The Closed Circle

by Jonathan Coe

  He found himself in a high-ceilinged room, lit brightly by an electric chandelier, but still there was no one there to receive him. Religious brochures and leaflets were scattered on the wide table which almost filled the space, and a clock ticked loudly on the wall, staring fixedly and unresponsively at the crucifix which hung opposite: its iconography of pain, suffering and bondage as usual sending a chill through Benjamin rather than inspiring him to thoughts of worship.

  Not knowing what else to do, he put down his suitcase, sat in a high-backed armchair—upholstered with a tapestry faded beyond recognition— and waited, listening to the ticking of the clock, the seemingly random peals of bells near and distant, and the occasional murmur of footsteps and voices in some far-off corner of the building. In this manner, time slowly began to pass.

  Then, after fifteen minutes or so, during which his unease began to swell into something like panic, rapid and decisive footsteps outside the door announced an arrival. A tall, sallow young man in a monk’s habit, his hair shaved to a crew-cut, eyes smiling keenly behind his wire-rimmed spectacles, swept into the room, came to a halt before Benjamin’s chair and held out an apologetic hand.

  “Monsieur Trotter? Benjamin? Je suis désolé . . .”

  It was Father Antoine, the Père hôtelier. And without another word, he took Benjamin’s case, and escorted him out of the room and across a court-yard to the doorway which led to his first-floor cell, in a low, finely proportioned tower from which you could even now breathe in the scent of the sweet-smelling newmown lawn.

  It turned out that there were three other guests at the monastery at this time, none of whom spoke much English. Benjamin only saw them at mealtimes, when conversation was forbidden, so the likelihood of striking up any friendships seemed remote. The monks themselves were courteous and welcoming, but not talkative. None the less, the relief of finding himself surrounded by other people again was indescribable.

  Benjamin soon discovered that life at the abbey was highly formalized, and after the dreary shapelessness of his days in Munich, he was grateful to have a routine mapped out for him. The first service of the day, Vigiles, took place at 5:25. He rarely attended this. If he had slept well the night before, he might feel himself capable of turning up for Laudes, at 7:30. After that came breakfast: some slices of bread and marmalade, a bowl of chocolate made with boiling water, Nesquik and powdered milk, taken in a small, low vaulted chamber beneath the hôtellerie itself. Breakfast was eaten in the company of his fellow-guests, and usually in silence—although silence was not compulsory here, as it was at other meals. Once or twice Benjamin would try to get a conversation going, but his efforts tended to meet with politely monosyllabic replies—either in French or in English—which he took as a rebuke.

  Messe was the great event of the morning, and started at 9:45. It was attended by large numbers of people from the village, and was held, like the other services, in that same magnificently austere chapel—converted from an old tithe barn, its roof a dazzling criss-cross of beams and wooden vaulting—where he and Emily had sat almost two long years ago, and listened to the same chanting. (Not knowing that it was the last evening they would ever spend together.) Then came Sexte, at 12:45, and soon after that, lunch. Benjamin and the other guests would file into the vast, brightly sunlit refectory, watched over on either side by rows of monks, of ages ranging, it seemed, from about twenty-five to ninety. Impossible to gauge their thoughts from their faces, however richly expressive the older ones seemed. Grace was sung, calm and mellifluous, and then the guests would take their seats and be waited on by two or three of the monks, serving with a briskness and cheerful efficiency that would have been the envy of the diners in many a Michelin-starred Parisian restaurant. Aromatically dressed salad was followed by meat, and vegetables from the monastery garden, and then a dessert which might be no more than warm crème anglaise topped with a raspberry or blackcurrant purée. Since conversation was forbidden in the refectory, instead of having to cope with the awkwardness of small-talk the guests listened while a young, angel-faced monk read—or rather sang—to them, chanting from the pages of what appeared, during Benjamin’s stay at least, to be a book of seventeenth-century French history. Reflecting on the exquisite monotony of the novice’s performance, Benjamin saw that here he might have stumbled, at last, on the key to the attainment of his lifelong artistic goal: finding new ways of combining music and the written word. Had these monks not solved this very problem, and in fact (as seemed almost annoyingly typical of them) done so in the simplest and most obvious fashion?

  The afternoons stretched long and languorous before him, punctuated only by None (straight after lunch) and Vêpres, which took place as dusk fell. Sometimes he took part in these services, sometimes not. No one seemed to mind one way or the other: he could never tell whether his behaviour was being noticed, his movements monitored. In any case the monks seemed so tolerant, it was hard to imagine anything he could do with his time that might discompose them. (He sometimes thought that boring them, failing to arouse their interest, would be the worst offence he could commit.) And then, after dinner came the final service of the day, and Benjamin’s favourite: Complies. This was held at 8:35, in the pitch dark. The old barn was illuminated only by two dimly glowing electric lights, mounted on to vertical beams on either side of the altar, which did little to dispel the dense shadows of those cold April nights. In the obscured recesses of their stalls, the monks ranged themselves as before, their cowled figures seeming ever more Gothic, ever more other-worldly, the clean lines of their melancholy chant sending out a dying, ethereal fall into the black stillness, and the measured silences interleaved between them seeming longer, calmer, more profound than ever.

  As his stay extended, Benjamin began to recognize the different characters of his hosts. At first he had found it difficult to tell them apart, even physically: the standard uniform of closely shaved heads, wire-rimmed spectacles and seemingly identical habits had made them all but indistinguishable to him. But gradually, peeping through the screen of daily ritual and apparent conformity, he began to get glimpses of different quirks and personality traits. He found garrulous monks, playful monks and arrogant monks; gossipers, thinkers, dreamers and misfits; jogging, vegetable-growing and cycling monks. In Père Antoine, rather to his surprise, he found a fellow-writer: one with an advantage over Benjamin, in fact, for Antoine’s works of “religious sociology” on the politics of the family had actually been published. “Quand votre recueil de poèmes sera publié,” Antoine said to him kindly one day, “vous devrez nous en envoyer un exemplaire.” Benjamin, embarrassed to think of his work being scrutinized by readers so pure in heart, had answered: “Ah, je ne sais pas: ils sont un peu trop profanes pour votre bibilothèque, je crois.” At which the monk had laughed delightedly: “ Trop profanes! Ah— vous vous faites des illusions sur notre compte!”

  One day, at the end of lunch, when a basket of fruit was passed among the assembled diners, Benjamin found himself faced with a row of contented monks, some youthful, some near-senile, all sucking or chewing abstractedly on a half-peeled banana. Their eyes were locked into the middle distance, as if in all-too fleeting acceptance of the pleasures of this earthly life, and for once he felt an intense, incongruous bond with them. It made him want to laugh, but in a joyous way, with no hint of mockery. There seemed a good deal of laughter to be had at the Abbaye, despite the warnings against it which were inscribed in the rulebook of Saint Benoit (a copy of which was deposited in his cell): “54: Ne pas dire de paroles vaines ou qui ne portent qu’à rire. 55: Ne pas aimer le rire trop fréquent ou trop bruyant.” Sometimes, he would even find groups of monks gathered together on one of the bridges spanning the Fontenelle as it flowed silently through the grounds, feeding crusts of bread to the ducks clustered there, with expressions of such childlike glee transforming their scholarly faces that for a moment it seemed possible—an old, once-familiar feeling—that the whole of life might one day be composed of these frag
ments of blissful simplicity, and a sense of fugitive gladness stole over him, just as it had done long ago on one or two priceless occasions, during his schooldays.

  It was the routine, Benjamin realized after a few days, that was doing most to restore him. What had seemed at first like a death-like sequence of repetitions came to feel perversely liberating, and he gradually slipped into his own pattern, attending four out of the day’s seven services, and filling the interstices with reading, walking and contemplation. (Though daydreaming, he sometimes thought, might have been a better word for it.) He became reluctant to vary this pattern, even to the point of wanting always to sit on the same bench at the same hour of the day. Even when gentle rain began to fall from the steel-grey skies over St. Wandrille, then, he was still to be found, at three o’clock every afternoon, at rest in the orchard, an object of no apparent curiosity to the working monks, chasing the tail of his own antic reflections. He was contented, now, up to a point: certainly glad to have escaped the miserable solitude of Germany. But he knew that beneath the surface, everything remained chaotic in his mind. He had no sense of religion; nothing returned to him, there, however many Laudes and Vêpres he sat through. He had nurtured a vague hope that by coming here he might start to feel holy, whatever that meant. Instead, the more his body felt rested, the more dreamless and pellucid his sleep became, the more his rogue brain whirred into anarchic overdrive. He thought about the past; his failed marriage; Emily; Malvina; Cicely; any others who happened to visit his consciousness. He thought about his lost faith, and his wasted years. Tried to decide whether they really had been wasted. Tried to decide all sorts of things, big and small. And invariably failed.

  On the eighth day of Benjamin’s retreat, a new guest from England arrived at St. Wandrille, and moved into the cell next door. From the very beginning, he seemed to differ slightly from the other retreatants. Not in outward appearance, perhaps: he was grey-haired, in late middle age, possibly a little more athletic-looking than most people the monkish life seemed to attract. The real difference lay in his manner. He appeared profoundly ill at ease within the abbey walls. He seemed to speak no french and was constantly looking to Benjamin for guidance on matters of protocol: when to stand, when to kneel, how to address the abbot, and so on. At mealtimes, when the other guests would be withdrawn, contemplative, this man’s eyes would dart around the room, anxiously, as if he was trying to make sure that his behaviour was not betraying him in any way. He rarely attended the services, and when he did, he looked even more uncomfortable. Benjamin became convinced that he had some secret to hide.

  He resented this man’s presence, at first. He had enjoyed being the only other British guest at St. Wandrille. Of course, staying there (he realized this now) was not going to solve any of his problems; but it would, at least, give him the will to start solving them as soon as he got home. Meanwhile, he had begun to feel as though he had been elected to the membership of a more than usually exclusive club, and this notion had always appealed to Benjamin, ever since his membership of the Carlton Club at school. Perhaps that was to demean, slightly, the experience that St. Wandrille had afforded him. It felt less like a club, maybe, than a glorious secret garden, unknown to the outside world, to which Benjamin had been magically offered the key. He could imagine going back to Birmingham, now, and drawing strength from his awareness that this place would always be waiting for him; sitting next to someone on a bus, or standing next to someone in the queue for a sandwich, and taking immeasurable comfort in the thought that these people knew nothing of Benjamin’s little paradise-on-earth; that he, he alone, knew that it existed, and where it could be found. He felt that there would be no end to what he could achieve, no limits to the vigour with which he could bounce back, if he kept this private knowledge clutched tightly to himself.

  Thinking these thoughts late one morning, shortly before lunch, as he sat on a hillside bench high above the valley with the milk-white splendour of the abbey stretched out beneath him, Benjamin found himself being approached by the mysterious guest.

  “All right if I join you?” the man asked, breathing fairly heavily from the exertion of having strode up the hill.

  “By all means. My name’s Benjamin, by the way.”

  “Good to meet you, Benjamin,” said the man, shaking him by the hand as he sat beside him. “And do you mind if I ask you something I’ve been meaning to ask ever since I arrived?”

  “Feel free.”

  “What on earth has brought you to this Godforsaken hole?”

  This was not what Benjamin had been expecting to hear; and for a moment he could think of nothing to say in reply.

  “That seems . . . an odd phrase to use,” he stammered, in the end, “about a monastery.”

  “Well, it’s very pretty here,” said the man. “I’ll give it that.” Belatedly, he held out his hand in return. “Michael’s the name: Michael Usborne. Pleased to meet you. Did you read about this place in Condé Nast Traveller too?”

  It was time to go home. Benjamin was sure of that now. Not just because of the new arrival, although that was reason enough in itself. Usborne had chosen to come to St. Wandrille, apparently, because the press were hounding him following the revelation of the pension scheme he had negotiated for himself after bringing yet another once-successful company almost to the point of liquidation. Benjamin had never heard of Michael Usborne, and was not really interested in the details, but it seemed that he had made something of a career out of this kind of thing. His latest pay-off, all the same, was considered so outrageous that the news had spread beyond the ghetto of the financial pages and made it on to the front of three of the national broadsheets on the day it was announced.

  “I’ve had bloody journalists camped on my doorstep ever since,” he said. “How do these people find out where you live? Well, they’re not likely to track me down here, at any rate. My spiritual side has been a well-kept secret up till now, and long may it stay that way. Thank Christ for monks! What would we do without them, eh?”

  Even before this development, however, Benjamin had been starting to feel a growing sense of confidence, a growing resolve, and the beginnings of an impatience to rejoin the world at large. The symptoms, at first, were not dramatic. He had started walking into the village every day to buy a newspaper and read more about the progress of the war. He had gone to the shop at the rear of the monastery grounds and browsed through the large CD selection; and instead of just buying (as had been his intention) recordings made by the monks themselves, he had bought half a dozen classical CDs as well. He was ready to listen to music again.

  One of the albums he bought was a new recording of Honegger’s oratorio Judith. Benjamin still remembered how it had been playing on the radio when he drove away from Claire’s house in Malvern in the summer of 2001, how he had turned the radio on just in time to hear the “Cantique des Vierges,” and how moved he had been by it, by the memories it rekindled. Claire had been so kind to him that evening, given him such good advice. She had always been kind to him, now that he thought about it, and he’d never given her much in return. How blind he had been, for so many years, where Claire was concerned! He had always been a little frightened of her, he realized now. She was very much his equal—more than his equal, in most respects—and he had never really been brave enough, perhaps, to enter into a relationship with a woman like that. He and Emily had huddled together behind the screen of their religion, and if she’d never had much to say about his writing or his music, well, that had suited him, in many respects. He didn’t like to be challenged. Claire would challenge him, every step of the way. If he wrote something that was no good, she would tell him. But surely that was what he needed. Surely that was what a real friend—a loving friend—would want to do for him. Was he big enough, yet, to cope with it?

  He would go to see Claire, as soon as he got back to the Midlands. Pay her a friendly visit, and see what came of it, see where it led them. Listening, now, to the music which he had come to a
ssociate with her, and which he had found so serendipitously in the monastery shop, he knew that it was absolutely the right thing to do.

  But then . . . then there was also Malvina.

  Benjamin sighed, and rolled over in bed. Moonlight peeped in around the edges of his threadbare curtains. How could he compare Claire and Malvina? Well of course, he couldn’t. And it was ludicrous, by any rational standard, to suppose that Malvina might make a suitable partner for him. She was twenty years younger than him, for a start. And he hadn’t actually seen her for almost three years—although he’d had a text message from her as recently as last October. He could imagine the contempt of his friends and family, if they were ever to become lovers; the sad shaking of heads over silly old Benjamin and his nervous breakdown and his mid-life crisis. (The same contempt he had felt for his brother, in fact, during the nightmarish episode—thankfully long over—when Paul and Malvina had themselves been on the point of having an affair.) And indeed, he couldn’t explain to himself—had never been able to explain—why he had always felt so close to Malvina, from the very first time he saw her. It had little to do with desire, although that came into it. He just felt helplessly, irresistibly drawn to her, as if by some elemental force. Feelings like that couldn’t, and shouldn’t be ignored. He had never felt anything like that for Claire. Never.

  Thinking of text messages stung Benjamin into action. He got out of bed and, for the first time in more than three months, he plugged his mobile phone into the mains and recharged the battery. As soon as it was turned on and the recharging icon started flashing, he waited for it to beep. But, anticlimactically, it remained silent. If any messages had been sent since his disappearance, they must have been deleted by his server some time ago.

  He climbed back into bed, and pulled the coarse blankets tight under his chin. Claire and Malvina . . . Malvina and Claire . . . The two names, the two faces, spun around inside his head as he sank into sleep.