The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  That the last thing I can remember is hearing a car drive by in the snow-dusted street outside, breaking the stillness of the night.

  And that I then started to read.

  Air

  The Rising Sun

  June 1987

  Last week I was obliged to visit the Strand, in central London, to complete the final paperwork for my departure to Australia; and now, in a few days’ time, I shall be leaving this country at last – perhaps never to return. In the meantime, my trip to London has stirred up some very potent memories, which I feel compelled to set down on paper before I leave.

  It did not take as long as I’d expected to complete the formalities at Australia House. After which, finding myself with most of an afternoon to spare, I decided to take a walk into the City. For old times’ sake, if nothing else. I had brought my camera with me – my trusted Kodak Retina Reflex IV, bought in the 1960s, which has never taken a bad picture yet – and wanted to make a permanent record of those places which had once been so familiar to me – if any trace of them still remained.

  As I made my way in blazing sunshine down Fleet Street, up Ludgate Hill, through the long shadow cast by St Paul’s Cathedral and along Cheapside until I could glimpse the massive portico of the Bank of England itself, I realized that it was almost thirty years since I had last walked these streets. Twenty-seven years, to be precise. Everything had changed, in the meantime. Everything. The old City of London, which had been the centre of my universe for a few intense, troubling months towards the fag-end of the 1950s, had witnessed a revolution which even in those far-off days had been considered long overdue. A revolution in architecture, in fashion and now, finally – or so one read in the newspapers – in working practices. All the fine, arrogant old buildings were still there – the Guildhall and the Mansion House, the Royal Exchange and St Mary-le-Bow – but wedged in amongst them were dozens of new tower blocks, some dating from the benighted 1960s, others only a couple of years old, vaulting, sleek and glittery, like the decade we were now enjoying. The men (there were still not very many women) all wore suits, but these suits seemed sharper and more aggressive than I remembered, and there was not a single bowler hat to be seen. As for the working practices … Well, nearly all of the trading was done on screens now, if reports were to be believed. The face-to-face meetings, the chummy handshakes on the Stock Exchange floor, were consigned to the past. No more deals adumbrated over port and cigars at the Gresham Club; no more business gossip swapped in well-bred undertones at the George and Vulture. Traders apparently took lunch at their desks these days – cellophane-wrapped sandwiches brought in at silly prices by outside caterers – never lifting their glazed eyes from the screens where figures flickered their ceaseless announcements of profit and loss, from early morning to late at night. What role could I have possibly have played, as an ignorant twenty-one-year-old, in this frantic and impatient new world?

  Yes, I had been only twenty-one when I first came to London. Some time in the last few weeks of 1958, it was. I had not been to university, and for two years had tucked myself away in the tedious anonymity of a filing clerk’s job in Lichfield, but some dormant mutinous impulse – my youthful horror, I suppose, at the thought of being stifled in this way for ever – had finally propelled me away from the safety of my home town and my parents’ house and sent me to London – to seek my fortune, as the cliché would have it. Or, if not my fortune, something even more elusive and intangible – my vocation, my destiny. For I had, without telling my family (nor would I have told my friends, if I had any), started writing. Writing! Such presumption would not have been tolerated, if my parents had known about it. My father would have mocked me mercilessly – especially when he discovered that my instincts inclined me towards poetry: and not just poetry, but, worse still, ‘modern’ poetry – that apparently formless, apparently meaningless cultural aberration that was hated above all other things by the middle-brow lower classes. Lichfield, the birthplace of Samuel Johnson, was certainly no place for an aspiring poet in the 1950s; whereas, if rumours were to be believed, London was awash with poets. I envisaged long, wine-fuelled conversations with fellow-poets in the bedsitting rooms of South London suburbs; heady evenings spent in Soho pubs listening to poetry readings in an atmosphere thick with Bohemianism and cigarette smoke. I imagined a life for myself in which I could make the momentous declaration ‘I am a poet’ without attracting incredulity or ridicule.

  I have a long story to set down, so I must move it forward. Easily enough, I found a room in a shared house near Highgate Cemetery, and – through the classified advertisements in the London Evening News – a temporary job as messenger boy for the stockbroking firm of Walter, Davis & Warren. Their offices were in Telegraph Street, and a large part of my job involved carrying mail by hand to and from the central clearing point for Stock Exchange Member firms in Blossoms Inn: a system which allowed for all settlement transfers and cheques to be delivered within the same day. (Such a thing would not be necessary now, of course, with faxes and electronic transfers.) I was allowed one hour for lunch, between 1 and 2 p.m., and most days I would take it at Hill’s, an old-fashioned City restaurant near Liverpool Street Station, where – if you didn’t mind the green-tiled walls that made it look somewhat like a public lavatory – you could dine on steak and kidney pudding, mashed potatoes and apple crumble for something in the region of half a crown.

  Dining alone is a problematic activity. I had no friends in the City, or indeed anywhere in London, and no one to talk to over lunch. Most days, therefore, I would take a book with me – usually a slim volume of contemporary verse, more than likely borrowed from the library in Highgate. The restaurant would be crowded, and at a table for six you might find yourself sharing with five strangers. One day, early in January 1959, I looked up from my book – it was Eliot’s Four Quartets – and found a bearded man of about my own age staring at me intently. His fork was poised over a plate of liver and onions but instead of eating, he fixed his eyes on me and declaimed, in a loud and perfectly modulated voice:

  Time present and time past

  Are both perhaps present in time future,

  And time future contained in time past.

  If all time is eternally present

  All time is unredeemable.

  The other diners at our table looked across at both of us in some puzzlement. One of them may even have tutted. To speak to a stranger, in such a loud voice, in a public place, and to make use of such peculiar phraseology, was no doubt considered a grave breach of City protocol. For my own part, I was dumbstruck.

  ‘Tell me, do you consider Mr Eliot to be a genius,’ my new acquaintance continued, in an insolent tone, ‘or a fraud and a humbug of the first water?’

  ‘I … I don’t know,’ I stumbled. ‘Or at least … Well –’ (more boldly, now) ‘– that is to say, in my view – for what my view is worth – I consider him … the greatest living poet. In the English language, that is.’

  ‘Good. I’m pleased to find myself sitting opposite a man of taste and refinement.’

  The man held out his hand, and I shook it. Then he introduced himself: his name was Roger Anstruther. We talked a little more about Eliot, then – touching also, I seem to remember, upon the work of Auden and Frost – but what I remember best about that first conversation was not its substance, but the strange sort of electric thrill which went through me in the presence of this singular and overbearing man. His hair had a slightly reddish tint, his beard was thick but closely trimmed, and although the sobriety of his suit marked him out unmistakeably as a working denizen of the Square Mile, a yellow handkerchief with pale-blue polka dots protruded from his top pocket in a manner that suggested some idiosyncratic sense of personal style – if not actual foppishness.

  Abruptly at a quarter to two he rose to his feet and looked at his watch.

  ‘Well then,’ he said. ‘They are playing Fauré at the Wigmore Hall tonight. The E minor quartet among other works. I have boo
ked two tickets for the front row, where I intend to lose myself in delicious mists of French introspection. Here is the other ticket. We shall meet at The Cock and Lion a few doors along the street, at seven o’clock. If you get there first, mine will be a large gin and tonic, with ice. Goodbye.’

  He shook my hand again, draped a long, black cashmere overcoat upon his shoulders, and was gone with a flourish. I gazed after him in shocked silence. But when the shock had receded, my predominant emotion was a throbbing, delirious happiness.

  Roger Anstruther was, it goes without saying, completely unlike any other man I had ever met in my short, circumscribed life.

  Music was his passion and, although he did not perform, his knowledge of the classical repertoire, from the baroque period to the present day, was flawless and comprehensive. But he could also discourse, with absolute authority, on any other branch of the arts. Architecture, painting, drama, the novel – there seemed to be nothing he hadn’t read, seen, heard and thought about. And yet he was only one year older than me. How had he acquired so much knowledge, and experience – and confidence, of course – in such a short span of time? The discrepancies between us (magnified as they were by Roger’s grandiloquent, teacherly, sometimes arrogant, sometimes downright bullying manner) could only make me feel more insular, provincial and poorly educated than I had felt before.

  So, at any rate, began what I consider to have been my real education. From now on, Roger and I would go out together almost every night. Orchestral concerts at the Royal Festival Hall; experimental theatre in Soho and Bloomsbury; the National Gallery; Kenwood House; poetry readings in windowless basements or the upstairs rooms of shabby Hampstead pubs. And when we could find nothing of that sort to interest us, we would simply walk – walk through the mazy, empty backstreets of London, long into the night, while he pointed out strange architectural features, quirky buildings, forgotten landmarks with some recondite fragment of London history attached to them. Once again, his knowledge seemed inexhaustible. He was enthusiastic, opinionated, fascinating, indefatigable and infuriating, in equal measure. He could be frivolous and loveable; he could also be impatient and cruel. He dominated me completely. It was a relationship which (at first) suited both of our needs perfectly.

  Many of our evenings together started directly after work, in a pub called The Rising Sun in Cloth Fair, close to Smithfield Market. I would usually get there first, shortly after five o’clock, and buy Roger his gin and tonic while waiting for him to arrive. I had discovered that he worked on the Stock Exchange floor, but not in as exalted a capacity as I might have imagined. He was what used to be known as a ‘Blue Button’ – someone at the very lowest level of the trading hierarchy. Essentially he was, like me, an errand boy, although he was certainly closer to the centre of things than I would ever be. The men who actually traded in shares on the Exchange floor were known as jobbers: they were not allowed to deal directly with members of the public, so they took their orders from the brokers, many of whom had little offices (or ‘boxes’) on the periphery of the floor. The Blue Buttons were intermediaries between the brokers and the jobbers: they carried messages, relayed instructions, and were generally required, during trading hours, to do whatever their jobber instructed them to do, however trivial or eccentric. I couldn’t help thinking that for someone of Roger’s praeternatural intelligence (as I thought of it) and lofty ambition, this job was rather on the demeaning side.

  ‘Well, I won’t be at it for long,’ he told me one evening, as we sat over our drinks in The Rising Sun, a fug building up inside while flurries of snow continued to swirl along Cloth Fair in the January wind. ‘My disillusionment with the world of high finance is more or less complete.’

  These were grand words, you might think, for a man of twenty-two. But this was the tone in which Roger always expressed himself.

  ‘I always knew that the Stock Market would be a frightful place,’ he continued. ‘But I’d also noticed that the people who worked there – while they invariably seemed to be dreadful bores – never gave the impression of being short of money. Of course, for a lot of them, it’s all inherited from Mummy and Daddy. Most of the brokers have been to Eton – and half the jobbers as well – and we all know that kind of education doesn’t come cheap. But still, they’re making a show of opening the place up to grammar school boys like me, and I reckoned that if I at least got a sense of how large amounts of cash tend to be traded back and forth, then surely some of it would come my way eventually. But I think I was being naive. And besides, I don’t have the temperament for it. I don’t love money enough to want to spend my whole life thinking about it. That’s where I differ from Crispin, you see.’

  Crispin Lambert was, I knew, the name of the jobber for whom (or with whom, as Roger preferred to phrase it) he had been assigned to work.

  ‘How do you get on with him?’ I asked.

  ‘Oh, well enough,’ he said. ‘He’s decent, I suppose, by the wretched standards of this place. But he’s just a typical product of the system, really. Charm personified, on the surface. If you ever meet him, you’ll think he’s the friendliest fellow you’ve ever set eyes upon. But that’s just a mask for his fundamental ruthlessness. He loves money more than anything else, and he wants money, and he’ll use any means at his disposal to get it. That’s what I mean when I say these people are all such bores. For me, money is a means to an end. I’d use it to travel. To see the world in style. I’d like to be able to afford good seats at the opera. I’d like to be able to own a Picasso or two. But for Crispin and his ilk, money is the end. Their aspirations stop there. Well, I’m sorry, but to me that’s just a tedious view of the world. Shallow. Superficial. Nothing to it. I mean, what actually goes on inside the heads of people like that? Where’s their inner life?’

  ‘Doesn’t he have, you know … pastimes? Hobbies, recreations?’

  ‘He’s a fiend for the horses,’ Roger admitted. ‘Studies the form assiduously. Knows the name of every trainer at every stable in the country. But I’m not sure it gives him any pleasure. He simply bets to win. It’s all about the money again, you see.’

  As it happened, I did meet Crispin Lambert a few weeks later: by which time, various subtle but disquieting shifts had taken place in my relationship with Roger. For one thing, I’d had my first experience of his facility – one might almost call it a relish – for creating embarrassing situations. We had attended a production of Titus Andronicus where the entire play was performed in modern dress and set in the offices of a local council building in Stockton-on-Tees. This innovation had been greeted with some approval from the newspaper reviewers, but Roger was noticeably unimpressed. Twenty minutes into the performance he stood up, and declared at the top of his voice: ‘I see that we are being bamboozled, ladies and gentlemen, by talentless oafs. These cretins are dragging our greatest playwright through the mire, and I will not stand for it a moment longer. Anyone who wishes to join me in making a swift exodus to the nearest pub is more than welcome. Come, Harold.’ On this occasion he was wearing – as was often his way – a black, silk-lined cape, which he swirled around himself in the most effective and compelling gesture before stumbling out over the legs of the other audience members in his row, dragging me after him while everyone (including the actors) looked on in outraged astonishment. To me, prone as I was to an attitude of deference and self-effacement whatever the circumstances, this was a frankly mortifying experience. My cheeks flamed under the knowledge that hundreds of pairs of eyes were fixed upon us, whereas Roger, I am sure, savoured the moment. He liked nothing more than to be the centre of attention. Afterwards, as we were sitting in the pub, he laughed heartily. ‘Someone had to show those idiots up for what they were,’ he said. ‘Everyone else would just have sat there like a flock of hypnotized sheep.’ Then, observing that I was upset and embarrassed by the whole episode, he began to chide me for my timidity. ‘Harold, you lack spirit,’ he said. ‘You are too cowed by inhibitions, which make you afraid not only to speak
your own mind, but even to look inside and find out what’s really in it. Your sort will do anything to preserve the status quo. I’m afraid you will never amount to anything, with that sort of attitude.’

  This sentiment was to be expressed several times during our friendship. It next happened after I had made the mistake of showing Roger some of my own poetry, an act of presumption on my part which led to a most painful evening together – the first evening I ever spent with Roger when for a while I really believed that I hated him, and wished him dead. As usual, we were in The Rising Sun, where we had been sitting for more than an hour and a half, while he lectured me on ancient British pagan rituals (the latest field to have attracted his fickle, quicksilver interest) without alluding once to the precious manuscript which I had put into his hands two days earlier in an anonymous A4 manila envelope. Finally, during a brief interlude in his monologue, my patience deserted me, and my curiosity would wait no longer.

  ‘Have you read them?’ I blurted out.

  He hesitated, and swirled the gin around in his glass.

  ‘Oh yes,’ he said at last. ‘Oh yes, I’ve read them all right.’

  The subsequent pause seemed to go on for ever.

  ‘Well? What did you think?’

  ‘I thought … I thought it probably best if I didn’t say anything, on the whole.’

  ‘I see,’ I said – not seeing at all, but feeling very wounded, all the same. ‘Didn’t you have any criticisms to make?’

  ‘Oh, Harold, what would be the point?’ Roger sighed heavily. ‘You have no poetry in you, that’s the problem. No poetry in your soul. The soul of a poet is a floating, airy thing. You are earthbound. Of the earth.’