A Touch of Love

by Jonathan Coe

  And so, slightly (but still not sufficiently) daunted by the number of disparities between their different accounts of the same, supposedly shared, experiences, Ted has a final bash at coaxing his friend into a mood of fond nostalgia, by saying:

  ‘What about that night, that unforgettable night, of the last May Ball? That unforgettable night, many of the details of which, I confess, I’ve forgotten, but one thing does stick in my mind, namely, that memorable conversation we had, on the bridge over the river, as the piper ushered in the dawn. That memorable conversation, the actual substance of which, admittedly, escapes my memory, except that I know Katharine was there too, and the three of us were together, watching the mist roll back from the water, watching the revellers in their jackets and ball gowns, revelling away, strolling beside the river, hand in hand, arm in arm, and I know that the three of us must have made a very handsome threesome, or perhaps foursome, for I forget whether you had anybody with you at the time, although presumably you must have done, now I come to think of it. Do you remember that morning, Robin? Do you remember that dawn? The dawn as it now seems, of our new lives, our brighter future?’

  But this time Robin can scarcely believe his ears, so little resemblance does there appear to be between his and Ted’s version of this episode, which he remembers vividly, with a nauseous clarity. He remembers the ball, which he had attended, much against his better judgement, as a favour to a friend, who had been looking for someone to accompany his sister. He remembers this friend’s sister, who ditched him after about half an hour, for some other bloke, leaving him to wander around in helpless solitude, wretched with embarrassment. He remembers coming across Ted and Katharine, beneath an archway, she with her back against the wall, he with his arms astride her, the frightened look in her eyes as she saw Robin approach, her mouth still wet from the kiss. And he remembers being on the bridge with them, only a few hours later, after they had all had far too much to eat and drink, and Ted was leaning queasily over the muddied waters of the Cam.

  ‘There there,’ Katharine had said, stroking his back, slowly. ‘There there.’

  ‘No,’ Robin now says, five years later. ‘No, I don’t remember that at all.’

  ∗

  Their dialogue was interrupted, at this point, by the abrupt arrival of a plastic football which landed in Ted’s lap. A small boy of about three or four came running up, and held out his hands. Ted laughed, offered the ball teasingly, withdrew it, offered it, withdrew it again and then gave it back. The boy failed to see the joke.

  ‘Well,’ said Ted, ‘that was a very big kick for such a little boy, wasn’t it?’

  Robin looked away in disgust. He noticed that the boy’s father was staring at them. He could not be certain, but he felt that he had seen this man somewhere before.

  ‘Come on, Jack!’ he called, and the boy ran off.

  Ted was still smiling, but his smile froze when he saw the look of wooden indifference on Robin’s face.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he said. ‘Don’t you like children?’

  ‘Not in the way that you do.’

  As soon as Robin had said this, Ted assumed such a peculiar expression, so suddenly suspicious and uneasy, that he hastened to add:

  ‘I mean, not to the same extent.’ He blundered on, ‘I suppose the big difference comes when you have a child of your own, but – I don’t see that happening, to me… For a while.’

  ‘No,’ said Ted. ‘Nor do I.’

  Ted began to feel the imminence of a number of disagreeable emotions: anger, at the frustration of his efforts at reminiscence; distaste, at what he had seen, over the last twenty-four hours, of Robin’s way of life; despair, at the thought of his immediate future; and fear, when he contemplated the differences which lay between them, the murky, unspoken impulses which set Robin apart and which may even have led him to his present impasse. He decided to leave, there and then, before these emotions became too oppressive. It would look odd, but he was under no obligation to behave tactfully. In half an hour he could be back on the MI, heading towards Surrey, and home.

  ‘Look, Robin, I think I’d better be getting along,’ he said.

  ‘OK.’

  ‘If you want to stay here for a while, I can find my own way back to the car.’

  ‘Fine.’

  Ted waited in vain for a gesture, a look, a point of contact.

  ‘Well, it’s been nice seeing you,’ he said. ‘After all these years.’

  Robin smiled.

  Ted began to walk away, down the path which leads from the memorial. Turning at the gateway, he gazed at Robin for the last time. He saw a figure huddled, on a warm summer’s evening, at one end of a park bench. Briefly it crossed his mind to wonder what on earth he might be thinking. Then he shook his head and made for the road.

  Robin was thinking: ‘Forces would seem to be conspiring against me.’

  PART TWO

  The Lucky Man

  Friday 4th July, 1986

  Alun Barnes, LL. B.,

  Pardoe & Goddard,

  Fourth Floor,

  Churchill House,

  18 Jeffrey Street,

  Coventry.

  Mrs E. M. Fitzpatrick,

  Frankley, Isham & Waring,

  39 Croftwood Road,

  Coventry.

  2 July 1986

  Dear Emma,

  Nice to see you at Margaret’s ‘do’ over in Stivichall last Wednesday. I thought she was looking very well. None of us would have believed she was going to get over it so quickly.

  I was wondering whether we could get together one of these days and have an informal chat, prior to the second hearing, about Hepburn v. Greene. I think old Mr Hepburn may be about to start making noises about settling out of court, which from both our points of view would be an extremely good thing, I think. I was wondering, in fact, whether you’d like to revive our little tradition of meeting at Port’s on Fridays at lunchtime, just to compare notes?

  Anyway, I shall be there on Friday, and I’ll look out for you.

  All the best,

  Alun

  P.S. Apart from anything else, I’ve acquired some new evidence in the Grant case which I think it might be in your interest to hear about. Do try to come if you can make it.

  ∗

  Emma laid the letter down and made a brief effort at being intrigued. The thing was, it was probably just Alun playing games again, and she had enough of that to cope with from her husband at home, at the moment. The sounds of Alison making another pot of coffee from the office kitchen seemed unusually distracting. A couple of weeks ago she would have been intrigued, no doubt about it: not that the case itself presented any special features of interest, apart from the fact that she rather liked her client, but her appetite for work had been stronger then. Now she was already beginning to feel sapped.

  Alison brought the coffee in and lingered unnecessarily over the pending tray.

  ‘Shit,’ Emma thought. ‘She feels sorry for me, and now she’s going to say something.’

  ‘Anything I can give you a hand with? Things are a bit quiet next door.’

  On the point of saying no, Emma hesitated, and then changed course:

  ‘You could file these things away,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’

  It was for the pleasure of watching her work, as much as anything else. Alison had been with them for nearly two years: soon she would be taking her articles. She was a neat, dark-haired, dark-eyed woman, and for some time now Emma had been taking quiet, almost surreptitious enjoyment in the way she moved with a rather diffident grace about the office, the angle of her head as she talked, the lightness and quickness of her fingers as they handled a document or opened an envelope. Sometimes she wondered why they were not better friends. There had been an evening when she had invited Alison back home, Alison and her then boyfriend, some student, and the four of them had had quite a pleasant dinner, around the kitchen table; the wine had been warm and fruity and Mark had been very charming. She re
called, with sudden clarity, the fragments of orange pith which she had seen caught between his teeth as he laughed, over the coffee. But friendship needs more fertile soil than is provided by the merely social occasion, and there remained a barrier between Emma and Alison which Emma, for one, had never been able to define, let alone cross: and now, for all her need, seemed as unlikely a time as any.

  ‘Alison,’ she began, none the less.

  ‘Yes?’

  Words made a tired effort to rise; then sank.

  ‘Do you fancy,’ she ended up saying, ‘coming for a drink, Friday lunchtime, at Port’s?’

  Alison shook her head.

  ‘Friday’s out. I’ve got to go down to Northampton, remember?’

  ‘Oh, of course.’

  Emma sipped her coffee and licked the rim of the mug absently. She had forgotten about that.

  ∗

  Port’s was a basement wine bar in the estate-agent district of the city. On Fridays you always got quite a few legal people in there, as well as the crowd from the building society next door, but it was rarely very full. Emma waited on the doorstep for a while, oddly reluctant to broach that dark interior. The city centre had looked surprisingly gentle and cheerful; she had thought how nice it would have been to spend the lunch hour on a bench in the park, with a few sandwiches and a trashy newspaper. It seemed a long time since she had done anything so unpredictable. Even seeing Alun again seemed predictable. She might have known that it would end up happening, and she supposed that he would probably try the same old tricks.

  She let the breeze play on her face for a few more seconds, then turned and went inside.

  It was dark and hot, but there was no music playing – that was something. Misspelt notices in chalk advertised the day’s bargains in salads and Beaujolais. Emma felt, as she descended the stairs, the absurdity of having worn such high heels – they seemed so noisy and impractical – and found that she was clutching her handbag to her bosom with a fervour which would have made her nervousness obvious had she not checked herself in time. Briefly she wished, very hard, that she was somewhere, anywhere else.

  Alun was sitting at a table for two in the corner, his briefcase keeping the second chair occupied. Blue striped shirt, red tie, the same light grey suit. But the moustache had gone; and he looked thinner, considerably thinner, since she had last been with him. Tall, too, when he rose to his feet and smiled his yellow smile of welcome at her.

  ‘Emma. You look charming. You are charming. I’m charmed. Please sit down.’

  For a dreadful moment she thought that he had been going to kiss her cheek; but they shook hands instead.

  ‘What’s it to be? What will you have?’

  She asked for white wine and soda. Then they made small talk for about ten minutes.

  ‘Look, Alun, time’s getting on,’ she said, finally. ‘What’s all this about Hepburn?’

  ‘Well, he’s come to his senses, basically. I’ve managed to disillusion him about what he might have come out with in the way of a court settlement. These people, they read in the papers about people being compensated to the tune of tens of thousands of pounds. I told him that he wasn’t even certain to win, if it came to that.’ He smiled. ‘Well, I’ve saved you some work, haven’t I?’

  ‘Yes, you have. Thank you. I’m very grateful. Not that things are especially busy just now, as it happens.’

  ‘Oh? Business isn’t slackening off, I hope?’

  ‘No, but you know how it is: sometimes you get quiet phases. I’m not complaining, I mean it’s nice to have a bit of space. Two people both doing demanding jobs… it can be a strain.’

  ‘Two people?’

  ‘Mark and I.’

  ‘Of course. I did warn you, though. A lawyer and a medic: what a combination.’

  ‘We knew what we were doing.’

  Alun fell silent and tried to force a meeting with her eyes, but they were elsewhere. Defeated, he began to rummage inside his briefcase, which contained the papers relating to his current cases and also a thermos flask and an apple. His wife made him a packed lunch every day but he quite often ended up throwing it away, preferring to go for pub meals with his friends from work. Meanwhile Emma was thinking of an evening several weeks back, with her and Mark lying side by side and wakeful; she was looking at herself as she lay in that dark and silent bedroom, thinking how stupid it was that she didn’t even feel that she could raise the question of a child any more, and if it was all going to come to an end, which she had started to see as a possibility, at last, then had she really missed her chance, a woman of thirty-four, would she be able to find anyone else quickly enough, someone she liked enough, would she even feel like going through the whole rigmarole again? She had felt so lonely that night, sharing a bed in the dark with a man whose bed she had shared for the last eight years of her life, and she felt lonely now, sharing a drink and a bowl of salad with a man whom she had never, it seemed, had much grounds for liking.

  ‘Let’s talk about Grant,’ he said, and pushed his salad to one side in order to make room on their needlessly small table (there were other, bigger ones free) for a small red notebook.

  ‘Fine,’ she said, genuinely relieved. ‘What was it you wanted to show me?’

  ‘You’ve met this chap, have you?’

  ‘Robin? Yes, twice.’

  She noticed a flicker of surprise at the fact that she had instinctively used his Christian name.

  ‘Twice?’

  ‘Yes. We met socially, last week.’

  He left a short, mannish, tiresomely eloquent pause.

  ‘Well, that’s your business. You must know what you’re doing.’

  ‘It’s not like that at all. We met through a mutual friend. A former client.’

  Alun waited, banking on a further explanation.

  ‘Some years ago – I don’t know if you remember – I defended this man called Fairchild. Hugh Fairchild. He was being prosecuted by the DHSS for fraud. He’d finished his Ph. D., and he was doing a bit of teaching at the university, earning about ten pounds a week or something, only at the same time he was claiming the dole. So the DHSS finally cottoned on to this and they asked for everything back. It wasn’t very much, a few hundred pounds or so, but it was far more than he had, and it actually looked for a while as though he might have been facing some kind of jail sentence. They were cracking down at the time and they seemed to have chosen him as someone to make an example of. So he pleaded guilty of course, and then I got this quite convincing case together and we managed to get him off with a fine and negotiate quite a sensible repayment programme. Which, so far as I know, he’s still in the middle of.’ She frowned. ‘Four years ago, now, at least. Strange how time goes, isn’t it?’

  ‘Go on,’ said Alun, who disliked it when people became reflective in his company.

  ‘Well, Hugh and Robin know each other, it transpires, so as soon as this thing comes up and he needs a solicitor, Hugh sends him over to me.’

  ‘You’ve been in contact with Hugh, all this time?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve had dinner with him. Two or three times. He’s a very good cook. He lives in a little bedsitter, out towards Stoke Green. Squalid, but homely. So he had this party out there last week – it was his birthday – and I went along. You know, just to show my face. I suppose I should have guessed that Robin was going to be there, but for some reason it didn’t occur to me. I had other things on my mind, at the time. I only spoke to him for a few minutes. Have you met him?’

  ‘Only in court.’

  ‘Well, he was very nervous that morning. As you’d expect.’

  ‘So, what’s he like? How would you describe him?’

  ‘Describe him?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, is he the usual child-molester type?’

  Emma leaned forward, for the first time, and looked him directly in the eye, also for the first time.

  ‘Let’s get this clear, Alun, Robin hasn’t done anything. There’s no case to answer here. I have absolut
e faith in him.’

  ‘How can you have faith in someone when you’ve only spoken to him for a few minutes?’

  ‘We had a long formal interview. I know all that I need to know.’

  ‘So what’s going to be the basis of your defence? Character? Are you using a psychiatrist?’

  ‘Of course not. There’s no need for that.’

  ‘You see, I have an eyewitness. I would have thought that puts you in a rather weak position.’

  ‘Who – not the boy’s father? But he didn’t see anything.’

  ‘He saw enough.’

  ‘I’ve already read his statement. It won’t stand up.’

  Alun smiled, a quiet, prematurely triumphant smile. He leaned over and picked up Emma’s glass, which was empty.

  ‘We’ve got a lot to discuss. Would you like another?’

  ‘No, thank you, I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Want to keep a clear head, I suppose. Something non-alcoholic?’

  ‘No thanks.’

  ‘Well, I’ll get you an orange juice. You can always leave it.’

  While he was away, Emma picked at the remains of her salad, until she could no longer palate the acrid taste of soft green lettuce leaves. A few questions tumbled through her mind but she couldn’t find it in her to follow any of them up. Which was odd, because she knew that only a few months ago this would have been precisely the kind of case which most excited her. She could not remember having felt so listless before, and started to wonder whether perhaps she ought to go and see a doctor: for some days now she had been conscious of a curious heaviness in her head – not headaches, exactly, as she had tried to explain to Mark only last evening, but a sort of throbbing drowsiness which made it hard to concentrate on anything. Well, isn’t it nearly that time of the month, he had said, and had seemed to think that he was being sensitive.

  ‘You look tired,’ said Alun, lowering the glass gently into her hand. ‘Is anything up?’

  ‘It’s been a long week. Maybe I’ll take the rest of this afternoon off and go home. Or something.’