Heard Over a Half

I slipped inside under the sign which rocked gently, its three fleurs-de-lis bloomed on the slant. It read “The French” which I muttered to myself. It swung between inverted commas and creaked with each mention.

The light dropped, it had been diffused – the hiss and rattle of Soho drowned. I looked around and it was all shelved bottles and picture frames. It was a grainy oblong room: a forum with dark cladding. There were people around and a clamour.

Words jostled by the brass ceiling fan which gestured but made no sound. Four drinkers were installed against the street-facing windows. One of the women clutched her stool and strained inwards; the other three each occupied a corner, and formed a crooked square.

The emphasis of their conversation shifted and re-shifted. They buckled, and leaned, and veered into new rhythms of talk, and portioned out amongst themselves the dominant beat. They inwardly echoed what was just said.  

So as not to linger, I shuffled along the worn flooring to the buttress of the bar and ordered a customary half-pint. Crisp white-shirted barmaids flitted about, took orders and distributed mustard. Their movements shook the fixtures. They were efficient but gentle and careful not to interrupt. I noticed the gossamer soft faces of past patrons glinted in the glassware; which twinged with every movement.

Bacon, Deakin, Handcock and Bernard. Farson, Behan, Freud and de Gaulle. John and Thomas hung on the wall. Nostalgia-brown; they were refracted in the Babel of bottles that towered over me. My lager was placed onto the bar top.

Then I was awash with words. The combative four increased their volume suddenly. They roused one another and retorted with equal brio. I skirted the wide rim of a hat, on a short man who faced the bar and made for a seat at the edge of the room. The discordant quartet halted. Two of them (necks-craned) listened and the bald fellow rocked on his heels. He seemed dishoused.

A number of raucous remarks filled the room and petered out at various intervals. Silence never took hold mind. The starts and ends of phrases clattered with silverware and the sound of Merlots sloshed. At one time no words could be discerned. At other times the hubbub abated and a long, impassioned monologue was unrolled for all.

No speaker was afforded precedence. The pathos of their words only contemplated until a woman's spluttering, or a drunkard's caw irrupted.

A man with green-grey trousers approached the bar. He slovenly requested a recommendation then fingered the napkins. He blinked with effort and seemed to be reciting something to himself. I thought he may have been rehearsing his wife's scorn. He puckered his lips dismissing the advice of his server; words fell out of him puffed and spitting. They fizzed, like scratchings in the hot oil of now.

Then I noticed, my half had become a quarter.

The din of London had receded, but single voices remained all too discernible. They culminated in a mercurial chorus which the landlady savoured from her perch by the bar. Words were loosened from their grammars and hung around in the dim light, like tobacco smoke. At first I had the impression, that ramshackle phrases intermingled with purpose. As though the great ceiling fan were the motor of a certain verbal serendipity, or a pivot which spun out sense. But when the raw noise of talk, with all its shambling tributaries surged: when speech was unflattened and meanings were deluged, then—I conceded—it could equally have been silent.

I was concentrating on my drink. I felt sealed in a glass. A buoyant girl wiped the shelf up to where my elbows rested – where they ebbed the varnish from its edge. She daubed it with such vigour, that sap was drawn from its fat joins. She did not impose upon my corner though.

At my eye line there was a narrower shelf for propping up customers. Dust settled on the ring marks only. Above this panels continued, lacquered; meeting the vermilion of the wall which protruded between countless frames.

Under the narrow shelf, a mirror ran round the room. The swill of words lapped against it. The two mirror-strips met in the corner which I faced. I could see three pairs of my hands in the reflected arrangement. One pair grabbed the glass for replenishing and almost immediately the others followed.

I returned with sherry and by then the noisy four had disbanded.

Then I was alerted to a cooing couple, posed about their wine; a green, red, prism, bottle. Their romance was staged in front of a cataractine window. They were framed by it, bathed in it. They scoffed boards of hams and cheeses, their touches inscribed on thin stemmed glasses.

A man dragged the stool to my right. He obscured my view. But I could hear the pair pouring themselves out into the ears of the other; making room, no doubt, for more blood-thick wine.

The lone man (with the stool) wore pinstripes and had a yellow liqueur of some sort. He had two white, ridged ramekins on the shelf as well: condiments for later I supposed. His back faced me. He looked out across the haze of the room. He was tense when uncertainty clung to the sound in the place. His shoulders loosened when a snorting lady forgot to stifle the loud announcement of her gossip, or when a bar maid cautioned against a rosé that could be taken in too quickly.

He steeped himself in louche snippets, surveying the dark-wood horizons. He grunted and guffawed a moment too late, so his listening could not go unnoticed. He rocked with his drink. Mumbled punch-lines before they had been played out. No one seemed to acknowledge him despite this.

Beneath a panoramic caricature of the proprietor; gleefully ensnared by a tricolore serpent, a caption announced: 'Between the crisis and the catastrophe there is always time for a glass of champagne.'

The eavesdropper had slunk off somewhere. Someone mentioned the “larder of life” wistfully.

The couple were no longer cooing; a few fingers of wine remained. The woman seemed drunk and like a garbled account of herself. She bemoaned all stilettos. Her syntax was dry – it galloped out toward me unopposed. But her pace was all wrong. She slurred and loitered. While the chap pressed on.

Then they discussed a painting that lounged below the nicotine-cream ceiling. It was a montage of portraits handled coarsely and plotted on a fading grid. They disagreed about the presence of a shadow at its edge. The man grew exasperated patiently for he had anticipated a disjoint.

Her parlance was unsettled. She was too direct when reporting her feelings, too efficient with jabbing statements. Yet her pronunciation stumbled. Words were split when she uttered them – they were both nonsense blares and units of rancour. Besides she could not reference what had been said just a moment before. Instead she would assemble absurd objections irrespective of the subject, and seemed to gather a cast of vitriolic phrases, that tottered onto their marks beneath lurching spotlights. Her face was blurred from the mouth outwards – her responses hitting some off-kilter cue, which she congratulated with a loose and flickering grin. She whirred inexhaustibly. Then her wine was drunk.

She abruptly left her partner, presumably for the bathroom. He did not seem to mind. The bar maid approached to clear the empty glass and dogged the woman, who lumbered with the weight of unconvincing composure. It was as though she were out of context: swaddled in all the self-sufficient pride (and despondence) of an outmoded gadget.

Some time passed and she returned subdued. She was preoccupied with reciting her actions to herself. Without warning she grew enraged at the incoherent loss of her glass. Her berating rung throughout the place, undeterred by the audience. The man: fixed as the sinister perpetrator behind her loss of drink, contemplated his own wine in solitude.

I made for the exit my change spent and my sensations suitably diluted. Before breaching the surface of Soho—who's black morning was by then almost effaced by the advancing, bright, white evening—I visited the gents.

On the wall above the toilet someone had written:

“Maybe this was only supposed to be a one time thing?” [1]

[1] This inscription can still be viewed in the Gentlemen's toilets at “The French House” Soho. Curiously the original lettering seems to have been gone-over repeatedly: a number of lines of varying colour and weight. It is unclear whether this is the work of a single, returning customer or if the same statement has been set down by an array of gentlemen in the same spot. The landlady, who offers the most reliable history of the establishment, rarely ventures into this part of the premises, and so it is also unclear who the originator of this statement was, or indeed, when it was first put down. Her absence from this area is clearly regrettable. From a historical viewpoint that is.