The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

Fifty thousand jobs were doomed last night as all hope of rescuing car firm Rover vanished. In a day of industrial disaster for Britain, the Alchemy group SCRAPPED its deal to take over the company from BMW.

  Workers CHEERED as the news broke—because they believed the rival Phoenix bid for the firm would resurface, saving more jobs than the Alchemy plan. But last night the cheers had turned to tears as the bleak reality sank in at thousands of Midlands homes— there will be NO Rover rescue and many families are set to face life on the dole.

  “What right,” Irene was saying, indignantly, “what right have they got to publish something like that? Nobody knows what’s going to happen. What are people’s families going to feel when they read that this morning? They have no right to say it.” She took the paper back from him and flicked through its front pages, tutting over everything, especially the Page Three girl. “This used to be a socialist paper,” she said. “Until Murdoch got his hands on it. Look at it. It’s a disgrace. Soft pornography and . . . tittle-tattle.”

  “Spirit of the times, Mum. Spirit of the times.”

  “Yes, but you don’t write stuff like that, do you? Nobody has to write it.”

  Doug thought for a moment, then drew closer to her and said: “Can I ask you something, Mum?”

  “Of course you can.”

  “The thing is—well, I’ve found something out. Something about a Member of Parliament.”

  “Yes?”

  “It’s to do with his marriage, and sex, and . . . you know, the usual sort of stuff.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “I’m not sure if it’s big enough to finish off his career—maybe it isn’t— but it would certainly do a lot of damage. What do you think I should do?”

  Irene said, without hesitation: “Politicians should be judged on their politics. Anything else is just gossip and nonsense.” She pointed at the newspaper lying on the table between them. “You don’t want to end up like them, do you?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Anyway. People can be weak, in their personal lives. Especially men. It makes no difference.” Matter-of-factly, she added: “Your father was no saint.”

  Doug was amazed. He had never heard her say anything like this before. “What do you mean?”

  Irene weighed her words carefully, her fragile hands cradling the enormous coffee mug. “I had a lot to forgive him for. But he was a good man. He had strong principles, and he stuck to most of them. Nobody sticks to them all.” She looked around her and said, brightly: “After all, as socialists, we shouldn’t really be drinking in a place like this, should we? Isn’t globalization meant to be the new enemy?”

  “Apparently,” said Doug. “It’s May Day on Monday. There are going to be demonstrations all over London. They’ll probably be targeting this place.”

  “There you are, you see: the people are on the move again. It was bound to happen, sooner or later. Will you be joining in?”

  “Maybe.” He smiled and leaned across to her, squeezing her hand. It lightened his heart to see her looking so well. “How’s your coffee, anyway?”

  “Delicious. How much did it cost?” And when Doug told her, she said: “I hope they put a big brick through the window.”

  In the event, it was not Starbucks that came under attack from the protesters on Monday, but McDonald’s: a small branch in Whitehall (a branch that was closed for the day) next to a bureau de change which was also smashed up and looted. Until then, the demonstration had been relatively peaceful: although the sight that greeted Doug when he jumped off the bus near Parliament Square was certainly bizarre.

  It was not long after midday, and the Square had been taken over by about one thousand protesters. Drums were pounding, people were sitting up trees, and a statue of Winston Churchill had now been augmented by an upturned policeman’s hat with a geranium planted in it. As for the Square itself, people had started digging it up, tossing the turf on to the road and embarking upon an impromptu gardening session which involved planting everything from lemon balm and rosemary to sunflower and rhubarb. Doug stood and watched for a while, thinking back to the rally for Longbridge just over a month ago and reflecting that what was happening here was very different in spirit. He moved on when he saw that a maypole was being raised into position and dancing had begun.

  He had arranged to meet Paul in the members’ lobby at 12:30, but in fact he didn’t have to walk that far. He caught sight of him standing on the Green—the ritual gathering-point for representatives of the media who wanted to waylay any passing MPs and solicit their views—sounding off about the May Day protests to a couple of cameramen from Sky News and BBC News 24. Doug hovered in the background until the interview was over (it only took a couple of minutes) and then attracted Paul’s attention with a wave.

  “Been giving them the benefit of your wisdom, have you?” he asked, as they struck off on foot in the direction of Downing Street, dodging the swelling groups of anarchists, environmentalists and riot police gearing themselves up for a skirmish. “Come on, then: what was your line this time?”

  “I told them that these people weren’t to be taken seriously. If they want to contribute to the political process, then they have to renounce violence and they have to work within the existing structures.”

  “Brilliant, as always,” said Doug, “except for the tiny fact that you’re the people who’ve shut them out of the existing structures in the first place.”

  “What on earth do you mean?”

  “I mean that the entire system nowadays is only geared to accommodating a tiny minority of political opinion. The left’s moved way over to the right, the right’s moved a tiny bit to the left, the circle’s been closed and everyone else can go fuck themselves.”

  “Just from your vocabulary, Douglas, I can tell that you’re mired in the past,” said Paul, as they cut down Horseguards Avenue, and into Whitehall Place. “That’s your basic problem—mired in the past. As I seem to remember telling you more than twenty years ago, one bonfire night if I’m not mistaken. Where are we going, anyway?”

  Doug took him to a vaulted, subterranean wine bar called Gordon’s on Villiers Street. It was a narrow, tunnel-like space where neither of them could stand up straight as they made their way to a table: Doug explained that this was once a riverfront warehouse, and they were sitting in one of the vaults where the Thames barges would have come in.

  “Very intimate, anyway,” said Paul, approvingly. He had not known about this place before, and had already got it marked down as somewhere he could safely bring Malvina.

  “Well, I didn’t want us to be overheard,” said Doug. “I wanted to talk to you about something private. Someone, I should say.”

  Paul looked at him evenly. “Go on.”

  “I think you probably know who I mean.”

  “Probably,” said Paul. “What about her?”

  “Well . . .” Doug swilled his orange juice around in his glass. He had decided to stay completely sober for the purposes of this conversation. “I think you should . . . consider . . . very carefully . . . where you’re going on this one, in terms of both your . . . working and personal relationship.”

  “OK.” Paul mulled these words over, and confessed: “I don’t understand that. What exactly are you trying to say?”

  Doug didn’t know exactly what he was trying to say, in all honesty. Having considered, carefully and at some length, what he was hoping to achieve by meeting Paul this afternoon, he had come to only one conclusion: for both Malvina’s and Susan’s sake, he wanted to provoke Paul into taking some action, initiating some change. And the only way he could get him to do that, as far as he could see, was by scaring him.

  “Paul,” he said. “I’ve got good news, and bad news. I went out with Malvina last week and after she’d had a few drinks she started talking to me about her feelings for you and she said . . . Well, she told me that she loved you.”

  “Fuck.” Paul gulped down half the contents of his wine glass. “OK. F
ine.” He had gone pale. “That’s bad—I mean, that is seriously bad—but thank you for telling me. I’m . . . very grateful.”

  “As it happens,” said Doug, “that’s the good news.”

  Paul’s eyes began to flicker with anger and panic. “Are you taking the piss? How can that be the good news?”

  “She’s a very attractive woman. Beautiful, you might even say. Very intelligent. Nice disposition, from what I’ve seen. Any man would be proud to have a woman like that fall in love with him.”

  “But I’m married, for Christ’s sake. I’ve got a daughter.”

  “Arguably, Paul, you should have thought about that before you started doing things like inviting her to spend the night at your family home.”

  Even though Doug was speaking quietly, almost in a whisper, Paul instinctively looked around to check that no one could have heard.

  “How the fuck do you know about that?”

  “That,” said Doug, “brings me on to the bad news. I was at an editorial meeting last week and your name came up and it looks as though there are people on the paper—probably other papers as well—who’ve started to get interested in you and Malvina.”

  “Shit,” said Paul, paling still further. “Shit shit shit. How much do they know?”

  Doug changed the subject abruptly. “How’s your relationship with Tony, these days? Close? Polite but cordial? Indifferent?”

  “Just come out with it, Anderton. Just tell me what you’re driving at.”

  “I was only thinking that political parties, and prime ministers, react to these kinds of situations quite differently. Some people are considered indispensable, for instance, and even when they’ve disgraced themselves, party leaders will stand by them through thick and thin. Others are—well, more dispensable, to put it bluntly. I was just trying to work out which category you fit into.”

  “I haven’t disgraced myself.”

  “Well, that all depends on how it’s presented in the media, nowadays, doesn’t it? Everything seems to depend on that.”

  Paul ignored his enigmatic teasing, for the time being, and mused aloud: “Tony likes me. I’m pretty confident of that. Always smiles at me in the corridor or the tea-room. And he sent me a very nice note after the question I asked a few weeks ago.”

  “The one about British chocolate and the European union?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s good, Paul, but I wouldn’t say that you’ve quite put yourself into the ‘indispensable’ bracket yet. Not only is it widely known, these days, that you and your minister don’t get on—” (Paul started to deny this, but Doug kept talking) “—but even apart from that, one profoundly unmemorable appearance on a TV quiz show, a short-lived column on cycling for a freebie newspaper and a blatant piece of public arse-licking disguised as a question about cocoa solids isn’t going to do the trick, I’m afraid. If any of this comes out, you may be for the chop.”

  “I’m a rising star, though. It said so last week in the Independent.”

  “Words, words, words,” said Doug, dismissively. “Words mean fuck all in a scenario like this. People are still judged by their actions, just about: which is the only thing that gives me any hope, actually. Anyway . . .” He was starting to feel almost sorry for Paul, who already had the look of a condemned man. “What I was going to suggest—which I’m sure will appeal to a man as firmly attached to traditional values as yourself—was a good old-fashioned piece of blackmail. Are you up for it?”

  Paul eyed him warily, although there were also traces of relief on his face. “What’s your price?”

  “Well, I’ve no intention of spending any more time on the books pages, thank you very much, so in a few days’ time I’m going to start offering my services to other newspapers as a political editor. And if I can offer them this story as part of the package, then I reckon they’re not going to be able to resist.”

  “You’d do that, would you?” said Paul, his voice pulsing with contempt. “You’d sink to that level? Common . . . decency means that little to you?”

  “Ah—now I’m glad you’ve brought up the subject of decency. Because, actually, that unassuming, much-maligned little word means a lot to me. Which is why I’m prepared to keep this whole thing to myself. On condition that you, Paul, do the decent thing.”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that you put Malvina out of her misery. And Susan, while you’re about it. I mean, I don’t know that Susan’s miserable too, but I would have thought it was a fair guess.”

  This was not at all what Paul had been expecting to hear. “How am I supposed to do that?”

  “Up to you.”

  “You think I should break it off with her?”

  “That’s one option. Probably the best option. What would you like to happen, Paul? What are your . . . feelings in this matter?”

  Paul drained the last of his wine, rested his chin in his hands and stared thoughtfully ahead of him. Now that Doug had posed this question, it seemed ridiculous that he had never tried to answer it before. He had been content for the relationship with Malvina to proceed as it did, unresolved, directionless; little more, really, than a titillating adjunct to his marriage, one which didn’t impinge on his work or disrupt his career in any drastic way. Even the lack of sex, he realized now, had been part of the attraction: it had stopped things from ever getting too intense, too real. How was he supposed to know that Malvina, meanwhile, had been starting to take it all so seriously?

  “I’m not sure,” he said at last, mutedly. “I’m going to have to think about this for a little while.”

  “She’s in love with you, Paul: that’s all I’m saying. Do something about it. Fix the problem. The message I’m picking up from her at the moment is that she’s had a pretty shitty life. She’s looking to you for a way out, into something better. Don’t become one more thing that she has to survive.”

  Paul stood up. He felt suddenly claustrophobic. “OK. Point taken, Doug. I’ll do something about it.” He reached for his overcoat. “Can we get out of here, now? I could do with some fresh air.”

  “I’m giving you two weeks. After that I go public.”

  Paul thought about this, weighed up his options. “That’s fair,” he said, and made for the staircase.

  They walked together up towards the Strand. Doug wondered what Paul was thinking. He had just presented him with a potentially momentous decision: either he was engaged in profound contemplation, or the implications of it hadn’t sunk in yet, or there really was an emotional vacuum where his heart should have been. Could anyone be that unfeeling?

  In the time they had been sitting in Gordon’s, the demonstration had clearly moved on. All the roads into Trafalgar Square were now blocked by rows of riot police. There seemed to be several thousand protesters hemmed into the square, with no apparent means of exit. Elsewhere, gangs of protesters ran through the streets, dodging the police batons and shouting abuse at anyone who got in their way. Small-scale fights and scuffles were breaking out all over the place. There were rancorous arguments taking place between the environmentally minded protesters and the more confrontational ones. “Plant your fucking veggies, fucking hippies, see what good that’ll do,” Doug heard somebody shouting.

  “What sort of country are we living in?” Paul muttered bitterly, as they surveyed the mayhem from the relative safety of a shop doorway. “Who are these people? What do they want?”

  “They probably don’t know. Nor do you, it would seem. Nor do any of us, when it comes to the crunch.”

  “The Guardian have given me a slot on their op-ed page this Friday. Twelve hundred words, about anything I want. I’m going to write about this. Say what a disgrace it is. That ought to go down well, don’t you think?”

  “With your constituents? What do they care? They’re a hundred miles away.”

  “No: I meant with Tony.”

  Doug turned to him and said, with some impatience: “Paul, just because I’ve let you off the ho
ok, it doesn’t mean that other people are going to. I told you, something about this business with you and Malvina is going to come out in the next week or two. It won’t be much—it’ll just be some offhand, anonymous comment in a gossip column or something—but after that it’s going to be out there, and it’s going to snowball, and you’re going to have to deal with it. And sucking up to Tony isn’t going to be enough. I told you—only the indispensable survive this kind of thing.”

  “You keep saying that,” Paul protested. “I can hardly make myself indispensable in a week or two, can I?”

  “No. Of course not,” said Doug; and decided not to labour the point any more. “Write something about Longbridge, anyway. Your silence on that subject has been positively deafening. It’s more than a local issue, you know. Fifty thousand people’s lives are hanging in the balance.”

  Paul nodded: “Maybe I will,” he said, without much obvious conviction. At which point, a wine bottle was hurled forcefully in their direction, shattering against the shop door just above their heads, and they made a run for it.

  Back in his Kennington flat, Paul sat in an armchair, quite unmoving, for several hours.

  When the daylight faded he sat in the dark. He sat in the dark and thought about Susan, and how she would react when the story started to leak out.

  He thought about Malvina, too, how thoroughly he had come to depend on her. How fond of her he had grown, in the last few weeks. More than fond, in fact. Much more.

  These thoughts were only interrupted by the periodic ringing of the telephone. There were messages from all the usual people: his minister, journalists, lobbyists, Susan, his friend Ronald Culpepper, the Whips. In the middle of these came a call from Benjamin, which was fairly unusual. But Paul still didn’t pick up the phone.

  At ten o’clock he turned the lights on and phoned for a pizza. He ate about half, threw the rest away, and drank most of a bottle of Chablis to wash it down. All at once he felt incredibly tired. He stripped off down to his underpants and sat on the bed, running his hands through his hair.

  He got into bed and was about to turn off the light when he suddenly asked himself: “Why did my brother phone?”