by Jonathan Coe
I know that I’m right. I know that what I’m thinking about Benjamin and Emily is true. I see it in her eyes, later that evening.
The gig (is that the word? It’s a word I can never take seriously) goes well. I remember hearing this band play a few times back in the 1980s, and thinking how out of date they sounded. They were doing these long, funky instrumentals, but this was a few years before somebody coined the phrase “acid jazz,” and that kind of thing became fashionable again. Back then, what they were doing just seemed perverse and anachronistic. But tonight it goes down a treat. Great rhythm section: I think the drummer used to work with Benjamin in a bank or something, that’s how the whole thing got started. Anyway, he knows what he’s doing, and so does the bass player: and over this solid foundation Benjamin and the guitarist and the sax player weave sweet, slightly wistful melodies (Benjamin’s touch there, I reckon) and improvise cleanly and cleverly: no over-indulgent solos, no blowing endlessly over the same two chords while the audience gives up and drifts back to the bar. After the first two or three numbers, in fact, people have stopped tapping their toes self-consciously and jiggling up and down on the spot. They’re dancing! Actually dancing! Even Philip, who may be a beacon of niceness and decency in some ways but is certainly no Travolta in the moves department. Emily’s really going for it, too. She’s surprisingly nifty on her feet. Really getting down and enjoying herself. She seems to have come along with a whole crowd of friends (“church people,” Phil tells me) and in the middle of one piece, after it’s reached its first climax and gone quiet again and there’s already a smattering of applause and cheering, she turns to one of these people—a tall, narrow-hipped, good-looking guy—and he leans down towards her and puts his hand on her shoulders and she shouts, “I told you they were good, didn’t I? I told you they’d be brilliant.”
She looks so happy.
Me, I can’t quite bring myself to join in. I don’t know why. Maybe because the last few days have been so strange and the last few months have taken me on such a long and tiring emotional journey and tonight I can feel the whole weight of that pressing down on me. Anyway. Nothing, nothing on earth is going to get me on to that dance floor. I stand on the edge of the crowd and lean against the wall watching, and after a while I go to the bar and buy myself a pack of Marlboro lights. That shows how bad things are. I haven’t had a cigarette for weeks: only took up smoking again when the Stefano business started to get me down, as well—before that I’d been clean for about four or five years. I’m not ready to light one up just yet, but it’s nice to have the feel of the pack in my pocket, nice to know it’s there. Sooner or later I’m going to want one. I can feel the need coming on.
About half an hour later, the atmosphere changes, and that’s when I know it’s time to go.
It happens like this. A bright, up-tempo song finishes with a flourish of cymbals and a crashing major chord, and then three of the band members put their instruments down and withdraw to the back of the stage. There are just two of them left—Benjamin and the guitarist—and the guitarist announces the next piece which he says is going to be a duet. He says that it’s written by Benjamin and it’s called Seascape No. 4. Then the two of them start playing and the mood changes completely. It’s a delicate, sad little tune—almost dangerously fragile— and Benjamin’s whole face is transformed when he starts playing it. He’s looking down at his keyboard, hunched over it suddenly, tense and introverted, and his eyes are half closed. Although the piece is quite complicated, he doesn’t have to concentrate hard on his fingering because you can tell he knows these chords, these patterns, off by heart—they’re stamped on his memory like the contours of a love a fair that you never forget—so he’s free to think about other things, free to fix his gaze somewhere else: backwards, back in time, back to the experience that inspired this heartbroken music, whatever it was. And of course, some of us in this room know what inspired it. Who inspired it, rather. And realizing this, I glance across at Emily to see how she’s responding to the music; how she’s dealing with the change in tone, the change in her husband. And her demeanour has changed, as well. She’s no longer staring up at the stage, adoringly. She’s looking at the floor. There’s a smile on her face, yes, but what a smile! It’s the ruin of a smile, a fossilized remnant left over from the exhilaration of the last few numbers; frozen into place now, lifeless and unmoving, a kind of rictus that only spotlights the terrible sadness the rest of her face is betraying. And I can see, with that one glance in her direction, that Benjamin may have had his heart broken, once, many years ago, by the woman commemorated in this music, but Emily’s has been fractured a hundred times, a thousand times over in the years she’s been married to him, by the knowledge that he has never got over that brief, ridiculous, devastating teenage love a fair. Never tried to get over it, I would guess: that’s the really bruising, the really unforgiveable thing. He has no interest in forgetting her. No interest in making Emily feel anything other than second best. The one he never really wanted. A consolation prize for the inconsolable.
I look around at the unreadable expressions of the other people in the audience, and ask myself: don’t they know what they are witnessing here, what they are listening to? Can’t they hear it? Can’t they see it in the stricken pallor that Emily’s face has been washed in, since this music began?
No. I don’t think they get it, to be honest. There’s only one other person in the room who seems lost in this music, taken over by it, who seems to know anything about the depths from which Benjamin must once have dragged it: and that, remarkably, seems to be Malvina. She’s got her eyes fixed on Benjamin and her demeanour has changed, too: she’s wired, alert. She’s been sitting on the sidelines until now, not taking part, observing everything coolly, but I can tell that something about this piece of music touches her. She’s involved, for the first time this evening—passionately involved.
Which leaves me wondering, again, the thing I’ve been wondering a lot over the last few days: what is going on between those two, exactly?
I glance at them both again, the two women that Benjamin (obliviously, I’m sure) has started to torment with this music, and I know that I have to get out of this pub right now. I find Patrick and tug on his arm, and when he turns to me I cup my hand around his ear and tell him that I’m leaving, and we make an arrangement that we’ll see each other tomorrow in his school lunch hour. Then I’m gone.
I stand by the side of the canal, a few minutes later. Frost is already spreading along the towpath, and the black water ripples sometimes, mysteriously, with the reflections of pale lights splintered into dancing fragments. The smoke from my cigarette coils in the air, and the rough taste of it at the back of my throat is bitter, hot and cleansing.
It feels, now, as if I know everything there is to know about what’s happened between Benjamin and Emily in the years I’ve been away. How easy it is, after all, to read the history of a lifetime in one single unguarded moment. You just have to be looking in the right direction; in the right place at the right time. But I knew that before, if I’m honest with myself. I found it out just a few weeks ago, in Lucca. Not in a pub. Not at a reunion of old jazzers. I was in the local gastronomia at the time. It was early evening, and I was by myself, and that was when I spotted Stefano and his daughter Annamaria trying to choose between two different kinds of olive.
Such a banal incident, when you think about it. Nothing unusual about it at all. Of course, my first impulse was to approach him. Why not? There would have been no awkwardness about it. We were supposed to be meeting for lunch in two days’ time. I hadn’t been introduced to Annamaria before, but it wasn’t this that held me back. All that held me back, at first, was my noticing that he was in the middle of trying to call someone on his mobile. I decided to let him finish, before stepping forward, before saying hello.
The relationship between us (right word, again? I don’t think there is one, to cover this strange situation) had been going on for three months, by
then. Stefano’s wife, despite her promises, was still being unfaithful to him. He kept saying that he was going to leave her. Whenever we talked about this, I refrained from giving any advice. I could not trust myself to be impartial. It was in my interest that he left her. No—I’ll put that less coldly. I was desperate for him to leave her. I was willing it with every muscle in my heart. But I never said anything. Falsely, our situation had cast me in the role of friend, and the only thing I could do, in that capacity, was remain silent. So we persisted with our lunches, and drinks, and our unspoken desires and the decorous, passionless kisses that marked the beginning and the end of our meetings. And as for the feelings that were giving me such grief, such unassuageable pain, I tried to pretend that they didn’t even exist. I tried to be a heroine. Which was stupid of me, really, although I suppose that underneath it all I was kept going by the thought that one day, in the tolerably near future, my patience would miraculously pay off.
The person he was trying to call didn’t answer. I heard him say to Annamaria, “No, she isn’t there.” And Annamaria said to him, “Can’t you remember, Papa, which one she likes?” They were looking at two bowls of plump green olives, laid out on a self-service counter, and he was hesitating between them. But this was no ordinary hesitation. Not at all. No—it was really, really important to him that he bought his wife exactly the olives that she liked best. And I could see at once that it was on little, everyday choices like this that the whole happiness of their shared life was founded. Which means that in that hesitation— at that moment—with sickening clarity, I glimpsed it: the unquenchable love that he felt for this woman, that he continued to feel for her despite all her betrayals, the love I had chosen to hope, in the leaden weeks building up to this moment, that he would one day transfer to me. That hope withered and died in a flicker, in the tiniest fragment of time. One second it was there, the next second it was gone. And its leaving felled me. I turned away from Stefano and his daughter, a different person—unrecognizably different from the one who had only just rounded the aisle of the gastronomia so carelessly and been on the point of greeting them. My identity had crumbled and dissolved in that moment. That’s what it did to me, that sudden, terrible gift of certainty: the certain knowledge that Stefano would never leave his wife. Never, for as long as they both lived.
Olives. Who would have thought it. I wonder which sort he chose, in the end.
Oh well.
The cigarette burns out and I toss it into the marble blackness of the canal. The cold is creeping into my bones and I know it’s time to go indoors, back to warmth and comfort.
Enough of thinking, already.
Sitting here at my leather-topped desk on the twenty-third floor of the Regency Hyatt—the last and best of my vantage points!—looking down on the scattered lights of this newly vibrant city which is so busy rebuilding itself, rein-venting itself, I’m glad that I went to hear Benjamin play tonight. Do you know why? Because I learned in a priceless instant that he is still lost, still in thrall to the past, and I saw the pain that he’s causing because of it, and I realized that I cannot possibly live my own life that way. I’m not talking about Stefano, I’m talking— regrettably, my much-loved sister—about you. You have been my silent companion all these years and somehow throughout that time I have clung to the fantasy that my words might somehow be reaching you, and I feel now that the time has come to let that fantasy go. Tomorrow I shall check out of this hotel and move on to another town and tonight I shall reach the end of this letter, at last—this long, long letter that I will never send because I have no one real to send it to—and when that’s done I shall close the Venetian notebook in which I’ve written it and put it away somewhere safe. Maybe someone else will read it one day. I so wish it could have been you. But that’s the very wish, I see tonight, that’s been holding me back. My wish that you could hear me. My wish that you could read me. My wish that you were still alive.
I have to start again. Back to the beginning. Which means that I must start by doing the hardest thing of all—the thing I’ve been resisting all this time—and give up hope.
Can I give it up?
I think so. Yes, I can.
Yes. There. It’s done.
And for that, dear Miriam, please forgive
Your loving sister,
Claire.
PALE PEOPLE
28
Pale people were filling the streets of London on the last night of the twentieth century. In tightly packed crowds, they pushed and pressed their way down towards the river Thames, to stare in wonder at the new London Eye, and to wait for the astonishing firework display—the so-called “River of Fire”—that the authorities had promised them. It looked dangerous, so many people crammed on to Whitehall and the Embankment at the same time. There had been doom-mongers prophesying for weeks that casualties were inevitable, that the gathering of such large crowds was bound to lead to human tragedy. These same people had, for even longer, been predicting that on the stroke of midnight the world’s computer systems would collapse.
“I’m glad I’m here,” said Sheila Trotter, “and not there. I wouldn’t be there for the world.”
Benjamin looked up from his work and glanced at his mother, unobserved. Even in her late sixties, she continued to surprise him. She would prefer this, would she, this lifelessness, this deathly quietude, to the party atmosphere of central London tonight? The four of them, sitting in the old living room in Rubery, the house his parents had lived in for the last forty-five years, with not a word to say to each other? Six of them, he supposed, if you counted his sister-in-law Susan, upstairs putting little Antonia to bed: but she was hardly adding to the celebratory mood, anyway. Susan was a conflux of resentments tonight—furious that her husband, Benjamin’s younger brother Paul, was not with them. The fact that there was a chance of glimpsing him on television in a few minutes’ time only seemed to fuel her rage.
Emily, Benjamin’s wife, was offering to pour his mother another half-glass of Cava. “Go on, Sheila love,” she was saying, “it’s not every day you get the start of a new millennium, is it?”
Benjamin seethed inwardly at the idiocy of this comment, and reached for the pile of CD cases stacked up before him on the dining table. He took out another CD and slotted it into the external CD-writer he had bought a few days ago. He was making back-up files of everything on his computer, and it was a time-consuming business. Most of the music files, for instance (an accumulation of at least fifteen years’ composing, sequencing and recording) took up more than ten megabytes, and there were almost a hundred and fifty of them.
“Do you have to work, Ben?” his father was saying. “I can’t believe you can’t take a few hours off, tonight of all nights.”
“Give up, Colin,” Emily said, resignedly. “He’s just doing it to prove a point. He doesn’t want to enjoy himself tonight and he’s going to make sure that we know about it.”
“It’s got nothing to do with that,” Benjamin said, with controlled insistence, his eyes fixed on the screen of his laptop. “How many times do I have to tell you? I have to back up everything before twelve o’clock.”
Susan came downstairs and flopped on to the sofa, looking exhausted and stressed out.
“Is she asleep?” Sheila asked.
“Finally. God, it doesn’t get any easier. I’ve been up there with her for—” (she checked her watch) “—three-quarters of an hour. She just lies there next to you and chatters, and sings. You don’t think she could be hyper-active, do you?”
“Here,” said Emily, handing her a glass. “Have a drink.”
Susan took the glass and immediately got up again, remembering that she had promised to phone her brother Mark before midnight.
“Where did you say he was at the moment?” Sheila asked.
“Liberia.” (Mark worked for Reuters, and there was no knowing in what part of the world he was to be found, from one month to the next.)
“Liberia? Just fancy!”
