Sweet corn
AFTERTHOUGHT JOHN WELLS
I have always found a kind of excruciating pleasure in sitting alone in restaurants. It may be that the unnatural act of eating solo in pub- lic heightens the sensibilities to an unusual degree, but the most trivial conversations con- ducted sotto voce at the next table, the most ordinary tie-fingering inquiries about a table for three, the simplest slapstick with spaghetti or grapefruit, or the poignant sadness of any- one else eating alone all take on the nature of dramatic entertainment. It is as impossible to read a book or pursue an independent train of thought as it would be in the theatre, and be- hind the feeble pretence of reading the small print on the mineral water bottle or looking innocently into the middle distance, one involuntarily strains for the next line, and the mind is poised to throw itself into rapturous applause or laughter.
This obviously has its disadvantages. Boring conversations that are obviously boring the participants only slightly or not at all can bore the silent spectator to the point of fury. In- genuous indiscretions about mutual acquain- tances run on unchecked, reducing the listener at another table to exaggerated frenzies of coughing, pepper-grinding, and chair-shifting, and however ham-handed the efforts of the elderly seducer, the rejected mistress, the pre- cocious godchild or the moustachioed wit may be, the unseen audience, as in the theatre, is powerless to intervene. The activity is not with- out its dangers, either, as I realised one evening after listening with growing rage to the fatuous monologue of a middle-aged American tourist from Wyoming, whom I attempted to silence with a malign glare. He appeared to pay no attention, and then as he was leaving he whis- pered to his wife, 'Hey, did you see that faggot over there? He was eyeing me up all evening.'
There are, however, moments of compensa- tion. As for example one day last week when I decided to have an early lunch in order to read a script. I had hardly read the first few lines when a knowledgeable, well-informed business voice began to impose itself, informing us that the speaker had experienced some reluc- tance on the part of the planning authority to authorise the erection of a caravan park in addition to a car port. I did my best to concen- trate on the script, but I realised it was useless and settled back to listen to the difficulties he had had in extending the concrete surfacing from the party wall to the main wall adjoining the house. It was a small and rather exotic Mexican restaurant, and the narrator, a plump man in a grey suit accompanied by two other fifty-year-olds, seemed a little out of place among the decor of bulls' heads, guitars and Mexican rustic furniture.
The narrator, it seemed, had only recently purchased the caravan, but was more than satis- fied with it, especially as it contained a built-in toilet unit. His daughter apparently had de-
veloped such an aversion to continental toilets that she had returned from their last holiday in Spain severely constipated. During this exposi- tion it was possible for the audience—consisting of two Mexican waiters and myself, sitting in the opposite corner of the restaurant—to learn about the character and background of the speaker, and of his two rather soft-voiced com- panions, who seemed to fulfil the role of cour- tiers, only occasionally daring to offer murmurs of admiration and agreement. One of them did attempt on one occasion to brag about his own holiday accommodation on the Costa del Sol, but he was rapidly crushed by the main char- acter threatening to rent it from him. With the exposition complete, it seemed almost certain that we were in for a one-act experiment in the theatre of tedium.
Then suddenly the tone of voice changed. He told them that he was going to set them a little problem. The problem had been devised by the Manchester School of Business Manage- ment, and was designed to test the ability of business executives to deduce facts from given situations. A man opens the door of a room and looks inside. He sees a man of exactly the same height as himself lying on the bed with a piece of wood. The piece of wood has a little bit missing from one end. The first man laughs and goes out. What is the situation?
The creatures of his whim were then forced to ask questions. Both appeared reluctant. Gradually, however, the more powerful charac- ter imposed itself and they miserably asked how long the piece of wood was, how tall the man who had come in was, and ,why he was lying on the bed. Clearly very pleased, the main character told them that they were not allowed to ask questions like that, but only questions requiring the answer yes or no. Even more miserably they inquired whether it was a long piece of wood, whether the person lying on the bed was a tall person, whether it had been a sardonic laugh or an amused laugh. This almost floored the main character, who thought that it might have been a sardonic laugh, but decided in the end it had been an amused laugh. One of the courtiers tried tragically to break away by engaging in conversation with the waiter, but he was dragged back.
Despite pathetic attempts to give up, they were forced to continue the questioning for almost twenty minutes. The dialogue closely resembled Beckett's. Finally he revealed that the man on the bed was a dwarf. Until that morn- ing he had believed he was the shortest man in the world. Another dwarf of exactly the same height had then challenged him to a competi- tion. Before the competition, however, the other dwarf had secretly entered the room and cut a little piece off the first dwarf's metre stick. The first dwarf had measured himself with it, be- lieved that he had grown, and committed sui- cide. The rival dwarf had then opened the door, seen him lying on the bed dead with the sawn- off metre-stick, and had laughed. The courtiers appeared stunned. To complete the carnage, the main character then told an interminable story about a circus manager who had hired five Basque dwarf acrobats, accommodated them for some reason in the Regent Palace Hotel, and allowed them to get drunk with some people in the bar who spoke French, stand on each other's shoulders and run through the re- volving door where they had met with an acci- dent. The moral of the story, he told them, was that you shouldn't put all your Basques in one exit. And who wants the Grand Guignol, ducky, when you can get that?
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