by Jonathan Coe
Frowning, Thomas followed his wife and his neighbour indoors. He knew exactly what was going on here: his imminent departure was weighing on Sylvia’s mind and, subconsciously, bestowing unnecessary attentions upon Mr Sparks was her way of punishing him for it. ‘I’m sure you like it strong and sweet, don’t you, Mr Sparks?’ she said, bringing the teapot in from the kitchen, and bending over him much too closely while she filled his cup. Sylvia had quickly regained her figure after giving birth, and even improved upon it: the breasts from which she fed the baby were fuller and more rounded than before, a fact which could scarcely escape Mr Sparks’s notice as he inclined himself slightly but eagerly towards her, his nose almost brushing the neckline of her dress, obviously breathing in her scent. ‘Milk and two lumps, please, Mrs Foley,’ he said hoarsely, looking up and holding the gaze of her hazel eyes for several moments too long. Thomas looked on with indignant surprise.
‘I must say, Foley’, Mr Sparks said, after Sylvia had returned to the kitchen to cut some slices of walnut cake, ‘that you’re a damned fool, if you want my honest opinion.’
‘Why so?’ Thomas asked, pretty sure that he wanted nothing of the sort.
‘Leaving the little woman all by herself while you swan off to Belgium, of all places. If I were you I wouldn’t leave her alone for more than ten minutes.’
Thomas stirred his tea, masking his irritation.
‘I don’t quite see what you’re driving at, old man,’ he said.
‘Well, after all, six months is a deuce of a long time,’ said Mr Sparks. ‘Aren’t you worried that she’s going to miss you?’
‘How considerate of you to think it,’ said Sylvia, coming back with the cake. ‘But I believe that aspect of it hardly troubles Thomas at all.’
‘Well, I don’t think it at all gallant of him.’
‘I shall be coming back at weekends, you know,’ said Thomas. ‘Some weekends, at any rate.’
‘And I suppose there are such things as letters, and telephones.’
‘Of course there are. We shall maintain a passionate correspondence.’
‘All the same,’ said Mr Sparks, ‘there are some . . . routine little tasks that only a man can carry out. And I would just like you to know, Mrs Foley, that if you ever have any requirements in that direction, I am always at your disposal. Just one ring on the doorbell, and I shall come running.’
‘Why, Mr Sparks, whatever can you be suggesting?’ asked Sylvia, with a delighted smirk.
Mr Sparks blushed to his roots. ‘Oh – I only meant,’ he mumbled, ‘that if you were to need a light bulb changing, or a shelf putting up, or anything in that line . . .’
‘I see,’ Sylvia replied, allowing herself the remains of a smile as she sipped her tea. ‘Well, that is very kind of you. What do you think, darling? Isn’t that a handsome offer of Mr Sparks’s?’
Thomas gave her a glassy stare, and merely observed, after a few moments’ pause: ‘Sparks was telling me that he’s a martyr to corns, these days. Almost prostrated with them, he is. He was limping like nobody’s business on our way home.’
If this remark was intended to dampen the sympathy that seemed to be developing by the minute between Sylvia and Mr Sparks, it actually had the opposite effect. Sylvia flashed him a look of sincere concern, and said: ‘That’s dreadful. Corns can be a terrible worry. My mother’s suffered for years. And her mother before her. It runs in the family.’
‘Does your mother use these?’ asked Mr Sparks, and produced his packet of corn cushions. ‘They stick over the affected area, you see, but with a hole in the middle, so that –’
Thomas had heard enough. Letting out a contemptuous sigh, he took a large bite from his cake, and then went to answer the telephone as soon as it started ringing in the hallway. On his return he found that the medical demonstration had run its course, and Mr Sparks had, instead, resumed his campaign of promising devoted assistance to the abandoned bride.
‘You might feel yourself rather confined here,’ he was saying. ‘Of course, if you need me to drive you anywhere – the station, for instance . . .’
‘You mean to tell me that old banger of yours is still running, Sparks?’ said Thomas (who was not yet able to afford a car). ‘I thought it fell to pieces ages ago.’
‘Who was that on the telephone?’ Sylvia asked.
‘Nobody. Just a bit of crackle at the other end of the line.’
‘Oh. That happened to me earlier today, while you were out.’
‘Really?’
‘Yes. And twice yesterday.’
It was time for Mr Sparks to leave, and to apply his ministering hands to his sister’s afflicted regions. Thomas made a point of escorting him to the garden gate, to make sure that he really was leaving the premises. When he returned to the hallway, Sylvia was standing by the telephone, the receiver to her ear.
‘Insufferable ass,’ Thomas muttered, not entirely to himself. And then, to Sylvia: ‘Everything all right?’
‘Yes. I was just a little worried about the telephone.’
‘Is the dial tone there?’
‘Seems to be.’
‘Then it should be fine.’
‘I’ve been noticing these funny noises, that’s all. Ever since the engineer came.’
On his way towards the kitchen, Thomas stopped and turned.
‘Engineer? What engineer?’
‘A man came from the GPO, on Thursday morning. He was here for about half an hour, fiddling with the wires.’
‘Really? Why didn’t you tell me?’
Sylvia didn’t say why she hadn’t told him, although they both knew the reason: because they had barely been speaking to each other all week.
‘Did he just turn up on the doorstep,’ Thomas asked, ‘without any warning?’
‘No. The two gentlemen told me that he would be calling.’
‘Which two gentlemen?’
‘The two gentlemen who came the day before.’
Thomas began, slowly and glimmeringly, to understand what must be happening.
‘I see,’ he said, grimly. ‘And I suppose they told you they were from the GPO as well?’
‘Yes. Why? Nobody would tell a lie about something like that, would they?’
Sylvia followed Thomas into the kitchen and they sat down together at the table. She began to tell him, in full, the story of her strange encounter with the two nice men from the General Post Office on Wednesday afternoon. They had arrived at about three o’clock, she said, and told her that they were investigating a series of complaints in the area, relating to crossed lines, interrupted calls and general interference and unsatisfactory conditions on the local telephone service.
‘And that’s all you talked about?’ Thomas wanted to know. ‘Nothing but telephones?’
‘Why yes, of course,’ said Sylvia. ‘I told them that we hadn’t had any problems in particular – none that I could think of – but they said that an engineer would call the next day anyway, just to make sure, and to carry out some . . . routine maintenance work. And then they asked me to fill in a form –’
‘A form?’
‘Yes.’
‘What, name, address, that sort of thing?’
‘Yes. And there were some other questions, like . . . I don’t know, funny things like if I belonged to any political parties, and where I’d been on my holidays, and things like that.’
Thomas sighed, and said drily: ‘They wanted all that information, just to mend the telephone?’
‘Yes, I did think that was a little odd.’ She looked up at him, deferential, trusting: ‘You don’t think there was anything . . . queer about it, do you?’
Thomas rose to his feet. ‘I shouldn’t think so,’ he said. ‘Probably just making sure everything’s ready for the new long-distance calls, or something.’
He was touched by t
he look of relief that lit up Sylvia’s face. Her naivety could sometimes be frustrating; but it was also capable of moving him, or at least making him feel powerful and necessary – which, if truth be told, he found a pleasant sensation. As for his growing suspicion that someone would most likely be keeping a careful eye on the daily comings and goings during his absence, that too, in its way, was strangely comforting.
The remainder of the weekend passed quietly enough. That night they went to the pictures – at the suggestion of Mrs Foley, of all people. ‘It’s your last Saturday evening together for a while,’ she said to her son. ‘For Heaven’s sake do something special. Give your wife a treat.’ Sylvia had been shocked, initially, by the thought of abandoning Gill for a whole evening, but Thomas’s mother had reassured her, and offered to sit with the baby herself. ‘I shall enjoy it,’ she had insisted. ‘It will make a change from sitting at home by myself. And what is the point of you having a guest room, if nobody ever sleeps in it?’ Thomas and Sylvia had taken the tube to Leicester Square and limbered up for his immersion in European cuisine by going to an Italian restaurant for lasagne and Chianti. After that, they had argued over the choice of film. Thomas wanted to continue the Italian theme by seeing Cabiria – Her Nights, Her Men, which was playing at the Continental: a suggestion which Sylvia vetoed firmly as soon as she learned that it was an X-certificate film, and that the main character was a prostitute. Her preference was for Peyton Place, which Mrs Hamilton at the Post Office had already seen four times, and which she could not recommend too highly: ‘The way they live . . .’ she had sighed to Sylvia the last time she had come in to cash a postal order. ‘The way they live in America. The great big motor cars, and the big wide roads. The beautiful houses, and everything in colour, and the men so handsome. There’s one actor plays the schoolteacher, and he’s such a good man, and has such strong principles, and at the same time you can just imagine him, with those wide shoulders, in those wonderful well-cut suits, taking you in his arms and . . .’ She had tailed off, dreamily, before thumping Sylvia’s postal order with her rubber stamp and handing over her two shillings and sixpence. Thomas, hearing this conversation repeated over zabaglione, remained unconvinced. Many years ago, without realizing it, he had acquired from somewhere the deep-rooted conviction that America was a shallow, vulgar, uncivilized place. He understood the allure of the image it was at pains to present to the world – a bold, insistent image, projected in Technicolor and VistaVision – but he was immune to it. Something within him rebelled against the idea of seeing a film which celebrated this way of life, even in the guise (hypocritical, he was sure) of a lurid melodrama which purported to expose its cracks and fault lines. So they ended up, by way of compromise, going to see Chase a Crooked Shadow, a British picture starring Richard Todd and Anne Baxter. It was filmed in black-and-white and, although most of the action took place in a Spanish villa, Thomas found some of the exterior shots to be curiously evocative of Hertfordshire. There was a twist at the end which wrapped the plot up neatly, and gave them something to talk about as they lit up their cigarettes on the tube home. It was a tidy, comfortable little film which left them both feeling dissatisfied, and it ended this valedictory evening on a note of anticlimax.
Mrs Foley returned to Leatherhead the next morning, and for the rest of the day, husband and wife did their best to keep up a façade of domestic normality. Sylvia spent most of the afternoon ironing her husband’s shirts, vests and underpants, while Thomas, bringing his armchair into companionable proximity with the ironing board, read the Sunday newspaper, which was full of stories about Mr Khrushchev and his demand that America call off its nuclear missile tests in the Pacific. His attempts to interest Sylvia in this subject were unsuccessful. She seemed depressed and distracted, and forgot to butter his toast before putting sardines on it. All she would talk about, over the tea table, was the sumac tree in the back garden, the branches of which were still bare, even in mid-April. ‘Supposing it never grew leaves again?’ she said at one point, unexpectedly. ‘Supposing that happened to all the trees, in the garden and on the common and everywhere? Suppose that they never came back? What if there were no more leaves?’ Thomas could not be sure if she was merely following some random, unhealthy train of thought of her own, or if these observations were somehow connected to the subject of nuclear missile tests, as broached by himself. It was really impossible to know. In fact the only things he could tell, for certain, were that Sylvia was deeply upset, and that neither of them had the gumption to do anything about it.
Motel Expo
On its approach to Melsbroek the next afternoon, Thomas’s plane flew low over the north-western suburbs of Brussels. He craned his neck towards the window and looked out, through the swirls of cigarette smoke, in the hope of glimpsing the Expo site, but the angle of approach was all wrong. Instead he saw miles and miles of farmland, divided up into irregular geometric patterns by long, straight hedgerows and canals; he saw the occasional tidy, unassuming village; and he also saw, more surprisingly and less explicably, a collection of temporary buildings which lay sprawling at the edge of one of these villages: long, low buildings, grouped into rows of four and criss-crossed by neat, angular carriageways. There must have been about forty rows altogether, standing on a broad, flat, barren stretch of land which looked as though it had been cleared expressly for this purpose. Thomas might have said this was a prisoner-of-war camp, from the look of it: but the construction was much too recent, and in any case he was not sure that there had ever been such things in Belgium. In a few seconds the plane had passed over these buildings and they were gone from view.
After retrieving his two over-filled suitcases, he was met in the arrivals hall by another of the Belgian hostesses: but it was not Anneke, this time, and her duties seemed to extend no further than accompanying him to the taxi rank, and relaying his instructions to the driver. The journey was slower than expected: the French-speaking driver complained that traffic on these roads had been building up for many weeks, and now, with only three days to go until the opening day of the fair, it was becoming intolerable. Thomas muttered his agreement at a few appropriate moments but made no attempt to revive the conversation when it fizzled out. In a manila envelope on his lap were the typewritten directions to his accommodation. They told him that he would be staying in Cabin 419 of something called the ‘Motel Expo’, and that he would be sharing it with another Englishman by the name of A. J. Buttress. But this gave Thomas no idea what to expect, except that the word ‘cabin’ had a rather austere ring to it, and the number 419 implied that, whatever this cabin turned out to look like, it would only be one among many.
After about twenty minutes’ driving, to his left, Thomas could once again see the glistening spheres of the Atomium rising above the trees, full moons of silver against the grey of the shifting afternoon sky. His spirits stirred. Tomorrow he would stand beneath them again, and the knowledge gave him a swift, electric thrill. In some complex, shrouded way, this monument represented everything that the fair itself – and the next six months of his own life – stood for: progress, history, modernity, and what it would feel like to be inside the engine that drove all of these things. And yet how could that feeling be reconciled with the life he had temporarily abandoned, the life that Sylvia remained marooned in? The two things seemed profoundly contradictory.
Ten minutes later his taxi turned off the main road and nosed its way into a small village by the name of Wemmel, which consisted of only a few dozen respectable, red-bricked houses, most of them generously provided with plots of land on which goats, chickens and sheep were grazing and otherwise passing the time contentedly, oblivious to the great events about to unfold in their vicinity. The taxi passed through the village and turned left; and then, after less than one minute’s drive along a sinuous lane lined with poplar trees, it drew up outside a large complex of makeshift buildings which Thomas recognized at once, even though he had only seen it from the air. He regretted the
fleeting comparison with a prisoner-of-war camp, now. Apparently this was to be his home until October.
Just beyond the barrier which opened up to allow them entry was one lonely wooden hut containing a small reception desk. Behind it sat a grave-looking man who bore a slight resemblance to a young Joseph Stalin.
‘Welcome, Mr Foley. Welcome to the Motel Expo Wemmel. As you can see we are still in the final stages of completion but I think everything will be to your satisfaction. Breakfast will be served in the canteen daily from seven o’clock until nine o’clock in the morning. A laundry service is provided and we also provide a chapel where Sunday services will be performed in English as well as other languages. The gate will be locked at midnight and after that you must ring for assistance. Overnight guests are not permitted. This is your key.’
Thomas’s cabin was at the far end of the site. As he trudged towards it with his suitcases, he was obliged to dodge and duck his way through the teams of workmen who were still putting the finishing touches to the motel: some were applying a final coat of light-blue paint to the woodwork, others were perched at the tops of ladders, nailing brightly coloured canopies to the eaves in order to give the rough, breeze-block structures a more festive atmosphere. A man with a wheelbarrow filled to overflowing with moist, reddish earth almost ran over his toe while crossing his path. Another workman was still painting numbers onto a few remaining doors: he had got as far as 412, so Thomas was able to find his own cabin easily enough by counting onwards.
Inside, he was immediately struck by the overwhelming sense of quiet. He sat down on the twin bed nearer the window – the other already had a suitcase placed on it – and looked around him. A wardrobe, a table, a tiny bathroom containing toilet, basin and shower. A skylight in the roof threw a faint rectangle of pallid sunlight onto the linoleum floor. No blankets or sheets on the bed – just one of those funny Continental quilt things. Duvets, were they called? The sounds of the workmen were distant, now, and served only to emphasize the more immediate silence. There did not seem to be anyone in the neighbouring rooms. All was still, very still.
