by Jonathan Coe
By the time that Clara had confided these things to him, their plates were empty and they had eaten their fill. Thomas poured her what was left from their bottle of Riesling and said: ‘And do you remember that other time, when you cycled out from Brussels to have a picnic with us, by the side of the river, not far from Leuven?’
Clara laughed. ‘How could I forget? I came with Anneke and Federico.’
‘That’s right. I’d forgotten his name. I wonder what became of him.’
‘She married him, of course.’
There was no reason, no sensible reason, why hearing these words should strike such a blow. But even as Clara spoke them, Thomas could feel himself being weighed down by something dull, something creeping: some spreading, cancerous mass. The leaden sadness of it was overwhelming. It came from somewhere within him. He could feel it slowly rising up, in his gut.
‘Really? Is that what she did?’
‘Yes. They were engaged even before the Expo ended. A few months later, she had already left Belgium. She went to live with him in Bologna.’
‘I didn’t think . . . I didn’t think she even spoke Italian.’
‘She soon learned.’
‘What did she do there?’
‘They had two children. A girl, Delfina, and then a boy. I forget the boy’s name. Anneke worked for a long time in a shop, I believe. She worked very hard. Federico was a good man, but lazy. He was always complaining about feeling ill, always taking time off work. He stopped working altogether, when he was still quite young. He became very fond of this game, this Italian game – what is it called? Bocce. He became very fond of it, and very good at it. It took up most of his time, playing it with his friends. He used to enter competitions, travel round the country. And Anneke would stay in Bologna, with the shop, with the children. A hard life for her, I think. Anyway, that’s really all that I know. We lost touch with each other a long time ago – in the 1960s, I would say. I have a picture from that time, though – something she sent me. Here.’
She passed him a photograph, some four inches square, its colours bleached and faded. It showed Anneke sitting beside a table, inside some house – her own house, presumably – with a pretty, dark-haired, seven- or eight-year old girl on her knee. Taking it between finger and thumb, Thomas gazed at it intently. He had only ever seen one other photograph of Anneke, a very different photograph, which he had always kept in a locked drawer at home, and had only rarely trusted himself to look at in the intervening decades. To see her in this entirely different role, looking so motherly, and so happy (he had to admit it), was disorientating.
‘I can make you a copy if you like,’ said Clara.
Thomas nodded and, with a powerful sense of reluctance, handed the picture back to her, after giving it one more lingering glance. Then he fell into silence. It was hard to tell whether Clara could see how affected he had been by her news. There was still a note of pronounced – if forced – cheerfulness in her voice when she said: ‘And that other woman who came on the picnic – Emily, the American. You must remember her.’
‘Oh yes.’
‘Of course you would. The thing I remember best about that day was that it made me feel . . . invisible. Emily and Anneke were so good-looking, and the three of you, you three men . . . You never really looked at me.’ Her voice was matter-of-fact, almost jaunty. ‘Oh yes, I was used to it, I suppose. But in another way, you never get used to it. It always hurts. Knowing that you are plain, in a world which is obsessed with beauty.’ She took a long sip of her wine. ‘And so, did you keep up with Emily? Do you know what happened to her?’
‘No,’ said Thomas, forcing out the words. ‘No, she just seemed to vanish. She just seemed to vanish into thin air.’
‘Ah, well. That’s how it was, in those six months. People passed through, came and went.’
The mood between Thomas and Clara never quite managed to recover, after that. It was only a little after eight o’clock when she looked at her watch and announced that it was time to go. ‘I want to be back before nine o’clock,’ she said. ‘I belong to a club. We all play cards together. Bridge. It’s nothing special, but I don’t like to miss it. There are always a few men there and – of course I already know most of them already, but still . . . You never know. You never know what might happen one day.’
Thomas insisted on paying for the meal. Out on the forecourt, in the yellow half-light thrown from the restaurant windows, he thanked Clara for bringing him here; and meant it. It had been good to see this place again, this vestigial reminder of that unique moment in their lives: a moment poised on the edge of the future, when past conflicts had been left behind, and anything had seemed possible.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Expo 58 will never be forgotten. Not in Belgium.’
They went through the ritual again, the three kisses on the cheek, and the friendly hug, and then Clara was just about to walk to her car when she turned and said: ‘I lost touch with Anneke, but I did see Federico again.’
‘Really? When?’
‘He came to Brussels last year, for the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations. There was a party for people who had worked at the Expo, from all the different countries. You weren’t invited?’
Thomas shook his head. ‘I haven’t been on the mailing list of the Central Office of Information for many, many years.’
‘Ah. Well, Federico came. In fact, we had quite a long conversation. And he told me quite a curious thing.’ She paused, and Thomas could see the glimmer of that smile on her face again: the somewhat chilling smile she always prepared when she was about to throw a surprise at him. ‘Apparently, their daughter – Delfina – was born in May, the year after the fair. Which always puzzled him. He thought it was early, much too early . . . It made him always believe that the father might have been someone else.’ She avoided Thomas’s eye, busied herself instead with buttoning up her overcoat. ‘But he was a good man, as I said. It never made any difference, to how he treated her. She would be fifty now. The same age as your boy David.’ She looked up at him again, waiting for him to speak. She waited and waited; but still Thomas did not respond. Finally, Clara said: ‘I’ll make you a copy of that photograph, as I promised.’
‘Thank you,’ said Thomas at last, his throat now tighter and drier than ever. ‘I’d like that.’
‘And the next time you come to Belgium,’ she added, brightly, ‘come in the summer, and we can go to Wijgmaal, and have a picnic together.’
‘Yes,’ he answered. ‘Yes, that would be nice.’
‘Can I give you a lift anywhere?’
‘No, thank you. I think I’d like to walk.’
Clara nodded, and as she turned towards the car, Thomas heard her begin to sing a tune under her breath. A tune he had not heard for more than fifty years:
Laß sie reden, schweig fein still
Hollahi hollaho
Kann ja lieben wen ich will
Hollahi aho.
She climbed into the car, started the engine and turned on the headlights. It was a hybrid model and the engine made almost no sound. The driver’s window opened smoothly and through it Clara smiled and waved at him one more time. As the car nosed its way out into the line of traffic, he heard the words again, and the lilting melody:
Laß sie reden, schweig fein still
Hollahi hollaho
Kann ja lieben wen ich will
Hollahi aho.
But now, Thomas could no longer be sure that it was Clara singing. He wasn’t sure if the tune was floating back to him from her car window, through the moist and wintry air, or if it was just echoing and rebounding inside his head, from all those years ago. Was it real, or imagined, or remembered? Sometimes, these days, it could be hard to tell the difference.
Acknowledgements
My first debt of gratitude is owed to Ann Rootveld, of Belgian Radio One. It was Ann who sugge
sted interviewing me on location at the Atomium in September 2010, thereby sparking my fascination with this extraordinary building and, soon afterwards, the whole history of Expo 58.
Lucas Vanclooster answered all my queries about Expo 58 with a promptness and thoroughness beyond the call of duty. Annelies Beck was a constant source of wisdom, advice and Flemish translations. Both of them read my manuscript with great attention to detail: their comments were invaluable.
As before, the writing of this novel was made possible by several residences at the Villa Hellebosch in Flanders, funded by the Flemish government under the Residences in Flanders scheme administered by Het Beschrijf in Brussels. I would like to express personal thanks to Alexandra Cool and Paul Buekenhout; to Ilke Froyen and Sigrid Bousset; and to my fellow residents Ida Hattemer-Higgins, Giorgio Vasta, Saša Stanišic´, Ófeigur Sigurðsson, Corinne Larochelle and Rhea Germaine Denkens.
Special thanks are due to Marcela Van Hout, who generously shared with me her Expo memorabilia and her memories of what it was like to be a hostess at Expo 58.
Staff at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek van België helped me to locate surviving copies of Sputnik magazine, from which Honoured Worker of Science Prof. Yuri Frolov’s article ‘The Man of the Twenty-first Century’ is extracted verbatim; Jane Harrison at the Royal Insitution in London made copies of Sir Lawrence Bragg’s papers relating to the British presence at Expo 58; and Sonia Mullett at the BFI arranged screenings of archive footage.
Further help, advice and inspiration in its various forms came from Rudolph Nevi, Marc Reugebrink, Stefan Hertmans, Paul Daintry, Ian Higgins, Tony Peake, Nicholas Royle and Chiara Codeluppi.
This novel draws on many published sources, most notably: James Gardner’s self-published memoir The ARTful Designer (1993), from which I learned the story of the replica ZETA machine; the day-by-day calendar of the fair contained in Jean-Pierre Rorive’s Expo 58 . . . ambiance! (Tempus, 2008); Jonathan M. Woodham’s excellent chapter ‘Entre plusieurs mondes: le site Britannique’ in L’Architecture moderne à l’Expo 58 (Dexia, 2006); and, for many details on the espionage background, World of Fairs: the Century-of-Progress Expositions by Robert W. Rydell (University of Chicago Press, 1993).
My description of the Britannia’s interior in the chapter ‘Rum sort of cove’ is taken more or less verbatim from the souvenir booklet The Britannia Inn: Universal and International Exhibition, Brussels (Whitbread, 1958); the story of the Britannia’s successor in Dover, and its subsequent fate, was found at http://www.dover-kent.com/Britannia-Townwall-Street.html.
Author’s Note
Towards the end of my novel The Rain Before It Falls, the elderly narrator Rosamond is speaking on tape to a younger member of her family, when she refers to her brother-in-law Thomas. Thomas has, up until this point, barely been mentioned. Now, Rosamond offers just a few words: ‘Thomas,’ she says, ‘is still with us. Must be into his eighties, though.’ (The year is supposedly 2006.) ‘A nice man, an interesting man. You should get him to tell you about his life one day, if you ever meet him. He was a dark horse, Thomas. There was more to him than met the eye.’
I wrote those sentences almost unconsciously, not really asking myself why I thought they were necessary. But at the back of my mind, undoubtedly, was the notion that this minor character might one day be useful; and that the truth behind the phrase ‘more to him than met the eye’ could be that he had worked for the British government as a spy during the 1960s. Expo 58 was written, in part, to explain how this might have come about.
The family of which Thomas is a member has been a fictional preoccupation of mine for more than twenty years, although its origin could hardly have been more obscure. Its first appearance was in a story called ‘Ivy and Her Nonsense’ – commissioned, and then rejected, by the Sunday Correspondent in 1990: an unpublished story, for a newspaper which has long since ceased to exist. I rewrote and expanded it for a tiny collection called 9th and 13th in 2005. The story is set during a family Christmas in Shropshire in the 1960s, and features a young brother and sister called David and Gill. Their father appears, but is not named. At the time I hadn’t thought of his name. I know now that it is Thomas Foley.
From this unprepossessing beginning a whole family tree began to sprout, along with further fictions including The Rain Before It Falls and the short story ‘Pentatonic’. Each episode in the family’s story is entirely self-contained: no previous acquaintance with the Foleys is necessary to appreciate Expo 58, I hope. But I’ve been doing my best to make the chronology of the different narratives consistent, and perhaps one day I shall have the chance to put them all together into a larger book.
The idea of sending Thomas to Expo 58 for his initiation into the mysteries of espionage came three years ago, when a Belgian radio journalist asked if she could interview me on location at the Atomium, on the Heysel plateau in the suburbs of Brussels. Like many British people I was entirely unaware of the existence of this monument: it was just a name that I’d heard, and I had no idea of the retro-futurist splendours that waited for me there. It is (as Thomas Foley finds) a staggering creation: epic in scale, brilliant in execution, at once touching, optimistic, absurd and surreal. It can only be Belgium’s deep-rooted inability (or reluctance) to trumpet its tourist attractions that prevents the Atomium from being as well known as the Eiffel Tower, with which it is directly comparable.
By the same token, though, Expo 58 itself does not loom large in the British memory. Not the official one, at any rate. Speak to any British woman or man of the right age, and they will remember being taken to the Fair as children, or hearing stories from their parents about it. However, on reading two substantial recent histories of Britain in the late 1950s (by Dominic Sandbrook and David Kynaston) I was surprised to find that Expo 58 rated not a single mention in either of them. It appears that while Britain may have taken part, it managed to do so while keeping an aloof distance – an attitude which you might say typifies all our recent actions towards the rest of Europe, and which I’ve tried to register faithfully in this novel.
It was this note of slight testiness that I also picked up from the most substantial cache of documents I was able to find relating to the British contribution: those held in the Lawrence Bragg collection at the Royal Institution. Here were complete records of the official planning meetings, giving off the authentic fusty air of the late 1950s. I only had to read of Sir John Balfour’s reaction to James Gardner’s proposal for a history of the British water closet (a proposal Sir John politely dismissed as ‘whimsical’) to be able to hear the conversation as if I’d been in the room myself, and to picture the besuited males gathered around the table as if they were the cast of a Boulting Brothers comedy being broadcast on BBC2 at 10.30 in the morning, with the familiar faces of Terry-Thomas, Ian Carmichael, Dennis Price and Miles Malleson glowing out at me from the TV screen.
Research at the Belgian end of things was slightly more taxing. Anxious to make my account as geographically accurate as possible, I found myself being drawn less towards library-based research than a sort of literary archaeology. The map of the Expo site which is reproduced in this edition is of course widely available in Belgian souvenir shops (not least the Atomium shop itself), and a copy was Blu-tacked to the wall above my desk during the whole writing process. Picturing Thomas’s various visits to the Expo site, I decided it would be best if he entered by the Porte des Attractions more often than not, and then either walked or at least looked down the Avenue de Belgique, since this would give him the best and most frequent views of the Atomium. It was much less easy to establish where he and the other British employees might have lived during their six-month stay. Many people told me of the existence of a large-scale housing complex called the ‘Motel Expo’, but where had it been? All traces of it seemed to have vanished in the last fifty-odd years. Eventually my indefatigable, unofficial and indeed unpaid researcher, Lucas Vanclooster of the radio station VRT, wrote t
o tell me that he had established beyond much doubt that it had been built close to the village of Wemmel, about four kilometres north-west of the Expo site. I then spent a strange weekend near Brussels, driving around the dirt tracks on the outskirts of the village, trying to fix in my mind where it might have stood and how easy it would have been for Thomas to walk to the site or indeed see the Atomium from there. After that, with the help of Rudolph Nevi’s excellent website which pinpoints some of the modern remains of Expo buildings, I drove to Antwerp and was delighted to find that the Oberhausen beerhouse was still fully recognizable in its latest incarnation as a Chinese restaurant. It felt as though I’d been gifted a physical metaphor for the way that the passage of time wreaks changes but also leaves things the same (perhaps the underlying theme of all my novels) and I knew that I had my final chapter.
About the Author
Author photograph © Matilda Coe
Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham, England, in 1961. He is the author of ten novels, including The Winshaw Legacy , winner of the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize; The House of Sleep, winner of the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger; The Rotters’ Club, winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize; The Closed Circle; The Rain Before It Falls; and The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim. His biography of the novelist B. S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant, won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best nonfiction book of the year. He lives in London with his wife and their two daughters.
