Number 11

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘It was the first time I’d ever heard him use that phrase. It certainly wouldn’t be the last.’

  She fell silent, until Rachel felt obliged to prompt her once more: ‘So what did he mean by it?’

  ‘I wasn’t sure at first. It was only afterwards that he explained. You saw the fountain in the centre of the lawn? It’s not working at the moment, of course. The pump stopped working a couple of years ago and now it’s one of many things that I need to get around to fixing. But it was working back then, and it formed a proper centrepiece to the garden. That was the first thing your eyes were drawn towards. And that day, I remember, it looked particularly stunning. The water had frozen, you see – that’s how cold it was. So you had this cascade, this waterfall of ice, tumbling over the different levels of the fountain. It looked like some sort of chandelier in the ballroom of a fairytale castle. There were icicles hanging from all the trees, the stream itself was frozen, and the lawn was a shimmering blanket of pure white. It did look kind of … eldritch, do you know that word? It means uncanny. Other-worldly. Rather like it was made of crystal. I thought that’s what Roger had meant, at first. But it turned out there was more to it than that.

  ‘We stayed out in the garden for about ten minutes but he hardly spoke in that time. He was wandering around in a kind of trance, walking over to different corners of the garden and then turning around to view everything from different angles. He stood beside the fountain and touched the frozen water. I can still see him doing this, such a sombre figure in his long black overcoat, his fingers stroking the cascade of icicles gently, then flicking them with his fingernails so that they sounded little notes like some far-off, tinkling musical instrument. His eyes were misted over. The owners of the house were trying to talk to us about water drainage and the cost of hiring a local gardener but Roger wasn’t listening to a word. He didn’t reply to a single thing they told him, until right at the very end of the tour, when he suddenly turned to them and said: “Of course, we’ll buy it.”

  ‘I was amazed. He hadn’t even asked my opinion. And he hadn’t said “We’ll be making an offer”; he’d said, “We’ll buy it.” Just like that. In the car on the way back to Oxford, I was too angry to talk to him properly. Anyway, he was behaving especially strangely; he was on some weird cloud nine of his own. He never once mentioned the garden. He kept talking about the house, rhapsodizing about it as though we could never have imagined anything so perfect. Finally I cut him off in mid-flow and told him that he should never, ever do anything like that again. He didn’t even know what I was talking about. When I pointed out to him that, without consulting me, he’d assured these people we were going to buy their house off them, he didn’t even seem to be aware that he’d done it. And the strange thing is, I believed him. It was as if he’d experienced some sort of fugue state.

  ‘As soon as we got back to our flat, he disappeared into the study and went online. I didn’t see much of him after that, until later that evening, when he came and found me on the sofa, eating dinner. I’d ordered pizza but he hadn’t heard me when I told him it had arrived. He was carrying his laptop with him and he sat down next to me and started talking.

  ‘“OK,” he said. “So I have to tell you what happened to me today in that garden.” I told him that was probably a good idea, and he started to explain: “Something came back to me,” he said. “Something I thought I might have imagined. From a long time ago.” He was struggling, rather, to find the words. “When I was just a kid, probably aged about five or six, I saw this film. At least, until today I wasn’t really sure whether I’d seen it or not. I didn’t know whether it was something I’d invented, or dreamed, or misremembered, or whatever. All I know is that the memory of it – even if it was a false memory – was so precious that I’d barely even allowed myself to think about it in all that time.” He looked at me so earnestly that I almost wanted to laugh. Which wouldn’t have been a pretty sight, since I had a mouth full of pizza at the time. “I didn’t know anything about it, except that it was a short film, as far as I could recall. It must have been shown mid-afternoon, in the school holidays, as some sort of filler between programmes, and it was called The Crystal Garden. At least, I was pretty sure that must have been the title. It’s so hard to distinguish what belongs to memory and what belongs to real life. I can’t remember anything about the story. I can only remember … an atmosphere, a feeling. A very faded print, the soundtrack filled with pops and scratches. A young boy as the hero: in one scene – the only scene I can call to mind, in any detail – he wanders into this garden, and I can remember the music on the soundtrack – there was a sort of tinkling background, some sort of tuned percussion, and over the top of that, a tune – a beautiful tune, lyrical and yearning – with a soprano singing the melody – there were no words – but again, the whole thing was incredibly scratchy, almost distorted – the recording must have deteriorated so badly … And this garden … The whole thing was made of crystal, was made of glass … It was a walled garden, he had to pass through a sort of passageway, a sort of tunnel in the wall to get to it, and when he came out into the garden … Yes, everything glittered, everything was made of crystal, all the flowers, the roses, the little topiary hedges, there were paths criss-crossing each other between the flower beds and they led towards this … lake, was it? this frozen pond? … a sheet of crystal, anyway, and this fountain at the centre of it, shimmering, glittering, just like the fountain in the garden today. The resemblance was incredible.” He paused for breath. I think this was the longest speech he’d ever made in the whole time I’d known him. His voice was quiet, but it was shaking as well. I’d never known him speak about anything with such passion. “I’m sure this is real,” he resumed after a while. “I’m sure I’m not imagining this. I did see that film. I know I did. I just wish I could remember more about it. It’s crazy, I can’t remember anything about the story. Nothing at all. Like I said, the whole thing is just … just an atmosphere, and the strange thing is, that the atmosphere of the film sort of … bleeds in to the atmosphere in the room when I was watching it. It was the school holidays – it must have been the school holidays – or perhaps I was off sick, something like that – and Mum wasn’t sitting next to me on the sofa or anything but she was inside the house with me, in the next room, I think, in the kitchen, getting dinner ready for when Dad came home. And it was winter, definitely winter, because there were ice crystals on the window of the living room and icicles hanging down above the window, and snow on the ground outside, or at least a frost – these details blend in, you see, they blend in with the crystal of the crystal garden; and our gas fire was on, our little old-fashioned gas fire, and it was hissing, as it always did, and giving out little pops and scratches, and again, that blends in, somehow, with the poor quality of the film soundtrack, so that it becomes even more hard to distinguish between what I’ve remembered and what I’ve imagined.”

  ‘He tailed off, and fell silent, until I asked: “How come you’ve never mentioned this before, if it’s such an important memory for you?”

  ‘And he said: “Because I couldn’t be sure if it was true or not. Not until today.”

  ‘“Just because the garden reinforced that memory,” I said, “doesn’t mean that it makes it true. It sounds to me that what you’re doing is conflating two different –” But he cut me off, and went back to the computer. “No,” he said, “that’s not the point. The point is that seeing the garden today made me go online and start looking for some evidence. And here’s what I found.”

  ‘He passed the laptop over. I wiped my fingers on a piece of kitchen towel and took it off him. He was on the IMDb, looki
ng at a page devoted to the filmography of some American cameraman. There was a long list of pretty undistinguished credits from the early 1940s onwards – some of them films, but mostly TV shows – and then just one credit as director, which said “Der Garten aus Kristall, 1937”. When you clicked on the link, it brought up a page which was completely blank except for the title of the film and the director’s name: Friedrich Güdemann.

  ‘I looked across at him and said: “That’s it?”

  ‘“That’s it,” he answered.

  ‘I double checked. “You’ve spent the last few hours searching the internet for this film, and this is all you found?”

  ‘“Yes. There’s no other reference to it. Nothing.”

  ‘I looked at the computer screen again. “So it’s a German film?”

  ‘“Apparently,” he answered. “When I put the English title into Google, nothing was coming up. So I started trying other languages, and slight variations on the title. And finally, this was what I found. It must be the right one,” he said, biting his lip. “It has to be.”

  ‘But was it the right one? This was Roger’s dilemma, and it turned out to be an agonizing, drawn-out wait before he would find the answer. Already, that day, he’d posted queries about the film on the message boards of every movie website he could think of. He’d asked if anyone, like him, could remember seeing the film on afternoon television back in the 1960s. He asked for any information anyone could provide about Friedrich Güdemann, whose IMDb filmography suggested that he had moved to America in the early 1940s and anglicized his name to Fred Goodman. There was no Wikipedia entry about him, and no further references anywhere online. Having made his enquiries, Roger could only sit back and wait for some answers to come in.’

  ‘And did they?’ Rachel asked.

  Laura shook her head. ‘Nothing. Nothing at all.’ She sighed. ‘He was crushed by that. Really disappointed. He’d been convinced that in this day and age, the age of universal information, there was no subject so obscure that it didn’t have its own expert online, somewhere or other. But for the time being he seemed to have drawn a blank. He kept checking the message boards, re-posting his questions and bumping the threads, but after a few weeks he seemed more or less resigned to the idea that he wasn’t going to hear anything that way. He didn’t talk about it much, but I knew that he was broken by it. He’d felt that he’d been on the verge of this … momentous discovery, and now he was back where he started.’

  Laura sipped her wine again. The fire suddenly gave out a sharp crackle and one of the logs tumbled out of place. Rachel looked down at the fire, and the sounds it was making, the warmth it was giving out, made her think of the infant Roger, sitting in front of his gas fire at home in the school holidays, watching this film with its ancient soundtrack of pops and crackles, his mother next door in the kitchen, preparing the family dinner …

  ‘Well, life went on. In fact it became pretty busy. That year we had two life-changing events to deal with – moving house, which we did in the spring, and then the birth of Harry, which happened in the summer. Roger was … you know, pretty helpful about all this. He was quite involved, and for the first few months after Harry was born he was a pretty good father. Very hands-on. It seemed to be distracting him from all his other obsessions for a while, I thought, but it turned out I was wrong about that. The memory of that film was still weighing him down. The first I knew about it was when he told me that he’d been asked to contribute to a book of essays that Palgrave Macmillan were bringing out. It was a sort of Festschrift, paying homage to this film writer called Terry Worth, who’d been quite a name to reckon with in the 1990s. He’d also been a bit of a specialist on the subject of lost films, and this was the aspect of his work that Roger had been asked to write about. So of course I asked him if he was going to mention The Crystal Garden and he said probably not – there just wasn’t enough information available to make it worthwhile. He said it in a very offhand way, so I really got the impression that he’d more or less forgotten about it, or at least put it to the back of his mind. He did say that this article was going to involve a lot of research, which didn’t come at an especially good time, for me. There were about two weeks when I didn’t see him at all. I was stuck at home feeding Harry, while Roger was away for days at a time down at the BFI library in London. Or at least, that’s where I thought he was.’ She paused, stared ruefully for a moment into the depths of her wine glass, then looked up again. ‘One day I got an email from a friend, who’d just run into him – not at the BFI at all. He was at the Newspaper Library in Colindale.’ She looked quickly across at Rachel. ‘What’s so funny? What are you smiling at?’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Rachel. ‘It’s just – I thought it might be something a bit … spicier than that. That he’d been having an affair, or something.’

  ‘That would have been preferable, in a way,’ said Laura. ‘At least that would have been relatively normal behaviour. But there was never anything normal about Roger. Only he could cheat on his wife by working in a different library than the one he was supposed to be working in. Anyway, he wouldn’t have made a very good adulterer, because when he got back from London that night and I mentioned it to him, he confessed everything. Apparently he’d been going to Colindale every day to trawl through the entire TV listings of the Birmingham Post for the mid-1960s. I got pretty angry with him, as you can imagine, and accused him of wasting his time. To which he said: “Ah! But it hasn’t been a waste of time. Not at all. I’ve narrowed it down to two days.”

  ‘“Narrowed what down?” I said.

  ‘“The screening date. Here – take a look at these.” And he took two sheets of paper out of his briefcase and threw them down in front of me, like some self-satisfied detective producing his proof of the murderer’s identity at the end of a film. I looked at them and couldn’t see what he was talking about. They were just photocopies of two separate television listings from an old newspaper. No mention of The Crystal Garden anywhere.

  ‘“Don’t you see?” he said. “Look at this one: 14 December 1966. A Wednesday afternoon. The school holidays would just have started. I’d be five and a half years old. Now look at the listings for ATV. There – look. At ten past two.” I looked at the listing and read out the title. “Against the Wind. What’s that got to do with anything?” He sighed impatiently, as if I was some kind of imbecile. “Don’t you see?” he said. “Look when the next programme started.” I did. It started at four thirty, but again, I couldn’t see the relevance of this. “Against the Wind,” he pointed out, almost breathless with excitement, “is an Ealing film from the 1940s, set in occupied Belgium. And it’s only ninety-six minutes long. And films run even more quickly when broadcast on television. So let’s say ninety minutes. Add in even twenty or twenty-five minutes’ worth of commercials, and you’re still left with a big gap in the schedule. Something that would need to be filled.” He stared at me in triumph, but I just looked down with a frown, not liking the direction this was taking at all. “And this one’s the same,” he continued, “but even better: 16 February 1967. A Thursday. Probably half-term. This time the film is The Man Who Could Work Miracles – an H. G. Wells adaptation, which I know I saw round about that time. I can remember it, quite clearly. And it’s only eighty-two minutes long! Which leaves a gap in the schedule of more than twenty minutes this time. And the weather was right that week, as well – there’d been a snowfall two days before. I’m certain this has to be the one. Ninety-nine per cent certain, anyway. When else could it have been? I’ve been through all the other listings and these were the only real gaps.”

  ‘“You’ve been t
hrough them all?” I said, incredulous. “How long did that take?”

  ‘“Not long,” he said, defensively. “Just three or four days.”

  ‘I was pretty shocked when I heard this was how he’d been spending his time, as you might imagine. But it seemed that these things went in cycles. He was all excited about his discovery for a few days, but nothing came of it. He hadn’t managed to prove anything, of course. He wrote to Central TV in Birmingham but they didn’t have any of their archives from the old ATV days. No paperwork or anything like that. Anyway they thought he was some sort of crank, obviously. So once again, after a few more months, he seemed to have got over it.

  ‘Academic publishing, as you know, doesn’t exactly move fast. It took two years for that book of essays about Terry Worth to come out, and when it did, Roger’s was singled out as being one of the best. It was a really good piece, I could see that. This was the tragedy: when Roger could get past his obsessions and tackle something serious, he really was a good writer. A lot of it was about a Billy Wilder film called The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which is famous for having about a third of its footage cut out before it was released. In the bits that are left, Holmes and Watson go up to Scotland and encounter the Loch Ness Monster. Roger and I watched it together one night, and I suppose that’s when we both started thinking about the Monster and what it represents. The one in this film turns out to be a fake, of course. As they so often do.

  ‘That was a good night. We sat up together for hours, talking about all these different Loch Ness films and trying to decide what they had in common. We noticed that the main characters usually take people’s responses to the idea of the Monster – some sense of awe, perhaps, bordering on fear – and try to make a profit out of it. That’s when he came up with this phrase, “monetizing wonder”.’ Laura paused, and shook her head with sad incredulity. ‘How long ago was that? And I’m still trying to finish the article for him. Unbelievable.’