The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  I suppose this can only go on for a few seconds, although it feels much longer. Anyway, then I’m out of luck. We come to a set of traffic lights where the road splits into two lanes, and the lights are on red. So I pull to a halt on the inside lane, and Mazda man screeches up next to me and jerks the handbrake on and next thing I know, he’s getting out of his car. I’m expecting some lumbering oaf with a neck thicker than his head, but in fact he’s a scrawny little thing, only about five foot four. I can’t remember anything else about him because what happened next is all a blur. First of all he starts hammering on my window. I glimpse his face for a horrible, stretched moment and then I stare straight ahead, willing the lights to change, my heart pounding as if it’s going to burst. Now he’s shouting—the usual sort of stuff, fucking bitch, fucking slag, I’m not really taking it in, it all sounds like white noise to me—and then I can’t stand waiting for the lights to change again so I go straight across on a red light, thinking that it’s clear, only another car is coming at me all of a sudden from the left, and it has to swerve to avoid me and slam on the brakes with a screech and then its horn starts blaring as well but soon that’s faded away because I’m driving off like a maniac, no idea what speed I’m doing, and it’s not until I’ve gone about a mile and left the city well behind that I wonder why my side of the windscreen is wet when it’s not raining and then I realize it’s because the guy managed to spit all over it before I drove off. His parting shot.

  There were quite a few lay-bys before I got to the motorway but I didn’t stop in any of them because I was scared that he might be following and if he saw me there he’d pull over too and try to complete his unfinished business. So I drove on, which was a crazy thing to do because I was crying and shaking all the way back into Birmingham, and endlessly looking around to see if there was a Mazda sports coming up behind me on the outside lane, headlights flashing, guns blazing for battle.

  Maybe some women would have turned around and given him the same treatment in return. But I genuinely think that if I’d wound the window down he would have attacked me. He was beside himself, completely out of control. I’ve never seen—

  I stopped there because I was about to say I’d never seen a man look that way before. But that isn’t true. As I said, I only glimpsed his face for a moment, but that was enough to see into his eyes, and yes, I have seen that kind of hatred in a man’s eyes—just one other time. I saw it a few months ago, in Italy. But that’s another story, and I should save it for another day because my hands are already stiff from all this writing.

  How quiet this house is. I really noticed it then. I realized that the scratching of my pen had been the only sound.

  Good night, sweet Miriam. More tomorrow.

  In my old bedroom

  St. Laurence Road

  Northfield

  Sunday, 12th December, 1999

  Late morning

  So, big sis, can you guess where Dad is, and why I’ve got the house to myself for an hour or two? Of course you can. He’s in church! Making himself a better person. Which would be a wonderful idea, in his case, if there was only the slightest prospect of it working. But he’s been doing this, week in, week out for about sixty years now (as he was reminding me over breakfast only this morning), and if you ask me, the results haven’t exactly been outstanding so far. To be honest, if that’s the best the church can do after sixty years, I think we should ask for our money back right now.

  But no—he’s not worth thinking about. And besides, I’ve only got one more meal to sit through with him—the dreaded Sunday lunch—and after that I’m out of here. I’ve decided to spoil myself, and I’ve booked in to the Hyatt Regency for two nights. It’s the poshest new hotel in Birmingham: more than twenty floors, right next to the new Symphony Hall and Brindley Place. I was walking round that part of town on Friday and I could barely recognize it, it’s changed so much since the 1970s. All that area around the canals used to be deserted, a waste-land. Now it’s wall-to-wall bars and cafés, and every one of them was jumping. More of that mysterious meeting and talking that I’ve noticed springing up everywhere.

  But maybe you know all this. Maybe you’ve been there yourself, in the last year or two. Maybe you were there on Friday morning, having a coffee with some friends in All Bar One. Who can say?

  Even though I only saw it for a fraction of a second, I keep thinking of the face of that man who swore and spat at me yesterday because I pipped my horn at him. I told you, didn’t I, that it reminded me of something that happened in Italy this summer. It was the only other time I’ve seen a man lose his temper like that. It was a terrible thing to see (in fact I did more than see it, I was caught up right in the middle of it), but in a way the consequences were even worse, because it led directly to me becoming involved with Stefano. And look where that got me.

  It seems like a lifetime ago, already.

  Lucca is surrounded by hills, but it’s the ones to the north-west that are the loveliest, I think. High on a hillside there, in open countryside but with a fabulous view of the city (which is one of the most beautiful in Italy), an old farmhouse was being restored, from top to bottom, inside and out. It was being restored by a British businessman by the name of Murray—or at least, he was the one who was footing the bill. The person supervising all the work was his wife, Liz, and the architect and project manager was called Stefano. Liz didn’t speak any Italian and Stefano didn’t speak any English and that was where I came in. I was brought in to do all the translating—in person and on paper—and so for six months Liz Murray became my employer.

  Now, it’s a slightly alarming feeling, to sign a contract with someone and then to realize, about two days later, that you’re dealing with the boss from hell. To describe Liz as having a bad temper and a foul mouth doesn’t even begin to convey what she was like. She was a stuck-up cow from north London whose basic attitude towards the people working for her—and, as far as I could see, to the whole of the human race—was one of absolute contempt. Whether she had ever worked herself I was never able to find out: certainly she showed no particular talent for anything, apart from scaring people and bossing them around. Luckily, my job was straightforward, and I was good at it, or at least competent; so although I never received a gracious word from her, or was made to feel that I was anything other than her minion, at least I never had her screaming at me. But Stefano had to put up with the most terrible abuse (which I of course had to translate), as did the builders themselves. Eventually, it was more than they could take.

  It happened on a Wednesday, I remember, a Wednesday in late August. There was a site meeting fixed for 5 p.m. Stefano, Liz and I all drove out to the house separately. The builders’ foreman, Gianni, was already there. He’d been working all day, with four other men, and they were hot and bothered. The job had overrun now by several weeks, and they were probably all wishing that they were on holiday, like everybody else in Italy. The heat was indescribable. Nobody should have to work in that kind of heat. But in the last couple of weeks they had done (I thought) an extraordinary job. A huge swimming pool had been dug out, and almost completely tiled. The tiling alone had taken three days. They had used porcelain tiles in subtly different shades of blue, each one five centimetres square. The effect was magnificent. But there seemed to be a problem.

  “What are these?” Liz snapped at Gianni, pointing at the tiles.

  I translated for him, and he answered: “These are the tiles you asked for.”

  She said: “They’re too big.”

  He said: “No, you asked for five centimetres.”

  Stefano stepped forward, leafing through the thick wedge of papers that made up his spec.

  “That’s right,” he said. “We placed the order about five weeks ago.”

  To Gianni, Liz said: “But I changed my mind since then. We talked about it.”

  He said: “Yes, we talked, but you hadn’t come to a decision. You never came to a new decision, so we just proceeded.”

&n
bsp; Liz said: “I did come to a decision. I asked for smaller tiles than those. Three centimetres across.”

  Slowly, as they argued, it must have dawned on Gianni what she was asking him to do. She wanted his men to strip all the tiles out, order thousands of new, smaller ones, and start all over again. What’s more, she wanted him to do this at his own expense, because she was adamant that she had given verbal instructions to use smaller tiles in the first place.

  “No!” he was saying. “No! It’s impossible! You’ll bankrupt me.”

  I translated this for Liz, and she answered: “I don’t care. It’s your fault. You didn’t listen to me.”

  “But you didn’t make it clear—” Gianni said.

  “Don’t argue with me, you fucking idiot. I know what I said.”

  I translated this, without the “fucking.”

  Gianni was still furious. “I’m not an idiot. You are the stupid one here. You keep changing your mind.”

  “How dare you! How dare you try to put the blame for your laziness and your sheer fucking incompetence on to me?”

  “I cannot do this. My business will go under and I have a family to support. Be reasonable.”

  “Who cares? Who gives a shit?”

  “Stupid woman! Stupid! You said five centimetres! It’s written here.”

  “We changed it, you cretin. We talked about it, and I said three centimetres, and you said you would remember.”

  “You never put it into writing.”

  “That’s because I was silly enough to think that you’d remember, you big fat fucking moron. I thought that three centimetres would be easy to remember because it’s the same size as your dick.”

  She waited for me to speak. I said: “I’m not going to translate that.”

  “I pay you,” she pointed out, “to translate every word that I say. Now translate it. Every single word.”

  I dropped my voice, and translated Liz’s last comment. And that was when I saw it happen: an astonishing transformation coming over Gianni—this big, kind, gentle man—whose eyes suddenly gleamed with hatred, and who without thinking about it snatched up some tool from the box near to him—it was a chisel, an enormous chisel—and lunged towards his employer, screaming at her, inarticulate words of fury, so that he had to be restrained by his workmates, but not before he had managed to catch her a blow across the mouth. So that Liz, lips bleeding, had to storm off indoors to the kitchen, which had just recently been plumbed in, and a few minutes later we heard her drive away without another word to any of us.

  After that the men packed up their gear methodically and in silence. Stefano and Gianni had a long conversation in a quiet corner of the garden, beneath the shade of a cypress tree. I had asked Stefano if I could go but he said that he would like me to stay a little longer, if that was possible. I waited for about twenty minutes and then, when he had finished talking to the builder, Stefano came over to me as I sat in what was designed to be the loggia, and he said, “I don’t know about you, but I need a drink after that—will you join me?”

  We went to a restaurant along the main road not far from the farmhouse, up on the hillside overlooking Lucca, and we sat on the terrace and drank wine and Grappa for a couple of hours, and then ate some pasta, and talked until the sun started to go down, and I noticed how handsome he was and how kind his eyes were and what a great, childlike, shoulder-shaking laugh he had, and he told me what a relief it would be if Liz sacked him, because she was the worst client he had ever worked for, and the stress of it was almost giving him a breakdown, and this was the last thing he needed because apart from anything else his marriage was in trouble. And there was a sudden silence after he said that, as if neither of us could understand how it had slipped out. And then he told me that he’d been married to his wife for seven years, and they had a little daughter called Annamaria who was four, but he didn’t know how much longer they were going to be together because his wife had been unfaithful to him and although her a fair was over now it had hurt him terribly, worse than anything that had happened to him in his life, and he didn’t know if he could ever forgive her or feel about her the same way again. And I nodded and made sympathetic noises and spoke comforting words and even then, right at the beginning, I was too blind, too self-deceiving to admit that really my heart was singing when he told me all this, that it was just what I most wanted to hear. And the evening ended with him kissing me in the restaurant car park—kissing me on the cheek, but not just in a friendly way, stroking my hair a little bit as he did so, and I asked him if he wanted my mobile number and he reminded me that of course he’d already got it, it was on my business card, and he said he’d call me again soon.

  He called me the next morning, and we went out for dinner again that night.

  Living the high life

  Hyatt Regency Hotel

  Birmingham

  13th December, 1999

  Late at night

  I fell on my feet with this hotel. I’m not quite sure how it happened, because I’ve never been very good at the fluttering-eyelashes, damsel-in-distress look. But when I turned up here yesterday afternoon, looking pretty downtrodden I suspect, with just a few clothes and things crammed into a holdall (I’ve left the rest of my stuff at Dad’s, for now) the man behind the desk was one of the junior managers and he did me a big favour. He told me that all of the executive suites were free at the moment and I could have one of those if I wanted. And I can tell you, dear sister, it’s been wonderful. After four miserable days in the Amish-style establishment that Dad maintains these days, I’ve at last been able to relax and enjoy myself. I’ve spent half the time in the bath and half of it raiding the minibar. It will all have to be paid for, of course, but this is going to be my last little fling before I settle down to the serious business of sorting my life out. Meanwhile the lights of Birmingham are twinkling away beneath my feet and all at once the world seems full of possibilities.

  Now: I’m just going to tell you about this evening, and then I shall leave you in peace.

  So, just a few hours ago, I decide that I might as well do the decent thing and go to hear Benjamin’s band after all. The pub where they’re playing, The Glass and Bottle, is only about five minutes’ walk along the canal from here. Phil and Patrick will be there, and so will Emily: it’s high time that I caught up with her. And there’s no danger of running into Doug Anderton, because he’ll be in London saying “Goodbye To All That” at the Queen Elizabeth Hall (a marginally more prestigious venue than The Glass and Bottle, I can’t help thinking to myself, but there you go). So I have no excuse, really, for not putting in an appearance.

  On my way there, all the same, I find myself wondering why it is that I feel so reluctant to be part of the audience tonight. It has nothing to do with musical taste, or my suspicion that I’m in for an evening of slightly morbid nostalgia. I’m trying to be entirely honest with myself, and I know it must be—partly at least— because I had a tiny crush on Benjamin when we were at school, and even now, so many years later, running into him again on Friday at the bookshop felt weird. Not just because of the woman he’d been with, and how obvious they made it that I was interrupting rather more than a meeting between two friends. No, there was something else: I can hardly believe this, because I have hardly given Benjamin a thought (truthfully) in the last decade or more, but it was still there—a stubborn little residue of what I used to feel for him. How annoying—how depressing—is that? It’s the very thing I don’t need to know at the moment. I feel that it’s now absolutely necessary, to my health, to my mental wellbeing, to my survival, that I flush Stefano out of my system as soon as possible: but what if you can never do that? What if those feelings never go away? Am I unique in that respect— uniquely hopeless—or does everyone have the same problem, deep down?

  I push open the door to the pub and exchange the black frostiness of the canalside for a blast of light and warm air and loud, competing voices.

  Patrick sees me at once, comes over, g
ives me a big kiss. Phil is talking to Emily. We fall into each other’s arms. Hi, Emily, great to see you, how long has it been, et cetera, et cetera. She hasn’t changed. No grey hairs (or at least, she’s got a good hairdresser), still with a nice figure, doesn’t even look as plump as she used to. (Cruelly, I tell myself that it’s easier for women to stay that way when they haven’t had children.) I ask for a Bloody Mary and Phil sees to it. (They’ve already clocked that Patrick is underage—not difficult, to be honest—and are refusing to serve him.) There’s a decent-sized crowd in there. “Have they all come for the music?” I ask. Philip nods. He’s in a good mood, proud that so many people have turned out for Benjamin. As I said, Philip was always the best-natured of us all. It’s not hard to define the crowd’s demographic: they nearly all seem to be men on the cusp of early middle age. I see incipient paunches everywhere. But most of the band members have got families by now, as well, so wives are also in evidence, and a few confused-looking teenagers. Altogether there are about sixty or seventy of us, maybe, gravitating in small groups towards the stage, which is in a far corner of the pub, and where the band is setting up. Benjamin is sitting at his keyboard, frowning in concentration, pushing buttons. There are beads of sweat on his brow already: the ceiling is low, and it must be hot up there, under the lights. I look around for his friend, Malvina, and spot her at a table by herself, in another corner. We make eye contact but that’s about all: I don’t know what the protocol is. She’s not socializing with any of the others and my guess is that she hasn’t met any of them before tonight. Am I supposed to make introductions? Too risky—I don’t want to complicate an already ambiguous situation. I wonder if Emily knows this woman exists, if Benjamin’s ever mentioned her. I bet he hasn’t. Emily is gazing up at him on stage, now, and her eyes are rapt, hero-worshipping. All he’s doing is plugging a keyboard into an amplifier and setting up a piano stool. It’s not like he’s building a model of Westminster Abbey out of matches or making an ice sculpture or anything like that. But she still adores him, after sixteen years of marriage. I never expected Benjamin and Emily to last that long, I have to say. I suppose in a way it makes sense: Benjamin would always find it hard to split up with anyone, because he hates difficulty, he hates confrontation. Anything for a quiet life, is his unspoken motto, and I imagine that life with Emily must be very quiet indeed. But really, they are not well suited. Benjamin always struck me as rather a self-centred person. I don’t mean that he’s greedy or (consciously) unkind, I mean that he has a strong sense of self—a good sense of self—and he doesn’t really need anybody’s company other than his own. He’s not very giving of himself, that’s for sure. Whereas Emily gives a lot of herself. She is happy to spread herself around, generously, among her friends, and I expect that within a relationship, or a marriage, she will give herself entirely, hold nothing back: no secrets or no-go areas. But surely there must have come a point where that’s started to frustrate her—giving so much of herself to him, and getting so little back? There must have been such disappointments for her, in that time. Not just the children, the lack of children. I mean the small disappointments. The many little ways, the hundreds of ways, in which he has probably let her down. Over the years.