Middle England

by Jonathan Coe

  Meanwhile, I’ve been thinking of the way you jumped the academic ship a couple of years ago, and wondering how spontaneous a decision that was. Had it been brewing for some time – weeks or months or even years? I’m asking because I’ve recently become tempted to pack it in myself. As of yesterday, in fact. I spent most of the weekend at a friend’s wedding, which involved leaving London and slipping into a slightly gentler pace for a couple of days. Yesterday in particular I had a lot of time and space just to sit around and contemplate life and get some perspective on things. It would be crazy to take a life-changing decision on the basis of twenty-four hours’ thinking, though, wouldn’t it? And yet the more I turn it over in my mind, the more it seems to make sense. The job’s not what it was, or at least not what I once thought it was going to be. Everything has become transactional. Students (or their parents) pay vast sums up front and expect value for money in return. Younger lecturers work themselves to the bone while the older generation sit around waiting for their retirement packages to kick in and meanwhile will do anything to preserve a quiet life: my head of department being a prime example …

  What a self-indulgent ramble this has become. (And that, my dear, is the first and only honest sentence you’ve written in this whole fucking email.) Let me come straight to the point. (OK, how big a lie is this going to be? Might as well make it a whopper.) A friend of mine moved to Chicago earlier this year, and has been badgering me to come and visit her. So I’ve booked my flight (no I haven’t, not yet) and will be coming out for a long weekend, starting on Friday 20. Do you think you’ll have an hour or two (a night or two, is what I’m really saying) to spare that weekend? It would be great to meet up again after all this time. A lot has happened since Marseille! I long to hear tales of how you’re coping with Trump’s America. (Yeah, that’s definitely what I long for. Better send this before I write something even more stupid.)

  With love,

  Sophie xx

  *

  From: Adam Turner

  Sent: Wednesday, April 11, 2018 07:22 AM

  To: Sophie Coleman-Potter

  Subject: Re: Chicago bound

  Dear Sophie

  It’s always great to hear from you, and even more exciting to hear that you’ll be coming to my neck of the woods. And I can only apologize for my abject failure to keep our correspondence going. Put it down to the pressures of fatherhood, if you will. (What? WHAT???)

  Yes, this is my great news since we were last in contact. Pat and I got married the summer before last (Pat? Who the FUCK is Pat?) and our daughter was born – with somewhat indecent haste, I’m ashamed to say – a few months later. We called her Alice – a neat coming-together of homages, if you will, mine being to Alice Coltrane, Pat’s to Alice Walker. Now, at 16 months, I won’t bore you with a father’s doting recital of the many ways in which I think she’s adorable – but I am attaching a picture. You’ll allow me that, at least? (What choice do I have?)

  (And, oh shit, I think I need another cup of coffee before I can read any more of this.)

  (OK, let’s hear the rest.)

  I’m sorry to hear things have been so difficult for you, personally and professionally. I remember when we met in Marseille and you were so recently married and seemed so happy and excited about it. Well, I suppose shit happens … Not very profound, I know, but what else can I say? (True, that just about sums it up.) And at least on the professional thing I can sound a little more encouraging: getting out of the academy was definitely one of the best decisions I ever made. Of course, I got lucky: the gaming company I joined has been doing well and they like my work and now I’ve got some shares in the company, and that’s all great: but the important thing is that I’m living off my creativity. I love the work that I do and it pays the bills and if it’s not quite the kind of music-making I grew up with there are other ways of doing that. I’ve formed a trio with a couple of friends and we’ve been doing some gigging on the side – in fact we’re playing here on the 21st, so if you and your friend have no plans that evening, you can come and hear us, which would be amazing! No charge – straight on to the guest list.

  So, everything is going well on that front but with reference to the last sentence of your mail I can’t say that I’m too happy with the bigger picture. Like every other fool in America, Pat and I were not expecting Trump to become president. Alice was born about ten days before the election and it was the weirdest feeling, because it meant we had about ten days of pure joy and excitement and then that damned result came through and we were like, What the f*** has just happened? It was like a cloud descended on the house that day, and to be honest with you it hasn’t lifted yet, and it won’t lift until our president has been replaced by somebody else – however that happens, and however long it takes. Not that Hillary was perfect by any means but there was a sort of basic competence and temperamental stability there which is just something you expect from your Head of State. The morning of November 9 I was mainly just angry and disbelieving but I guess it was even worse for Pat. It was incredible how quickly and dramatically the emotional temperature changed. The day before we had been looking at Alice and taking nothing but delight in her freshness and innocence and vulnerability and now we looked at her and couldn’t believe how insecure her future felt, how our country and the world had come to feel so much more unstable and malign and dangerous overnight.

  Anyway, we can talk about all this when I see you – which is in just over a week, right? You and your friend can come to the show Saturday and maybe on Sunday you could come over to our place for lunch, if you’re not too busy. I know Pat would love to meet you and of course I can’t wait to show off the lovely Alice. :)

  So let me know your plans and call me the minute you hit town.

  À bientôt (one of the few useful French phrases I still remember).

  Adam

  42.

  After reading the email, Sophie lay down on the narrow bed in the tiny room and curled up tight for about fifteen minutes. It was almost six years since she had met Adam in Marseille but ever since then a fantasy, a foolish, unworkable fantasy, had lodged in her mind and this morning she was furious with herself not just for clinging to it but now, even more foolishly, for acting upon it and exposing it to him so starkly and eliciting this gracious, tactful, mortifying response.

  How could she write back?

  Three days later she sent off another email – it was the eighth or ninth draft – explaining that her friend’s mother had died suddenly and she was going to be flying home that weekend and Sophie needed to be here for her. Sending it was perhaps the most embarrassing thing she had ever done but she couldn’t think of an alternative. As for Adam’s reply, she could only bring herself to skim it and then send it quickly down to the foot of her computer screen at the bottom of her flagged email list. At least she had saved herself the price of a flight to Chicago, something she could ill afford at the moment.

  So it was that, on Friday, 20 April 2018, she found herself taking a train to Birmingham Moor Street rather than a plane to Chicago O’Hare. A weekend with her father, rather than a weekend with Adam. On Friday evening, an Indian takeaway, a four-pack of lager, and the exchanging of family news. Sophie felt so depressed and drained of hope that she could barely speak.

  Her father, on the other hand, was uncharacteristically voluble.

  ‘I’m putting this place on the market,’ Christopher said. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

  Sophie shook her head.

  ‘I always got the impression you didn’t like it much anyway.’

  ‘I didn’t,’ she admitted. ‘Where will you move to?’

  ‘Well …’ He took a breath. ‘That’s the other thing. I’ve been seeing somebody.’

  ‘Somebody?’

  ‘Another woman. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Someone you’re going to move in with?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Sophie was both impressed and deflated. Even her father’s love lif
e was healthier than her own. ‘That was quick,’ she said.

  ‘I know. You don’t mind, do you?’

  ‘Will you stop asking me if I mind? Why should I mind? I just want you and Mum to be happy.’

  ‘Good. Well, I am. Very happy.’

  ‘What’s her name?’

  ‘Judith.’

  ‘What does she do?’

  ‘She’s a divorce lawyer.’

  ‘That should come in handy.’

  Christopher smiled. ‘What about your mother?’

  ‘What about her?’

  ‘Has she found anybody else?’

  ‘I don’t think she’s looking for anybody else. She is looking for a house in France, though.’

  ‘Oh?’ He seemed taken aback by this. ‘She didn’t seem to like that idea when I suggested it.’

  ‘Well, she and Benjamin are talking about moving there together now. He’s putting the mill house up for sale. They want to buy somewhere big so they can take guests.’

  ‘Quite a change for them.’

  ‘Change seems to be in the air.’

  ‘At least you’re staying put,’ said Christopher. ‘Providing a bit of continuity in our lives.’

  ‘I’m going to quit my job,’ Sophie announced. ‘Give my notice.’

  Christopher almost dropped his onion bhaji. ‘What? Why?’

  ‘I suppose,’ she said, ‘it turned out not to be the job I always dreamed it would be. The things I liked about it slowly got overwhelmed by the things I hated.’ And then she reached out and touched her father’s arm, and added, more brightly: ‘Don’t worry about me, Dad. I’ve got something else in mind. Everything’s going to be all right.’

  *

  Late the following morning, as she took the bus into the centre of Birmingham, she asked herself when she had got into the habit of lying to everybody. She didn’t believe for a minute that everything was going to be all right, and she certainly had nothing else in mind. Many years earlier, when she was doing her A-levels, she had talked about becoming a therapist. Right up until the submission of her PhD thesis, that plan had remained at the back of her mind. Lorna, the woman who had provided relationship counselling for her and Ian, had not impressed Sophie much: she was pretty sure she could do a better job than that, even though her own relationships didn’t provide much of a blueprint for success. But could she face the task of retraining, at this stage? The years of low-paid (or even, for much of the time, unpaid) work? It wasn’t an appealing prospect. Easier to get a job in a museum, a gallery, the National Trust. Not really the kind of thing she had been working towards, all her life, but it would still be public service, of a sort …

  She left the bus when it reached the city centre, and began to wander at random through the crowded streets, jostled by eager shoppers. After months of indifferent weather, temperatures had climbed freakishly in the last few days, and the sun had drawn people to New Street and Broad Street and Corporation Street in large numbers. Pale, freckly teenage girls, their skin exposed in vest tops and denim shorts, contrasted oddly with the black outlines of women in full niqab. Sophie felt relaxed in the crowd, happy to lose herself in it.

  But she had no desire to go shopping and was not exactly sure why she had come here today. She had been preoccupied lately by the thought that she should really contact Ian and discuss getting a formal divorce: this had been on her mind for several months, in fact, but she shied away from the idea, the crushing finality of it. Still, it was cowardly of her (of both of them) to let the situation just drift on like this. She was only about five hundred yards from his flat – from the flat she had shared with him for so long – and it would be easy enough to call him, meet up for a friendly chat in some coffee shop, see where the conversation led. Besides which, it would be nice to see him again, in some ways …

  Sophie sat down on a bench in Cathedral Square and spread herself out in the sunshine. Here in the very centre of Birmingham, she realized that she was surrounded by memories of him. Just opposite her on Colmore Row was the office building where she’d taken her Speed Awareness Course. Behind her, on Corporation Street, was the sweet shop where Ian had intervened and got himself injured during the summer riots of 2011. Thinking back to that week set a complex chain of reflections in motion … Her most vivid memory – even more vivid, oddly, than the moment in hospital when Ian had proposed to her – was of driving to the hospital with Helena and feeling a yawning silence open up between them in the car when she had spoken the unforgiveable words: ‘He was quite right, you know. “Rivers of blood.” He was the only one brave enough to say it …’ It was amazing, Sophie thought, how some people remembered that speech, clung to that speech, delivered to a Birmingham audience by a Birmingham-born politician, how it had impressed them as the expression of an essential but unspeakable truth and had lain hidden in their hearts like a cancer, festered, for … Jesus, for fifty years now. Half a century! Only last week the BBC had broadcast it again, delivered by an actor this time, in order to mark its fiftieth anniversary (as if, Sophie thought, this was an anniversary worth marking), and she had caught a few minutes of it on the radio, and the banal dreariness of it had depressed her, while Enoch Powell’s nasal voice and eerie cadences (in the actor’s excellent impersonation) had chilled her to the bone, but today a more cheering thought rose up: the realization that here, on this sunny day in April, the people of Birmingham – young people, mainly – were going about their lives in happy and peaceful acceptance of precisely that melding of different cultures that Powell’s pinched, ungenerous mind had only been able to imagine leading to violence. She remembered Sohan’s scornful response, all those years ago, when Lionel Hampshire had described his fellow countrymen as being essentially welcoming and easy-going – the very opposite of Powell’s lethally well-spoken, well-bred racism – but she couldn’t help hoping that the author had been right, not just about the English but about people the world over. Otherwise, what hope was there?

  She began to walk along Waterloo Street, through Victoria Square, past the site of the old Central Library – now gone – and The Grapevine pub – now also gone – until she emerged into Centenary Square, in front of the sleek and monumental new library building. She was only one hundred yards from Ian’s flat, at this point, but she carried on walking, through the International Convention Centre and out into Brindley Place, where she stood for a few minutes on the bridge over the canal, watching the passing traffic of shoppers on the towpaths. It was lunchtime and people were starting to look for places to eat. Her hand was clasping the phone in the pocket of her jeans and she was wondering, yet again, whether to give Ian a call when – like an omen – she felt a tap on her arm and she turned to see two people she was not at all expecting to see: two people she recognized, but had not spoken to since before her separation: Mrs Coleman’s one-time cleaner Grete, and her husband Lukas.

  They were laden with shopping bags and dressed far too warmly for the summery weather. They were also about to go to Pizza Express for lunch. They invited Sophie to join them.

  Over lunch they stuck to inconsequential topics – the weather, the restaurant business, the new shops in the city centre – and avoided mentioning the thing (the person, rather) that had brought them together in the first place. But when the meal was over and coffee arrived, Sophie asked them if they had any news of Ian or Mrs Coleman. The question seemed to provoke some embarrassment.

  ‘To be honest,’ said Lukas, ‘we see Helena in the village sometimes, but we’re not on good terms with her. As for Ian …’

  ‘I don’t think he’s been around much lately,’ said Grete. ‘Probably not for a couple of months.’

  ‘Why do you think that?’ Sophie asked. It sounded to her as though there might be a particular reason.

  Lukas said: ‘Something happened, earlier this year. It was very ugly … Very upsetting for all concerned.’

  ‘We had something to do with it,’ said his wife. ‘In fact we were the cause. Which makes me
feel terrible, I must say. I think there must have been a rift between Ian and his mother and we were basically the reason for it.’

  ‘Don’t say that,’ said Lukas. ‘Don’t blame yourself. Don’t blame us. We weren’t at fault. You were the victim, in case you’d forgotten.’

  They fell silent. Sophie could see that a difficult subject had been raised, but her curiosity to know more was fierce.

  ‘If you don’t want to tell me …’ she prompted, disingenuously.

  ‘No, of course,’ said Grete. ‘You should really know about it. I mean, I’m not sure where things stand at the moment, between you and Ian, but – I think you’d like to know about this.’

  Sophie nodded, urging Grete on with her eyes. After a moment or two, she continued:

  ‘So – you remember the village shop, of course?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, this happened in the shop in February. It was a Saturday lunchtime and it was a rather cold day, I remember, so there were not many customers – but as you know, that shop is never busy. Anyway, that doesn’t matter. It began like this. There were just four of us in the shop. Two people behind the tills, serving two customers. I was one of the customers. The other was a man, maybe about twenty-five or thirty. I think he must have come from a pub somewhere because we could all see that he had been drinking, and now he was trying to buy more alcohol, some cans of lager. I was just buying a few things, toothpaste and dishcloths and stuff like that. But also, I admit I was being quite rude and doing something which I normally don’t do, which was talking on the telephone while I paid. I must say it annoys me when other people do that, but my sister had just called me and I was quite pleased because I hadn’t heard from her for a long time and I’d been getting a little bit worried. So I was talking to her all the time I was paying and leaving the shop. In our own language, of course.