by Jonathan Coe
Claire resumed chopping, and said merely, “We didn’t get much of a chance to speak,” in a tone which implied—to her son, at least—that there was nothing more to be said on that subject.
The evening went well. Patrick managed to dig out three more CDs that met with his mother’s approval, and there seemed no need to resort to her fall-back plan, which had been simply to cut their losses and watch television when they ran out of things to say to each other. In fact—perversely—Claire ended up feeling that it had gone almost too well. Which is to say that tonight, for the first time, she started to notice something strange about Patrick’s behaviour: that it was too thoughtful, too considerate, too much predicated on her own needs and responses, which he was adept at second-guessing. There was a curious stiffness, a curious unease, about the way he carried himself, she realized—almost as if he believed himself to be role-playing, an actor in somebody else’s script. Perhaps this was just the characteristic self-consciousness of adolescence; but there seemed more to it than that—there was an extraordinary watchfulness about Patrick, a sense that he was waiting for the world to show him how to behave, to disclose his own personality to him before he could begin to inhabit it. Was this what they—she and Philip—had done to him, by splitting up when he was just three, and then shunting him backwards and forwards from parent to parent for years afterwards? He was missing something, she was beginning to see that now, missing some vital component. Something she couldn’t yet identify, although she knew it was more than a question of family stability.
Patrick poured her a last glass of wine and brought it to her on the living-room sofa.
“Here you are,” he said. “I’m going to bed, now. Don’t sit up all night getting pissed.”
“I won’t.”
He leaned down to kiss her. His cheeks were downy, with the first traces of a baby beard.
“It’s been nice tonight, hasn’t it?” she said.
He folded her in a hug. “Yes, it has.”
As he straightened up again, she let the wine give her courage and asked: “You’re OK, are you, love? Phil and Carol look after you well, do they?”
“Of course they do. Why, don’t I look OK?”
They were too vague, too complicated, the anxieties that had been stirring within her for the last few minutes. All she could say was: “You look pale, that’s all.”
Patrick smiled defensively. “We all do,” he said. “Me and all my friends. It’s all that junk your generation keeps feeding us.” In a quieter voice, he added: “We’re the pale people.”
Without explaining what he meant, Patrick blew his mother one last goodnight kiss; and then she noticed, before he went up to bed, how his eyes lingered again on the mantelpiece photographs.
After her shower the next morning she came out of the bathroom to find that he had opened the door of Miriam’s old bedroom, and was standing inside.
She followed him in.
“Not much to see, is there?” she said.
It was just as she had last found it: no furniture, bare floorboards, whitewashed walls. Not a room at all, but a statement: a statement of absence. She imagined her father coming in here every day, standing quite still in the centre, breathing in the nothingness of it. Thinking about Miriam, as he must have thought about her every day, unmoving, inscrutable. Why else would he keep the room this way? It was spotless, too: as conscientously dusted and hoovered as every other room in the house. She could see his logic, even as it repelled her. This was a missing person’s room.
“Where’s all her stuff?”
Claire shrugged. “I don’t know. I’ve got some of it: you know, the pictures you’ve seen, a few other bits and pieces, bracelets, a hairbrush, that sort of thing. Some toys—” (she thought her voice was going to crack, but recovered herself) “—from when she was little. I think Dad threw the rest away. Gave away all her furniture, I know that. There were a lot of other things—photograph albums, all her diaries. I don’t know what became of them. They’ve gone for good.” She paced the length of the forlorn, tiny room in three short steps, and stared out of the window at the back garden, frugal and obsessively tidy like everything else at this house. “Do you talk about her much?” she asked. “I mean, do they ever mention her—Philip and Carol?”
“No.”
“But you think about her, don’t you? I can tell that you do.”
Patrick said, “She may still be alive.” And all at once his voice was pleading.
Claire turned on her heel and left the room. “Let’s not go there, OK?”
They were out on the landing together now. Patrick pointed up at the trap door in the ceiling.
“How do I get up there?”
“You can’t.”
“All it would take is a ladder.”
“There’s nothing there. Just junk.”
She stared at him, willing it not to happen. She didn’t want this to be his mission. She couldn’t go through it all again, for one thing; and it was dangerous for him, too. He was too young, too vulnerable to take on something like this.
“I’m going out to the shops,” she said. “We can have fish tonight, is that OK? And I’m going to get some more wine. Have a bath or something. We’ve got to leave in about an hour if we’re going to get to Cannon Hill on time.”
He nodded, but didn’t move. Finally she said: “There’s a ladder in the garage. At least there used to be.” She touched his shoulder. It felt bony and thin. “Why do you want to do this, Pat? What’s it all about?”
He removed her hand; but gently. “I don’t know. It’s to do with you and Dad, and why you split up, and . . .” He turned away, heading down the stairs. “I don’t know. I just want to.”
“You won’t find anything,” she called after him. “He threw everything away.”
But Claire was wrong.
When she came back from the supermarket half an hour later, she found Patrick—still unbathed, still wearing the T-shirt and boxers in which he had slept—sitting on the bare floorboards of Miriam’s old room. Somehow he had managed to carry a massive, old-fashioned leather trunk down from the loft, and he was sitting beside it. The trunk had been padlocked, but he had wrenched the lock apart with a pair of pliers. He had removed about half the contents of the trunk, which lay scattered on the floor around him. Claire stared at them, unbelieving. Her mouth dropped open and she was drained of breath.
Here were things she had not seen for more than twenty years. Her sister’s clothes. Her books and ornaments. A little treasure box she had brought back from John O’Groats, filled with plastic jewellery. Old magazines, copies of Jackie, with pictures of seventies pop stars clipped out and dotted with holes where Miriam had drawing-pinned them to the wall. David Bowie and Bryan Ferry. A man’s purple shirt which had once been one of her most precious possessions, although no one had ever learned why. And diaries. Two or three volumes of diaries, written in blue biro in her looping, girly handwriting.
Claire reached for these first.
“You haven’t looked at these, have you?” she said. She had remembered that they would be meeting Doug Anderton at the rally. She didn’t want Patrick to know that Doug’s father had been involved in the disappearance.
“No,” he answered. He had found dozens of photographs of Miriam— Miriam and Claire—slides mainly, and he was holding them up to the grey light framed by the uncurtained windows.
“Good,” said Claire, and opened the diary for 1974, flipping the pages, too shocked to read anything properly, and dropping the book altogether, letting it fall to the floor with a slap, when she came upon pages brown with fingerprints—the prints of her own, fourteen-year-old Bovril-stained fingers—and her eyes filled with acid tears, tears like needles, the kind she thought she had forgotten how to cry.
21
—— Original Message ——
From: Malvina
To: btrotter
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 3:38 p.m.
Subject:
Rally for Longbridge
Hi Ben
Yes, I think I’ve persuaded your brother to come—though of course he is terrified of doing anything which might be seen to be critical of the party, and Tony in particular—so shall certainly be there myself.
It would be lovely to meet up. Waterstone’s café, for old times’ sake? I could probably be there by ten.
See you there, unless I hear to the contrary.
Love
Malvina XoX
Benjamin arrived first, inevitably. He bought himself a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat, and a large mocha for Malvina, because he remembered that that was what she liked.
He was ten minutes early; she was five minutes late. He filled in the time by reading two Inland Revenue leaflets: one about changes in the way that consolidation adjustments were to be recorded, the other about how to recover advance corporation tax by way of offset against mainstream corporation tax liability. It was as well to keep up with these things. By the time that Malvina arrived, her mocha had gone cold, and she had to order another one. Her cheeks were icy to the touch when he kissed her. He prolonged the kiss for as long as he could, breathing in her perfume, which instantly brought back to him the memory of all their earlier meetings, and the weird, vaporous hopes he had built around them.
Once they were seated opposite each other, he found that he could think of nothing to say to her. His embarrassment seemed to be contagious, and for a while they sat in clumsy silence.
“So,” Malvina said at last, after two or three sips of her warming drink, “what do you think will happen today? D’you think it’s going to achieve anything?”
“Well—I don’t know . . .” Benjamin seemed nonplussed by this question. “I just thought it was a sign that we could . . . you know, carry on being friends.”
Malvina held his gaze for a moment, then smiled. “I didn’t mean that. I was talking about the rally.”
“Oh. Oh—that.” Benjamin looked down at the frothy surface of his coffee. Was there no end to the ways in which he could humiliate himself? “I don’t know. I think it’ll be a memorable day. I think people will feel inspired, and encouraged, probably. It won’t change anybody’s mind, though, will it? The powers that be.”
“No. Of course not.” More brightly, she said: “And what about your work? How’s that going? Have you written much, in the last few weeks?”
Malvina was one of the few people in whom Benjamin had confided any details of his magnum opus. Even then, he had not been able to talk about it to any depth. He had told her the title—Unrest—but as soon as he began trying to explain what he hoped to achieve with it—why he considered it to be unique, and groundbreaking, and necessary—words became inadequate; he could hear himself speaking, but the phrases issuing from his mouth seemed to bear no relation to the ideal, pristine form which the work continued to take inside his head. He wanted to tell her that it was the most important thing in his life; that it was driving him mad; that it was an unprecedented marriage of old forms and new technology; that it would change the relationship between music and the written word for ever; that he hadn’t written a word or composed a note for months; that sometimes he felt it was the only thing that was keeping him alive; that he could feel himself losing faith in it, as in so much else . . . But there seemed no point, no point in expressing any of that to this beautiful, unfathomable woman who was sitting opposite him licking traces of coffee from her fine, wine-dark upper lip.
“So-so,” he ended up saying, lamely. “I keep plugging away at it.”
Malvina smiled, and shook her head. “What are you, Benjamin—the king of understatement? You’ve been writing this thing for twenty years. Are you ever going to allow yourself a little pat on the back? It’s incredible, the way you’ve stayed with it. God, if I write just five lines of a poem and then get stuck for an idea, I usually give up and throw it away.” She sat back and looked at him, beaming, almost with pride. “How do you do it? What keeps you going?”
And after a moment Benjamin answered, quietly: “I’ve told you that before. The very first time we met.”
Malvina glanced down into the depths of her coffee cup. “Ah, yes—the mysterious femme fatale. The love of your life. What was her name again?”
“Cicely.”
“And the idea behind this book is . . . Can you remind me?” Benjamin said nothing, so she continued: “That’s right—she’s going to read it one day and realize that you’re a genius and she was crazy to leave you, and then she’ll come running back. Something like that, wasn’t it?”
“Something like that,” said Benjamin, his face suddenly grim, withdrawn.
“Benjamin,” Malvina said—urgently, now—“I may not know what I’m talking about here, but has it ever occurred to you that being abandoned by her was the best thing that could have happened to you? That you may have had a narrow escape?”
Benjamin shrugged, and sipped the dregs of his cappuccino.
“I mean, if it makes you carry on writing, all well and good—that’s probably the only thing that keeps you sane, anyway—but otherwise, I wish you’d forget this stupid business. There comes a point where you just have to draw a line. And in your case I’d say you’d passed it about two decades ago.”
It was impossible to say whether Benjamin was even hearing this advice or not. He simply changed the subject, by asking: “What about you? Getting anything written at the moment?”
“Oh, yes, I’m still . . . ‘plugging away,’ as you’d put it.”
“I don’t know how you find the time,” said Benjamin, “with everything else that’s going on in your life.” (Although he did know how she found the time, really: it was because she was young.)
“Well, you know,” she answered. “Late nights. Black coffee. I’m trying to write more stories, but I can never seem to manage more than a few pages. They’re just fragments. I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.”
“Have you shown them to anyone?”
“No. I’d be too embarrassed.”
“Maybe you should.”
What Benjamin still wanted, of course, was to read them himself: anything to bring himself back into a kind of closeness with her. But he could tell that she would never agree to this. He clutched, instead, at the thought that he might be able to help her in some more practical way, even though a few moments’ clear-eyed reflection would have told him that this too was impossible.
“I know someone you could show them to,” he said. “A friend of mine: Doug Anderton.”
“Yes, I know Doug. At least, I’ve spoken to him on the phone. He just got a new job, didn’t he?”
“That’s why I mentioned him. He’s literary editor now. Why don’t you send your stuff to him?”
Malvina frowned. “What would be the point? He just commissions articles and book reviews, doesn’t he? They wouldn’t publish stories or anything like that.”
“Sometimes they do,” Benjamin insisted. “And besides, he told me that publishers keep phoning him up and asking him out to lunch, now. So if he liked your stuff, he could mention it to them, couldn’t he? And they’re always going to want to do him a favour, to make sure they get good coverage. The whole business is a racket. You might as well take advantage of it.”
It came out sounding pretty plausible, he thought, considering that he didn’t really know what he was talking about. And Malvina—who was always swift to believe that the world operated in this way—looked more than half convinced.
“Maybe . . .” she murmured.
“Anyway,” said Benjamin, “you’ll be seeing Doug in a minute.”
“Really? He’s coming on the march today?”
“Of course he is. His dad was a shop steward at Longbridge, remember? I was going to meet him at New Street Station in about twenty minutes. Can you come along?”
“I don’t know yet. I don’t know where I’m meeting Paul.”
The answer to that came quickly enough. Malvina and Benjamin fin
ished their coffees, stepped out into the damp, bone-chilling morning and joined the thickening crowd as it headed out along New Street in the direction of the Bristol Road. Already the human river was busy and fast-moving, even though this was just a tributary to the main current. There were banners everywhere you looked (“Don’t Let Rover Die,” “Save Our Jobs,” “Blair Doesn’t Care”), and all of the city’s life seemed to be here: pensioners were walking with teenagers, Bangladeshis alongside whites and Pakistanis. It was a good atmosphere, Benjamin thought, even if everybody did look decidedly cold. He kept close to Malvina, partly for fear of losing her in the crowd, partly because he wanted to; so she was not able to hide her reaction when a text message from Paul came through. She seemed irritated, even a little hurt, but not in the least surprised.
“Oh, Paul,” she said to the phone, slapping it shut and putting it back in the pocket of her leather jacket.
“What’s up? He hasn’t bottled out, has he?”
“Says he’s got too much paperwork to get through.” She looked away, biting her lip. “Shit. It would have done him so much good to be seen here. Why couldn’t I get him to believe that?”
“My brother’s a coward,” said Benjamin, as if to himself.
She looked at him sharply. “Do you think so?”
Benjamin shrugged. “Sometimes.” Then he added: “I know I shouldn’t say that to you.” And, more quietly: “I know you’re fond of him.”
“Yes,” Malvina admitted. “Yes, I am. That doesn’t mean he can’t be a complete arsehole sometimes.”
“So he’s staying down in London, is he?”
“No,” said Malvina. “He’s at home. I’m going to join him there later.”
“Oh.” Benjamin was taken aback. “And what does Susan think about that?”
“She doesn’t know. She’s gone to her parents’ for the weekend. With Antonia.”
“You’re staying the night?”
“Yes.”
“Cosy,” said Benjamin, investing the word with a good deal of meaning.
“You think it looks bad?”
