A Touch of Love

by Jonathan Coe

  As she sat there waiting for Helen to arrive, Emma became aware of increasing depression. Partly, she knew, it was to do with the poverty of the occasion itself. She recognized the pieces the organist was playing, and could tell that Helen had chosen them: subtle, melancholy music which she remembered from their days at law school together. But she was also in a position to catch glimpses of the organist, up and to the right of the choir stalls, and she could see that he was a frail and very old man whose fingers were slipping clumsily on the keys. Emma knew that when the hymn-singing started it would be ragged and thin. Also, there was no escaping it, she could never attend a wedding without being reminded of her own, which had taken place six years before that summer. Helen had been there, too. Emma had felt very smug at the time; yet perhaps her friend had done the smart thing by leaving it so late to get married. She realized, now, that she was going to find it hard to congratulate her.

  When she turned to watch Helen come up the aisle, she found her pale and nervous: but their eyes met and they exchanged a quivering smile.

  As the service progressed, she felt her strength slowly leave her. She wished that she had an arm to cling onto, even her husband’s. Fortunately the aunt sitting next to her was letting slip the occasional tear, so Emma felt less bad about having to keep dabbing at her eyes with a handkerchief; but finally, just when she thought she was going to make it safely through the entire ceremony, something gave way, and she broke. It was during the last hymn, which happened to have been, once (in the days when she used to go to church), one of her favourites. She liked the tune, apart from anything else, but it had a special significance for her because it had been sung at her wedding, too. Now, after only the first two lines, the rhythm dragging beneath the organist’s ancient hands, the notes shrill and unsteady, a terrifying sorrow rose within her:

  Dear Lord and father of mankind

  Forgive our foolish ways

  Suddenly she was sobbing loudly, louder than anyone was singing, and then people were turning to look at her, and she sank to her knees, and the aunt was laying a bony hand on her arm; smiling sweetly in wrong-headed sympathy.

  ∗

  At the reception, which was held at Helen’s parents’ house, the first thing Emma said to her old friend was:

  ‘Helen, I’m so sorry. I don’t know what happened. I spoiled everything for you.’

  ‘Of course you didn’t. Don’t be silly.’ She was still wearing her wedding dress. ‘Look, shall we go away and talk somewhere? I haven’t seen you in ages.’

  They went out into the garden and threaded their way through those guests who were prepared to put up with the grey skies and the threat of rain. These included the groom, Tony, and a group of his friends.

  ‘Hello, Emma,’ he said. ‘You’re looking good.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Mark not with you today?’

  ‘No, not today. He couldn’t make it.’

  Tony kissed his wife, and the two women moved on. As they left, Emma heard one of the group asking, ‘Who’s Mark?’, and Tony answered, ‘Her husband.’ His friend shook his head, and said, wistfully, ‘Lucky man.’

  The garden backed on to Edgbaston reservoir, and by passing through a little wicket gate they could get out onto the footpath and sit almost by the water. The ground was very damp, but they didn’t mind.

  ‘Emmy,’ said Helen, ‘tell me what’s wrong.’

  Emma cried in her friend’s arms for a while and the she started to talk.

  ‘Oh Helen, what am I going to do?’ she said, when she had told her everything. ‘What can I do?’

  ‘Well, what do you feel like doing?’

  ‘I don’t know. I hate being with him. I hate being in the house.’

  ‘Have you anywhere else to go?’

  ‘No. I don’t know. Home, I suppose.’

  ‘Perhaps you should do that, just for a while. Take a holiday. Can you afford to? Are things very busy at work?’

  Emma sat up and began to dry her eyes.

  ‘Not very. There’s only really one case that needs much doing on it at the moment.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  She told her the story of Robin, and explained about how she was being advised to change his plea.

  ‘Well, why don’t you? Are you so sure that he didn’t do it?’

  ‘I was fairly sure, yes.’

  ‘But look, it would make life so much easier for him if he pleaded guilty, wouldn’t it? Wouldn’t it mean a lighter sentence? Saving the boy from the ordeal of having to go to court, and all that? You can get him to understand, surely. That’s what I’d do.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘If you did that, would you be able to take some time off?’

  ‘Probably. A week or so.’

  ‘Then do it, Emma, for heaven’s sake. Be selfish for once in your life. When was the last time you were selfish?’

  Emma summoned a small, grateful smile, and looked out over the cloudy water of the reservoir as it started to swell with the rising wind. Her mind was already searching for the words with which to break the news to Robin.

  PART THREE

  The Lovers’ Quarrel

  Friday 18th April, 1986

  Forces would seem to be conspiring against me, Robin had thought, as he sat on the park bench and watched Ted disappear from view.

  I have all these theories, all these theories about literature, and I can’t for the life of me write them down. I have all these stories, all these stories which by some miracle I do actually manage to get written, and nobody will read them. I spend my evenings traipsing from house to house, distributing leaflets for unilateral disarmament and world peace, and the so-called leader of the so-called free world wakes up one morning and decides to slaughter a few hundred Libyans because he’s lost a bit of face. The only person I respect, the only one I feel capable of loving, in this whole city, is so bitter and angry at the way people have treated her that she rounds on me at the slightest provocation. I plan a restful holiday in the Lake District, and wind up stuck in Coventry, playing host to some idiot who claims he used to be a friend of mine at Cambridge.

  Actually I don’t dislike Ted. The indifference he inspires in me is really rather exhilarating. Five minutes out of his company and already I have almost forgotten what he looks like. Some faces fade the minute they leave the room. And some faces never fade. Never, never. At least – what am I, a man of twenty-six – I assume they never fade. Perhaps when I am forty-six I shall have forgotten, completely forgotten, what she ever looked like. Perhaps Kate and I will pass in the street somewhere or other, Bradford or somewhere, and we shan’t even recognize each other. I doubt it, though. I can’t see it happening somehow. I hope I don’t live to be forty-six, for one thing.

  Or anyway, I hope that if I live to be forty-six I will by then have left behind all this stuff, all these ideals, whatever you want to call them, these hopes that I carry around my neck like a sack of potatoes; or failing that, that I will perhaps have made something of them, that it will all have paid off, all this waiting, and I will after all be a famous writer or something, and then one night the lights in some studio will be shining bright in my face, and some television presenter on some late-night chat show will smile at me and say:

  ‘Perhaps you can tell us something about your years in Coventry. Looking back, now, does it not seem that this was a particularly formative time for you, in terms of your writing and the development of your theoretical ideas? Can you tell us something about the so-called “Coventry group”, and the form your meetings used to take?’

  And I will scratch my head, or rub my nose, or cross mylegs, and answer, in a tone of detached reminiscence:

  ‘Well, by and large, our meetings used to take the form of us all sitting around in some tacky coffee bar spouting off about a load of books that none of us had read properly. We did our best to turn Coventry into a centre of intellectual and cultural debate, but frankly a lot of the time it felt as tho
ugh we were fighting a losing battle. Naturally we modelled ourselves on the Parisian intelligentsia of the 1920s and 30s, but whereas Jean-Paul Sartre and friends had cafés like The Dôme to meet at, we tended to drink our coffee out of paper cups in the local Burger King, opposite the bus station, or, if we were feeling flush, we’d go to Zuckerman’s, a mock-Viennese patisserie just down the precinct from British Home Stores. Anyway, I finally got browned off with the whole business, and effectively I had nothing more to do with them after April 1986.’

  ‘Who were the main members of the group, at the time?’

  ‘Well, there was me, of course, and then there was Hugh Fairchild, now one of the world’s leading authorities on T. S. Eliot, except that nobody has ever heard of him, and there was Christopher Carter, now one of the most obscure and undistinguished literary theorists in England, if not in Europe, if not even in the civilized world, and there was Colin Smith – how could a man with a name like that fail to achieve eminence? – who would almost certainly have gone on to become an immensely respected poet, critic and man of letters, if it were not for this slight problem he used to have with getting out of bed in the mornings, and if only (one can’t help thinking) he had ever bothered to write any of the things he was always going on about writing.’

  ‘I suppose the university used to play an important part in your collective intellectual life.’

  ‘Yes, it did. It was where we used to buy our sandwiches.’

  ‘What would you say were the main characteristics of the group?’

  ‘Pallor, depression, extreme social gracelessness, malnutrition and sexual inexperience. You must forgive me if I sound bitter about this period of my life. To be honest, I find it hard to imagine what it will be like to look back, in twenty years’ time, because I find it hard to imagine what it will be like to be twenty years older than I am now. For I am not a man of forty-six, I am a man of twenty-six, and if I look back twenty years, I see myself only as a tiny wee thing who was always refusing to drink his milk at school, and who refused to hold his mother’s hand when we went out walking, and who used to think his big sister was the most wonderful person in the world. I never see my sister now, you see. She lives with her husband in Canada. The occasional letter. And the problem with envisaging the kind of man I will be at the age of forty-six, is that I have no idea, really, no idea at all, of the kind of man I am now. I have absolutely no sense of self, if that makes any sense to you. I feel quite hollow. Seeing Ted under these circumstances was really the last thing I needed, because he seems to have a very clear idea of the kind of person I am, but he is so wide of the mark that it does nothing but confuse me. Nobody really knows who I am, that is the trouble, and I need someone, badly, to tell me who I am. Aparna must be the only one who knows, and she refuses to help. She has always refused to help.’

  ‘That seems to me a rather defeatist attitude. Why palm the responsibility off onto other people? If you feel that you’ve lost direction, then it’s time to start asking yourself questions. Remind yourself of what it is that matters to you. Your writing, for example.’

  ‘My writing.’

  ‘Tell me about your writing. What are the distinguishing characteristics of your writing? How would you describe it?’

  ‘Well, since you ask, my writing – are you really interested in all this?’

  ‘Of course. Carry on.’

  ‘My writing falls into two distinct categories. There is my creative writing (not the best word, I know, but I can’t think of any other) and my critical writing. Now what distinguishes my creative writing, what it all has in common, what gives it a sort of thematic unity, is that it is all, without exception, unpublished. None of it has ever appeared in any printed form whatever, and none of it has ever attracted even a word of praise or approbation from any agent, editor or publisher’s reader. Some of it, on the contrary, has elicited letters of rejection expressed with a fervour which can only be described as religious. And then, even within this category, there is a further distinction to be made, between that which has simply never been published, and that which, moreover, has never been read. For there are some works, perhaps for this very reason the most characteristic, the most typical, the most central to my oeuvre, which I have not even been able to get my closest friends to read, and which nobody, to my knowledge, has ever succeeded in wading through, however good their intentions. But to turn to my critical works, they have a slightly different quality to them, and this is that they are all, again without exception, unwritten; that they have, in fact, no existence at all outside the imagination of my supervisor (at his most sanguine), and even he is probably beginning to wonder why I have never shown him any of them. Although it must be remarked, in this context, that my supervisor’s failure to display any surprise, let alone displeasure, at the non-appearance of my thesis over the last four and a half years, is nothing short of remarkable, and suggests one of two things: either that he is a man of great patience, and tolerance, or that he doesn’t give a toss about me and my work, and at least this way he doesn’t have to read any of it. So that as long as the university gets its fees, and he gets his salary, it is a matter of complete indifference all round whether I actually write anything or not. I cannot bring myself to be completely indifferent about it, though. Not completely.’

  ‘And might it be too much to ask what you have been doing in these four and a half years, when you should have been working?’

  ‘Oh, a number of things, really, a number of things. I’ve met some interesting people, and had some interesting conversations. I’ve sat and thought, about this and that. I’m sorry to be so vague, I just find it hard to be positive about the tangibility of my achievements at the moment. Take politics, for instance. A few months ago I would have said I’d matured politically since I’d been here. Now I’m not so sure.’

  ‘You’ve suffered some kind of loss of faith, in this respect?’

  ‘Well, recent events have upset my theories slightly, that’s all. I was trying to satirize him at the time, but now I would agree with Lawrence about the naivety of much of what passes for political activity. I don’t want to talk about this now, though, it will only make me angry.’

  ‘But perhaps anger is exactly what you need. Were you by any chance referring to President Reagan’s bomb attack on Libya, carried out with the complicity and co-operation of the British government? Is that why you’ve been hiding in your room like a frightened animal for the last three days, watching every TV programme, listening to every radio bulletin, venturing out only to buy the newspapers?’

  ‘It’s probably not the only reason for the way I feel at the moment, but I have to admit it’s upset me more than any other political event I can remember. It terrifies me, the way these people behave. They’re barbarians.’

  ‘The United States was acting in self-defence, within the guidelines of international law. Surely you’re not suggesting that terrorists should be allowed to get off scot free?’

  ‘It’s hard to know where to start demolishing that argument, there are so many different ways. The US are claiming justification under Article 51 of the United Nations Charter, but if that is the case, why could they not have gone to the Security Council before taking action (as even Mrs Thatcher did at the time of the Falklands crisis)? Thatcher explained why in Parliament on Tuesday: “Because the Security Council could not have taken any effective action and has not been able to take effective action to deter state-sponsored terrorism”, In other words, because it would not have authorized them to do anything. Reagan has ridden roughshod over the legal channels. He knew that an attack on Libya would not constitute self-defence within the terms of Article 51, because the terrorist acts to which he was retaliating could neither be ascribed with certainty to Libya, nor were they sufficiently serious to justify retaliation on the scale which he intended.’

  ‘But Reagan was responding to two recent attacks, specifically directed at American civilians and servicemen.’

  ‘Nob
ody knows for certain whether Libya was behind the TWA bombing. At the moment it seems more likely that it was the work of Abu Nidal’s group in Lebanon: they issued a statement on March 26th to the effect that “anything American has from now on become a target for our revolutionaries”, Nobody either in America or Britain has yet come clean about the evidence which is supposed to link Libya to this attack. The Commander of NATO, General Bernard Rogers, has merely said, “I can’t tell you how we get it, but it’s there.” Thatcher stonewalled Parliament by repeating that Libya was “demonstrably involved in the conduct and support of terrorist activities”, On the 14th, Geoffrey Howe was quoted as saying that there was “solid evidence” of Libyan involvement; later in the day Whitehall sources changed “solid” to “quite convincing”, Possibly the source of their information was the monitoring of communications in Cyprus, where Libyan messages could have been intercepted, but this is pure supposition because the government has consistently refused to lay any real evidence before Parliament, for reasons of “security”, In any case, five Americans were killed in the TWA bombing, and one other died in the attack on a discotheque in West Berlin on April 5th. To avenge these deaths, Reagan mounted an attack which killed at least one hundred people (according to the most modest estimates) including Gadaffi’s adopted daughter. Many of those most seriously injured were Italians, Greeks and Yugoslavs, and the French, Austrian and Finnish embassies in Libya were all devastated. And yet in October 1983, more than 250 US military personnel died in the bombing of the Marine base in Beirut: five months later, the Americans left Lebanon without doing anything to avenge these deaths. Almost every recent act of air piracy or bombing has been claimed by groups in Beirut, not in Libya, but, as many US diplomats and intelligence officers admit, countries like Iran and Syria are simply too big for America to take on at the moment. So instead Reagan has decided to make a scapegoat of Gadaffi because he is small enough to be crushed without the consequences being too serious. So he gets this hate campaign going against him and comes out with statements like the one he made on the 10th: “We know that this mad dog of the Middle East has a goal of world revolution, a Muslim fundamentalist revolution… maybe we are the enemy because, like Mount Everest, we are here.” But how can you avenge six deaths by sending in the whole of the US Sixth Fleet, including nineteen cruisers, destroyers and frigates and two gigantic carriers (total 140,000 tonnes) loaded with more than one hundred aircraft including F18 and F14 fighter jets, plus the F111 bombers launched from bases in England?’