Vingt-Quatre

Summer on the beach

Simon Sebag Montefiore

The Blairite epoch began for me at a louche café called Vingt-Quatre which is the heart of that quarter of Fulham Road preposterously known as the 'Beach'. After I left Blair's peoples' triumph at the Royal Festival Hall and saw the resigned Major return to No. 10 in his last moments of power, I breakfasted at dawn at Vingt- Quatre, so-called because, like the Wind- mill Theatre during the last war, it never closes. Typically, the café contained some tipsy Referendum partisans, two broken men from Smith Square sipping vodka and tonics and eating eggs and chips for their last Tory breakfast, and three tanned, terp- sichorean girls. pulsating to the music in leather miniskirts, who appeared not to know about the election.

`What an election night!' said the waiter as the various defeated politicos stag- gered to bed. 'Change of the guard or what!'

And as if by magic, as in a dream from a lost era, there was a clipping and clop- ping of hooves on tarmac. We all jumped up — none having yet slept — and threw open the glass doors and there, trotting past the Pan bookshop down the empty road, like the ghosts of old regimes gal- loping out of town and into history, was a squadron of green-clad cavalry guards on horseback. This host of horsemen trotted away down the deserted Fulham Road until they were out of sight and we could just hear their hooves, and then that sound was gone too. . . The guard had changed. It is entirely appropriate that this wistful last act of an era should have been played out at Vingt-Quatre.

V-Q's food is comforting, unpretentious: breakfast that dying art form of old-fash- ioned truckers' beans, toast, eggs; at lunch and supper, pasta like delicious penne, chilli and artichoke, or roast chicken; in the afternoon margaritas and tea. But the question is not what to eat but what to watch. People come to the Beach for the oldest pastime since cafés were invented: to promenade and to spectate — just as grandes horizontales in the Second Empire drove their chariots through the Bois to show off their rich equipages or as Lon- don's countesses and courtesans rode along Rotten Row to bow at gentlemen and arrange their assignations.

That's how the Beach got its ludicrous name. Even in midwinter the girls often do not wear much more than bikinis, in order, they say, to 'surf the Zeitgeist' and 'search for a wave': yes, it is a thoroughfare of clichés! As on every beach, it's the drift- wood that's interesting. The area is usually featured in various guides to fashionable living and eating as the Mecca of the beau- tiful though it is regarded by puritans as a Gomorrah of excessive wealth, shameless philistinism, consumer idolatry, libertine sexual congress, promiscuous narcotic con- sumption and, last and worst of all, vulgari- ty. All true, of course.

There is an endless cavalcade of what you might call Beachcombers — tran- sient, aspirant bedouin who plying some trade, perhaps looking for fame, love or possibly the meaning of life, parade up and down all day, both men and women, in their best suits, shortest skirts, bran- dishing mobile telephones like pistols. Many of the beauties in V-Q belong in a Jackie Collins novel, if not a Guy de Maupassant conte. Alongside V-Q's cock- tail of businesswomen and men, aristo- crats, students, clubbers and models, there is always some French, German, Creole or American girl who one week is pointed out as London's newest, most notorious call-girl — or at least demirep; two weeks later, she is London's newest super-model, promoted from Paphian obscurity to the peak of female success. And no one remembers. . . .

Vingt-Quatre is ostentatiously ordinary, like a cafeteria-style diner with its plastic chairs and grey chrome walls. But its care- fully contrived drabness is somewhat like those warlords such as Frederick the Great and Napoleon who shrewdly accentuated their own magnificence by always wearing the same plain, old tunics. Against its dourness, the coffee tans, the streaked blondness, the garish brightness of the clothes of its indolent female guests shine ever more brightly: just as Balzac described the arrival in the provinces of the heroine's cousin in Eugenie Grandet, they glow in V-Q 'like a peacock in a pigsty'.

I recommend sitting at a round table at the front, watching the Beach through the open French doors that frame the sights like a television screen. But the watching works both ways since the promenaders always peer into the window to see who is there, while pretending not be interested. The spectator is also the spectated at. The rules of engagement go like this: from mid- night to 7 a.m., V-Q is occupied by scream- ing, bare-bellied clubbers and out-of-towners. Then they go. Mercifully, the locals understand that no one is to address each other from 7 until after 11. You feel at home whether you're a pop star Messalina in clanking, gilded Versace just back from Juan-les-Pins, or an unshaven, unwashed, grumpy curmudgeon like me.

The place is ruled by Guy, the beneficent manager-waiter-philosopher, who sees everything that happens on the Beach. Guy is a social enigma. Exceedingly good-look- ing, Antipodean and likely to pop up unex- pectedly at great houses at weekends, he volunteers no information at all. But if you ask — as you must — when Beachcombers and other driftwood pass, he knows every secret. . . .

In the Beach's complicated social eti- quette, it is understood that if you are in the window at V-Q after midday you offer yourself as the prey of anyone who walks past. It is usually the last person you want to see, but they always come and sit at your table and order coffee. There is a special species of sponger called the Beach Sponge, who is usually an Englishman returned from New York who has forgot- ten that Brits are only supposed to sponge off foreigners.

But then the Beach is not really English, it is a mixture of Manhattan's Village and a small, corrupt Sicilian town. It has its ghet- tos too: the Italians who all hang out down the road at Luigi's do not understand the attractions of V-Q. Every Italian stops to insult England: They say London today is the dolce vita: you English couldn't even dream of the dolce vita here. Pah! For the dolce vita, you need spon- taneity, but in London no one will do any- thing without planning it two months ahead. What shit!

V-Q has changed lately — for the better. There aren't just miniskirted adventuresses now but also booming, shabby but cheerful mothers from the countryside and middle- aged, obviously cultured men in tweeds reading The Spectator over a glass of claret. There is also an even stranger breed: sever- al tables of businessmen in suits with mobiles who hold board meetings and even run their businesses from there. At a typi- cal lunch-time, on one side I hear some glamorous MTV presenter girl loudly telling her companions, 'Do you know? I am a Nineties cultural icon.' Then there is usually a pair of boyish cut-throats with files and telephones. They could be plan- ning a documentary on the healing rituals of Pathan warriors, a murder, or starting a new religion. Some lunch-times, they claim to be doing all three. At another table I eavesdrop, as always, on two lovely if some- what plastic young women, tanned to the point of frying, who daily boast to each other about their lubricious hunt for any superstar who happens to be in London to launch a film or a new album.

This is a mesmerising, never-ending yet restful pantomime of friends, grotesques and beauties, which is why I won't have my breakfast anywhere else. Besides, V-Q is the sort of place where you can order your own special off-menu dishes. They like to name dishes after regulars, which is clever because it makes you want to return. This is in a great tradition: Prince Stroganoff had his beef, Wellington his boeuf, Napoleon his chicken Marengo. There was soufflé Rothschild and Woolton pie. Lord Sandwich, the notori- ous Jemmy Twitcher, had his slices of bread. Bombe Orsini is something sweet named after an incendiary device that almost killed Napoleon III, while Molo- tov's cocktail is an incendiary device named after something sweet. Sadly, after these eponymous dishes of world-histori- cal drama, mine's just a cup of coffee. I always order a cappuccino in a pint glass, which they claim to have named after me. But, knowing my frailties, they're proba- bly just trying to make me happy. They have succeeded.

Simon Sebag Montefiore writes for the Sun- day Times. His novel, My Affair with Stalin will be published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in September.