The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  Philip said: “At the end of the day, if someone you love has been a victim of terrorism—has been killed in a terrorist attack, let’s say—it makes no difference to them whether the terrorist has done it because he’s psychotic or because he feels his country or his religion or something has been hard done by. The fact is that the person you love is dead and the person who did it is the person who planted the bomb or flew the aeroplane or whatever. You don’t care about their motives. They shouldn’t have done it. Roy Slater killed your sister because he was an evil man. Sorry to be so blunt about it, but that’s that.”

  Claire said: “Yes, but it wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the pub bombings.”

  Philip said: “Maybe not to that person, at that time. But he would have found other reasons for doing it to somebody else. And whatever became of him, by the way?”

  Claire said: “It was weird, I had no curiosity about Slater, after that. It was as if I’d been bled dry of all those feelings. Patrick made some inquiries, a couple of years later. Found out that he’d died a while ago. Died in prison. Emphysema.”

  Philip said: “That’s funny. Patrick never mentioned doing that.”

  Claire said: “What that day in Norfolk made me realize—this is all I’m saying—is that there are patterns. You have to look hard for them but when you see them you can cut your way through all the chaos and randomness and coincidence and follow the path back to its source and say, ‘Ah, that’s where it started.’ ”

  Philip said: “You’d be crazy to do that. There are individuals. There are bad individuals—it’s as simple as that—and they’re the people you have to watch out for, and even if there are reasons for the way they behave, nine times out of ten they’re not to do with history, and not to do with culture. It’s to do with psychology and human relationships. Other people have made them the way they are. Parents, most of the time.”

  Claire said: “So then you have to ask what made the parents the way they were.”

  Philip said: “But that’s impossible! Then you’ll just keep going further and further back and there’ll be no end to it.”

  Claire said: “No, not impossible. Difficult, yes. Very difficult. But that’s what we have to do.”

  Stefano came out on to the balcony. He was carrying a bottle of red wine from which he refilled both of their glasses.

  Claire said: “Smells fantastic in there. How long’s it going to be?”

  Stefano said: “Another half an hour or so. You can’t rush risotto.”

  He went back inside. Claire and Philip sipped their wine, and the mournful late sunlight of a September evening threw long shadows and burnished the ancient stones of the piazza beneath them.

  Philip said: “People have to accept responsibility for themselves, that’s all. Look at Harding. Maybe he was damaged by his parents, I don’t know. But lots of people are damaged by their parents and end up living more or less harmless lives. He chose to become the person he became.”

  Claire said: “You never really told me what happened when you went to meet him.”

  Philip said: “I’ll tell you now.”

  “Harding was in Norfolk, too. Nowhere near where you went, though. Right at the other end of the county—the western end. The address I’d been given was some farm in the middle of nowhere, a few miles south of King’s Lynn. The beginnings of the fen country.

  “I don’t remember the date exactly but it must have been some time late in March because I was listening to the radio on the way up and the Americans had been bombing Iraq for a couple of days by then. ‘Shock and awe,’ that was the expression. You couldn’t listen to the radio for five bloody minutes without some military strategist banging on about ‘shock and awe.’ It felt strange after I’d left the main roads and I was driving through this empty landscape—things get very quiet in Norfolk very quickly, you can leave civilization behind in no time—and all I was hearing on the radio was descriptions of carnage and destruction, and all these American guys talking proudly about how much bloody awe the rest of us must be feeling. I suppose it’s not hard to inspire awe in someone if you’re the richest country in the world and you spend half of it on machines designed to bomb the living shit out of people. Anyway, there are different kinds of awe, aren’t there? Sometimes it can be a landscape that gives you that feeling. It’s so beautiful around there, so still. Miles and miles of watery flatness. Just you and the birds. And those Norfolk skies! In the summer they can be amazing. That afternoon it was just grey, silvery grey. But . . . the silence of it. That’s what was so awesome, I suppose, coming from the city. I turned the radio off and before going to find the farmhouse I pulled the car over and turned the engine off and for a while I just got out and listened to the silence.

  “I could see why he’d chosen to come and live here.

  “You could see the house from miles away. There was no woodland round there, and the land was completely flat. Just reed beds for as far as you could see, and those strange-looking waterways which were made hundreds of years ago but still run absolutely straight, and feel very man-made. An odd kind of landscape. Not like anywhere else I know. Very exposed, in a way, but at the same time, so remote, you couldn’t imagine anyone coming to find him there. I wondered if that was the idea. I wondered if he was hiding from something, or someone. I think the police had been after him more than once in the last few years, because of things he’d said and things he’d posted on the internet and of course the CDs, as well. I thought perhaps he was just lying low for a while, to give whatever trouble he was in the chance to blow over.

  “I could see smoke coming from the direction of the house but when I got there I realized it wasn’t coming from the main building. It was coming from the chimney of this old caravan he’d parked in the yard. There were a couple of women living there—or girls, actually—I don’t know what you’d call them, they looked like they were in their early twenties. He called them Scylla and Charybdis and I never found out what they were doing there apart from helping him out with some of the farm-work. They were very good looking. I don’t know where he’d found them or how he’d persuaded them to come there.

  “Anyway, I parked the car next to this caravan and sat there for a while trying to get my thoughts straight. I had no idea what I was going to say to him, or even what I was there for, really. I suppose it was curiosity, mostly. I wanted to know how the person we’d known at school—or thought we knew, at any rate—could possibly have turned out like this. I suppose that learning what Harding had become had knocked my whole past—our shared past—out of shape, and I was hoping to put that right, somehow, to make it seem that there was some logic behind it all. Keeping that chaos at bay, again. But there was another reason, too. I wanted to ask him about Steve. What he’d done to Steve at school. I wanted to know how he could ever justify that, even to himself.

  “I sat there for about five minutes and then I went to the front door and I knocked as loudly as I could.

  “There was no way I would ever have recognized him. In fact for a second or two I was sure that I must have got the wrong house. He was wearing a flat cap—I found out later this was because he’d gone almost completely bald—and had little round steel-rimmed glasses and an incredible bushy beard that came down practically to his chest. He was dressed in tweeds, a mustard-yellow waistcoat, neckerchief, the lot—he’d reinvented himself as an English gentleman farmer, although judging from the state of the fields I’d just driven through, he hadn’t quite got the hang of the farming part of it yet. I can’t say that he looked very strong, physically—he’d begun to walk with quite a stoop, and there wasn’t much flesh on him—but the thing that really struck me about him was his eyes. There was real aggression there. Was he always like that, at school, can you remember? I mean, he knew who I was, he remembered me, and he was expecting to see me, but there was terrific hostility, terrific suspicion in those eyes. As if he was just waiting for me to say a word out of place and then he’d explode. An
d it was like that from the minute I appeared. No trust. You could tell he didn’t trust me, didn’t trust anything for that matter. He didn’t trust the world.

  “Of course, the first problem was, I didn’t know what to call him. I’d already found out that he didn’t like to be called Sean any more. He’d anglicized it to John. John Harding. I suppose it had a good, solid, English sound to it. I remembered that his dad was Irish, but later on, whenever I mentioned that, he’d ignore it. At one point he said that his father was only Irish going back a generation. Made quite an issue out of that. But on the whole he hardly talked about his father anyway. He said his mother was far more important to him, and there were pictures of her everywhere—on the shelves, on the mantelpiece, on the piano. She was a scary-looking woman, I must say. Looked like someone from the 1930s, not the 1970s. Like the kind of headmistress who’d give you nightmares. In a couple of the pictures she was wearing a monocle.

  “I have to say the place was fairly tidy, and clean. I’ve got a feeling that Scylla and Charybdis had something to do with that. Not that there was much to clean, or tidy, when it came down to it. I don’t think he had many possessions. There was hardly any furniture, just a table to eat off and a table to work at—one of the rooms was set up as his study, and he had a computer in there. But there were books everywhere: not just in the study, but all over the place, in the kitchen, the hallway, the bathroom. Great piles of them. Books on every subject. A lot of stuff on local history and topography, but also weird things like occultism, witchcraft, paganism. A lot of classical texts. Novels, hundreds of novels—not modern stuff, but lots of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers. Some politics, history. Mein Kampf, inevitably. A lot of books on the eastern religions. A lot about Islam. Very eclectic, I had to admit. Quite impressive. I don’t remember him being that much of a reader at school.

  “The silly thing was, we had nothing to say to each other. At least, he clearly had no desire to make conversation, and nothing that I said seemed to interest him very much. You know, the routine questions like ‘How are you?’ and ‘What have you been up to?’ didn’t seem to get us anywhere. I tried telling him what the people from school had been doing, but he didn’t want to know. Didn’t even try to be polite about it. ‘I don’t remember any of those people,’ he would say. Didn’t remember Doug—didn’t remember you, either. He just said, ‘You were all earthbound. You were all of the earth.’ I’m not sure what that was supposed to mean. The only exception, seemingly, was Benjamin. Something lit up for a minute in his eyes when I mentioned Benjamin. He asked whether Benjamin had ever got his book published and I said no, he never managed to finish it. He seemed to think that was a pity. He said Benjamin had potential, or something.

  “I told him how it was Benjamin who had rediscovered him, how he’d come across that entry he’d written in the log-book in Dorset, and I asked him if he’d remembered writing it. And he said, oh yes, that was him all right, but he didn’t write those kinds of things any more. He said Arthur Pusey-Hamilton was dead and buried. I asked him how closely he’d identified with the character and he said very closely: he had this theory that in order to satirize something, or in order to parody it properly, you really had to be in love with it, on some level. He told me that he’d developed this theory in a big book he’d been working on, a history of English humour, starting with Chaucer and coming up to P. G. Wodehouse. He talked a lot about all the books he’d written. None of them had been published. But then he said that he’d ‘renounced’ humour, like someone would say they’d given up smoking or converted to a different religion. Apparently he’d spent some time in a monastery—there you are, another link with Benjamin—and he told me about this saint called Saint Benoit and how the monks tried to live according to his rules, and one of them was not to make jokes, and another was not to laugh too often. He said that laughter wasn’t holy, wasn’t dignified. Those kinds of words—holiness, dignity—seemed to have become important to him. He used them a lot.

  “So I took him up on that. I said that I couldn’t see there was anything holy about drugging Steve Richards to make sure he didn’t pass his physics exam, or that there was much dignity in victimizing one of the teachers—we had this maths teacher for a while, called Mr. Silverman—just because he was a Jew. And as for working with a bunch of Nazi thugs like Combat 18, or putting money into bands who wrote songs celebrating the Holocaust— well, I couldn’t see how any of that could be justified with the kinds of words he was using. But that argument didn’t seem to worry him. He said that he’d made mistakes in the past, he didn’t deny that. But he said that he actually admired the skinheads and the people who took ‘race war’ seriously—that was the phrase he used, race war—people who took it to the streets. He said he didn’t call them thugs, he called them warriors, and the Warrior Spirit was part of our heritage, part of our folklore. So I said to him, ‘What about the riots in Bradford and Burnley and Oldham a couple of years ago, when these people were out of control and were beating people up, Pakistani and Bangladeshi guys in their sixties and seventies—grandfathers! What was so great about that?’ And he said that violence was terrible but if it was the only way to reach your goal then it was justified. He said that he approved of those riots and thought they were a positive step and that was when I began to think that he was a little bit delusional because he started claiming that he’d helped to provoke them, that some of the things he’d written on the internet had been influential in getting them started.

  “And I said, ‘Well what is this goal, anyway? I don’t understand. What is it you’re trying to achieve?’ And he said that the only thing the Aryan people had ever hoped for was to be able to live the way they wanted, in peace, and in harmony with nature. So I said, ‘What’s stopping you, then?’ And he said that it couldn’t happen while the land was suffering. He said the land was suffering because it was being raped and polluted by the big corporations, and it was overrun with aliens, people who had no respect for the land and no right to be here, and it was the big corporations and the political establishment who were in collusion to keep things this way, because this was what their power was based on. The usual conspiracy theory nonsense. He said it was a way of perpetuating an evil, materialist culture and it was all based on usury, and of course he reckoned the Jews were behind it all.

  “And that, apparently, was why he had become so interested in Islam and had convinced himself that jihad was the new way forward. Not that he seemed to be learning how to fly an aeroplane or taking part in any suicide bombing missions or anything. But he did claim to have met Osama bin Laden, who he called ‘Usama,’ for some reason. I suppose to prove that he was on better terms than the rest of us. That was the point I decided he must have gone completely mad. He said that al-Qaeda and the Aryan warriors were basically on the same side because the real enemy was America and the Zionists who ruled the world but I’d sort of stopped listening by that stage. But he was in favour of the war in Iraq, apparently because he thought it would inspire more terrorist attacks on the West and this was a good thing.

  “I had one last crack at it and said, ‘But what about all the Iraqi civilians who are being killed in the war?’ and again he just said that this was very sad, but war was a tragic necessity and much more blood would flow before things were put right again. And he told me to read an essay he’d written called ‘Violence and Melancholy.’ It was on the internet with all his other stuff, he said, on some website that his friends had set up for him. I was glad to hear that he had some friends, all things considered.

  “Well, we didn’t talk much after that. He went off to make me some tea and I looked at his record collection. That was pretty impressive too. A few thousand albums, all in alphabetical order, all on vinyl. I think he’d got most of Western classical music pretty well covered. When he came back in I remarked on this and I pointed out, ‘Not much “Oi!” music here then, is there?’ He put on the record that was already on the turntable—it was Vaughan William
s, ‘Norfolk Rhapsody Number One’—and he listened to it in silence while we were drinking our tea, and his face changed while he was listening to it, he stopped looking aggressive and paranoid, and this kind of beauty came over him, he came closer to smiling, for a few minutes, than I’d seen him all afternoon. But when it finished he looked very sad and he told me that he must have listened to that music thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, but he never grew tired of it. It was one of his mother’s favourites, he said. So I reminded him that Vaughan Williams was a socialist and would have hated him and everything that he believed. But he said that politics like that were superficial, and you could tell that the composer’s real beliefs were in his music. There didn’t really seem to be any answer to that.

  “Just before I left I told him what had happened to Steve Richards, how he’d landed this great new job and moved his family to Birmingham and then just a few months later the whole department had been closed down. (Which I believe, Claire, was the work of an ex-boyfriend of yours—am I right?) And Harding said he was sorry about that but the real trouble was, Steve didn’t really belong in this country, he’d be happier if he went back to where his own people were. His ‘folk,’ as he liked to call them. I lost my temper when he said that and just told him he was a fucking idiot. And I remembered something that Doug had said about Harding once, that it would be depressing to meet him again because he’d probably have turned into a quantity surveyor, but nothing could have been more depressing than this, to think of all that cleverness, all that humour, all that mischief, and see the place it had led him to, in the end. So sad. I asked him if there was a Mrs. Harding, and he said there had been, for a while, but she’d died. And I took one more look around the house and shuddered to think what a mean and bitter and lonely little life he’d made for himself—you know?—but I couldn’t manage to feel sorry for him. You couldn’t reach him, that was the problem, so how could you feel sorry for him? He’d put himself beyond that. I didn’t shake his hand, I just said goodbye, and on the way out I said, ‘Give my regards to Usama, won’t you? Ask him if he’ll do an interview for the Birmingham Post one of these days.’ And he said something back to me in Arabic. I asked him what it meant and he translated it for me and said it was from the Qu’ran. It meant, ‘Show us the Straight Way, the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace, whose portion is not wrath, and who do not go astray.’ ”