by Jonathan Coe
But I was soon to find out that it could. One morning, early in the school holidays, I arrived at the shed to discover that a white envelope had been pushed underneath the door. It was addressed to me, in my father’s handwriting. It was my first letter.
∗
The Nuttall Farm Residents’ Association,
Poultry Place,
Much Clucking in the Yard,
Cropshire.
19 July 1960
Dear Mr Owen,
May I just say, on behalf of all my fellow-residents, how delighted we are that you have decided to take up the tenancy of Mr Nuttall’s vacant cowshed.
This news has caused general rejoicing all over the farm. Some of the animals have even come out in goose-pimples, and can’t wait to come and have a gander at your new house, while the cows are simply over the moon. As for the horses, they, of course, are especially pleased to have acquired a new neigh-bour.
You may find at first that some of the smaller birds have a tendency to grouse, or even snipe. But you must bear in mind that many of these animals, far from being as educated as yourself, can only be described as pig-ignorant. In short, I hope that you won’t be cowed by any of the remarks you may have herd.
Don’t hesitate to drop round for a chat whenever you like, as my wives and I are always happy to receive visitors. We get sick and tired of being cooped up in here, as the atmosphere is positively fowl.
Yours sincerely,
Bertie Rooster
(Cock of the Walk).
∗
The next dream that I remember is the briefest of the three, but was so vivid and frightening that it had me screaming at the top of my voice until my father came running from his bedroom to quieten me. When he asked me what was wrong, all I could say was that I’d had a nightmare, in which a man had been bending over my bed, staring into my face so intently that I was sure he was going to kill me. My father sat down beside me and stroked my hair. After a while I must have fallen asleep again.
There was one other thing I might have told him – except that I didn’t really grasp it myself at the time – to explain why the dream had been so terrifying. The truth is that I had recognized the man bending over the bed. I had recognized him because it was me. It was me, as an older man, staring back at my own young self, and my face was now ravaged with age and grooved like an ancient carving with the traces of pain.
∗
Photography was one of my father’s hobbies. He had a little, leather-cased box camera and a home-made flash unit, and in lieu of a darkroom he would cover up the bathroom windows with black paper and fill the bath with developing fluid until one day he miscalculated and burned off all the enamel and my mother forbade him to use it ever again. Before that happened, though, he came down to Mr Nuttall’s farm to make a photographic record of Joan and me at the height of our domestic bliss.
Yes, we were now living together. Or at least, writing together – for I had warily agreed to embark upon a collaboration, in which my Victorian detective was to be transported back to the Tudor period in order to solve a murder mystery at the behest of Henry VIII himself. (This whole scenario, I seem to recall, was largely inspired by The Time Machine, which my father had been reading aloud to me at bedtime.) For this purpose another chair had been obtained from Mrs Nuttall, and we now sat opposite each other, writing alternate chapters and passing them back and forth along the workbench, in between breaks for refreshment and inspirational walks around the miniature garden. Needless to say, the venture was not a success: we never finished our story, and when we found ourselves reminiscing about it more than twenty years later, neither of us could remember what had become of the manuscript.
None the less, it was during our brief period of creative partnership that my father took his photograph. It caught us in characteristic poses: Joan sitting eager and upright, a trusting, toothy grin lighting up her face, while I half turned away from the camera, a pencil held to my lips, my head inclined at an introspective angle. My father made two prints from the negative, and gave us one each. For many years, she told me, Joan kept her copy in a secret drawer, where it occupied a special place even among her most prized possessions. But I chose to have it on show in my bedroom; and before very long, as so often happens with these childish treasures, it was lost.
∗
Barkers Bank Ltd,
The Counting House,
Lucre Lane,
Shillingham.
23 July 1960
Dear Mr Owen,
We were most interested to hear that you have recently received a rise in your pocket money to the tune of 6d a week. With your weekly income now totalling 3s, we thought you might like to hear of some of our new savings opportunities.
May we recommend, for instance, our Bonanza Budget account? This package combines minimum investment with maximum growth. In fact one of our customers, who only opened his account last month, has already shot up to more than 6′ 6″.
Failing that, as a farm-dweller you may like to consider our Piggy Bank Special. We supply the pig, you supply the cash – and you might end up saving more than your bacon! At the end of the year, you could find yourself with a lump sum of more than £1 IS (or a ‘guinea pig’, as we like to call it) simply by depositing sixpence a week: we wouldn’t suggest anything rasher.
Incidentally, as one of our most valued customers, you are now entitled to join the bank’s social club, which meets every Tuesday at ‘The Quids Inn’ for an evening of capital entertainment and first-class cuisine: whether your taste runs to bags of dough, some royal mint or just the occasional bit of lolly, we’d be glad to have you along.
Yours in the pink,
Midas Touch,
(Manager).
∗
There is one other dream that I can remember clearly, and it dates from several years later, when I was fifteen. On Wednesday March 27th 1968, in the early hours of the morning, I dreamed that I was flying in a small jet plane which suddenly and for no apparent reason began to plummet to the earth. I can still hear the quiet hum of the engine turned to a throaty splutter, and see the wall of dense grey cloud appear out of nowhere. The window shatters loudly and in an instant there are shards of glass hurling themselves at me, spearing my arms and shoulders, and now there is a mighty rush of air, throwing me backwards into bruising collision with the fuselage, and now we plunge, hurtling downwards at unthinkable speed, and I am hollow, my body is an empty shell, my mouth is open and everything that was inside me has been left way behind, way up in the sky, and the noise is deafening, the terrible whine of engine and airstream, and yet above it all I can still hear myself talking, for I am repeating a phrase, either to myself or to some absent listener, evenly and without emphasis, I repeat the words: ‘I’m going down. I’m going down. I’m going down.’ And then there is the final scream of metal, the piercing laceration as sections of the fuselage start to tear themselves apart, until at once the whole plane breaks up and shoots off in a million different directions, and I am in freefall, diving, unshackled, nothing but blue sky between me and the earth which I can see clearly now, rising up to meet me, the coasts of continents, islands, big rivers, big surfaces of water. I am no longer in pain, I am no longer afraid, I have already forgotten what it means to feel these things: I merely notice that the shadow of the earth has begun to swallow the delicate blue of the sky, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.
Then I wake up, not shaking or sweating or shouting for my father, but registering, with a sense of anti-climax, even regret, the fact of my familiar shadowed bedroom and the unresponding night outside. I turn over and lie awake for a few minutes before falling again, this time into a dreamless and pellucid sleep.
It was two days later, over breakfast on the Friday morning, that my father passed me his copy of The Times and I learned that Yuri Gagarin was dead, and his co-pilot too, their two-seat jet trainer having crashed at Kirzhatsk just as I was having my dream. The las
t that anyone had heard from Yuri was the calm announcement ‘I’m going down’ as he tried to steer his aircraft away from a populated area. I didn’t believe it at first, not until I saw a photograph in the next day’s paper which showed the building where his ashes had been put on display, the Central House of the Soviet Army; and coiled around it, threading through the blackened streets, a queue of mourners six deep and three miles long.
∗
… Si vous dormez, si vous rêvez, acceptez vos rêves. C’est le rôle du dormeur …
The envelope dropped to the floor. Immediately, roused by its arrival as nothing else could have roused me, I swung my legs out of bed and rushed into the hallway to retrieve it. It bore a first-class stamp and was addressed to ‘M Owen, Esq’ in elegant, spidery handwriting. Too impatient to go into the kitchen for a knife, I opened it roughly with my thumb, then took it into the sitting room and began to read the following communication, my astonishment mounting with every sentence:
Dear Mr Owen,
This brief, too hastily written notelet is by way of apology, and by way of a proposal.
Apologies first. I have, let me be the first to admit it, been the perpetrator of several crimes, against your property, and against your person. My only excuse – my only claim, in fact, upon your mercy and forgiveness – is that I have always acted out of motives of humanity. For many years now, I have been deeply interested in the case of Miss Tabitha Winshaw, whose long and unwarranted confinement I regard as one of the most shocking injustices I have ever encountered in my professional career. Accordingly, when I learned, through your advertisement in The Times, that you were engaged on an investigation into circumstances not wholly unrelated to this matter, my curiosity was at once excited.
You must pardon the eccentricities, Mr Owen (or may I call you Michael, for I must admit to feeling, having read your two excellent novels, that we are already the oldest and dearest of friends) – you must pardon the eccentricities, as I said, of a wayward old man, who, rather than approaching you direct, preferred to sound out the territory in advance, according to his own tried and tested methods. I must confess that it was I, Michael, who broke into the office of your remarkable publishers, and pilfered your manuscript; it was I who followed your taxi home the very next day; it was I, wishing to make personal contact with you, in order to assure you of the honesty of my intentions, who approached you outside a restaurant in Battersea, and was privileged – if somewhat surprised – to receive a gift of twenty pence from your charming companion (a cheque for which sum you will find enclosed with this letter); and it was I, you will have guessed by now, who followed you both home from the restaurant, my aged legs struggling to keep pace, and finally, through a sad miscalculation on my part, gave said companion a most regrettable shock at the very moment – if my reading of the situation is to be trusted – that you might have been about to progress to terms of the most delightful intimacy.
Can you forgive such a sorry record of reprehensible behaviour? I can only hope that my present candour, at least, will be partial atonement.
Now, Michael, for the proposal. It seems clear to me that, as independent operators, we have both proceeded as far as we can with our inquiries. The time has come for us to join forces. Let me assure you that I have in my possession a great deal of information which would be of assistance to you in your work, and that I am willing to share it all. For my own part, in return, I request sight of only one item: namely, a scrap of paper mentioned in the early stages of your fascinating history, a message jotted down by Lawrence Winshaw, which you describe – with an elegance and concision entirely characteristic, if I may say so, of the whole narrative – as a ‘scribbled note to the butler, asking for a light supper to be sent up to his room’. I believe that this scrap of paper – which I once made my own unsuccessful efforts to retrieve, but which now seems, through some obscure caprice of Fate, to have fallen into your possession – will be of vital importance in establishing Miss Winshaw’s sanity and innocence; that it must contain, in short, some coded meaning or clue which may well have proved elusive – you won’t take this the wrong way, I trust – to someone who is perhaps lacking in my wide and varied experience of these matters.
We must meet, Michael. There are no two ways about it. We must arrange a rendezvous, and there is no time to be lost. Might I make an impish little suggestion, as to an appropriate venue? I notice that on Thursday next the Narcissus Gallery in Cork Street (prop. Roderick Winshaw, as you will certainly be aware) is holding a preview of – true to form – some doubtless vapid new paintings by a young member of the minor aristocracy. I think we can be confident that the lure of such an occasion to London’s cognoscenti will not be so overpowering that two strangers would fail to recognize each other in the assembled throng. I will be there at seven-thirty sharp. I look forward to the pleasure of your company, and, more tremblingly, to the beginnings of what I trust will be a fertile and cordial professional association.
The letter ended with a simple ‘Most sincerely’, and was signed, with a flourish:
(Detective)
Roddy
1
Phoebe stood in a corner of the gallery, where she had been standing for the last quarter of an hour. Her wineglass was sticky in her hand, the wine itself warm and no longer palatable. So far not one person had stopped to talk to her, or even acknowledged her presence. She felt invisible.
Three of the guests were known to her, nevertheless. She recognized Michael, for one, even though they had only met once, more than eight years ago, when he was just about to start work on his Winshaw biography. How grey his hair was looking now. He probably didn’t remember her, and besides, he seemed to be deep in conversation with a white-haired and very loquacious pensioner who had done nothing but make rude comments about the paintings ever since he arrived. And then there was Hilary: well, that was all right. They had nothing to say to each other anyway.
But finally, of course, there was Roddy himself. She had caught his guilty eye more than once and seen him turn away in panic, so he clearly had no intention of making his peace. That was hardly surprising: her only real reason for coming to the opening in the first place was to cause him embarrassment. But it had been naïve of her to think that it would work. She was the one who felt embarrassed, by now, as she watched him moving easily among his friends and colleagues, chatting, gossiping. All of them, she was sure, would know exactly who she was, and be fully informed as to the nature of her distant, presumptuous connection with the gallery. Her cheeks started to burn at the very thought. But she would hang on. She would cope. She would just grip her glass more tightly, and stand firm.
This evening, after all, could threaten nothing to compare with the tidal waves of humiliation which had crashed over her when she had first walked through these doors, more than a year ago.
∗
Phoebe had always painted, ever since she could remember, and her talent had been obvious from an early age to everyone but herself. With every school report, her art teacher’s praises had scaled new heights of rapture; but they had rarely been echoed by his colleagues, who found her academic performances on the whole disappointing. When she left school she didn’t have the nerve to apply to art college, and had begun to train as a nurse instead. A few years later her friends managed to persuade her that this had been a mistake, and she went on to study for three years at Sheffield, where her style underwent some rapid changes. All at once, an infinity of unsuspected freedoms had been laid before her: in the space of a few hungry, incredulous weeks she discovered fauvism and cubism, the futurists and the abstract expressionists. Already skilled in landscape and portraiture, she began to produce dense, cluttered canvases, packed with incongruous detail and imbued with a fascination for physical minutiae which drew her towards unlikely sources, including medical textbooks and books of zoological and entomological drawings. She was also starting to read widely for the first time, and in a Penguin edition of Ovid she found the inspirat
ion for her first series of major paintings, all dealing with themes of flux, instability and the continuity of the human and animal worlds. Without realizing it – for she allowed nothing to complicate her exhilaration during this period – she was edging on to dangerous territory: she was heading for that unfashionable cusp between the abstract and the figurative; between decoration and accessibility. She was about to become unsellable.
But even before she was in a position to make this discovery, there were setbacks: a crisis of confidence, the abandonment of her course at the end of its second year, a return to full-time nursing. She didn’t paint for several years. When she took it up again, it was with renewed passion and urgency. She rented a shared studio in Leeds (where she now lived) and spent every spare waking moment there. Small exhibitions followed, in libraries and adult education centres, and there were occasional commissions, none of them very challenging or imaginative. But locally, at least, she had begun to acquire a sort of reputation.
One of her old tutors at Sheffield, with whom she kept sporadically in touch, invited her out for a drink and suggested that it was time to start showing her work to some London galleries. To make the process simpler, he offered her a personal introduction: she had his permission to approach the Narcissus Gallery in Cork Street, and to mention his name. Phoebe thanked him cautiously, for she was a little doubtful about this proposal. Her tutor’s much-vaunted influence with Roderick Winshaw had been something of a standing joke among her fellow students, who had never been able to find much evidence for it. He and Roddy had been at school together, it was true, but there was nothing to suggest that they had ever been close, or that the great art dealer had done anything to keep up the friendship in the intervening years. (When once invited, for instance, to give a guest lecture at the college, he forgot all about it and never showed up.) None the less, this was a real opportunity, and kindly offered, and it was not to be turned down lightly. Phoebe phoned the gallery next morning, spoke to a cheery and helpful receptionist, and made an appointment to come down the following week. She spent the next few days preparing her slides.
