The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  As for Patrick, well . . . I want to see as much of Pat as I can, while I’m here, obviously. He is so grown up now. Of course, we have been writing and emailing each other constantly, and last year he came out to Lucca for a few days, but still— it surprises me every time. I can’t tell you what a peculiar feeling it is, to look at this man—he may be only fifteen, but that’s what he seems like, now—this tall (rather skinny, rather pale, rather sad-looking) man and know that once he was . . . inside me, not to put too fine a point on it. He seems to have a very good relationship with his father, I must admit. I envied them the ease with which they talked to each other, shared jokes together. Blokes’ stuff, maybe. But no, there was more to it than that. I can see that they look after him well, Philip and Carol. I have no grounds for complaint there. A little jealousy, maybe. But then, it was my choice, to try my luck in Italy again, and leave Pat with his father. My choice.

  And now to my final piece of news, and in some ways the most momentous— or disturbing, maybe. I saw Benjamin again. About an hour ago. And in the strangest circumstances, I have to say.

  I had been given the lowdown on Ben the night before. Still working for the same firm—a senior partner now, and I should think so too, after being there for so long—and still married to Emily. No kids: but, well, everyone has given up asking about that. Phil said that they’d tried everything, and been down the adoption route as well. Medical science baffled, etc., etc. Neither of them is to blame, apparently (which probably means that, deep down, without being able to say it, each blames the other). And in Benjamin’s case, as with children, so it is with books: he’s been labouring (!) for years to produce some shattering masterpiece, and so far, nobody has seen a word. Though everyone still seems touchingly convinced that it will appear one of these days.

  So, that’s the story so far. And now picture me, if you will, looking through the History section of Waterstone’s on High Street. Only been back here a day and a half and already I can’t think of anything better to do. I’m right next to the part of the shop that is set aside for the ubiquitous coffee-drinkers. Out of the corner of my eye I can see a girl who’s facing me—very pretty, in a paper-thin sort of way— and opposite her, with his back to me, is a grey-haired guy who I assume at first must be her dad. I guess the girl must be about nineteen or twenty, and there’s a touch of the Goth in the way she dresses: she has lovely hair, black hair, thick and long and straight, half way down her back. Apart from that I don’t take much notice of these two to start with, but when I move over to look at the books on one of the display tables, I notice her reaching down to get something out of her bag, and I notice the way her black T-shirt rides up to expose her midriff, and I notice the way that he notices this, quickly, surreptitiously, and all of a sudden I recognize him: it’s Benjamin. Wearing a suit—which looks odd, to me, but of course it’s a working day for him, and he must just have slipped out of the office for a while—and looking, in that instant, altogether . . . What’s the word? I know there is a word this time, a perfect word for the way men look when they’re in that situation . . .

  Ah . . . I remember. “Besotted.” That’s the word, for how Benjamin looks.

  And then he notices me; and time seems to slow down—the way it always does, in the moment you recognize someone you weren’t expecting to see, and haven’t seen for a long time, and something shifts inside you both, some sort of realignment of your expectations of that day . . . And then I’m walking over to the table, and Benjamin is standing up, and holding out his hand, of all things, holding his hand out so I can shake it. Which of course I don’t do. I kiss him on the cheek instead. And he looks confused and embarrassed, and straight away he introduces me to his friend; who is also standing up, by now; and whose name, it transpires, is Malvina.

  So, what is the situation, there? What’s going on? After five minutes’ broken conversation—not a word of which I can remember—I’m none the wiser. But in what is already establishing itself as a pattern, in the last couple of days, I do have something in my hand that I didn’t have before. A flyer. A flyer for another event taking place on Monday December 13th. It turns out that Benjamin’s band is playing that night.

  “I thought you split up ages ago,” I say.

  “We’ve reformed,” he explains. “This pub’s celebrating an anniversary. Twenty years of live music. We used to have a residency there, and they’ve asked us to come back and play, for one night only.”

  I look at the flyer again, and smile. I remember the name of Benjamin’s band, now—“Saps at Sea.” Named after a Laurel and Hardy film, he once told me. It would be fun to see them again, in a way, although I never cared for his music much. But I’m speaking the honest truth when I say: “I’ll come if I’m still in town. But I may have left Birmingham by then.”

  “Please do,” Benjamin’s saying. “Please do come.”

  Then we say the usual awkward stuff about it being nice to see you, and so on, and next minute I’m out of there, with never a backward glance. Well, OK, then—one backward glance. Just enough to see Benjamin leaning towards Malvina—who he introduced to me as his “friend,” which was all the explanation I got—and showing her the flyer and telling her something about it. Their foreheads are practically touching over the table. And all I can think of as I hurry away is: Benjamin, Benjamin, how can you be doing this to your wife of sixteen years?

  In my old bedroom

  St. Laurence Road

  Northfield

  Saturday, 11th December, 1999

  Night time

  This trip just gets worse and worse. It happened more than three hours ago, and I’m still shaking all over. Dad is sitting downstairs, reading one of his terrible old Alastair Maclean novels. He wasn’t remotely sympathetic. Seemed to think the whole thing was my fault anyway. I don’t think I can stay in this house any longer. I shall have to leave tomorrow, find somewhere else to stay for a while.

  I’ll tell you what happened, briefly. I was longing to see Pat again today, and he was supposed to be playing football for the school in the morning. It was an away game, against a team in Malvern. So I said I’d pick him up from Philip and Carol’s house, and drive him over there myself. Much against his better judgment, Dad let me borrow his car.

  We went south along the Bristol Road and then took a right turn when we got to Longbridge, through Rubery and along towards the M5. It was pretty weird, being alone in the car with him—weirder than it should have been. He’s very quiet, my son. Maybe he’s just quiet when he’s with me, but somehow I don’t think that’s the whole story. He’s an introvert, for sure—nothing wrong with that. But also—and this was what really unnerved me—when he did start talking, the subject he chose was the last thing I’d been expecting. He started talking about you, Miriam. He started asking questions about when I’d last seen you, and how Mum and Dad had coped with it when you disappeared. I was dumbstruck, at first. Simply didn’t know what to say to him. It wasn’t as if any of this had arisen naturally in the course of conversation: he brought it all up, quite abruptly. What was I supposed to say? I just told him that it was all a long, long time ago now, and we would probably never find out the truth. Somehow we had to live with that, find an accommodation with it. It was a struggle: something we both battled with, me and Dad, in our different ways, every day of our lives. What else could I tell him?

  He fell silent, after that, and so did I, for quite a while. I was a little freaked out by that conversation, to be honest. I thought we’d maybe be talking about life at school, or his chances in the football match. Not his aunt who had vanished without trace ten years before he was born.

  I tried not to think about it any more, tried just to concentrate on the road.

  Now, there’s another thing I’ve noticed about this country, Miriam, in the few days I’ve been home. You can take the temperature of a nation from the way it drives a car, and something has changed in Britain in the last few years. Remember I’ve been in Italy, the hom
eland of aggressive drivers. I’m used to that. I’m used to being cut up and overtaken on blind corners and sworn at and people yelling out that my brother was the son of a whore if I’m going too slowly. I can handle it. It’s not serious, for one thing. But something similar has started to happen here—only it’s not that similar really, there’s an important difference: here, they really seem to mean it.

  A few months ago I read an article in the Corriere della Sera which was called “Apathetic Britain.” It said that now Tony Blair had been voted in with such a huge majority, and he seemed like a nice guy and seemed to know what he was doing, people had breathed a sort of collective sigh of relief and stopped thinking about politics any more. Somehow the writer managed to link this in with the death of Princess Diana, as well. I can’t remember how, I can remember thinking it all sounded a bit contrived at the time. Anyway, maybe he had a point. But I don’t think he really got to the heart of the matter. Because if you scratch the surface of that apathy, I think what you find underneath is something else altogether—a terrible, seething frustration.

  We weren’t on the motorway for long—only about twenty minutes or so—but even so, I started to notice something in those twenty minutes. People on the motorway were driving different ly. It’s not just that they were driving faster than I remembered—I drive pretty fast myself—but there was a kind of anger about the way they drove. They were tailgating each other, flashing their headlights when people stayed in the outside lanes for a few seconds longer than they should. There seems to be a whole new class of driver who just takes up residence in the middle lane and won’t be shifted, and that really seems to infuriate everybody else: people drive about five yards behind them for a while, pressuring them to move, and then, when they don’t move, they swing out into the outside lane and swing back in again before it’s really safe, cutting into their path. And there were drivers who were happily cruising along at seventy and then, when they noticed that someone was overtaking them, they would accelerate, up to eighty, eighty-five, as if it was a personal a front to suggest that a P-registration Punto might overtake an S-registration Megane, and they weren’t going to stand for it; as if it was an insult to the rawest and tenderest part of them. I’m exaggerating, perhaps, but not massively. This was a Saturday morning, after all, and surely most of these people were heading off to the shops, or just out to enjoy themselves, but there seemed to be a collective fury building up on this motorway. It felt tense and pressurized, as if all it would take was for someone to make one really bad mistake and it would tip us all over the edge.

  Anyway: we arrived at the school, and battle commenced. Patrick was playing somewhere in midfield, and the game seemed to keep him pretty busy. He was self-conscious with me watching him, and was trying to look tough and grown-up, but then there was also this permanent frown of concentration on his face which wiped about five years off him and almost cracked my heart at the same time. He played well. I mean, I don’t know anything about football, but it looked to me as if he was playing well. His team won, 3–1. I almost froze to death, standing there on the touchline for an hour and a half—there was still frost on the pitch—but it was worth it. I’ve got a lot of ground to make up with Patrick, and this was a start, definitely. Afterwards I’d assumed we would go off and have lunch somewhere, but it turned out he had other plans. He wanted to go back on the coach with his school friends, and then he was going round to the house of this friend of his, Simon, the goalkeeper. I couldn’t very well say no, even though it took me by surprise. Within a few minutes the boys had showered and the coach was gone and suddenly I was left in the middle of Malvern all by myself. With the rest of the day to kill.

  So: back to my usual state of a fairs. The loneliness of the single woman. Too much time, not enough company. What was I going to do? I had a sandwich and something to drink at a pub on the Worcester Road, and in the afternoon I went for a walk along the hills. It calmed me; cleared my head. Perhaps I’m someone who only feels happy inside herself when she’s halfway up a hill. Certainly I seem to have spent a lot of time, these last few weeks, climbing up to different vantage points. Maybe I’m at a point in my life where I need that Olympian perspective. Maybe I lost my bearings so thoroughly when I got involved with Stefano that I can only recover them by getting a sense of the bigger picture. The picture today was pretty big, I must say. Would you remember that view, I wonder, Miriam, if you were ever to see it again? We used to go there when we were kids, you, me, Mum and Dad. Freezing cold picnics, ham sandwiches and thermos flasks, the four of us tucked away behind some big rock on the escarpment for shelter, the fields spread out below us, beneath grey Midlands skies. There was a little cave in a hidden part of the hillside, I remember. We used to call it the Giant’s Cave, and somewhere I’ve got a picture of us, standing outside it, in our matching green anoraks, hoods pulled up tight. I think Dad’s thrown most of them away, the pictures of you, but I managed to hold on to some of them. Saved from the wreckage. It seems to me now that we were both terribly scared of him, always, and it was that fear that made us so close. But that doesn’t make the memories unhappy. Quite the opposite. They’re so precious that I can hardly bear to think of them.

  I don’t believe you could have just walked away from all that. It makes no sense. You wouldn’t have done it, would you, Miriam? Left me to fend for myself? I can’t bring myself to believe it; even though the alternative’s worse.

  By half past three, it’s getting dark. It’s time to gather my strength and go home and spend another evening with Dad. The last one, I’ve decided. I’ve been thinking that if things had been better, we might have spent Christmas together, but that’s not going to happen. He and I are a lost cause. I’ll have to find somewhere else to stay. Maybe Pat and I could go away together somewhere. We’ll see.

  So, anyway, I’m on my way home. I told Dad that I’d pick up something for us to have for dinner, so I pop into Worcester, and I buy some steak. He likes steak. Considers it his patriotic duty to eat it, in fact, as rare as possible and as often as possible, now that the French have banned it. That’s Dad for you. And I’m leaving the outskirts of Worcester and I’ve already had a bit of a skirmish with someone who tried to overtake me on a roundabout and I’m getting jumpy about it again, getting that sense that everyone behind the wheel of a car these days is for some reason on edge. And as I head further out of the city, there’s a car in front of me going very slowly. The streetlamps are lit by now and I can see that the driver is a man, a man on his own, probably not very old; and the reason he’s driving slowly is that he’s talking on his mobile. Otherwise he would probably be speeding along because he has quite a fancy car—a Mazda sports. But this phone conversation, whatever it’s about, is evidently quite distracting. He’s driving with only one hand on the wheel and keeps veering over to the left-hand side of the road. We’re in a forty-mile limit but he’s doing about twenty-six. But it’s not the fact that he’s slowing me down that’s annoying me, so much: it’s because what he’s doing is so unsafe, so incredibly irresponsible. Isn’t it illegal, in this country? (It is in Italy— not that anyone takes any notice.) What would happen if a child were to run out in front of him? He speeds up for a moment and then slows down again, drastically and for no reason, and I almost crash into his bumper. He has no idea that I’m behind him, as far as I can see. I brake sharply and the plastic bag of shopping I’ve put on the passenger seat next to me shoots off and spills its contents over the floor. Great. And now he’s picking up speed again. I think about pulling over and putting the food back in the bag but decide against it. I watch the driver ahead of me, instead, fascinated in spite of myself. He’s reached an animated point in the conversation and is making hand gestures to himself. He has no hands on the wheel at all! I decide that I want to get away from this situation as quickly as possible: if there’s going to be an accident, I don’t want anything to do with it. The road is single-carriageway, at this point, passing through the outer suburbs, and
there’s a window of opportunity with no other cars in sight. It’s not the safest thing to do but I’ve had enough of this joker: so I indicate, swing out to the right, and try to overtake him. He’s slowed right down again so it should only take a few seconds.

  But as I’m overtaking, he notices what I’m doing and he doesn’t like it. Without dropping the phone, he puts his foot down and starts racing me. I’m the one going faster, still, but Dad’s Rover doesn’t have a lot of power in it, and it’s taking me a lot longer to overtake than I’d like: and now there’s a van coming in the other direction. Swearing to myself at the sheer stubbornness of this macho idiot, I change down to third gear, hammer down hard on the accelerator, and rev forward at forty-five, fifty miles an hour, just squeezing in ahead of him as the van closes in, flashing its headlights on to full beam to tick me off.

  And that was that. Or would have been, if I hadn’t done two really stupid things as I was in the middle of overtaking. I glanced over at the man on the telephone, making eye contact for a second or two. And I pipped my horn at him.

  Now, it was only a little, frail, girly sort of pip. I’m not even sure what I meant by it. It was just my feeble way of saying, “You wanker!,” I suppose. But it had the most amazing, instantaneous effect. He must have finished that call and chucked his phone on to the passenger seat immediately because a couple of seconds later this car is right up behind me—about six inches away, I reckon—and his lights are on full beam, blinding me in the rear-view mirror, and I can hear his engine screaming. A real howl of anger. And suddenly I’m scared. Terrified, actually. So I try to accelerate away from him—quickly reaching some ridiculous speed, like sixty miles an hour or something—and he doesn’t give any one of those inches. He’s still coming up behind me, bumper to bumper. I wonder if I dare try flicking the brakes on, just to give him a shock, just to make him pull back a little, but I daren’t do it, because I don’t think it would work. I think it just means he would crash into the back of me.