by Jonathan Coe
It had begun the day before, with a phone call from Malvina.
“You’re on,” she said. “This week. They’re recording tomorrow afternoon.”
“On what?” Paul asked, and she reminded him of her promise to secure him an appearance on a satirical TV show: a weekly panel game on which young comedians would sit around making scathing jokes about the news, sometimes joined by a high-profile politician. It was considered a great coup for an MP to be invited on to this programme, even though he (it was rarely she) would often find himself subjected to a barrage of mockery from the other guests, and could sometimes scarcely be expected to leave with his reputation intact.
Paul could hardly believe it.
“They want me? You talked them into it? How on earth did you do that?”
“I told you—I know one of the people who works there. He was my mother’s boyfriend for a while.” (Malvina’s mother had, by the sound of it, lived with a good many different partners during the last few years, so this explanation sounded plausible enough.) “Remember? A couple of weeks ago I told him you’d be available at short notice, in case someone else dropped out. You know, someone they really wanted to have on.”
“That’s fantastic,” said Paul—who, upon hearing any piece of good news, seldom noticed if there was an insult buried in it. But almost immediately afterwards he became nervous. “Hang on, though—am I expected to be funny?”
“It is a comedy programme,” Malvina pointed out. “It wouldn’t do you any harm to make a joke or two.”
“I don’t really do jokes,” Paul admitted. “I mean, what other people find funny . . . I can never quite see it.”
“Well, you’ll just have to develop a sense of humor,” said Malvina, pragmatically. “You’ve got about twenty-four hours. I should start working on it if I were you.”
“How am I going to do that?”
“Go home tonight,” she said, “with all of the newspapers, sit down and read them, and see if you can think of anything funny to say. Try and choose a story that has something to do with you, some personal connection. Don’t be shy, go in for a little bit of self-advertisement. And try to be irreverent. That’s what it’s all about.”
“But everyone at Millbank watches that show. I think even Tony watches it. They might not like it if I’m irreverent.”
Malvina told him not to worry. She had noticed, by now, that humour was not Paul’s strong point. And yet his tendency to take everything seriously was one of the very things that most endeared him to her. It made him so easy to tease.
Back at the flat, Paul spent all evening reading through the newspapers and flicking through the satellite channels from one news station to another. There wasn’t much that caught his eye. The Northern Ireland secretary, Peter Mandelson, had announced that 500 troops were to be called back to the mainland, and British Aerospace had been given a £530 million grant to develop a European “superjumbo” to be introduced in 2007. BMW were selling off the Rover factory at Longbridge—which was all very sad, of course, and a Birmingham story of sorts, but hardly the stuff of comedy. The only item that struck Paul as at all promising was the news that EU ministers had at last agreed to allow the sale of British chocolate in other European countries: previously it had been ruled that it contained too much milk and vegetable fat, and not enough cocoa solids.
He mulled over this last development and had cautiously begun to feel, by the time he went to bed, that here was a story that might well suit his purposes. For one thing, the main beneficiary of the ruling would be the Cadbury factory in Bournville: by mentioning it, then, Paul would appear to be speaking up for Birmingham, his home town, where he generally seemed to be regarded with suspicion and almost invariably got a bad press. Also, it was a positive, upbeat story about a much-loved British product, so he would certainly endear himself to the party leadership by bringing it up. (Much more so than by dwelling on that miserable Longbridge business.) All he needed to do, then, was to think of a joke on the subject, and to make sure that somehow or other he was able to shoehorn it into the programme.
“And what did you come up with?” Malvina asked the next day, as their taxi stopped and started its bottlenecked journey through the central London traffic in the direction of the South Bank.
“Nothing much so far,” Paul admitted. “The only thing I could think of was—isn’t there a sort of . . . old cockney expression, or something, ‘I should coco’?”
Malvina nodded solemnly.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“It means, ‘I should say so.’”
“Well, perhaps I could say that.” In response to her blank stare, he added: “It would be a pun, you see. A pun on ‘cocoa.’ ”
“Yes.” She nodded again, seeming to weigh his words with uncommon seriousness. “And when are you going to bring this up, exactly? How are you going to . . . drop it into the proceedings?”
“We could be talking about the EU story,” Paul explained, “and one of the other guests could say to me, ‘What about you, Paul? Do you like British chocolate?’ And . . .” his voice faltered, losing all confidence, in the face of Malvina’s unwavering stare, “that would be . . . when I said it . . .”
“From what I’ve heard,” she replied, after a significant pause, “they have gag-writers on the set. They can supply you with material if you get into trouble.”
Paul looked away, glancing out of the taxi window, offended. “It’ll be funny in context,” he said. “Wait and see.”
And he was still turning the joke over in his mind as he sat in his make-up chair later that afternoon. The last two hours, which had been taken up with rehearsals and awkward small-talk with his fellow-panellists, had done nothing but make him even more nervous. He didn’t understand any of these people, didn’t speak their language, couldn’t even tell half of the time whether they were trying to be funny or serious. Having been provided with a list of the questions that were supposed to provide a springboard for the televised banter, he was alarmed to see that the subject of European sales of British chocolate was not mentioned anywhere. He had raised this issue with one of the producers, run his “I should cocoa” joke past him, and been rewarded simply with incredulous silence.
“He just ignored me,” Paul complained to Malvina. She was sitting in the chair beside him as he waited in front of a brightly lit mirror for the return of the make-up girl, who had been called away to the telephone. “Just looked at me and didn’t say a word.”
“I wish he’d ignore me,” Malvina answered. “He had me pressed up against a wall for most of that rehearsal. You’d think it was enough that he’d already shagged my mother.”
“You know what’s the matter with all these people, don’t you?” Paul leaned in towards her and lowered his voice to a whisper. “ They’re all on drugs.” He directed her gaze to a large bowl of white powder which stood on the shelf in front of him. “I was offered that, you know. By the make-up girl, if you please. Brazen as anything. ‘Do you normally use this, Mr. Trotter?’ she said. Can you believe it? Can you imagine if I had, and she’d blabbed to the newspapers? That almost amounts to entrapment, don’t you think?”
Malvina got up and inspected the contents of the bowl. She dipped her finger in, took a lick and grimaced.
“Paul, calm down, can’t you? It’s loose powder, for God’s sake. You put it on your face. It covers up the sweat.”
“Oh.”
Paul’s mobile rang, and, while Malvina was answering it, he carried on thinking about his joke. To him it seemed every bit as funny as some of the wacky flights of fancy invented by his team captain (a popular TV comedian), or the cynical point-scoring of his opposite number (the smart-arsed editor of a satirical magazine). And besides, it was important that the public knew about this. Chocolate was of interest to everybody. Cadbury’s was a great British company. Why shouldn’t this story be given a bit of prominence?
Malvina tapped him on the shoulder at this point and handed h
im the phone.
“Have a word with this guy,” she said. “Philip Chase. From the Post.”
Paul didn’t recognize the journalist’s name and his first response— thinking of a conversation he’d had with Malvina almost a week ago, about starting to build up a media profile in America—was to grab the phone and yell excitedly: “Hello, Washington!”
“Philip Chase here,” said the nasally accented voice at the other end. “Calling from Birmingham. Sorry if you were expecting Woodward and Bernstein. Is that Paul Trotter?”
“Speaking,” said Paul, flatly.
Philip reminded him that they had been at school together—information in which, at that moment, Paul was not the slightest bit interested. He told Philip about the television programme he was about to record—information by which Philip, for some reason, did not appear to be remotely impressed. Philip, sensing that Paul was not in the mood for a lengthy conversation, asked him what he thought of yesterday’s news from Birmingham. Paul, his mind still running on chocolate exports rather than motor industry redundancies, replied that it was good news for the industry, good news for Birmingham and good news for the whole country. There was a shocked pause at the other end of the line: obviously, Philip had not been expecting him to express himself quite so pithily.
“Can I just get things clear, Paul?” Philip asked. “You’re saying that you’re happy about this announcement, are you?”
Paul glanced at Malvina joyfully and took a deep breath before saying, as loudly as he could—and in a horrific mockney accent—“I should coco!” Then, reverting to his own voice—but even now barely able to keep a tremor of excitement out of it—he added: “And you can quote me on that!”
After which, it hardly mattered whether he managed to say it on the programme tonight or not.
A chauffeur-driven car took them back towards Kennington. It was more comfortable than a black cab. The seats were deeper, plusher, upholstered in some sort of yielding imitation leather that swished arousingly whenever the sheerness of Malvina’s black tights shifted against it. Streetlamps spotlighted her face at amber intervals. The arresting, beckoning action of traffic lights—a set every few yards, it seemed—rocked her body backwards and forwards beside him. Paul’s thoughts were fuzzy with the vodka he’d knocked back in the hospitality room after the recording. He was elated, borne aloft by the realization that his first brush with show business had been so successful. (By which he meant that it hadn’t been a disaster.) He wanted to show his gratitude to Malvina, the woman who was bringing him all this. The woman who had stood constantly beside him, smoothing things over—intervening, expertly, whenever he had tried to communicate with all those baffling media types. The woman who had phoned Philip Chase as soon as Paul had been called on to the set—sweating with the knowledge that he had just committed another outrageous gaffe (would those rivulets of panic show up on camera?)—and had managed to resolve the whole situation in a few moments, explaining what Paul had really meant to say, showing it up for the comical misunderstanding it was. How had he ever managed to do without her? What would happen if she abandoned him now? He wanted to hug her: but the thin tautness of her body— always wired, never relaxed—forbade him. He wanted to kiss her, too. Perhaps that would come later. For the time being he merely said:
“Do you think it went well tonight?”
“What do you think?” she answered, turning her head a fraction, brushing away the hair that fell over one eye.
“I think it went well. I think I was on pretty good form, actually. That’s what your friend said, isn’t it?”
“Well, not exactly. What he said was, ‘It’s OK, we can probably edit around you.’”
Paul looked downcast for a moment. Then thought about it a little longer, and burst into tipsy laughter. “Jesus. I was shit, wasn’t I?”
“No,” said Malvina, kindly. “All they said was, they could edit around you.”
She brushed the rogue strand of hair away again, and allowed her eyes to meet Paul’s briefly—having carefully avoided doing so, for the last few minutes—and Paul seized upon this crumb of intimacy, resting his hand on her lean, nylon thigh, stroking it, caressing her knee, as she looked down at his hand impassively, with what looked like almost out-of-body detachment.
“You’re the best thing that’s ever happened to me,” he blurted out.
Malvina smiled and shook her head. “No I’m not.”
Paul pondered his own words. “You’re right. I suppose winning that election was the best thing that ever happened to me.”
“What about your wife? Your daughter?” He didn’t answer, so she continued: “Paul, you’re going to have to get real.”
“Real?” He sounded as though the word was new to him. “About what?”
“About everything. You’re living in a fantasy world at the moment. You’re so screened off from what’s happening in the real world, it’s frightening.”
“Are you talking about Longbridge?” he asked, with a curious frown.
“Partly I’m talking about Longbridge, yes. I mean, I may not be the most politically . . . conscientious person in the world, but even I can see that thousands of people losing their jobs is more important than how much cocoa they have to put in a chocolate bar before they can sell it in Antwerp, for God’s sake . . .” She took hold of his hand and removed it from her knee, which it had still been clasping limply. “But that’s not all. You have to get real about me, as well.”
“Meaning . . . ?” said Paul, leaning closer, and beginning to think, with a shift in his heartbeat, that the moment he had been anticipating for so long was about to arrive.
“Meaning, that sooner or later you have to decide, Paul, what it is that you want from me.”
“That’s easy,” he said, and stroked her hair gently, two, three times before putting his lips to the tiny, immaculate curve of her ear and whispering: “I want to make love to you tonight.”
It may only have been a whisper, but it was still loud enough to make their driver switch his car stereo on. His radio was tuned to some late-night AOR station, playing the theme song from the film Arthur.
Malvina drew away. She said nothing, for some time, merely fixing Paul with a look that seemed at once to convey rejection, sadness and even (unless he was just deluding himself) a little bit of reluctantly suppressed desire. But then all she said was: “I don’t think you’ve really thought this through.”
24
This was only the second time Benjamin had visited Doug’s house. Doug and Frankie’s house, he supposed he should call it. Or perhaps just Frankie’s house, since it had been in her family for two or three generations, and Doug had simply married his way into it. After his first visit, Benjamin hadn’t wanted to come again: it had been too upsetting. He didn’t want to have his nose rubbed in it any more, the knowledge of all that Doug had won for himself. But Emily had enjoyed her weekend down there, and Doug and Frankie had invited them again, and Benjamin, besides, ended up finding himself unwillingly drawn to the place: realizing that he had finally reached the point where the most he could ask was to be allowed—if only for a couple of days—to scavenge like a starveling cat for whatever scraps he might find of the life he had once imagined himself leading. That life—only ever conceived by Benjamin as an abstract ideal, but now concretized by Doug, with his skyrocketing career and fortuitous marriage—included (among many others) the following elements: a house worth something in the region of two or three million pounds, spreading over five floors, tucked away in a hard-to-find backwater between the King’s Road and Chelsea Embankment, as pretty and quiescent a spot as you were ever going to find in central London; four implausibly attractive, good-humoured and cherubic children (two of them not Doug’s own, it must be said); and an extended household which seemed to be populated almost exclusively by young, desirable women—au pairs, child-minders, home-helps, twentysomething East European refugees of every description who judging by their looks could just as eas
ily have found employment as high-class escorts or porn stars; and to top it all, of course, Frankie herself. The Hon. Francesca Gifford, a former catwalk model (with an old black and white portfolio to prove it), and now something big in charitable fund-raising on the Chelsea circuit, a somewhat ill-defined and mysterious occupation (profession?), but one which certainly seemed to keep her busy between pregnancies.
Frankie was blonde, slender, probably in her late thirties but looking about ten years younger, with the sing-song voice and slightly terrifying smile of the devoted Christian, which is exactly what she was. Her Christianity, at least, gave her something in common with Benjamin and Emily, whom she liked but appeared to regard—collectively—as little more than another charitable object deserving of her compassionate attention. Benjamin sensed this and resented it deeply, but was annoyed to discover that it didn’t stop him from fancying the pants off her. Merely being in her presence gave him a secret thrill; and that, perhaps, was the last and most decisive reason for agreeing to come down for the weekend.
When he wandered into the kitchen early on Sunday morning (three days after the recording of Paul’s television triumph), Benjamin found that Frankie was the only other adult to have risen. Her five-month-old, Ranulph, was jigging up and down on her lap, the traces of some unidentifiable mucus-like baby food smeared over most of his face, his hands, his upper torso and his mother’s white towel dressing gown. Frankie herself was attempting to drink some coffee but every time the cup got anywhere near her lips the baby’s jigging would upset it, and mostly it ended up either on her lap, her feet or the floor. There was a brushed steel, digital radio on one of the shelves, tuned quietly to Classic FM, and—as usual—Benjamin could recognize the music: it was Ravel’s Introduction and Allegro, a work which for him always seemed to evoke images of an unattainable paradise and so felt particularly appropriate in this setting.
