by Jonathan Coe
“You have to stop seeing him, Barbara. You have to.”
“I know.” She stirred her coffee thoughtfully, as if trying to find meaning in its swirling depths. “But the thing is, when I’m with him, he makes me feel so special. He makes me feel so alive. He makes me feel so appreciated.” She stared out at the traffic, the queue at the bus stop, the dogged housewives walking by with their shopping trolleys, faces clamped against the wind. “I need your advice, Sheila. What should I do?”
“I just told you. You have to stop seeing him.”
Barbara didn’t make any answer to this. She merely said: “I told you how it started, didn’t I?”
“You told me, yes: how he kept chatting you up at parent— teachers meetings. I was there, remember?”
“And then how he got Philip to give me a note.”
“You told me.”
“He wanted me to come on a day trip down to the Tate Gallery. Help him to look after his school group.”
“You told me that, yes.”
“One thing led to another. We got separated from the boys. He started showing me all these paintings, telling me about art, about sculpture, things I’d never thought about before. I could listen to him all day talking about art. I could go round galleries with him forever. And now that was months ago, and the ridiculous thing is, we still haven’t . . . gone to bed together or anything. Did I tell you that?”
“Yes, you did.”
“All we do is talk.”
“I know. You told me.”
“But he talks so beautifully. That’s what I like about him. He has such a—”
“—way with words. I know. You told me that.”
Two more customers came in. They sat at the far end of the café. Even so, Barbara lowered her voice.
“I love Sam. Of course I do. He’s been wonderful to me. He’s done nothing to deserve this at all. And I know you don’t need to be a brainbox to be a coach driver but I just wish . . . I just wish he had a bit more to say for himself, sometimes.”
“Does Sam know you’ve been seeing him again?”
“Yes.”
“What did he say?”
“He told me I had to make a choice. Him or me, he said.”
“And what did you say to that?”
“I told him that he’d been a good husband and I’d stay with him.”
Sheila sighed with relief. “Good. That was the right thing to say. So now you’ve broken it off?”
“Not yet.”
“Then you’ve got to. Write him a letter, and tell him you can’t carry on like this.”
“I’ve tried that, lots of times. He just writes back, using all these words. These beautiful long words that I can’t understand. Oh, Sheila, what am I going to do?”
“I’ve told you what you should do. Three or four times now.”
But Barbara wasn’t listening. Her head was filled with words—not Sheila’s words, of course, but his words: a torrent of phonemes, a polysyllabic whirlpool in which she could even now feel herself drowning: sublimity concupiscence veneration Aphrodite inamorata dalliance coquetry blandishment chastity billet-doux purity adulation betrothal epithalamium —swirling faster, more dizzyingly even than the coffee which she had unconsciously been stirring with more and more violence for the last few seconds, until Sheila stilled her hand and said once again:
“Barbara, you must stop seeing him.”
Mrs. Chase raised her eyes and seemed to have noticed her for the first time.
“You’ve been such a good friend to me,” she said, dreamily. “But the thing I need to know is—what’s your advice?”
Colin Trotter and Sam Chase met at The Black Horse one rainy evening. They sat at a corner table and drank pints of Brew XI. “These are on me,” said Sam. “My way of saying thank you. For being such a good friend.”
Colin was very touched. They clinked glasses, and drank deeply.
“I think it’s probably safe to say,” Sam continued, “that the crisis is now over. Thanks to you, the moment of danger has passed.”
“Thanks to me?”
“I took your advice, and it seems to have worked.”
“What happened?”
“Well, as you know, I was all for confronting him. But you suggested a more subtle approach.”
“It’s been my experience at work,” said Colin, “that you can’t go at these things like a bull at a gate.”
“Exactly. But you do have to take the bull by the horns.”
“So you spoke to Barbara?”
“I did. I said, Barbara, we’ve reached a crossroads. This is the end of the road. It’s him or me, I said. You have to choose between the devil and the deep blue sea. I told her straight out: you can’t have your cake and eat it.”
“And what did she say to that?”
“She told me to stop talking in clichés.” He put down his beer glass and leaned forward confidingly. “The thing is, Colin, I’ve got a lot to make up, education-wise. My parents never thought it was that important, you see. So I’m having to start all over again, from square one. I’ve started reading some of these fancy books that Philip brings back with him from school. I take them away with me on the long drives and try to improve myself a little bit. It’s hard work, but I’ll get there. Every dog has his day.”
“Well, I think that’s great, Sam. I really do.”
“I can win her back, Colin. I know I can.”
“I think so, too.”
“We’re over the worst now, I’m sure of that. The clouds are parting and I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. This is the calm after the storm.”
“The calm comes before the storm,” Colin pointed out.
“Yes, but every cloud has a silver lining.”
“That’s true,” said Colin, and they clinked glasses again.
“I’m not one for making predictions,” said Sam, and Colin smiled to himself, for even he had noticed by now that this was his friend’s invariable prelude to making predictions, “but I think I can safely say that those two won’t be seeing each other again.”
12
Claire watched in fascination as Mr. Plumb scooped out a large chunk of coffee and walnut gâteau, then offered it to Barbara on his fork. Her mouth opened and slowly, awkwardly, he eased the cake past her teeth and on to her waiting tongue. Her eyes were closed, languorously. In performing this action they did not make actual physical contact, but there was a striking intimacy about it. They might as well have been making love on the table.
It was Saturday afternoon and Claire was sitting in the café of the Ikon Gallery in John Bright Street. There was a pillar next to her table and it was from behind this that she took her occasional surreptitious glances at the amorous couple, either one of whom might have spotted her if they were not so deeply absorbed in their conversation (which seemed, Claire thought, rather one-sided), not to mention their leisurely, inescapably sensual consumption of the gâteau. She was not worried about Mr. Plumb, so much: she had never been taught by him, and the only reason he might identify her as a pupil of King William’s was that she had a pile of back issues of The Bill Board on the table with her, dating from 1974 and 1975. With Mrs. Chase, though, there was a more serious danger of being recognized. They had often passed each other in the Northfield streets, and had been introduced to each other by Philip, once, after a chance encounter in the Grosvenor Shopping Centre. It would be best to keep out of sight.
They seemed—or rather, Mr. Plumb seemed—to be talking about art, while Barbara looked on in hypnotized admiration, her mouth half-open, her lips sticky with coffee cream and crumbs. Claire could only make out the occasional word, which was frustrating. But what words they were! She heard triptych, aquarelle, gerotint and gouache, whispered as if they were terms of the most guileful seduction, plucked straight out of Casanova’s pocket-book. She heard him talk of chiaroscuro, ceroplastics, petroglyphs and grisaille as if he were a wandering troubadour serenading her at the foot of some Ve
ronese balcony. Clearly, this monologue could only be a prelude—or perhaps the sequel—to a visit to the gallery itself. Had they been, or were they about to go? Were they billing and cooing pre- or post-coitally? Claire willed the other patrons into silence as she strained to listen for clues.
And then, suddenly, Mr. Plumb and Mrs. Chase pushed the remains of their gâteau aside, left the debris of their meal scattered on the table like two lovers abandoning an unmade bed in a cheap motel, and headed for the door to the gallery.
Claire rose to her feet, intending pursuit, but then checked herself swiftly. Really, she had no business to be doing this. She was here to do some work, and it was no concern of hers if Mrs. Chase had decided to have an affair, or if Mr. Plumb had succeeded in adding another name to his long list of conquests. She was kidding herself if she thought that she’d be helping Philip by finding out more about this sorry liaison; and besides, that wasn’t even her real motivation, if she were to be honest. Her immediate, unthinking impulse to rise from the chair could be explained away in one word: sex. She had caught a whiff of something to do with the subject that always commanded her most eager, most morbid attention.
Her parents were to blame. They were to blame for everything, she had come to feel; everything that had gone wrong in the last few years. By refusing to talk to their daughters about sex, refusing to mention it, refusing even to acknowledge its existence, they had achieved nothing but to inspire in them both an obsessional curiosity, and in Miriam’s case, the results had already been disastrous. It seemed to Claire more than probable that none of them would ever see her sister again, and the thought of it tore her apart. Even today, when she had work to distract her or at least, failing that, the passing sideshow of Miles’ and Barbara’s antics, the sense of Miriam’s absence gnawed at her, filled her with a wintry void she knew she would never grow used to. She missed her every waking minute of every day. And the not knowing, the awful infinity of speculation about what might have become of her, that was even worse.
The facts were these. There was one weekend, in November 1974, when Miriam had begun to seem especially distraught. She had not spoken about anything in particular, but Claire knew that she had been away with Bill for the night, and for some reason it hadn’t worked out. On the Sunday morning they had gone for a walk together, and wound up at the café next to the number 62 bus terminus in Rednal, where they had shared a table with the Trotter brothers, Paul and Benjamin. The next day, Miriam had gone back to work, and the worst of the trouble seemed to be over. And then eight days later, on Tuesday 26th November, she had disappeared. She had gone into work as normal, and not come back. Her parents had sat up for most of the night, weak with anxiety, and in the morning Mr. Newman was on the point of going to see the police when Claire felt it necessary, much against her will, to tell them the secret: Miriam had a lover, and in all probability she had spent the night with him. The Friday before last, when they had both thought she was staying over with her friend Judith, she had been with her lover, at a hotel in Stourbridge, and she was probably with him last night as well. Her father had wanted to know his name; she had refused to tell him, but that evening, when she returned from school, he had forced it out of her. She closed her eyes and shuddered, now, to think of the way he had treated her that night; it had been her first and—so far, anyway—only glimpse of the capacity for violence which she had always believed lay not far beneath his pious, preternaturally self-controlled veneer. Anyway, she had told him: it was Bill Anderton, Doug’s father, one of the most important shop stewards at the Longbridge plant where Miriam worked as a typist.
She had thought then that her father really was murderous. The things he had threatened to do to Mr. Anderton were frightful. Not even her mother had been able to restrain him, at first. But eventually he was persuaded that he should call him on the telephone, rather than just turning up on the man’s doorstep.
For two hours the Andertons’ phone had been engaged, but just as Donald was on the point of giving up and going round to the house after all, his next call was answered. After a brief, hostile conversation he got straight into his car and drove away.
Claire learned, subsequently, that her father had met Mr. Anderton at a Northfield pub, but she never learned the details of this encounter. All she knew was that it had been inconclusive. The next morning Donald went to the police and reported Miriam as a missing person. The police seemed profoundly unconcerned, especially when they heard that there was a man involved. They gave him to understand that this sort of thing happened all the time, and that Miriam would almost certainly turn up or contact them in the next few days. And, to give them credit, they were right. Twelve days later a letter arrived.
The letter. Two years on, it still lay in Donald’s writing desk, unanswered and indeed unanswerable. Its single sheet of A5 paper folded crisply, the envelope with its typewritten address (curtly directed to “Mr. and Mrs. Newman”) cut open along the fold with a single, clean swipe of the letter-knife. Neither Donald, nor Claire, nor her mother Pamela had looked at it for at least eighteen months. They didn’t need to. They had all read it so often during those first few weeks that it was stamped on their memory, every clue, every drop of possible meaning squeezed out of it so that it now seemed a useless thing, sterile, desiccated.
The letter, too, had been mostly typewritten. It had said:
Dear Mum and Dad,
This letter is to tell you that I have left home and will not be coming back. I have found a man and I have gone to live with him and I am very happy. I am expecting his baby and will probably have it.
Please do not try to look for me.
Your loving daughter.
Miriam had signed the letter herself, and had added a postscript, also in her own handwriting:
“P.S. The postmark on this letter is not the town where I am living.”
The envelope was postmarked Leicester, and the date on the stamp said 9th December, 1974. It had arrived on the next day, a Tuesday. There was no date on the letter itself.
Claire had become fixated on this last detail, although she had never been able to make her parents see the significance of it. What it proves, she had told them—or what it suggests, at least—is that Miriam could have written this letter at any time. Even before she disappeared. So what? said her father. Well, Claire had said, and took a deep breath: Supposing somebody had . . . done away with her. Killed her. And supposing they had found that she was carrying this letter, in her handbag. What a perfect opportunity. All they had to do was to wait a week or two, take a train to another town—Leicester, let’s say—and post the letter from there. And then nobody would think that she was dead. They would just think that she had run away to be with her lover.
Donald had two objections to this theory, one of them rational and the other not. His rational objection was that it was too much of a coincidence. It was quite simply implausible to suppose that any putative murderer—they had to use words like this, it was hideous, but they had to do it—might have been handed this perfect smokescreen, this oh-so-convenient means of covering his tracks. And in any case there still had to be a lover, for Miriam to have written the letter in the first place. At which point his irrational objection would arise, and take everything over. As soon as he had learned about Miriam’s affair with Bill, he had ransacked her bedroom in search of her diaries, understanding their significance now, realizing why their discovery had caused such a terrible rift between Claire and her sister. And when he read them, when he became aware of the intimate, the physical detail in which Miriam had at first fantasized about the relationship and then recorded it, his feelings towards his eldest daughter were changed, irrevocably. He began to feel revulsion for her, mingled with a kind of severe, contemptuous pity, and any suggestion of Claire’s that there might be more to her sister’s disappearance than the letter implied was rudely dismissed.
“We don’t know how many men that slut of a sister of yours might have been sleeping with,”
he had said. “She might have been servicing the whole factory, for all that we know.”
Claire had wept when he threw these words at her, and tears sprang to her eyes now, when she remembered them again. She hated her father: a terrible thing to admit, but it was true, and she had lived with the dull knowledge of it for so long now that it didn’t surprise or appall her any more. She hated his smoothness, his hypocrisy, his subtle but complete domination of her mother and above all she hated the atmosphere of rank, overheated religiosity that pervaded their house at all times; the same atmosphere that had driven Miriam away, first of all, and was now driving Claire herself out of doors most weekends, to the forlorn refuge of public spaces like this café.
Claire wanted to stop thinking about all this and to concentrate instead on her pile of back issues, which she was intending to scour for sparks of editorial inspiration. But there was something else she had to decide first. Something about Doug.
Doug fancied her; she was in no doubt about that. And under normal circumstances, she might have been flattered and interested: he was good-looking, and funny, if a little too sure of himself. But the circumstances were not normal. She knew that she was unfriendly towards him, sometimes unforgivably so, and she knew that Doug had no idea why she behaved in this way: he was ignorant, she believed, quite ignorant of the story of Miriam and his father. This would have made her relationship with him difficult in any case, but the thing that made it worse, much worse, was that she could never quite stop herself from wondering whether Bill Anderton might, in some way or another, have been implicated in Miriam’s disappearance.
To put it more bluntly: how could you possibly go out with a boy, when you suspected that his father may have murdered your sister?
