What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  The shapeless memory of some ancient but wounding disagreement arose before me and prompted a smile. For the first time I realized how nice it was to be with Joan again; to be able to feel that life did in fact have a sort of continuity, that the past was not an ignoble secret to be locked away but something to be shared and wondered at. It was a warm, uncomplicated feeling. But then Joan, having finished her meal, turned over and lay at my feet, resting on her elbows, cupping her chin in her hands and affording me a panoramic view of her cleavage; and suddenly I was caught again in a tangle of different impulses, urging me to look and not to look. Of course I turned away, and pretended to be admiring the scenery, so that a difficult silence descended until Joan gave up and asked the inevitable question: ‘What are you thinking?’

  ‘I was thinking about my review. He’ll have read it by now. I wonder how he’s taking it.’

  Joan rolled on to her back, plucked a long blade of grass and began chewing it. ‘Do you really suppose people care what you say about them?’

  ‘In this case,’ I said, my eyes still fixed on the horizon: ‘Yes, I do.’

  ∗

  Storm clouds gathered. There was a black bank of them, ranged so threateningly in the western sky that by four o’clock in the afternoon we both decided it would be sensible to head for home. Besides, it was Joan’s turn on the cooking rota again. ‘It wouldn’t do to let them down,’ she said. ‘They’ll be counting on me.’

  When we got back to the house she went straight into the kitchen and started chopping vegetables. I was so tired by this stage that my legs would barely support me. I asked if she would mind me lying down on her bed for a little while and she said no, of course not, fixing me at the same time with a look of such concern that I felt obliged to say: ‘It’s been a great day, though. I really enjoyed it.’

  ‘It has, hasn’t it?’ She went back to her chopping board and added, half to herself, ‘I’m so glad I’ve got you till Sunday. Two more lovely days.’

  On my way through the sitting room I passed Graham, who was busy reading the film reviews in the paper.

  ‘Have a good trip, did you?’ he asked, without looking up.

  ‘Very nice, thank you.’

  ‘You got back just in time, I reckon. It’s going to piss down in a minute.’

  ‘Looks like it.’

  ‘I’ve just been reading your piece.’

  ‘Oh yes?’

  ‘Very enigmatic.’

  I lay on Joan’s bed for about twenty minutes wondering what on earth he could have meant by that remark. Enigmatic? There was nothing enigmatic about what I’d written. I’d gone out of my way to make my feelings plain, in fact. If anything it was Graham who was being enigmatic. I knew the piece off by heart and went through it, sentence by sentence, to see if there was anything that might have thrown him. This drew a blank, and for a while I tried to put the whole thing out of my mind, but still his peculiar phrase nagged away at me. Finally I knew that it wouldn’t give me any more rest, so I went back downstairs to see if there was an explanation.

  Graham was watching a local news programme on Joan’s television. I picked up his discarded paper and glanced at my review, pleased to see that it had been laid out prominently at the top of the page.

  ‘I don’t see what’s so enigmatic about this,’ I said, reading the first paragraph to myself and admiring the quietly sarcastic note I had managed to inject into a simple plot summary.

  ‘Look, it’s no big deal,’ said Graham. ‘It’s only a bloody review, after all. I just couldn’t see what you were getting at.’

  ‘Seems fairly clear to me.’ I was on to the second paragraph, where the tone began to get more explicitly frosty. I could imagine my subject starting to bristle with apprehension at this point.

  ‘Look, there’s obviously some clever metaphor or figure of speech that I’ve missed out on,’ said Graham. ‘I’m sure your metropolitan friends will understand it.’

  ‘I really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. I couldn’t help smiling at some of the digs in the third paragraph; they looked even more pitiless in print.

  ‘I mean, what are you trying to say, exactly?’ said Graham. ‘That this bloke is never going to write a really good novel, because he doesn’t own a pen?’

  I looked up sharply. ‘What?’

  ‘The last sentence. What does it mean?’

  ‘Look, it’s simple. He obviously wants to write this fantastic, funny, angry, satirical book, but he’s never going to do it, because he hasn’t got the necessary –’ I was about to read the word aloud for confirmation, when suddenly I saw what they had printed. I froze in amazement: it was one of those moments when the reality is, literally, so horrific that it staggers belief. Then I screwed up the newspaper and threw it across the room in an involuntary fury. ‘The bastards!’

  Graham stared at me. ‘What’s the matter?’

  I couldn’t answer at first; just sat there and chewed my nails. Then I said: ‘Brio, is what I wrote. He doesn’t have the necessary brio.’

  He retrieved the newspaper and examined the sentence again. A smile began to dawn on his face.

  ‘Oh, brio ...’ Then the smile became a chuckle, the chuckle became a laugh, and the laugh became a helpless, deafening, maniacal roar which brought Joan, ever anxious to be in on the joke, running from the kitchen.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Look at this,’ said Graham, handing her the paper and struggling to speak through his choking laughter. ‘Take a look at Michael’s review.’

  ‘What about it?’ she said, scanning it with a frown which struggled for precedence with her anticipatory smile.

  ‘The last word,’ said Graham, by now gasping for breath. ‘Look at the last word.’

  Joan looked at the last word, but still she couldn’t fathom the mystery. She looked from me to Graham, from Graham to me, more puzzled than ever by our different reactions. ‘I don’t get it,’ she said at last, after reading the sentence one more time. ‘I mean, what’s so funny about a biro?’

  ∗

  It was another subdued meal. We had red kidney bean stew followed by pineapple jelly; the noise of us all eating seemed louder than usual, interrupted as it was only by Joan’s occasional abortive attempts to get a conversation started, and Graham’s sporadic fits of laughter, which he seemed to be containing only with the greatest difficulty.

  ‘Well I still don’t think it’s very funny,’ said Joan, after his fourth or fifth eruption. ‘You’d think they’d have proper proof readers or something, on a national newspaper like that. If I were you, Michael, I’d have a jolly good go at them on Monday.’

  ‘Oh, what’s the use,’ I said, pushing a bean idly around my plate.

  The lashing of rain against the windowpane intensified, and as Joan served us a second helping of jelly there was a flash of lightning, followed by a terrific thunderclap.

  ‘I love storms,’ she said. ‘They’re so atmospheric.’ When it became clear that nobody had anything to add to this observation, she asked brightly: ‘Do you know what I always feel like doing when there’s a storm?’

  I tried not to speculate; but the answer turned out, in any case, to be fairly innocuous.

  ‘I like a good game of Cluedo. There’s nothing to beat it.’

  And this time, for some reason, our opposition was ineffectual, so that after the plates had been cleared away we found ourselves setting out the board on the dining-room table and squabbling over who should be assigned which character. In the end Phoebe was Miss Scarlet, Joan Mrs Peacock, Graham the Reverend Green, and I was Professor Plum.

  ‘Now, you’ve got to imagine that we’re all stuck in this big old house in the country,’ said Joan. ‘Just like in that film, Michael, that you were always telling me about.’ She turned to the others and explained: ‘When Michael was little, he saw this film about a family who all got killed one stormy night in this rambling old mansion. It m
ade a big impression on him.’

  ‘Really?’ said Graham, pricking up his cinéaste’s ears. ‘What was it called?’

  ‘You wouldn’t have heard of it,’ I said. ‘It was in English, and it wasn’t made by Marxist intellectuals.’

  ‘Ooh, touchy.’

  Joan fetched a couple of candlesticks, placing one on the table and another on the mantelpiece, and then turned out all the lights. We could hardly see what we were doing, but the effect, it had to be said, was suitably eerie.

  ‘Now, are we all set?’

  We were ready to start, except that Joan, Graham and Phoebe were each provided with pens or pencils to tick off the suspects on their murder cards, and I wasn’t. Typically, it was Graham who noticed.

  ‘Hang on a minute,’ he said. ‘I think Michael lacks the necessary biro.’

  Even Joan collapsed into giggles at that, and Phoebe permitted herself an apologetic smirk which soon, in the face of the others’ hilarity, turned into laughter too. I fetched myself one of the coloured pens from beneath the rota board in the kitchen, then sat down and waited composedly for the hysteria to subside. It took quite a while, and in the meantime I made a firm, silent resolve: from that day on, I would write no more reviews for the newspapers.

  We played three games, each of them fairly long because there were some quite sophisticated bluffs and counter-bluffs going on, usually between Graham and Joan. As for Phoebe, I had the impression that her heart wasn’t really in it. Neither was mine, at first: I tried to treat it as no more than a mathematical puzzle, an exercise in probability and deduction, but then after a while – and I suppose this will seem childish – my imagination began to assert itself and I became thoroughly absorbed. Helped along by the cracks of thunder and flashes of lightning which would momentarily flood the room with garish contrasts of light and shadow, I had no difficulty in believing that this was a night on which terrible things might happen. In my mind, Professor Plum began to take on the characteristics of Kenneth Connor, and once again I had the sense (the sense which had never been far away, ever since my birthday visit to the cinema in Weston-super-Mare) that it was my destiny to act the part of a shy, awkward, vulnerable little man caught up in a sequence of nightmarish events over which he had absolutely no control. The posters on the wall came to resemble ancient family portraits, behind which a pair of watchful eyes was likely to appear at any moment, and Joan’s tiny house began to feel as vast and sinister as Blackshaw Towers itself.

  Joan won the first game: it was Mrs White, in the study, with the lead piping. Then Graham decided to take a more rigorous approach and fetched himself a clipboard and a large sheet of blank paper, on which he carefully recorded the transactions which took place between every player. He won the second game this way (it was Colonel Mustard, in the billiard room, with the revolver) but was then unanimously disqualified from using similar tactics again. The third game was closely fought. It soon became obvious that the crime had taken place either in the lounge or the conservatory, and either with the dagger or the candlestick; but I was at a significant advantage when it came to naming the murderer, because I held three of the relevant cards in my hand. While the others were still floundering and firing off wildcat suggestions at each other, the solution slowly revealed itself to me: the culprit, of course, was none other than myself, Professor Plum.

  As soon as I realized this, it struck me that the game was intrinsically flawed. It seemed wrong that by a simple process of elimination you could find yourself guilty of a crime, and yet still not know how or where you were supposed to have committed it. Surely there was no precedent for this situation in real life? I wondered what it would actually feel like, to be present at the unravelling of some terrible mystery and then to be suddenly confronted with the falseness of your own, complacent self-image as disinterested observer: to find, all at once, that you were thoroughly and messily bound up in the web of motives and suspicions which you had presumed to untangle with an outsider’s icy detachment. Needless to say, I could not imagine the circumstances in which such a thing might ever happen to me.

  As it turned out, in any case, Graham was ahead of us all. On his next move he crossed over to the conservatory via the secret passage and pointed an accusing finger in my direction.

  ‘I suggest,’ he said, ‘that it was Professor Plum, in the conservatory, with the candlestick.’

  He was right; and at this point we conceded defeat. Joan turned the lights on and made us all a mug of cocoa, and the mood would perhaps have been shattered if the storm had not continued outside, gathering in ferocity, if anything, as midnight approached.

  ∗

  This time I didn’t have the excuse of a book to fetch; nor was I feeling hot or uncomfortable. I could probably just have lain there, listening to the rain against the window, the occasional crash of thunder, and sooner or later I would have nodded off to sleep. But only half an hour after I was sure that everyone had gone to bed, I climbed out from beneath the blankets and padded up the stairs in my T-shirt and underpants. The door to Joan’s room, as before, was standing ajar. As before, her curtains were open, letting in a good deal of light from the street lamps. And as before, she was lying on her back, her skin grey and luminescent in the silver lamplight, flickering sometimes into blueness as gashes of lightning streaked across the night sky. Although she was more than half covered, tonight, by the pale duvet, it was still enough to root me to the spot, my beady, impotent eyes consuming her hungrily from the safety of the shadowed doorway.

  I stood, and I watched; but soon, strangely enough, it was her face that I found myself watching – the face I had seen every day for the last four days, and not the body which had been magically offered up to me in these precious, illicit glimpses. Perhaps there is something more private, more secret to be found in a sleeping face than there is even in a naked body. At rest, her lips slightly parted, her closed eyelids seeming to suggest an act of intense concentration on some distant, inward object, Joan was shockingly beautiful. It was now impossible, shameful even, that I could ever have thought her plain.

  I watched.

  And then suddenly her eyes were open; she was looking back at me and smiling.

  ‘Are you just going to stand there,’ she said, ‘or are you coming in?’

  How different my life might have been, how very different, if I had stepped into her room instead of slipping back into the darkness as quickly and as silently as a dream slips from the waking mind.

  ∗

  On Saturday morning I left the house before any of the others were awake, and returned to London. It was the last I saw of Joan for many years. Her parents retired to a village on the South coast, so we never met up again while visiting our families at Christmas. The only news I ever heard was when my mother told me (shortly before we stopped speaking) that she had moved back to Birmingham and married a local businessman.

  On Monday morning, I telephoned the Peacock Press and accepted their commission to write a book about the Winshaws.

  The same afternoon, I went out and bought my first video recorder.

  Thomas

  Few people remember anything about the first domestic VCR, launched by Philips as long ago as 1972. The price was high, the recording time was limited to one hour, and it ended up selling mainly to commercial and institutional buyers. Thomas Winshaw bought one, all the same, and had it built into a cupboard behind one of the oak-pannelled walls of his office at Stewards. But he decided not to invest at this stage. Although he was both privately excited by the invention and keenly aware of its commercial possibilities, he sensed that its time had not yet come. Almost, but not quite.

  1978 saw the first real flurry of activity. In April JVC introduced its Video Home System, retailing at £750, and only three months later Sony launched the rival Betamax machine. Over the next few years these two systems were to slug it out in the marketplace, with VHS finally proving itself the clear winner. In the autumn of 1978, when Thomas Winshaw announced t
hat the bank would be involving itself heavily in the burgeoning industry, his fellow board members’ initial reaction was one of dismay. They reminded him that Stewards’ flirtation with the film industry in the early 1960s had not been successful, and even invoked the crisis at Morgan Grenfell ten years ago, when a major commitment to film financing had ended in a potential disaster only warded off at the last minute by intervention from the Bank of England. Thomas dismissed these precedents. He was not suggesting anything as risky as investment in film production. He simply proposed taking a modest stake in one of the leading hardware manufacturers; the software market being, as he would be the first to admit, at this stage too new, too unstable and, frankly, too sleazy. As usual, his instincts were right. Over the next five years, imports of video recorders multiplied ten times over, and by 1984 there was a machine in 35.74 per cent of British homes, as opposed to 0.8 per cent in 1979. The bank profited handsomely. Then in 1981 they became advisers and fund managers to a firm which was rapidly building up a strong market share in post-production, distribution and film-to-video transfers. With Stewards’ help, this company went on to merge with an independent video duplication house and within a few years more than three quarters of its income was coming from duplication services. Once again, the bank reaped substantial dividends. Thomas slipped up on one occasion, however: he was an enthusiastic proponent of Philips’s videodisc system, LaserVision, which was put on the market in May 1982 but after more than a year had only collected sales figures of around 8,000. The obvious explanation was that it did not offer a recording facility, and when, a few months later, JVC abruptly cancelled their own disc system, and RCA decided to halt all player production in 1984, it was clear even to the least sophisticated industry analyst that the new technology had failed to catch on. Yet Thomas maintained his commitment to a £10-million disc-pressing plant in Essex, which was running at a huge loss.