Expo 58: A Novel

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Take my father, for instance. He’s the sweetest, gentlest, most placid kind of man you could imagine. A scientist. The only time he ever gets really passionate about something is when he’s inside a laboratory. Now, many years ago – I suppose I would have been ten or eleven years old – he took us hiking in the woods. Me and my younger sister, Joanna. It was a steep, rocky sort of area – beautiful to look at, all right, but kind of tough going for two little kids. Well, early in the afternoon we stopped to eat the food that he’d brought. I settled down on a rock, and was tucking into a ham sandwich or something, and Joanna – who was only eight at the time – sat down on the ground right next to a tree trunk that had fallen over. A hollow trunk. And there we both were, eating happily away, when my father, very slowly, started walking towards Joanna. In his hand he was carrying a thick, heavy, straight piece of wood he’d just picked up, about the size of a baseball bat. And there’s a look in his eyes I’ve never seen before. He’s staring right at the end of the tree trunk, just next to where Joanna is sitting. And all of a sudden, he raises the piece of wood and he brings it down – thwack! – on the ground right next to her. And there’s a terrible sound, a sound like you can’t imagine only once you’ve heard it you can never forget it. A kind of reptilian howl, if that makes any sense. But my father hasn’t stopped. He raises the weapon again and again and he brings it down again and again, smashing it to a pulp, whatever this thing is that’s been sitting next to Joanna. She’s already screamed her head off by now and has run over to where I’m sitting, and she’s clinging on to me for dear life. And we’re both looking at my father and I swear to you that neither of us can even recognize him. This is a man we have literally never seen before. His face is twisted and contorted and he’s breathing faster and more heavily than you would have thought possible but he also looks – and you may think this is an odd word to use, but I can picture him, even now, and it’s the only one that fits – he also looks … ecstatic. Do you know what I mean? He was sort of transported, to another level, a place I don’t believe he’d ever been before. And he didn’t stop until he could be sure the creature was dead.’

  There was a long silence.

  ‘What was it?’ Thomas asked, hoarsely.

  ‘It was a timber rattler. One of our only two deadly species. A big one, too, more than five feet long.’

  ‘And was it going to bite your sister?’

  ‘Who knows? It certainly wasn’t a risk my father was going to take. If it had chosen to bite her, she would have died, so he did what anybody would have done in that situation – he killed, in order to protect the thing that he loved. He . . .’ She hesitated, searching for the right phrase, and when she found it, she pronounced it with a rhythmic, melancholy clarity: ‘. . . He did the necessary thing.’ More reflectively, she added: ‘I don’t believe he knew that he was capable of it, actually. In any case, he changed after that day. Everything about him changed. He’d learned the truth about himself, you see. And my sister and I had learned something as well. We knew now what he was capable of.’

  Emily held Thomas’s eyes with a steady, questioning gaze, until he felt obliged to look away.

  ‘Ever since then, it’s been my belief,’ she said, ‘that when it comes to safeguarding the things that are most precious to you – your children, your family, your country if it comes to that – there can’t be any limit on what you’re prepared to do.’ She smiled at Thomas – a somewhat alarming smile, he thought – and concluded: ‘You should really have punched him on the nose.’

  ‘Just after those trees, there was a beautiful field, which in the summer was full of buttercups – tall ones, meadow buttercups, I think they are called. A whole field of brilliant yellow. All you had to do was walk across this field and that brought you to the back of the farm.’

  The buttercups were almost waist-high. Thomas walked slowly through them, alone, leaving the river and Emily behind. He had the map in his hands and was walking towards the point where somebody, more than a half a century ago, had marked a thick cross in pencil.

  At the edge of the meadow, there was a fence consisting only of a single thread of wire stretched between wooden posts. Thomas ducked under the wire and continued walking. The ground underfoot was ridged, now, as if it had once been ploughed. According to the map this was once a wide, open space, but now the surrounding woodland was beginning to encroach upon it. He knew that he was very close to the place where his grandfather’s farm had once stood.

  He heard footsteps behind him and turned around. It was Anneke.

  ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello. Do you mind if I join you?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  Actually he would have preferred to be alone. Too many impressions were starting to crowd his mind, that afternoon. Emily’s story had taken him by surprise – it was the last thing he had been expecting to hear – and shaken him profoundly. He needed time to process it, but he could no longer put off the task of exploring these surroundings, combing them over for those buried traces of his family history he was sure they must contain. And now, on top of all that – Anneke. She was wearing the same pale-blue summer dress she had been wearing the night they had visited the Parc des Attractions and the Oberbayern, and she was standing close beside him (very close) in a way which made him feel that she expected something of him. Something he was not sure he could give, at this moment. Even without Clara’s parting words, Thomas could have guessed that the sudden appearance of Federico at the picnic had been nothing more than a smokescreen, a distraction. Anneke’s desire for him had never been more obvious, and everything about her – her youth, her beauty, her eagerness – should have made him realize that he was being offered a priceless gift. But something still held him back.

  ‘Bringing us here,’ she said, finally. ‘You had a reason, didn’t you? Something to do with your family.’

  ‘Yes. This was where she lived. My mother.’

  ‘Here?’

  ‘I think we’re standing on the very spot.’ He looked around. ‘Could there have been a farmhouse here, do you think? Even though there’s nothing left?’

  ‘I don’t know. I suppose so. What happened to it?’

  ‘It was burned down by the Germans.’ He began walking towards the nearest thicket of trees, his eyes fixed on the ground, searching for clues. Anneke followed him. ‘They were here in 1914. August 1914. There were two towns they almost destroyed, near to here – Aarschot and Leuven. In Aarschot they assassinated many people, including the burgomaster and his son and other members of his family. In Leuven –’

  ‘I know. They destroyed the library. Hundreds of thousands of volumes. It’s a famous story in Belgium.’

  ‘One day, during that first round of attacks, they rounded up the people of Aarschot and decided to march them all the way south to Leuven. It was a completely pointless thing to do. I suppose they were just doing it to terrorize them. They must have passed very close to here. My mother’s family knew they were coming. And they knew exactly what to expect. The German soldiers had been behaving with no shame, no remorse. The young Belgian men were being shot and killed, again for no reason except that the Germans suspected them of resisting. The women were . . . attacked as well. A ghastly business, absolutely ghastly. It was decided that my mother and my grandmother should try to get away, although they hated to leave the others behind. They thought their best chance of safety was probably to reach England. They left on bicycles, believe it or not, in the middle of the night. I don’t know anything about their journey – my mother has never told me that story. I know they reached London a few weeks later.’

  ‘And your grandfather? Did he escape?’

  ‘No. They never saw him again. Nor her brothers.’

  Thomas sighed, and looked around helplessly. What was there to see here? What traces were left?

  ‘Has your mother talked much about those days
– when she used to live here?’

  ‘Not really. She was only a little girl. I know she was very happy. Her father was wealthy, successful. She went to the village school in Wijgmaal, along the river. She remembers going to Leuven on market days. Somewhere here –’ (he gestured at the field) ‘– there used to be a barn where the hay was stored, where she used to play with a friend of hers from the village, a little boy called Lucas. She doesn’t know what became of him, either.’

  ‘Maybe we can find something under here,’ Anneke said, kneeling down and tugging at the long grass. ‘There must be something . . . Some bricks, some foundations.’

  ‘No.’ Thomas shook his head. He reached down to take her by the arm and pulled her gently to her feet. The feel of her warm bare skin beneath his fingers gave him a sudden thrill – fleeting, inappropriate, to be shaken away. ‘There’s nothing to see. Come on. Let’s go. This is a sad place, now.’

  On the way back to the river, they stopped in the field of meadow buttercups. He handed Anneke his camera and asked her to take a photograph, as his mother had wanted. The sun was behind her, turning her hair to a halo of light, throwing her face into shadow. The tranquillity of the scene was ruptured, briefly, as a plane flew low overhead, approaching its landing at Melsbroek. He did his best to smile for the camera.

  Thomas had not ridden a bicycle for years, not since he used to cycle all by himself (he had no brothers or sisters, and his whole childhood had been solitary) along the country lanes around Leatherhead, back in the old days, the days before the War. He was worried, at first, that he might be out of condition, and that his two companions would humiliatingly outpace him; but these fears proved groundless. The roads were level, the going was easy, and as they approached the outskirts of Brussels from the north at about seven o’clock, he still felt that he had plenty of energy left.

  There was something, too, that he had forgotten about cycling: it was a great stimulus to thought. He barely noticed the countryside rolling by: it was quite bland and featureless anyway. Instead, the complex events of the last few hours, the fragments of conversation, the looks, the gestures, the shifting relationships, all slowly began to swim into focus. He thought about the simple declaration he had made to Emily – ‘my marriage is over’ – and how its bald, incontrovertible truth could no longer be ignored. But at the same time, a surprising thing had happened this afternoon: the depression that had been weighing down on him all week seemed to have lifted. Hurt and dismayed though he was by Sylvia’s betrayal, he no longer felt flattened by it. Instead, in a curious, unlooked-for, almost shocking way, he felt … liberated. Was it not possible to see this development, perhaps, as an opportunity rather than a setback? For months, privately, secretly, he had been railing against the shackles of married life; he had begun to feel like a prisoner in his own self-constructed, suburban cell. Well, here was a chance to get away from that: an opportunity to start again. Yes, it would be painful. He had emotional ties – strong emotional ties – to Sylvia, and to his daughter, of course. And divorce was an awful stigma: he would have to carry the shame and the embarrassment around with him for some time. And yet there could be no going back to how things were before. Today’s visit to the site of his grand-father’s farm had taught him that, at least: it was pointless trying to recapture the past, returning to scenes of long-lost happiness in search of relics, consoling souvenirs. As his mother had said – ‘What’s gone is gone.’

  Just then Thomas turned a bend in the road and it came into view: the Atomium. Emily and Anneke were cycling together, side by side, about twenty yards ahead of him, and the gleaming aluminium globes of André Waterkeyn’s surreal monument were between them, framed by them. The evening sun shimmered and bounced off the structure’s sleek, massive curves and ellipses, as it reared arrogantly above the treetops of the Expo park. Thomas stopped pedalling and freewheeled onward, his mouth open; in no doubt, now, as to what this tableau represented: it was his own future: seductive, beckoning, previously unimaginable in its shapes and outlines, illuminated on all sides by glimmering, clairvoyant shafts of light, and above all, modern: irresistibly, unprecedentedly modern. A future which he now had the opportunity to share either here in Europe, with Anneke, or perhaps in far-off America, in the wilder, more mercurial company of Emily.

  And so it was settled. And all that remained was for him to make a simple choice.

  Excellent work, Foley

  On Monday afternoon, Thomas was at work in the office towards the rear of the British pavilion. When Manchester University’s large transistor-based computer had arrived more than a week ago – replacing the ill-fated replica ZETA machine as the most prominent scientific item on display – it had been accompanied by a lengthy booklet written in impenetrable scientific jargon. His job was to reduce the contents of this booklet to four or five hundred words of plain English, which could then be printed on a large display card for the enlightenment of the general public. He would also have to arrange for the card’s translation into three or four different languages.

  The telephone rang. Thomas sighed, and thought about ignoring it. This was not his desk, the call would not be for him, and the chances were that he would end up having to scurry around the pavilion for five minutes or more, trying to deliver a message. He did not like to have his concentration broken in this way. But after ten rings or so, his resolve crumbled.

  ‘Hello? British pavilion, Brussels.’

  ‘Good afternoon. Might I speak to Mr Foley, please? Thomas Foley.’

  Thomas did not recognize the voice at first, but he recognized the tone of authority, and involuntarily sat up and straightened his tie before answering:

  ‘Erm . . . yes, this is Mr Foley speaking.’

  ‘Ah! Splendid! It’s Mr Cooke here.’

  ‘Mr Cooke? Oh, good afternoon, sir. This is a surprise. How’s . . . how’s the weather in London?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, Foley. I’m in Brussels.’

  ‘In Brussels?’

  ‘That’s right. And so is Mr Swaine. In fact we’re partaking of the hospitality of the Britannia at this very moment. Are you anywhere in the vicinity? We need to have a word.’

  Thomas abandoned his work at once and took the short, now familiar route around the ornamental lake towards the pub. For some reason his heart was thumping. Perhaps he had not realized, until now, that one of the many things he had been most enjoying about Expo 58 was the hundreds of miles of distance it had put between him and his superiors at the COI. But what would they be doing here now? Just carrying out a spot-check, he supposed. He prayed to God that Mr Rossiter was relatively sober this afternoon, and that Shirley was being her usual reliable self, keeping things running smoothly.

  Mr Cooke and Mr Swaine were seated at a table for two, and seemed to be in the middle of a late lunch. Mr Cooke was tucking into his steak and chips with some gusto, while Mr Swaine was toying listlessly with a piece of battered cod. His brow, Thomas noticed, was beaded with sweat.

  ‘Ah, Foley!’ said Mr Cooke. ‘Do come and join us. Pull up a chair. Perhaps that attractive lady behind the bar can bring you a drink.’

  ‘That’s all right, sir. I don’t drink in the afternoons, as a rule.’

  ‘Very wise. Glad to hear it, Foley. Well, it’s very exciting to see everything here at last, in the flesh. The Britannia certainly seems to be packing them in.’

  ‘Yes, sir, we’ve been doing exceptional business, for the last few weeks. When did you both arrive in Brussels?’

  ‘We flew in yesterday. Mrs Cooke is here as well. And Mrs Swaine, of course. I believe they’re sampling the pleasures of Gay Belgium, even as we speak. Combining business with pleasure, as it were.’

  ‘Jolly good.’

  ‘Yes, the four of us took a ride in one of those cable car things a little while ago. Gave us quite an overview. That’s why Mr Swaine is looking somewhat green about the gills, I’m af
raid. No head for heights, as it turns out. Think we might give the top of the Atomium a wide berth. Have you been up?’

  ‘Yes, I have. Several times.’

  ‘Queer sort of structure, if you ask me. But some people seem to like it. Each to their own, and all that.’

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Anyway, we had a good look around the British pavilion this morning. Everything seems to be in good shape. That Mr Gardner may be a queer fish, but he’s got a good eye, I’ll give him that. The building stands out a treat, and all the displays seem to be ticking over nicely. Shame about ZETA, but I think we managed to wriggle out of it without too much embarrassment. Apparently there’s a rather withering reference to it in the Soviets’ news rag this week. Is that right?’

  ‘I believe so, yes.’

  ‘Well, can’t be helped, I suppose. At least the papers have been nice about our pavilion. Hit of the fair, in some people’s eyes. You know what they like about us? They say we don’t take ourselves too seriously. Know how to laugh at ourselves, how to take a joke. Odd, isn’t it? All that science, and technology, and culture, and history, and it’s the good old British sense of humour that sees us through in the end. I’d say there was a lesson to be learned from that, young Foley.’

  ‘I’m sure you’re right, sir.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you agree, Mr Swaine? Dear me, I must apologize for my colleague, he looks as though he could do with a breath of fresh air and a good strong cup of tea. Come on, Ernest, give up on that fish, for goodness’ sake.’

  Mr Swaine laid down his knife and fork and mopped his brow with one of the Britannia’s paper napkins.

  ‘Terribly sorry,’ he said. ‘It’s the heat at this place – the crowds – that blasted cable car.’

  ‘And as for this pub,’ Mr Cooke continued, with a disapproving look in Mr Swaine’s direction, ‘I’ve just been reading some of the comments in the guest book. Very impressive. Full marks for service and atmosphere. The place is clean, it looks good, the food is by all accounts . . . adequate, and the staff certainly seem to know their onions. And since you’re the one who’s been keeping an eye on the operation, I think you should have your share of the credit. You’ve been doing excellent work, Foley.’