The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Don’t worry, Max – everything will be fine.’

  I looked at him in surprise. I was definitely seeing some new sides of my father this week. It was not like him to be reassuring.

  ‘You seem very … calm, considering what you’ve been through today,’ I said.

  ‘Well, what can you do?’ he said. ‘Some things, Max … some things just aren’t meant to be. It’s more than forty years since I last saw Roger. It’s fifty years since we did the things I wrote about in that memoir. I’ve survived without him all that time. Sure, I was pretty cut up when we managed to miss each other again today. A dreadful sense of history repeating itself, as you can imagine. But then … Well, I walked back to the tea room – the one I’d gone to first of all, down by the ornamental lake. And I sat there for a while, and drank a beer, and thought – if he comes, he comes, and if he doesn’t, he doesn’t. And he didn’t. It was a beautiful afternoon. It’s much warmer in Melbourne than it is here. I sat there, and I drank my beer, and I listened to all the exotic bird noises, and I looked at the palm trees and the date trees … I had a lovely time, actually. They have a magnificent bald cypress there, just by the ornamental lake. A Mexican bald cypress. In fact I wrote a poem about it. “Taxodiaceae”, I called it. Here – have a look.’

  He handed me his black moleskin notebook and I attempted to read the little eight-line poem he had written in there this afternoon. Trying to decipher his handwriting was bad enough: as for the poem itself, as usual I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  ‘Great,’ I said, handing the notebook back, and struggled to think of something else to say. ‘You should really get these poems of yours published.’

  ‘Oh, I’m just an amateur, I know that.’

  ‘Did Roger leave any messages on your phone?’ I asked, still hoping to salvage something from today’s debacle.

  ‘I’ve no idea,’ my father said. ‘I don’t know how to retrieve messages, and I don’t really want to hear them if he did.’

  ‘Really?’ I said. ‘After all these years, you have no … curiosity?’

  ‘Max,’ my father said, leaning forward and resting his hands on mine. Another unprecedented gesture. ‘You did an amazing thing for me today. I’ll never forget that. Not because I really wanted to see Roger again, but because it shows that you accept me. You accept me for what I am.’

  ‘Better late than never,’ I said, with a quiet, regretful laugh.

  ‘What do you think of my apartment?’ my father asked, after a short pause (during which he withdrew his hands from mine).

  ‘Well, it’s … OK, I suppose. Needs a bit of work doing on it, maybe, to make it more homely.’

  ‘Hideous, isn’t it? I’m going to give notice.’

  ‘And move? Where to?’

  ‘I think it’s about time I came home, really. That flat in Lichfield’s just going to waste, after all. It would make far more sense for me to live there. If you get worried about me again – or I get worried about you, for that matter – it makes life much easier if I’m three hours’ drive up the motorway, doesn’t it? Rather than a twenty-four-hour flight.’

  And yes, I agreed: it would make far more sense if he lived in Lichfield, rather than Sydney. So we spent the rest of the evening talking about that: not about Roger Anstruther, or the Chinese woman and her daughter. Instead I told my father about Miss Erith and how she had called him a miserable sod for going away and not telling her when he was going to come back, and how friendly she was with Dr Hameed, and how she had railed against the takeover of England by the big corporations. And he agreed that it would be nice to see her again. And somehow, I’m not quite sure how – talking about his original move to Lichfield, I suppose, as a reaction to my mother’s death – we ended up talking about my mother. Talking about my mother, after all these years! Before tonight, I don’t think either of us had mentioned her name to the other, since her funeral. And now, for the first time, I saw my father’s eyes fill with tears, real tears, as he started talking about their years of married life together, what a lousy husband he felt he had been, what a shitty time he had given her, what a useless hand she had been dealt by God or fate or whatever it was – dying at the age of forty-six, when all she’d known up to that point was the joylessness of being married to a man consumed with self-hatred, a man who had no idea how to relate to her, or even to his son, a man who knew nothing but how to bottle up his emotions and repress his desires …

  My father only started to compose himself again when he realized that the waiter was standing over us.

  ‘Gentlemen,’ said the waiter, ‘in a few minutes you will have to leave. We are closing.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ I answered.

  ‘Before then … perhaps two more amaretti?’

  When he brought the drinks, my father and I clinked glasses again, and drank a toast in memory of my mother.

  ‘She meant everything to me,’ I said. ‘I never told her that, you know. I should have done. I hope she understood, somehow or other, just how much I loved her.’

  I looked across at Dad, wondering if he was going to say something similar. Had he loved her too? Surely he must have done, in his own way, to have stayed with her all that time. But he said nothing: just smiled back at me sadly.

  The waiter had begun to stack chairs on the tables around us. We were both tired and ready for bed.

  ‘Well, anyway – let’s look to the future. At the very least, we should do something about Mum’s gravestone. All it says is “Barbara Sim, 1939–1985”. We really ought to come up with something better than that.’

  ‘You’re right,’ my father said. ‘That’s the first thing we’ll do.’

  I had a moment of inspiration. ‘I know – what about those lines from Four Quartets? Those really nice ones, about time past being contained in time present.’

  My father considered this. ‘Not bad. Not bad at all.’

  But I could tell that he wasn’t convinced.

  ‘Have you got a better idea?’

  ‘Not really. But the trouble is, your mother couldn’t stand poetry. She would have hated to have T. S. Eliot on her gravestone.’

  ‘All right, then. What did she like?’

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. She liked Tommy Steele, Cliff Richard …’

  ‘OK, let’s go with Cliff. A few lines from one of his songs.’

  ‘“Living Doll” …’ mused my father, and shook his head. ‘Not very appropriate for a gravestone, really.’

  ‘What about “Devil Woman”? Maybe not.’

  ‘“Congratulations”? I don’t think so.’

  ‘“We’re all going on a summer holiday”?’

  ‘No, those don’t work as epitaphs. None of them.’

  Our eyes met again, and suddenly we burst out laughing: then continued to swirl the two glasses of amaretto around in our hands before drinking them down to the last drop.

  22

  Donald Crowhurst started to contemplate the insoluble mystery of the square root of minus one and before long found himself entering a ‘dark tunnel’ from which he was never to emerge. Most of us, thankfully, are luckier than that. Few people are able to avoid those tunnels altogether, but usually something brings us out the other side. The one I was in … well, actually it turned out to be longer and darker than I could ever have imagined. I realize now that I had been lost in it for most of my life. But the important thing is that I escaped in the end: and when I did finally step out into the sunlight, blinking and rubbing my eyes, it was to find myself at a place in Sydney called Fairlight Beach.

  I arrived there at nine o’clock in the morning, having taken one of the earliest ferries from Circular Quay to Manly. From Manly Wharf to Fairlight was a walk of perhaps fifteen minutes. The skies were grey and puffy with rainclouds, but despite this there was a moist, dense heat in the air. It was certainly warm enough to go swimming. The dozens of joggers I passed on the coastal walk from the Wharf to the beach were covered in sweat. I’d imagined t
hat I would be conspicuous, that I would have the place to myself and would cut a suspicious-looking figure sitting above the beach all alone, but no: there was a continual flow of passers-by. Not just the joggers but the dog-walkers and the sight-seers and people who were just out for a morning stroll, wandering down to the shops to buy their Sunday papers. I felt at home here: felt myself to be part of a community that was genial and relaxed and accepting.

  Three hours, though, is a long time to sit by yourself on a bench overlooking the sea, waiting anxiously for someone to appear. I’d picked up a copy of the Sun-Herald on the way, but that only kept me occupied for about an hour. The only other item I’d thought to bring was a small bottle of water, and I didn’t even like to drink too much of that in case it made me want to go to the toilet. The view was spectacular: at the edge of the sandy beach there was a saltwater swimming pool built into the rock, an iridescent rectangle of blue-green water, and beyond that the sea, calm and grey this morning, stretched out towards the horizon, dotted with yachts, and then further still, far off in the distance, implied rather than glimpsed, lay the gorgeous immensity of Sydney itself. You would have thought it was impossible to get tired of this view. Perhaps on another occasion, when I wasn’t looking out so hungrily for the arrival of the Chinese woman and her daughter, I could have been happy to spend the whole day sitting on that bench looking out over the beach and the water. But today, this prospect quickly began to lose its charm.

  Anyway, I don’t want to make you wait for as long as I did. They came. They came shortly after midday. The Chinese woman, her daughter, and another little girl of about the same age. A friend of the daughter’s, obviously. Blonde and Caucasian. The three of them walked right past my bench and then down on to the beach, where the Chinese woman spread out a picnic rug on the sand and the two little girls immediately undressed down to their swimming costumes and ran off towards the rocks to play. The Chinese woman – who was wearing a white T-shirt and navy-blue slacks, flared at the ankle – sat on the rug and poured herself something hot to drink from a thermos flask while looking out towards the opposite side of the bay.

  So, here was my chance. The moment had come at last. But could I really do it? Could I really walk over to a complete stranger, a single woman who had come for an afternoon at the beach with her little daughter and her friend, and break in upon her world, invade her privacy, with some clumsy phrase like, ‘Excuse me – you don’t know me, but … ?’

  I was just preparing to admit to myself that I couldn’t go through with it after all when there was a sudden scream of pain and distress from the direction of the swimming pool.

  I looked up. It was the little Chinese girl’s friend. She had slipped and fallen. She had been standing right on the edge of the swimming pool, balancing on the stone wall, and she had lost her balance and fallen over the edge, into the sea. Instinctively, I ran to her aid. Coming from a different direction, coming from the beach where she had laid out her picnic rug on the sand, the Chinese woman was running towards her too, and we both reached the same spot at the same moment.

  ‘Jenny!’ she called. ‘Jenny, are you all right?’

  The water here was quite shallow, and Jenny was standing upright now, in floods of tears. The drop from the wall to the sea was about four feet, too high for her to climb, so the first thing to do was to pull her back up towards us. I held out my arms.

  ‘Here you are,’ I said, ‘hold on to me. I’ll pull you up.’

  The little blonde girl seized both of my hands and I lifted her easily back on to the edge of the pool. We could see now that her left shin and ankle were badly grazed where she had fallen against the rocky sea floor. They were bleeding profusely. She flung herself into the Chinese woman’s arms and cried there for a few moments, and then all four of us made our way around the edge of the pool and back towards the picnic rug.

  ‘Thank you, thank you so much,’ the Chinese woman was saying. She was even more beautiful now that I could see her close up.

  ‘Is there anything I can do?’ I said.

  ‘I think she’ll be fine. She just needs to be cleaned down and –’

  ‘We’re not going home, are we, Mum?’ her daughter said.

  ‘I don’t know, honey, that depends on what Jennifer wants. Jennifer, do you want to go back home to your mother?’

  Jennifer shook her head.

  When we reached the picnic rug, Jennifer lay down and we had a good look at her leg. One of the scratches was pretty deep and nasty. The Chinese woman took some Kleenex out of a box in her picnic basket, and I poured water from my water bottle on to the wound, and together we cleaned it and staunched the flow of blood. Then she rummaged through the basket again and I heard her whispering to herself, ‘No Band Aids! How could I not have brought any Band Aids!’ And I remembered passing a pharmacy on the way to the beach, so I said:

  ‘I’ll go and get some.’

  ‘No – please – really – it’s too much to ask.’

  ‘Not at all. There’s a shop just up the road from here. She really needs to have something to cover up those scratches. Otherwise she’s not going to be able to go in the water all day.’

  ‘Really, I don’t think –’

  But I didn’t listen to her protests, and before she had finished making them, I had set off on my errand. I was there and back in less than ten minutes. Once I’d returned, and handed over the Band Aids, I felt that I didn’t have much else to offer by way of help. The scratches were covered over quickly enough, and the two little girls – who seemed to have polished off most of their picnic while I’d been away – had fully regained their high spirits. Now they were ready to rush off to the swimming pool again.

  Before they were allowed to go, the Chinese woman stood up and pulled her daughter’s hair back into a tight ponytail, securing it with a hair-tie.

  ‘Now don’t get into the water until your food’s digested,’ she said. ‘And please be careful this time.’

  ‘We will.’

  ‘And what about saying thank you to the nice gentleman, for all his help?’

  ‘Thank you,’ they chorused dutifully.

  ‘Don’t mention it,’ I said. But they were already gone.

  We stood there for a little while, the two of us, me and the Chinese woman, in confused silence. Neither of us knew what to say.

  ‘Really,’ I stumbled, in the end, ‘I’m just glad that I happened to be here. I mean, I’m sure you would have been all right by yourselves, but …’

  She looked at me with a frown, and said: ‘I’m not usually very good with accents, but – yours is English, right?’

  ‘It is, yes.’

  ‘So are you just visiting? Have you been in Sydney for long?’

  ‘Just a week,’ I said. ‘I came to see my father. Bit of family business to sort out. Now that it’s done, I’m heading back to London. Tonight, as it happens.’

  On hearing this, she held out her hand stiffly, formally. ‘Well, thank you very much for your help, Mr … er –’

  ‘Sim,’ I said, taking her hand and shaking it. ‘Maxwell Sim.’

  ‘Thank you, Mr Sim. Before you go, there was one thing I wanted to ask you – if I may.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, I was just curious, really. I was just curious to know whether it was purely coincidence that we were eating at the same restaurant last night.’

  ‘Ah,’ I said. My game, it seemed, was up.

  ‘And also two months ago, if I’m not mistaken.’

  ‘Two months ago,’ I repeated. ‘Yes, that’s correct.’

  ‘Are you following me, then, Mr Sim? Should I be calling the police?’

  I didn’t know what to say. Her eyes had quite a glint in them, now: but it was a glint of defiance, rather than alarm.

  ‘I did come here,’ I said carefully, ‘because I knew that I’d find you. And I wanted to find you, because I wanted to ask you a question. There’s something I need to know, that only you can tell m
e. That’s all.’

  ‘That’s all? Well then, we’d better have the question.’

  ‘Right. The question.’ Oh well, I might as well blurt it out. ‘Are you married? Do you have a boyfriend? Does your daughter have a father?’

  The Chinese woman smiled tightly, and looked away. ‘I see,’ she said. Then, turning back towards me: ‘Yes, Mr Sim, I am married. Happily married, as I believe the saying is.’

  ‘Ah. Right.’ Immediately it felt as though a huge chasm of disappointment had opened up in front of me, and all I wanted to do, now, was to throw myself in. ‘In that case,’ I said, ‘I think I’d better go. I’m very sorry if I … disturbed you in any way. It was extremely –’

  ‘Please,’ said the Chinese woman. ‘Don’t go. You haven’t disturbed me at all. In fact you’ve been more than helpful. And what you’ve done is – well, quite romantic, from one point of view. If you’ve come all the way to this beach just to see me, then the least I can do is to offer you something. A cup of tea, perhaps?’

  ‘That’s very kind of you, but –’

  ‘Please, Maxwell, sit down. May I call you Maxwell?’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  She sat down on the rug and motioned for me to join her: which I did, with a certain sense of embarrassment.

  ‘My name is Lian. My daughter’s name is Yanmei. Her schoolfriend’s name, you already know. Will you take your tea with lemon? I’m afraid I didn’t bring any milk.’

  ‘I’ll just have it … as it comes, actually. Whatever’s easiest.’

  Lian poured black tea into two plastic cups, and handed one of them to me. I thanked her, and we drank in silence for a moment or two. Then I said, ‘If I can offer you some sort of explanation –’

  ‘Please do.’

  ‘The truth is that when I saw you and Yanmei having dinner together at that restaurant two months ago, it made a profound impression on me.’

  ‘Really? In what way?’

  ‘I’d never seen anything quite like the … intimacy that I saw between the two of you. I saw that intimacy and I felt the lack of it in my own life, and I started to hope – to fantasize, actually – that I might be able to share in it.’