The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  Colin waved his assent, and Susan disappeared to use the phone in the hallway. Meanwhile, midnight approached. At a quarter to twelve, Benjamin took out his mobile and called the office. Adrian, the company’s system administrator, was meant to be making back-up copies of every single file on their network: more than 4,000 company accounts, he calculated, and at eight o’clock that evening he had still been working on it. But there was no answer when Benjamin rang, so he assumed that the job had been finished in time. He could always rely on Adrian. Still, as one of the senior partners, it was his responsibility to double-check that the clients’ records had been safeguarded.

  “Susan, here we are—look! Can you see Paul anywhere?”

  The television cameras had moved into the Millennium Dome, where an invited audience of politicians, celebrities and members of the royal family had gathered to await the striking of Big Ben. Nobody was quite sure how, but Paul Trotter had managed to wangle an invitation at the last moment. There had been no tickets available for his wife, or for his three-year-old daughter; but he had not let that deter him. It was too prestigious an opportunity to miss. He was the youngest Labor MP to have been invited, and great emphasis had been laid on this fact in his latest constituency newsletter (to the no doubt considerable bemusement of its readers). His parents had drawn their chairs up close to the television screen, and were straining to identify him.

  “Come on, Benjamin, come and look at this. The clock’s going to strike any minute.”

  Reluctantly, Benjamin rose to his feet, wandered over to join the rest of the family, and sat down next to his wife. She put a hand on his knee and handed him a glass. He sipped from it and winced. Ushering in a new millennium with supermarket Cava, for God’s sake: couldn’t they all have tried a little bit harder, tonight of all nights? He looked at the television and saw the grinning visage of the Prime Minister he had voted for with such optimism two and a half years ago, along with millions of other Britons. He was mouthing the words of “Auld Lang Syne” as he stood next to the Queen, and they were both making rather a poor job of it. Was there anybody who knew the words to that bloody song?

  “Happy New Millennium, darling,” said Emily, kissing him on the mouth.

  Benjamin returned the kiss, and hugged his mother and father, and was about to kiss Susan when she caught sight of something on the television and said: “Look, there he is!”

  It was Paul, sure enough, craning forward among the ranks of partygoers, and seizing the Prime Minister by the shoulder as he moved among his political colleagues, backslapping and glad-handing them. Paul managed to hold his gaze for a couple of seconds, and in the Prime Minister’s eyes during that time there was visible confusion, not to mention a complete failure of recognition.

  “Well done, Paul!” Sheila was calling out to the television. “You got in there. You made your mark.”

  “Bugger!” Colin shouted, and rushed towards the TV cabinet. “I forgot to put the video on. Bugger, bugger, bugger!”

  Twenty minutes later, when the singing was over and the River of Fire had fizzled out in a most disappointing fashion, the telephone rang. It was Benjamin’s sister Lois, calling from Yorkshire.

  “They’ve been letting off fireworks in the back garden,” Colin reported back to the rest of the family. “They had all the neighbors round. The whole street joined in, apparently.” He sank back down into his armchair and took another sip of wine. “Two thousand,” he said, wonderingly, sighing and puffing out his cheeks. “I never thought I’d live to see it.”

  Sheila Trotter went into the kitchen to put the kettle on for some tea.

  “I don’t know,” she muttered as she left, talking to no one in particular. “It doesn’t really feel any different to me.”

  Benjamin returned to his computer, and discovered that, so far, his files were unaffected, and the calendar had clicked over to 01-01-2000 without a murmur of complaint. But he continued with the task of backing up anyway. As he did so, he remembered that, almost thirty years ago, he used to do his homework at this same table, in this same house, with his parents sitting on the same furniture in front of the television. Benjamin’s companions then had been his brother and sister, rather than his wife and sister-in-law—but that was hardly a radical change, was it? It was not as if his life had been transformed in the intervening three decades.

  He took the mug of tea from his mother’s outstretched hand and thought, No, you’re right. It doesn’t feel any different.

  27

  Paul Trotter, at this stage in his career, was parliamentary private secretary to a minister at the Home Office. It was turning out to be an ambiguous and frustrating position. Traditionally, it was regarded as a rung on the ladder towards genuine ministerial office; but in the meantime, Paul found himself consigned to an unobtrusive and restricted role, which involved mainly liaising between his minister and the backbenchers. He was not allowed to speak to journalists on matters relating to his department; was not encouraged, in fact, to speak to them at all. But Paul had not entered politics in order to work behind the scenes. He had views—strong views, most of which coincided with the mainstream of his party’s thinking—and he was inclined to express them, whenever the opportunity arose. Whereas many of the younger, more inexperienced Labour MPs would scurry away at the sight of a reporter or a microphone, Paul had already acquired a reputation as someone who would talk and more often than not say something quotable. The broadsheet editors had started phoning him with requests for occasional columns, and lobby correspondents would actively seek him out to pass comment on newsworthy topics: even (or perhaps especially) those in which he had no particular expertise.

  Paul was not naive about this, all the same. He knew that journalists would like nothing better than to catch him off his guard. He knew that the people who had voted him in had certain expectations of a Labour administration, and that many of his own personal convictions, if he were to state them frankly and publicly, would have shocked them, inspired them with a profound sense of disquiet and betrayal. He had to be careful: and this was already starting to make him impatient. Almost three years into his first term of office, the routine of his parliamentary life (half of every week in central London, and then a long, long weekend at home in his Midlands constituency with his wife and daughter) was beginning to grate. He was getting restless, and hungry for change: rapid, radical change. He could feel himself grow moribund, sink into premature complacence and torpor, and he was looking for something that would shock his whole being into renewed life.

  In the event, he found it one Thursday evening in February, 2000, and it came from a most unlikely source: his brother.

  Benjamin put up the ironing board while Emily sat watching television. She was watching a team of highly trained celebrity gardeners transform a drab, urban back yard into a verdant oasis, complete with decking, barbecue area and water feature, all in the space of a weekend. Outside, their own garden lay shabby and neglected.

  “I’ll iron that for you, if you like,” she offered.

  “Don’t be silly,” said Benjamin. “I know how to iron a shirt.”

  His reply was not meant to sound like that: dismissive and ungracious. But that was how it sounded. To be honest, he would have preferred Emily to iron his shirt. He did not like ironing shirts, and he wasn’t very good at it. If he had really been going out for dinner à deux with his brother Paul, as he had told her, then he would happily have allowed Emily to iron his shirt. But the fact that Malvina was going to be there, and the fact that he hadn’t shared this information with his wife, made him feel guilty. Despite his habitually analytical frame of mind, Benjamin did not analyse why it made him feel guilty, on this occasion. He was merely aware of feeling guilty, and aware that to have Emily iron his shirt for him before he went out would make him feel guiltier still.

  He began to iron the shirt. Every time he ironed one of the sleeves, he would turn it over to find that the other side now boasted two or three obvious cr
eases which hadn’t been there before. This always happened; he didn’t know why.

  The gardening programme finished and was succeeded by a cookery show in which an implausibly glamorous young woman, living in an implausibly elegant house, prepared delicious morsels of food while tossing her hair, pouting seductively at the camera and licking traces of butter and sauce off her fingers in a manner, to Benjamin, so explicitly suggestive of oral sex that he found himself getting an erection while ironing his cuffs for the fifth time. Five minutes into her implausibly effortless concoction of poached pistachio-sprinkled apricots stuffed with crème fraîche he heard the microwave ping: during the commercial break Emily had put on a Marks and Spencer’s macaroni cheese, which she now emptied into a bowl and consumed half-heartedly while watching the televised display of erotic gastronomy with beady, envious eyes.

  So, why hadn’t he told her, Benjamin started asking himself? He cast his mind back three months, to the day in November 1999 when Malvina had sat down at the table next to his in the Waterstone’s café on High Street. It had been almost seven o’clock, the end of a long working day. Of course, he should have been at home with Emily by then. But that evening—as on many other evenings—he had told her that he needed to work late. Not so that he could slip away and spend a few hours with his mistress (Benjamin would never have a mistress), but so that he could snatch thirty minutes’ solitude, alone with a book, and his thoughts, before coming home to the deeper, more oppressive solitude of his shared domestic life.

  He had not been sitting there long before becoming aware that the young, pale, slender woman at the next table wanted to catch his attention. She kept meeting his eye, and smiling, and looking so pointedly at the book he was reading (a biography of Debussy) that it reached the point, soon enough, where it would have been rudeness on his part not to say something to her. When they began talking, he rapidly learned that she was a student of media studies at London university, visiting Birmingham for a few days to stay with friends. They must have been good friends, too, for she seemed to come and visit them regularly: after that first occasion, Malvina and Benjamin would meet (at the same place, by arrangement) at least once a fortnight—sometimes more; and before long (for Benjamin, at least) each of these encounters began to feel not like a simple meeting between friends, but a tryst. In the minutes before seeing Malvina he would feel dizzy with eagerness. When they were together, he could never finish the cake or the sandwich he would have ordered. His stomach contracted, turned into a clenched fist. Whether she felt the same way, he had no idea. Presumably she must do, or why would she have approached him like that in the first place? So his hair had gone grey, his jowls were beginning to sag, his midriff had started to expand according to some strange independent timetable of its own, which bore no relation whatsoever to the amount of food he consumed. Did that mean he would never again be attractive to women? Apparently not. There was something that worried him more than that, anyway: the aura of failure, of disappointment, which he could feel clinging to him these days, which he knew his friends had grown accustomed to but which would always, he was convinced, be immediately obvious to anyone new who happened to strike up a conversation with him. And yet—amazingly— Malvina seemed unaware of it. She kept returning to him, again and again. She had never yet refused a single invitation for coffee or a drink. She had even turned up at the reunion concert of his band at The Glass and Bottle, just before Christmas.

  What was it about him, he was obliged to wonder, that interested her so much? He was still unable to answer that question, even after the many hours she had spent listening to him, with seemingly unflagging attention, as he talked about his twenty-year career in accountancy, his rather more short-lived part-time musical career in the 1980s, and (the biggest secret of all, in some ways) the novel he had been working on for the whole of that time, which now extended to several thousand pages and felt no nearer to completion than when he had started. It seemed that Malvina had an insatiable appetite for hearing these personal details; and in return, she did let slip the occasional revelation of her own, such as the news that she too was an aspiring writer, with a growing collection of unpublished poems and short stories to her credit. Benjamin had asked—inevitably—whether she would allow him to see any of them; but so far Malvina (just as inevitably, perhaps) had not granted this request. She was probably just being shy; but in any case, curiosity was not Benjamin’s motive. He truly wanted to help her, in any way possible. At the back of his mind, all the time—unspoken, unrecognized even—was the fear that these wonderful encounters, which had transformed his life in the last few months, might come to an end at any moment. The more he could help her, the more favors he could offer, the more he might make himself indispensable to her—all of these things, he believed, made it less likely that she might one day grow tired of seeing him. And it was for this reason, finally, that he had offered to introduce her to Paul.

  Malvina’s second-year project at university was a 20,000-word dissertation on the relationship between New Labour and the media. It was a big subject: bigger than she could manage, he was beginning to suspect. He knew that she was already behind with it; he could hear the edge of panic in her voice whenever it was mentioned; and while it was hardly practical for him to suggest, for instance (as he would willingly have done), that he might write the dissertation himself, he could certainly give her some practical assistance, in the form of direct access to one of New Labour’s rising stars. The kind of first-hand research that none of her fellow students would be able to match.

  “Do I have to?” Paul had complained, as soon as Benjamin put the request to him on the telephone.

  “No, of course you don’t have to,” said Benjamin. “But it would only be a couple of hours of your time. I just thought that the three of us could have dinner together, the next time you were both in Birmingham. We could have a pleasant, social evening, that’s all.”

  To which Paul had said, after a short pause: “Is she pretty?”

  Benjamin had thought for a moment, and then answered, “Yes.” Which was a simple statement of fact. An understatement, actually. It never occurred to him that the question was anything other than casual, offhand: not coming from Paul—a married man, with a young and beautiful daughter.

  But then, Benjamin was married himself; and he had never yet mentioned Malvina to Emily. And tonight, as the doorbell rang, it suddenly seemed more important than ever that his wife should know nothing of this new friendship, should not even be made aware that Malvina existed.

  With this thought uppermost in his mind, Benjamin rushed to open the door.

  “You’re not going in that old shirt, are you?” his brother asked, at once. He was wearing a bespoke Ozwald Boetang suit.

  “I’m in the middle of ironing one. Come in.” As he stepped over the threshold, Benjamin added, in a stage whisper, “Look, Paul, remember: we’re not meeting anyone tonight.”

  “Oh.” Paul’s disappointment was palpable. “I thought that was the whole point. I thought this woman wanted to meet me.”

  “She does.”

  “So when’s that going to happen?”

  “Tonight.”

  “But you just said we weren’t meeting anyone tonight.”

  “We’re not. But we are. D’you see what I’m getting at?”

  “I haven’t got a clue.”

  “Emily doesn’t know.”

  “Doesn’t know what?”

  “That she’s coming to dinner with us.”

  “Emily’s coming to dinner with us? Great. But why doesn’t she know?”

  “No—Malvina’s coming to dinner with us. Emily isn’t. But she doesn’t know that.”

  “She doesn’t know that she isn’t coming to dinner with us? You mean— she thinks that she is?”

  “Listen. Emily doesn’t know—”

  Paul pushed his brother aside irritably.

  “Benjamin, I don’t have time for any of this. I’ve just spent forty-five excru
ciating minutes with our parents and it becomes more and more obvious to me that there is a streak of insanity in our family, which you seem to have inherited. Now are we going out for dinner or not?”

  They went into the sitting room and Benjamin finished ironing his shirt. Paul attempted a few moments of broken small-talk with Emily and then sat wordlessly beside her on the sofa, watching the cookery goddess unpeeling a banana with languorous fingers and then nuzzling abstractedly at its tip with her pulpy lips. “God, I’d like to fuck her,” he murmured after a while. It wasn’t clear whether he knew he’d spoken the words out loud or not.

  In Paul’s car on the way to Le Petit Blanc in Brindley Place, Benjamin asked him, “Why was it so excruciating seeing Mum and Dad?”

  “Have you been to see them lately?”

  “I see them every week,” said Benjamin, catching the self-righteous note in his own voice and wincing at it.

  “Well, don’t you think they’re becoming odd? Or were they always like that? When I told Dad we were driving into town tonight, do you know what he said to me? ‘Watch out for gangs.’”

  Benjamin frowned. “Gangs? What sort of gangs?”

  “I have no idea. He didn’t say. He was just convinced that if we went into the center of town on a Thursday night, we’d be set upon by gangs of some description. He’s losing his marbles.”

  “They’re old, that’s all,” Benjamin said. “They’re old and they don’t get out much. You should give them a break.”

  Paul grunted, and then fell silent. Normally he was an impatient driver, prone to jumping across traffic lights and flashing his headlamps at anyone who wasn’t going fast enough, but tonight he didn’t seem to be concentrating. He drove with one hand on the steering wheel, and kept the other one close to his mouth, biting on it occasionally. Benjamin recognized the gesture from their childhood: it was a sign of nervousness, preoccupation.

  “Is everything OK, Paul?”

  “What? Oh yes, everything’s fine.”