The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Yep. I think these are some of Dad’s poems and things. Apparently he’s lost the other copy and now this is the only one.’ I glanced through the pages, and saw that there were two sections: one in verse, the other in prose. ‘Don’t know why it’s so important. I suppose I’d better hang on to it. Weird title,’ I added, looking at the first page. ‘Two Duets.’

  ‘Hm, I see,’ said Miss Erith. ‘Half of Eliot.’

  ‘Half of Eliot?’

  ‘T. S. Eliot. You’ve heard of him, haven’t you?’

  ‘Of course I have,’ I said, defensively. Then added, just to make sure I was thinking of the right person: ‘He wrote the lyrics for Cats, didn’t he?’

  ‘His most famous poems are the Four Quartets,’ she said. ‘Have you never read them?’

  I shook my head. ‘What are they about?’

  She laughed. ‘You’d have to read them to find that out! Oh, they’re about time, and memory, and things like that. And they’re all themed around the four elements – air, earth, fire and water. Your father was a great admirer of Eliot’s. We used to argue about him all the time. Not my cup of tea, you see. Not my thing at all. He was an anti-Semite, apart from anything else, and you can’t forgive something like that, can you? At least I can’t. But that sort of thing wouldn’t have bothered your father. He’s got no interest in politics, has he?’

  ‘Well …’ I had never really thought about this, I must say. And besides, I wasn’t very interested in politics either. ‘We never really talk about stuff like that. Our relationship is sort of based on … other things.’

  Miss Erith was closing her eyes, now. I wondered at first whether she was about to nod off, but it seemed that this was an attempt at recollection instead.

  ‘The point is,’ she said, ‘that I’m an old lefty, and always will be. Ever since I started reading George Orwell and E. P. Thompson and people like that. Whereas your father had no political awareness at all. That’s why it’s probably a good thing that we never went on our trip together, because we were going into it for completely different reasons.’

  ‘You were planning a trip?’ I asked politely, hoping this wasn’t going to trigger a long reminiscence.

  ‘There was a book called Narrowboat. Quite a famous book in its day. Rolt was the author’s name – Tom Rolt. I’ve still got it on the bookshelf over there. He and his wife bought this narrowboat back in the thirties and lived on it for a few months, going up and down the canals. Then he wrote all about it and he published this book in the 1940s and the amazing thing about it is that it mentions my father’s shop: because I grew up on the canals, you know, and my father used to have a shop at Weston, where all the barges used to stop every day. He sold everything: every kind of rope and line you could think of, every kind of food, all sorts of tobacco, and then lamps, crockery, saucepans, clothes – you name it. And shelves and shelves of sweets for the children, of course. Such an Aladdin’s cave, it was! And the boats used to be stopping all the time, we got to know all the canal folk – it was a whole world, a different world, a secret world, with its own codes and rules. Just a tiny little shop, the front room of a thatched cottage in a row of other cottages, and I must have served behind the counter from when I was about eight or nine years old. Dad would have been amazed to know his shop was mentioned in this famous book but of course he didn’t read books like that – or any sort of book, really – so he never knew anything about it. And I didn’t find out until years later. I left home when I was sixteen, you see, to be with this man – a bargeman he was, naturally – and a year later I’d had my first baby and we left the canals and started living not far from here, in Tamworth, but we never got married – that was a bit of a scandal, I can tell you – and a couple of years later we had another baby and then this man left me. Well, I booted him out, if you must know, because he was a dead loss, really, never got a job or anything, used to spend all his time down at the pub or chasing other women – after a while I decided he was more trouble than he was worth. So there I was, in the early 1950s, living all by myself in a poky little flat with two small children, and the only thing I could do to stop myself from going crazy was to start reading. Of course I’d hardly had any education to speak of, but the Workers’ Educational Association was very strong, in those days, and I used to go to lectures and meetings and all sorts of things. And actually I did manage to go to university in the end, but that was when I was almost forty and so that’s another story entirely. Anyway, that was how I started reading books and I can’t remember how old I was when I read Narrowboat but I know that my mum and dad were both dead by then because I would have loved to tell them that their shop was mentioned in the book and I never did.’

  While she was pausing for breath, Mumtaz said: ‘Do try to keep to the point, Margaret. You were supposed to be telling us something about Max’s father. Now none of us can remember what you were talking about.’

  She gave him a pointed stare. ‘Well, I can remember. The thing was that Harold and I made this plan, you see, that we were going to hire a narrowboat ourselves for a few weeks, and follow the same route that this man Rolt and his wife had taken. We were going to do it in 1989, exactly fifty years after they’d set off. The idea was that we’d visit all the same places and see how things had changed in the meantime. Well, that was my idea, anyway. All Harold wanted to do, I’m sure, was sit on the roof of the boat looking at the clouds and daydreaming and writing his precious poems. But for me, you see, the point about Tom Rolt’s book – and this’ (fixing Mumtaz with another stare) ‘is why I’m telling you about it – is that it’s not just a book about canals at all. It’s one of the most amazing books about England ever written. Rolt was a very interesting man – a man with very strong beliefs – and although I dare say he was a bit of a Tory in his politics he was also into green issues years before the term had been invented. And do you know what he saw – way back in 1939? He saw a country that was already quite happily allowing itself to be killed off by the power of the big corporations.’

  Mumtaz rolled his eyes and gave a comically theatrical sigh. ‘Oh, I see. Now I get it. Watch this carefully, Maxwell,’ he said, holding up a finger in warning, ‘because you are about to see a woman climbing on board her hobbyhorse, and once that happens, you are never going to be able to get her off again. We are going to be here for the rest of the morning and most of the afternoon, I tell you.’

  ‘It’s not a hobbyhorse,’ Miss Erith insisted, ‘and I’m not going to climb on board it. All I’m saying is that, if you read that book, you’ll understand a bit more of what’s going on in this country, and how long it’s been happening. What big business is doing to it. It’s not a recent thing at all: it’s been going on for years – centuries, even. Everything that gives a community its own identity – the local shops, the local pubs – it’s all being taken away and replaced by this bland, soulless, corporate –’

  ‘What she’s really saying,’ Mumtaz explained to me with a weary smile, ‘is that we’ve been trying to think of a nearby pub where we can go for our lunch, and she doesn’t like any of them any more.’

  ‘No, I don’t,’ said Miss Erith. ‘And do you know why? Because they’re all the bloody same! They’ve all been taken over by the big chains and now they play the same music and serve the same beer and the same food …’

  ‘… and they’re full of young people,’ Mumtaz said. ‘Young people enjoying themselves – that’s what irks you! Young people who like it that way.’

  ‘They like it that way because they don’t know any other!’ Miss Erith said, her voice suddenly rising to an angry pitch. The good-humoured, bantering aspect of their conversation seemed to evaporate in an instant. ‘Mumtaz knows very well what I mean.’ She had turned to look at me directly, now, and I was amazed to see that there were tears in her eyes. ‘I’m saying that the England I used to love doesn’t exist any more.’

  A long silence followed, while these words were allowed to hang in the air.

/>   Miss Erith sat forward and drank the remains of her tea, not saying anything more, looking straight ahead of her.

  I looked down at my father’s blue ring binder, wondering if this would be a good moment to make my excuses and leave.

  Mumtaz sighed and scratched his head. He was the first one to speak.

  ‘You’re right, Margaret, absolutely right. Things have changed a lot, even since I’ve been here. It’s a different place now. Better in some ways, worse in others.’

  ‘Better!’ she echoed, scornfully.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, rising to his feet, ‘I think we should try The Plough and Harrow again. It will be nice to get out into the countryside, and the piped music isn’t too loud, and the food is good.’ He turned to me and said kindly: ‘Why don’t you join us, Maxwell? We’d be glad to have your company.’

  I stood up as well. ‘That’s really nice of you,’ I said. ‘But I think I’d better be getting on my way. I’ve got a long journey ahead of me.’

  ‘You’re going to Scotland, I think you said?’

  ‘That’s right. About as far as you can go – all the way to the Shetland Isles.’

  ‘Marvellous. What an adventure. And what takes you there, might I ask? Is it business, or pleasure?’

  The simplest way to answer this, it seemed, was to reach inside the pocket of my jacket and fetch out another of the toothbrush samples I’d been carrying around with me since yesterday. I’d given my two IP 009s to Mr and Mrs Byrne – all the others were still in the boot of the Prius – so what I handed over to Mumtaz was the nice, plain, elegant model that Trevor had shown to me first of all – the ID 003, made of sustainable pine, with the boar’s-hair bristles and the non-detachable head.

  ‘I represent a company that markets and distributes these,’ I explained, surprised to find how proud I was to be saying it.

  Mumtaz took the brush from me and whistled admiringly through his teeth.

  ‘Wow,’ he said, running his fingers along the shaft, ‘this is a real beauty. A real beauty. You know, I might even enjoy cleaning my teeth if I had one of these, instead of it being a chore. And you are going to sell some of these in Shetland?’

  ‘That’s the plan.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, giving the toothbrush back to me. ‘You will have no difficulty, that’s for sure. Margaret! Margaret, did you hear any of that?’

  But Miss Erith was still in a kind of daze. She turned towards us slowly, almost as if she had forgotten that we were in the flat with her at all. Her eyes remained rheumy and unfocused.

  ‘Mmm?’

  ‘Maxwell was telling us that he is going to Shetland to sell toothbrushes. Beautiful, wooden toothbrushes.’

  ‘Wooden?’ she said, her concentration gradually appearing to return.

  ‘Perhaps this idea will … appeal to you,’ I said, hesitantly, trying hard to find the right words. ‘My company, you see, is not a big corporation. In fact we’re fighting against the big corporations. We’re a small company, and whenever we can, we commission our brushes from other small companies. This beautiful brush was made in Lincolnshire, by local craftsmen – part of a family business.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘May I see?’

  I passed her the brush, and she turned it over in her hands, slowly, reverently, again and again, as if she had never seen such a wondrous object in all her seventy-nine years. When she gave it back to me – unless I was imagining it – her eyes had cleared, and were shining at me with a new, rejuvenated light.

  ‘You can … You can have that if you like.’

  ‘Really?’

  Unexpectedly, she pulled back her top lip, to reveal teeth which were yellowing but otherwise complete, strong and healthy.

  ‘These are all mine, you know. I clean them three times a day.’

  ‘Here you are, then. Here you are – take it.’

  Perhaps I am being fanciful now. Perhaps my memory of that day is playing tricks on me. But as that exquisite toothbrush was passed back from my hand to hers, in the rapt silence of Miss Erith’s flat high above the city of Lichfield, with Dr Mumtaz Hameed looking on benignly, smilingly, I felt that what was taking place was almost a religious ceremony. That we were doing something – what is the word? – that we were doing something you might almost describe as – yes, I know … sacramental.

  There, I told you I was being fanciful. It was definitely time to say my farewells, and get back to the car. Back to Emma, to the motorway, and reality.

  15

  I had a late lunch at a place called the Caffè Ritazza at Knutsford Services. I’d driven slowly from Lichfield, trying to conserve petrol, and it was after 2.30 by the time I arrived there. The café (or should that be caffè?) was on the first floor, quite close to the bridge connecting the two halves of the service station, so I was able to get a small table near the windows and watch the traffic going by. While I was eating and watching the traffic, I thought about Dr Hameed and Miss Erith, driving to their country pub and enjoying a nice lunch together while lamenting the slow death of the England they both remembered. I wasn’t sure whether I agreed with them about that. I supported the ethos of Guest Toothbrushes, of course, but all the same – speaking personally – I really like the way you can drive into almost any city nowadays and be sure of finding the same shops and the same bars and the same restaurants. People need consistency in their lives, don’t they? Consistency, continuity, things like that. Otherwise everything just gets too chaotic and difficult. Supposing you drive into a strange town – Northampton, say – and it’s full of restaurants whose names you don’t recognize. So you have to take a punt on one, just on the basis of what the menu looks like and what you can see through the window. Well, supposing it’s shit? Isn’t it better to know that you can go to any random town in the country and find the nearest Pizza Express and have an American Hot with extra black olives? So that you know exactly what you’re getting? I think so. Maybe I should have gone for lunch with them and argued the point. In fact, why hadn’t I done that? It wasn’t true, as I had told Dr Hameed, that I was pushed for time. Actually I had at least two hours to spare. But again – just like last night, when Mr and Mrs Byrne had asked me to stay to dinner – I had fought shy of the chance to have a face-to-face meal with someone. When was I going to get over this? When would I start finding it easy to have a normal conversation again? As it happened, I’d attempted one just now, with the girl in Caffè Ritazza who had served me my lunch. She gave me a strange look when I asked for a tomato and mozzarella panino, so I launched into my explanation of how panini was actually a plural word and it was grammatically incorrect to ask for one, single panini. I’d become quite obsessed with this fact, recently (as well as by the fact that nowhere seemed to serve toasted sandwiches any more, only panini – even in Knutsford, for God’s sake). The idea was that it might trigger some lighthearted banter between us, perhaps about the way that England was slowly becoming more European, or declining standards in education or something, but her initial response was to give me such a hostile and suspicious look that at first I thought she was going to call Security. Eventually she did say something, but even then her only comment was ‘I call them paninis’, and that was an end of it. She obviously wasn’t the bantering type.

  It was quite relaxing and hypnotic, sitting there watching the traffic going by under the motorway services bridge. It reminded me again of my friend Stuart, and how he’d had to stop driving because he was freaked out by the idea that millions of traffic accidents were only averted every day by a matter of inches or seconds. Watching the northbound traffic on the M6, you could see his point. Nobody seemed to think anything of taking life-threatening risks, just to shave a couple of minutes off their journey. I started to count the number of times people pulled out without indicating, or overtook on the inside lane, or tailgated someone remorselessly, or cut in on another car without giving it enough space. After I’d counted more than a hundred such incidents I suddenly realized that I had bee
n sitting there for more than an hour, and it was time to finish driving up to Kendal.

  – Proceed on the current motorway, Emma said, for the eighth or ninth time.

  I didn’t mind the repetition. I still liked just hearing the sound of her voice. I wasn’t feeling very talkative myself, so every few minutes I would throw out some casual remark to her – ‘Crossing the Manchester Ship Canal now, look’, or ‘those must be the Pennines over to the east’ – and would press the ‘Map’ button on the steering wheel to elicit her reply. The rest of the time, I preferred to be alone with my thoughts.

  I thought about Lucy, first of all. Why did people have children in the first place? Was it a selfish act, or a supremely unselfish one? Or was it just a primal biological instinct that couldn’t be rationalized or analysed? I couldn’t remember Caroline and I discussing whether to have children or not. To tell the truth, our sex life had never been very lively, anyway, and after a couple of years’ marriage we just reached a tacit agreement that we would stop using contraception. Conceiving Lucy had been an impulse, not a decision. And yet, as soon as she was born, life without her became unimaginable. My own theory – or one of them – was that once you started to hit middle age, you became so jaded and unsurprised by life that you had to have a child in order to provide yourself with a new set of eyes through which to view things, to make them seem new and exciting again. When Lucy was small, the whole world to her was like a giant adventure playground, and for a while that was how I’d seen it too. Just taking her to the toilet in a restaurant became a voyage of discovery. Even now, for instance, when I saw all those trucks overtaking me (I was in the inside lane, with the cruise control stuck at 62 miles per hour), I felt a pang of longing to have the seven- or eight-year-old Lucy with me again, to play the game we always used to play on motorway journeys, the game where you had to guess which country the truck was from by looking at the writing on the side and trying to identify the names of the foreign cities. A game at which she had been surprisingly –