by Jonathan Coe
‘Sylvia,’ he said, placing Gill gently back down on the floor, ‘we have something to discuss. Something very important.’
‘Do we now?’ said Sylvia, still absorbed in her unpacking. It seemed she had been to the chemist’s as well, for now she was taking out baby powder, headache tablets and milk of magnesia.
‘There is no easy way for me to say this,’ Thomas began. ‘So I shall be honest and direct. I know that, while I’ve been away, things have not always been easy for you. It was perhaps a selfish decision on my part, to –’
He broke off abruptly, and, stepping over to the kitchen table, snatched a small box from Sylvia’s basket and glared at it, holding it at arm’s length as though it were a foreign object.
‘Good God, woman, what’s this?’ he said. ‘Are you even doing Sparks’s shopping for him now?’
Sylvia seemed to have no idea what he was talking about. Thomas lifted up the offending item – a box of Calloway’s Corn Cushions – and brandished it under her nose.
‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Those aren’t for Norman. They’re for me.’
Thomas fell suddenly silent. It took him almost half a minute to recover his power of speech.
‘You? Since when have you suffered from corns?’
‘Just in the last couple of months. I’m sure I told you once that they run in my family. Norman recommended these, because he has the same problem. In fact – weren’t you there, the morning we talked about it?’
Thomas sat down at the table, and gazed vacantly into space.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, I was there.’
‘I’ve been using them since . . . May or June, I suppose.’
There was a knock at the door.
‘It’s on the latch!’ Sylvia called, and a few seconds later – inevitably – the amiable, ingratiating face of their next-door neighbour popped itself around the kitchen door.
‘Good morning!’ Mr Sparks trilled. ‘And welcome back, Thomas! Sylvia told me you’d been given your marching orders. Dear me! Goodbye Brussels, hello Tooting. No more gallivanting around with les belles dames de Belgique for you. That’s going to take a bit of getting used to, I should think. Now, what was it you wanted to see me about?’
Thomas raised his eyes slowly, and stared at his neighbour for a long time, without malice, without anger, without jealousy, without irritation, without anything except the sensation of a deadly numbness creeping all over him. It was true, he thought, that Sparks’s nose still looked eminently punchable. But there was nothing much he could do about that.
‘Do you know,’ he said, speaking in a careful, laboured, measured tone. ‘I’ve completely forgotten why I wanted to see you. It’s gone clean out of my head. All I know is that I suddenly feel . . . very tired.’
‘Ah,’ said Mr Sparks, chortling in his usual offensively conspiratorial manner. ‘No wonder you do. The morning after the night before, eh? Well, I’m afraid it’s back to reality for you now, old man. Back to the marital grindstone. Back to the deadly old nine-to-five. Good grief, no wonder you look so glum! The party’s well and truly over.’
The English summer had not lasted for long. Thomas and his mother sat on a bench at the top of Box Hill, close to the viewpoint at Salomons Memorial, and shivered in the wet afternoon air. It was a grey, misty Sunday, and there was no view across the weald today.
They both continued to stare fixedly into the distance, none the less. Since Thomas had made his revelations, and asked for his mother’s advice, neither of them had looked the other directly in the eye.
Finally, Martha spoke. Her voice, always rather flat and toneless, sounded drier and more coldly emphatic than ever.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘but to me it’s obvious what you must do. You have a wife. You have a child. That means that you have duties, and responsibilities. It was a very stupid thing that you did in Belgium. Stupid in many different ways. To start with, anyone could see that Sylvia would never behave like that. She is completely devoted to you. Don’t ask me why, but she is. Even after you decided to abandon her for six months, just when she needed you the most, she would still never be unfaithful. So that was your first stupidity, jumping to such a ridiculous conclusion. As for this girl in Brussels, what are you trying to tell me? That you thought you might leave everything behind here, and go to live with her? In Belgium? Are you completely stupid? How do you even know that this is what she wants? When thousands of strangers come together, from all over the world, in a strange atmosphere like that, of course stupid things are going to happen. Even now, she is probably regretting what you both did. She is probably telling herself that she did a stupid thing, and nothing like it should ever happen again. And she’s right. So I’m telling you right now: forget all about her. She’s not important. Your wife is important. Your child is important. Your family is important. Of course you feel unhappy now. That’s because you’ve been stupid. But that will change. The feeling will pass.’
Thomas bowed his head, as a family of four walked by, the little children zigzagging from side to side and throwing a red plastic ball between themselves with shrill notes of instruction and excitement. His mother’s words had been agony to hear. Each use of the word ‘stupid’ had been like a blow to the skull. He said nothing, just let their meaning sink in, settle, find its place and its level. When he raised his head again the family had almost disappeared from view: he could just about still hear the cries of the children, bringing back a distant memory, some cloudy image of another time he had come to this place, as a young boy, with his mother and father. A picnic? Yes, they must have brought a picnic. Disorientatingly, this long-forgotten excursion, which he had not thought about for twenty or twenty-five years, probably, now felt more real and more recent than the picnic at Wijgmaal which had taken place little more than a week ago.
As if intuiting her son’s train of thought, Martha Foley looked down at her lap, where she was holding the photograph Thomas had brought home for her.
‘This is a nice picture,’ she said. ‘It was kind of you to do what I asked. I’m going to frame it and put it on the wall in the sitting room. But this buttercup field doesn’t look at all how I remember it. Are you sure you went to the right place?’
He couldn’t write to Anneke while he was at home. It felt all wrong, sitting at the bureau in the dining room long after Sylvia had gone to bed, staring at the sheet of Basildon Bond on which the words stubbornly refused to form, his fountain pen casting a long shadow across the page beneath the amber glow of his reading light. He wrote it at work instead, on his second day back at the Baker Street offices. The task he had been given on his return to the COI was scarcely inspiring: composing the voiceover commentary for a short film about underage drinking. He knew that he would not be able to apply himself to it until the letter was out of the way.
Even when it was finished, he was not happy with the result. How could he be? But he posted the letter anyway, on Wednesday morning at the post office in Marylebone High Street.
There was no reply for almost a month. He assumed that he was never going to get one. And then it came, delivered to his work address, garlanded with exotic Belgian stamps and franked with the official postmark of Expo 58.
Dear Mr Foley,
Thank you for your letter. It was very polite of you to write and explain your position – just what I would expect from an English gentleman.
Since this is how you feel, I am sure it would be best if we both forgot everything that happened during your time in Brussels. I would not like to cause you any pain, or any embarrassment; which I think are probably one and the same thing, in your case.
Rest assured that I will not disturb or intrude upon you in any way from this time onward.
In fact, allow me to borrow from your two friends – the mysterious men in raincoats and hats – a phrase which might prove useful to us in this respect:
‘this conversation never took place.’
I remain respectfully yours
Anneke Hoskens.
Unrest
Sylvia was on her knees in front of the toilet. The Marmite on toast she had eaten for breakfast had just come back up. It was the third day in a row that something like this had happened. She gasped for breath and tore off some sheets of toilet paper, wiping her lips and wincing at the sour, rancid taste in her mouth.
Thomas was at his desk in Baker Street, feeling thoroughly depressed. Two items of news had just come his way. One was that his next assignment was to draft a pamphlet on the perils of drink-driving: it seemed that he was now first in line for any job with a connection to pubs, licensing laws or the consumption of alcohol generally. The other was that his friend and colleague, Carlton-Browne, had effectively just been promoted over his head, having been chosen for the much more prestigious task of writing the script for a big-budget public information film about the measures to be taken in the event of a nuclear attack.
‘I think we’re going to have another baby,’ Sylvia said to him that evening, at the dinner table.
‘I think it’s time I looked for another job,’ Thomas told her, as they lay awake in bed that night, side by side, holding hands beneath the sheets.
‘I think we should move,’ she told him the next morning, at the breakfast table. ‘I don’t like living in London. I never have liked it. I want to be close to Mum and Dad again.’
Things happened quickly. Thomas mentioned his plans to another colleague at work, Stanley Windrush. Word got around, and a few days later Carlton-Browne approached him in the canteen with some useful information.
‘Chap I know knows a chap who reckons there’s a firm in the Midlands looking for someone to head up their PR department. Sounds as though it could be right up your alley.’
The firm in question was a large manufacturer of car components, both for export and for the domestic market. They were based in Solihull, not far from central Birmingham and only a few miles from King’s Heath, where Sylvia’s parents lived. On the morning of Thursday, 16 October 1958, Thomas took the train from Euston station and arrived promptly for his interview at eleven o’clock. By eleven-fifteen, it was being made clear to him that the job was his for the taking. No references were requested. No questions were asked, in any detail, about his suitability for this particular role. The personnel manager simply told Thomas that he was ‘just the sort of fellow they were looking for’.
He spent the next few hours agreeably enough, visiting the offices of local estate agents, and exploring the area on foot. Really, Birmingham was not half as grim as he had imagined. Compared to Tooting, these south-eastern suburbs appeared leafy, quiet and spacious. Walking along the wide, tree-lined streets close to the Cadbury factory in Bournville, enjoying the colours of fast-approaching autumn, he found himself easily able to imagine living here: he pictured himself escorting Gill to the school bus stop on spring mornings, the feel of her trusting hand clutched tightly within his; playing Sunday-afternoon football in the nearby recreation ground with his son (for they were both convinced that it was going to be a boy, and had already agreed that he should be named David, after Thomas’s father). He was pleasantly surprised to learn that they could afford to buy a much bigger property here, and still turn a handsome profit on the sale of their house in Tooting. With the money they looked likely to make on the deal, he could easily afford to buy a family-sized car.
Thomas arrived back at New Street Station in plenty of time to catch his London train. He bought a copy of The Times at the station newsagents’, and installed himself in an empty second-class compartment. He did not open the newspaper, though, preferring to gaze out of the window, lost in half-formed fantasies centred around the pleasures of family life, and the satisfactions of living as a solid, middle-class, respectable citizen. He did not tire of these agreeable daydreams until the train had passed Rugby: at which point the door to his compartment suddenly slid open. A young man in a British Rail steward’s uniform looked down at Thomas and said: ‘Mr Foley?’
‘Yes?’
‘Message for you.’
He handed Thomas a scrap of lined notepaper, and left without waiting for a reply. Thomas unfolded the note and read it. All it said was: ‘Fancy a drink?’
Warily, he rose to his feet and, taking his copy of The Times with him, made his way down the corridor to the restaurant car. This, too, was empty: empty, that is, except for one table, upon which three glasses of whisky were resting. Three glasses of whisky, and a solitary packet of Smith’s crisps. Sitting on one side of the table, squashed together rather tightly on the banquette seat, were Mr Radford and Mr Wayne.
They looked up when they saw him, with every appearance of surprise and pleasure.
‘Why, it’s Mr Foley!’
‘Bless my soul!’
‘Here, of all places!’
‘On this train, of all trains!’
‘Do sit down, there’s a good chap.’
‘Take a pew, old man. Make yourself comfortable.’
‘Whisky? We took the liberty of ordering for you.’
‘Don’t know why, just had a sort of feeling that you might show up.’
‘Just a hunch, you understand.’
Thomas flopped down into the seat opposite them; taken aback, of course, to find that they were still following him, but more angry than anything else. These two ludicrous figures belonged to a part of his life that he’d assumed was long since over and done with.
‘Good afternoon, gentlemen,’ was all he said, investing the words with as much hostility as he could muster. He looked at the whisky but decided not to touch it.
‘It’s not poisoned, you know,’ said Mr Wayne, sounding almost offended.
Thomas pushed the glass away, all the same.
‘Cigarette?’ said Mr Radford.
‘No thanks,’ said Thomas. He had given them up, and was trying to persuade Sylvia to follow suit. (Although, as a concession, he had agreed that she could smoke while she was pregnant. It was a stressful time for a woman, after all, and smoking did help her to relax.)
‘So,’ said Mr Radford, lighting his own cigarette with a gold-plated lighter, which he then passed on to his companion. ‘Job interview went well this morning, I gather?’
‘I see,’ said Thomas, ‘so you’re still tapping my phone?’
Mr Wayne looked even more offended.
‘I say, we don’t go in for that sort of thing, old man.’
‘You’re not in the Soviet Union now, you know.’
‘Well, you seem to know an awful lot about my movements.’
‘Just taking a friendly interest, that’s all.’
‘Just finding out what you’re up to.’
‘After all, it’s not as if you made any effort to keep in touch.’
‘Not even a postcard.’
‘Keep in touch?’ said Thomas. ‘Why should I?’
‘Well, I don’t know . . . Call us sentimental, but I thought we established quite a . . . rapport, out there in Brussels.’
‘Did you, indeed?’
‘Well, it’s all water under the bridge now, anyway,’ said Mr Wayne. ‘The fair’s almost over. This weekend, everyone will be packing up and going home.’
‘I dare say there’ll be something about it in the newspaper on Monday,’ said Mr Radford.
Thomas made no reply.
‘Of course,’ Mr Radford continued, ‘not everything that happened at Expo 58 was reported in the papers.’
‘Far from it,’ said Mr Wayne.
Mr Radford shook his head. ‘That terrible business with Mr Chersky, for instance. Thank goodness that never got into the news.’
‘Ghastly affair,’ Mr Wayne agreed.
Thomas did not like the sound of this. He decided to rise to the bait.
‘Mr Chersky?’
‘Yes. Surely you heard what happened to him?’
‘No.’
‘No? That’s extraordinary.’
‘Well,’ said Thomas, impatient now. ‘What happened to him?’
‘He died, of course.’
‘Died?’
‘Yes, poor chap. Died of a heart attack.’
‘They found him,’ said Mr Radford, ‘in the honeymoon suite of the Astoria Hotel.’
Allowing time for this information to sink in, the two men sipped their whiskies, and then sat back, with a certain air of amused satisfaction, to wait for Thomas’s response.
‘But that . . .’ he said at last, forming the words slowly and carefully, ‘that was where Emily took him.’
‘Really?’
‘Is that a fact?’
‘You know even more about it than we do.’
Thomas leaned forward, now, and the mounting anger could no longer be kept out of his voice. ‘Come on, then. Tell me what you’ve got to tell me. Tell me what happened.’
‘Well, I’m not entirely sure we can help you there,’ said Mr Wayne. ‘What do you think, Radford?’
Mr Radford shook his head.
‘Shaky ground . . .’
‘Thin ice . . .’
‘Then again . . .’
‘On the other hand . . .’
‘We have already taken Mr Foley into our confidence, to a certain extent.’
‘True, true.’
‘He’s already in possession of some of the facts.’
‘Yes, you have a point.’
‘Oh, shut up, the pair of you,’ said Thomas. ‘Was Emily involved in all of this? Has she been implicated?’
