The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

“You’re up early,” said Frankie; and her second thought was, “Gosh, I must look simply terrible.”

  Benjamin was never able to say anything gallant if he thought it might make him sound lecherous or sexist. This was a failing to which he had been prone for more than twenty years. So instead of protesting, “No, you look fantastic actually”—as perhaps he should have done—he merely asked: “Did you sleep well?”

  “So-so,” said Frankie. “But it doesn’t help when there’s a certain gentleman who won’t leave your nipples alone all night.”

  It flashed through Benjamin’s mind for a second that she was talking about Doug, so acute was his current tendency towards sexual envy; but then Frankie smiled sweetly down at her baby son, just in time to put him right. Benjamin went over to put the kettle on, in order to hide his confusion.

  “Emily needs a cup of tea before she can face the world,” he explained. “We thought we’d get up and go to the ten o’clock service.”

  “Oh good, I’ll come with you,” said Frankie. “It’s so nice to find a couple of Duggie’s friends who don’t regard going to church as some sort of perversion.”

  They went to the morning communion at St. Luke’s Church in Sydney Street, and here, for a brief hour, Benjamin was able to immerse himself in ritual and forget the pressure of dissatisfaction which at all other times he felt mounting up and threatening to overwhelm him. Leaving the church he made eye contact with Emily—even that was rare enough, these days—and they smiled warmly at each other, drawn into temporary closeness. After which, they loitered outside in the sunshine, having nothing much to say to each other, while Frankie busied herself talking to other members of the congregation. Most of these people, presumably, she saw every week or so, but upon meeting it still seemed necessary to hug them with tremulous passion, like old friends from whom she had been separated for long, lonely decades. She appeared to know everybody, and to be regarded on all sides as some kind of saint: people clustered around her, hovered on the fringes of her conversations, as if purely to have the privilege of touching her. Her two older children had stayed at home, but she was carrying Ranulph in front of her in a baby-sling—his face pressed smotheringly into her bosom—while Coriander Gifford-Anderton, her two-year-old daughter, clutched Emily’s hand and waited in patient silence, sometimes looking up and down the sunlit street warily; gloweringly sceptical of the world she was in the process of having bequeathed to her.

  “OK,” said Frankie, rejoining them, the breathless social round completed. “Where to next?”

  “I was hoping to look at some shops,” said Emily.

  “Oh, Mummy!” Coriander protested, hearing this. “You promised the tarousel.”

  “It’s carousel, darling. Ka, ka. She has trouble with her cs, for some reason,” she explained.

  “Where’s the carousel?” Benjamin asked.

  “Oh, she just means the little roundabout in the park down the road.”

  “I don’t mind going there,” said Benjamin—seizing what he thought would be a chance to spend more time alone with Frankie and her daughter. “You can spare me for a bit, can’t you, Em?”

  “Gosh, that’s nice of you!” said Frankie. At once she took Emily by the arm and began steering her hurriedly away. “You lucky girl,” she added to Coriander, “getting Benjamin all to yourself.” And to Emily: “Come on then, I’ll show you that new fabric shop I was telling you about.”

  Coriander felt for Benjamin’s hand and clasped it uncertainly as they watched the two women walk off together in the direction of the King’s Road. It was hard to tell which of them felt more shocked or abandoned.

  On the way to the shops, Frankie made a quick call to Doug, who was still in bed. The conversation was short, flirtatious, enigmatic, and had something to do with swearing. Afterwards she explained to Emily: “Duggie’s been in a shocking mood all week because I’m on a sex strike.”

  “A sex strike?” said Emily, swerving off the pavement to avoid a crazed middle-aged platinum blonde on roller blades who appeared to be jabbering to herself, although it turned out she was just negotiating some kind of flight deal on her hands-free mobile phone. The “day of rest” thing didn’t seem to have caught on in Chelsea.

  “To stop him swearing all the time,” Frankie explained. “You know, I’ve only just noticed how much he does it. In front of the children, as well, that’s the problem. Not Hugo and Siena so much—I mean, for goodness’ sake, they hear worse at school already—but Corrie’s been coming up to me recently and saying things like, ‘Mummy, what’s a dickhead?’ and ‘What’s a wanker?’ and—well, much worse, actually, so I’ve told him that it’s got to stop. Every time he swears in front of the kids he misses out for another day. Two days for the F-word, and three for the C-word. Access denied.”

  “Aren’t you punishing yourself as well?”

  Frankie laughed. “Not really. It’s never much fun, is it, having sex only five months after you’ve given birth? You probably remember.”

  She realized her mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. But then, people always seemed to forget that Emily and Benjamin didn’t have children of their own. Perhaps because they were so good with everybody else’s.

  “Look at me, Benjamin, look at me!”

  Coriander stood triumphant at the top of the highest slide—the one that was only supposed to be for children older than five—and waited until Benjamin had come closer, until she could be certain that she was the focus of his adoring, undivided attention. Then she launched herself down the slope, her eyes even then never leaving him, checking that not for a moment should he allow himself to be distracted. She didn’t notice that a toddler was already sitting at the bottom of the slide, not quite knowing how to get off, and there was a brief, spectacular collision as she crashed into him with outstretched legs and kicked him off on to the rubberized asphalt. Benjamin rushed over, picked him up and dusted him down. He cried a bit but didn’t seem too upset, and his father, sitting on a nearby bench reading the business section of the Sunday Telegraph, didn’t even notice.

  There were lots of fathers in the playground that morning, and lots of children seeking attention and not getting any. Coriander, despite the absence of her parents, was not doing badly in that respect. Most nannies, it would appear, had the day off on Sundays, and the deal was that fathers got to spend quality time with their children in the playground while the mothers stayed at home and did whatever it was they couldn’t do during the rest of the week when their nannies were looking after the children. In practice this seemed to mean that the children were left mainly to their own forlorn, bewildered devices while the fathers, heavily freighted not just with newspapers but also pint-sized paper cups from Starbucks and Coffee Republic, attempted to do on the playground benches exactly what they would have done at home, given the chance.

  Coriander wanted to go on the see-saw next. While he was pushing her up and down, Benjamin looked across at a pair of diminutive swings in the corner and watched a curious drama unfold. There were two little girls on the swings, but neither of them was doing any swinging. One of them, a grave-looking toddler with pale eyes and brown ringlets, was sitting bored and motionless while her father leaned against the metal frame of the swing and scoured the pages of the Herald Tribune. The other girl—not at all dissimilar in looks and colouring—was trying to give her swing some much-needed momentum with thrusts of her own body, but hadn’t got the hang of that move yet. “Daddy, Daddy!” she started calling, but her father didn’t hear her, and besides, he had a cappuccino in one hand and, in the other, a mobile phone on which he seemed to be talking to a business colleague in Sydney. Pushing the swing in these circumstances was clearly out of the question. Both the girls’ swings were completely at rest when this second father, concluding his call, took a final swig from the coffee cup, tossed it in the rubbish bin, lifted one of the girls into his arms and headed off in the direction of the playground gate. What interested Benjamin about this
situation was that he had not picked up the girl who had addressed him as “Daddy.” She remained in one of the stationary swings, staring with mounting distress at the receding figure of the man who was presumably her father. Meanwhile the Herald Tribune reader read on, happily unaware that his own daughter was in the process of being benignly abducted.

  Neither of the adults seemed likely to notice the mistake, and the little girls seemed to be too stunned to say anything, so Benjamin ran over and intercepted the cappuccino-drinker at the playground gate.

  “Excuse me,” he said. “It’s really none of my business, but—I think this girl might not be your daughter?”

  The man glanced down at the toddler in his arms. “Shit,” he said. “You’re right. This isn’t Emerald.” He hurried back to the swings and accosted the other father just as he was folding up his Tribune. “Is this yours?” he asked.

  “Daddy!” Emerald held out her arms, her cheeks glistening with tears. There was a hasty swap-over, much shamefaced laughter, and then, just as Benjamin was returning to the see-saw, the playground gate squealed open again and a familiar, unexpected figure burst in, pulling a visibly reluctant three-year-old girl behind her.

  “Susan!”

  “Benjamin? What on earth are you doing here?”

  “I’m here with Doug’s daughter. We’re staying down here for the weekend.”

  “Is this her?” Susan asked, looking down at the little girl sitting in mute bewilderment at the bottom end of the see-saw. “This is Lavender, is it, or Parsley or whatever she’s called? Right.” She picked up Antonia and plonked her at the other end. “Go on, then, you two—play. That’s what you’ve been told to do, so get on with it. Bloody hell, I sound like Miss Haversham, don’t I?”

  She sat down on a bench and patted the space next to her.

  “What are you doing in London, though?” Benjamin asked.

  “We’ve driven down for the day. Took us two-and-a-half hours. And all because of your bloody brother. Jesus, I don’t know why I even listen to him. Yesterday afternoon he suddenly announces, completely out of the blue, that we all have to come down today so Antonia can be dragooned into playing with Doug Anderton’s children. Apparently it’s important that they become bosom buddies—never mind the little fact that they live 120 miles apart. Everything has to revolve around him and his bloody career . . .”

  “So where is Paul?”

  “Oh, he hasn’t come along. He’s gone straight off to Kennington to have a post-mortem about that stupid programme he was on. With his media adviser, if you please. Did you see it on Friday?”

  “I did.”

  “What a prat. He never said anything funny from start to finish. Well, how could he, he had his sense of humor surgically removed at birth. No, he just abandoned me on Chelsea Bridge, jumped out of the car, gave me their phone number and left me to get on with it. So I phoned up the house and got some dippy girl who hardly spoke a word of English—”

  “That would be Irina. She’s from Timisoara.”

  “—and she told me that everyone would probably be here. So here I am. And here they are.”

  She looked over at the two children, who were still sitting in the same positions on the unmoving see-saw, staring at each other with horrified antipathy. Benjamin wandered over to say, “Come on, you two, what’s the problem here?,” and pushed the see-saw up and down a few times, after which they carried on by themselves, albeit rather half-heartedly. Susan got up to join them, and pinned a rogue strand of Antonia’s hair back with a butterfly hairclip.

  “Are we going to see Daddy again soon?” the little girl asked.

  “That,” said Susan, “is anybody’s guess. He’s supposed to be joining us for lunch, but I wouldn’t like to bet on it. Not when there’s a choice between us and his media adviser.”

  The words were spoken brightly; but Benjamin knew—from the way she then took his arm and squeezed it—that the brightness was forced. He tried to think of something consoling to say, but couldn’t.

  23

  When they arrived at Pizza Express on the King’s Road, they found that Emily, along with Frankie and Doug, their three other children, Ranulph, Siena and Hugo, plus Irina, the Romanian nanny, were all waiting for them at one of the large, round, marble-topped tables. The children, under the guise of doing some drawing, writing and coloring, were in fact poking each other in the eyes, ears and various other body parts with a selection of crayons and pencils, while the grown-ups were smiling the tight, eyes-on-the-horizon smiles of people who really wished for nothing more dearly than to be transported away from this place and back to a time before they had children. The noise level was deafening, and indeed you could have been forgiven for thinking, at first, that you had wandered not into a restaurant but a terminally short-staffed crêche for under-disciplined and over-privileged children. Everywhere you looked, blond-haired boys and girls with names like Jasper, Orlando and Arabella were wreaking havoc, hurling fragments of half-chewed pizza and dough balls at each other’s French and Italian designer outfits, fighting for possession of their state-of-the-art Game Boys and shrilling across the room in perfect BBC English: beginning even now to master the braying accents of the ruling class with which, in twenty years’ time, they would no doubt be filling the pubs of Fulham and Chelsea. A lone childless couple sat together at one small table in the corner, occasionally ducking to avoid the flying foodstuffs, sometimes looking up and glancing around in wordless horror, clearly desperate to leave and bolting their pizzas down as if aiming for a world record.

  Susan and Benjamin made sure that the two new friends were placed side-by-side (for Antonia and Coriander, against all the odds, had already become inseparable, little more than an hour after meeting each other), then squeezed in and picked up their menus. Benjamin leapt up almost immediately, with a mingled cry of revulsion and pain, having sat on a half-chewed piece of bruschetta which was mysteriously impaled on the detached arm of a Barbie doll. Irina took it off him and spirited it away, defusing the crisis with the silent, inscrutable efficiency that appeared to be her hallmark.

  Doug was in an expansive mood. He had spent all morning reading the Sunday papers and was apparently satisfied that this week he had beaten off the competition, as far as his rival commentators were concerned. He had written an impassioned polemic about the threatened closure of the Leyland plant, drawing heavily on memories of his late father’s days as a shop steward there. Nothing else he had read that morning had been written with such feeling, or imbued with such a strong sense of personal experience. Now he felt ready to relax, and play the role of charismatic father-figure to this chaotic, extended family.

  Fully within the earshot of his children, and mischievously conscious that he was being transgressive, he began to tell Benjamin the full story of Frankie’s recent refusal to have sex with him.

  “She’s told you about this system she devised, has she? One day without sex for an ordinary swear word. Two days for F and three days for C?”

  “Ingenious,” Benjamin conceded, glancing across at Frankie and noticing that she was listening to every word of the conversation, grinning broadly, clearly doting on her husband and enjoying the power she had over him.

  “Well,” said Doug, turning in her direction, “do you realize that I haven’t sworn for more than a week? And do you know what it means?”

  “What does it mean?” she asked. (And there was, to Benjamin’s ears at least, a kind of flirtatious tenderness to her voice even in apparently bland phrasings like this.)

  “It means that tonight’s the night,” said Doug, triumphantly. “I’ve paid off my debt to society. Balance repaid, account closed. And I fully intend—” he took a meaningful sip of his Pinot Grigio “—to claim my reward.”

  “Duggie!” she reprimanded. “Do you have to share the details of our sex life with everyone at the table?” But she didn’t really seem to mind. Benjamin and Emily were the ones who shifted in their seats and looked uncomfortable
and avoided each other’s eyes.

  A few minutes later, Paul arrived.

  “Bloody hell,” he said, kissing Susan functionally on the top of the head, “it’s like the third circle of hell in here.” He ruffled Antonia’s hair and she looked up—briefly—from her drawing, dimly registering the fact that her father had appeared. He ignored Benjamin altogether and merely said: “Hello, Douglas—are you going to introduce me to your beautiful wife?”

  As Paul drew up a seat next to Frankie and embarked upon what he fondly believed to be the process of charming her, Doug stared across the table at him darkly. “I hate being seen out in public with that twat,” he whispered to Benjamin, sawing into his Four Seasons pizza. “Let’s get out of here as soon as we can.”

  And indeed, the parliamentary private secretary and his would-be ally in the quality press said almost nothing to each other over lunch, except for one moment when Doug made a point of catching Paul’s attention, and raised the subject of his television appearance.

  “Can I just ask you, by the way—if you can prise yourself away from my wife for a second, that is—what happened to you on television the other night? I mean, were you under written instructions from Millbank not to say anything? Because I don’t think I’ve ever seen a guest on that programme who remained completely silent before.”

  A look of fleetingly murderous anger passed across Paul’s face; but he quickly composed himself and said (following the line he had agreed with Malvina a few hours earlier), “Do you know what? They cut my contributions out. Every single one—I don’t know why. I said some terribly funny things, as well. There was this brilliant line about chocolate . . .” He tailed off, and shook his head regretfully. “Ah well—what’s the use? I’ll know next time. They just edit these things to make themselves look good, don’t they?”

  Doug pondered this explanation for a moment, before snorting in thinly veiled disbelief and getting to his feet.

  “Anyway,” he announced, “Ben and I haven’t had much of a chance to catch up so far, so we’re just going to take a walk. See you all back at the house.”