The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  The police decided straight away that it was suicide and basically weren’t interested in hearing any other explanation. Not even when his nephew, Jason, was found hanging from railings outside another pub six months later! People were pretty angry about this and eventually there was an inquest. It happened last month and you probably read about it. The coroner decided it was suicide again. The police admitted Errol had contacted them about the death threats but they hadn’t done anything about it.

  I’m writing to you because I’ve been sent a few things in the post here myself in recent weeks. Two letters, and a CD—a really horrible CD, which I only put on for about ten seconds. (And then only in the car, because I knew what it was going to be like and I didn’t want my family to hear it.)

  I’m not scared about any of this. I just think there’s a story here, which nobody is telling. Sure, we live in a successful multicultural society. A tolerant society. (Though what have I ever done, that people have to “tolerate” me?) But these people are still out there. I know they’re a minority. I know they’re just jokers and tossers, most of them. But look at what’s been going on, the last few weeks, in Bradford and Oldham. Race riots—proper race riots. Black and Asian people being made the scapegoats, again, for something that has gone wrong in white people’s lives. So I’m thinking that maybe this “tolerance” is just a mask for something ugly and rotten which is going to flare up at any moment.

  I won’t go on. I expect journalists don’t like people telling them what pieces they should write. I just think it says something when people like me aren’t allowed to get on with their lives peacefully. Even now—in the twenty-first century! In Blair’s Brave New Britain.

  Ah well. Get in touch if you can, if only for old times’ sake.

  All the best,

  Steve (Richards). (Astell House, 1971–79)

  Two days later, at around seven o’clock in the evening, Philip drove out to Telford. Traffic on the northbound M6 was dreadful, as always—there always seemed to be at least one lane coned off to make way for non-existent roadworks—and it was after eight by the time he parked at the bottom of Steve’s drive. The houses here were even newer than most of the houses in Telford: this was a New Town, after all, one of the great experiments of the 1960s, but the estate where Steve lived must have been finished only two or three years ago. The houses were spacious, comfortable-looking, neo-Georgian. Fiats and Rovers and sometimes BMWs were parked in the driveways. It did not feel soulless, exactly: just placid, and somehow unambitious, and very, very quiet. Philip could imagine that it wasn’t such a bad place to live. It just felt odd, to him (and had always felt odd, ever since he had come to know this part of the world as a boy, visiting his grandparents) that this militantly new, characterless town had so recently arrived, unannounced, without preamble, without history, and simply dumped itself into the middle of one of the oldest and least-known, most mysterious and recondite counties in the whole of England. It didn’t belong there, and it never would. It was a breeding ground for displacement and alienation.

  But Steve, it had to be said, looked neither displaced nor alienated when he opened the door with a broad smile and beckoned Philip inside. He was greying around the temples, and he wore glasses now, but the smile had not changed, and there was a youthfulness, a boyish delight about the way he tugged Philip into the living room to introduce him to his two daughters, who turned the television off without complaint and seemed genuinely intrigued by the appearance of this unassuming phantom from their father’s past.

  “The girls have already eaten,” Steve explained. “It’s no good trying to get them to wait. Come on now, you two, get upstairs. No more telly till your homework’s done. You can come down and have something to drink with us after.”

  “Wine?” asked Allison, the elder of the two, who looked to be about fourteen.

  “Maybe,” said Steve. “Depends how good you’ve been.”

  “Brilliant.”

  They both ran upstairs; after which, Steve took Philip through into the kitchen, to meet his wife, and to eat.

  Kate had baked two pizzas—hot ones, with ground beef and chilli peppers—and dressed a crisp green salad of watercress and rocket leaves. From a wine rack under the stairs Steve chose a rich and velvety Chilean Merlot, although Philip had to switch over regretfully to mineral water after only one small glass.

  “Now, Kate is going to find this really boring,” Steve said, throwing her an apologetic glance, “but I have to ask you—are you still in touch with any of those guys from school?”

  “One or two of them,” said Philip. “Claire Newman, for instance— remember her?”

  “Yeah, I remember. Nice girl. She used to work on the magazine with you.”

  “That’s right. Well, I married her, a few years after we left school.”

  “You did? That’s fantastic! Congratulations.”

  “OK, but don’t get too excited. Then we got divorced.”

  “Oh.”

  “It’s all right. Everything worked out fine. It was just one of those . . . bad decisions. We’ve got a son called Patrick. He lives with me and my second wife, Carol, for various complicated reasons. Claire was in Italy for quite a few years but just recently she’s moved to Malvern, so maybe we’ll see a bit more of each other now. We were talking about having a few days in London together soon, going down with Patrick.”

  “All sounds very grown-up and liberal to me,” said Steve. “Not sure I could handle that.”

  Teasingly, Kate said: “Steve’s getting more and more conservative in his old age. I’ve been trying to persuade him to have an open marriage for years, but he won’t listen.”

  He laughed this away. “But what about Benjamin? Did you ever hear what happened to Benjamin? I mean, I know this sounds crazy, but every so often I go into a bookshop, into WH Smith or something, and I go and look at the ‘T’s in the paperback section, ’cause I’m still expecting something by him to pop up there any minute. I mean, we all thought he would have won the Nobel Prize or something by now.”

  “Oh, I’m still in touch with Ben. See him every couple of weeks, actually. He’s still in Birmingham. Works for a company called Morley Jackson Gray.”

  Steve speared some rocket and said, “Sounds like a firm of accountants.”

  “That’s exactly what it is.”

  “He became an accountant?”

  “Well, T. S. Eliot worked in a bank, didn’t he? I dare say that’s the kind of precedent that goes through Benjamin’s mind.”

  “I remember now,” Steve said. “Benjamin worked for a bank, didn’t he? Just for a few months, before he went up to university.”

  “That’s right. And then . . . Well, after he graduated, he’d just started this novel, and he wanted to get it finished, so he didn’t want to get a proper job at first. The bank said they’d take him back for a few months, and that must have sounded like the ideal way to buy himself a bit more time for writing. But—I don’t know, the novel never quite seemed to get finished, and meanwhile he got friendly with this other bloke from the bank and they formed a band—you know how Benjamin always used to write music, as well—and that started to take up more and more time, and somehow in the middle of all this, he must have got some kind of taste for all that number-crunching, because the next thing I hear, he’s doing his accountancy exams and saying that the novel’s gone on hold and he needs a long period of stability to get his head around it.” Philip took a sip of water and added: “And then, of course, he goes and marries Emily.”

  “Who?”

  “Emily Sandys. From school. Don’t you remember? From the Christian Society.”

  Steve shook his head. “Not my scene, really. I always assumed he was going to marry . . . you know . . . Cicely.”

  His voice dropped as he spoke this name: leading Phil to wonder whether, even now, Steve still suffered from some sort of sexual guilt about the time he and Cicely had been in the school production of Othello together, and af
terwards had had a quick fling (though fling was too strong a word for it—nothing more than a teenage grope, really, at the after-show party) which had led to the break-up of his first serious relationship. It never ceased to surprise Philip that even after two decades there were some people who could not pronounce that name without it producing a kind of frisson: Benjamin was one of them, obviously, but so was Claire, for some reason, and now (apparently) Steve as well. How could anyone have left such a legacy behind her, such a trail of energy, generated so unthinkingly and in such a short time?

  “No one really knows what happened to Cicely,” he said, guardedly. “She went back to America and kind of . . . left Benjamin in the lurch. Took him a long time to recover from it.”

  “Has he recovered from it?” Steve asked, after a pause.

  Philip mopped up some salad dressing from his plate with a scrap of bread, and said: “Benjamin told me once—I don’t know if this is true or not—that she went back to America to be with this woman Helen, and they became . . . you know . . . lovers.”

  Steve’s eyes widened. “Cicely? A dyke?”

  “As I said, I don’t know if it’s true or not.”

  Kate stood up and began to clear the plates away.

  “Maybe we should change the subject,” Steve said, when she was over by the sink, out of earshot. “But there’s one more thing: what happened to Benjamin’s sister? The one with the boyfriend who died in the pub bombings.”

  Now it was Philip’s turn to look suddenly wistful.

  “Yeah . . . Lois . . . Well, Benjamin doesn’t talk about her much. Doesn’t see her much either, I don’t think. As far as I know she lives up north somewhere—York or something. I think she was ill, for quite a long time, after that happened. And then she met this guy and sort of . . . threw herself into it. Got married, had a daughter . . . Can’t remember her name now.”

  “Did Benjamin have kids?”

  “No. They couldn’t. I don’t know why. Don’t think they do either.” Philip was remembering, now, the last time he had actually spoken to Lois. “There was this dinner party,” he said, reminiscing aloud, while Steve frowned, doing his best to follow the rambling train of thought. “And Lois was wearing this dress. She could only have been about sixteen. I fancied her something rotten. We had this terrible food—God, can you remember what we used to eat back in the seventies . . . ?”

  “I know.” Steve laughed, and gestured at the debris on the table. “We’re all such sophisticates now.”

  “. . . And that was the night . . . I suppose that was the night I got my first clue, that my mum was thinking of starting an affair with Mr. Plumb— Sugar Plum Fairy: d’you remember him?”

  “I certainly do. The horny old sod.”

  Philip smiled, and shook his head. “My parents nearly broke up over that. Can you imagine? It did my head in, for a while.” Steve offered to pour some more wine, and he pushed his glass forward, not caring, for a moment, that he had a long drive ahead of him later that night. “Thanks.”

  “He and your mum, though: they never . . . did anything, did they?”

  “Depends what you mean,” said Philip, swirling the wine around in his glass. “She died five years ago, and afterwards, I cleared out some of her old stuff. Dad didn’t want to do it. And there were all these letters. Letters he’d written to her. They were very passionate—even if you did need a bloody dictionary to understand them. And she hung on to them, all that time. I don’t know what to make of that. Don’t know what it tells me . . .”

  “She stayed with your dad all that time, as well,” Steve reminded him. And when Philip didn’t respond, he asked: “Is he coping OK—with being on his own?”

  “Well . . .” Philip smiled again; a private smile this time. “He’s a great reader, that’s the thing you have to remember about my dad. Always has his nose in a book. His eyesight’s going, but he still reads. Every day. Novels, history—anything he can get his hands on.”

  Kate came back to the table carrying a plate of strawberry cheesecake, and for a while the two old friends forced themselves to stop talking about their schooldays. Philip learned, instead, how Kate and Steve had met in their last year at Manchester university, how Kate had interrupted her career to bring up the girls but was now looking for a way to get back into teaching as soon as she could, and how Steve had found himself a niche working in the research laboratory of a local firm, based on an industrial estate just outside Telford, trying to make advances in the field of biodegradable plastics.

  “I am the R&D department, basically,” he explained. “Me and a part-time assistant. It’s frustrating that we don’t have many resources, but they’re a good company—really into what I’m trying to do.”

  “Unfortunately,” said Kate, spooning out the cheesecake, “they can only afford to pay him peanuts. That’s the real problem.”

  “I didn’t think plastics were biodegradable,” Philip said, feeling rather simple-minded as he did so.

  “Well of course they’re not,” Steve said. “They’re synthetic. But we might be able to make them biodegradable, or photodegradable, in time. They’ve developed some plastics that are soluble in hot water, for instance. Cellophane is biodegradable—did you know that? The trouble at the moment is that the degradation takes such a long time.”

  “What about recycling? Isn’t that the answer?”

  “Well, it’s not easy, because people chuck all their plastic stuff away together, but then it all has to be recycled in different ways. So someone has to sort it all. Thermoplastic polymers and thermosetting polymers can’t be recycled in the same way, for one thing.”

  “I’ve got a feeling,” said Kate, “that Philip doesn’t know what you’re talking about. Any more than I do, to be honest.”

  “No, but I can tell that what you’re doing’s important,” said Philip.

  “It’s too important, actually, for the place where I’m working. Too big, in a way.”

  “Do you think you could move on to somewhere else? A bigger firm, with more money for that sort of thing?”

  “These people have been great, but . . . yeah, it’s crossed my mind.” Steve reached for the cafetière and started pouring coffee. “I’m keeping my eye on the job adverts, put it like that.”

  Just before Philip left, Steve handed him a large jiffy bag. Inside were some sheets of handwritten paper, and a CD. The handwriting was ragged and erratic—a mixture of lower-case letters and capitals, scrawled with a blotchy blue biro. The CD seemed to have been manufactured on the cheap: the black-and-white cover looked as though it had been reproduced on a photocopier, and featured the usual neo-Nazi iconography of skulls and swastikas. The title was Auschwitz Carnival and the band was called “Unrepentant.”

  “Lovely,” said Philip, scanning the song titles briefly.

  Conscious that Allison and Diane were lingering in the hallway, looking on with some curiosity, Steve said: “Look, Phil, it’s been a great evening. Fantastic to see you again. Don’t let’s spoil it by talking about stuff like that.”

  “OK,” said Philip. “I’ll check it out in the next couple of days.”

  “Be good if you could write something.”

  “I’ll see what I can do.”

  They smiled at each other, now, and Philip offered to shake Steve’s hand; but Steve embraced him instead, and clapped him gently on the back.

  “Let’s stay in touch from now on—yeah?”

  “Will do.”

  Philip kissed Kate goodnight, and kissed both of Steve’s daughters, and looked back at them as they stood waving in the doorway when he walked down to his car. It had a good feeling about it, that family, he thought on the drive home; and this made him even sicker with fury the next day when he read the letters Steve had been sent, with their references to his “white slut wife” and his “deformed children, half-white and half-nigger.” He only listened to a few minutes of the CD, turning it off in the middle of the second track. Without having to reflect fo
r a moment longer, he knew that he owed it to Steve to find out more about this. He would have to write a piece. A series of pieces. Maybe something even bigger.

  11

  MINUTES

  of a meeting of

  THE CLOSED CIRCLE

  held at Rules Restaurant, Covent Garden

  Wednesday 20 June, 2001

  Strictly Private and Confidential

  An inaugural meeting of THE CLOSED CIRCLE was held at the above venue on the above date. The members present were:

  Paul Trotter, MP

  Mr. Ronald Culpepper, MiF, EMBA

  Mr. Michael Usborne, CBE

  Lord Addison

  Prof. David Glover (London Business School)

  Ms. Angela Marcus

  Drinks were served in a private room at 7:30 p.m. All the members being well known to each other, no introductions were considered necessary. Dinner was served at 8 o’clock and the business of the meeting began at 9:45 p.m.

  It having been previously agreed that the nature of the CIRCLE’s business, and the manner in which it was to be conducted, required that there should be no chair, informal opening remarks were addressed by Mr. CULPEPPER.

  These remarks were brief, and consisted principally of congratulations directed towards Mr. TROTTER on his recent re-election as a Member of Parliament. A toast was proposed to Mr. TROTTER’s continued parliamentary success. Mr. CULPEPPER’s sentiments were warmly echoed by the other members of the CIRCLE.

  The remainder of the business consisted largely of an address by Mr. TROTTER.