The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  “No,” said Philip, turning round to face her again. “Sorry—carry on with what you were saying.”

  “I was just saying,” Claire resumed, rather testily, “that we talked about her disappearance that morning, and—well, it reopened a whole lot of stuff, as far as I’m concerned. Stuff which I’ve been trying not to think about, since then—for the sake of my sanity as much as anything else, because I went down that road a long time ago, and all it achieved was . . . Phil, are you listening to any of this, or not?”

  “Of course I am,” said Philip, snapping to attention again.

  “What’s your problem, then? Your eyes keep glazing over.”

  “Sorry. It’s just that . . .” He took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes in a distracted gesture. “Seeing Paul just now . . . And hearing you talk about Miriam . . . I don’t know, it sparked something off. There’s something at the back of my mind—some connection between those two. It keeps coming and going—you know, like déjà vu?”

  “What sort of connection?” Claire asked. Her voice was eager, suddenly.

  “I don’t know,” said Philip. “Like I said, it keeps coming and going.” He picked up the wine list again. “Don’t worry, I’m sure it’ll come back to me.”

  “I’ve nearly finished the article,” Philip was saying, a couple of hours later. “But really I’ve only just been scratching the surface. The thing about these neo-Nazi organizations is . . . you can just dismiss them as the lunatic fringe: you know, Holocaust deniers and that sort of thing—nutters, basically. But then, look what’s been going on in the north these last few months. Not just the race riots, but the number of council seats the BNP has been winning off the back of all that unrest. Now, the way the BNP’s marketing itself at the moment is very interesting. They’ve been watching New Labour, I reckon, and they’re targeting women voters, and middle-class voters. Half their candidates seem to be women, these days. What’s different is that you only have to peel back the marketing and you come bang up against something really ugly—like that CD. But the white voters in Burnley and Bradford aren’t doing that. We’ve all become too used to taking things at face value, you see. There’s no spirit of inquiry any more, we’re just consumers of politics, we swallow what we’re given. So it’s actually about the way the whole country is going, the whole culture. Do you see? That’s why it has to be a book. I can take the far right as a starting-point, but it’s going to be about much more than that.”

  “Sounds fascinating. Have you got the time to do it?”

  “I’ll have to make the time. I’ve got to move on, Claire. I can’t go on writing ‘About Town with Philip Chase’ for the next twenty years. Everybody’s got to move on some time.”

  “We’re all so restless now, aren’t we?” Claire said, almost crossly, as if the whole of her generation had just at that moment started to irritate her. “Our parents stayed in the same jobs for forty years. Nowadays no one can sit still. Doug’s changed jobs. I’ve changed jobs—and countries. Steve wants to get a new job, by the sound of it.” She thought for a moment, and added: “D’you know, I can only think of one person who never seems to move on.”

  “Benjamin,” said Philip, without needing to be asked.

  “Benjamin,” she repeated, quietly, and sipped at her coffee.

  “Well,” said Philip. “At least he’s moved on from his marriage, now.”

  This provoked a curt laugh. “But he hasn’t moved on, has he? He’s been kicked out. That’s just so typical of him. He creates an impossible situation and then he just . . . festers in it until somebody else does the dirty work of putting it right.” Her anger—if that’s what it had been—was quickly spent, and now she asked in a more kindly vein: “How is he, anyway?”

  “Oh, all right,” said Philip. (Benjamin had moved in with him three days ago.) “Out at work most of the time, which is a great relief. Predictably, he’s gone a bit bonkers, but I imagine that’s only a short-term thing. He keeps talking about becoming a monk.”

  “A monk? He hasn’t got religion again, has he?”

  “No—I think it’s more of a lifestyle choice.”

  “Poor Benjamin. How long’s he going to stay with you? Is Carol OK about it?”

  “Well, not over the moon, exactly. But he can stay as long as he wants, I suppose.”

  “I worry about him,” said Claire; which, as far as Philip could see, was merely stating the obvious. “Do you think he’s ever going to finish this book?” she asked; and then voiced an even more dangerous question. “Do you think it even exists?”

  “Well, let’s ask his brother,” said Philip, and stood up to waylay Paul, who was passing through the restaurant again on his way out. “Paul!” he called out, cheerily, offering his hand. “Philip Chase. Birmingham Post— and, indeed, King William’s School. We spoke on the phone last year. How are you?”

  Paul shook his hand limply, thrown into visible confusion by this chance encounter. He was flanked by two other men, at this point. One of them was tall, grey-haired, imposing: he was dressed like a businessman but his weathered features, paradoxically, suggested a predilection for the outdoor lifestyle. He looked as though he was no stranger to yachting clubs and Jamaican beaches, and seemed to be a good twenty years older than Paul. The other man not only looked older still—being almost completely bald, for one thing—but was massively corpulent, with a stomach of kingly girth and darting, watchful eyes made apparently tiny by the fleshiness and jowly rotundity of the face in which they were deeply sunk. Philip would never have recognized him in a million years. But it was this man who happily exclaimed:

  “Chase! Philip Chase, as I live and breathe! What the hell are you doing here?”

  Realization dawned slowly, and Philip again held out an uncertain hand. “Culpepper?” he said, tentatively. “It is you, isn’t it?”

  “Of course it is. Good grief, I haven’t changed that much, have I?”

  Could this be the same person who had once competed with Steve so fiercely for the title of Victor Ludorum, the top athletics trophy in the school? The transformation was bewildering.

  “Not really, it’s just that you’ve . . .”

  “Oh, I know. I’ve put on a few inches round the midriff, over the years. Who hasn’t? Mind if we join you for a minute or two?”

  The other man was introduced to them as Michael Usborne, but before anyone had had the chance to sit down, Paul Trotter—looking more uncomfortable by the minute—glanced impatiently at his watch and announced that he had to leave. Culpepper, meanwhile, suggested that instead of ordering more drinks at the table, they should all move on for liqueurs at the bar of his hotel, which was only a few minutes’ walk away. Claire and Philip agreed—impelled (as they admitted to each other later) almost entirely by morbid curiosity to find out what had become of this legendary bête noire from their schooldays.

  Paul said goodbye to them in the street, and saved his final words for Culpepper. “Well, enjoy having a drink with your journalist friend, won’t you?” he said.

  If there was a hint involved, Culpepper seemed to take it. He shook Paul’s hand solemnly.

  Afterwards, as they were walking up the Charing Cross Road towards Centrepoint, they could talk of nothing at first except the extraordinary change in Culpepper’s appearance.

  “I can’t believe it,” Philip kept saying. “The man was a dynamo at school, whatever else you thought about him.”

  “So what happened? Years of four-course business lunches taken their toll, d’you think?”

  “Must’ve done. He seems to be on the board of about a dozen companies, so I suppose that means twelve times as much food. Anyway,” he said, in a gently accusing voice, “you could have asked him yourself, if you hadn’t spent the entire hour locked in conversation with the captain of industry. What were you talking about, all that time?”

  “I thought he was a nice guy,” said Claire. “Bit of a smoothie, but nothing too obvious. He was telling me all sorts of st
uff. He’s had some really bad luck recently. Hasn’t even got a job at the moment.”

  “Claire, do you realize who Michael Usborne is? Don’t you ever read the business pages?”

  “Of course I don’t read the business pages. Who reads the business pages? My cat poos on them.”

  “Michael Usborne,” said Philip, as they dodged a trio of drunken teenagers gesturing noisily at the driver of a vacant black cab, who clearly had no intention of picking them up, “was CEO of Pantechnicon until earlier this year. He was responsible for half the railway track in the south-east. It was the second job he’d had running one of the privatized railway companies: his speciality is to cut the workforce, economize on safety procedures and then usually get the hell out of the boardroom before the shit hits the fan, which it usually does a few months later. He ran that company into the ground and I think they paid about three and a half million to get rid of him. Before that he was in telecommunications and he did exactly the same thing. And before that it was a distillery. The man’s a serial wrecker of companies.”

  Claire said nothing in reply to this. She stopped outside the window of an electrical shop and looked at the gleaming racks of stereo systems, lap-tops and DVD players. It was still open, even at this hour, and a young guy in denims—he looked as though he might still be a teenager—was loading himself up with cardboard boxes while his friend signed a credit card slip. The consumer boom was still in full swing, then.

  “Why do they have all these shops next to each other, selling the same things?” she wondered aloud. “It can’t be good for business.”

  Philip sighed and asked: “He wasn’t coming on to you, was he?”

  “What does it matter to you?” she said. “Are you my guardian angel all of a sudden?”

  “He’s had about four wives as well, you know.”

  “He’s been married twice,” she corrected him. “And he told me that he was always on the lookout for good technical translators, so I gave him my business card.” Something else occurred to her. “Oh—and he asked me up to his hotel room. But I told him I wasn’t in the mood.”

  “Dirty old man,” Philip muttered. “Still, at least he can’t pester you much in Malvern.”

  “Funnily enough, he’s got a house near there—in Ledbury,” said Claire. “He invited me down next weekend.”

  “You’re not going, are you?”

  They had reached the lobby of their hotel. Claire headed for the lift, pressed the button for the third floor and turned to Philip, with a kind of weary resolution in her voice: “I’m forty-one, you know, and I can make my own decisions. I’m also single, and to be perfectly honest, I don’t get hit on much any more. Perhaps you’ve forgotten what that’s like. So if some good-looking guy—who also appears to be good company—and also happens to have a house near me with not one but two indoor swimming pools—wants to invite me there, for whatever reason, it’s up to me whether I go or not. On top of which, I haven’t had a shag for . . . well . . .” She tailed off as the lift arrived. They both stepped inside, and Claire didn’t finish that particular sentence. She just said: “Well, there are some things you don’t even tell your ex-husband.”

  Philip smiled at her then, fondly and apologetically, and they made their way in silence to their adjacent rooms. Claire’s was a double, which she was sharing with Patrick.

  “Anyway,” she said, fumbling in her handbag for the electronic card. “That was a very nice evening. Thank you.”

  “I enjoyed it too. Say hi to Patrick for me. I’ll see him at breakfast.”

  “Will do. If he’s still up.”

  It was later than they had both thought: almost 1:30.

  “Shit,” said Philip. “I meant to phone Carol tonight. Find out how Benjamin was.” And then, at the mention of this name, he remembered something. “By the way—when you saw him a few weeks ago, did Benjamin say anything to you about a hairdresser?”

  Claire stopped in the act of opening her door.

  “Yes, he did. Why, has he mentioned her to you?”

  “Only in the sense that . . . Well, he told me that he went to see her last week and tried to get talking, and it all went horribly wrong. Apparently, not only did he not manage to ask her out, and not only did he not get his hair cut, but the manager’s banned him from going within a hundred yards of the place.”

  “Banned him?” said Claire, disbelieving. “Why, what happened?”

  “He just got nervous, I suppose,” Philip said. “And sometimes, you know, when you get nervous—the wrong words come out.”

  “But all he was going to ask for was a cut and blow dry.”

  “The ‘cut’ bit came out OK,” Philip told her, deadpan. “It was ‘blow dry’ he had some difficulty with.” He shook his head and unlocked the door. “I suppose he just had something else on his mind at the time.”

  And for the next half hour, he and Claire lay listening to each other’s laughter on either side of the dividing wall.

  7

  —— Original Message ——

  From: P_Chase

  To: Claire

  Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2001 10:27 a.m.

  Subject: Déjà vu

  Great to see you last week. We must celebrate the painful and devastating severance of our marital bond more often. And what a weird surprise that we should run into Culpepper that night. He seemed so pleased to see us that, for a moment there, I’d got him marked down as nothing more than a harmless old bore—until I remembered what a bastard he’d been at school, and how he had made life hell for Steve, apart from anything else. Shows how dangerous nostalgia can be, blurring the sharp outlines of fact into something more palatable, more soft-focus . . .

  Anyway: I was emailing for a slightly odd reason, namely that I just this morning remembered what it was that I *couldn’t* remember the other night re. Paul Trotter and Miriam. And now that I have remembered it, it seems a bit embarrassing—too insubstantial, in a way, to be worth passing on. Also, I’m not sure that I should encourage you (or Patrick) to keep obsessing over this business. Some things simply have to be laid to rest, and a firm line drawn under them.

  Anyway. This is what it was. One day at school, Benjamin and I were out with the Walking Option and we got lost pretty badly—as we did most weeks, I seem to remember. I can’t say we tried very hard to get back to the others—my memory is that we’d taken some food with us, and possibly some beer as well, and we ended up just sitting down and making a picnic of it. That was when Paul came by, riding his bicycle. He was off sick that day—allegedly—though that didn’t seem to stop him practising for the Tour de France up and down the Lickey hills, as far as I could see.

  Benjamin and I were having one of those laddish (I’m not sure the word existed then, or was used much, at any rate) conversations about women. We were both rather ruefully admitting that neither of us had ever seen a naked woman except on the telly. And that (at least, this is how I remember it) was when Paul chipped in and reduced us both to silence by saying that he *had* seen someone naked—and then he mentioned your sister.

  Now, I wouldn’t attach any significance to this at all—because he could have been making it up, or he could have been referring to some pervy glimpse of her he got when spying on the girls’ school showers one day (I wouldn’t have put anything past him, at that age)—if it wasn’t for one peculiar detail. Remember that we’re talking about a conversation that took place probably about twenty-five years ago, so my memory of it is hardly going to be very clear; but on the other hand, I haven’t thought about it since then—not once—which means that it hasn’t had the chance to get distorted and rewritten in my head. And my recollection is that he said he had seen her down by a reservoir—a reservoir near Cofton Park. I suppose that means the one off Barnt Green Road.

  Now—that would be a pretty strange thing to make up, wouldn’t it? Ben and I just thought he was bullshitting us—took absolutely no notice of what he was saying, really, whereas if he had not been
such a comprehensive pain in the arse we would at least have *registered,* I suppose, that this was a curious tale he was spinning. What I’m trying to sort out now, in my mind, is the date of this event. I mean, I have no way at all of knowing how recently Paul had had this experience (if it was a real experience); but I think I can say, with some certainty, when he told us about it. When he waylaid us on his bicycle he was singing “Anarchy in the UK”—I remember that, with complete clarity—so it can’t have been any earlier than autumn 1976. Two years after Miriam disappeared. And it may even have been a few months later than that because I’ve got a feeling that Benjamin was already into his on-off-and-on-again thing with Cicely by then—which would date it after his famous “Othello” review came out at the beginning of the spring term, 1977.

  Benjamin himself might remember more about this. I’ll ask him when he gets in from work tonight. (Mind you, it’s hard to get him to talk about anything other than the miserable state of his life at the moment.) Alternatively, you could contact Paul directly—get it from the horse’s mouth, as it were. Rather you than me, on that one.

  Look, I’m probably making a big deal out of nothing, here. I can’t help feeling guilty even about sending this message off to you. I hope it doesn’t start you off on some sort of false trail and just re-open all the stuff you tried so hard to put a lid on years ago. Don’t rush into this, Claire, OK? Think about what you’re getting into. Take a few days and try to decide whether you really want to start off on that road again.

  Take care, anyway, and big love from

  Phil XX.

  —— Original Message ——

  From: Claire

  To: P_Chase

  Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2001 11:10 a.m.

  Subject: Re: Déjà vu

  Hi Phil, thanks for that.

  Can you let me have Paul Trotter’s number please?

  Much love Claire x

  —Hello?

  —Hello—am I speaking to Claire Newman?