by Jonathan Coe
They cut through the back streets until they had reached Chelsea Embankment, where an unbroken stream of cars and trucks roared back and forth, and the clouds of carbon dioxide hung heavy over the little village of millionnaires’ houseboats moored in a crook of the river Thames, and the postmodern grandiosity of the Montevetro building gleamed back at them from the other side of the river and shimmered in the pale March sunlight. Benjamin thought of home: not the city centre, where he worked every day—and where buildings not unlike this one were beginning to spring up, as well, on a smaller scale—but the house he shared with Emily, off King’s Heath high street, the little world they had built for themselves there, extending to not much more than a few shops, and a couple of pubs, an occasional foray into Cannon Hill Park . . . The difference seemed immense, suddenly. He couldn’t get his head around it.
“Do you like it here?” he asked. “I mean, do you feel . . . comfortable?”
“Sure,” said Doug. “What’s not to like?” Anticipating his friend’s answer, he added: “If you’re comfortable with yourself—inside your head— then you can feel at home anywhere. That’s what I reckon, anyway. Stay true to yourself.”
“Yes, you’ve done that,” said Benjamin, pursing his lips doubtfully, “I suppose.”
“Just because I’ve married into a posh family,” (Doug’s voice was rising in exasperation), “doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten where I came from. Where my loyalties lie. I haven’t given up on the class war, you know. I’m behind enemy lines, that’s all.”
“I know,” said Benjamin. “I wasn’t implying anything. Anyone can tell that about you—you only have to see what you write for the paper. It must be great,” he went on, more quietly (envy creeping into his reflections again), “having that kind of platform. You must feel . . . you must feel you’re doing exactly what you want to do.”
“Maybe.” They had been leaning against the low wall close to Battersea Bridge, looking out across the water. Now Doug straightened up and began to walk downriver, breathing deeply on the noxious fumes pumped out by the ceaseless traffic. “I’ve reached a bit of a ceiling there, I think. I’ve been writing those pieces for about eight years now. A few months ago I started telling people I was feeling ready for a change. You know, putting the word around the office. Well, now they’ve sat up and taken notice, apparently. They’re planning a big reshuffle. Been planning it for weeks, in fact.”
“Sounds good,” said Benjamin. “What do you think’s going to happen?”
“Well, I know the editor’s PA a little bit—Janet, her name is. Nice girl: she’s only been there since just before Christmas. We kind of hit it off, and now she’s always feeding me bits of gossip. And she heard—well, she overheard him talking on the telephone, and it seems my name came up, in connection with a job.”
Benjamin waited. Then had to ask: “Yes? Which was?”
“She wasn’t sure,” Doug admitted. “She couldn’t hear properly. But she said it sounded definite; and this was just a couple of days ago. And she was sure—well, ninety per cent sure, anyway—that he either said it was political editor—which would be brilliant—or deputy editor. Which would just be . . . fantastic.”
“Deputy editor?” Benjamin repeated, obviously impressed. “Wow. Do you really think that’s what it’s going to be?”
“I’m trying not to think about it,” said Doug. “Political editor would be great. That would be just fine. I’d settle for that.”
“Would it mean more money?”
“They both would. Lots more money, potentially. Which is going to make Frankie happy, for a start. Someone’s probably going to phone me up today to let me know which one it is.”
“Today? On a Sunday?”
“Yep.” Doug started rubbing his hands together at the thought. “Today’s the day, Benjamin. Maybe we can have a bit of champagne before you drive off this evening. Followed, in my case—after a whole week’s abstention from oaths, profanity and all manner of filthy language—by what I can only imagine is going to be an epic shag. The mother of all shags.”
They crossed the road effortfully, threading their way through the four lines of traffic, heading back towards the picture book enclave where the Gifford-Anderton residence lay hidden.
“I thought you weren’t in sympathy with the other people on the paper,” said Benjamin. “Politically, I mean.”
“Ah, but that’s my trump card,” Doug pointed out. “It’s true, they’re all fucking Blairite idiots. But the bottom line is, they have to cater for the readers: and most of the readers are still Old Labour. So they need to have someone like me on board, even though they don’t like it. I give those people a voice. The kind of people who think we should make some sort of an effort to keep Longbridge open even if it isn’t making any money. The kind of people who are actually in their forties and fifties and sixties and have been reading the paper for years and don’t give a fuck about what kind of eyeliner Kylie Minogue uses, which is the kind of story our esteemed editor seems obsessed with . . .”
“Do you not get on with him too well?” Benjamin asked.
“We get on fine,” said Doug, “but he’s a man of no scruples. Completely opportunistic. A few months ago, for instance, they shot some particularly under-nourished looking model for a fashion piece in the magazine, but she looked so ill and scrawny that they couldn’t use the pictures. Then last week he dug them out and put them in the main paper after all—to illustrate a story about anorexia nervosa. Didn’t seem to think there was anything wrong with it.”
He chuckled sourly as they reached the garden gate and squeaked it open. Doug had forgotten his house-keys, so he pressed the entryphone button and they waited for a while, admiring the trails of ivy around the door lintel and the mullioned windows. Frankie was always too busy to do any gardening, Doug explained, so they had a man come and do it for them, three mornings a week.
Soon the front door was opened by a breathless Irina.
“Ah—Doug—come in, quickly. Someone phoned for you.”
“Who is it?” he said eagerly, following her inside.
“There—in there.”
She gestured towards the downstairs sitting room, which ran the length of the house and ended in a conservatory twice the size of Benjamin’s back garden. Doug and Benjamin hurried in and found that everyone was there: Paul, Susan, Emily, Frankie, all of the children. They stared at Doug excitedly, smiling with anticipation, while Frankie spoke to someone on a cordless phone.
“Yes—he’s here. He’s just literally come through the front door. I’ll hand you over. Here you are.”
Doug grabbed the phone off her and retreated to a corner of the room.
“Is it about his job?” Benjamin whispered, and Frankie nodded.
At first it was hard for the others to tell what was happening, just listening to one side of the conversation. Doug said very little, apart from occasional grunts of assent. Everyone started to notice, however, that these changed in tone as the exchange went on. Doug’s silences became longer and longer: the voice at the other end of the line seemed to be building up to some sort of revelation. And when it finally came, Doug went deathly quiet. So did the rest of the room.
It felt as though whole minutes had ticked by before Doug said, “What?,” very quietly; and immediately afterwards shouted “WHAT?,” again, only this time at the very top of his voice, in a bellow of thunderous fury that had the children glancing at each other in frightened apprehension.
Now the voice at the end of the line was raised too, and could be heard saying, “Doug—please think about it. Don’t ring off. Whatever you do—”
Doug pressed a button to end the call, took the phone over to the mantelpiece and laid it there in a gesture of preternatural calm.
“Well?” said Frankie, unable to bear the suspense any longer.
Doug was staring at his own face in the gilded mirror.
“That woman,” he said at last, his voice hoarse, and strangely rem
ote. “That woman Janet. She’s going to have to get her hearing tested.” He turned to look at the circle of bewildered faces. “Political editor? No. Deputy editor? No.” Then, gathering breath, he bellowed: “ LITERARY editor. Do you hear me? LITERARY—FUCKING—EDITOR. They want me to commission book reviews. They want me to spend every day putting novels into fucking jiffy bags and sending them out to . . . to . . .” He spluttered, lost for words, and then started reeling around the room in a frenzy, yelling as he did so: “The cunts. The fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking CUNTS!”
In the absolute silence that followed, Benjamin almost imagined that he could hear the words echoing around the room and dying away. Nobody could think of anything to say, until Coriander turned to her mother and gravely whispered: “What’s a tunt? What’s a futting futting futting futting tunt?”
It was the longest sentence she had ever spoken. But Frankie did not think it was the moment to remark on this; or to mention the fact that her husband had just disqualified himself from sex again, for at least the next three weeks.
22
Claire, who could be more or less garrulous in the right company, sat at the kitchen table opposite her son and tried to think of something to say.
It was becoming obvious to her that she was out of practice at motherhood. Ten years ago, when Patrick was just five, she wouldn’t have believed such a thing to be possible. It was not just that loving him, in those days, had come as naturally to her as breathing: of course she still loved him, as much as she ever had. The difference was that she no longer knew how to behave around him. The process had begun, she knew, even before she had left for Italy. Already, when he was only nine or ten, she had felt herself losing her footing, not knowing quite what tone to strike: she hadn’t understood his burgeoning obsessions, the sports he became fixated on, the clothes he felt compelled to wear. She could see that this wasn’t happening between him and Philip; not to the same extent; and that was one of the reasons she felt it was sensible—or at least permissible—to let him move in with his father and stepmother, while she set off on her Italian adventure. By the time that was over—by the time she arrived back in Birmingham five years later (home-sick, absurdly, for a place she didn’t even like that much)—an even greater distance had opened up between them. That was inevitable, she supposed: he had visited her, in that time, and she’d come back to England at least twice a year, but still, he had changed, grown away from her, immeasurably, almost beyond recognition. The wordlessness she had already been starting to feel in his presence became more and more acute.
It was the first time she had been back to her father’s house since December. On that occasion, she had moved out after only four days, then stayed two nights at a hotel in Birmingham and spent Christmas with friends in Sheffield, friends from her university days. There was no way she could have lasted a minute longer. This weekend, however, Donald Newman was safely out of the country: living it up in the second home in France that he was always bragging about, these days, and which she had no intention of ever visiting. It sounded as though, since retirement, he spent more and more time there: but then she knew little about his current arrangements, and cared less. Some clever stockbroker friend had made him a few thousand in the nineties, apparently, and that had enabled him to pick up this picturesque ruin somewhere outside Bergerac. Bully for him. He was welcome to it.
It was Patrick who mentioned him first, as it turned out.
“Grandad keeps this place pretty well, doesn’t he?” he remarked, looking around the orderly kitchen. “For a bachelor, I mean. An old geezer like him.”
“Nothing else to do, I suppose. Anyway, I think he gets some skivvy in to do it for him. I’d be very surprised if he knew one end of a vacuum cleaner from another.”
Her son smiled. She wanted to say something nice to him—how good his hair looked, now that he was wearing it a bit longer, how glad she was that he didn’t seem to have had any body parts pierced yet—but the phrases wouldn’t form. Instead she thought about the evening ahead, the two places she was going to have to lay at that table, the meal they would later be eating in thick suburban silence, and felt suddenly afraid that she couldn’t go through with it.
“Look, Pat, shall we go out tonight? Drive out to the country, find a pub or something?”
“Why? I thought you’d bought some food.”
“I have, but . . . you know.” She gestured with her eyes. “This place.”
“We can liven it up,” said Patrick. “Put some candles on the table. I brought some music.”
While Claire rummaged in drawers to find a tablecloth, her son took a ghetto blaster out of his holdall and connected it to a wall socket. He flicked through a wallet of CDs and clicked one into the machine. Claire braced herself, anticipating some monstrosity, but heard instead a piano figure in a minor key, pulsing, insistent, tango-like, surrounded soon by cunningly woven lines for violin and cello and bandoneon.
“That’s nice,” she said. “What is it?”
“Astor Piazzolla,” said Patrick. “Thought you might like this one.” And then, with a short laugh: “Of course, it’s not what I listen to by myself. Normally I only ever listen to big black gangsters singing about raping their bitches and being strung out on crack. I just keep this one as a standby, for the old folk.”
“You watch what you’re saying,” Claire warned. “You’re treading on sensitive ground, there. I shudder to think what the other people in that house say about me.”
It was March 31st, 2000, and Claire had come to Birmingham that weekend to take part in tomorrow’s protest against the Long bridge closure: a huge, city-wide demonstration, which was to begin with a march from the centre of town, with more crowds joining along the way to converge, finally, on a rally in Cannon Hill Park. Claire’s home, at this time—not that she thought of it as home, or as anything other than a momentary staging post—was a house in Ealing, west London, which she shared with three graduate students in their early twenties. She’d found a temporary job as a sort of glorified accounts clerk, processing invoices for a firm which imported Italian furniture. The whole set-up was decidedly grim. She felt as though her life was a tape which someone had just rewound by about fifteen years.
“They take the piss out of you, do they?” asked Patrick.
“It’s not quite as blatant as that. They’re much too polite. But you can tell from the way they look at me that they’re wondering if they should get a Stannah stair-lift installed one of these days, or buy me one of those foot-spas for my birthday.”
She put a saucepan on to the hob for the pasta, and started chopping onions and tomatoes. Patrick poured her some wine and asked if he could have some.
“Of course you can. You don’t have to ask that.”
Patrick wandered out into the living room and was gone for a few minutes. Claire peeped through at one point and saw that he was looking at the family photographs on the mantelpiece. Except that “family” photographs was not the right word for them. There were no pictures of Mr. Newman’s daughters, there: no mementoes of the missing Miriam, or the errant Claire. Just photographs of Donald and Pamela, a tracking of their life together, their ageing: the wedding picture, the holidays in Scotland and the Scilly Isles; the two of them outside the Bergerac cottage, Pamela looking bowed, shrunken. She’d surrendered to cancer just eight months after they bought it. In the centre of the mantelpiece was a silver-framed portrait of her, A4 size. It must have been taken some time in the fifties, before the children came along. Dark hair, pearl necklace, a cocktail dress in black or navy blue. She was smiling the unknowable smile that people wear for the camera. Patrick lifted the picture, tilted it away from the light, appraised it intently; as if it was going to yield up some family secret.
“So,” he said, returning to the kitchen, wineglass in hand, “are you actually speaking to Grandad at the moment?”
“There’s been no official declaration of hostilities,” said Claire. “It’
s just that I never phone him, and he never phones me. Or almost never. I mean, he was perfectly civil when I asked if I could stay here for the weekend. Though he thought my reason for coming to Birmingham was ludicrous.”
“Well, he never was much of a revolutionary, was he? Can you imagine Grandad going on a demo? It would have to be in favour of bringing back hanging for people who hold hands in public before marriage.”
“Or making fox-hunting part of the National Curriculum.” She smiled, not so much at the jokes as at the warmth they were promising to generate between them. “Anyway, what about you? Are you going to come along tomorrow?”
“Yes. ’Course I am. It’s important, isn’t it? A lot of people’s jobs are at stake.”
“Is your dad going?”
“Yep.”
“Your step-mum?”
“I should think so. Carol’s pretty worked up about Longbridge, like everybody else. You going to be OK with that?”
“Oh, sure. I’ve got a lot of time for Carol.”
“Some of Dad’s friends’ll be there, too. Doug Anderton? D’you remember him? He’s coming up from London. And Benjamin’s tagging along, I think.”
“My God,” said Claire, “that really will be weird. A proper little King William’s reunion. I haven’t seen Doug for donkey’s years. And I think the last time we were all together was at our wedding.”
“Benjamin was best man, wasn’t he?”
“That’s right. He made an absolutely disastrous speech. Full of quotations from Kierkegaard—which might have meant more to the audience if he hadn’t insisted on reciting them in the original Danish—and then some elaborate joke which hinged on a confusion between Rimbaud the poet and Rambo the Sylvester Stallone character. Nobody had the faintest idea what he was talking about.” She sighed, fondly. “Poor Benjamin. I wonder if he’s changed.”
“I thought you saw him just before Christmas.”
