by Jonathan Coe
But it transpired that the news was much more dramatic than that. ‘She’s had a dreadful accident,’ Sylvia told them. ‘She was stopped at a roundabout in her car when some enormous truck ran into the back of her.’
‘My God,’ said Thomas, ‘was she badly hurt?’
Sylvia nodded. ‘She’s broken her neck, poor soul. She’s going to be in hospital for months.’
There was a solemn, respectful silence.
‘It sounds like she’s lucky to have escaped with her life,’ said Mrs Foley.
‘I know. We should be thankful for that, at least.’
In the further silence that followed, Thomas said: ‘Talking of being thankful . . .’
‘Oh. Yes, of course.’ Sylvia put her hands together and closed her eyes. The others did the same. ‘For what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly thankful.’
‘Amen,’ intoned Thomas and his mother.
They began to eat; and before long, another of those aching conversational voids had made itself felt.
‘These place mats are charming,’ said Mrs Foley, in something like desperation. ‘Alpine scenes, aren’t they?’
‘Quite,’ said Thomas, without looking up from his food.
‘I bought them in Basle,’ said Sylvia. ‘Of course, they weren’t the only souvenir I brought back from that holiday.’ She smiled a flirty, conspiratorial smile at her husband, but he was bent over his Yorkshire pudding, and did not register that he had heard her comment. Rebuffed, Sylvia continued to watch him for a moment, her gaze held by the intensity of his efforts to soak up as much gravy as possible before putting the fork in his mouth. His self-absorption pierced her: filled her with an acute, dizzying combination of love and disquiet. This was the man she had entrusted her life to. Sometimes she wondered if she had made a mistake.
Sylvia had little experience of relationships with men, and what little she had had been unfortunate. She had married late, at the age of thirty-two. Throughout most of her twenties she had lived at home in Birmingham, with her mother and father, during which time she had squandered (it now seemed to her) many of the best years of her life on an engagement to a much older man, a commercial traveller from the north. They had met one Friday afternoon in the café of a department store, where he had insisted on paying for her coffee and eclair. After that first encounter she had not seen him for some months, but a passionate series of letters had been exchanged, culminating in another coffee-bar meeting and an offer of marriage. Sylvia shuddered now to think of her own naivety. They continued to see each other two, perhaps three times a year. The letters had kept coming, at irregular and increasingly distant intervals. Finally an envelope had arrived in the post one morning, enclosing an anonymous note which informed her that her betrothed already had a wife, three children, and a string of similar fiancées up and down the country.
Sylvia had plunged, after this, into a long period of depression, which her doctor had advised would probably best be cured by fresh air and strenuous exercise. With the help of her parents she had arranged, in the summer of 1955, to travel to Switzerland for an extended walking holiday in the Alps. She had travelled with two other women, both of them spinster daughters of her father’s work colleagues. She had not known either of them beforehand; nor, having made their acquaintance on the trip, had she come to like them very much. But all had not been lost. At the end of the holiday, while resting in Basle for a few days, the three women had plucked up the courage to visit a beer cellar, and there they had encountered Thomas. An Englishman – a bachelor, no less – who was on holiday alone, and seemed only too glad to fall in with some welcoming female company. What’s more, he had the most charming manners, and the most impressive jawline. One of Sylvia’s companions thought there was more than a hint of Gary Cooper in his pale-blue eyes; the other saw a striking resemblance to Dirk Bogarde. Sylvia noticed neither of these: but she did see – potentially – a future husband, and from the ferocious competition which ensued over the next few days she was the one who emerged triumphant. All the same, she did not rush into an engagement this time; she kept Thomas on tenterhooks for weeks, after returning home; but there had been no doubt in her mind that she would accept him, after a decent interval. He seemed to be a splendid catch. His job at the COI was steady, prestigious and not badly paid. And the prospect of moving to London had, at first, felt glamorous and exciting . . .
Sylvia became aware that her mother-in-law was saying something to her.
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Foley? I didn’t quite catch that.’
‘I was asking,’ Mrs Foley repeated, dabbing at her lips with a gingham napkin, ‘if you had thought any more about the mangle. I hardly use it any more, as I said. I know that some people consider them old-fashioned, but the old ways are usually the best ways, you know. And I’m sure you must have much more laundry to do since Baby came along.’
‘Well,’ said Sylvia, ‘that’s very kind . . . What do you think, darling?’
After lunch, Baby woke up, and Sylvia went upstairs to feed her. Thomas made his mother a cup of tea and they went out to inspect the garden. A hint of late-afternoon sunshine was breaking through the blanket of clouds, and it was warm enough to sit, for a minute or two, at the little wrought-iron table he had optimistically bought last summer, in anticipation of quiet afternoons spent reading the newspaper while Baby played happily in the (as yet unconstructed) sandpit. The garden looked a mess.
‘You really need to do some work on this,’ said his mother.
‘I know.’
‘What on earth’s that big hole over there?’
‘I started a goldfish pond,’ said Thomas.
‘I thought you were planning to grow vegetables.’
‘I am. I’m going to plant some potatoes and beans. It’s too early yet.’
Then he told his mother about the meeting with Mr Cooke and Mr Swaine and Mr Ellis of the Foreign Office. He told her that they were asking him to go to Belgium for six months.
‘What does Sylvia say?’ she asked him.
‘I haven’t mentioned it to her. I’m waiting for the right moment.’
‘Could you take them with you?’
‘It’s been suggested. I don’t think it sounds ideal. We’re not sure what the accommodation’s going to be like yet. It could be pretty basic.’
His mother looked very doubtful. ‘You shouldn’t have told me first. You should have discussed it with your wife.’
‘I’m going to.’
She held up a warning finger. ‘Don’t neglect her, Thomas. Be a good husband to her. This –’ (she gestured into the near distance, beyond the unfinished goldfish pond, beyond the air-raid shelter in which Thomas kept his few garden tools, beyond the railway embankment, and towards the dreary flatlands of Tooting itself) ‘– is not her home, you know. Not really. It’s not what she’s used to. And it’s no fun being a long way from home with a man who doesn’t care for you.’
Thomas knew that she was talking about her own experience, about her marriage to his father. He didn’t want to hear it.
‘Your father had affairs, you know.’
‘Yes. I know.’
‘I put up with it. But that doesn’t mean that I didn’t mind.’ Mrs Foley shivered, and wrapped her shawl more closely around her shoulders. ‘Come on. I think we’d better get inside. It’s getting chilly.’
She was about to get up, but Thomas laid a restraining hand on her arm, and said earnestly: ‘I’ll be in Brussels, Mother. Close to Leuven, close to where the farmhouse was. Only about half an hour away. I can go there and – I know the house isn’t there any more – but I can see where it used to be, and . . . talk to people, and . . . take pictures . . .’
Mrs Foley rose stiffly to her feet. ‘Please don’t do that. Not on my account. I don’t think about any of those things any more. What’s gone is gone.’
These are modern times
Four-thirty on Tuesday afternoon found Thomas walking through St James’s Park, on his way to a meeting in Whitehall. Despite the steady downpour of rain, there was an unaccustomed jauntiness to his step, and under his breath he was singing to himself a cheerful tune he had caught on the Light Programme the night before: ‘The Boulevardier’ by Frederic Curzon.
Things had progressed pretty smoothly since the weekend. Over last night’s dinner, he had finally told Sylvia about the Brussels assignment. She had been shocked, at first: the thought of coming with him did not seem to cross her mind (nor did he suggest it), and the prospect of being left alone for six months certainly alarmed her. But Thomas’s reassurances were convincing: there would be letters, there would be telephone calls, there would be weekends when he flew home to see her. And the more he told her about the fair itself, the more she came to see that this was an opportunity he could not afford to turn down. ‘So, really,’ she had said – at last beginning to see the thing clearly, as pudding was dished up and she poured condensed milk over her slender portion of apple pie – ‘it’s a great honour that Mr Cooke has singled you out in this way. He didn’t ask any of the others. And you’ll be rubbing shoulders with people from all sorts of places: Belgians, French – even Americans . . .’ And Thomas had realized, when she said this, that from one point of view Sylvia was actually willing him to go, already: that in her eyes, painful though the separation would be for both of them, he would grow in stature from this experience. No longer a mere government pen-pusher, he would become, for six short months, something much more interesting, and indeed glamorous: a player (however small) on the international stage. The idea appealed to her – even titillated her. And perhaps it was this knowledge, more than anything else, that lightened his step that Tuesday afternoon, and added a few imaginary inches to his height as he strode across the footbridge towards Birdcage Walk. He felt a sudden, unexpected kinship with London’s seagulls as they swooped low over the water beneath him, revelling in the freedom of flight.
Half an hour later, Thomas was seated in Conference Room 191 of the Foreign Office, as close as he had ever come in his life to a centre of power.
The conference table was huge, and every seat was taken. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Some of those present Thomas had already met in the waiting room downstairs. Others were public figures whom he recognized: Sir Philip Hendy, director of the National Gallery; Sir Bronson Albery, the famous theatrical manager; Sir Lawrence Bragg, the physicist and director of the Royal Institution. Several times in the last few months, back at the COI’s Baker Street offices, Thomas had caught glimpses of James Gardner, designer of the British pavilion; but he had not, until today, met the man with whom Gardner spent most of the meeting locked in combat – Sir John Balfour, GCMG, Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom’s participation at Expo 58.
The trouble began early on. Thomas could tell that there was a general sense of panic in the air. The fair was due to open in three months’ time, and there was obviously a good deal of work still to be done. Sir John had a thick pile of paperwork on the table in front of him, the very sight of which seemed to fill him with a palpable disgust.
‘Now I have to say,’ he began, crisply but with an edge of weariness to his voice, ‘that our Belgian friends have been most prolific with their communications over the last few weeks. This mountain of paper represents but a small proportion of their output. And we have been more selective still in making copies for everyone. So perhaps it would be in order for me to summarize. Let’s start with the musical side of things, shall we? Is Sir Malcolm here?’
Sir Malcolm Sargent, chief conductor of the BBC Symphony Orchestra and musical advisor on the British contribution, had not been able to come to the meeting, it transpired.
‘He’s in rehearsals, I’m told,’ said a young man in a pin-striped suit, whom Thomas took to be a junior clerk. ‘Sends his apologies and all that. But the concert programmes are well in hand, he says.’
‘Did he give you any details?’
‘A few names were mentioned. Elgar, obviously. A bit of Purcell. The usual suspects, by the sound of it.’
Sir John nodded. ‘Ideal. I must say there are some pretty . . . peculiar ideas coming out of the Belgian side.’ He glanced at the uppermost of his sheets of paper. ‘A week-long festival – week-long, it says here – of electronic music and musique concrète, featuring world premieres by Stockhausen and – how the devil do you pronounce this – Xenakis?’ He looked around the room, frowning incredulously. ‘Has anyone heard of these chaps? And what is “concrete music” when it’s at home, I’d like to know? Can anyone enlighten me?’
There was a general shaking of heads around the table; in the midst of which Thomas became distracted, on suddenly becoming aware of two curious figures seated at the far end. What was it about them, in particular, that caught his attention? They were following the discussion as closely as anybody – perhaps more closely – and yet they seemed somehow detached from it. Although they never spoke to each other, or appeared to acknowledge each other’s presence, they were sitting rather closer to each other than was strictly necessary, and gave the impression of being in some sort of conspiracy. They were both (he would have guessed) in early middle age. One of them had slicked-back dark hair, and a moon-shaped face whose expression managed to be both vacant and intelligent at the same time. The other looked more benign, and less watchful; he had a noticeable scar down his left cheek, but the look of it was not at all sinister, and it did not detract in the least from his general air of dreamy good nature. They were the only two people who, throughout the entirety of the proceedings, were never named or introduced, and once he had noticed them, Thomas found their presence strangely distracting.
‘Well, I don’t know about you, but I think that’s an excellent proposal,’ Sir John was saying.
Thomas realized that he had not been following the discussion. It appeared that Britain was being asked to make its own contribution to the contemporary music week, and the general feeling around the table was that a military tattoo would fit the bill perfectly.
‘The Grenadier Guards, perhaps?’ someone suggested.
‘Perfect,’ said Sir John, nodding to the secretary at his side, who duly made a note of the decision.
At which point, from one corner of the table, came what could only be described as a derisive snort. ‘Ha!’
Sir John looked up, in wounded surprise.
‘Mr Gardner – would you like to register an objection?’
The lean, ascetic figure in question, who peered through conservatively horn-rimmed glasses but wore his hair rakishly long, waved his hand dismissively and said: ‘Really, Sir John, it has nothing to do with me. No, I don’t want to register an objection. But your secretary can register my amusement if she likes.’
‘And what, might we ask, is so amusing about a military tattoo?’
‘In this context? Well, if you can’t see that, Sir John, all I can say is . . . you are probably the ideal person to be chairing this committee.’
Thomas was expecting a ripple of laughter, but there was only shocked silence.
‘Mr Gardner,’ said Sir John, leaning his elbows on the table and putting his fingertips together to form a pyramid, ‘I was going to defer discussion of your latest suggestions for the British pavilion, but perhaps after all this would be a good moment to consider them.’
‘They’re just ideas,’ said Gardner, offhand.
‘The Brussels World’s Fair,’ Sir John reminded him, ‘opens in three months’ time. Work on the construction of the pavilion is running weeks behind schedule. Isn’t it a bit late to be pitching in with new ideas? Particularly ideas like . . .’ (he glanced down at his paperwork) “ ‘A history of the British water closet.’ ”
‘Oh,’ said Gardner, ‘didn’t you like that?’
‘It seems a trifle . . . well
, “whimsical” would be a polite way of putting it.’
‘Don’t feel that you have to be polite if you don’t want to, Sir John. After all, we’re all friends here.’
‘Very well. I shall rephrase that, and say that this suggestion appears to me . . . downright stupid and offensive.’
Several of the men (there were no women, apart from Sir John’s secretary) seated around the table looked up at this point, their interest keenly aroused.
‘I respectfully disagree, Sir John,’ said Gardner. ‘Britain’s contribution to the disposal of human waste has never been properly recognized. That’s not just my opinion, it is a historical fact.’
‘Gardner, you’re talking rot.’
‘Well –’ (there was an embarrassed cough from a pallid, undernourished young man sitting to the left of Mr Gardner, who seemed to be part of his team) ‘– not exactly, Sir John.’
The Commissioner raised an eyebrow.
‘Not exactly?’
The man who had spoken up seemed more embarrassed than ever. ‘What I mean is, Jim – I mean Mr Gardner – does have a point. Toilets are crucial to everyday life. I mean, we all use them, don’t we? We all . . .’ (he swallowed hard) ‘. . . do them, after all.’
‘Do them, Mr Sykes? Do what?’
‘There’s no point in pretending otherwise, really, is there?’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘Well, you know. We all do . . . number twos.’
‘Number twos?’
‘Precisely!’ Gardner jumped to his feet and began pacing the perimeter of the table. ‘Sykes has put his finger on it. We all do them, Sir John. Even you! We all do number twos. We may not like to talk about them, we may not even like to think about them, but years ago, somebody did think about them, he thought about them long and hard – if you’ll pardon the expression – and the result was that we can now all do our number twos cleanly, and without embarrassment, and the whole nation – the whole world! – is a better place as a consequence. So why shouldn’t we celebrate that fact? Why shouldn’t we celebrate the fact that, besides conquering half of the globe, Britons have also fought a historic battle against their number twos, and emerged victorious?’
