Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Mike Oldfield!’ he shouted, spilling rice all over the carpet. ‘That’s Mike Oldfield there! This is Tubular Bells!’

  He took out his phone and hurried over to a quieter corner of the room and called Benjamin. When the phone was answered Philip could hear music in the background but it was different music, something anguished and discordant. A string quartet by the sound of it.

  ‘Aren’t you watching it?’ he said.

  ‘Watching what?’ said Benjamin.

  ‘The Olympic opening ceremony.’

  ‘Is that tonight?’

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake. Turn the telly on.’

  ‘No, I don’t fancy it. I’m working tonight.’

  ‘Don’t argue. Turn it on now.’

  Benjamin paused, impressed by the urgency in Philip’s voice. ‘Well, all right, then.’

  Philip could hear the string quartet being turned off and the television being turned on. A few seconds later Benjamin said:

  ‘Blimey, is that Mike Oldfield?’

  ‘Exactly. Mike Oldfield. Mike Oldfield!’

  ‘What’s he doing there?’

  ‘He’s playing Tubular Bells, what does it sound like?’

  ‘But why?’

  ‘Because finally – finally – someone has realized what a genius he is. A great British composer! We were right all along!’ Benjamin could hear the triumphant smile in his friend’s voice. ‘OK, I’m going now. Keep watching the rest of the ceremony – it’s amazing.’

  Putting his phone down on the arm of the sofa, Benjamin sat in front of the TV and glanced briefly at the strange scene that was unfolding there. A whole lot of people in nurses’ uniforms and children in pyjamas were bouncing up and down on giant beds as if they were trampolines while Tubular Bells continued to play in the background. Most viewers of the ceremony could have told him that this section was meant to be a celebration of the NHS; and in fact Benjamin could probably have worked that out for himself if he had been concentrating, but he wasn’t. He was thinking back to the mid-1970s, a couple of years after Mike Oldfield’s album had been released, how he and his friends used to listen to it in the common room at King William’s School and have endless nerdy discussions about it. Doug, who at this time was listening mainly to Motown, would not attempt to hide his disdain. To the rest of them, however, it was a sacred musical text. He remembered one lunchtime – yes, it was amazing how these images came back to you sometimes, with razor-sharp clarity, something almost Proustian about it, no doubt it was the music on TV that was providing the trigger – anyway, he and Harding were listening to Tubular Bells, this very section in fact, these opening minutes – and they got involved in some stupid argument about the time signature: Benjamin could remember it now, Harding insisting there was nothing strange about it, it was just in normal common time, and Benjamin insisting, No, you’re not listening carefully enough, it’s in 15/8, and then Philip chipping in and saying, Actually, no, it isn’t as complicated as that, there’s just a beat missing from the second bar in every four-bar phrase, so it goes 4/4 – 3/4 – 4/4 – 4/4, and Yes, that did mean it was in patterns of fifteen beats, but that didn’t mean it was in 15/8, that wasn’t the same thing, but then Harding said they were both idiots, they didn’t know what they were talking about – he was always, Benjamin realized now, just trying to stir things up, just trying to cause trouble – so in the end they took the record to the head of music, Mr Sill, and he listened to it and gave a different answer altogether, something even more complicated, and then he’d taken out some more records and got them to identify the time signatures, starting with ‘Mars, the Bringer of War’ by Holst (5/4) and then moving on to The Rite of Spring, and they’d spent the whole of the rest of the lunch break like that …

  Good times, Benjamin thought. Happy times.

  Back in London, the NHS section of the ceremony came to an end but Benjamin failed to notice, as his television flickered quietly in the background and he stared out towards the river, a beatific, reminiscent smile on his face.

  *

  ‘That’s Simon Rattle, isn’t it?’ said Christopher, as the eminent conductor strode into the centre of the Olympic stadium.

  ‘Uh-huh,’ said Lois, looking up briefly from the tapestry she only ever did when she was on holiday, which had never been finished and never would be finished. She didn’t look up again until she heard her husband laughing. ‘What’s so funny?’

  ‘Look – Mr Bean.’

  Simon Rattle was conducting an orchestra as it played the theme tune from Chariots of Fire (another victory for Philip’s teenage tastes, as he had also been a Vangelis fan back in the seventies) while Rowan Atkinson, saddled with the task of playing a single note over and over on an electric keyboard, was acting out a diverting mime of boredom and frustration.

  ‘I wonder why they decided to have him?’

  ‘Quite a clever idea, actually,’ said Christopher. ‘The whole world loves Mr Bean.’

  ‘Really?’ said Lois, going back to her tapestry.

  ‘Don’t you remember, that time we were in Arezzo, and we walked past the theatre, and they had a Mr Bean impersonator on?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘And I said – look, that’s how popular he is, over here. They even have people impersonating him.’

  ‘I don’t remember that at all.’

  ‘It was in Arezzo. Three years ago.’

  ‘Sorry,’ said Lois, holding the tapestry away from her and regarding it critically. Something was not quite right with the last colour she’d chosen. ‘I’ve got no recollection of that conversation.’

  Christopher sighed, ‘Of course not. You never remember anything that I say.’

  He leaned across and kissed her on the cheek, out of habit, out of resignation. Lois smiled thinly but she didn’t return the kiss.

  *

  Coriander had grown restless during the Mr Bean section and had wandered downstairs to see what her father was doing. She found him on the sofa in the main sitting room with a can of lager in his hand and, to her amazement, faint traces of a tear running down one cheek. She had never seen anything like this before.

  ‘Dad?’ she sat down beside him. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, wiping his eyes. ‘This is so embarrassing. But I’m loving this. I’m loving every minute of it. Go and fetch your mother. She should be watching it too.’

  Coriander stared at him. ‘What do you mean? Of course she’s watching it. She’s there.’

  ‘She is?’

  ‘She’s in the VIP section. I saw her earlier, sitting next to Bryan Ferry.’

  Doug was briefly surprised by this information, although it made perfect sense when he thought about it.

  ‘How are you two still together?’ his daughter asked. ‘I’ve never known people so bad at communicating with each other.’

  ‘True. If we lived in a smaller house,’ said Doug, ‘I’m sure we’d have got divorced by now.’

  ‘Well, I wish you would,’ said Coriander. ‘It’s so lame, having parents who’ve been together as long as you two.’

  Doug wasn’t sure if she was joking or not. He was pleased, anyway, when she settled down on the sofa next to him.

  The ceremony had now moved on to a section called ‘Frankie and June say … thanks, Tim!’, which seemed to be a strange, near-incomprehensible mash-up of British musical and film references. (‘A Matter of Life and Death!’, Sophie texted to Sohan. ‘The Wicker Man!’ he texted back.) Threading it together was some kind of love story about two teenagers meeting each other and communicating via social media while they travelled on the London Underground. It was all very confusing, but exhilarating too, and the best part of it was just trying to identify all the songs. Doug was amazed by how many of these his daughter seemed to know. She recognized The Jam, The Who, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and Frankie Goes To Hollywood, as well as the ones he would have expected her to know like Amy Winehouse and Dizzee Rascal. She didn’t unde
rstand the TV clip of two women kissing and he explained it was from a soap opera called Brookside, and it had been one of the first kisses between two women to be shown on mainstream national TV and it was amazing that Britain was now using it to proudly show the whole world how enlightened and progressive it was. ‘This is being watched in Saudi Arabia, you know,’ he said, and Coriander had to admit that was incredibly cool and felt a little tingle of excitement as she realized it.

  ‘But who’s he?’ she said, as the roof was lifted off the set of a gigantic house in the middle of the stadium, to reveal an ordinary, boring-looking, middle-aged man sitting at a desk tapping away at a computer keyboard, while the phrase THIS IS FOR EVERYONE flashed up on screens and monitors all around him.

  ‘That’s Tim Berners-Lee.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘He invented the internet.’

  ‘What? The British invented the internet?’

  ‘In a way, yes. At least, he did.’

  ‘That’s amazing,’ said Coriander. She took out her BlackBerry and took a picture of the image on the screen, then wrote I come from an awesome country and tweeted it to all 379 of her followers.

  *

  The creative part of the ceremony was over. Now it was time for all the competing athletes to parade through the stadium, and that threatened to go on for ninety minutes at least. The viewers dispersed.

  Sophie and Ian went to bed. They hadn’t made love for almost a week. They made up for it tonight. Ian fantasized that he was James Bond making love to the beautiful dancing teenager from the ‘Frankie and June’ section.

  Colin fell asleep on the sofa, then woke up at 3 a.m., confused, and dragged himself up the stairs to bed.

  Helena sat up until 1 a.m., writing a letter to the Telegraph complaining about the ceremony’s left-wing bias, but it was five hundred words long so unsurprisingly it never got published.

  The Chases were on such a high after the ceremony that Philip went online and immediately bought four of the few remaining tickets for one of the athletic events, followed by four return train tickets to London, which turned out to be phenomenally expensive.

  Sohan did some research online about Humphrey Jennings and Michael Powell before changing his clothes, having a shave and going out to a club at twelve thirty. The night was still young and full of possibilities.

  Christopher made two mugs of hot chocolate, and took his up to bed. Lois joined him ninety minutes later, by which time she judged he would be safely asleep.

  Doug started writing his column. He showed Coriander the first two paragraphs and asked her what she thought. She said: ‘They’re shit.’ After that, she sat down at the desk beside him and they wrote the rest of the column together.

  As it was a warm night, Benjamin went out to sit on his terrace, taking a glass of cold white wine with him. He was feeling happy. Work on the pared-down version of his novel was finished. The text – a lightly fictionalized account of his relationship with Cicely, entitled A Rose Without a Thorn – was ready to be sent off to publishers now. To celebrate, Benjamin turned on his portable speakers and scrolled his iPod wheel to the piece of music that had inspired it and given him the title: a brooding, passionate duet between the jazz pianist Stan Tracey and the saxophonist Tony Coe, recorded in 1983. He turned it up loud. He could listen to music as loud as he wanted here, and as late as he wanted. But when it was over he felt a kind of relief, and realized that he much preferred the silence. The silence of England sinking into a deep, satisfied sleep, the kind of sleep you enjoy after throwing a successful party, when all the guests have gone home and you know that there is no need to get up early in the morning. England felt like a calm and settled place tonight: a country at ease with itself. The thought that so many millions of disparate people had been united, drawn together by a television broadcast, made him think of his childhood again, and made him smile. All was well. And the river seemed to agree with him: the river that was the only thing still to disturb the silence, proceeding on its timeless course, bubbling and rippling tonight, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily.

  DEEP ENGLAND

  * * *

  ‘To the privileged, equality feels like a step down. Understand this and you understand a lot of populist politics today.’

  İyad el-Baghdadi, Twitter, 1:36 p.m., 25 July 2016

  16.

  August 2014

  ‘Well,’ said Sohan. ‘Congratulations.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sophie.

  They clinked glasses and drank the champagne, which wasn’t anything special. Sohan – who was paying – reflected momentarily on the price, which was very special indeed.

  ‘What are we celebrating, anyway?’ Sophie asked.

  ‘You.’

  ‘Me? What about me?’

  ‘Everything about you. Your glorious rise to fame.’

  Sophie smiled. ‘A slight exaggeration, I think.’

  Glasses in hand, they moved away from the bar and began to stroll slowly around the observation deck. Beneath them lay London, languid and supine in the early-summer evening heat. The Thames stretched and wound like a vast filthy ribbon, dwindling eventually into a pinpoint of light glimmering through the smog on the eastern horizon.

  ‘Your town,’ said Sophie, coming up close beside him and putting her arm through his, as they both peered down through the floor-to-ceiling glass of the Shard’s viewing platform at the buildings more than two hundred metres below: the tower blocks, the former council flats, the new-builds, the occasional relic of Hawksmoor’s London peeping through the grey modern jumble.

  ‘Mine? Not really. London doesn’t belong to Londoners any more.’

  ‘Then who does it belong to?’

  ‘Foreigners, mainly. Real foreigners.’ Sophie gave him a sceptical look, so he added: ‘This building where we’re standing. London’s latest star attraction. You think it’s British? Ninety-five per cent of it is owned by the state of Qatar. The same goes for half those glittery new office blocks you can see from here. Those towers full of luxury riverside apartments. To say nothing of Harrods, that most wonderful old English institution. We’ve been selling ourselves off for years. Walk anywhere in central London these days and the chances are you’re treading on foreign soil.’

  With a small but vocal band of young Spanish tourists pressing in on them, taking excited pictures and videos of the cityscape with their phones, Sophie and Sohan moved on, walking around the perimeter of the platform to get a different view of the capital. St Paul’s Cathedral looked tiny and vulnerable from here, struggling to assert any kind of identity in the face of the modernist, Brutalist and post-modernist creations which had so recently sprung up around it.

  ‘And is that the Olympic stadium?’ Sophie asked, pointing towards a distant circle of white, like a giant polo mint dropped unceremoniously into the middle of the old East End.

  ‘It is.’ Sohan took another sip from his champagne flute, and said: ‘God, doesn’t it seem like a long time ago, all that? Remember how sceptical we all were at first, and then how excited we all got for about five minutes? I mean, I actually bought tickets for one of the events after that ceremony. A sporting event. Me! Watching sport!’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Women’s football.’ Sophie laughed, and he explained, defensively: ‘It was the only thing that wasn’t sold out. I know, it was a completely stupid idea. I don’t like football and I don’t even like women all that much. Present company excepted. I had this foolish notion that I could turn it into a kind of date. I took this guy called Jeremy with me. That was the kiss of death for that relationship, anyway …’

  ‘What were you thinking? Hardly a candlelit dinner for two, was it?’ She put a consoling arm around his shoulder. ‘I hope there’ve been some others since then.’

  ‘Sure. Plenty. But no one I really liked and … well, no one at all for a couple of months.’ He took a longer than usual sip of the champagne. ‘Of course, I’m grateful to Mr Cameron that we can get
married now. In fact it’s the only thing I’m grateful to him for. But I’m beginning to think there’s probably no one out there for me. Getting pretty sure of it, actually.’

  ‘Well,’ said Sophie. ‘I never thought you were the type to settle down anyway.’

  ‘I never thought so either. But now that you and Ian have set such an amazing example of married bliss …’

  She was pleased to see the glint return to his eye, and to hear the ironic undertone return to his voice; and yet, at the same time, there was something about this jibe that annoyed her.

  ‘As a matter of fact,’ she said, ‘we’re very happy.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it for a moment.’

  And it was more or less true. After the first few, slightly wobbly months their marriage had settled into a routine, a pattern of habits. On Mondays and Fridays Sophie would work either at home or in the recently opened Library of Birmingham. If she was home, Ian would come back between morning and afternoon classes and they would have lunch together. The other days of the week, she went in to the university. On Saturdays he would go to the Villa match with Simon or watch sport at home, and on Sundays they would visit his mother. It was comfortable, it was pleasant, and Sophie was determined to be satisfied with it. And if ever she felt that married life was falling ever so slightly short of expectations (as she sometimes – very occasionally – did, in the still, dark hours of a winter morning, when she had woken early and Ian was still asleep, breathing evenly beside her, her thoughts starting to wander in hazardous, unpredictable directions), she had the consolation of knowing that her career was progressing nicely, one small step at a time. Her thesis had been published. The chapter on Powell’s portrait of Dumas, which had also appeared separately in an issue of the Oxford Art Journal, had caught the attention of a Radio Four producer, who had invited her on to an early-evening discussion show. She’d handled the programme well and further invitations had followed: some of them from academia, some from the more highbrow end of the media (broadsheet arts pages, mainly, clinging on to their precarious existence for dear life). And more recently, she had received the most unexpected invitation of all: a request to appear as guest lecturer on a ten-day cruise of the Baltic, setting sail from Dover the day after tomorrow.