End piece
Making it work
Jeffrey Bernard
Last Monday the Daily .Mail began the serialisation of what it called 'David Jacobs' Startling Love Story'. Not an epic event in itself, but one that caught my eye when I read, on the front page blurb, 'It is not unknown for a middle-aged man to fall violently in love with a girl half his age.' Mesmerised by that bit of information I read on and, further down the blurb, I got to the corker, 'Through the whole episode David Jacobs managed to maintain the debonair facade which is his hallmark as a TV and radio personality.' Well, speaking as a middle-aged man whose hallmark is a frenzied facade in his local launderette and public house, I can only view David Jacobs' sad love story with a tinge of envy and the distinct flavour of sour grape juice in my mouth. Would to God the Daily Mail would pay me to serialise my last violent precipitation into love. She wasn't half my age, in fact, but I could give her fifteen years. We met last April and throughout our relationship I managed to maintain the facade that you'd expect a rabbit to put up confronted by the headlights of a juggernaut in the dead of night. I first saw her in a restaurant one day and she hit me as a must. It was like window shopping with a thousand quid in cash in my pocket and I more or less walked through the plate glass window of scruples to get at the goods. There was nothing subtle, furtive or calculated about my approach. I simply met the woman and declared my interest. At first, I think she thought I was mad. Then, when I persisted, she, starved presumably of flattery for some time, acquiesced and adopted me on a whim. Superstitious people stroke even alley cats. We dillied and we dallied through the summer and come the autumn I made the fatal mistake of losing that essential sense of the absurd. Two weeks ago, a deafening silence on the telephone confirmed my fears that I was redundant.
Now, it occurs to me that if I went in to detail — romantic, pornographic and poetical detail — and assuming I was able to maintain a debonair facade on or in the media, then I could elaborate and cash in on one of the most depressing relationships it's ever been my pleasure to balls up. I wouldn't exactly describe the telling of this as 'cashing in' on the situation, but I thought I'd let you know about it just so's you don't feel the only one the next time you don't get the expected phone call. Standing two weeks away from the situation, as it were, I can now view it all from the upper circle. Thank God some farces don't transfer to the West End. Most of my runs have been provincial and all my revivals have been disastrous. It's my attempted revivals that I'd like to cash in on and serialise in a national newspaper. I'd be as rich as a Greek.
It was while I was watching my boats being burned last week, that I bumped into Anne who, you may remember from this whining column, was the lady who, Sarah Bernhardt-like, delivered herself of the line, upstage and prompt corner in my old bed-sitter, 'You've snapped at me for the last time.'
Seeing her in a pub suddenly last week gave me an inkling of what a dog feels like when it sees an old bone. I actually held her hand for two minutes, feigning affection while really hoping for a more realistic reaction, and after two dry sherries on her part I gave up all attempts at resuscitation. That business about not going back is bang on. It really doesn't work. So, it's back to the drawing board, heart to the grindstone and on we go. There's an odd compulsion to make something 'work'. I wonder why. Perhaps it's seeing friends go straight home at five-thirty. It could be looking at snapshots of their holidays last year. It's perhaps a load of sentimental old garbage but my freedom that they envy so much is something I'd like to lose. What's so awful and yet makes me laugh a little is the idea of climbing out of one's foxhole, holding the white flag of surrender high in one hand and then not getting captured. And a happy weekend to my reader.
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