What a Carve Up!

by Jonathan Coe

  Perhaps I didn’t say any of this. It becomes so hard to remember.

  ∗

  I sat on a black vinyl chair in the Relatives’ Room and tried to read a newspaper, but must have been so tired that I dozed off. I had a strange dream in which the hospital became a film set and I was sitting in the darkened auditorium of a cinema, watching myself on the screen as I held Fiona’s hand and spoke to her. Such scenes, I find, are rarely very involving, and after a while I got up from my seat in the stalls and went to find the bar, where I was served a drink by Dr Gillam. I swallowed it in one draught, then sat down on a black vinyl chair in a corner of the bar and started to doze. Some time later I awoke and looked up to find Joan standing over me and smiling in recognition. It took me several seconds to realize that this was not part of my dream. It really was Joan: here, in the Relatives’ Room, before my very eyes.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ I said.

  ‘Oh, Michael.’ She knelt down and hugged me. ‘It’s so nice to see you. It’s been ages. It’s been years.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  She told me that she was now married to Graham, and that Graham was the patient who had been brought into the hospital unconscious last night. Thanks to the attention he had received from Dr Gillam and Dr Bishop in the early hours of the morning he was now out of danger and they expected to be able to discharge him soon. Possibly I should have been astonished by these revelations but I found myself wearily incapable of rising to the occasion: even when she told me that Graham had almost been killed while trying to make a documentary about Mark Winshaw, it didn’t provoke either laughter or outrage. I simply chalked it up mentally as another point against the family, to add to my already substantial tally. I told her about Fiona, and tears came into her eyes. She wanted to start hugging me again and saying how sorry she was, but I wasn’t having any of that. I had to keep holding things in for a little longer. So I started asking her questions instead about how she’d been and what she’d been up to. She was still in the same line of work, it seemed, but she’d moved back to Birmingham now. They lived no distance at all from where the two of us had grown up together. None of this information was really sinking in, and I can’t have been thinking straight, because I now asked her a very stupid question: I asked why she’d never tried to get in touch.

  ‘Michael,’ she said, ‘we did our best, but it was as if you’d gone into hiding. First I tried to get hold of you, then Graham tried to get hold of you. You never answered letters, you never picked up the phone. What could we do? And whenever I spoke to your mother, she just said that you’d gone a bit strange, and I got the impression that you didn’t see each other much any more.’

  I said: ‘You’ve been seeing my mother?’

  ‘Now and again. Not as often as I’d like.’

  ‘Well, how often is that?’

  ‘I hardly see her at all at home,’ said Joan, sighing. ‘It’s silly really, with us living so close. But of course, I was with her a couple of days ago. We both were.’

  ‘Both of you? How come?’

  ‘She was down at my parents’ house for Christmas. You know that perfectly well, Michael, and don’t try to pretend otherwise. You were invited, as usual, but of course you wouldn’t come.’

  Needless to say, I’d heard nothing of this. ‘What reason did she give?’

  ‘She didn’t.’ Joan turned to me, her gaze a gentle accusation. ‘Look, I know why you haven’t wanted to see me. It’s to do with what happened in Sheffield, isn’t it? But that was ages ago, Michael. We can both forget about that now.’

  I could see that Joan wanted only to console and reassure me, and it wasn’t her fault if her presence in the hospital was having the opposite effect: confronted by this impossible, freakish development, I felt more disorientated than ever. She hadn’t aged at all in the last eight years: the same round, trusting, open face; the slight plumpness which she none the less carried so lightly; the hidden, toothy innocence which was liable to reveal itself in a sudden smile. I had missed all of these things.

  ‘Did something go wrong between you, Michael?’ she said. ‘You’ve changed, you know. You look so much older. I hope you don’t mind me saying that, but it’s true. I hardly recognized you. I wasn’t even going to say hello at first: I wasn’t sure it was you. Did something go wrong between you? I was so sorry to hear about your father. I know how close you were to him. I was going to write you a letter or something. It must have been awful for you. It wasn’t anything to do with him, was it, Michael? Is that what went wrong?’

  ∗

  Joan had hit upon the truth, and there was no getting away from it: I did look older. Patrick had noticed it too. Perhaps I had been flattering myself the night Fiona first came to visit me, when I had stared at my own reflection in the kitchen window and tried to imagine how it would have appeared to her. Or maybe the events of the last twenty-four hours had taken a dreadful toll. Whatever the reason, when I looked at myself in the mirror of the men’s washroom later that night, I could scarcely believe what I saw. It was the face which had once been revealed to me in a nightmare more than thirty years ago: the face of an old man, ravaged with age and grooved like an ancient carving with the traces of pain.

  ∗

  It was about two o’clock in the morning when the nurse came into the Relatives’ Room to wake me up. I was in the middle of a deep sleep. She didn’t say anything, and I didn’t ask why she had come. I just followed her down the corridor. As we approached the ward she did make some remark, but I can’t remember what it was. She hesitated before opening the door and said: ‘You were fast asleep, weren’t you?’

  And, when I didn’t answer: ‘Shall I get you a cup of coffee?’

  And, when I didn’t answer: ‘Strong and black?’

  Then she pushed open the door and led me into the cinema. It was very quiet in there. The rest of the audience seemed to be asleep. I followed the bobbing light of her torch and took a seat towards the front of the stalls. Then she left.

  The image on the screen hadn’t changed. There was still this woman, Fiona, lying there surrounded by tubes and gadgets and drips. She was staring straight ahead, motionless. And sitting next to her was Michael, her lover or friend or whatever he liked to call himself. He was holding her hand. Neither of them said anything for a long time.

  Then he said: ‘I suppose now you’re going to die on me.’

  He said this very quietly. In fact I’m not sure that he said it at all. It seems a strange thing to say, in any case.

  There was another long silence. I began to get a bit fidgety in my seat. I hoped this wasn’t going to be too boring. I don’t like death-bed scenes, as a rule.

  Then he said: ‘Can you hear me?’

  Another pause.

  Then he said: ‘I suppose thank you is the most important thing I’ve got to say. You were so kind to me.’ There was some fairly sentimental stuff after this. His voice was shaking and he started to get incoherent. There was a lot I couldn’t understand, and then he started alluding to some secret he’d been keeping from her, some story to do with a Chinese restaurant he’d never explained to her properly.

  He said: ‘It isn’t too late to tell you now, is it? You’re still interested?’

  Personally, I don’t think she could hear him by this stage. That’s my theory. But he carried on anyway. He was the persistent sort.

  He said: ‘It was a Friday night. We’d booked a table for two, for eight o’clock. Mum had come down about five. I thought she seemed a bit edgy, for some reason. I mean, she’d just had a long drive and everything, but it was more than that. So I asked her if there was anything the matter, and she said yes, she’d got something to tell me, some news, and she wasn’t sure how I was going to take it. I asked her what it was and she said it was probably best to wait till we got to the restaurant. So that’s what we did.

  ‘Well, you know how busy the Mandarin gets, especially on a Friday night. It was pretty full. Th
e food was a long time coming but she insisted on waiting for the main courses before saying whatever it was she had to say. She was getting very nervous. I was getting nervous, too. Finally she took a breath and told me that there was something I had to know about my father. Something she’d been meaning to tell me ever since he died, but had never had the nerve because she knew how much I worshipped him – how he’d always been my favourite, out of the two of them. Of course I denied this at the time, but it was true. He used to write me these letters when I was little. Made-up letters, full of all these silly jokes. They were the first letters I ever got. My mother would never have done anything like that. So, yes, it was true: he was my favourite. Always had been.

  ‘And then she started telling me about how they’d met, how they’d both belonged to the same badminton club, and how he’d courted her for months and kept asking her to marry him and she’d kept refusing. I knew most of this already. But what I didn’t know was the reason she finally accepted, which was that she was pregnant. Pregnant by another man. She was three or four months pregnant by then and she asked him if he would marry her and help her to bring the baby up and he said yes he would.

  ‘So I said: Are you telling me that the person I called my father all those years wasn’t my father at all? That he had nothing to do with me?

  ‘And she said: Yes.

  ‘So I said: Who knew about this? Did everybody know? Did his parents know? Is that why they never wanted to speak to us?

  ‘And she said: Yes, everybody knew, and yes, that was why his parents had never wanted to speak to us.

  ‘We’d both stopped eating by now, as you might have guessed. My mother was crying. I was beginning to raise my voice. I don’t know why I was starting to feel angry: maybe it was just because anger was so much easier to deal with than the emotions I should have been feeling. Anyway, I asked her, in that case, could she possibly see her way clear to telling me who my real father was, if it wasn’t too much to ask. And she said his name was Jim Fenchurch, and she’d met him twice, once at her mother’s house in Northfield and once again about ten years later. He was a salesman. She’d been on her own in her mother’s house and he’d come round to sell her a vacuum cleaner and after a while they’d gone upstairs and that was when it had happened.’

  The nurse came back at this point. She tapped Michael on the shoulder and put a cup of coffee on the table next to the bed, but he didn’t seem to notice, and carried on talking in this low, murmurous monotone. He was gripping Fiona’s hand quite hard by now. The nurse didn’t leave, she just stepped back a few paces and stood in the shadows, watching.

  ‘So then I started losing my temper. Then I started thumping the table and sent a couple of chopsticks flying, and I said: You went to bed with a salesman? You went to bed with a man who came to sell you a vacuum cleaner? Why did you do it? Why? And she said she didn’t know, he was so charming, and so nice to her, and he was handsome, too. He had lovely eyes. Like your eyes, she said. And I just couldn’t stand it when she said that. I shouted: I do not! I don’t have his eyes! I’ve got my father’s eyes! And she said: Yes, that’s exactly it, you’ve got your father’s eyes. And that was when I got up and walked out, only you know how close together the tables are in the Mandarin, I was so angry and I was in such a hurry, I bumped into this couple’s table and knocked their teapot over and I didn’t even stop or anything. I just walked straight out into the street and didn’t look to see if my mother was following. I walked straight out into the street and didn’t go back to the flat for hours, not till some time after midnight. And my mother was gone by then. Her car was gone and she left a note for me which I never read and a few weeks later she sent me a letter which I never opened and I’ve never heard from her since. After that night I just stayed in my flat and didn’t really go out or speak to anyone for two, maybe three years.’

  He paused. Then his voice was even quieter: ‘Till you came along.’

  And then, quieter still: ‘So now you know.’

  Then the nurse stepped forward and put her hand on his shoulder. She whispered, ‘She’s gone, I’m afraid,’ and Michael nodded, and bowed his head, curling in upon himself. He might have been crying, but I think he was just very very tired.

  He was like that for about five minutes. Then the nurse made him let go of Fiona’s hand, and said: ‘I think you’d better come with me.’ He stood up slowly and took her arm, and they walked off the screen together, to the left of the frame. And that was the last I ever saw of him.

  As for me, I stayed right there in my seat. I wasn’t going to move until Fiona did. There seemed no point in leaving the cinema, this time.

  PART TWO

  ∗

  ‘AN ORGANIZATION OF DEATHS’

  CHAPTER ONE

  Where There’s a Will

  THE short January afternoon was fading into premature dusk. Thin, silent rain fell drearily. A dank, clinging fog had risen from the river, and was creeping furtively over the city. Through this grey pall the familiar roar of London’s traffic penetrated, persistent, yet with an eerie, muffled effect.

  Michael turned away from the window and sat down in front of the silently flickering television screen. The room was dark, but he didn’t bother to turn on the lights. He picked up the remote control and switched idly from one channel to another, settling finally for a news bulletin which he watched for a few minutes with bored incomprehension, dimly aware that his eyelids were beginning to droop. The radiators were on full, the air was thick and heavy, and before long he had slipped into a light, uneasy doze.

  It had already become his habit, in the two weeks since Fiona’s death, to leave the front door of his flat unlocked and slightly ajar. He had taken a resolve to stay on closer terms with the other residents, and this gesture was intended to express the character of a friendly, approachable neighbour. Today, however, it had another effect, for when an elderly stranger, clad from head to foot entirely in black, arrived at Michael’s threshold and received no answer to his inquiring knock, he was able to push the door noiselessly open and make his own way, unseen, into the darkened hallway. Proceeding into the sitting room, the stranger positioned himself next to the television set and stood a little while in impassive contemplation of Michael’s slumped, recumbent figure. When he had seen all that he wanted to see, he coughed, loudly, twice in succession.

  Michael awoke with a start and brought his sleepy eyes into focus, whereupon he found himself staring at a face which would have struck terror into the heart of many a stronger man. Gaunt, misshapen and unhealthy, it expressed at once a meanness of spirit, a slowness of intelligence and, perhaps most chillingly of all, an absolute untrustworthiness. It was a face from which all marks of love, compassion, or any of those softer feelings without which no man’s character can be called complete, had been viciously erased. It had, one might have thought, a touch of madness in it. It was a face which gave out a simple, dreadful message: abandon hope, all you who look upon this face. Give up every thought of redemption, every prospect of escape. Expect nothing from me.

  Shivering with disgust, Michael turned off the television, and President Bush disappeared from the screen. Then he switched on a nearby tablelamp, and looked for the first time at his visitor.

  He was not a man of forbidding aspect: the austerity of his clothing and steadiness of his gaze made him more severe than sinister. He was, Michael surmised, very much on the wrong side of sixty; and he spoke flatly, with a Yorkshire accent, his voice deep, cold and expressionless.

  ‘You’ll forgive me for intruding, unannounced, upon your personal domesticity,’ he said. ‘But as your door had been left ajar …’

  ‘That’s quite all right,’ said Michael. ‘How can I help you?’

  ‘You are Mr Owen, I take it?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘My name is Sloane. Everett Sloane, solicitor, of the firm of Sloane, Sloane, Quigley and Sloane. My card.’

  Michael struggled into an upright position a
nd took the proffered instrument, which he examined blinkingly.

  ‘I’m here under instructions from my client,’ the solicitor continued, ‘the late Mr Mortimer Winshaw, of Winshaw Towers.’

  ‘Late?’ said Michael. ‘You mean that he’s dead?’

  ‘That,’ said Mr Sloane, ‘is precisely my meaning. Mr Winshaw passed away yesterday. Quite peacefully, if reports are to be believed.’

  Michael received this news in silence.

  ‘Won’t you sit down?’ he said at last, remembering his visitor.

  ‘Thank you, but my business can be kept very brief. I have only to inform you that your presence is requested at Winshaw Towers tomorrow evening, for the reading of the will.’

  ‘My presence …?’ Michael echoed. ‘But why? I only met him once. Surely he wouldn’t have left me anything?’

  ‘Naturally,’ said Mr Sloane, ‘I am not at liberty to discuss the contents of this document until all the concerned parties are gathered, at the appointed time and place.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Michael, ‘I can see that.’

  ‘I can count on your attendance, then?’

  ‘You can.’

  ‘Thank you.’ Mr Sloane turned and was about to leave, when he added: ‘You will, of course, be staying the night at Winshaw Towers. I would advise you to bring plenty of warm clothing. It is a cold and desolate spot; and the weather, at this time of year, can be uncommonly fierce.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll bear that in mind.’

  ‘Until tomorrow, then, Mr Owen. And don’t worry: I can see myself out.’