is a not untypical event at a London restaurant.  Over the last few years restaurants have developed a sense of maniacally aggrieved entitlement and lose all reason if every chair is not occupied for a single second of the day.  Book online and you are advised your stay is limited to an hour and a quarter.  Arrive five minutes late and your table will be gone and you will face abuse.  Fail to turn up altogether and you’ll be fined half your monthly salary.  Do that twice in a calendar year and no restaurant in London will accept your booking. Soon, not adhering to the laws of table-booking will be an imprisonable offence. The charge? - Trattoria Terrorism.

I have just read that this practice is spreading.  There’s a story going around that restaurants in Barcelona simply won’t serve you if you’re just one.  ‘Paella is for a minimum of two, señor.’   ‘That’s OK, I’ll eat it all myself.’  ‘Lo siento, señor.  Paella has to be for two.’

It's because I have so much to lose if I refuse the table on the street that I accept.  At least this way I’ll be able to see if my missing lunch companion wanders by in confusion.  But I hate eating on my own.  I don’t like the way people look at me when I eat alone, half in pity, half in fear.  Be seen dining solus and it is assumed you are some sort of sexual outcast, a molester, an onanist, a somethingphobe, at the very best a bottomlessly sad, loveless human being with bad breath and no conversation. The strange thing is that it is not only other people who think this, you think it yourself.  I am eating alone - I must be a pervert. 

Better to go hungry. But if eating by myself is forced upon me, as it is today, I try to find a corner of the restaurant where no one will notice me.  I make sure I’m carrying a newspaper big enough to hide behind.  And under no circumstances do I pick a tenebrous table, romantically laid-out.  Sit solus at a table with a white tablecloth on which a flickering candle burns and your heart will break with self-pity. 

The logic of this should demand that I prefer to sit outside and eat casually.  Am I not a creature of the streets?  Have I not admitted to an admiration for Baudelaire?  Look like Baudelaire and you will never appear out of place at a sidewalk café.  The waiters will know you.  Your absinthe will be waiting for you in a glass jug.  The ash tray will have been pre-filled.  And passers-by will nudge one another.  Voila.  The great flaneur.  Pausing to assemble his impressions.  Alone.  All very well, but to sit as Baudelaire will have sat requires a certain raffinement de la rue, and raffinement of any sort is not something that comes easily to a northern Englishman.  Not something that comes easily to me at least.  I am too self-conscious.  I have to think twice before I cross my legs. By cruel mischance, the street that was empty before is full now of people regarding the sad spectacle I present – the man without a friend in the world. 

I recall sitting on the street at a restaurant just like this some twenty-five years ago in Melbourne, dealing with the collapse of a marriage.  My second. But don’t feel sorry for me. Rejection saves us from grandiosity, remember.

Another solitary diner with blue-grey hair, cut like a small boy’s, had been shown to the table next to mine.  It felt deliberate, as though the waiters had engineered this proximity as a sort of social experiment, like putting recalcitrant pandas together in a zoo.  I hid behind my paper.  He ordered Cinzano and olives and sang to himself.  From behind the paper I observed the precise way he popped olives into his mouth, as though each might taste differently from the others. I noted the heavy, beaten, piratical silver ring on his marriage-finger and the way he moved his head, like a bird.  Without any warning or preamble he turned to a woman at a nearby table and said, ‘I love your diamonds.  I love the way they catch the light.’

 The woman thanked him and quickly left.

We ate in silence, I uncomfortably aware of him, he contemptuously aware of me.  We both were dining solus, but whereas I looked sad, he didn’t.

He ordered another Cinzano.  I another glass of Shiraz.  Suddenly he spoke. He told me he was in Melbourne for a conference, that he was a mathematician, a lawyer and a linguist, that his soft skin and brown eyes belied his age and that his brother always introduced him with the words, ‘This is David, he’s got five degrees from five universities and all he thinks about is sex.’

‘Aha, really, how interesting, oh well,’ I said, looking deep into my glass of Shiraz. I wished I’d ordered a magnum.  Solitary eaters, I thought.  Every word they said about us was true.

Getting nothing from me, David began to talk to people passing on the street. ‘I’m just a slut,’ he said to no one in particular. 

As the waiter passed, David moved his chair closer to mine, looked me directly in the eye and asked, ‘Do you want him?’

‘The waiter?’ I laughed.  ‘I wouldn’t know what to do with him.’  I wondered how I could bring mention of my wife into the conversation.  I may look sad and lonely but I have a wife.  Not for very much longer, but still, right this minute, I have a wife.   Wife.

You read me?  I wished I could have said wives.  I wished I could have said I had a magnum of wives.

He decided he didn’t want to eat anything.  Called for the bill.  Asked the waiter if he was circumcised.  Then tottered off into the night (to find a prostitute, he announced), his hands in his pockets, his little blue-grey bullet head bravely erect, a man not ashamed of being out on the street his own.