by Jonathan Coe
Actually I was not making a cup of tea when the climax occurred: I was reading Henry Fielding. For the whole of that last day I stayed in my chair by the window, finishing Joseph Andrews and then making serious inroads into Tom Jones. Early in the afternoon, Jorgen, Stefan, Rolf and Paul had gone cycling: I didn’t know where. At about four o’clock, just as Tom was rescuing Mrs. Waters from the dastardly Ensign Northerton, the Danes came back together and went straight into their house. Half an hour later, as I was deeply immersed in the story of The Man of the Hill, that curious, lengthy digression which seems to have nothing to do with the main narrative but is in fact its cornerstone, Rolf and Paul returned. I could hear that there was some sort of commotion, but I didn’t go to investigate. Gunther came into the sitting room, I remember, and fetched a bottle of brandy from the drinks cabinet. I realized afterwards that this must have been for Rolf, who was subsequently taken up to bed. When he joined us for our final dinner that evening, he seemed subdued but otherwise normal. Nobody talked about what had happened during the afternoon.
What little I learned, I learned that night, as I lay awake in my camp bed next to Paul. The lights in the house had only been off for about five minutes when I heard footsteps coming softly down the staircase. Then Rolf appeared in the doorway. He went over to Paul’s bed and knelt down beside it. I heard him whisper a few words in German—Paul’s name being one of them—and heard my brother answer in the same language. And then Rolf said, quite distinctly, in English:
“You saved my life today. I will always remember that.” He kissed my brother tenderly on the forehead. “I will be for ever in your debt.”
When Rolf had padded out of the room, I said to Paul:
“What on earth was all that about?”
He did not answer for a long time. I began to assume (since it would have been in character) that he was not going to answer at all. But at last he replied, yawningly:
“Just as he said: I saved his life today.”
Exasperated by his continuing silences, I asked, “Well, do you mind telling me how?”
“The Danish boys tried to drown him,” said Paul, in a quite calm and unemphatic way. “They hate him because of what he said to them yesterday and they tried to kill him this afternoon.”
“Paul . . .” I sat up in bed. “What are you talking about?”
“I don’t mean they held him under the water or anything like that,” he explained. “But we all went up to the Skaw, up to where the seas come together, and they teased him again, saying that he was too weak to go swimming there. He didn’t know how dangerous it was. I tried to warn him but he thought I was exaggerating. So he went in. I could see he’d only gone about ten yards before he was in trouble. Stefan tried to hold me down but I was stronger than him so I threw him off and went in after Rolf. I got there just as the current was taking him away and he knew that he wasn’t going to make it, so I grabbed him around the neck and managed to bring him back. Jorgen and Stefan ran away. So technically speaking, yes—” (he gave another yawn) “—I did save his life. Now look: we have to pack up early tomorrow. D’you mind if we get some sleep?”
And that was all he would say to me on the subject.
I think about this story, sometimes. It’s one of the things I try to make sense of. I thought of it as we drove away from Skagen to return our hire car to the airport at Ålborg the next morning. I thought of it today as I walked home from the bus stop to my parents’ house. But slowly, irresistibly, I can feel it beginning to dissolve into the hazy falsehood of memory. That is why I have written it down, although in doing so I know that all I have achieved is to falsify it differently, more artfully. Does narrative serve any purpose? I wonder about that. I wonder if all experience can really be distilled to a few extraordinary moments, perhaps six or seven of them vouchsafed to us in a lifetime, and any attempt to trace a connection between them is futile. And I wonder if there are some moments in life not only “worth purchasing with worlds,” but so replete with emotion that they become stretched, timeless, like the moment when Inger and Emil sat on that bench in the rose garden and smiled at the camera, or when Inger’s mother raised the Venetian blind to the very top of her high sitting-room window, or when Malcolm opened up his jeweller’s box and asked my sister to marry him. If he ever did.
. . . my clearest memory is of the light we saw there, that
painters’ sky, greyblue like Marie’s eyes and like her grandsons’
eyes, the colour of a pain that won’t go away . . .
(Unpublished story, found among Benjamin Trotter’s papers by his niece, Sophie, in 2002. A very much shorter version won the 1976 Marshall Prize for creative writing at King William’s School. Judges: Mr. Nuttall, Mr. Serkis, the Chief Master)
2
At the end of the art history lesson, Mr. Plumb took Philip to one side.
“All set for Saturday?” he said, laying a hand as if unconsciously on his arm. Saturday was the day for a proposed excursion to London, where Mr. Plumb’s O- and A-level classes were to visit the George Stubbs exhibition currently showing at the Tate Gallery.
“Sure,” said Philip.
“Good. It will I’m sure be the most revelatory experience for you. Epiphanic, if I may be so bold.”
“Yeah,” said Philip. “I’m looking forward to it.” He could not quite see where this was leading, and was anxious to be getting on to his next lesson.
“Your mother,” said Mr. Plumb, suddenly, and with a kind of nervous tenderness to his voice. “She’s well, I hope?”
“Yes, yes. Very well.”
“Good. That’s very good. In which case, I wonder . . .” He appeared to hesitate for a moment, fished for something in his briefcase, hesitated again before pulling it out, and finally presented Philip with a plain white envelope, on which his mother’s name was inscribed in Mr. Plumb’s baroque, spidery handwriting. “I wonder if you might object—or might not object, I should say—to passing on this small—em—communiqué. A notelet, nothing more, entirely innocent in manner and import.”
“This is for my mother?” said Philip.
“You have it in a nutshell.”
Philip looked at the envelope. Nothing could be deduced from it, beyond the simple fact that Mr. Plumb wanted to send his mother a private message. He put the envelope in his pocket.
“OK,” he said, and walked on. He could feel Mr. Plumb’s eyes upon him until he reached the end of the corridor and turned a corner.
Eric Clapton was standing on stage at the Odeon New Street, his eyes screwed tight, his left hand caressing the neck of his guitar, high up the fretboard. He was in the middle of some extended solo, bending a note on the second string. “Motherless Children,” maybe? “Let It Rain?” Impossible to say. He seemed to be enjoying himself, at any rate, and to be happily oblivious of the fact that he was standing in front of an enormous swastika. Beneath his platformed feet the word “RACIST” had been printed in eighteen-point bold type.
Philip examined the image critically.
“Well,” he said, “it’s not exactly subtle, is it?”
Doug chewed on his pencil for a moment or two before replying.
“Subtlety,” he pronounced, with studied contempt, “is the English disease.”
There was no answer to this; at least, Philip couldn’t think of one, offhand. Sitting opposite him, on the far side of the wide editorial table, Claire Newman began to write something down. She made a proper show of it, muttering the words beneath her breath and placing great emphasis on “English disease.”
“What are you doing?” Doug asked.
“I’ve decided that your bon mots have to be preserved for posterity,” she said, in the tone of cutting facetiousness she seemed to reserve for Doug alone. “I’m going to be Boswell to your Johnson. Your amanuensis.”
The others smiled; even those who didn’t understand the word.
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Doug, briskly. “So what do you think about the c
over?”
“It’s all right.”
Philip, meanwhile, had thought of a new objection. “It might be libellous,” he said.
“You think Eric Clapton’s going to sue a school magazine?” When this was merely greeted with a shrug, he added: “If he does, so much the better. We’ll get into the newspapers.”
Mr. Serkis, the young English master who oversaw these meetings, pulled thoughtfully on his long, soon-to-be-unfashionable hair.
“I might have to show this to the Chief, you know. We should really run it by him before we go to press.”
“Come on, that’s censorship, pure and simple,” Doug protested. “We’re living in Callaghan’s Britain, not Ceauşescu’s Romania.”
Claire picked up her biro again. “Are you spelling Romania with an ‘o’ or a ‘u?’ ” she asked.
“Any halfway decent amanuensis would know that already,” said Doug. This time, there was a flirtatiousness in his smile which she registered but refused to return. Rebuffed, and conscious that the others had seen it, he spread his hands and turned to rhetoric. “I thought we were agreed,” he said, “I thought we were agreed that if this paper was going to be anything more than a sixth-form gossip sheet, we were going to have to give it some edge. And that means politics. I mean, there’s always been politics in this paper before. We’ve got to keep that going. Sharpen it.” He looked again at Claire, sensing that she was, in this at least, his closest ally. “I thought we were agreed on that.”
“Well yes,” said Claire, doodling on her notepad now. Upside down, it was hard to see what she was drawing. A tree, perhaps. “That’s true. But I’m not sure this is . . . I don’t know, the right approach . . .”
Silence descended. Mr. Serkis glanced at the clock on the wall, which showed 3:20. The meeting would overrun if they didn’t reach a decision quickly.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve got to make up our minds about this. The Chief’ll be going home in half an hour, so if there’s anything he needs to see . . .”
Benjamin, sitting on the windowsill which afforded a sweeping view of the school rooftops, had taken no part in the discussion so far. He stared into the encroaching dusk, watched as the neon lights flared up, one by one, in the language laboratories across the courtyard. There was a remoteness about him, nowadays; something more than abstraction. It was possible, Mr. Serkis thought, that the distance opening up between Benjamin and his friends might soon become unbridgeable. He wanted to do everything in his power to prevent that from happening.
“What do you think, Ben?” A slight turn of the head; eyelids heavy with indifference. His thoughts might have been anywhere. (As it happened they were on a chord change: D minor 6th to C seven.) “You’re a fan of his, aren’t you?”
“Used to be,” said Benjamin. He rose stiffly from the windowsill and crossed over to the table, the better to inspect Doug’s illustration. All eyes were upon him, awaiting his verdict (none more intently than Claire’s). But he merely picked the collage up between finger and thumb, glaced at it for a listless moment, and blew out his cheeks. “Oh, I don’t know . . .”
“What did he actually say?” Philip wanted to know. “What did Clapton actually say?”
Doug wasn’t sure. “I haven’t got the exact quote,” he said. “I haven’t been able to find it. Something about Britain becoming one of its own colonies. He mentioned Enoch Powell, anyway. I’m sure of that. Said that Powell was right and we should all be listening to him. It’s in my article.”
“He was drunk, wasn’t he?”
“So? What difference does that make?”
Mr. Serkis watched as Benjamin drifted away from the table and picked up a bag from the corner of the room. It was a plastic carrier bag, twelve inches square, and bore the name and address of a shop called Cyclops Records, much patronized by the sixth-formers of King William’s. Benjamin’s books and exercise pads had been crammed into it with some difficulty. A briefcase would have been more practical but would not, he suspected, have radiated the same aura of would-be cool. Then Benjamin hovered in the doorway, intending to say goodbye to his colleagues, it seemed, and waiting for a suitable hiatus in their conversation. By now Doug and Philip had given up on the specifics of Eric Clapton’s recent faux pas and moved on to the subject of racism generally. Birmingham, Doug maintained, had produced two notable racist thinkers in the last few decades: Enoch Powell, and J. R. R. Tolkien. Philip was outraged by this statement. Tolkien was unquestionably his favourite author and in what way, he wanted to know, could he be described as racist? Doug suggested that he reread The Lord of the Rings. Philip assured him that he did, at six-monthly intervals. In that case, Doug replied, surely he must have noticed that Tolkien’s villainous Orcs were made to appear unmistakably negroid. And did it not strike him as significant that the reinforcements who came to the aid of Sauron, the Dark Lord, are themselves dark-skinned, hail from unspecified tropical lands to the south, and are often mounted upon elephants?
“This racism thing is beginning to obsess you,” Philip retorted. “It’s about time you changed the record.”
“It’s about time you changed your reading habits,” said Doug.
Benjamin had gone.
He still nursed a residual fondness for Tolkien, even though it was years since he had read The Lord of the Rings. He had moved on to Conrad and Fielding, and was beginning to struggle with Ulysses. In any case, it was The Hobbit that held a special place in his affections; and although it had never struck him before that it was written by a local author, now that Doug had mentioned it, he could see that it made a kind of sense. Why else, after all, had Benjamin remained so partial to Tolkien’s own illustration of Bag End and Hobbiton-across-the-Water, the limpid colours of which still, after so many years and changes of taste, glowed soothingly down upon him from his bedroom wall? Surely it was because somewhere in that painting, in the diffident contours of its landscape, in its artless evocation of one morning “long ago in the quiet of the world, when there was less noise and more green,” he found sentimental echoes of the area where he himself had grown up. More particularly, it reminded him of a place just a mile or two south of Longbridge: the Lickey Hills, where his grandparents lived, and where he was heading that same afternoon. It wasn’t just the slow inclines and occasional muted, autumnal glades of this semi-pastoral backwater that made him think of the Shire; the inhabitants themselves were hobbit-like, in their breezy indifference towards the wider world, their unchallenged certainty that they were living the best of all possible lives in the best of all possible locations. These were attitudes, Benjamin knew, that Paul was already beginning to despise; and no doubt with some justice. But for his own part he had grown up with them, inherited them, and he could not shed them. Not completely. He loved his grandparents precisely for, and not in spite of, their preposterous, unspoken belief that God had somehow chosen them, marking them out for special favour, by placing them where all of life’s blessings seemed to be gathered together in one unassumingly hallowed spot. It was a belief from which he at once recoiled and drew strength.
When he rang the doorbell it was his grandmother who answered and said, “Hello, love,” giving him a soft and camphored kiss on the cheek. She seemed to have been expecting him, even though he had given no forewarning. “Come for tea?”
Good manners demanded that he sit on the sofa for a while, dunking digestive biscuits into his mug of pallid tea and telling her about his week at King William’s. It was no hardship, really. Benjamin’s grandmother took an amused, unforced interest in his life at school, her mind was sharp, she even had a better memory for the names of his friends than his parents had. He liked talking to her, almost as much as he liked talking to his grandfather, who could be glimpsed in the garden raking the first of the fallen leaves into a bonfire and who even now was probably dreaming up some silly joke or terrible pun to make him groan over the tea-table.
Nevertheless, Benjamin had not come here to see his grandparents, howeve
r much he liked them. He had come to use their piano; and at the earliest opportunity, while his grandfather remained busy with the gardening and his grandmother went next door to the kitchen to begin work on a shepherd’s pie, he hurried up to the spare bedroom, retrieved a small suitcase containing his two tape recorders, and ran downstairs again to begin setting up his makeshift studio.
His latest musical project, slotted in between occasional work on his novel and short stories, was a series of chamber pieces for piano and guitar called Seascape Nos. 1–7. They were inspired both by his memories of Skagen and, inevitably, by his continuing, unrequited longing for Cicely. The first three had already been recorded and, listening back to them over the last few days, Benjamin thought that he could hear a new maturity, a measured, reflective lyricism beginning to emerge in his writing. He was aiming for something simple but resonant; austere but heartfelt; a suitable antidote, he hoped, to the different excesses against which he imagined himself rebelling, namely the ridiculous symphonic pretensions of Philip’s progressive heroes, on the one hand, and on the other, the neo-neanderthal dynamism of punk, which Doug was just beginning to discover and enthuse about to his horrified friends. To map out another creative path altogether, not so much between these two courses as on some lonely, blasted heath of his own choosing, appeared to Benjamin a fine thing, noble and romantic. He was sure that Cicely herself, if she ever heard any of the music (which seemed highly unlikely), would have been moved and intrigued by it.
The practicalities of recording at his grandparents’ house were a little on the mundane side, all the same. First of all he had to stop their cuckoo clock by detaching the pendulum, since it was ticking far too loudly and was liable to sound the hour at the most inappropriate moment. Not something that Richard Branson’s roster of musicians ever had to worry about when recording at the Manor, he imagined. And then there was the whole problem of extraneous noise generally, not just the traffic noise from the Old Birmingham Road but the everyday sounds of his grandparents going about their business, for he had never been able to impress on them the need for absolute silence while he was making these secret bids for musical immortality. There had been many times, three-quarters of the way through a take, when everything had been ruined by the ringing of the telephone or the careless slamming of a door.