The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  There were three men already sitting at one of the tables when they arrived. When they saw Glyn they rose to their feet; there was much back-slapping, hand-shaking and exchanging of greetings in Welsh. The men said “Good evening” to Ben and Cicely, as well, but it was then made apparent, firmly but subtly, that they were expected to sit at the other table by themselves. This seemed to be the most sensible arrangement all round. At the four friends’ table an elaborate game of cribbage began to take shape, interspersed with a good deal of conversation, some of it very boisterous, some of it conducted in quiet, earnest voices, with the occasional pointed glance towards the two English interlopers.

  “I’ve seen these fellows before,” Cicely said to Benjamin, sipping gamely on her beer and screwing her eyes up at the thick tartness of it. “They come to the house sometimes, usually after Aunty’s gone to bed.”

  “What are they talking about?”

  “Politics, I expect. They’re fierce nationalists, all of them.”

  Ben was shocked. He had heard about the Welsh Nationalists on the news. They burned people’s holiday cottages down.

  “Is your uncle a nationalist?”

  “Of course he is. He’s always giving quotes about it to the English newspapers and getting into all sorts of trouble. He supports the IRA as well.”

  Benjamin’s eyes widened even further. For years, ever since the pub bombings or even before the pub bombings, he had heard nothing—whether from his family, his friends, the teachers at school, the politicians on the television—nothing but vilification and contempt being poured on the IRA. He had heard them being called everything from child-murderers to lunatics and psychopaths. It had simply never occurred to him before that there might be another way of looking at it. Glyn might be terrifying, but he was also Cicely’s uncle, and she was obviously fond of him, so there could be no doubt, in Benjamin’s mind, that he was essentially on the side of the angels. And yet this man supported the IRA! The people who had killed Malcolm and caused Lois such dreadful suffering. How could that possibly be? Was the world even more complicated than he had imagined—weren’t there even any arguments with only one side to them? How on earth did people like Doug keep hold of their certainties, their clearly defined, confidently held political positions, in a world like this?

  “The IRA hurt my sister,” he said to Cicely. It was a simple statement of fact; the best he could do.

  “How is she, Ben?”

  He sighed. “Oh, not so bad. Quite jolly, these last few days, in fact. Mum and Dad are hoping she can go back to sixth-form college in the next two or three years, get her A-levels, then maybe think about university.”

  “It’s been a long time, hasn’t it? Nearly four years.”

  “Well, you know, there’ve been setbacks. You still have to tread pretty carefully around her. Just the other day Paul upset her again.”

  “What happened?”

  “We’d put the table up outside the caravan in the evening, and we were all going to have some sausages. Dad had done them on the barbecue. And then—you know this terrible fight I was telling you about, between Steve and Culpepper, on the last day of term?—well, Paul started asking me about it. And he went on and on. He didn’t want to know what it had been about, or anything like that, he just wanted all the gory details: ‘Was his nose broken? How much blood was there? Did he fracture his skull?,’ all that sort of thing. Well Lois can’t handle that kind of stuff. It reminds her too much of what Malcolm must—must have looked like. So she flipped. She started screaming ‘Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!’ at Paul and then she threw her food at him and went inside and cried for about two hours. The next day she wouldn’t get out of bed all morning, and we all went into Pwllheli to do some shopping, all except Dad who stayed there to look after her. And apparently at about lunchtime she just got up and got dressed and announced she was going out for a walk. She was gone the whole afternoon. Of course we were all worried sick but I knew she’d come back, in the end. And she did. But she said afterwards that she didn’t remember anything about it and she couldn’t tell us where she’d been or anything like that.”

  Cicely took his hand and squeezed it. It was more than a gesture of comfort.

  “I’m so sorry, Benjamin. Poor Lois.”

  He went to refill their glasses and then asked Cicely to tell him about her mother. He hadn’t known that she was Welsh, for one thing.

  “Well, she doesn’t make nearly so much of it as Uncle Glyn. All her husbands have been from different countries and I think she rather likes the idea of having no nationality at all. Anyway, at the moment she’s in New York and everything’s America, America, America.” Cicely lowered her voice. “The fact is, Ben, this whole Welsh business is all a bit of an exaggeration. Glyn and Mummy were born in Aberystwyth but they moved to Liver-pool when they were small and spent most of their lives in England. He only got interested in Wales again when he heard about this house and found out that he could get it dirt cheap and live the life of a country gentleman. As for Aunty, her family are all from Tunbridge Wells. Of course that doesn’t stop him from meaning what he says. You just shouldn’t be intimidated by it, that’s all.”

  Benjamin thought that Cicely was starting to look tired, and Glyn noticed this too, before very long. He said goodbye to his friends, who seemed to be settled in for the night, and took the two of them back to Plas Cadlan in the car. Benjamin sat in the front passenger seat.

  “Well then, Englishman, what did you think of a taste of real Welsh beer? You don’t get that in the tourist pubs or on your—” (he dredged the words up from the back of his throat like a ball of phlegm) “—caravan site.”

  “Don’t call him ‘Englishman,’ ” said Cicely. “It sounds incredibly rude.”

  “You are English, aren’t you?” Glyn said, glancing at him.

  “Of course.”

  “Well then, that’s what I’ll call you. You’re not ashamed to be called an Englishman, I suppose?”

  “Should I be?”

  “Personally, I don’t like the English. And funnily enough, neither do the friends I was talking to just now. Do you know why?” Without waiting for an answer, he went on: “I’ll tell you, then: the Welsh have hated the English for as long as anyone can remember, and they’ll carry on hating them until the English leave them alone and stop interfering in their affairs. They’ve hated them ever since the thirteenth century, when Edward the First invaded Wales and his armies slaughtered the women and children and Llewellyn the Second was slaughtered too and laws were passed which banned Welsh people from holding positions of authority and English lords were put in place to govern them and Welsh law was suppressed and replaced by English law and English castles were built over the whole country and Welsh people weren’t allowed to live anywhere near them and Welsh-men were continually sent off to the killing fields in France to be slaughtered in wars which had nothing to do with them but were mainly being paid for by Welsh taxes anyway. And then they started to hate them even more at the beginning of the fifteenth century when Owain Glyn Dwr tried to lead the Welsh to independence and restore to them a sense of nationhood, and the English responded by turning the whole of North Wales and Cardigan and Powys into a wasteland, burning the homes and destroying the churches and even kidnapping thousands of Welsh children and tearing them from their families and sending them away to England to be the servants of rich English families.” Glyn pulled over into a convenient passing space at this point, and turned off the engine. His passion had been getting the better of him and the car had been veering alarmingly from side to side of the narrow road, so it was quite a relief that he had stopped. “And all through this terrible time,” he resumed, “the Bardic tradition managed to keep the language alive, the wonderful Welsh language which is the oldest language in these islands—did you even know that?—but then even this, even our very language, our very identity, was taken away from us in 1536 by Thomas Cromwell and his so-called Act of so-called Union, which imposed the
pale, sickly, enfeebled English language on us and made it a crime even to conduct our affairs in our own language, for pity’s sake! That accursed Act was no more an Act of Union than the one the English imposed on the Scots in 1707, when they threatened to blockade all Scottish trade if their terms were refused and forced the Scottish parliament to vote itself out of existence in return for a tiny sprinkling of Scottish MPs down in Westminster and a paltry bribe of a few hundred thousand pounds. ‘We’re bought and sold for English gold,’ Robbie Burns wrote, and by God he was right! And then the English started doing to the Scots exactly what they’d always done to the Welsh, rigging the taxation system so that it was the hard-earned money of poor Scottish folk—weavers and miners—which was used to finance the imperial ventures of the English abroad. And so it remains to this day, with the North Sea oil revenues! And yet neither the Welsh nor the Scots have suffered so terribly from English rapacity and intransigence and ruthlessness as the Irish. Do you have any notion, have they taught you anything at all in that school of yours, about the horrors inflicted by the English upon the Irish during the reign of Elizabeth the First and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell? When Elizabeth undertook the plantation of Ireland in 1565, the country rose in rebellion, and her English generals competed with each other for the savagery with which they could butcher, hang, pillage, loot and massacre the innocent families of the native population. The lands of the victims and survivors alike were seized and given to Scottish settlers, and when there was another uprising in the 1640s it was crushed by Cromwell, and, after toying with the idea of total genocide, he decided just to transplant all the native Irish into the region bounded by the Shannon, and in the process thousands of them were either slaughtered or imprisoned or shipped out as slaves to the West Indies. For God’s sake, after atrocities like that, does it surprise you that any Irishman of spirit still considers himself to be at war with the English, three centuries on? Does it surprise you that the Scots distrust you and the Welsh despise you? Do you think the native Indians of America, and the Maoris of New Zealand, and the aborigines of Australia and Tasmania will ever forgive you for all but exterminating them with murder and famine and disease? You don’t fool the world, you know, not any more, with your oh-so-charming diffidence and politeness and English irony and English selfdeprecation. Ask any free-thinking Welshman or Scotsman or Irishman what he thinks of the English and you will get the same answer. You are a cruel and bloody and greedy and acquisitive people. A nation of butchers and vagabonds. Butchers and vagabonds, I tell you!” At which point Glyn, who had been leaning forward in his driver’s seat and clutching at the steering wheel until his fingers went white, sat back with a deep breath and demanded, “So: what do you say to that, Englishman?”

  There was a long silence, while Benjamin pursed his lips, and chose his words carefully. “It’s a point of view,” he said.

  Glyn started the car again and drove them home.

  The following afternoon, an afternoon of cloudless, jet blue skies and tireless sunshine, an afternoon of impossible stillness where the buzzing of a fly amongst the heather could seem like an event of consequence, Benjamin and Cicely walked on the headland above Rhîw. The previous night, before going to their separate beds, they had kissed at the doorway to her room, and there had been no ambiguity about the kiss at all. Even Benjamin could decipher this one. And to make it even clearer for him, Cicely had whispered, “We’ve started something, now, haven’t we?,” before slipping into the darkness of her bedroom and looking back at him with one more quick and delighted smile.

  He lay awake almost until dawn, his mind dancing with the knowledge of his new, unhoped-for good fortune.

  Today they scrambled up towards the ragged escarpment of Creigiau Gwineu, which Uncle Glyn had told them was the site of a hill fort probably dating back to the Iron Age. It was hard to think of such things on a hot and silent afternoon, with the crested ocean rolled out before them on three sides. The descent from the fort to the clifftops was gentler. Benjamin took Cicely’s hand and guided her along a sheep-path through the bristling gorse: he became agile and sure-footed in this place, realizing that the very texture of the ground in Lln was imprinted on his consciousness, from years of childhood walks, long bright evenings of happy exploration with Lois, his mother and father, his grandparents, even Paul. He didn’t care what Glyn said: part of this peninsula belonged to him, in some sense.

  Before reaching the edge of the cliffs they came upon a broad and well-worn path which clung low to the headland. Here they turned left and walked in the direction of Porth Neigwl. Just as the path started to curve inland, a wide, flat rock jutted out from the bracken. It was the perfect place to sit. There was just room for two people, provided that they wanted to sit as close to each other as possible.

  Benjamin looked across the bay, this prodigious four-mile strand which had earned its name by luring countless seamen to their deaths over the centuries, but which this afternoon, once again, looked almost kindly. The majesty of the prospect, consecrated now by the presence of Cicely, filled him with a mysterious, indefinable gladness.

  “This time last year,” he said, “I was looking at a view like this with my grandfather. Just—” (he pointed across the bay to Cilan) “—just over there. And he said this extraordinary thing. He told me that no one could look at this view and not believe in the existence of God.”

  Cicely was silent for a few moments. “And do you agree with him?” she asked.

  Benjamin was on the point of replying, when he checked himself. He had been about to say yes, unhesitatingly; but something was stopping him. Some new layer of uncertainty. A rapid and complex chain of thought was set in motion, at the sudden end of which he said to Cicely: “Can I ask you something?”

  “Of course you can. Anything.”

  “How can you forgive me?”

  “Forgive you? Forgive you for what?”

  “For writing that review.”

  “But Benjamin—that was simply ages ago.”

  “Yes, I know that; but still—it was so hurtful. So unkind.”

  “Not at all. I’ve told you this before: it was the best thing anyone could have done for me. I was never any good at acting. I was just doing it because my mother wanted me to, and because it fitted in with some stupid self-image I had. You cured me of that. That’s what it was, literally: a cure. And I don’t believe you did it out of malice. You were already writing music out of . . . out of love for me—I know that now—and I think that’s why you wrote the review, as well.”

  “Out of love?”

  “Yes, I think so. To show me to myself. That’s what love is, if you like. It’s a condition in which . . . in which people help each other to see the truth about themselves.”

  “Yes,” said Benjamin. “Yes, you’re right.”

  She had answered his question. In his new closeness to Cicely, he was already discovering a truer self: and that self was not sure, not sure at all, whether God existed or not. It seemed he was about to be saddled now with an even more doubting self than the one he had lived with before.

  “I don’t know,” he admitted to Cicely. “I don’t know whether I agree with Grandpa or not.”

  “Christianity isn’t for me,” she said decisively. “I think the Eastern religions have a lot to teach us, don’t you? And anyway, I believe the same God is probably at the bottom of every religion. What does that make me—a pantheist?”

  “A pantheist is someone who sees God in everything. I think my grandfather may be a pantheist, actually.” Poor Grandpa. He was bedridden now, and in constant pain. Benjamin shook off the morbid thoughts that were beginning to press in on him. “All I know,” he said, “is that I love this place very much, and that it feels very much bound up with . . . my future.” Cicely looked curiously at him, not understanding. He didn’t understand either. “My story will end here,” he said, slowly, but that was no better. “Sorry: that sounds so portentous.”

  She leaned her head o
n his shoulder and for a while they said nothing. But she was thinking about his last words. “Where on earth will my story end?” she wondered aloud. “I don’t really have a home. I don’t feel at home in Birmingham; or anywhere else, to tell the truth. Perhaps it’ll be America.”

  “Why America?” Benjamin asked.

  Her voice faltered. “Because that’s where I’m going next.” She felt Benjamin tense rigid beside her, and turned to him with eyes full of sorrow for the pain she was about to cause him. “Oh, it’s not for ever, Ben. Just for a few months.”

  “A few months?”

  “Just while my mother’s doing this play in New York. It’s an off-Broadway thing, it might even close after a week or two. I miss her terribly, Benjamin. It’s a good opportunity. We’ll stay in Manhattan, and have weekends on Long Island . . .”

  “What about your exams? I thought you were going back to school.”

  “Not until after Christmas.” She stood up, and drew Benjamin with her. She pressed her body tightly into his and he could feel her quick breath, her beating heart. “Look, Ben, I’ve made lots of stupid mistakes with men in the past. You’re not a mistake. You’re the first one. The first and the last and the only. What’s happened between us here, it’s just the beginning, don’t you see? We’re going to have fabulous times together, you and me. Fabulous, unbelievable times. We’re so lucky, so very very lucky, to have found each other. We’re so young, Ben, we’re so young and already we know! We’re the luckiest people in the world, you and I! I’m not going to throw that away. Nothing on earth is going to make me throw that away. What’s a few months, a few months apart, compared to what we’ve got ahead of us? It’s nothing, Benjamin. Nothing at all.”