by Jonathan Coe
Well, I admit that this was not the sort of conversation you usually heard in the canteen of this department store, let alone the sort that I very often took part in myself. I’ve never been very interested in politics. (In fact I didn’t even vote in the last two elections, although I did vote for Tony Blair in 1997, mainly because I thought it was what Caroline wanted me to do.) And when I found out, as I soon did, that Caroline was only working in the maternity section of the department store as a temporary measure, while she began work on her first novel, I felt even more out of my depth. I hardly ever read novels, never mind trying to write one. But in a way this only fuelled my curiosity. I couldn’t work Caroline out, you see. After spending all those years on the road, cold-calling people and trying to sell them stuff, I was fairly satisfied with my ability to size people up and decide, in the space of a few seconds, what it was that made them tick. But I hadn’t met many people like Caroline. I’d never been to university (she was a history graduate from Manchester) and had spent most of my adult life in the company of men – businessmen, at that. The kind of people who never gave away much about themselves when they talked and tended to take the status quo for granted. Compared to them, Caroline was an unknown quantity to me. I couldn’t even begin to guess what had brought her here.
She gave me the explanation for that on our first date, and a very sad story it turned out to be. We were in a branch of Spaghetti House (one of my favourite chains, back in those days, though you don’t see so many of them any more) and while Caroline picked at her tagliatelle carbonara she told me that, when she was at university in Manchester, she’d got quite deeply involved with this man who was studying English in the same year as her. Then he’d got a job in London, working in a TV production company, so they’d both moved down and found themselves a flat in Ealing. Caroline’s real ambition was to write books – novels and short stories – so she took this job in the department store as a temporary thing, trying to get on with her writing in the evening and at weekends. Meanwhile, her boyfriend started an affair with someone he’d met at the production company, and fell madly in love with her, and within a couple of weeks he’d dumped Caroline and moved out, and she was left all by herself, living somewhere where she had no friends and doing a job in which she had no interest.
Well, the truth is obvious enough now, isn’t it? There’s a phrase, a cliché, for the state Caroline was in, back then: on the rebound. She liked me because I was being kind to her, and because I’d caught her at a low ebb, and because I probably wasn’t quite as crass and insensitive as the other guys in the canteen. But there’s no denying, in retrospect, that I was out of her league. In a way it’s amazing that we lasted as long as we did. But of course, you can’t see into the future. I usually have trouble seeing a couple of weeks ahead, never mind fifteen years. Back then, we were young and naive and at the end of that evening in the Spaghetti House, when I asked her if she’d like to drive out into the country with me at the weekend, neither of us had the slightest idea where it would lead and all I can remember now is the shining light of gratitude in her eyes as she said Yes.
Fifteen years ago. Is fifteen years a long time, or a short time? I suppose everything is relative. Set against the history of mankind, fifteen years is just the blink of an eye, but it also seemed that I had travelled a long way, an unimaginably long way, from the hope and excitement of that faraway first date in the Spaghetti House to the evening a few months ago, 14 February 2009, when (at the age of forty-eight) I found myself sitting alone at a restaurant in Australia, the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering behind me, and I couldn’t stop staring at the beautiful Chinese woman and her little daughter who were playing cards together at their table. Caroline had left home by then. Walked out, I mean. She had been gone six months and she had taken our daughter, Lucy, with her. They had moved up north, to Kendal in the Lake District. What was it, finally, that drove her away? Just a long-standing build-up of frustration, I suppose. Apart from the birth of Lucy, it seemed that the last fifteen years hadn’t brought Caroline any of the things she’d been hoping for. The great novel remained unwritten. She hadn’t even managed to finish a short story, so far as I knew. Lucy’s arrival had put paid to a lot of that. Motherhood is pretty demanding, after all. I certainly couldn’t see why being married to me should stop her from writing anything, if that’s what she really wanted to do. Another thing that occurs to me is that Caroline might, deep down (and this is a painful thing to admit) have been a little bit ashamed of me. Of my job, to be more precise. I’d moved on, by now, to one of the biggest and most prestigious department stores in central London, where I was employed as an After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer. It was an excellent job, as far as I could see. But maybe there was a part of her that thought the husband of an aspiring writer should do something a bit more … I don’t know – artistic? Intellectual? You’d think we might have discussed some of these issues but the saddest thing about our marriage, during the last few years, had been the almost complete lack of communication. We seemed to have forgotten the art of talking to each other, except in the form of screaming rows accompanied by the swapping of painful insults and the hurling of household objects. I won’t rehearse all the details but I do remember one of our exchanges, from the penultimate squabble or perhaps the one before that. We had begun by arguing over whether to use an abrasive scourer or a soft sponge to clean off the stainless steel surface of our cooker, and within about thirty seconds I heard myself telling Caroline that it was clear she didn’t love me any more. When she failed to deny it, I said, ‘Sometimes I don’t even think you like me that much,’ and do you know what she said to that? She said, ‘How can anybody like a man who doesn’t even like himself?’
Well, if she was going to talk in riddles, we were never going to get anywhere.
The Chinese woman and her daughter stayed at the restaurant for a long time. Considering how young the daughter was, it was surprising that they were still there at about ten-thirty. They’d finished eating ages ago and all that was keeping them there now was the card game. Most of the tables were empty, and soon it would be time for me to go back to Dad’s flat, as well. There were some things we needed to talk about before I caught my flight home the next afternoon. I needed a pee before leaving, though, so I stood up from my table and made my way to the gents’ in the basement.
I don’t like to pee standing up. Don’t ask me why. As far as I know, there was no traumatic incident when I was a child, getting molested in a public toilet or anything like that. In fact I don’t like to pee standing up even when there is no one else in the gents’, in case someone walks in when I’m halfway through, causing me to stop in mid-flow and turn myself off like a tap, and then have to walk out in a fury of frustration and embarrassment, with my bladder still half-full. So I sat down in one of the cubicles – after making the usual preparations, wiping the seat and so on – and that was when it really hit me. The loneliness. I was sitting, underground, in a tiny little box, tens of thousands of miles from home. If I were to have a sudden heart attack sitting on that toilet, what would be the consequence? Some member of the restaurant staff would probably find me just before they locked up. The police would be called and they would look at my passport and credit cards and somehow, I suppose, through the use of some international database, they would work out my connections to Dad and to Caroline, and they would phone them up and tell them. How would Caroline take the news? She’d be pretty upset, at first, but I’m not sure how deep that would go. I didn’t play much part in her life any more. It would be worse for Lucy, of course, but even she was growing steadily more distant: it was more than a month since I’d heard anything from her. And who else was there? There might be one or two passing tremors of feeling from friends or work colleagues, maybe, but nothing major. Chris, my old schoolfriend, might feel … well, something, some spasm of regret that we’d become estranged and hadn’t seen each other for so long. Trevor Paige would be sorry, genuinely
sorry. So would Janice, his wife. But my passing wouldn’t send out many ripples, beyond that. A Facebook account gone inactive – but would any of my Facebook friends really notice? I doubted it. I was alone in the world, now, terribly alone. I would be flying home the next day, and pretty much all that would be waiting for me when I got there was an unlived-in flat full of Ikea furniture and three weeks’ worth of bills, bank statements and pizza delivery adverts. And now I was sitting by myself in a little wooden box, underground, in the basement of a restaurant beside Sydney harbour, and upstairs, just a few feet above my head, were two people who – however much they might be alone in the world, in other ways – at least had each other; at least were bonded to each other, with a strength and an intensity that was obvious to anyone who so much as glanced at them. I envied them for that, fiercely. The thought of it filled me with a sudden, overwhelming need to get to know this beautiful Chinese woman and her beautiful daughter, who loved each other so much. The prospect of walking away from this restaurant without attempting to introduce myself to them – to make them aware, somehow, that I existed – seemed intolerable.
And the amazing thing was that the more I thought about it, the more I realized there was no reason why I shouldn’t actually do it. Why was I even hesitating, in fact? This was the very thing I was supposed to be good at. Before Caroline and Lucy left me, knocking me for six and turning me into a sort of involuntary hermit, I had built an entire career on my ability to get on with people. What else do you think an After-Sales Customer Liaison Officer does, after all? It’s more or less the very definition of the job. I could be charming, when I wanted to be. I knew how to put a woman at her ease. I knew that politeness, good manners and an unthreatening tone of voice would usually disarm even the wariest stranger.
And so that night – for the very first time since Caroline had walked out on me, six months earlier – I finally came to a decision: a strong one. Without even bothering to work out what I was going to say, I left the cubicle, gave my hands a cursory rinse, and climbed back upstairs with quick, resolute steps. I was breathing heavily and tense with nervousness but also a sense of freedom and relief.
But the Chinese woman and her daughter had paid their bill and gone.
2
My father was asleep when I got back from the restaurant, so we had to wait until the morning, over breakfast, to resume our argument about his flat in Lichfield.
Actually ‘argument’ is too strong a word for the kind of confrontations I have with my father. So is ‘confrontations’, for that matter. My father and I have never raised our voices to each other. If either of us disagrees with the other, or takes offence, we simply retreat into wounded silence – a silence which has been known to last, in some instances, for several years. This method has always worked for us, after a fashion, although I know that other people find it peculiar. Caroline, for instance, was forever taking me to task on this subject. ‘Why do you and your father never talk to each other properly?’ she used to ask me. ‘When was the last time you had a real conversation with him?’ I would remind her that this was an easy thing for her to say. She didn’t know what a difficult man my father was. In fact she barely knew him at all, having only met him once, the time we took Lucy out to Australia when she was about two. (My father had not come back to England for my wedding, or for the birth of his only granddaughter.) As it happened, both he and Caroline were aspiring writers – although my father’s preferred form of expression has always been poetry, if you please – so she’d been hoping that this shared interest would provide some common ground; but even she had to concede, after a few days, that he was not the easiest person to understand or talk to. All the same, it remained a bone of contention between me and Caroline, during the next few years, that my relationship with my father was so badly damaged. I was an only child, and my mother had died when I was twenty-four, so he was really all that I had in the way of family. And when Caroline finally left me, her parting gift (if you can call it that) was this trip to Australia, which she paid for without telling me anything about it: the first I knew being an email from Expedia one day just before Christmas, reminding me to apply for an online tourist visa. She had booked me on a flight which left Heathrow exactly six months to the day after her departure – sensing, perhaps, that I would not be ready for the journey before then, and that this was the earliest I could expect to have climbed out of the trough of depression to which she knew she was condemning me. And in this respect, her calculation (the word seems appropriate, somehow) proved to be accurate. Just goes to show, I suppose, that after all those years she really did know me inside out.
Well, Caroline, it was a charming thought. Cheer up your abandoned husband by sending him off to see his estranged father for three weeks and get them talking to each other again. The trouble is, it takes more than a bit of goodwill and a cut-price air fare to engineer a miracle like that. The next morning, as we ate our last breakfast together in near-silence, I realized that my father and I were as distant as we’d ever been. If the Chinese woman and her daughter were at one end of the scale of human intimacy, we were right at the other. In fact we were almost off the scale. Looking back, there were any number of things we could have bonded over. The fact that our partners had a habit of walking out on us, for instance. Since moving to Australia more than twenty years ago, my father had drifted in and out of any number of half-hearted relationships: I had only met one of the women involved, and she had given up on him five or six years ago. Since then he had been living with a retired pharmacist in the suburb of Mosman, but they’d split up just a few weeks earlier, and he’d now been obliged to find a new apartment, which at the moment was barely decorated or furnished. So we could have talked about that sort of thing; but we didn’t. Instead, we returned to the subject of his flat in Lichfield. He’d bought this flat back in the mid-1980s, just after Mum died – in response to some unspoken impulse, I imagine, to return to the city of his birth – and I’d always assumed that he’d sold it again before moving to Australia. But apparently not. Apparently it had been sitting empty for the last twenty years. Now, I realize that most sons would have got angry with their fathers when they learned that a potentially valuable family property had been allowed to sit empty for twenty years, falling into disrepair. But all I said was, ‘That seems a bit of a waste.’ And all he said was, ‘Yes, I should probably do something about it.’ Then he asked if I would go and look at the flat when I went back to England. I thought he meant that he wanted me to start the process of putting it on the market, and I began telling him that it wasn’t a good time to try selling property in the UK right now, the credit crunch was starting to bite, people were losing their jobs and their savings, everyone was in a state of financial uncertainty, and house prices were falling every month. To which my father answered that he had no intention of selling the flat. He said that he just wanted me to go there and look for a blue ring binder on one of the bookshelves, with the words Two Duets written on the spine, and send it back to him. I asked him what was so significant about this blue ring binder and he said that it contained some ‘important’ poems and other bits of writing, and he wanted it now because the only other copy had been thrown away by his former partner (the pharmacist from Mosman) a few weeks ago when they’d split up. Also, he said that I should read it before sending it to him because among other things it explained how I came to be born; and then he launched into a long and rather bizarre digression about how I would never have been born if there hadn’t been two pubs close to each other in London both called The Rising Sun back in the late 1950s. Again, other sons, probably, would have pressed their father on this point, but I suppose I just thought, ‘Oh God, there goes Dad again – rambling away, off on some strange tangent of his own,’ and instead I started asking him exactly where the ring binder could be found and precisely what shade of blue it was. So, we had an opportunity to delve into a potentially interesting byway of our shared history, and instead we ended up discussing s
tationery. The usual situation, in other words. And after that, I went into the spare bedroom to pack.
In the taxi on the way to the airport, I didn’t think about my father. I found myself thinking about the Chinese woman and her daughter, and what a shame it was that they’d left the restaurant before I’d had the chance to speak to them. All was not entirely lost, it’s true, because I had managed to corner the waiter after I came back upstairs, and he told me something about them, something that was potentially useful. He didn’t know who they were, or where they came from, but he did know this: that they came to the restaurant regularly, on the second Saturday evening of every month, without fail; and that they were always alone: they never brought a man with them. And for some reason – although I know it sounds crazy – I was comforted by both of these things. That restaurant may have been 10,000 miles from where I lived, but the world is a small place, these days, and getting smaller all the time, and at least I knew that, whenever I wanted to, I could always get on a plane, and fly to Sydney, and go to that restaurant on the second Saturday of any month, and there they’d be, playing cards and laughing together. Waiting for me. (I know that sounds fanciful, but that was how I’d already started to think of it.) And, what’s more, they would be alone. There was no one else, no rival for their attentions. I’d guessed as much, actually, from the way they behaved towards each other. There was no room for another person in that relationship. The presence of a man would have polluted it. Unless, of course, that man happened to be me.
