The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Here, I brought you the book,’ said Clive, proudly. ‘And the DVD.’

  He handed me an old hardback copy of Ron Hall and Nicholas Tomalin’s book, The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, and a DVD of Deep Water, the feature-length documentary that had recently been made about his journey.

  ‘You’ll enjoy these,’ he predicted, happily. ‘The whole story just gets more fascinating the more you find out about it.’

  ‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘Let me know how I can get them back to you. Through Poppy, maybe.’

  ‘Or directly, if you prefer,’ he said, and handed me his card. It gave his business address as Lincoln’s Inn Fields. I hadn’t even known that he was a lawyer. ‘Send me an email or something anyway – let me know what you think of the film.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, for form’s sake. ‘I’ll do that.’

  Clive hesitated; he was clearly on the point of saying something more personal.

  ‘Poppy told me …’ he began, and left a pause – during which I wondered exactly what Poppy had told him about me. Maybe she had told him that she was hugely attracted to me, but embarrassed to admit it, because of the age difference? ‘Poppy told me that you’ve been off work with depression.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘That.’ Curious how that piece of information seemed to be following me everywhere I went. ‘Yes, but I think … I think I’m over it now.’

  ‘That’s good to know,’ said Clive. His smile was kind. ‘All the same, you know – these things take time. I was just thinking about your trip to Shetland.’

  ‘Just what I need, probably. Take me out of myself.’

  ‘Probably. But it’ll be lonely up there. And you’ll be a long way from anyone you know.’

  ‘No, I’ll be fine. I’m really looking forward to it.’

  ‘Good. I’m glad to hear it.’ He patted me gently on the back, and said, rather unexpectedly: ‘Take care, Max.’ But I was far more interested to see that Poppy had just appeared by his side, with her coat on.

  ‘Thought I’d walk you to the station,’ she said. ‘We didn’t really get the chance to talk much, did we?’

  I was glowing with happiness as we walked side by side to South Kensington tube. The fact she had gone out of her way to keep me company; the fact that our bodies kept almost colliding, because we walked so close to each other: there seemed a perfect logic to these things. It felt as though everything that had happened to me in the days since meeting Poppy had been leading up to one charged, pivotal moment, and that moment was now very nearly upon us. Just a few more steps, until we reached the arcade at the entrance to the tube station, and then it would be time: time to do what I’d been hoping to do all evening.

  ‘Well,’ said Poppy breezily, when we had arrived. ‘Good to see you, Max. I’m off to Tokyo tomorrow, assuming I can get onto the flight, but … well, good luck with your Shetland trip, if I don’t see you before then. And thanks for the chocolate.’

  She reached up and offered me her cheek. I took both of her cheeks between the palms of my hands, tilted her face firmly towards mine, and kissed her on the lips. The kiss lasted for perhaps a couple of seconds before I felt her mouth tauten and disengage itself, and Poppy pulled violently away.

  ‘Erm … Excuse me?’ she said, rubbing her mouth. ‘What was that about, exactly?’

  At this point I became aware that passers-by were looking at us, with curiosity and amusement. Or looking at me, rather. I suddenly felt very stupid, and very old.

  ‘Was that … not what you were expecting?’ I said.

  She didn’t answer at first, just took a few steps back, giving me a slightly incredulous glance. ‘I think I’d better go,’ she said.

  ‘Poppy – ’ I began; but words failed me.

  ‘Look, Max.’ She came a little closer: that was something, at any rate. ‘Do you not get it?’

  ‘Get it? Get what?’

  ‘What tonight was about? What it was for?’

  I frowned. What was she talking about?

  ‘Max –’ She gave a little sigh of despair. ‘You’re twenty years older than me. You and I could never be … a couple. You’re old enough to be my …’

  She tailed off, but it wasn’t the hardest sentence in the world to complete, even for a dimwit like me.

  ‘OK. I see. I get it. Goodnight, Poppy. Thanks for walking me to the station.’

  ‘Max, I’m sorry.’

  ‘No need to be sorry. Don’t worry. I get it now. It was a kind thought. And your mother’s a very attractive woman. Lovely, in fact. Just not my … not my type, I’m afraid.’

  She may have tried to answer me, I don’t know. I turned away and without looking back walked down the stairs towards the ticket barriers. My face was burning and I could feel tears of humiliation pricking my eyes. I brushed them away with the sleeve of my jacket as I fumbled in my pocket for my Oyster card.

  You might have thought that things couldn’t have got any worse that night. But they did. Out of some weird masochistic impulse I checked the emails on my Liz Hammond account and saw that Caroline had written her a message, attaching – as requested – a copy of her latest short story. It was called ‘The Nettle Pit’.

  I swear to you that my heart stopped beating for a few seconds when I saw this title. She couldn’t have done that, could she? She couldn’t have written about that episode?

  While the story was printing out, I went to fetch myself a drink. There wasn’t much in the house, so I had to make do with vodka. My hands were shaking. Why put myself through this, after that dreadful parting from Poppy? Wasn’t it enough that an evening on which I’d been pinning so many (false) hopes had already ended in catastrophe?

  It was no use. I was powerless in the face of a morbid curiosity that made me drag my steps into the sitting room, vodka in one hand, ten printed sheets of A4 in the other. I flopped down on to the charcoal-coloured Ikea sofa, glared at the framed photograph of Caroline, Lucy and the Christmas tree which looked back at me mockingly from the mantelpiece, and then began to read. Began to read her account – written in the third person, to give it ‘objectivity’ and ‘distance’, if you please! – of what had happened on that family holiday in Ireland, five years ago.

  Earth

  The Nettle Pit

  ‘“Cheating” is an interesting concept, don’t you think?’ said Chris.

  ‘How do you mean?’ said Max.

  Caroline stood against the kitchen sink and watched the two men talking. Even from this seemingly insignificant exchange, she felt that she could detect a world of difference between them. Chris was a skilled and attractive conversationalist: however small the subject, he would approach it enquiringly, quizzically, endeavouring always to penetrate to the truth and confident that he would get there. Max was perpetually nervous and uncertain – nervous even now, in conversation with the man who was (or so he liked to tell everyone, including himself) his oldest and closest friend. It made her wonder – not for the first time, on this holiday – exactly why the fondness between these two men had endured for so long.

  ‘What I mean is, as adults, we don’t talk about cheating much, do we?’

  ‘You can cheat on your wife,’ said Max, perhaps a touch too wistfully.

  ‘That’s the obvious exception,’ Chris conceded. ‘But otherwise – the concept seems to disappear, doesn’t it, some time around teenagerhood? I mean, in football, you talk of players fouling each other, but not cheating. Athletes take performance-enhancing drugs but when it’s reported on the news the newsreader doesn’t say that so and so’s been caught cheating. And yet, for little kids, it’s an incredibly important concept.’

  ‘Look, I’m sorry –’ Max began.

  ‘No, I’m not talking about today,’ said Chris. ‘Forget about it. It’s no big deal.’

  Earlier that afternoon Max’s daughter, Lucy, had been involved in a fierce and tearful argument with Chris’s youngest, Sara, over alleged cheating during a game of French cricket. They had been pl
aying on the huge expanse of lawn at the front of the house and their screams of reprimand and denial had been heard all over the farm, bringing members of both families running from every direction. The two girls had not spoken to each other since. Even now they were sitting at opposite ends of the farmhouse, one of them frowning over her Nintendo DS, the other flicking through the TV channels, struggling to find anything acceptable to watch on Irish television.

  Chris continued: ‘Is Lucy curious about money yet?’

  ‘Not really. We give her a pound every week. She puts it in a piggy bank.’

  ‘Yes, but does she ever ask you where the money comes from in the first place? How banks work, and that sort of thing.’

  ‘She’s only seven,’ said Max.

  ‘Mm. Well, Joe’s getting pretty interested in all that stuff. He was asking me for a crash course in economics today.’

  Yes, he would be, Max thought. At the age of eight and a half, Joe was already starting to manifest his father’s omnivorous, bright-eyed curiosity, while Lucy, only one year younger, seemed content to exist in a world of her own, composed almost entirely of fantasy elements: a world of dolls and pixies, kittens and hamsters, cuddly toys and benign enchantments. He was trying not to worry about it too much, or to feel resentment.

  ‘So I told him a little bit about investment banking. You know, just the basics. I told him that these days, when you said that someone was a banker, it doesn’t mean that he sits behind a counter and cashes cheques for customers all day. I told him that a real banker never comes into contact with money at all. I told him that most of the money in the world nowadays doesn’t exist in any tangible form anyway, not even as bits of paper with promises written on them. So he said to me, “But what does a banker do, Dad?” So I explained that a lot of modern banking is based on physics. That’s where the concept of leverage comes from. Gears, ratchets and so on – you find terms like this coming up in modern theories of banking all the time. Anyway, you must know all about that.’

  Max nodded, even though he didn’t, in fact, know any such thing. Caroline, who knew her husband well (too well) after all this time, saw the nod and recognized it for the bluff that it was. The little private smile she offered to the kitchen floor was tinged with sadness.

  ‘I told him that a lot of modern banking consists of borrowing money – money that isn’t your own – and finding somewhere to reinvest it at a higher rate of return than you’re giving to the person you’re borrowing it from. And when I told him that, Joe thought about it for a while, and said this very interesting thing: “So bankers,” he said, “are really just people who make a lot of money by cheating.”’

  Max smiled appraisingly. ‘Not a bad definition.’

  ‘It isn’t, is it? Because it brings a different moral perspective to bear on things. A child’s perspective. What the banking community does isn’t illegal – at least most of the time. But it does stick in people’s throats, and that’s why. At the back of our minds we still have unspoken rules about what’s fair and what isn’t. And what they do isn’t fair. It’s what children would call cheating.’

  Max was still thinking about this conversation later that night, when he and Caroline were lying in bed together, up in the attic bedroom, both on the point of falling asleep.

  ‘I didn’t think Chris would have gone for all that “out of the mouths of babes” stuff,’ he said. ‘Bit too cute for him, I would have thought.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Caroline, non-commitally.

  Max waited for her to say more, but there was only silence between them; part of a larger, magical near-silence which hung over the whole of this coastline. If he listened closely, he could just about hear the noise of waves breaking gently on the strand, about half a mile away.

  ‘Close, aren’t they?’ he prompted.

  ‘Who?’ Caroline murmured through her encroaching cloud of sleep.

  ‘Chris and Joe. They spend a lot of time together.’

  ‘Mmm. Well, I suppose that’s what fathers and sons do.’

  She rolled over slowly and lay flat on her back. Max knew this meant that she was almost asleep now, and conversation was over. He reached out and took her hand. He held on to her hand and looked up at the restless clouds through the bedroom skylight until he heard her breathing become slower and more regular. When she was fully asleep he gently let go and turned away from her. They had not made love since Lucy was conceived, almost eight years ago.

  When they prepared for their walk the next morning, the skies were grey and the estuary tide was low.

  The two wives would be staying behind to prepare lunch. Pointedly sporting a plastic apron as her badge of domestic drudgery, Caroline came out on to the lawn to wave the party off; but before they all struck off through the fields and down the path towards the water’s edge, Lucy took her parents to one side.

  ‘Come and see this,’ she said.

  She clasped Max’s hand and led him across the wide expanse of lawn towards the hedgerow which marked the boundary of the farmland. Out of the hedge grew a young yew tree, with a single, gnarled branch stretching out back towards the lawn. A piece of knotted rope hung from the branch, and underneath it, the earth had been scooped out to form a deep basin, now choked and brimming with a dense thicket of stinging nettles.

  ‘Wow,’ said Max. ‘That looks nasty.’

  ‘If you fell in there,’ said Lucy, ‘would you have to be taken to hospital?’

  ‘Probably not,’ said Max. ‘But it would really hurt.’

  Caroline said: ‘Not a very good place to put a rope, really. I don’t think you’d better do any swinging on that.’

  ‘But that’s our game,’ said a boy’s breathless voice behind them.

  They turned round to see that Joe had run over to join them. His father was following.

  ‘What game would that be?’ Caroline asked.

  ‘It’s a dare game,’ Lucy explained. ‘You have to get on the rope and then the others push you and then you have to swing across like ten times.’

  ‘I see,’ said Chris, in a tone of resigned understanding. ‘Somehow this sounds like one of your ideas, Joe.’

  ‘It was, but everybody wants to do it,’ his son insisted.

  ‘Well, I don’t think you’d better.’

  ‘What would you do,’ Caroline asked, ‘if one of you fell in there? The stinging would be terrible. It would be all over your body.’

  ‘That’s the point of the game,’ said Joe, with the triumph of one stating the obvious.

  ‘There are lots of dock leaves,’ said Lucy. ‘So if you fell in, you could make yourself better.’

  ‘Five words,’ said Caroline. ‘No, no, no, no, no.’

  Joe let out a sigh of resignation and turned away. But he was not given to brooding on life’s disappointments, and his enquiring mind was never at rest for long. As they headed down towards the estuary path, Caroline could hear him asking his father why it was that dock leaves always grew in proximity to stinging nettles, and she could hear his father replying – as always – with a concise, informed explanation. Her eyes followed them as their figures receded, and as Joe’s two sisters ran and caught up with them: the bodies of father and son, so alike already in shape and bearing despite the years between them, and the eager, thronging daughters – the three children clustered around their father, drawn together into an inseparable group by blood and mutual affection and above all their unflinching regard for him. And she watched Max and Lucy following them down the same path: hand in hand, yes, but somehow sundered – some force intervening, holding them apart – and sundered in a way that she herself recognized, from personal experience. For an instant, in the odd paradox of their closeness and separation, she saw an emblem of her own relationship with Max. A shaft of keen, indefinable regret pierced her.

  Now she could hear the two of them talking as they walked away.

  ‘So why do dock leaves always grow next to stinging nettles?’ Lucy was asking.


  ‘Well,’ Max answered. ‘Nature is very clever …’

  But whether he managed to tell her any more than that she couldn’t say, their voices being carried off by the sea breeze.

  How did he do it, Max found himself wondering on that walk. Just how did Chris get to be so bloody knowledgeable?

  He could have understood it if he was just talking about things which fell within his own area of academic expertise. But it wasn’t only that. The fact was that he knew everything. Not in an offensive, I’m-cleverer-than-you sort of way. It was merely that he had been alive for forty-three years and in that time he had taken notice of the world around him, absorbed a lot of information and retained it. But why couldn’t Max have done that? Why couldn’t he remember the simplest things about physics, biology or geography? How could he have lived for so long in the physical world and not learned anything about its laws and principles? It was embarrassing. It made him realize that he was drifting through life in a dream: a dream from which he would maybe awaken one day (probably in about thirty years’ time) only to realize that his time on this earth was almost over, before he had even got the slightest handle on it.

  Max looked up from these gloomy reflections as he felt Lucy’s hand slip out from his grasp, and saw her run away to catch up with Chris and his three children. The genial, ramshackle, ivy-covered outline of Ballycarberry Castle rose up before them, and she was running towards the point where the river curved, where it was sometimes possible to cross at low tide. Chris was explaining to Joe and his daughters about the tides and the gravitational pull of the moon, a subject (like so many others) of which Max had never achieved anything approaching mastery. He began to half-listen, but then started to feel self-conscious and, by way of distraction, picked up a flat stone which he attempted to skim across the river’s surface. It sank after a couple of bounces. Turning to catch up with the others, he found that Chris had now gathered all four of the children around him beside an exposed cross-section of the river bank. Even Lucy seemed to be paying attention.