The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  Nor, I might add, were these lewdnesses confined to the minor players in that night’s drama. While watching the play I had already been struck by what I believe is called the “chemistry” between the two leading performers, naively believing that this was the product of skilful acting on their part. Not so, I was soon to discover! For, on accompanying Pusey-Hamilton Jnr upstairs to the improvised “cloakroom” in search of his cagoule and ear-warmers, we came upon none other than the two principals—Othello and Desdemona themselves, to conceal their identities no longer—occupied on one of the beds in a procedure which could hardly fail, were it to proceed to its seemingly inevitable conclusion, to result in miscegenation.

  This, to be sure, was more than could be borne by man, beast or indeed Pusey-Hamilton Jnr, whose feelings on being caught up in these scenes were now clearly discernible from his whines of distress, his pitiful tugging at my hand, and his repeated cries (obviously directed at the other partygoers) of “Go home, go home, I hate you, you’re ruining my life.” There was no time to be lost in extricating him from that sink of iniquity, and sure enough, within thirty minutes he was safely at home, had been (firmly) tucked up in bed by Gladys, my good lady wife, and was enjoying the kind of sleep for which the only prerequisites are youthful innocence, an untroubled conscience and, of course, a powerful dose of barbiturates.

  How soon my son will recover from this dreadful ordeal remains to be seen.

  Through your columns, I address myself to the Chief Master of King William’s School. And I demand of you, Sir: are you to allow this kind of carry-on from your pupils? Is the name of this once-great institution to be dragged through the mud, thrown in the gutter and flushed down the toilet? This is no hysterical over-reaction from someone “out of touch” with our modern, “swinging” era. I am no fogey, “square” or fuddy-duddy. Good grief, Sir, I can tolerate a little friendly buggery between schoolpals, now and again: but congress—physical congress— with the opposite sex? At so tender and impressionable an age? And between the races, for pity’s sake? This will not do. It will not do at all. I call upon you to act now, to stamp out all trace of this rancorous canker, to purge the surge of this verminous scourge, which threatens, in my view (and that of Gladys, my good lady wife), the very honour and lifeblood of this school.

  Be decisive on this issue, I beg of you! As we used to say in my army days, “Come on, Sir—play the white man!”

  Yours faithfully,

  Arthur Pusey-Hamilton, MBE.

  SEALED with the ancient and noble Seal of the Pusey-Hamiltons.

  9

  Mr. Serkis came back to school in the second week of term. He had recovered from his appendicitis, but he wasn’t a happy man.

  “I’m very, very disappointed,” he told the editorial committee.

  It was another grey, rainswept Friday afternoon, and the radiator in the meeting room was not working. This was perhaps the coldest room in the entire school, at the very end of the Carlton corridor, which was reached by a narrow and somehow mysterious flight of stairs beside the entrance to the prefects’ locker room. Only sixth-formers were allowed to penetrate this remote spot, and even then there were severe restrictions. Membership of the Club itself, which gave access to its desirable, oak-panelled clubroom, was by election only, and every year more than half of the applicants were turned away, weeded out by some time-honoured vetting procedure whose intractable criteria were never explained. Benjamin himself would not be eligible for membership until next year. Meanwhile, even to be allowed to sit once a week in this icy and inaccessible garret, with its cracked plaster and antique plumbing, had seemed, a few months ago, an unimaginable privilege. But the editorial meetings had never quite lived up to his filmy, undefined expectations. An air of anticlimax always seemed to settle in, even after the first few minutes.

  “You were left to produce two issues by yourselves, and look what happens.” Mr. Serkis indicated a wad of paper on the table in front of him. “Seventeen letters of complaint. Including one from the Chief.” He skimmed through them, while Doug, Claire and Philip looked on, abashed. “Most of them,” he said, “were about the letter.” He looked up. “Does anybody know who wrote it?”

  “Harding,” everybody (except Benjamin) chanted in unison.

  Mr. Serkis sighed. “That figures.” He contemplated the authentic waxen seal at the bottom of the offending typescript. “It bears his mark of perfectionism.”

  “He did that with his own signet ring,” Philip said. “He picked one up somewhere—an antiques market, or something— and now it’s never off his finger.”

  “You should never, ever have published this,” said Mr. Serkis, glancing through the letter again and tutting over its worst excesses. “At the very least, you should have edited it. You should never print somebody’s home address. And this bit about Steve and Cicely—it practically suggests they were having sex in public. That line about ‘miscegenation’ is horrible. Horrible. You’ll have to print an apology.”

  “OK,” said Doug, resigned, scribbling a memo. “Apology.”

  “Now, I don’t know who wrote that gag about the wanking option, but the Chief went ballistic. It wasn’t just the word, it was . . . Well, as he says here—” (picking up the Chief Master’s lengthy, ornately handwritten note) “—‘I would have hoped that, in the spirit of editors past, the present team might occasionally be able to rise above the level of cheap undergraduate humour.’ ”

  “We’re still at school, aren’t we?” Philip pointed out. “So I would have thought undergraduate humour was pretty good going.”

  “Print an apology,” said Mr. Serkis, unmoved by this argument, and Doug scribbled another memo. “Now—” he turned to Claire “—your profile of Cicely’s come in for a lot of stick. And I have to admit, it’s one of the bitchiest things I ever read in my life.”

  “She deserved it,” Claire answered; but the defensive edge to her voice was very noticeable. “She’s a prima donna of the first order. Everybody knows that.”

  “You didn’t give her a fair hearing. And the stuff about her flirting in class was completely out of order.”

  “But it’s true.”

  There was a short silence; the sound of deadlock.

  “This is going to be some bloody apology,” said Doug, scribbling. “There’ll be no room left for anything else, at this rate. Who’s going to write it?”

  When it was obvious that there would be no volunteers, Mr. Serkis chose Benjamin.

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re the best writer on the magazine.” Assuming (correctly) from Benjamin’s dumbstruck response that this compliment was both unexpected and overwhelming, he qualified it by adding: “Also, you’re the only one whose stuff doesn’t seem to bring in a deluge of complaints these days.”

  Unwittingly, here, Mr. Serkis had touched a nerve.

  “Well why doesn’t it?” Benjamin wanted to know. “I was incredibly rude about that play. Why haven’t I caused a bit of controversy?”

  Nobody seemed to know the answer to that one, and Benjamin was promptly despatched to the adjacent office to compose a fulsome yet subtly unrepentant apology.

  He sat at the typewriter and looked out at the rooftops, glistening silver with rainwater. Above them, the two tall oak trees which flanked the South Drive swung feverishly in the wind. He stared at the trees for a few moments, then allowed his eyes to glaze over until the objects before him lunged out of focus. A blur of slate grey and chocolate brown and pastel green. His fingers rested on the keys of the typewriter, passive, stupefied. The question that had been nagging at him—Why was it? Why was it that nothing he did seemed to . . . bother anybody, get under their skin?—withdrew to some inaccessible corner, was absorbed, swallowed up. A kind of numbness took its place. Dimly, Benjamin remained aware that the life of the school was proceeding, winding down, in the many rooms and corridors that lay beneath his feet. The Friday afternoon Options would be coming to an end: the chess players packin
g away their pieces, the War Games fetishists abandoning their maps and charts, the artists washing their brushes under Mr. Plumb’s distracted supervision, the Combined Cadet Force swapping their prickly green uniforms for civvies, the musicians and radio hams and bridge players and fives enthusiasts all preparing to go home. How the world strained to keep itself busy! Already Benjamin felt so distant from all of that, so far removed. He continued merely to sit at the typewriter, in a swoon of heaviness and incuriosity. Claire entered the room, at one point, retrieved a couple of box files filled with back issues of the magazine; she may have spoken to him. Philip, certainly, looked in on his way downstairs, a raincoat slung over his shoulder, and said, “How’s it going, maestro?,” or “Don’t be too long,” or “See you Monday, then,” or something along those lines. And one by one, Benjamin supposed, the others must have left as well. He would have to go too, in a minute. Couldn’t very well sit here all weekend. And yet there was something strangely comfortable about this listlessness, this solitude. The silence of the corridor outside agreed with him.

  Sometimes, when he was alone like this, Benjamin would wait for God to speak to him. He was reminded of the silence in the locker room, and then the door of the nearby locker swinging open and shut, and then his own footfalls as he went to retrieve the gift that had been left for him that momentous day. But God had not spoken to him since then. He would, of course; some time, some time soon, He would speak to him again. But there was nothing Benjamin could do, for now, except wait. Patience was everything.

  He heard footsteps in the corridor. A light, feminine tread, heading past his own half-closed doorway, in the direction of the editorial meeting room. He took no notice.

  Benjamin wondered if he should begin work on the apology. But the effort suddenly seemed tremendous, the physical effort of lifting his finger and striking one of the typewriter keys, striking it firmly enough for a letter to be imprinted on the page, to say nothing of the mental effort, deciding which key he should strike, and therefore, by extension, which word should bear the awful responsibility of coming first. He would write it at home, tomorrow or on Sunday. There was plenty of time. Far preferable now just to savour this aloofness, to close himself off, settle further still into a luscious insensibility that no sound, no image would ever be able to pierce.

  And indeed, it wasn’t a sound or an image that roused Benjamin from his inertia at all. It was a smell. The smell of a cigarette.

  This was very odd. Smoking in school was forbidden, so strictly forbidden that even Doug had never been known to try it. As soon as the unmistakable stagnant odour reached his nose, Benjamin was intrigued. He rose immediately from the chair in which he had come to assume an almost supine position, and walked carefully—even stealthily—along the corridor towards the meeting room. On reaching the doorway he paused, and then for some moments feasted his startled eyes on the seated figure of Cicely Boyd.

  She was sitting, or rather crouching, at the editorial table, with her back to the door, and with one bare foot (the shoe seemed to have come off) tucked beneath her bottom. Her posture radiated tension and nervous expectancy. She was wearing fawn trousers and a loose, chunky, navy blue Argyll sweater, with the famous golden hair swept into a long ponytail which reached almost to the small of her back. Ash from her unfiltered cigarette fluttered down on to the table, unnoticed, as she stared intently towards the window, favouring Benjamin with a view of her left profile. Her nose was thin and aquiline, her eyes were the palest blue imaginable, there was a galaxy of tiny freckles above her cheekbones, and one even tinier mole on her left cheek. All of these details were new to Benjamin, who realized now that he had never really seen Cicely before, except at a distance, or in snatched glimpses. Here, close up, in the flesh, she was fifty, a hundred, a million times more beautiful than he could have thought possible. For many seconds, it seemed, his heart stopped beating completely.

  Then she turned; and he knew at once, before their eyes had even had a chance to meet, that she had come here for no other purpose than to see him.

  He took a faltering, involuntary step forward.

  “You’re Benjamin,” she stated, baldly.

  “Yes.” And for some reason, the next thing he said was: “You’re not allowed to smoke in here, you know.”

  “Ah.” She let her cigarette fall, picked up her shoe and carefully ground the glowing stub into the floor. “We must stick to the rules, mustn’t we?”

  She looked at him for a while, until he felt compelled to say something else:

  “Everybody’s gone home.”

  “Not quite everybody,” she answered. “It was you I wanted to meet.” She took a breath. “You wrote—”

  “—a review of your play, yes, I know. I’m . . .” (and suddenly the word seemed useless, although it was the only one he had) “. . . sorry.”

  She took stock of this comment; absorbed and pondered it.

  “Why did you write it?” she asked, after what seemed like a long pause.

  Benjamin had been dreading this question. It was the same question he had been pointedly refusing to ask himself, and now that it confronted him, there was no plausible answer that he could see. Quite simply, some sort of madness must have seized him when he sat down at the typewriter that evening. Here, after all, was the opportunity he had been dreaming of for years: the chance to compose, not just a love letter to Cicely, but something infinitely more potent—a public statement of his admiration for her, a panegyric to her beauty and her talent which couldn’t fail to put her endlessly in his debt. And yet for some crazy, unfathomable reason he had done nothing of the kind. He had sacrificed this glorious opening on the altar of some half-baked notion of critical objectivity. Yes, her performance had been bad; of course he had realized that, of course he had believed it; but to have said so, in such uncompromising terms, when every motion of his heart was telling him to do the opposite—well, this was idiotic. This was perverseness of the first order. The whole episode, in fact, raised a much larger question, just as unanswerable, and one which was pressing itself upon him a good deal these days: what was the matter with him, exactly?

  Cicely, in any case, did not wait for his response. She had her own, ready to hand.

  “I’ll tell you why you wrote it,” she said, and then her voice cracked and broke. “Because it was true. Every word.”

  As soon as she said this, Benjamin had, for the first time in his life, what might be called an out-of-body experience. He could see himself, quite clearly, rushing towards her, kneeling down beside her chair and putting a comforting arm around her shoulder. He could hear himself, quite distinctly, saying, “No, Cicely, no. It wasn’t true. None of it was true. I was stupid to write it.” He could see at once that this was the right and natural thing to do. But he didn’t do it. He said nothing, and remained by the doorway.

  “The last few weeks have been dreadful. Unimaginable.” She took another cigarette out of the packet and began to twirl it between agitated fingers. “First of all that interview. That . . . thing Claire wrote.” She screwed up her eyes at the recollection. “So hurtful.”

  “I think Claire has a problem,” Benjamin volunteered, tentatively. “Where you’re concerned. I think she may be a bit jealous.”

  “She used to be my friend,” said Cicely. She was speaking to herself, and gave no indication of having heard his remark. “I must have done something awful to her.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Benjamin, but again she ignored him.

  “I hate myself. I really do.” She looked at Benjamin directly now. “Do you know what that’s like? Do you hate yourself?”

  “Perhaps I should, after what I did to you,” said Benjamin; or would have done, if he wasn’t having another out-of-body experience. Instead he mumbled: “I don’t know, really.”

  “But in a way,” Cicely continued, “what she wrote . . . What she wrote is easier to cope with. Because she didn’t mean any of it. She was just being a bitch. And none of it w
as true. Whereas you did mean it, didn’t you? You hated my performance. Everything about it.”

  “No, I . . . I was being very harsh. I don’t know why.”

  “Did I really get all those stresses wrong?”

  “So did everybody else, actually,” Benjamin said, in a vain attempt to make things better. “If anything it was Tim’s fault. He was directing you, after all.”

  Cicely stood up, and drifted towards the window. She was taller than he had thought, and so slender, and lovely, and so full of grace. Benjamin cowered at the thought that he might have vandalized such beauty, done violence to it in any way.

  “What about . . . Harding’s letter?” he found himself compelled to ask, rather to his amazement. “That wasn’t true either, was it?”

  Cicely turned sharply. “About me and Steve?”

  He nodded.

  “It was wicked of them to print that. Steve’s girlfriend saw it. She dumped him.” And now her whole body shook, with a visible sob. “It happens so easily. You’re working with someone, things get very intense. It was only a little fling, I never meant it to do any harm. Oh, I’m a terrible, terrible person.”

  Benjamin had run out of reassuring words, and besides, the knowledge that Richards had indeed enjoyed this good fortune, however briefly, filled him with an irrational and paralyzing jealousy. Once again some better-natured but inaccessible part of him suggested that he should be offering physical comfort to Cicely. Once again, he remained frozen to the spot.

  Even without his assistance, she managed to compose herself after a moment or two. She stood by the window with her back towards him, and wiped her cheeks with a scrap of tissue. Then she turned. Her eyes, though still red-rimmed, now carried within them the hint of a different, steelier light.