The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  I was struck by the insouciance with which she was telling me all this. Titillating though I found the idea of an ‘adultery facilitator’, I also thought it rather shocking.

  ‘What about …’ I said, trying to choose my words with care, ‘what about the moral dimension?’

  ‘The what?’ said Poppy.

  ‘I just wondered if you had any qualms about it. You know … the fact that you’re helping people to cheat on other people. Does it bother your – your conscience, at all?’

  ‘Oh, that.’ Poppy stirred up the froth at the bottom of her coffee cup and sucked nonchalantly on her plastic spoon. ‘I’ve gone past the stage where I bother about that kind of thing. I got a First in History from Oxford, you know. And do you know what kind of jobs I’ve been doing since? The shittiest of the shitty. The best was PA to the director of a lapdancing club. The worst was … Well, you don’t want to hear about the worst. And that’s without the months of unemployment in between. This job gives me easy money, and it’s regular work, and it allows me plenty of time to sit around reading, and watching films, and going to galleries, which is what I really like doing.’

  ‘Yes, I know things are … difficult out there at the moment. I just thought –’

  ‘You know, you’re starting to sound just like Clive. This is exactly what he said to me when I told him about this job. And do you know what I said back to him?’

  Of course, I didn’t know what she had said back to him. I didn’t even know who Clive was. But my first – and indeed, only – thought at this point was that I wasn’t happy another man’s name had been introduced into the conversation already.

  ‘Well, I lost my temper with him,’ Poppy said, ‘which I very rarely do with Clive. I said to him: Do you realize that, if there’s one thing people of my age cannot stand hearing, it’s people of your age giving us lectures on morality. Look at the world around you. The world you’ve bequeathed to us. D’you think it allows us any scope to do things on principle? I’m sick of hearing about how my generation has no values. How materialist we are. How lacking in any political sense. Do you know why that is? Take a wild guess. That’s right – because that’s how you brought us up! We may be Mrs Thatcher’s children, as far as you’re concerned, but you were the ones who voted for her, again and again, and then carried on voting for all the people who came after her, and followed exactly in her footsteps. You’re the ones who brought us up to be these consumerist zombies. You chucked all the other values out of the window, didn’t you? Christianity? Don’t need that. Collective responsibility? Where’s that ever got us. Manufacturing? Making things? That’s for losers. Yeah, let’s get those losers over in the Far East to make everything for us and we can just sit on our backsides in front of the TV, watching the world go to hell in a handcart – in widescreen and HD, of course.’ She sat back, looking faintly embarrassed for having spoken so passionately. ‘So, anyway – that’s what I said to Clive, when he told me I shouldn’t be doing this job.’

  Well, it was certainly all very interesting. Poppy had raised a lot of issues there, and given me plenty to think about. In fact, she had touched on so many important subjects, it was hard to know where to begin.

  ‘Who’s Clive?’ I asked.

  ‘Clive? Clive’s my uncle. My mother’s brother.’

  I breathed a sigh of relief, and said: ‘I’m so glad to hear that.’ It came out before I could stop it.

  ‘Glad?’ said Poppy, bemused. ‘What are you glad about? You’re glad that my mother has a brother?’

  ‘Well … yes,’ I said, fumbling hopelessly. ‘It’s not good to be an only child. I mean, I’m an only child, and I wouldn’t recommend the experience …’ This was ridiculous. I would have to change the subject as quickly as possible. ‘Your agency’s fees must be very expensive,’ I said, ‘if they have to cover the cost of you flying all over the world on a weekly basis.’

  ‘They are expensive,’ said Poppy. ‘But that’s not the reason. Actually it doesn’t cost that much for me to fly out here and back. I do it on standby, you see. It’s slightly unpredictable, because you never know if there’s going to be a seat available – sometime you end up having to sleep in the airport, which isn’t so great – but usually it works out.’

  ‘And were you lucky this time?’

  ‘Well, it was a close thing. I’d got my eye on this BA flight …’

  ‘7371?’ I asked, hopefully.

  ‘That’s the one. Is that your flight?’

  ‘Yes. Did you get on it?’

  ‘I didn’t think I was going to. At first they told me it was full up. But apparently, a seat’s become available, for some reason.’

  A beautiful certainty suddenly took hold of me.

  ‘Did they put you in Premium Economy?’

  ‘That’s right. Why?’

  ‘I think you’re going to be sitting next to me.’

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  Should I explain to her the circumstances of Charlie Hayward’s recent demise? It would mean telling her that she was going to be taking the place of a dead man. Did she look the squeamish type? I wasn’t going to risk it – I wasn’t going to do anything that might throw a shadow over the journey home that the two of us were about to enjoy, side by side. Out of nowhere, after all, fate had dropped this lovely young woman into my lap, and now it seemed we were going to be bound even more closely together. Not to mince words, for the next twelve hours, we were going to be sleeping together. And on our first date!

  4

  For the second and final leg of the journey, Charlie was supposed to have had the aisle seat, and I should have had the window. Poppy said that she didn’t mind where she sat, but I didn’t really believe her. Everybody prefers a window seat, don’t they? So I insisted that she took the seat by the window. I was determined to make the journey as comfortable for her as could be. I was determined to do everything in my power to make the best possible impression on her. I was determined to make her like me.

  ‘By the way, I suffer from clinical depression,’ I said, as soon as we were settled.

  Poppy seemed completely unfazed, to my relief. She just looked at me for a few seconds and said, ‘Yes – well, I guessed it was something like that.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘It’s that obvious?’

  ‘Let’s just say I have a nose for these things.’

  And after that, at least, the information was out there; it was something understood between us. She was the first person (I mean apart from my employers, and my GP, and my Occupational Health Officer – the first friend, I suppose is what I’m trying to say) with whom I had felt brave enough to share this shameful secret. And if I had been expecting her to edge away from me, retreat into wary silence, ask a stewardess if she could be moved to another seat, or anything like that, I had been wrong. It seemed to make no difference to the way she thought of me. I felt intensely grateful for that, and immediately it seemed to establish an odd sort of intimacy – a settled, comfortable sort of intimacy – which meant that conversation between us, which I had thought would be nervous and forced, seemed from then on to unfold with a rhythm that was entirely natural. To be honest, we did not talk in the next few hours nearly as much as I’d assumed we would. We sat for much of the time in the sort of companionable silence you would expect from an elderly couple who had been married for thirty years – just like that couple I’d seen at the restaurant in Sydney harbour, sitting together on the same side of the table so that they could share in the view rather than talk to each other. A couple of hours into the flight (about two a.m., Singapore time, it would have been) that’s how we were: me flicking through the different movies on the little seat-back screen in front of me, sometimes commenting on them to her, not really able to settle on anything, while Poppy, having spent a few minutes writing up a brief report on her laptop, was now using it to pass the time with what seemed to be some kind of incredibly complicated three-dimensional Sudoku.

  More i
mportantly, though, in the idle moments between these activities, we would talk.

  ‘What about jet lag?’ I asked her at one point.

  ‘Mmn?’

  ‘In this job of yours. Surely your body clock must be all over the place. Is it ever a problem?’

  Poppy shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem to be. Sometimes when I’m at home I wake up a bit early. Sometimes a bit late. It’s not a big deal.’

  I sighed enviously. ‘What it must be like to be young.’

  ‘You’re not in your bath chair yet, Grandad.’

  ‘Well, it’s going to take me a day or two to recover from this trip, I know that. And I have to get over it as quickly as possible because later this week I’ve got a decision to make.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Really. It’ll be six months since I’ve been off work. I have to go into the department store and see their Occupational Health person, and tell her whether or not I want to come back. And even if I say that I do, she might decide that I’m not well enough, which will probably give them an excuse to …’ (it took me a while to remember the euphemism) ‘… let me go. Which might well be what they’re hoping for anyway.’

  ‘And do you?’

  ‘Do I? Do I what?’

  ‘Want to go back.’

  I thought about this for a few moments, but it was too hard a question to answer directly. My thoughts raced ahead, instead, to everything that would be waiting for me when I got home: the bleak, chafing February weather, the empty flat, the pile of junk mail on the other side of the door. Oh yes, it was going to be bad. Just then, it didn’t even feel as though I could face that lonely homecoming, let alone the decision that would have to follow it.

  ‘You know, I still have this fantasy,’ I said, eventually, ‘that I’ll get home, and she’ll be there waiting for me. Caroline. She’s still got a key, you see, so it could happen. I open the door, and as soon as I open it, I know that she’s back. I don’t see her at first, but I can tell that there’s someone in there – the radio’s on, there’s a smell of fresh coffee in the kitchen. The place is warm, and tidy. And then I see her, sitting on the sofa, waiting for me, reading a book …’ I turned towards Poppy again. ‘It’s not going to happen, is it?’

  All she said was: ‘You know, I’m sure you’ve been seeing a therapist, but is there anyone else you can talk to about these things? Someone in your family, say?’

  I shook my head. ‘Mum’s dead. She died young – more than twenty years ago. Dad’s a lost cause. We’ve never been able to talk much. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.’

  ‘Friends?’

  I thought about my seventy friends on Facebook. Honesty compelled me to admit: ‘Not really. I’ve got this friend called Trevor. He used to live nearby, but he’s moved away now. Apart from that …’ I tailed off, suddenly wanting to change the subject, or at least the focus of attention. ‘What about you? Do you have any siblings?’

  ‘Nope. I’ve got my mother, but she’s a bit … self-absorbed, shall we say. She doesn’t really “do” other people’s problems. And Dad ran off some time ago, when she caught him having an affair.’ Another laugh – more rueful, this time. ‘He could have done with the services of a good adultery facilitator, now I think of it. What a pity we weren’t in business then.’

  ‘So you’re like me, then?’ I said – perhaps a little too eagerly. ‘You don’t really have anyone you can talk to.’

  ‘It’s not quite like that,’ said Poppy. ‘You see, I have my uncle. My uncle Clive.’

  She abandoned the Sudoku now, and closed down the programme, so that all I could see on her laptop was her desktop wallpaper – which appeared, rather bizarrely, to be a photograph of some sort of catamaran, a very old one, half-decayed, a ruin of shattered plyboard and flaking paint, lying abandoned somewhere on a tropical beach. My eyes rested curiously on this for a while, as she told me more about her uncle, and why she liked him so much. She told me how her mother had sent her to this posh boarding school in Surrey at the age of thirteen; how she was supposed to be just a weekly boarder, and come home every Friday evening, but her mother was often out of the country so she would go and stay with her uncle instead; how she came to cherish and look forward to these visits; how Clive (who lived in Kew) would take her almost every weekend to the cinema, or the theatre, to concerts and art galleries, introducing her to worlds which before then had been closed to her. And how, if he wasn’t seeing her at the weekends, he would write long letters to her, letters full of news, full of humour, full of fun and information and anecdote and, above all, full of love.

  ‘And you know what?’ she told me. ‘I still read those letters. I still take them with me everywhere.’

  ‘Everywhere?’

  ‘Yes. Even on these trips. I’ve got them right here.’ She tapped her forefinger against the laptop. ‘I scanned them all in. And all the photos he used to send me. This one, for instance – this is one of Clive’s.’ She was pointing to the photograph of the washed-up boat. ‘Well, he didn’t take it or anything like that,’ she explained. ‘It was taken by an artist called Tacita Dean. The boat’s called Teignmouth Electron.’

  ‘Teignmouth?’ I said. ‘That’s in Devon, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right. Where Clive and my mum grew up.’

  ‘So why do you have it on your desktop?’

  ‘Because there’s an amazing story associated with it. The story of a man called Donald Crowhurst.’ She gave a yawn, protracted and involuntary, before remembering to cover it with her hand. ‘Sorry – I’m really sleepy all of a sudden. Have you heard of him?’

  I shook my head.

  ‘He was the man who sailed round the world in the late sixties. Or at least said he did, but actually he didn’t.’

  ‘I see,’ I said, totally confused.

  ‘I’m not explaining this very well, am I?’

  ‘You’re tired. You should go to sleep.’

  ‘No, but it’s a great story. I think you should hear it.’

  ‘I’m fine. I’ll just watch a movie. You’re too tired to talk. Tell me the story in the morning.’

  ‘I wasn’t going to tell you the story. I was just going to read you what Clive wrote to me about it.’

  ‘It can wait.’

  ‘Tell you what.’ Poppy tapped a few keys on her laptop before passing it over to my table, and then reaching beneath her own seat where she had stashed her pillow and blankets. ‘You can read his letter. There it is. It’s a bit long, sorry – but you’ve got plenty of time, and it’ll do you more good than watching some terrible rom-com for a couple of hours.’

  ‘Are you sure that’s OK? I mean, I don’t want to look at anything that’s … too private.’

  But Poppy assured me it was OK. So while she snuggled down under the blankets, I placed her computer on my lap, and looked at the first page of her uncle’s letter. It had opened up in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, so that I could still see the creamy yellow of the notepaper on which he had written it, and even make out the faint swirling watermark behind the handwriting. The writing itself was crisp, angular and easily legible. I guessed that he had been using a fountain pen. The ink was navy blue, shading almost into black. As I started reading the first sentences I felt a slight pressure against my left shoulder, and looked down to see that Poppy had placed her pillow next to it and settled her head there. She looked up at me, just briefly, as if to ask permission with her eyes, but at the same instant her eyelids flickered and closed, and already she had slipped into a deep, unshakeable sleep. After a few seconds, when I felt it was safe to do so, I breathed a goodnight kiss into her hair, and could feel my own body tingle with happiness.

  Water

  The Misfit

  12 March 2001

  Dear Poppy

  I was sorry not to see you this weekend. Weekends are always a bit lonely here when you’re not around. You missed a glorious display in the Gardens – the crocus carpet is in full bloom already – very early this
year – and to stroll along Cherry Walk, one’s eyes taking in swathe upon swathe of these white and purple beauties, their heads bobbing in the breeze, is to realize that spring has come again – finally! Anyway, I hope you had a good time with your mother. Did she take you anywhere, do anything interesting with you? The NFT were showing The Magnificent Ambersons on Saturday evening and I would also have liked to take you along to that. I went by myself in the end, but while I was there I bumped into a friend of mine, Martin Wellbourne, and his wife Elizabeth, and they were kind enough to invite me for supper with them afterwards. So it was not such a solitary evening after all.

  Now, about our plans for Saturday. I think I mentioned that there was a show at Tate Britain at the moment that you might find especially interesting? They are showing some films and photographs by a new young artist called Tacita Dean. You might possibly have heard of her already. A couple of years ago she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize. If you don’t like the sound of it, just say so and we shall certainly find something else to do, but I hope you will want to come. I have to say that I have very particular and personal reasons for wanting to see this show. You see, it contains a short film inspired by the disappearance at sea of the lone yachtsman Donald Crowhurst in the summer of 1969 – and even, so I am led to believe, some photographs of his ill-fated yacht, the Teignmouth Electron, which Ms Dean has taken just in the last couple of years, travelling for this purpose to its final resting place at Cayman Brac in the Caribbean.

  It occurs to me that you might not know what on earth I am talking about here. It also occurs to me that, if I am to tell you a little bit about my fascination with the story of Donald Crowhurst, this is going to turn into a very long letter. But, no matter. It is Monday morning, an empty day stretches ahead of me, and there is nothing I like better than writing to my niece. So, excuse me for a moment while I go and pour myself another cup of coffee, and I shall try to explain.