What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  The more I saw of these wretched, lying, thieving, self-advancing Winshaws, the less I liked them, and the more difficult it became for me to preserve the tone of the official historian. And the less I was able to get access to solid and demonstrable facts, the more I had to bring my imagination to bear on the narrative, fleshing out incidents of which I had been able to learn only the shadowy outline, speculating on matters of psychological motivation, even inventing conversations. (Yes, inventing: I won’t fight shy of the word, even if I’d fought shy of the thing itself for nearly five years by then.) And so, out of my loathing for these people came a rebirth of my literary personality, and out of this rebirth came a change of perspective, a change of emphasis, an irreversible change in the whole character of the work. It began to take on the aspect of a voyage of discovery, a dogged, fearless expedition into the darkest corners and most secret recesses of the family history. Which meant, as I soon came to realize only too well, that I would never be able to rest, would never consider my journey at an end, until I had uncovered the answer to one fundamental question: was Tabitha Winshaw really mad, or was there a vestige of truth in her belief that Lawrence had, in some devious and obscure way, been responsible for his brother’s death?

  Not surprisingly, this was another subject on which the family was reluctant to give me anything in the way of concrete information. Early in 1987, I was lucky enough to be granted an interview with Mortimer and Rebecca at a hotel in Belgravia. I found them by far the most approachable and helpful of the Winshaws, and this in spite of Rebecca’s serious ill-health: it is largely to them that I owe what little knowledge I have of the events surrounding Mortimer’s fiftieth birthday party. Lawrence had died a couple of years earlier and they now, as Rebecca had once fearfully predicted, found themselves in possession of Winshaw Towers, although they spent as little time there as possible. In any case, she too passed away within a few months of my visit; and shortly afterwards Mortimer returned, a broken man, to live out his last days in the family seat which he had always so heartily detested.

  My investigations became ever more sporadic and desultory, until one day they stopped altogether. I forget the exact date, but it was on the same day that my mother came down to stay with me. She arrived one evening and we went out for a meal at a Chinese restaurant in Battersea and then she drove straight back home again the same night. After that I didn’t go out or talk to anyone for two, perhaps three years.

  ∗

  On Saturday morning I settled down to continue work on the manuscript. As I suspected, it was in a serious mess. Parts of it read like a novel and parts of it read like a history, while in the closing pages it assumed a tone of hostility towards the family which was quite unnerving. Worse still, it didn’t even have a proper ending, but simply broke off with the most tantalizing abruptness. When I finally rose from my desk, then, late in the afternoon of that hot, sweaty, summer Saturday, the obstacles which stood between me and the book’s completion had at least taken on a certain starkness and clarity. I would have to decide once and for all whether to present it as a work of fact or fiction, and I would have to renew my efforts to delve into the mystery of Tabitha’s illness.

  On Monday morning, I took three decisive steps:

  – I made two copies of the manuscript, and sent one of them to the editor who had once been responsible for publishing my novels.

  – I sent another copy to the Peacock Press, in the hope that it would either earn me another instalment of salary (which I hadn’t been paid for three years) or alternatively so horrify Tabitha, when she saw it, that she would cancel our arrangement and release me from the contract altogether.

  – I placed the following advertisement in the personal columns of the major newspapers:

  INFORMATION WANTED Writer, compiling official records of the Winshaws of Yorkshire, seeks information on all aspects of the family history. In particular, would like to hear from anyone (witnesses, former servants, concerned parties, etc.) who can shed light on the events of September 16, 1961, and related incidents.

  SERIOUS RESPONDENTS ONLY, please contact Mr M. Owen, c/o The Peacock Press, Vanity House, 116 Providence Street, London W7.

  And that, for the time being, was all I could do. My burst of energy had in any case turned out to be temporary, and I spent the next few days mostly slumped in front of the television, sometimes watching Kenneth Connor scuttle in fear from the beautiful Shirley Eaton, sometimes watching the news. I became familiar with the face of Saddam Hussein, and started to learn why he had recently become so famous: how he had announced his intention of absorbing Kuwait into his own country, claiming that according to historical precedent it had always been an ‘integral part of Iraq’; and how Kuwait had appealed to the United Nations for military support, which had been promised by both the American President, Mr Bush, and his friend the British Prime Minister, Mrs Thatcher. I learned of the British and American hostages or ‘guests’ who were being detained in hotels in Iraq and Kuwait. I saw frequent re-runs of the scene where Saddam Hussein brought these hostages before the television cameras and put his arms around the flinching, unwilling child.

  Fiona dropped by two or three times. We drank cool drinks together and talked, but something about my manner must have put her off, because she usually left to go to bed early. She told me she was having trouble getting to sleep.

  Sometimes, lying hotly awake at night, I could hear her dry, irritable cough. The walls in our building were not thick.

  2

  At first there was little sign that my strategy would bear fruit. But then suddenly, after two or three weeks, I got telephone calls from both publishers and managed to fix up two appointments for the same day: the Peacock Press in the afternoon, and, in the morning, the rather more prestigious firm which had once been pleased to consider me one of their most promising young writers. (Long years ago.) It was a small but well-respected imprint which had run its business, for most of the century, from a Georgian terrace in Camden, although recently it had been swallowed up by an American conglomerate and relocated to the seventh floor of a tower block near Victoria. Something like half of the personnel had survived the change: among them the fiction editor, a forty-year-old Oxford graduate called Patrick Mills. I arranged to meet him shortly before lunch, at around eleven-thirty.

  It should have been a simple enough journey. First of all I had to walk to the tube station, which meant going through the park, across the Albert Bridge, past the fortress-like homes of the super-rich on Cheyne Walk, up Royal Hospital Road and into Sloane Square. I stopped only once, to get myself some chocolate (a Marathon and a Twix, if memory serves). It was another viciously hot morning, and there was no escaping the palls of thick black smog which issued from the backsides of cars, trucks, lorries and buses, hanging heavy in the air and all but forcing me to hold my breath whenever I had to cross the road at a busy junction. But then, when I arrived at the station and rode down on the escalator, as soon as the platform came into view I could see that it was absolutely packed. There was some fault with the service and there couldn’t have been a train for about fifteen minutes. Even though the line at Sloane Square isn’t deep, the steady downward motion of the escalator made me feel like Orpheus descending to the underworld, confronted by this throng of pale and sad-looking people, the sunlight which I’d just left behind already a distant memory.

  … perque leves populos simulacraque functa sepulchro …

  Four minutes later a District Line train arrived, every inch of every carriage filled with sweating, hunched, compacted bodies. I didn’t even try to get on, but in the pandemonium of people fighting past each other I managed to manoeuvre my way to the front of the platform in readiness for the next train. It came after a couple of minutes, a Circle Line train this time, just as full as the last one. When the doors opened and a few red-faced passengers had forced their way out through the waiting crowd, I squeezed inside and took my first mouthful of the foul, stagnant air: you could tell, ju
st from that one taste, that it had already been in and out of the lungs of every person in the carriage, a hundred times or more. More people piled in behind me and I found myself squashed between this young, gangly office worker – he had a single-breasted suit and a pasty complexion – and the glass partition which separated us from the seated passengers. Normally I would have preferred to stand with my nose up against the partition, but when I tried it that way I found there was a huge slimy patch, exactly at face-level, an accumulation of sweat and grease off the back of the earlier passengers’ heads where they had been rubbing up against the glass, so I had no choice but to turn round and stare eyeball-to-eyeball at this corporate lawyer or swaps dealer or whatever he was. We were pushed up even closer after the doors closed, on the third or fourth attempt, because the people who had been standing half in and half out of the train now had to cram themselves inside with the rest of us, and from then on his pallid, pimply skin was almost touching mine, and we were breathing hot breath into each other’s faces. The train shunted into motion and half the people who were standing lost their balance, including a builder’s labourer who was pressed against my left shoulder and was wearing nothing on top except a pale blue vest. He apologized for nearly falling on top of me and then he reached up to hang on to one of the roof-straps, so I suddenly found that my nose was right inside his moist, gingery armpit. As unobtrusively as I could I put my fingers up to my nostrils and started breathing through my mouth. But I consoled myself, thinking, Never mind, I’m only going as far as Victoria, one stop, that’s all it is, it’ll be over in a couple of minutes.

  But the train was already slowing down, and when it finally came to a standstill in the pitch dark of the tunnel I reckoned that it had only travelled three or four hundred yards. As soon as it stopped you could feel the atmosphere grow tense. We can’t have been there for more than a minute, perhaps, or a minute and a half, but already it seemed like an eternity, and when the train started crawling forward there was visible relief on all our faces. But it turned out to be short-lived. After only a few seconds the brakes came on again, and this time, as the train shuddered to a decisive halt, it was with a terrible sense of finality. At once everything seemed very quiet, except for the hiss of a personal stereo further up the carriage, which grew louder as the passenger in question took her headphones off to listen for announcements. In no time at all the air had grown unbearably warm and clammy: I could feel the uneaten chocolate bars turning to liquid in my pocket. We looked around anxiously at each other – some passengers raising despairing eyebrows, others tutting or swearing under their breath – and anyone who was carrying a newspaper or a business document started using it as a fan.

  I tried to look on the bright side. If I were to faint – which seemed entirely possible – then there was no chance of falling over and sustaining an injury, because there was nowhere to fall. Similarly, there was little danger of death by hypothermia. It was true that the charms of my neighbour’s armpit might begin to pall after an hour or two: but then again perhaps, like a mature cheese, it would improve upon acquaintance. I looked around at the other passengers and wondered who would be the first to crack. There were several possible candidates: a rather frail and wizened old man who was clinging weakly to a pole; a slightly plump woman who for some reason was wearing a thick woollen jumper and had already gone purple in the face; and a tall, asthmatic guy with an earring and a Rolex who was taking regular gulps from his inhaler. I shifted my weight, closed my eyes and counted to one hundred very slowly. In the process, I noticed the level of noise in the carriage increasing perceptibly: people were beginning to talk to one another, and the woman in the woollen jumper had started moaning softly to herself, saying Oh God Oh God Oh God Oh God – when suddenly, the lights in the carriage went out, and we were thrown into total darkness. A few feet away from me a woman let out a little scream, and there was a fresh round of exclamations and complaints. It was a scary feeling, not only being immobilized but now completely unable to see, although at least I had the compensation that I was no longer required to stare at City Slicker’s blackheads. But I could sense fear, now, fear all around me whereas before there had only been boredom and discomfort. There was desperation in the air, and before it proved contagious I decided to beat a retreat, as far as possible, into the privacy of my own mind. To start with, I tried telling myself that the situation could be worse: but there were surprisingly few scenarios which bore this out – a rat on the loose in the carriage, perhaps, or a busker spontaneously whipping out his guitar and treating us all to a few rousing choruses of ‘Imagine’. No, I would have to try harder than that. Next I attempted to construct an erotic fantasy, based on the premise that the body I was pressed up against belonged not to some spotty stockbroker but to Kathleen Turner, wearing a thin, almost transparent silk blouse and an unbelievably short, unbelievably tight mini-skirt. I imagined the firm, ample contours of her chest and buttocks, the look of hooded, unwilling desire in her eyes, her pelvis beginning unconsciously to grind against mine – and all at once, to my horror, I was getting an erection, and my whole body went taut with panic as I tried to pull away from the businessman whose crotch was already in direct contact with mine. But it didn’t work: in fact, unless I was very much mistaken, now he was getting an erection, which either meant that he was trying the same trick as me, or I was giving out the wrong signals and was about to find myself in very serious trouble.

  Just at that moment, thank God, the lights flickered back on, and a muted cheer went up around the carriage. The speaker system also crackled into life, and we heard the laconic drawl of a London Underground guard who, without actually apologizing for the delay, explained that the train was experiencing ‘operating difficulties’ which would be rectified as soon as possible. It wasn’t the most satisfying of explanations, but at least we no longer felt quite so irredeemably alone and abandoned, and now as long as nobody tried leading us into prayer or starting a singalong to keep our spirits up, I felt that I could cope with a few more minutes. The guy with the inhaler was looking worse and worse, though. I’m sorry, he said, as his breathing began to get faster and more frantic, I don’t think I can take much more of this, and the man next to him started making reassuring noises but I could sense the silent resentment of the other passengers at the thought that they might soon have to deal with the problem of someone fainting or having a fit or something. At the same time I could also sense something else, something quite different: a strong, sickly, meaty sort of smell which was now beginning to establish itself above the competing bouquets of sweat and body odour. Its source quickly became apparent as the lanky businessman next to me squeezed open his briefcase and took out a paper bag with the logo of a well-known fast food chain on it. I watched him in amazement and thought, He isn’t going to do this, he can’t be going to do this, but yes, with the merest grunt of apology – ‘It’ll go cold otherwise’ – he opened his gaping jaws and crammed in a great big mouthful of this damp, lukewarm cheeseburger and started chomping on it greedily, every chew making a sound like wet fish being slapped together and a steady dribble of mayonnaise appearing at the corners of his mouth. There was no question of being able to look away or block my ears: I could see every shred of lettuce and knob of gristle being caught between his teeth, could hear whenever the gummy mixture of cheese and masticated bread got stuck to the roof of his mouth and had to be dislodged with a probing tongue. Then things started to go a bit hazy, the carriage was getting darker and the floor was giving way beneath my feet and I could hear someone say, Watch out, he’s going!, and the last thing I can remember thinking was, Poor guy, it’s no wonder, with asthma like that: and then nothing, no memory at all of what happened next, just blackness and emptiness for I don’t know how long.

  ∗

  ‘You look a bit done in,’ said Patrick, once we’d sat down.

  ‘Well, it’s just that I haven’t been out much lately. I’d forgotten what it’s like.’

  Apparent
ly the train had started up again just two or three minutes after I’d fainted, and then the businessman, the asthmatic and the woman in the woollen jumper had between them taken me to a First Aid room at Victoria station, where I slowly recovered with the help of a lie-down and a strong cup of tea. It was nearly midday by the time I arrived at Patrick’s office.

  ‘Bit of a sticky journey, I suppose, on a day like this?’ He nodded sympathetically. ‘You could probably do with a drink.’

  ‘I could, now that you mention it.’

  ‘Me too. Unfortunately my budget doesn’t run to that sort of thing any more. I can get you a glass of water if you like.’

  Patrick looked even more depressed than I remembered him from our last meeting, and his new surroundings were made to match. It was a tiny office, done out in an impersonal beige, with a smoked-glass window offering a partial view of a car park and a brick wall. I had expected there to be posters advertising the latest books but the walls were in fact quite bare, apart from a large and glossy calendar supplied by a rival firm, which hung in the dead centre of one wall directly behind Patrick’s head. His face had always been long and lugubrious, but I’d never seen his eyes looking so sleepy before, or his lips set in such a resigned, melancholy pucker. For all that, I think he was quite pleased to see me, and as he fetched two plastic beakers full of water and set them down on his desk, he managed to summon the ghost of a smile.