Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  Not sure if it was the right moment to ask this favour, but fairly certain that another such opportunity would never present itself, Doug now said gently: ‘I don’t suppose you have any paperwork on those people, do you? The Imperium Foundation. Nothing you could show me?’

  Nigel’s expression gave little away as he said: ‘Leaking confidential documents? Is that what you’re asking me to do?’

  Doug looked away, embarrassed, and changed the subject at once. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I can see why you want to get away from all this. I’m sure you’ll find the perfect niche somewhere – PR, advertising, maybe? Marketing, media training, something like that?’

  A rather disturbing change started to come over Nigel’s face. His eyes began to shine again – this time with amusement, if anything. Doug imagined that he could see the hint of a smile hovering around his lips too.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ he said. ‘Those are pretty good suggestions, aren’t they?’

  Nigel shook his head slowly. ‘I’ve got a much better one.’

  Doug said: ‘Would you like to tell me about it?’

  Nigel looked from left to right, then over his shoulder, then leaned very close to Doug’s face. ‘I’m going to travel round the world.’ And just as Doug was on the point of nodding and saying, ‘That sounds good,’ he added, with a note of inexpressible triumph, ‘… in a hot-air balloon!’

  Seeing that he had reduced his companion to open-mouthed silence, Nigel rose to his feet and started declaiming, first to Doug himself and then to the bemused patrons of the café as a whole: ‘Oh, yes! That’s the life for me! Cresting the superb peaks of the French Pyrenees! Following the course of the Ganges as it rolls majestically towards the Bay of Bengal!’ He began wriggling into his coat with some difficulty, struggling to force his arms into the turned-out sleeves. ‘No more lying to the newspapers! No more spouting out the rubbish that politicians are too embarrassed to say themselves! I’m free! Free, I tell you! Free to soar like a bird through the open skies!’

  As the other customers looked on with increasing alarm, Nigel flung open the door of the café and strode out into the fresh air. Doug tried to wave after him, but Nigel no longer seemed to be looking. Doug’s last glimpse of his long-time trusted source was of a flapping, agitated figure striding off into the distance, his arms still trapped across his chest as he wrestled with the sleeves of his recalcitrant coat. For some reason – who knows why? – it made him think of a straitjacket.

  37.

  October 2017

  Ben? …

  … moments in life worth purchasing with worlds, yes, I remember that phrase, it’s from a novel by Fielding, Amelia, the one that nobody has read, nobody except me, obviously, and of course it’s meant ironically, he’s sending up the character who says it, because Fielding was the very opposite of a sentimentalist, but still there is something wonderful in the phrase, something very appealing, but what I do start to wonder, as I get older, is whether those moments are gifted only to young people, whether it’s the kind of thing you only experience in your teens or early twenties or at least during puberty, which in my case probably went on for much longer than that, in fact I might not even have emerged from it yet, better not speculate about that, best not to go there, but the question has to be asked, am I ever going to experience any of those moments again, anything like the morning after Cicely and I slept together for the first time, for instance, when I sat in The Grapevine and finished my beer all by myself and so many thoughts rushed through my head and, looking back, that may even have been my pinnacle of happiness, certainly my pinnacle of happiness with her because I didn’t see her again after that for God knows how many years, but was it also my pinnacle of happiness more generally, have I ever been as happy in my whole life as I was at that moment, did I peak at the age of eighteen, in other words, that’s the crucial question, but maybe it’s more complicated than that, more nuanced, because there are different kinds of happiness, aren’t there, there are kinds of happiness which are maybe not so intense but which go deeper, and last longer, and perhaps that’s what I’m feeling now, standing in the Garden Quad at Balliol and looking across the Croquet Lawn at my old staircase and thinking, OK, I’m fifty-seven now, but probably the last few years have been the best in my life, living alone, living in comfort, seeing friends, no longer obsessing over Cicely, and then getting the book published, and then the lucky break, and then hearing from readers, real, genuine readers who’ve written letters to me and emailed me and come up to me at events, the thrill of knowing that some people, even if it’s only a handful, have been touched by what I wrote, and then the weirdness of meeting Jennifer again, and the even greater weirdness of going out with her, no, you can’t call it that when you’re in your fifties, being in a relationship with her, although it’s been an odd kind of relationship, I wouldn’t say that our feelings for each other have been all that strong, I thought she said she loved me at one point but that was just a misunderstanding, I realize now, and then there is one little inconvenient fact, the fact that she’s probably sleeping with someone else, this guy called Robert, but the strange thing is it turns out I’m not really bothered about that, I don’t want to spend all my time with her, it’s nice just to see her occasionally, and the sex is good, better than good, great even, I mean, Jesus, who would have thought I’d be having the best sex of my life at fifty-seven, wonders will never cease, but even so, what I have with Jennifer is not really the same as what Doug has with Gail, say, now that’s amazing, to see the two of them together, after years of him always going for these posh Sloaney women, finally he seems to have found someone who is on his wavelength, it just goes to show you don’t have to share someone’s politics to fall in love with them, I suppose that’s what I thought about Sophie and Ian once as well, and yet they’ve foundered, haven’t they, it doesn’t seem to have worked out for them after all, but maybe the differences between them were just too serious, or perhaps there were other things going on that I never knew about, anyway, it’s a great shame that they’ve broken up, I know how much Sophie wanted to make that work, and I do worry about her, now, being lonely, feeling that all her relationships are doomed, but surely it can’t be long before someone like her finds somebody else, she’s a strong woman, there’s no denying that, look how she survived those troubles at work, which would probably have broken some people, but Sophie is made of stronger stuff, she rode it out, and if I have one quarrel with Doug, actually, it’s that he never really intervened to help her while that was going on, he should have made more of an effort with Coriander, it’s all very well saying she never listens to him but she is his daughter, for God’s sake, there must have been some way he could have done it, there must be some channel of communication still left open, I should really have mentioned it the other night, why do I never really confront my friends about the things I think are important?, it’s always been like that, I’m a coward, in many ways, a moral coward, but on the other hand when you’re in somebody’s house, when they’ve invited you as a guest, when you’re sitting around their table and eating the food they’ve prepared for you, it would seem a bit churlish to start criticizing their parenting skills, especially when Doug and Gail were both being so helpful over dinner, helping me out with my current problem, after all it was a pretty boring topic to bring up, I hadn’t really been planning to mention it, it wasn’t my plan to make everyone listen to me droning on about the fact that I have a new book to deliver in less than six months and I don’t have the faintest idea what it’s supposed to be about yet, someone could easily have changed the subject, moved swiftly on, but no, they all took an interest, or pretended to, and it turned into quite an interesting conversation actually, or at least I thought so, a conversation about what a writer should or shouldn’t be doing at a time like this, whether writers should attempt to be engagés, as I believe the French expression is, or whether it’s best for them to be ‘inner emigrants’, retreating inside themselves as an escape from
reality, but not just an escape, also a means of responding to it, creating an alternative reality, something solid, something consoling, and when I mentioned this idea Doug laughed and said, Well, of course, that’s what you’ll be doing, isn’t it, Ben?, that describes you perfectly, and I suppose I bridled a little because he’s been taking the piss out of me for forty years about the fact that I have no interest in politics, as far as he can see, certainly not to anything like the extent that he has, but then Doug has always been a little bit obsessed on that front, in my opinion, but anyway this time I decided not to take it lying down, so I said that actually I didn’t want my next book to be like the last one, completely personal and autobiographical, I wanted to write something broader, something about the state this country has got itself into in the last few years, and Doug thought about this for a while and said, Fine, why don’t you write about the time you met Boris Johnson at Oxford, and at first I thought he was taking the piss again, because this has become a bit of a joke lately, the fact that I shared a corridor with Boris Johnson at Balliol College for about three weeks in the autumn of 1983, and we used to pass each other in the corridor on the way to the toilet and back, so I said, Oh yes, very funny, but Doug insisted that he was being serious and said, No, but think about it, you were actually there at the beginning of something very important, that was the beginning of the time when a whole generation of Conservative students basically took over the Oxford Union, and they all became friends – rivals as well, of course, but friends most of all – and they would play out their little political rivalries in the debating chamber of the Oxford Union and argue about stuff like whether Margaret Thatcher was the greatest British prime minister of all time and whether we should stay in the European Union or not, and of course a lot of them joined the Bullingdon Club as well and when they weren’t pretending to run the country in the Oxford Union debating chamber they were busy getting pissed and smashing up restaurants and getting their parents to pick up the bill, and now look at them all, thirty years later, David Cameron, he was at Oxford in the eighties, Michael Gove, he was at Oxford in the eighties, Jeremy Hunt, he was at Oxford in the eighties, George Osborne, he was at Oxford a few years later, these cunts (Doug’s word, not mine) all knew each other, and now these self-satisfied, entitled twats (Doug’s phrase, not mine) were running the country, and they were still jostling for power and having their sad little arguments but instead of doing it at the Oxford Union they were doing it on the national stage and we were all having our lives shaped and redirected by these people and their stupid infighting whether we’d voted for them or not, and how was that as the subject for a novel, and of course Gail looked a bit horrified because he was talking about some of her colleagues but she took it all in good part and even agreed with a lot of it, I wouldn’t be surprised, and although I was pretty sceptical at the time I thought it over for a while and the upshot of it is that here I am, a few days later, revisiting Oxford, which is a city I’ve successfully managed to avoid revisiting more than a handful of times since I was here as a student, even though of course my sister lives here now, she finally left Chris, she’s renting a bedsit somewhere on the Cowley Road and I’m meeting her here today, in fact she should be here any moment, and coming back has been a peculiar experience so far, I must say, bittersweet I suppose is how you would describe it, there is something distinctive about this city, something in the way the past and present collide here that I don’t remember finding anywhere else, I suppose it’s the way these chain shops and chain restaurants and chain coffee shops, the places you see wherever you go in this country now and make every city look and feel exactly the same, it’s the way they’ve been tucked away inside all these lovely old buildings, nestling alongside the college buildings which are so beautiful, so old, so full of history, that’s what creates the strange and complicated flavour of this place, and so yes, this is the perfect city to come and surrender to your memories, to let the present be invaded by the past, and that’s what I’ve been doing this afternoon so far, autumn is a good time for it as well, the season when things start to fade and decay, that’s how most people see it, but here in Oxford, if you’re an academic, it’s a time of renewal, the beginning of a new year, a time of hope and possibility, and standing here, here in the Garden Quad, looking across the Croquet Lawn at my old staircase, that’s what I’m feeling, the stirrings of it at least, the stirrings of creativity, but I don’t think I’ll be taking it in the direction Doug suggested, that sort of thing isn’t for me, if anyone’s going to write a book about how the country’s still being run by a bunch of public schoolboys who all cut their teeth at Oxford it should be him, I have to write something more personal than that, ‘write about what you know’, isn’t that the first and most obvious piece of advice any new writer gets?, but I don’t mean it literally, I’m not going to write a book about an old man, OK not quite old yet, but starting to feel as if he’s getting that way, an old man standing in an Oxford quad looking back on his student days and asking où sont les neiges d’antan? or anything like that, I need to look not quite so close to home, so I know what I’m going to take a stab at – yes, Charlie!, the story of Charlie Chappell and his bitter rivalry with Duncan Field and how he’s managed to end up in prison, of course I will change all the names and so on and so forth but I reckon I’m on to something there, there’s a book in that, and if there isn’t, well, maybe I don’t need to write another book anyway, maybe the story of me and Cicely was the only story I had to tell, and I shall just have to give my advance back and find something else to do, but I really will have to do something, not just because I’m finally running out of money but also because I haven’t done a real job now, I haven’t made what you might call a meaningful contribution, for almost …

  … Benjamin!

  *

  He turned and saw that Lois was standing beside him.

  ‘Didn’t you hear me? I’ve been looking for you for ages.’

  38.

  In the first week of November 2017, Charlie came to the mill house in Shropshire to discuss Benjamin’s idea for a book based on his story.

  His short prison term had ended in July, and he was now looking thinner and older than Benjamin remembered, but his cheerfulness seemed undiminished. Banned for life from working with children in the UK, he remained unbowed even though his career as a clown was over. Something would turn up, and in a bizarre way he felt better for his three months inside. He’d had time to reflect, and he no longer felt corroded by anger and bitterness, as he had done for so long. Benjamin realized that in Charlie’s eyes, life had always been a series of accidents which could not be halted or controlled, so that the only thing you could do was to accept them and capitalize upon them whenever possible. It was a healthy outlook, he thought. One which he had never quite managed to attain himself.

  Charlie was positively excited about being immortalized in Benjamin’s next work of fiction. He had brought along a folder full of paperwork to help with the research.

  ‘I made a lot of notes,’ he said, ‘in the run-up to the trial, and while I was inside. Also, I’ve been keeping a diary, on and off, for a few years.’

  ‘Brilliant,’ said Benjamin. ‘That’ll be incredibly useful. But of course I shall have to tell the story in my own words.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Charlie. ‘I understand that. But maybe I could make a few suggestions?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘You see, if I was writing this book,’ said Charlie, fishing a piece of paper out of the folder, ‘I would start with this. To get the reader’s interest up.’

  Benjamin took the paper from his hand and began reading. It was a clipping from a local newspaper, the Bromsgrove Advertiser, dated 7 September 2016.

  ‘A sort of prologue,’ Charlie added, ‘to explain what happened, before you rewind to tell some of the backstory.’

  Benjamin nodded. ‘Sounds good,’ he agreed.

  The clipping read:

  CLASH OF THE CLOWNS


  Shocked children were treated to a surprise horror show at a birthday party on Saturday afternoon – a punch-up between two rival entertainers.

  Much-loved kids’ comic Doctor Daredevil (also known as Duncan Field) was showcasing his trademark buffoonery at Richard Parker’s ninth birthday bash in Alvechurch when fellow entertainer Baron Brainbox (also known as Charlie Chappell) turned up at the same venue. Apparently the two clowns had been double-booked.

  Witnesses said that they withdrew to the kitchen to settle the argument but within a few minutes they were at each other’s throats – literally. Fun gave way to fisticuffs and the police were quickly summoned to the scene.

  Richard’s mum Susan Parker said: ‘It was horrific. One minute the kids were having a great time making stink bombs, then suddenly it was mayhem. The kids were screaming and before I knew what was happening two of my kitchen chairs were broken up and some of my best crockery had been smashed.’

  Afterwards Mr Field, who sustained a fractured jaw among other injuries, commented: ‘This was a vicious and unprovoked assault by someone who has always been professionally jealous of me. Rest assured I shall be pressing charges and invoking the full force of the law.’

  Mr Chappell said the fight had nothing to do with professional rivalry and arose from ‘an argument about Brexit’. He was remanded in custody.

  Or should that be … custard-y?

  Benjamin winced when he saw the joke. ‘Ew … that last line needs a bit of work.’

  ‘Definitely. What do you think of reprinting that clipping, though, as a way of starting things off?’

  ‘I think it’s a great idea.’