Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Have you eaten yet?’

  ‘Dinner’s at nine. There didn’t seem to be much going on so I thought I’d come here by myself for a drink first.’

  ‘Where are you eating?’

  ‘Some restaurant.’

  A beat.

  ‘I miss you.’

  ‘Me too,’ said Sophie. Because that, after all, was what you were supposed to say when your husband told you that he missed you.

  *

  The Quatorzième Colloque Annuel Alexandre Dumas was taking place in the third week of July at the university of Aix-Marseille. A call for papers had gone out twelve months earlier, and Sophie had submitted the chapter from her thesis about contemporary portraits of Dumas, without any expectation of it being accepted. But the organizer of the conference, François, had written back in his charmingly almost perfect English to say that ‘the objective of the conference this year is to be multidisciplinary as well as multilocational’, a statement which still puzzled her, in some respects. Anyway, her paper had been accepted, that was the important thing, and here she was, at her first international academic conference. What’s more, it was taking place on the Mediterranean coast, where the sun never stopped shining and the average daily temperature was 33 degrees Celsius, while England, even in July, continued to suffer from downpours so torrential that the Olympic torch relay had had to be halted during the final stages of its progress from Beijing to London.

  Dinner that Sunday evening was an al fresco affair at a restaurant on a steep, busy street leading up to the Cours Julien. They were a multinational and multilingual party, with French, German, Italian, Turkish, Iranian and Portuguese guests, and one American: a thoughtful, quietly spoken man from Chicago of around Sophie’s age. His name was Adam, his presence there was funded by a special fellowship for African-Americans and he turned out to be a musicologist working in the field of film music.

  ‘That’s interesting,’ she said, happy to find herself sitting next to him towards the end of the evening, when things were getting more informal and people had started to swap places. ‘So what’s the Dumas connection?’

  ‘It’s pretty tenuous,’ he admitted, ‘but I’m giving a paper on the different Three Musketeers scores. Hopefully these guys will see it as a bit of light relief.’

  ‘Sounds great. I hope there’ll be plenty of clips. Which one’s your favourite, by the way?’

  ‘No spoilers,’ he said. ‘If I told you that, you’d have no reason to turn up and listen.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll be there,’ said Sophie. ‘It’s obviously going to be the highlight of the week.’

  Afterwards, she reflected that this was a vacuous thing to say, not least because it sounded sarcastic when it wasn’t meant to be. But Adam didn’t seem to mind, or even notice, so she didn’t let it trouble her for long. Already she was high on the warm air, the good food and, most of all, the sheer relief at having left the leaden skies of England behind for a few days.

  *

  Sophie’s paper was only the second to be delivered, late on Monday morning. The venue was the Espace Fernand Pouillon on the main university campus, right next to the railway station. She could see at once that this was going to be a tight, well-run conference. She spoke in English, with a scrolling French translation of her paper projected on to the screen behind her. She spoke for an hour on William Henry Powell’s portrait of Dumas. The audience’s questions afterwards were thoughtful, engaged and numerous: they spilled over into lunch, and for a while Sophie was buoyed up by a feeling of success, and by the enthusiasm of her fellow scholars.

  By the middle of the next afternoon, however, she realized that she had already started to feel out of place among this gathering of Dumas experts, not to say fanatics. She remembered that there was, after all, a reason she had decided to have no more academic boyfriends: that habit of focusing obsessively on one subject and letting the rest of the world go unremarked and unnoticed. And Dumas, it turned out, gave plenty of scope for obsession: Sophie had not quite appreciated the energy and productivity of the man, the hundreds of novels, the millions of words, the ‘assistant authors’ hired to help with the writing of books, the altogether industrial scale of production. All she had read, herself, was The Count of Monte Cristo and (many years ago) about half of The Three Musketeers. Most of the papers, naturally enough, were focused on the writing, and concerned texts that she was not familiar with, and over breakfast, lunch and dinner, the conversation tended to be Dumas, Dumas and Dumas. On Tuesday, halfway through a desperately dry presentation on the plays (which nobody seemed to read these days anyway) she decided that she would skip the rest of the afternoon and explore the city by herself.

  She understood, now, what François had meant when he described it as a ‘multilocational’ conference. The intention, as he had explained to everyone over dinner on Sunday, was not to be confined by the Marseille campus but to make the impact of the conference felt throughout the city and indeed throughout the region. Adam’s talk on film music, for instance, would take place in the Conservatoire at Aix-en-Provence, half an hour away. Thursday’s keynote lecture, which was about Dumas’s concept of imprisonment, would be given at the Château d’If, in the very cell where the writer had imagined the confinement of Edmond Dantès. And Tuesday’s sessions were taking place at an arts centre called La Friche La Belle de Mai, housed in a former tobacco factory in the third arrondissement. Slipping out of the lecture theatre in the midst of an interminable summary of the plot of Charles VII chez ses grands vassaux, Sophie stood for a moment blinking in the fierce sunlight of the courtyard. Her first impulse was to phone Ian. She thought of him as her antidote to this pinched, airless academic universe, and suddenly craved even a few minutes of normal conversation with him: but there was no answer from his phone. No matter – she was on her own for the rest of afternoon, and that was fine in itself. She browsed in the bookshop for a while, went outside to watch half a dozen guys going through their paces in the skateboard park, and then visited one of the exhibition rooms, to lose herself in a series of panoramic, sharp-focus, black-and-white photos of Beirut cityscapes.

  After passing a couple of hours at La Friche in this way, she took a bus back downtown, along La Canebière, and then, getting out at the Noailles Metro stop, she wandered uphill through the Marché des Capucins, strolling at random through these narrow, intersecting streets, each one filled with shops selling every kind of French and African food, the air filled with the tantalizing aroma of familiar and unfamiliar spices. The streets were crowded with shoppers, and Sophie could see that the heady mixture of cultures that gave London its modern character was to be found here in even denser, more concentrated form. She loved it. She felt that she could lose herself in this city.

  *

  The next morning, she had promised Adam that she would be there for his talk on film music. The organizers had chartered a coach which drove them along the motorway to Aix, and then to the Conservatoire Darius Milhaud, a handsome, restful building named after the region’s most famous composer, which stood in the Rue Joseph Cabassol. Adam’s paper, illustrated with music and film clips, was clever and engaging, although she heard mutterings from some of the more hardcore Dumas scholars that it wasn’t sufficiently on-topic for their taste. During some of the more analytical passages, it’s true, he lost her, but there was something soothing and attractive about his accent, so from time to time she drifted off and just focused on that. And she enjoyed the big, semi-serious reveal at the end, in which Adam argued that the most sophisticated and experimental music composed for any of the Dumas screen adaptations, in his opinion, was Scott Bradley’s score for The Two Mouseketeers, a Tom and Jerry short from the 1950s.

  Afterwards, bent on an early lunch, most of the delegates hurried off up the road in search of the restaurant François had booked. But Sophie needed the toilet, and when she came out everyone had gone: everyone except Adam, who was standing in the hallway talking to one of the young teachers at the Conserv
atoire.

  ‘That was great,’ Sophie said, breaking in on a pause in their conversation. ‘I really learned a lot. Thank you.’

  But Adam was interested in something else altogether.

  ‘This piano,’ he said, indicating a rosewood grand standing in a corner of the hallway, ‘is actually Milhaud’s piano, can you believe that?’

  Sophie had at least heard of Darius Milhaud, since he was the kind of composer her uncle Benjamin was always enthusing about, but she didn’t know anything about him and couldn’t quite match Adam’s excitement.

  ‘Can I really play it?’ he said to the teacher.

  ‘Yes, of course. Be our guest.’

  He sat down on the stool and raised the lid and said: ‘Is it specially tuned to play in two keys at once?’ The teacher laughed; Sophie didn’t. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Musicologist’s joke.’ And then he started to play. He was improvising, it seemed: plangent, bittersweet chords which made Sophie think of Ravel and Debussy and late-night cocktail bars. She drifted over to the doorway while he played, looking out at the street, the yellow-stone buildings in the morning sunlight. Aix was very different to Marseille: quiet, prosperous, calming; perhaps a little complacent. Opposite the Conservatoire was a shop selling English-language books: its sign was a teapot painted like a Union Jack. Sophie wandered over and looked in the window. Adam’s music still floated out from the open doorway into the street. She could hear it quite clearly. Then it stopped and she heard him thanking the teacher and saying goodbye and then he was beside her.

  ‘Beautiful,’ she said, turning to him. ‘I was listening to it out here. You play so nicely.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said, but with the shyness – or modesty – that she was beginning to realize was typical of him, he didn’t know what to do with the compliment. ‘Nice bookshop – shall we go inside?’

  Afterwards, Sophie could never quite decide what it was that gave the next few minutes such a special quality in her memory. Perhaps it was the atmosphere in the bookshop, which was so serene and other-worldly, and where they were the only customers. Perhaps it was because there were few things so intimate, to her mind, as two people browsing among books together. Perhaps it was the watchful, smiling attention of the woman behind the counter, who greeted them so politely, in such good English, and seemed to assume that they were a couple. Perhaps it was because, when she picked up a copy of The Twilight of Otters, by Lionel Hampshire, and said to Adam, ‘My God, he gets everywhere,’ it didn’t matter that he didn’t see the joke, and he laughed anyway. Perhaps it was because, when he picked up a book by an American writer whose name she’d never heard and said, ‘My father wrote this,’ it made perfect sense that he should be a writer’s son. Whatever the reason, once Sophie had bought the book, and they had said goodbye to the bookshop owner, whose eyes shone knowingly at them from behind strands of chestnut hair, and they were back in the street and walking towards the restaurant, something had changed between them; some almost imperceptible shift in their centre of gravity.

  *

  Sophie avoided Adam for the next day and a half, and spent that time alone, discovering more of Marseille, venturing into the coastal enclaves of Malmousque and the Vallon des Auffes, and spending three or four hours in the rough-cast concrete sanctuary of La Cité Radieuse, the most famous of Le Corbusier’s apartment buildings. (She had a soft spot for Brutalist architecture, and while she was excited – like everyone else – to see the new Library of Birmingham taking shape, she hoped that John Madin’s Central Library, a 1970s masterpiece, would be spared the wrecker’s ball.) She did not rejoin the conference again until Thursday afternoon, which was the time for their journey to the Château d’If. It was hotter than ever – thirty-six degrees – and the reflections from the sun on the waters of the Vieux Port were dazzling. The sea trip took little more than twenty minutes: they chugged slowly out of the Vieux Port at first, past the Fort Saint-Jean and the huge waterside building site where the new, ultra-modernist Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations was nearing completion, and then picked up speed as they made for the island of If itself, passing massive cruise ships from all over the world moored in the harbour for the day, and pleasure-seekers crossing their path in speed boats and on jet skis: for this was the height of the tourist season, and Sophie had the strange, disorientating sense of being at work (of sorts) among holidaymakers. The crossing was calm, and as the chateau came into closer view, she found that it was hard to imagine it as a strategic fortress, or – as it had been later in its life – a brutal and inescapable site of incarceration. Today, its turrets and battlements baked creamy white by the Mediterranean sun, it looked wholly benign and welcoming. A tourist attraction, and an impossibly beautiful one.

  The view of the chateau as they approached it, however, had not prepared her for the views that the chateau, in turn, would offer of the city and the coastline once you had climbed the steep spiral stairs to the rooftop terrace. Sophie saw the whole of Marseille spread out before her, the jumble of ancient and modern buildings, the sprawl of apartment blocks to the west, the verdant wilderness and vertiginous cliffs of the Calanques to the east, and, watching over it all, the commanding tower of the Basilique Notre-Dame. Between the chateau and this vista stretched the ocean, rolling gently, sparkling beneath the sun, a rich, flawless ultramarine to its very depths. And all of this was bathed in light: yes – that, she realized, was what they were missing in England, that was the factor that made everything here seem so vivid, so sensual, so full of energy, so ineluctably alive. What a pinched, miserable existence they all seemed to live by comparison, back in the country she was obliged to call home. From Marseille to Birmingham, Marseille to Kernel Magna: these places didn’t seem to belong to different countries, or even different planets, they seemed to belong to different orders of existence altogether. This light was making her feel alive in a way that she hadn’t felt for years: perhaps since she was a child. Her colleagues on the terrace were all busy taking photographs from every different angle and every different vantage point, but Sophie knew there was nothing to be gained from this, and she kept her phone in her bag. No arrangement of pixels was going to capture the emotion of this moment, this utterly new, intense sensation of livingness.

  The chateau closed to the public at five thirty: they had been granted unique and, she imagined, unprecedented access for two further hours. At six o’clock, while the tourists were gathering on the jetty for the last return boat to Marseille, they made their way to the cell on the ground floor which had been named after Edmond Dantès, Dumas’s unfortunate hero. It was a deep but oddly spacious stone-flagged room, with a fine ray of sunlight streaming in from a window high up in the wall. Here the keynote speaker, Guillaume, had set up his PowerPoint presentation, and he spoke for rather more than an hour on L’Incarcération comme métaphore de la paralysie psychologique. Sophie enjoyed his talk and was impressed by it, but she was impatient to leave the cell and get out again: out into the evening light.

  At seven thirty they were offered a choice. The boat would take them back to Marseille and to the restaurant which had been booked for them that evening; but it could also detour to the other islands in the Frioul archipelago, just a few hundred yards away across the water. If anybody wanted to disembark at the port on Ratonneau, they were free to do so, and could then take one of the public boats back to the city later in the evening.

  Most people chose to return to Marseille at once; they were fired up by Guillaume’s paper and couldn’t wait to discuss it over dinner. Sophie, Adam and three of the others, however, were curious to visit these other islands, and so they were deposited there a few minutes later.

  The islands of Ratonneau and Pomègues were linked by a long stone causeway, adjacent to the little port where they disembarked, on a quayside which was lined with shops and bars. It was for one of these bars that the others made at once, wanting nothing more than to enjoy a drink outside as the evening air finally started to cool. />
  ‘What do you think?’ said Sophie. ‘Shall we join them?’

  ‘I don’t know …’ said Adam. ‘I feel like a walk. Isn’t there meant to be a beach near here somewhere?’

  They consulted a map on the harbourside wall and then set off along a flat, dusty road that led away from the port and towards the Calanque de Morgiret. Clearly they were going against the tide of visitors, because a continual stream of people – couples, family groups, noisy parties of young men – walked past them in the opposite direction, carrying towels and beach bags. Ratonneau was a rocky island, the landscape so starved of vegetation that it appeared almost lunar. Before long the dust made Sophie’s throat feel dry and ticklish, and the heat was intense even this late in the day. But it only took a few minutes to walk to the little pebbly beach, where a few people were still swimming or snorkelling in the warm, turquoise water.

  ‘Shame we didn’t bring swimsuits,’ said Adam, looking out at the sea from the escarpment above the beach, and shielding his eyes against the low beams of the setting sun.

  ‘I was just thinking that,’ said Sophie, although part of her was relieved: she was acutely conscious of the paleness of her own body beneath her lightweight summer dress.

  They walked a little further, up a steep, winding path which led them to a stony ridge high above the beach. Even this walk was tiring, so they found a flat rock by the side of the path and sat down eagerly, thankful that, up here at least, the hint of a sea breeze made the heat more tolerable.

  After a long, companionable silence, Sophie said: ‘I started to read your dad’s book.’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Very nice. It has a bit of an Updike feel to it.’

  ‘A few people have said that. He doesn’t like Updike.’ He smiled. ‘But at least he’d be pleased you weren’t comparing him to James Baldwin. The truth is, my father’s the kind of guy who can take any compliment and turn it into an insult. I wouldn’t describe him as an easy person to be around.’