Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  13.

  June 2012

  Benjamin was amazed to realize that he had been living at the mill house for two and a half years. Where had the time gone? Apart from driving over to visit his father in Rednal two or three times a week, he could not see that he’d done anything very constructive in those thirty months. Carrying out odd pieces of repair work on the house, driving into Shrewsbury to buy food, cooking himself ever more elaborate delicacies … None of it added up to a life well spent, he was forced to admit. Perhaps the loss of Cicely had been a harder blow than he’d thought, and he’d been living in a state of emotional shock since then. Or perhaps, at the age of fifty-two, he was getting prematurely complacent and lazy.

  In all that time, he had not even thought much about his novel. Or his novel sequence, his roman fleuve, whatever the damn thing was supposed to be called. Unrest, the project on which he’d been working ever since he was a student at Oxford University in the late 1970s, now extended to some one and a half million words, or somewhat longer than the complete works of Jane Austen and E. M. Forster put together. Supposedly combining a vast narrative of European history since Britain’s accession to the Common Market in 1973 with a scrupulous account of his own interior life during that period, it was further complicated by the fact that it also had a musical ‘soundtrack’, composed by Benjamin himself, whose precise relationship to the text he had never quite been able to decide. Shapeless, sprawling, prolix, over-ambitious, misconceived, unpublishable, in parts unreadable and by and large unlistenable, the whole thing had started to lower over Benjamin like an oppressive cloud. He couldn’t bring himself to abandon it, but he had lost all sense of whether it possessed the slightest merit. What he needed was some objective advice.

  He turned to Philip first of all, as so often. He was a reliable friend in any kind of crisis, and these days, better still, he made his living by editing difficult manuscripts and knocking them into shape. But when Philip received the files by email, and realized the scale of the job he was being asked to undertake, panic took hold of him, and he phoned Benjamin with a different suggestion:

  ‘Come to The Victoria in John Bright Street on Monday night,’ he said. ‘We’ll have a proper committee meeting about it.’

  ‘Wait – there’s a committee?’ Benjamin asked.

  ‘Don’t worry. I’m putting one together.’

  The Victoria, which Benjamin had never visited before, turned out to be a sepulchral Victorian pub tucked away in a hard-to-find corner beside the Suffolk Street Queensway in central Birmingham. It was Monday, 4 June, and in honour of the Queen’s diamond jubilee, which the nation had been celebrating over a long weekend, there had been four days of torrential rain up and down the country. When Benjamin arrived, lugging a print-out of his chef-d’œuvre in two substantial hold-alls, the downpour had finally stopped but the streets still glistened with fresh rainwater and reflected lamplight. Inside the pub he found himself confronted not just by Philip but by two other faces from the past.

  First of all there was Steve Richards, another of his old friends from King William’s School. Steve had been the only black boy in their year, and had suffered the ensuing barrage of racial taunts and jokes with unflagging dignity and resignation. These days he was doing well: his daughters had grown up and left home, and after many years in the industrial sector he was now pursuing his lifelong research interests as director of something called the Centre for Sustainable Polymers at one of the Midlands’ leading universities. He carried an air of quiet contentment, besides looking younger than Benjamin and considerably healthier.

  Sitting next to Steve was a figure Benjamin couldn’t identify at first. In his mid-sixties, perhaps, with a goatee beard and shoulder-length grey hair, he did look vaguely familiar, but after a few moments’ uncertainty it became clear that he would have to introduce himself by name:

  ‘Benjamin? It’s Tom. Tom Serkis. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.’

  Mr Serkis … Yes! Their English teacher in the sixth form. The man whose great contribution to King William’s history was the setting up of a school magazine called The Bill Board, where Benjamin, Philip, Doug and others had all cut their journalistic teeth. Benjamin hadn’t clapped eyes on him for thirty years or more. And now that he looked closely, apart from general symptoms of the ageing process, nothing about him had changed, nothing at all: same haircut, same ragged tweed jacket; even his jeans were flared, 1970s-style.

  ‘Well,’ Mr Serkis said, ‘I guess it’s not so surprising that you didn’t recognize me. Had a bit of an image makeover since then. See?’

  He indicated his left earlobe, which was pierced and sported a small golden earring.

  ‘Ah – yes,’ Benjamin nodded, rather bewildered. ‘That must be it. Makes all the difference. Well, what are you up to these days?’

  ‘Still teaching. A nice comp in Lichfield. Bit different to King William’s, but just as much fun, in a way. Different challenges. Still, I shall be retiring at the end of this term. That’s it – hanging up my mortar board. Oh, but they were great days, weren’t they, the 1970s? When Steve here played Othello and you wrote that shocking review. The fuss that caused! And Doug, of course, with all his political stuff. He’s done well for himself, hasn’t he? Are you still in touch?’

  ‘On and off,’ said Benjamin. ‘He married one of the wealthiest, poshest women in London and they live in a mansion in Chelsea.’

  ‘Ha! I wonder what his father would have thought of that. Shop steward at Longbridge, wasn’t he?’

  ‘He was – but I can assure you Doug’s fully conscious of the irony. Tortured by it, you might even say.’

  ‘But then he always had a thing for posh women,’ Steve reminded them. ‘Ever since he bunked off to London one weekend when we were still at school and lost his virginity to some Sloane on the Fulham Road.’

  ‘True,’ said Benjamin; and took a moment to reflect that perhaps he was not the only person, after all, to have had the course of his adult life determined by a teenage romance.

  After more pleasant reminiscences along these lines, Philip called everyone to order and reminded them that they had business to conduct tonight. Meanwhile the widescreen TV at the back of the pub showed images from outside Buckingham Palace, where a concert was bringing the Queen’s jubilee celebrations to an end. Shirley Bassey was singing ‘Diamonds are Forever’ while Her Majesty looked on with good-humoured bemusement.

  ‘Look at that bloody parasite,’ said Mr Serkis, scowling up at the screen.

  The three friends were shocked.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know. I think she does a good job,’ said Philip.

  ‘Very good for tourism,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘She came to visit the university once,’ said Steve. ‘Nice lady.’

  There was a brief silence as they all suddenly realized, under Mr Serkis’s disappointed gaze, how conservative and middle-aged they sounded. Embarrassed for them all, Philip quickly moved on.

  ‘Now, Benjamin, did you bring the book?’

  ‘I did.’

  Taking it out of the two hold-alls, sorting the different sections into the right order, removing all the rubber bands and so on, took some considerable time, not least because the table they were sitting at turned out not to be big enough for the mountains of paper, not to mention the stack of CDs on which the music files were stored. They moved to the next table – the biggest one in the pub, capable of seating a party of ten – where Phil, Steve and Mr Serkis stared at the manuscript for some moments in stupefied silence.

  ‘Shit,’ said Steve, ‘I mean, I knew it was long, but …’

  ‘How did you manage it, Ben?’ Mr Serkis said. ‘Did you never think about just … stopping?’

  ‘I can’t stop,’ said Benjamin, simply, ‘until I’ve reached the end.’

  ‘Fair enough,’ said Steve.

  Shirley Bassey left the stage to prolonged applause, and was replaced by Kylie Minogue.

  ‘Now, what I did,�
�� Philip explained, ‘was that I asked Steve to read the personal material, and got Tom to read the political bits, and I listened to the music and tried to work out how it would all fit together.’

  ‘Sounds like a plan.’

  ‘Yes, well … Let’s see how everyone got on. Steve, what was your first impression?’

  ‘It’s too long,’ said Steve, without hesitation.

  ‘OK. Tom, what did you make of the –?’

  ‘It’s way too long,’ said Mr Serkis, without even waiting for the question to be finished.

  ‘Good,’ said Philip. ‘I can see a pattern emerging here. So that’s helpful. Now, when it comes to the musical side of things, that’s a bit more complicated. You see, I’m not quite sure …’ He paused and looked at Benjamin in an apologetic way. ‘… I’m not quite sure what function the music performs, in the overall scheme of things. Some of it felt a little bit … well, redundant.’

  The author/composer bristled, and said: ‘When you say some of it …?’

  ‘Well, I suppose what I really mean is … all of it.’

  ‘All the music?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Redundant?’

  ‘Redundant is a bit harsh, I know,’ said Philip, ‘but … but accurate in this context, I feel.’

  An uneasy hush fell over the table. On the television, Kylie Minogue was belting out ‘Can’t Get You Out of My Head’ with an energy that belied her forty-four years.

  Benjamin was silent for a long time, and then he blurted out:

  ‘Yes, you’re right. I know you’re right! The whole idea of combining music with printed words was ridiculous from the very start. I never thought it through, I never really asked myself what I was doing, I …’

  Without saying any more, he took the pile of CDs from the table and crammed them back into one of the hold-alls.

  ‘There. I feel better. We’ve got something simpler now. It’s just a book. It’s just a very, very long book.’

  ‘Too long,’ said Steve.

  ‘Too long,’ Benjamin agreed.

  ‘One way of making it shorter,’ Mr Serkis suggested, ‘would be to get rid of some of the political, historical stuff.’

  Benjamin considered this. He felt that his former teacher was not being entirely honest with him.

  ‘When you say some …’ he prompted.

  ‘I mean all of it. I mean, it’s interesting, and what have you, but … I didn’t feel it had that essential quality, that special something …’

  ‘You’re talking about half the book,’ Philip reminded him.

  ‘Yes. Well, we all agree that it’s too long.’

  ‘OK,’ said Benjamin grimly, and removed sections II, IV, VI, VIII, X, XII, XIV, XVI and XVIII from the table, stuffing the reams of paper back into the bags in which he’d brought them. The table was now only half-covered with printed pages, and the book suddenly looked much more manageable.

  ‘Right, Steve. Your thoughts.’

  ‘My thoughts. OK. Well, first off, I only had a week to do the reading, so I didn’t manage to read everything. But what I read I enjoyed. There were some great descriptive passages, and … well, Benjamin, you’re a very talented writer. But you don’t need me to tell you that.’

  ‘Thanks, Steve.’

  ‘What was weird about it, though, given what a talented writer you are, and how great some of the descriptive passages were, and all that … What was weird, I suppose, was how … well, how boring it was.’

  The longest and most shocked silence of all succeeded this remark. Nobody knew what to say, but they were all very aware of the sound of Elton John singing ‘I’m Still Standing’ outside Buckingham Palace.

  ‘Boring?’ said Benjamin at last, in a trembling voice. ‘OK. I wasn’t expecting that, but if that’s what you thought …’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong,’ said Steve. ‘I mean, there was one section I really enjoyed. The one about you and Cicely.’

  ‘Ah! Yes,’ said Philip. ‘I read that too. Now I really like that section. That was really written from the heart, I thought.’

  ‘You mean it wasn’t boring?’

  ‘The point is – well, this is the great story of your life, isn’t it, Ben? The great romance. How you met her at school, how you found her, how you lost her again, how she came looking for you years later … And the way you tell it – it’s in a different league to the rest of the book. The writing’s on another level altogether.’

  ‘But that’s only about two hundred pages out of the whole thing.’

  ‘True, but – you know, two hundred pages is a good length for a novel. Much better than five thousand.’

  The section in question was in a little pile of its own, at the corner of the table closest to Benjamin. He picked it up and flicked through the pages.

  ‘You’re saying that I should just keep this, and … junk the rest?’

  ‘I reckon you could get it published. I’m sure you could.’

  ‘But it’s not meant to be separate from the rest of the book. It doesn’t have its own title, or anything.’

  ‘I bet we could think of a title.’

  ‘That scene,’ said Steve, ‘when she’s been gone about three or four years and you buy that jazz record and you put it on and there’s a tune that makes you think of her. What’s it called? “A Rose Without a Thorn”. Now that’s beautiful.’

  ‘Steve’s right. There’s your title,’ said Philip.

  ‘Yes, that’s not bad …’ The more Benjamin thought about the idea – although he was too proud to admit this – the more he liked it. Maybe it had been the effort of carrying those two big bags full of paper from the car park to the pub, but he had a strong sense, right now, of this book as a physical burden, one which had been weighing him down for thirty years but which had tonight been miraculously lifted from his shoulders. It was almost too good to be true; which was perhaps why he kept thinking of objections. ‘But still, no one will ever want to publish it.’

  ‘I’ll publish it,’ said Philip.

  ‘You?’

  ‘Yes, me. I’m a publisher.’

  ‘I think I’d rather try a proper – I mean, a bigger publisher, first.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Philip. ‘Send it to Faber. Send it to Jonathan Cape. You’d be crazy not to. But then, if they don’t want it, I’ll publish it. It’s about time I published something decent.’

  Benjamin was moved by the generosity of this offer. ‘Would you do that?’ he said.

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Still, I’d rather it was a serious – I mean, one of the more established publishers.’

  ‘Sure. That goes without saying.’

  With the matter settled, they turned their attention to Paul McCartney, who was currently struggling his way through a rather approximate version of ‘Let It Be’ outside the palace gates. It was only a few minutes later that Philip realized Mr Serkis had taken little part in the final stages of the conversation.

  ‘So, do you agree with us, Tom? Do you think Benjamin should have a crack at getting just one part of it published?’

  ‘Well, I didn’t read that bit,’ he reminded them.

  ‘No, but you read a lot of the other sections.’

  ‘True,’ he said, ruefully.

  ‘So on the basis of that, do you have any advice?’

  ‘Do I have any advice for Ben, on the basis of what I read?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The song came to an end, the audience applauded, Mr Serkis furrowed his brow, chose his words with care, and turning to Benjamin said:

  ‘Have you ever thought of taking up teaching? It’s not too late, you know.’

  14.

  July 2012

  Sophie was sitting outside a bar in the Vieux Port, sipping her second glass of rosé – rendered rather anaemic by the ice cubes that had quickly melted in it – when her phone rang. It was Ian. For a moment she considered not answering. Then she remembered that she’d promised to call him as soon as she a
rrived and she’d forgotten and now she felt guilty. So she took the call.

  ‘Hi there,’ she said.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m at the Vieux Port, having a glass of wine.’

  ‘You got there OK, then? You said you were going to call.’

  ‘Yeah, I’m sorry, I forgot.’

  ‘I was worried.’

  ‘Well, if there had been a bomb on the plane it would have been on the news by now.’

  ‘I know. I was tracking your flight anyway, on FlightRadar.’

  ‘Aren’t you sweet to be so concerned.’

  ‘What’s your room like?’

  ‘It’s your typical student room.’

  ‘What’s Marseille like?’

  ‘I don’t know. All I’ve seen so far are the halls of residence and this bar. Which is very nice, I must say.’

  ‘I can hear music.’

  ‘Yeah, there are some guys with a beatbox rapping in the square about twenty yards away. I think it’s that sort of town.’