The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  “Well, come on then? Who are you and what do you want?”

  “I’m a friend of Cicely’s,” Benjamin stammered.

  “You’re what?”

  “Glyn! Glyn!” The reproving tones came from a small and motherly woman of about the same age who came padding up behind him. “Can’t you see the boy’s wringing wet?” She took Benjamin by the arm. “Come in, my boy, come in.”

  “I’m a friend of Cicely’s,” Benjamin repeated, as he stood dripping on the flagstones. It was the only thing he could think of. It was his calling card.

  “I’m Beatrice, Cicely’s aunt,” said the woman. “And this is her Uncle Glyn.”

  The man glowered at him again; but this time, it seemed to be by way of greeting.

  “Glyn, run and fetch this boy some whisky.”

  They gave him a tumbler of whisky, neat, and he drank it much too fast. Then they sat him by the glowing hearth in the kitchen and instead of feeling better he began to shiver even more uncontrollably. They gave him another glass of whisky, this time mixed with ginger and hot water. And then, presumably, they must have put him to bed. When Benjamin awoke, he was dead and gone to heaven. There could be no doubt about that. He had never actually tried to imagine what heaven would be like, but he recognized it as soon as he saw it. Or heard it, rather, for the first thing he noticed about heaven was the sound: the sound of birdsong. He couldn’t still be in Lln, because you never heard real birdsong on the peninsula: only the lonely wailing of gulls. But the birds here were singing in a mellifluous, unending chorale, to which the humming of bees provided a tunefully droning counterpoint. It was the most beautiful sound he had ever heard. Heaven felt good, as well: he was lying on crisp, thick, newly laundered cotton sheets. Sun was streaming in through the window in shafts of white gold, which rippled slightly as they passed through the white lace curtains which swung and drifted in a gentle breeze. Cool currents of air played on his face. In the background, waves broke softly on a distant shore.

  Benjamin had never tried to imagine what heaven was like; but he knew, for certain, that it had one essential component, one criterion that simply had to be met. Cicely had to be there.

  And here she was. Sitting at the end of his bed, gazing intently at him as his eyes struggled to open. She was dressed all in white, too, a loose white summer dress, and her hair was long and golden, she had grown it long again, and she was paler than ever and more slender than ever and the blue of her eyes seemed more fragile than ever before.

  So it was true, then. Heaven existed; and he was the latest arrival.

  “Hello, Benjamin,” said Cicely.

  Benjamin sat up in bed. He seemed to be wearing a night-shirt that didn’t belong to him. “Hello,” he said.

  “You came to find me.”

  “It looks that way.”

  “Yes.” Cicely smiled. “I knew that you would.” Benjamin seemed surprised by this, so she added: “What I mean is—I knew that if anybody came, it would be you. Here—”

  She took a cup of tea from his bedside table, and offered it to him. The tea in heaven tasted much the same as anywhere else, it transpired. A little too milky, if anything. All right, so this wasn’t heaven after all. Benjamin didn’t mind. Cicely kissed him on the forehead and whispered, “I’m so glad that you’re here,” and he knew that he was somewhere else altogether, somewhere even better.

  The smell of fried bacon drifted out of the kitchen, through the cavernous hallway, up and around the ancient oak staircase and into every bedroom, bathroom, study, parlour, laundry room and attic in Plas Cadlan. It drew Benjamin, newly bathed and clothed, swiftly down to the kitchen, a room which never saw much sunlight, and where he found Cicely already sitting at the vast dining table with her uncle and aunt. They served him fried eggs, black pudding, coarse and delicious cuts of bacon and challengingly large slices of soft white bread.

  “I’m afraid we are going to have to disillusion our niece,” said Beatrice, beaming with satisfaction as Benjamin laid into his breakfast. “She’s under the impression that you came all the way from Birmingham to see her.”

  Apparently, even in his state of near-delirium the night before, Benjamin had managed to offer some rambling explanation about being on holiday with his family near by. He now elaborated on this for the benefit of Cicely, who had been in bed at the time.

  “I don’t care where he came from,” she told her aunt. “It’s just so nice that he’s here. Benjamin is the kindest and most thoughtful of all my friends.”

  “And is this your first visit to Lln?” Beatrice asked.

  “Oh, no.” At once Benjamin felt the need to stake some sort of proprietorial claim. “This is a kind of second home to my family. We’ve been coming here for years. Every year, to the same caravan site.”

  There was now a minor eruption as Cicely’s uncle slammed his teacup down on the table and let out what could only be described as a snarl. It seemed that he was also on the point of speaking, but his wife warned him off by murmuring, “Glyn! Glyn!,” and explaining to Benjamin:

  “My husband has strong feelings about caravans. They are one of the many things that he has strong feelings about.”

  Shortly afterwards, Glyn muttered something about going to his studio, and left through the back door. Benjamin finished his breakfast and started to wash the dishes while Cicely dried.

  “Did I make a faux pas back there?” he wanted to know, after Beatrice had disappeared upstairs.

  “Don’t worry about it. Pretty much every pas is faux as far as my uncle’s concerned.” She put down her tea towel and seized him around the waist. “Oh, Benjamin, it’s wonderful to see you. You’ve no idea.” He returned the embrace, but rather stiffly, as was his way. She drew back a little. “I’m sorry, I’m being frightfully tactile today, aren’t I?” Resuming her drying, she said: “It’s been so lonely here. I mean, they’ve both been great, but it’s been four weeks now. I was starting to go out of my mind.”

  “Have you been very ill?” Benjamin asked.

  “Oh, I don’t know what happened. Everything just got a bit much, I suppose. I came down with flu or something and then I just couldn’t shake it. It seemed to get worse and worse. I don’t know if it was the exams, or that awful business with Mr. Ridley. I was mad to get involved in that. Insane. Oh—”

  “Don’t say it,” Benjamin pleaded, and put a soapy finger to her lips.

  “Say what?”

  “That you’re a terrible, terrible person.”

  “How did you know that was what I was going to say?”

  Benjamin just laughed, and asked, “Well, do you want to hear what’s been going on at school while you’ve been away?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  And so he started to tell her; and it ended up taking most of the morning.

  After lunch, Beatrice showed him around the house and the garden. She was especially proud of the garden.

  “We were ready for that rain,” she said, leading him across a small, well-trimmed lawn which was still notably wet underfoot, despite the afternoon sunshine. “I’m sorry if it spoiled your holiday, but for some of us it was a prayer answered. Anyway, they say it’s going to be dry now for the rest of the week. What do you think of my buddleia?”

  Benjamin said that it was very nice. As indeed it was.

  “There’s a special atmosphere here,” he ventured. “It feels very different from the rest of the peninsula. Like another world.”

  “Yes. These bays,” said Beatrice, gesturing at the ranks of bottle-green-leaved trees which climbed up the hill towards them and rose to a height of thirty or forty feet, “screen us from the rest of Lln and also provide us with shelter which other gardeners on the peninsula don’t have. This is why I’ve been able to do so much here. Creating this garden has been the work of twenty years.”

  “I like your roses,” said Benjamin, pleased to have found a flower that he could identify.

  “In a moment we shall come to the h
erb garden. This walkway is called Glyn’s Walk. He loves the view of Porth Neigwl from here. These plants are among his favourites, too: forsythia, mallow, japanese azalea.”

  “Cicely tells me that your husband is a sculptor,” Benjamin said, ducking to make his way between the plants, which grew close together on either side of the path.

  “Do you think she’s recovered?” asked Beatrice, ignoring this overture. “I find it so hard to tell, with Cicely. She is such a frail thing anyway. So pale.”

  “She seems in very good spirits,” he said, non-committally.

  “Your arrival has had a very salutary effect, I must say. I do hope you can stay a few more days. Note how the azalea here is covered with clematis orientalis. We have eucalyptus, as well. To your left. I had not realized that there was anyone among her schoolfriends of whom she was quite so fond. She has had some very unsuitable liaisons in the last few years. It would be nice to think of her spending time with someone suitable, for a change.”

  Benjamin heard a note of almost maternal anxiety in these words, and was intrigued, because he knew that Beatrice and Cicely were not blood relatives.

  “Where’s her mother at the moment?” he asked.

  “In America. She has been there for two months now, in rehearsals. None of this might have happened, of course, if she had not been quite so . . . absent. However, that is not for me to say.” They were now approaching an outbuilding, a low-roofed cottage from which the sounds of hammering and chiselling were clearly audible. “We must not disturb my husband,” Beatrice said, walking on hastily. “He will be going to France next week. The civic authorities in Nantes have commissioned something for a most important public space.”

  From these hints Benjamin gathered that Cicely’s uncle had a considerable reputation. She had never mentioned him before, but then she had always been offhand about her family and their various achievements, which to Benjamin seemed remarkable. Her father, he knew, was an architect, although he lived in London and rarely saw his daughter more than once or twice a year. Her mother (who had remarried several times) was a successful actress whose work kept her out of the country more often than not. It seemed to Benjamin that these people inhabited, as if by right, a world into which he would only ever be able to peer yearningly, his face pressed up against the glass.

  “There,” said Beatrice, turning to admire the view. They had walked as far as the wrought-iron gate, and could now see most of the house itself, the steep line of its high-pitched roof rising proudly out of the hollow in which it had been built. “It’s a fine prospect, isn’t it? The south-west gable never fails to delight.”

  Benjamin couldn’t tell which gable she was drawing his attention to. Come to that, he wasn’t too sure what a gable was. He didn’t think that his parents’ house in Longbridge had gables. He remembered his family, suddenly—almost for the first time that day—and found it bizarre, almost unthinkable, that their caravan was still pitched only a few miles away, on Cilan Head at the far end of Porth Neigwl.

  “Is Plas Cadlan very old?” he asked, wanting to get the image out of his head.

  “It was built in the late sixteenth century,” said Beatrice, leading him back towards the front door, “and enlarged by the Victorians. We took it on twenty years ago, after it had been derelict for some time. It was an enormous task.”

  “I’ve always dreamed of living in a place like this.”

  “Of course. Well, perhaps you will, one day. Cicely tells me that you’re going to be a writer.”

  “I hope so. Or a composer, maybe.”

  “Really? You have many strings to your bow.”

  This reminded Benjamin of something: a resolution he had taken earlier this morning, and which he was now ready to put into action. The time was right, at long last, to play Cicely one of his tapes. He found her sitting on a wooden bench in the back garden, high above the house, looking over the roofs and chimneys of Plas Cadlan and its outbuildings towards the sea as it swept into Porth Neigwl, placid and unthreatening this afternoon.

  “Has Aunty been boring you?” she asked.

  “Not at all. I love this place. It’s magical—I feel like I’ve finally been let in on the most perfectly kept secret . . .” Cicely smiled, and clasped his hand as he sat next to her. It seemed the most natural thing in the world to sit together on the bench like this, hand in hand. How could they have moved so quickly on to this new level, this immeasurably higher plane, in just a few hours? “Cicely,” he said, “is there a tape recorder in this house?”

  “A tape recorder?”

  “A cassette player.”

  “Yes, I think so. Uncle Glyn likes to listen to music while he’s working.”

  “Do you think we could borrow it for a while?”

  “I’m sure we could.” She looked at him, her eyes bright with curiosity, as if she would never stop being surprised by him. “I’ll go and ask.”

  Fifteen minutes later, they were sitting up in Cicely’s room, on either side of the bed, with Glyn’s portable radio-cassette player on the coverlet between them. Benjamin had fetched his rucksack and retrieved the tape which contained the series of pieces he had called Seascape Nos. 1–7. It was getting on for two years since he had recorded them. The tape was almost worn out, he had listened to them so often in that time.

  “Are you going to tell me what this is all about?” Cicely asked, as he slotted the cassette into the machine.

  Benjamin wound the tape forward about nine minutes, to the beginning of Seascape No. 4, then took a deep breath and said: “I write music, you know. Did I ever tell you that?”

  “No,” said Cicely, wonderingly.

  “Well, I do. And I thought . . . I thought you might like to hear some of it.”

  “Yes. Of course. I’d love to.”

  “The thing is, the piece I’m going to play you . . . It’s sort of—about you.”

  Cicely blushed, and asked: “But how can a piece of music be about someone?”

  “Well, I was thinking about you when I wrote it. That’s all I mean, I suppose. You inspired it, if you like.”

  “How . . . extraordinary. And when did you write it?”

  “About two years ago,” he said. He pressed the play button and soon heard the onset of extra hiss that signalled the start of the recording.

  “But . . .” Cicely was thinking about this, and it made no sense. “But we didn’t even know each other two years ago.”

  Then the music began and she fell politely silent.

  Benjamin tried not to let her see how nervous he was feeling, in case it spoiled her enjoyment. He tried not to look at her as she was listening, in case it made her self-conscious. But some of the time, he couldn’t help himself. They seemed like the longest four minutes of his life. The recording quality was terrible, he could admit that now. His performance was dire, too: all those bum notes! Why hadn’t he played it again, until he got it right? How could he have listened to it so many times since, over and over, always so uncritically? And it seemed now to express nothing of his feelings for Cicely. Only the dimmest echo of the dimmest echo. He would need a symphony orchestra, and the lyrical gifts of a Ravel or Sibelius, to convey a fraction of what he now realized that he felt for her.

  And yet, she was moved by this offering, he could see that. As it drifted on towards its ambiguous conclusion, he saw no loss of attention, no embarrassment on Cicely’s face. Her lips were slightly parted and she was even swaying, very gently, to the rhythm. And then Benjamin tautened with excitement as the key moment had its desired effect: the one stroke, he thought, of real harmonic interest, at which precise point Cicely turned to him and said, over the closing chords:

  “Oh—what was that?”

  “Just a simple key change,” he explained, proudly, “from G minor to D. Only you’re not expecting it.”

  “No, I meant that noise. In the background.”

  “Noise?”

  “It sounded like a cat.”

  The piece c
oncluded and Benjamin switched off the tape.

  “Yes, it was a cat. His name’s Acorn. He was locked out of the room when I made the recording.”

  “I didn’t know you had a cat. What sort is he?”

  “He’s not ours. He belongs to my grandparents.”

  Cicely told him how much she had liked the music, how touched she had been by it, and he could see that she was telling the truth. All the same, he was disappointed. He shouldn’t have played it to her. It had been the wrong thing to do.

  “I’d better take this back to Uncle Glyn,” she said, picking up the tape recorder. “Oh, and by the way—” (she paused by the door) “—he wants us both to come out to the pub with him tonight. I’ve been here for four weeks and he hasn’t asked me once, but now that you’re here, he wants us both to go. It’s the most amazing thing: I think he really likes you.”

  Benjamin was worried about this trip to the pub. Supposing they went to one of the places his family used, in Abersoch or Llanengan? But he had no cause for anxiety, as it turned out. Glyn was unswerving in his desire to keep away from holiday-makers, and the venue he had chosen was a good twenty-minute drive into one of the most remote and unvisited spots on the peninsula. They passed through Aberdaron, where the poet R. S. Thomas still lived and worked as the parish priest (“A great man; a very great man,” Glyn informed them) and then wound their way slowly into the hills somewhere above Uwchmynydd. A few hundred yards off the coast lay the rocky outcrop of Ynys Enlli, Bardsey Island, once a monastic settlement and legendary place of pilgrimage. As they left the car they could just make it out in the blue, smoky dusk.

  The building to which Glyn had brought them did not look like a pub at all. It seemed to be a small farmer’s cottage, whitewashed and partly thatched. Five sheep were nibbling at the thin grass outside the door, and there were no other cars parked near by, or any sign to imply that members of the public were welcome. Inside there was no bar, just a pair of tables and an enormous oak cask set against the stone wall, from which the customers—if that was the right word—simply drew their glassfuls of red, yeasty, foam-capped beer whenever they wanted. No money seemed to be changing hands.