Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  Well, look, I’ve got a class in a few minutes. Better do some prep.

  OK. Can’t keep ’em waiting.

  But it’s great to be in touch again. And sorry again that I left it so long.

  Like I said, no problem. Sorry for stalking you.

  I’m glad you did.

  Run along, then.

  I’ll let you know my new email. The academic one won’t work after December.

  Great. Let’s stay in touch!

  OK. Bye.

  Bye x.

  When the chat was over, she sat back in her chair and breathed deeply, calming herself. She took a few rapid sips of wine. Then she logged off Skype and went into the kitchen to see if there was anything she could do to help.

  *

  They ate their fish. It was a bit dry. The print-out of the email lay on the table next to Ian. By now it was splattered with tiny grease marks.

  The email was from Martin, Sophie’s head of department. It said that a complaint had been received from a first-year undergraduate student about transphobic remarks made by Sophie during a seminar one week earlier. It invited her to come and see him in his office at 4 p.m. tomorrow, to give her side of the story before the matter was taken any further.

  ‘But you’d never say anything transphobic,’ said Ian. The word sounded slightly odd, to Sophie’s ears, coming from him.

  ‘Of course not,’ she said. ‘It’s just a misunderstanding.’

  She cast her mind back to last week’s seminar. Emily Shamma was one of her quieter students, and Sophie could only remember two moments of direct interaction with her this time. Early in the session, she had lobbed her a fairly simple question, in the hope of drawing her out: she’d shown Emily two versions of Munch’s The Scream and asked her to say which one she thought was painted earlier. The answer (to Sophie’s mind) was pretty obvious, but Emily had been unable to come to a definite conclusion. Sophie had not in any way belittled her for this, but had explained the answer patiently, and moved on. Later, as everyone was leaving, they’d had a brief – and once again inconclusive – discussion about whether their forthcoming one-to-one tutorial should take place on Wednesday or Thursday in the penultimate week of term.

  ‘And that was it?’ said Ian.

  ‘I think so,’ said Sophie. ‘I can’t remember anything else.’

  ‘Well, then, just tell Martin that, and it’ll all be fine.’

  ‘Of course it will,’ said Sophie. She took a mouthful of rice, and thought no more of it: her mind wandered back, instead, to the exchange of messages with Adam and, beyond that, to those few sun-drunk days in Marseille, the boat trip to the Frioul islands, their moonlit bathe on the Calanque de Morgiret, so that she was hardly listening when Ian – more worried by the email than she was, apparently – glanced through the print-out one more time, gave a forced laugh and said:

  ‘Everything about this is ridiculous. Even the name of the student who’s complained. I mean, who calls their daughter Coriander, for God’s sake?’

  27.

  The next morning, as usual, Sophie took the seven-forty train from Birmingham New Street to London Euston. Just as the train was passing Milton Keynes, and she was in the middle of sending a text to Sohan confirming their venue for dinner that night (she was supposed to be meeting his new boyfriend for the first time), Ian called.

  ‘Hi,’ she said. ‘What’s up?’

  ‘Well …’ he began. He sounded distinctly nervous. ‘I know you aren’t on Twitter, but I’ve just taken a quick look, and today you’re all over it.’

  Sophie felt a sudden, awful hollowing sensation in her stomach.

  ‘All over it?’ she said. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘There are a lot of tweets about you. Not that you’re trending exactly but … well, near enough.’

  ‘Tweets? Who from?’

  ‘Students, mainly. It looks like this Coriander woman has been busy spreading the word.’

  ‘Oh shit. Are they bad? What do they say?’

  ‘Look, don’t read them, whatever you do. I know you never listen, but I’ve told you before what these Social Justice Warrior types are like. There’s nothing quite as nasty as a pack of lefties once they’re on a moral crusade and they’ve got a victim in their sights. I was in two minds whether to tell you about this, to be honest, but I thought it was probably best if you knew what was going on before you went into that meeting this afternoon.’

  ‘Jesus, how has this happened? I don’t even know what I’m supposed to have said yet.’

  ‘Nothing, probably. Which is why I’m sure it’ll blow over. But at the moment it looks a bit bigger than we thought.’

  ‘OK, thanks. Forewarned is forearmed, and all that, I suppose.’

  ‘Exactly. Love you.’

  ‘Love you too.’

  She hung up and stared out of the window for a few minutes. But the hollowness in her stomach was just getting worse, and she was fighting off a growing temptation to look at those tweets. To distract herself, she decided to do some work: a few last-minute preparations for her two seminars later that morning.

  She needn’t have bothered, however. None of her students showed up, for either seminar.

  *

  ‘Am I being boycotted?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘It would appear so,’ said Martin.

  ‘But that’s ridiculous. That’s fucking ridiculous.’

  ‘Sophie, please don’t get emotional about this. That won’t help anyone.’

  Sophie’s head of department, Martin Lomas, was a fifty-two-year-old professor of European history, specializing in the role played by flax in Britain’s trade deals with the Baltic in the early seventeenth century, a subject on which he had so far written four books. Looking around his office, with its immaculate shelves of books arranged not by author or subject but by size and spine colour, Sophie could understand why emotion might terrify him.

  ‘This is all, I’m sure, a silly misunderstanding,’ he continued. ‘But the university insists that we follow the proper procedures. Let’s just follow the proper procedures, and everything will be all right.’

  ‘Well, you can start by telling me what I’m supposed to have said.’

  Martin looked at his meeting notes. ‘You addressed a transgender student in such a way as to imply that her gender dysphoria was the result of character weakness.’

  Sophie was speechless for a few seconds. Then managed to say: ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Sophie, please …’

  ‘OK, then, rubbish. Total rubbish. Is that better?’

  ‘Let me just lay out the facts, as reported.’

  ‘Reported by whom?’

  ‘First of all, by the student you addressed. Emily Shamma. She reported it to her friend, Corrie Anderton, and Ms Anderton reported it to the equal ops officer of the Student Union. The remark was overheard by three other students who confirmed the report.’

  Sophie fell silent. This did not sound so good.

  ‘Apparently you said to Emily: “You have a lot of difficulty making your mind up about things, don’t you?” ’

  Sophie waited.

  ‘And?’

  ‘That’s it.’

  She looked at him for a moment, then breathed a long sigh of relief. ‘OK. Well, thank God for that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, we don’t have anything to worry about. She misunderstood me, that’s all.’

  Martin waited for clarification, looking unconvinced.

  ‘I wasn’t talking about her gender choices. It was just a comment about the fact she couldn’t decide whether to come to a tutorial on a Wednesday or Thursday.’

  ‘I see.’ He made some notes on the pad in front of him. ‘But, then, why did you say it?’

  ‘Because she was being indecisive.’

  ‘Yes, but this was just one moment of indecision. And yet you generalized from it.’

  ‘Oh. No, no … I was referring back, in a jokey way, to something we’d talke
d about earlier in the seminar. I’d shown her these two pictures and asked her which one she thought was painted first and she couldn’t decide.’

  Martin wrote all of this down.

  ‘Well, that gives it some context, I suppose,’ he said, doubtfully.

  ‘No, it doesn’t give it some context,’ Sophie insisted. ‘It explains it. It explains why I said it, and what I meant.’

  ‘Still, it wasn’t a very tactful thing to say, to a student who, as I understand it, is considering gender reassignment.’

  ‘Tact? Is this about tact, all of a sudden? No, of course it wasn’t tactful. In fact it was a stupid thing to say. I can see why it was misconstrued. So I’ll go and apologize to her, and then we’re done.’

  ‘Mm.’ Once again, Martin looked far from persuaded that things were as simple as Sophie believed. ‘Let’s hope so. You see …’

  Martin stared through his office window, distracted as always by the banality of the view it offered: the brick wall of the humanities department’s North Wing, with its rows of anonymous office windows. He felt an overwhelming ennui steal over him. The previous week he had discovered a new fact about flax and the role it had played in Britain’s trade deals with the Baltic in the early seventeenth century, and all he really wanted to do was expand it into an article. Or even a book. Yes, perhaps there might be another book to be written here …

  Reluctantly, he ditched this train of thought and tried to return his attention to the latest departmental crisis.

  ‘You see, what Ms Anderton is really saying is that by making this remark, you could be in breach of equal opportunities legislation. That’s the crux of it. And of course, that would be a very serious matter.’

  ‘But …’

  ‘And in the past this could all have been dealt with internally. Not hushed up, exactly, but … well, the whole matter could have been settled within this department. But now we have social media to contend with. Have you seen any of the tweets or replies?’

  ‘No, I haven’t. Bad?’

  ‘Opinions are being vigorously expressed within the student community.’

  ‘Anyone taking my side?’

  ‘Perhaps best if you look at them yourself. You can find them quickly enough by searching the hashtag “#sackColemanPotter”.’

  ‘Right,’ Sophie said. ‘I can see where that one’s going.’ She felt sick again. Still, she could see no reason, however bad things looked at the moment, why this scandal couldn’t be stopped in its tracks. ‘I’ll have a word with Emily, and get this sorted, shall I?’

  ‘It may not be that simple. The person who made the complaint was Ms Anderton, when the remark was reported to her. I’m not sure what Ms Shamma’s position on the matter is. That might even be beside the point. It sounds to me as if she’s rather a passive …’ He checked himself, just in time. Even in a private conversation like this, it was unwise to make sweeping character judgements about members of vulnerable minority groups.

  ‘Can I see the text of the complaint?’

  ‘It will be released to you, in the fullness of time.’

  ‘Can you tell me exactly what it said?’

  ‘I’m not sure I have it to hand,’ said Martin, leafing through the first couple of items in the pile of papers on his desk. ‘It used the expression “microaggression”, I think.’

  ‘ “Microaggression”?’

  ‘You’re familiar with the term?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, that’s what you were guilty of, in this student’s opinion. A “huge microaggression”.’

  Sophie frowned. ‘How can you have a huge microaggression? That would just be … an aggression.’

  Martin smiled wanly, then rose to his feet and extended his hand.

  ‘Let’s just follow the proper procedures,’ he said. ‘If you do that, in my experience, you can’t go wrong.’

  *

  Sohan and Sophie both turned up at the restaurant on time, but Mike had texted that he was going to be half an hour late. They sat reading their menus while waiting for him to arrive. Sophie was looking at the prices in dismay. There was no way this was going to come out at less than £150 a head and Ian would be furious if he learned that she’d paid that much for a meal.

  ‘Doesn’t this look incredible?’ Sohan was saying. ‘I can see why this place gets amazing reviews.’

  ‘I can see why it’s half-empty. Fifteen pounds for a starter?’

  ‘People will pay that on a special night out.’

  ‘And what the fuck are “fermented sardine croquettes”? How do you ferment a sardine and why would you put it in a croquette once you’d fermented it?’

  ‘The hummus sounds good.’

  ‘Hummus? You can get that for one pound twenty in Tesco. Throw in a “pickled Shimeji mushroom” – whatever that is – and they think they can charge twelve quid for it.’

  ‘You’ve changed since you moved to Birmingham,’ said Sohan, still scouring the menu eagerly. ‘I know they still serve chicken in a basket and lemon meringue pie up there, but the rest of the country’s moved on.’

  ‘Hilarious,’ said Sophie. ‘Seriously, though, I can’t pay these kinds of prices.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about that. Mike will pay for everything.’

  ‘No, he won’t. I have to pay my own way.’

  ‘Darling, he earns ten times as much as you and me. Did you hear that? Ten times. I make him pay for everything. We couldn’t afford to do anything together otherwise.’

  ‘And he’s OK with that?’

  ‘It’s just common sense. I’m telling you, my lifestyle has improved beyond recognition since I met this guy. He’s just a couple of years older than us and he’s a bloody millionaire!’

  Sophie shook her head with reluctant admiration. ‘How come? Family money?’

  ‘Not at all. He’s a genuine prole, believe it or not. His father was a steelworker in one of those Godforsaken northern towns – Harrogate or Halifax or somewhere.’

  ‘I don’t think either of those ever had much to do with steel.’

  ‘Well, something beginning with H.’

  ‘Hartlepool?’

  ‘Hartlepool, that’s it. But Mike’s maths teacher at school reckoned he was a genius. He got into Imperial – first man in his family to go to university – stayed on to do a PhD in Pure Maths and then straight into the City.’

  ‘They’re still recruiting people like that? I thought that was a pre-crash thing.’

  ‘Apparently not.’ Turning to the menu again, his face lit up. ‘Wow. Wagyu tenderloin, with fava beans and shaved broccoli. For thirty-six pounds!’

  Sophie looked at him to see if he was joking. He wasn’t.

  ‘Putting your spectacular love life to one side,’ she said, ‘do you want to hear the other unbelievable thing about today’s fiasco?’ She had already given him the full details of her meeting with Martin. ‘This student who’s complained about me – turns out I practically know her. She’s the daughter of one of my uncle’s best friends.’

  ‘Uncle Benjamin the Booker-longlisted novelist?’

  ‘Exactly.’

  ‘Well, that’s good news, isn’t it? He can call his friend and have a civilized chat and get him to tell his daughter to shut the fuck up.’

  ‘Possibly.’ Sophie could see how this might look like a sensible option, but it did not alleviate the sense of impending disaster that had come over her that day. Late in the afternoon her resolve had cracked and she had looked at some of the students’ tweets. After two minutes’ reading, the sheer number and hostility of the messages had had a physical effect and she’d had to run down the corridor to dry-retch in the ladies’ toilet. Perhaps this was another reason why she could not get excited by the items on tonight’s menu.

  ‘Anyway, maybe the Left have turned on you but you could end up being a heroine to the Right,’ said Sohan. ‘If we can spin it so it looks like you’re attacking political correctness, maybe the free-speech libertarians wi
ll come riding to your rescue. They’ll put you on the front cover of the Spectator and the Daily Mail will write leaders about you.’

  Sophie was annoyed that he was making a joke of it. She smiled dutifully but was grateful when they were interrupted, a few seconds later, by the arrival at their table of a tall, blond-haired, confident-looking man in a dark business suit. The man ruffled Sohan’s hair and squeezed his shoulders, and Sohan said, ‘Hey, you,’ and kissed him on the cheek as he sat down beside him. ‘Sophie, this is Mike,’ he said. ‘Mike, Sophie.’

  They shook hands across the table.

  ‘We meet at last,’ said Mike. ‘Sorry I’m late.’

  Sophie hadn’t been so immediately impressed by a man’s good looks since the day she had met Ian for the first time. She glanced across at Sohan and he looked triumphantly back at her, his eyes twinkling like a cat that has just been presented with a rich and generous serving of cream in a saucer made of unalloyed gold.

  *

  The bill for dinner came to £435. As Sohan had predicted, Mike insisted on paying, although he did it so discreetly that Sophie didn’t even realize it had happened until a waitress came back to their table with the receipt.

  ‘No, that’s not fair,’ she protested, as Mike pocketed the receipt after asking whether she could make use of it for tax purposes.

  ‘It’s completely fair,’ said Sohan. ‘This man gets paid obscene amounts of money for devising bizarre financial instruments which only help the rich to get richer. Meanwhile I’m engaged on important research – vital research, you might almost say – into the very nature of what it means to be English, and I’m paid peanuts. A pittance.’

  ‘Is this true?’ Sophie asked, smiling at Mike. ‘Not about his research, obviously, but what your job involves?’

  ‘More or less,’ he said.

  ‘I thought derivatives were considered a bit dangerous after the crash.’

  ‘I arrived in the City in 2007,’ he said. ‘So I was only just getting settled in when it happened. Bit of a baptism of fire. Sure, everyone was a bit shaky for a while, but then things calmed down again. Nobody’s really changed their behaviour, as far as I can see. The sums of money involved are too great. You get hooked on making it. It’s like any other kind of addiction – drugs, sex – you can’t stop it just by regulating it. Especially when the regulation’s half-arsed anyway.’