by Jonathan Coe
‘So, was he just making all of that up?’ Benjamin asked.
‘Oh no – Kalergi existed, and he probably is the founder of the EU, if you want to trace it right back,’ said Philip. ‘But the way these people twist his ideas is incredible. Maybe what I said about cranks being harmless was a bit naive.’
‘No, I don’t think so.’ Benjamin reached his car first, and fumbled for his keys. ‘We just got unlucky today. There aren’t many like him.’
‘I bloody hope not. Shall we meet somewhere else next time?’
‘No, I like it here.’ Benjamin fastened his seat belt, shut the car door and opened the driver’s window. ‘It’s always an adventure. You never know what you’re going to find. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s nasty, a lot of the time it’s as weird as hell. But that’s England for you. We’re stuck with it.’
He waved out of the window as he drove off, leaving Philip to wave after him, and then to shake his head ruefully, wondering whether Benjamin was starting to carry this whole equanimity thing a bit too far.
8.
April 2011
Ian talked a lot about his mother. He rarely spoke of his father, who had died when he was still a teenager, or his older sister Lucy, who was married and lived in Scotland and didn’t seem to have much to do with the rest of the family, but his mother was clearly an important presence in his life. She lived alone, in a small village somewhere near Stratford-upon-Avon, and every Sunday he went to visit her. Sophie (who was inclined towards over-analysis of her relationships anyway, but especially so in this case, as she was determined – determined – that this one should not fail) vacillated in her mind between finding their closeness touching and finding it alarming. It seemed of a piece with Ian’s thoughtful and generous nature, certainly; at the same time, was it really healthy for a thirty-seven-year-old man to see his mother so regularly, to speak to her on the telephone so often?
Of course, he was anxious that Sophie should meet her as soon as possible, but for many weeks she resisted the suggestion. It was not until they had passed numerous other landmarks – his first dinner with Lois and Christopher (which had been a great success), the first time they had spoken the words ‘I love you’ to each other (during a quiet moment in a particularly boring film she had taken him to see at the Electric), the day Sophie finally moved into his flat (bringing with her boxes and boxes of books to fill up those empty shelves) – that at last she relented. And so, one bright Sunday morning in April found them driving out of Birmingham along the A3400 and into the unimposing Warwickshire countryside; their destination being the village of Kernel Magna, where Ian had been born and had spent the greater part of his life.
Sophie enjoyed the journey, not least because she liked the way that Ian drove. There was something sexy about watching a man do something he was so good at: his constant relaxed alertness, his courtesy to other drivers, the sense of his being in easy command of a complex, responsive machine. For some reason it made her want to put a hand on the inside of his thigh and try distracting him. After she had teased him sufficiently in this way, and once conversation between them had started to run dry, they played a word game. It was Ian’s idea: you took the last three letters from the number plate of a nearby car and made a phrase out of it.
‘Come on, I’ll start,’ he said, and read out the initials from a Vauxhall Astra waiting ahead of them at a junction. ‘TLX – Tony’s Lovely Xylophone.’
Sophie laughed. It was a stupid way of passing the time – the kind of game she had always imagined she might play with her children, if she ever had any – but it gave her a gleeful sense of being on holiday from the deadly earnestness of academic smalltalk (socializing within the department could be quite an ordeal). And Ian’s sense of fun, as so often, was catching.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘ZCH – Zoo Captivates Harpists.’
‘WPL,’ said Ian, glimpsing a VW Golf as it sped past. ‘Wankers Prefer Lesbians.’
‘YMG – Your Magnificent Gallstone.’
Finally, they both spotted a big black Range Rover as it reversed out of a driveway.
‘DPP – Derrida Purposely Prevaricates,’ said Sophie, at the exact moment that Ian came up with: ‘Dead Panda Pongs.’
They burst out laughing and then, before Sophie had had time to reflect on the difference between their suggestions, they passed the sign that welcomed them – and other careful drivers – to Kernel Magna itself.
It was not quite the picture-postcard village that Sophie had been anticipating. It would probably not have passed muster as the model for one of those jigsaws that enjoyed such healthy sales in the toyshop at Woodlands Garden Centre. For one thing, as you approached it from the north, estates of brand-new, characterless houses, built of the same pale red brick and all standing slightly too close to one another, sprang up on either side of the road. They looked nice enough, but Sophie could not imagine herself living in one of them.
‘That used to be mine,’ said Ian, pointing towards one house in particular, although she had no idea which one it was. ‘Lived there for nearly two years,’ he added, half to himself.
The speed limit was thirty, but he slowed down conscientiously to twenty-five miles an hour as they drove past a convenience store, an Indian restaurant, an estate agent and a hairdresser’s, all grouped within a few yards of each other.
‘That’s it,’ Ian said. ‘That’s all that’s left of the village, now. This –’ he indicated a large abandoned building on the left ‘– used to be the local pub, but then one of the big chains bought it up, and it wasn’t making them any money, so they closed it after a couple of years. Not much life here these days.’
‘Any of your friends still live here?’
‘Nope. They’ve all moved out. Simon was the last one to go – he’s in Wolverhampton, now.’
Sophie was still trying to remember the names of all Ian’s friends. ‘Which one’s Simon, again?’
Ian gave her what was almost – but not quite – a reproving glance. ‘My best friend. We were at primary school together.’
‘He’s the one who joined the police?’
‘That’s right. OK, this is Mum’s house, here.’
He pulled into a driveway and parked in front of a tall, three-storey house, dating from the 1930s or so. A white-haired figure was already sitting in the front bay window, looking out for them. She was up and on the doorstep before Ian and Sophie had even had time to get out of the car. She was a tall woman – five foot eight or nine, Sophie would have said – and despite her age her posture was still good; she stood strong and upright, with a straight back. Her eyes were blue, her teeth well preserved, her gaze searching; only the slight hint of a tremor as she held out her hand to Sophie gave any hint of her seventy-one years. She was, it was immediately clear, a formidable woman.
‘Mmm,’ she breathed, as she looked Sophie up and down intently while clasping her hand in both of hers. ‘Even prettier than he said you were. My name is Helena, dear. Do come in.’
She led them into the sitting room and poured them glasses of sweet sherry, a drink Sophie realized she had never tasted before.
‘Really,’ Helena said, when smalltalk about the journey had been exhausted, ‘I think my son might have brought his new lady friend to see me before today. I gather you’ve already moved in to his flat, dear, is that correct? So this … relationship, must be very advanced already. It seems rather a topsy-turvy way of doing things.’
‘Well … that’s completely my fault,’ said Sophie, with a nervous glance at Ian. ‘He’s invited me lots of times before now, but it’s never quite worked out. Sundays are … always a bit busy,’ she improvised desperately.
‘Do you go to church?’ Helena asked, with a kind of lethal innocence.
‘No, but …’
Ian came to her rescue. ‘I think I terrified her, Mum, by talking about you too much.’
‘How silly,’ said Helena, rising to her feet. ‘I wouldn’t say boo to a g
oose. Now, let me get lunch ready.’
‘I’ll come and help,’ said Ian.
Left alone in the sitting room, Sophie looked around her at the pictures on the mantelpiece and the walls. Family photos, mainly: one of Ian as a schoolboy, aged about thirteen, in a double frame with a girl some three or four years older: Lucy, obviously. There were several pictures of Helena’s late husband: a black-and-white one, in which he was wearing army uniform (National Service?); a nice one of the two of them, she wearing a swimsuit, he an open-necked shirt and shorts, taken on some distant family holiday (the south of France, maybe? The 1960s?); and a much later one, given pride of place on the mantelpiece, in which he was wearing a suit and looked to be about fifty: not long before he died, perhaps. Then there was a picture of Lucy graduating (a small one, tucked away on a shelf next to the television), but only Helena and a young Ian were with her. All the pictures needed dusting, Sophie noticed.
For lunch, Helena had prepared ham on the bone, with a warm potato salad. They ate not in the dining room, which Helena said was too dark at this time of year, but in the kitchen; which Sophie thought was rather dark as well.
‘Ian was telling me,’ she ventured at one point, ‘that you’ve lived here for more than forty years.’
‘That’s right. We moved here the year that Lucy was born. I don’t suppose I shall ever move now, even though the village is not what it was, not by any means. My son can probably tell you: there used to be a butcher’s, an antiques shop, an ironmonger’s. All family businesses, of course. It was very different back then. The post office closed down about five years ago. That was a great blow. Now I have to drive into Stratford if I want to send a parcel. And the parking there is so very difficult. And of course there was Thomas’s!’
‘What was Thomas’s?’
‘The village shop. A proper village shop. Not just selling food but toys and stationery, books – all sorts of things.’
‘That’s going back a bit, Mum.’
‘Some of us have long memories.’
‘Anyway, there’s a shop now.’
‘That place?’ Helena shuddered. ‘Hardly the same thing. One can hardly go in there and expect to have a conversation with the person behind the till. You never know what language they’re going to be speaking, for one thing. Which reminds me, did I tell you about my new cleaning woman?’
Ian shook his head.
‘My lovely cleaner,’ Helena said to Sophie, ‘who has been coming here since goodness knows when, has finally retired and moved to the coast. Devon, I believe. So now the agency has sent this new girl. Grete is her name. She comes from Vilnius. Lithuania, of all places! Can you imagine?’
‘Doesn’t really matter, does it,’ Ian said, ‘so long as she can clean? What’s her English like?’
‘Excellent, I must say. Although her accent is very strong, and I do wish she would speak a little louder.’
‘Perhaps she’s scared of you. A lot of people are, you know.’
Understanding that this remark – in part at least – referred to Sophie, Helena turned to her guest, and her tone softened. ‘Anyway, my dear,’ she said. ‘Do tell me all about your work at the university. My son says that you know absolutely everything there is to know about old paintings.’
‘Not exactly,’ Sophie answered, wincing inside. ‘Like all academics, I work in a very specialized field. My thesis was about contemporary portraits of black European writers in the nineteenth century.’
‘Black Europeans? Who on earth could you mean?’
‘Well, Alexander Pushkin, for instance, whose great-grandfather was African. Or Alexandre Dumas – the man who wrote The Three Musketeers? – whose grandmother was a slave from Haiti.’
‘Goodness, I had no idea. The things one learns!’ Helena exclaimed, in a way which suggested there were some things she would rather not learn at all.
‘So I examined portraits of these figures, to look at the different ways each artist had acknowledged – or failed to acknowledge – their black ancestry.’
‘How utterly fascinating. Would anybody care for some rhubarb crumble?’
Having closed off the subject effectively in this manner, Helena busied herself fetching the pudding from the oven, and making custard. Afterwards Ian (whose visits to his mother nearly always involved carrying out some odd jobs on her behalf) went upstairs to fix a toilet seat that had come loose. Helena, meanwhile, took Sophie outside.
‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I think that for the first time this year, it’s just warm enough to take tea in the garden.’
They sat on a wrought-iron bench, painted white and overlooking a flower bed which would, no doubt, offer a fine display of colour in a few months’ time. Helena put her arm through Sophie’s and held her in a grip which was terrifying in its steadiness and ferocity.
‘I’m so glad that my son has found you,’ she said. ‘His last two girlfriends were not at all suitable – although a mother is bound to say that, of course. I would so love for him to have a steady companion; a life companion. Speaking for myself, I feel the lack of that very keenly, even though it’s – goodness! – more than twenty years since my lovely Graham passed away.’
‘It must have been … very sudden, unexpected?’
‘Completely. A heart attack, at the age of fifty-two. He was in the prime of life. He loved his family, loved his work …’
‘Which was?’
‘He worked at the old Pebble Mill studios in Birmingham. He was a studio manager. A senior studio manager, I should say. It was a long drive to work every day, but he didn’t mind. He loved every minute of it. He was a BBC man through and through. I don’t know what he would think of them today … Lucy was away at university when it happened. She kept her distance, which I’m sure was her way of dealing with it. I can’t blame her for that. But it was Ian and I who had to live with the worst of it, here in this house. That was when we became so close, I suppose …’
‘You didn’t … You never found anyone else?’
Helena drew back and looked at her, a smile of faux-astonishment on her face. ‘It would never have occurred to me. Not once.’
They fell silent. It was very quiet here. The occasional passing car, the occasional snippet of birdsong. Quiet, Sophie thought, but somehow not restful.
‘It was Graham who planted this garden,’ Helena continued at last. ‘This bed here, the closest one, is the rose bed. You must come here in a few months, in July. There will be such a display! We have many varieties, but my favourite, the loveliest of all, is a Damask rose, called York and Lancaster. It is a white rose, with the most delicate hint of pink in some of the petals. Just the colour of your skin.’ She looked directly, now, into Sophie’s eyes, and in the old woman’s unwavering gaze, Sophie could read many things: among them a plea, so eloquent she might have been expressing it in words, that Sophie should not hurt her son in any way; and behind it, far behind it, but just as real, a threat: a threat that if she did hurt him, there would be consequences. All of this remained unspoken. The only words she spoke were: ‘That’s what you seem to me, my dear. A lovely rose. An English rose.’
And Sophie, profoundly disconcerted, could only look down into her cup, and take a careful sip of tea.
9.
August 2011
As soon as the taxi had deposited them all back at the house, Coriander ran upstairs to her room. She made straight for the record player on her dressing table, forcing herself not to look either to the left or right of her, not to see the collage of pictures plastered all over the walls, and put on side two of her vinyl copy of Back to Black. Only then, as the defiant, heartbreaking chorus of ‘Tears Dry on Their Own’ filled the room, did she dare to look around her, at the gallery of images which, before they went on holiday, had been a celebration of the living, but in their absence, impossibly, had become a shrine to the dead.
There were photos of her in every conceivable pose and context: sitting on a washing machine in a laundromat,
strumming a Les Paul guitar; on stage in tight red shorts and black leather jacket, her heavy black eyeliner teased into that distinctive flick; standing with her husband Blake as they gazed raptly into each other’s eyes, he in pork-pie hat, she in check sunfrock and red bra; a posed photo of her seated, wearing angel wings, a strand of black hair covering one eye, a beauty spot visible above her bored, pouting mouth; another photo of her on stage, wearing a cropped vest top from which her breasts spilled sexlessly, ballet pumps and big hoop earrings, her wild hair pulled into a beehive by a chiffon scarf with Blake’s name embroidered on it; a terrible picture of her towards the end, anorexic, desperate, her cheekbones jutting, her eyes haunted. There was also a huge, blown-up photo of her record collection, or parts of it: LP covers scattered across the frame; albums by Count Basie and Sarah Vaughan, Dinah Washington, Aretha Franklin, Diana Ross, Louis Armstrong, Sidney Bechet, Sammy Davis Jr. Coriander’s eyes roamed hungrily over the pictures as the album played. When she heard the thin rawness of Amy’s voice on ‘Some Unholy War’ she had to bite back the tears. There were lines in that song – ‘just me, my dignity, and this guitar case’ – which always caught her in the gut and twisted her inside out but now, in the knowledge that the singer was dead, that there would be no more songs, no more music, made the listening experience almost unbearable.
When it was over, Coriander felt that she had made the first steps in the process of regaining her own identity, after three nightmare weeks trapped in a Tuscan villa with her family. It was good to be back in her bedroom again, back in her own house. There was nothing else about this house that she liked, but she did feel at home in this room.
Coriander was fourteen years old. She lived in a house currently valued by local estate agents at a little over six million pounds, spreading over five floors, tucked away in a hard-to-find backwater between the King’s Road and Chelsea Embankment. Her father, Doug Anderton, was a prominent left-leaning commentator in the national media. Her mother, the Hon. Francesca Gifford, was a former catwalk model who had found religion and become a leading light on London’s charity circuit, the doyenne of fundraising auctions where the cheapest seat at a dinner table cost ten thousand pounds. Coriander hated her mother and felt alienated from her father. She felt no connection with her younger brother, Ranulph, or her older half-brother and -sister, Hugo and Siena, all of whom had been in Italy with her. She hated her private day school in Hammersmith, and hated the fact that she was being privately educated in the first place. She hated Chelsea and she hated south-west London. There were times when she felt that the only thing she loved – loved with a fierce, corrosive passion – was the voice of Amy Winehouse. And now Amy was dead. She had died just a few days into their holiday, and Coriander, until now, had been given no opportunity to mourn.
