Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘She’s good,’ Philip admitted, ‘I’ll give her that. Talk about turning base metal into gold.’

  ‘Whose side are you on? She also makes out that I’m a snob – ditching my old primary-school friends when I got into King William’s.’

  ‘Ah, nobody will care about that,’ said Philip. Then added, less reassuringly: ‘I’d be more worried that you come off as a bit of a racist, to be honest.’

  Benjamin stared at him.

  ‘I mean, is this really what you said?’ Philip again took the newspaper from his friend’s quivering hands: ‘ “From the comfort of his riverside retreat in the heart of the English countryside, Trotter declares that ‘Multiculturalism is an urban phenomenon. I left London to get away from all that.’ ” ’

  Benjamin spluttered with outrage. ‘I said something like that, yes. But there was all sorts of stuff in between, about how I wanted to get away from the noise and the crowds and the stress.’

  ‘Selective quotation is a beautiful thing. “I point out that BAME writers are more strongly represented on this year’s list than ever before, and hint that this is something we should be cheering on, to which Trotter’s only response is: ‘I’m the real outsider.’ ” ’

  Again, Benjamin was incoherent with rage. ‘ “A” real outsider. “A”. Indefinite article, not definite. And I was talking about publishing. I was talking about the fact that I got dozens of rejections so I ended up being published by you.’

  Philip laid the newspaper down and shook his head. ‘Well, sales are still holding up, so no harm done.’

  ‘But she seemed so nice. By the end, we were getting on really well. I was giving her career advice and everything, and she said, “We’ll be in touch,” or something like that …’

  ‘Pretty, was she?’

  Benjamin didn’t see any point in dissembling. ‘I suppose she was pretty, yes.’

  ‘Oh, Ben … Just put it down to experience. It was your first interview, after all.’

  ‘True. When’s the other one, by the way?’

  ‘The other one?’

  ‘Wasn’t there supposed to be another one?’

  ‘Oh, they never followed up on that. I called them back a couple of times but … I think that’s gone cold.’

  ‘Great.’ Benjamin hunched over his cappuccino and stared gloomily ahead of him.

  ‘On the other hand –’ Philip reached into his pocket and pulled out a handwritten envelope ‘– you do have a fan letter. At least I assume it’s a fan letter.’

  He passed it over to Benjamin, who submitted it to wary inspection, examining the front and the back, the handwriting and the postcode, until Philip said: ‘Just open the thing, for Christ’s sake.’

  Benjamin tore the envelope open with his forefinger, read the first couple of sentences and then flipped the letter over to look at the signature.

  ‘Jesus,’ he said. ‘You’ll never guess who this is from.’

  Philip wasn’t even going to try.

  ‘It’s from Jennifer Hawkins.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You remember Jennifer Hawkins. She was at the Girls’ School. I went out with her for a while.’

  ‘Her? You mean … that Jennifer Hawkins? The one in the wardrobe?’

  ‘Exactly. The wardrobe.’

  Many years earlier, when he was still a schoolboy, Benjamin had attended a party thrown by Doug while his parents were away on holiday. He had blacked out at some point during the evening after drinking three-quarters of a bottle of port, and had woken up just before dawn inside a wardrobe, entwined with the body of a half-naked girl who subsequently turned out to be the aforementioned Jennifer Hawkins. Gallantly, having interpreted their drunken teenage gropings as some sort of betrothal ceremony, Benjamin had asked her out on a date, and for a few weeks after that they had actually considered themselves boyfriend and girlfriend – although the relationship had fizzled out soon enough.

  ‘Well!’ Phil was grinning broadly. ‘Now there’s a blast from the past. What does she say?’

  Benjamin scanned the letter with quick eye movements. ‘She saw my name in the paper when the longlist was announced,’ he said. ‘It brought back a lot of memories. She bought the book and she really liked it.’

  ‘Does she say where she bought it?’ Philip asked.

  ‘Yes. In a garden centre just outside Kidderminster. Now she works for an estate agent. Manages one of the local branches. She’s –’ he turned the page, saw what the next word was and pronounced it with great emphasis ‘– divorced …’ (There was a pause while his eyes met with Philip’s, and they digested the implications of this.) ‘… and she wonders whether I’d like to meet up for dinner, to catch up and talk about the quote good old days unquote. Love, Jennifer. Kiss kiss.’

  He looked up at Philip, whose smile had grown broader still.

  ‘There you are, then – Doug was right. Women are throwing themselves at you now! They can’t resist a successful writer.’

  ‘Very funny. There’s just one problem. Going out with Jennifer was one of the worst decisions I’ve ever made.’

  ‘And you’ve made a few shockers, let’s face it.’

  Benjamin took this blow on the chin. ‘Fair enough. So I’m not about to repeat that one. No way in hell am I meeting Jennifer Hawkins for dinner.’

  He took a big, angry sip of cappuccino to drive the point home, and scalded his tongue.

  25.

  Two weeks later, he met Jennifer Hawkins for dinner. She lived in Hagley, these days, about thirty miles from Benjamin’s house, so they compromised by meeting in a pub in Bridgnorth which was rumoured to serve good food.

  As with Charlie Chappell, Benjamin was not convinced that he would have recognized Jennifer if they had met by chance. She was elegant, well-dressed, attractive – definitely looking good (better than he was) for someone in her mid-fifties – but at first he could see no connection between the woman he was talking to and the teenage girl with whom he’d once been so intimate, with whom he’d shared so many awkward summer evenings drinking in The Grapevine, and who had dragged him out to see Star Wars (a film he’d hated ever since) at the cinema on her birthday. He could never have picked the middle-aged Jennifer out in a crowd, and for the first few minutes he had the weird sensation of being in conversation with a complete stranger. The feeling persisted until she said, ‘Do you remember how I used to call you “Tiger”?’, and he recalled, with a jolt, that this had indeed been her ironic nickname for him, and he was at once both embarrassed and pleased by the reminder, and he began to settle into a reminiscent mode, which made him think that this reunion was not going to be so painful after all.

  ‘It was good of you to put up with me at all, now that I look back on it,’ he said. ‘You must have thought I was such a fool.’

  ‘Not a fool,’ she said. ‘You were never a fool, Benjamin. A bit immature, maybe. But boys don’t grow up as quickly as girls, everybody knows that.’

  She drank some red wine from a large glass that was already half-empty. She had come to the pub by taxi. Benjamin had come in his own car, so he was having to be more careful with the wine.

  ‘Do you remember the last time we met?’ she asked. ‘Do you remember what I said to you?’

  ‘Not really,’ said Benjamin. ‘I expect it was in The Grapevine, was it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jennifer. She had a strong Birmingham accent – how had he never noticed that before? ‘It was late August 1978.’

  ‘That’s very precise.’

  ‘I was keeping a diary at the time. It was just after our A-level results came out.’

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘You got four As.’

  ‘That’s right. How did you do?’

  Jennifer laughed and said: ‘Well, it’s very nice of you to ask, Benjamin, thirty-seven years after the event, because you didn’t ask me at the time. I got two Bs and a C, if you’re still interested.’

  ‘Congratulations,’ he found himse
lf saying, absurdly.

  ‘Thank you. You’d invited me out for a drink in order to dump me, as you may recall.’

  ‘Really?’ said Benjamin, shifting more and more uncomfortably in his seat.

  ‘Don’t worry – I was quite ready and willing to be dumped. I was surprised that it hadn’t happened already, in fact. Of course, the fact that you were throwing me over for Cicely Boyd was just the icing on the cake. Don’t you remember how I reacted when you told me?’

  ‘Well, if you’d poured a glass of beer over my head I would probably have remembered, but I expect it was something along those lines.’

  ‘Not really. Don’t you remember? I was horrified. I warned you, Benjamin. I warned you what she was like. She chews people up and spits them out, I said. And you didn’t listen, did you? That little crush buggered up your life for … what, the next three decades?’

  ‘Pretty much.’

  ‘Well, you got a book out of it, I suppose. Was it worth it?’

  Benjamin couldn’t think of any simple way to answer that question. As it happened he had thought long and hard, over the years, about the relationship between human suffering and the art it might inspire, but he didn’t suppose that Jennifer was really looking for a disquisition on that subject right now.

  ‘Your poor wife, though,’ Jennifer said. ‘How on earth did she put up with it?’

  ‘She couldn’t, in the end. I suppose I wore her down.’ More brightly, he added: ‘You know her, actually – Emily? Emily Sandys? You were in the same year.’

  ‘You married Emily? Bloody hell, Benjamin, if you were going to marry one of the most boring girls in the school you could at least have chosen me.’

  ‘So who did you marry, after I’d disappointed you?’

  ‘Ah, yes – Barry. The lovely Barry. Met him at a works’ do in the late eighties. Got married, settled down until he did the classic midlife crisis thing five years ago. Ran off with the checkout girl from the local Decathlon. I did wonder why he was going down there every weekend when he hadn’t taken any exercise since about 1995.’

  ‘I’m so sorry. Did you have kids?’

  ‘Two. Both at uni now. What about you and Emily?’

  ‘No, that never … worked out.’

  ‘Ah well. Maybe for the best, eh?’

  Benjamin surprised himself, now, by deciding to trust Jennifer with a secret he shared with very few people. ‘Cicely and I had a daughter,’ he said.

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Right after school. She never told me, but she was pregnant when she went to America. She had the baby while she was out there. Her name is Malvina. I didn’t find out for years.’ Benjamin swallowed hard. It was a struggle to finish telling this story: these were events he didn’t like even to think about, let alone to recount to another person. ‘Then Malvina came back to England, and met my brother Paul, and he … took advantage of her.’

  Jennifer’s eyes widened, aghast.

  ‘That’s why I don’t speak to him any more.’

  ‘And her? Do you speak to her?’

  ‘Sometimes. She’s back in the States now. Birthdays, Christmas, that kind of thing. It’s difficult. More than difficult – impossible.’

  Jennifer reached across the table and gave his hand a squeeze. He smiled back. The gesture was commonplace – and the moment passed quickly enough – but he liked it, very much.

  *

  ‘What amazes me about getting old,’ said Jennifer, ‘is that you start thinking in these … new units of time. You don’t remember things in years any more. It’s decades.’

  ‘I know,’ said Benjamin.

  ‘You start doing these sums in your head. Like, a few weeks ago I watched Jaws with Grace, my daughter. She’s eighteen, and that film’s forty years old now. Forty years! If I’d watched a forty-year-old film when I was eighteen, it would have been made in the 1930s.’

  ‘I suppose a lot of things happened in the world between the thirties and the seventies. A lot changed. Maybe not so much since.’

  ‘You think? Is that the reason it all seems so recent, still? Or are we just …’

  She tailed off. It was half past ten, the meal was over, and she’d had a lot to drink.

  ‘You know how Philip Larkin used to look at it?’ Benjamin asked.

  ‘No. Tell me – how did Philip Larkin use to look at it?’

  ‘Well, if you live until you’re seventy, each decade is like a day of the week.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘So life starts on Monday morning.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘So now that we’re in our mid-fifties, do you know where we are in the week? It’s late on Saturday afternoon.’

  Jennifer stared at him in horror.

  ‘Saturday afternoon? Bloody hell, Benjamin.’

  ‘Basically we’ve only got Sunday left.’

  ‘And Sundays are shit. I hate Sundays. There’s never anything on the telly, for a start.’

  ‘There you go. That’s what we’ve got to look forward to. “The hospital years”, as I once heard somebody calling them.’

  ‘Fuck. You’ve really depressed me now.’

  ‘I know. I’m sorry. Most people live into their eighties these days, I suppose.’

  ‘Well, that’s something. Still …’ She drained what was left in her glass, and said: ‘Well, Benjamin, at least you haven’t lost your ability to show a girl a good time. You certainly know how to end an evening on a high note.’ She looked at her watch. ‘We should get the bill, and I should call a taxi.’

  ‘I’ll pay,’ said Benjamin. ‘That prize is worth fifty thousand pounds, you know. And it’s practically in the bag.’

  ‘That’s a very handsome gesture. I accept.’

  ‘And don’t worry about a taxi, either. I can easily drive you home.’

  *

  They both knew that it wasn’t an innocent offer. Even if neither of them could be sure what would happen next, they both knew that a decision had been taken – a mutual decision, based on the feeling that whatever process had been set in motion over dinner, it had not yet run its course. And yet this knowledge, which should have drawn them closer together, should have made them thrillingly complicit, seemed only to create a terrible distance between them. As soon as they got into Benjamin’s car and began the twenty-minute drive to Jennifer’s house, a heavy, frozen silence imposed itself. Benjamin, who by his normal standards had been positively chatty in the pub, now became a perfect mute. It was not difficult to understand why: the prospect – or even the possibility – of physical intimacy with another person, after so many years’ enforced abstinence, was enough to render him speechless with both excitement and fear. And his speechlessness communicated itself to Jennifer, who was rendered speechless in turn. Benjamin’s mind floundered for anything to say which might be even slightly appropriate in the circumstances, and the more it floundered, the more remote became its chances of coming up with a single phrase or word. He actually felt that his tongue had swollen to twice its normal size and would never be capable of pronouncing a syllable again. He glanced at Jennifer, her face pale beneath the glow of amber streetlamps, and was sure that she was staring at him in disbelief. As he braked to a halt at a set of traffic lights, he was determined to have one last go. There must be something he could say. Here they were, potentially about to embark on the most beautiful journey that two people could undertake together, and there was no reason on earth why he should be lost for words. He was a writer, for God’s sake. Silently he exhorted: Come on, Benjamin, you can do this. You can rise to this sweet, hopeful, terrifying occasion.

  ‘So,’ he said, turning to Jennifer at last.

  ‘So,’ she repeated, and looked at him questioningly, full of tremulous anticipation.

  He took a deep breath. ‘So … If David Cameron does hold an in–out referendum on EU membership, which way do you think it will go?’

  She gave a loud, despairing sigh. ‘Bloody hell, Benjamin – is that really what�
��s on your mind right now?’

  He shook his head. ‘No. No, it isn’t. Not at all.’

  ‘Thank God for that. Because then I really would be worried. Here – it’s the next left.’

  He swung into a side street, and said: ‘I’m sorry. I’m just a bit … Well, it’s been a nice evening, and I don’t want it to …’

  ‘Me neither. Here, this is it. Number 42.’

  He steered the car into her front drive. It seemed incredibly quiet when the engine was switched off.

  ‘You’ll come in for a coffee, won’t you?’

  ‘Yes, sure.’

  ‘Good. Come on, then.’

  In the kitchen, just as she was putting the kettle on, Benjamin said: ‘Actually I can’t have a coffee. Caffeine keeps me awake. I never drink it after lunchtime.’

  ‘I’ve got decaf.’

  ‘It has the same effect.’

  ‘Well, then, I’ve got a suggestion.’ She took a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc out of the fridge and stood directly in front of him, holding it up. ‘Why don’t you have a nice big glass of wine instead, and stay the night in one of my three spare bedrooms?’

  ‘Where are Grace and David?’

  ‘On holiday with their dad. I’ve even got a spare toothbrush.’

  For once, Benjamin didn’t hesitate. ‘OK,’ he said.

  ‘Good,’ said Jennifer, and gave him a gentle, lingering kiss on the lips by way of reward.

  *

  Neither of them was prepared to get naked in front of the other. When they went up to Jennifer’s bedroom some time later, the curtains were drawn and the lights were turned off and they undressed in the semi-dark, much to Benjamin’s relief. There were full-length mirrors in his bathroom at home, but he had become adept at avoiding looking into them whenever he got in or out of the shower or the bath. He had no wish to see his pale, sagging, fifty-five-year-old body reflected back at him. He assumed that Jennifer felt the same way; but when he climbed into bed beside her and ran his first tentative, exploratory hand along the curve of her hip and beyond, he felt nothing but firmness and smoothness. He felt that a compliment was in order.