The Accidental Woman

by Jonathan Coe

  I see no need to describe the ensuing scenes, in fact it would be difficult to do so with accuracy. No, we shall move on, leaving out about twenty-four hours, and rejoin Maria’s family around the dining table at half past one on Sunday afternoon. They had drunk sherry in the sitting room, and now they were having a bottle of wine, not very good wine, Maria thought, with their meal, for days like this do not come often. Bobby carved the joint, and Maria served the potatoes and sprouts, while their parents smiled and watched intently pleased apparently with the novelty of being waited on. Then they all started to eat. Maria had forgotten how seriously her family took their meals. They were perfectly single-minded about it, and although she at first made occasional attempts at conversation, remarking, for instance, on her mother’s excellence at cooking, even though it had been Maria herself who had done most to prepare the meal, her comments were never answered, and neither of her parents uttered a word until their plates were empty. Even Bobby, who, you will recall, had been so talkative over his food in Chapter Seven, solemnly observed the family tradition, but then he was more used to it, perhaps it didn’t seem so strange to him. It was her father who at last broke the silence.

  ‘Not a bad joint of beef, that,’ he said, laying his knife and fork neatly together on the plate. ‘Very nicely done, too. Potatoes were a bit soft.’

  Bobby noticed that his father’s glass was nearly empty, and poured him some more wine.

  ‘Let’s drink a toast,’ Bobby suggested. They all gripped their glasses expectantly. ‘To Dad,’ he said. ‘Happy birthday.’

  ‘Happy birthday.’

  ‘Well,’ said their father, ‘isn’t it funny how time marches on. Sixty years on, and it doesn’t seem a day since you two were little kids.’

  People always say things like this on their sixtieth birthday.

  ‘It isn’t sixty years since we were little kids,’ Bobby pointed out.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ his father said. ‘Days like this, they make you think.’

  ‘I bought you a birthday present,’ Maria said.

  From a drawer in the sideboard she fetched a small packet. It was oblong in shape, and had been wrapped in red wrapping paper. It was found to contain a gold wristwatch.

  ‘It’s a watch,’ said her father, examining it with delight. ‘And it’s got my name on the back.’

  ‘I had it engraved.’

  He kissed her warmly.

  ‘I’m touched, Maria. I’m deeply touched. More than that, I’m moved. I’m deeply moved. What a wonderful present for a man to get from his daughter, on his sixtieth birthday. To think that you still care, after all this time.’

  ‘And it’s not just decorative,’ said his wife. ‘It’s practical.’

  ‘Exactly. Of course it is. Of course it’s practical. I’ve only got to look at this watch, and not only shall I think of my daughter, but I shall know what time it is.’

  ‘I’ll go and fetch the pudding,’ Maria said. ‘Bobby will you help me clear away?’

  She had hoped, I think, by descending into practicalities to put a stop to her father’s maudlin ramblings before it was too late. But it was already too late. Barely audible above the noise of shifting crockery, he continued to drone on about the strangeness of time’s passage, forgetting, apparently, that things would be very much stranger if time did not pass at all, and he was still at it when Maria served him his bowl of apple pie and custard.

  ‘It’s funny, isn’t it,’ he said, taking an enormous mouthful which in no way seemed to impair his speech. ‘I can even remember my own father’s sixtieth birthday. I can remember him looking and feeling exactly as I do now.’ He sighed. ‘Eight years later he was in his grave. I’ll never forget that day. We sat around their old table, and we drank, and laughed, as if we hadn’t got a care in the world.’

  ‘What, the day he died?’ asked Bobby.

  ‘Not the day he died. I’m talking about his sixtieth birthday. Can’t you listen, for a change?’ He turned to Maria, and his tone softened. ‘Do you remember that day?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You were only three. Oh, but he was fond of you, Grandad was. He used to take you on his knee and bounce you up and down, almost until you were sick sometimes. He loved his little Maria. You were the delight of his old age, you two were. His grandchildren.’ He picked up his glass, but found that it was empty. ‘Of course, your mother and I haven’t been so lucky, when it comes to grandchildren.’

  Maria and Bobby looked at one another. Their mother coughed.

  ‘They’d only make you feel old,’ Bobby said.

  ‘You’d only get tired of them making a mess and a noise all over the place,’ said Maria.

  ‘That’s for me to decide,’ he answered, and looked darkly at Bobby. ‘It’s about time you got married, if you ask me. You can’t gad about chasing women all your life.’

  ‘I don’t chase women,’ said Bobby.

  There was a short silence, to allow time for the rest of the family to realize that this was true.

  ‘More pie, anyone?’ Maria then said, hurriedly.

  ‘I think we all ought to do something this afternoon,’ said her mother, as more helpings were distributed. ‘You know, the whole family. We ought to go somewhere together. Just like in the old days.’

  ‘Where to?’ asked Bobby, without enthusiasm.

  ‘Yes, where to?’ asked his father, likewise.

  ‘Let’s go to the park,’ said Maria.

  ‘The where?’

  ‘You know, the park. Where you used to take us when we were children.’

  ‘I don’t remember any park. There’s no park near here.’

  ‘Yes you do,’ said Maria’s mother. ‘Up on the hill, not far from the motorway.’

  ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘Yes, I remember that. What do you want to go there for?’

  He gave his grudging agreement at the time, but when, an hour later, Maria asked him if he was ready to go, he cried off altogether. The City match is on television in a minute, he said, and besides, I’m getting a bit old to go climbing up hills. A bit old, said Maria, listen to you. A few grey hairs and you start acting as though you’ve lost the use of your legs. Don’t you make fun of my grey hairs, he said, you’re not short of a few of those yourself, and he wasn’t lying. Am I not allowed to do what I like on my own sixtieth birthday? Yes, father, of course you are, Maria had answered.

  If your father’s not going, her mother said, I think I’ll stay here with him. They were in the kitchen. I’m going to bake a cake, she said, a birthday cake for his birthday tea. And some scones. I don’t fancy climbing that great hill in this heat. Why don’t you and Bobby take the car and go by yourselves, you could have a lovely walk together. All right, said Maria, we will.

  Bobby was sitting in the garden, under the shade of the sumac tree, out of the sun. Maria brought him a glass of lemonade, with ice, and one for herself, and then sat down on the grass beside his deck chair.

  ‘Are you coming to the park with me?’ she asked.

  ‘Wouldn’t you rather go by yourself?’

  This conversation takes place slowly, by the way. Don’t rush it.

  ‘Not really. I’m tired of doing things by myself.’

  ‘No, I think I’ll stay here. I’ve had a lot to eat, and I feel sleepy.’

  Maria sipped her drink, disappointed.

  ‘What did you mean just now,’ she asked, ‘when he told you that it was about time you got married, and you said –’

  Bobby’s laugh interrupted her, quiet though it was.

  ‘You love to build up mysteries around me, don’t you? Do you remember that time in Oxford? When I went out to get something to eat, and didn’t come back till the morning?’

  ‘Now you’re going to tease me again.’

  Bobby smiled. ‘Only because I think you like it.’ He touched her with his foot.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maria. ‘Yes, I do like it.’

  And so it transpired, as we might all h
ave guessed, that Maria drove to the country park alone. She drove in her father’s car, with the radio tuned to Radio Three. It was a broadcast of Prokofiev’s F minor violin sonata, always one of her favourites. At the end of the first movement, its quiescent harmonies and wandering melody seemed especially in keeping with her own thoughts. She turned into the car park at the foot of the hill and found it almost empty. The sky was a cloudless blue. She locked the car and began to climb.

  On her way to the summit the sound of the wind was, at first, the only sound of which she took any notice. Then she started to hear others, the distant cars, the songs of birds, the cries of children. ‘Cathy! Cathy!’, a child was calling, thus:

  But there were very few people on top of the hill, that afternoon. Two men were playing with a model aeroplane, and an old couple were walking their dog. Otherwise Maria, and the birds, and the cows, had the place to themselves.

  She passed by a huge electric pylon which she remembered well, and then found herself at the very crown. Here some thoughtful person, paid no doubt to do such things, had erected a toposcope. There will be those among you to whom the word means nothing, probably, so I should explain that this is a kind of round map, carved in stone. What a gift for explication. It informed her, much to her interest, that the towns of Stafford and Lichfield lay due north, Coventry and Rugby due east, Cheltenham and Gloucester due south, and Ludlow due west. This will incidentally enable the curious to reconstruct her position with some accuracy. She turned her gaze, for the time being, to the east, but all that she could see were the tower blocks of outer Birmingham in a blue haze, and, prominent among them, the green-tipped tower of Rubery asylum. She tried to calculate how long it had been since she had last seen that view.

  Maria had come to this hill for a specific purpose, and an unashamedly nostalgic one. She had hoped that it would remind her of the day when a small girl, whose name had been Maria, it now seemed, by no more than coincidence, had come there with her family, and had lost them, and had cried and fallen into the long grass. And indeed it could hardly do other than to remind her, or at least to make her think of it, but the recollection was regrettably pale, on the whole. The countryside around her called attention to itself, rather than to the memory of that long-lost other afternoon. While she wandered around, then, in a vague search for the exact spot where she had fallen, she could not help being distracted by the colours of the gorse, the rustle of holly bushes in the wind, the sight of a jay darting before her, by hawthorn. Hawthorn. Her mother had once taught her to sing, A little bit of bread and no cheese, like the chaffinch. What was that doing in her mind, all these years on? She felt suddenly and savagely sad to have seen her parents looking so old. But even this moment passed, and in its wake Maria felt, now, a curious lack of emotion. All at once the park appeared to have nothing to do with her memory, it belonged neither to her youth nor to her middle age, neither to remembrance nor to hope, and this was good, because from now on Maria would be leaving all of these things behind.

  She could hear a lark singing nearby. The bird was perched on a branch of the hawthorn bush, and was looking at Maria with intense interest, fascination, you might say. She returned its stare, and for a while these two creatures stood quite still, watching one another. I find the thoughts of both, at this point, equally impossible to divine. It is even hard to say with which, of the two, I feel more in sympathy, but let us for the sake of this story cast our lot with the lark, for whom the sight of Maria’s quick unmoving eyes eventually became too much. He flew off the branch and launched himself into mid air. On the ascent, he took another look at her, saw her dwindle, spiralled, saw her move, saw her smaller and smaller still, climbed, looked again, saw her little figure on the hillside, climbed higher, and higher again, and then saw only the hillside, where we must leave her, leave her to her last calm, Maria, a speck in the unseen, homeward bound, alone, and indifferent, indifferent even in the face of death which who knows may be the next thing chance has in store for her.

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Contents

  The Accidental Woman

  1. Beforewards

  2. The World of Meaningful Looks

  3. Two Companions

  4. The House

  5. Last Days

  6. Her First Mistake

  7. Redunzl

  8. A Great Day for Ronny

  9. Mana in Exile

  10. Afterhand