The Rotters' Club

by Jonathan Coe

  He smoothed back the hair from her forehead, and said, “Will you write to me?,” and she said, “Every day,” and in her eyes he could see two oceans reflected, and in his eyes she could see the swelling of tears, but even through his tears Benjamin felt a monstrous, divine happiness consume him, knowing at last what it was to love and be loved.

  28

  When Benjamin let himself into his parents’ empty house the following afternoon, the first thing he saw lying on the doormat was a letter containing his exam results. He opened it up and found that he had achieved the highest possible grades in every subject.

  The telephone rang. It was his grandmother.

  “Where have you been? We’ve been calling you non-stop.”

  “Sorry, Grandma. I’ve been out a lot. How’s Grandpa?”

  “A bit better. Sitting up today. He sends his love.”

  Benjamin told her about his grades. He was glad to have somebody to tell. After he had told his grandmother he phoned Philip and told him. Philip himself had done almost as well. He would be able to go to Bristol in the autumn, no problem.

  “What about Steve?” Benjamin asked.

  Philip sighed. “He failed physics. Failed it outright. And he only got a D and C on the others.”

  “So what does that mean?”

  “It means no university’ll take him to do physics now. He’ll have to sit them all again next year.”

  “And Culpepper?”

  “One A, one B and one C. But the A was in physics, so basically, he got what he needed. He’ll scrape through.” They were both glumly silent. “Life stinks, doesn’t it?”

  After what seemed to be a decent interval, Benjamin said: “Well, anyway, we should celebrate. You and me.”

  “Yes—and Claire. And Emily. How about tonight?”

  “Not tonight: tomorrow,” said Benjamin. “Tonight, I’ve got some dirty work to do.”

  He hung up and looked through the rest of the post. Most of it was pretty boring stuff, but there was one thing that made him laugh. Apparently the strike at the Grunwick factory was over at last. The strikers had been defeated, according to the newspapers: but at least his father’s holiday photos from Skagen had arrived, finally, almost two years after he had sent them off to be developed.

  Benjamin’s dirty work consisted of taking Jennifer for their last drink at The Grapevine. He told her the story of his family’s catastrophic trip to Wales and she laughed a lot. She had a throaty, slightly salacious laugh and a reliable sense of humour. He realized now that these were among the many things he liked about her. Even so, when they had finished exchanging news about holidays and exam results, he put his Guinness down on the table with careful emphasis and said: “Listen, Jennifer. I think we should call it a day, the two of us.”

  “Yes,” she answered, cheerfully. “Of course we should.” Benjamin was thoroughly taken aback by this. He had expected some weeping at the very least. “I just think,” he explained, wondering if she had really taken in what he was saying, “I just think we’ve reached the end of the road.”

  “Come off it, Ben: we never even found the road, did we? We had nothing in common, for one thing. I never learned to tell my Debussy from my Delius or my Beckett from my Baudelaire. I was boring you silly.”

  “No you weren’t.”

  “Be honest with me, Benjamin. We owe each other that, at least.”

  “You might have sounded a bit upset,” he protested.

  “With university to look forward to? According to the prospectus there are a hundred and twenty-six rooms in my hall of residence; and every one of them’s got its own wardrobe. That ought to keep me busy.” She could tell that he was finding it hard to see the joke, so she admitted, reluctantly: “Yes, of course I’m upset. But don’t look so tragic about it. Don’t worry, Tiger—you’ll find somebody else.”

  Benjamin saw the chance to regain some of his dignity. “I already have, as a matter of fact.”

  “Oh?” said Jennifer, in an offhand way which pleasingly failed to convince. “Anyone I know?”

  “Yes, actually: it’s Cicely.”

  Her reaction, again, was the last he had been expecting: there was a sudden gasp, and then her face drew itself into an expression he had never seen before, in all the months he had known her. She was looking at him with fondness and reproach and, above all, solicitude.

  “Oh, Ben . . . no,” she pleaded. “Not her. Not you and Cicely, for goodness’ sake.”

  “Whyever not?” he asked. (Almost wanting to add: “Everyone else has been out with her.”)

  “Hasn’t anyone ever warned you about Cicely? Haven’t you noticed what she does to people? The way she chews them up and spits them out?”

  He shook his head. “You don’t know her. You don’t know her the way I do.”

  “That,” said Jennifer, after a short laugh, “is the stupidest thing I ever heard.”

  But she was never going to convince him. Benjamin wasn’t in the market for common sense any more. The door had finally been flung open, the door that would take him out of his old life and into an infinitely richer one. Nothing that Jennifer could say would prevent him from stepping through. And nothing that anybody could say would ever unmake those moments he had shared with Cicely yesterday, as they had stood together on the headland and she had made her promise and he had looked into her eyes: eyes in which he saw reflected, twice over, the clear blue waters and gaping jaws of Porth Neigwl; Hell’s Mouth; the very maws of doom.

  Green Coaster

  But are there moments in life worth purchasing with worlds, and moments so charged, so full of emotion that they become somehow 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 was about to ask my sister to marry him (because he never did ask her, I know that now), and is this one of those moments, as I raise this glass of Guinness to my lips and think to myself that surely life can’t get any better, it can only be downhill from here, so how can I prolong this moment, how can I stretch it, how can I make it last for ever, because I have been to Paradise Place and nothing else can ever compare with that, et in Arcadia ego, as somebody once said, I forget who, but perhaps it can be done, perhaps if I don’t move, if I just hold the glass here, two inches from my mouth, and don’t even look across at the bar, where Sam is buying me another, then it will last, and no, I won’t even turn my head to look out of the window, either, to look at Cicely, my beautiful Cicely, my beautiful girlfriend—it’s true, I know it sounds incredible, but it’s true, that’s what she is—because I don’t need to look at her now, I know that I will see her again in a few hours, and in the meantime I can imagine her, I can imagine her walking away from Paradise Place and through the concrete precincts of the library buildings and across Chamberlain Square and into Victoria Square, the sway of her long back, the air of thoughtful distraction, slight otherworldliness, the way that she is never aware how other people are looking at her, turning towards her irresistibly, magnetized, how can she doubt herself when other people look at her this way, how can she believe that she is anything other than a very extraordinary person, but she doesn’t even notice it, her thoughts are elsewhere, I don’t know where most of the time, but I will fnd that out, it is one of the many things I will find out in the years of knowing and loving her that I have to look forward to, and then of course if my imagination fails me I always have memory to fall back on, because I have memories of Cicely now as well, amazing memories, and none more amazing than what happened between us this morning, but I will come to that carefully, slowly, every detail must be savoured, and it starts, well, I suppose it starts with the very first thing I was thinking this morning, can I remember what it was, yes, I was thinking about Dickie’s bag, bizarrely enough, but wait a minute, there is something that comes before that, the thing I was dreaming about, as is
the way with dreams I can’t really remember it, it slipped away just as I was waking up, but I can remember the policemen, there were rows and rows of policemen in this dream, and I have nothing against policemen as a rule but the sight of these men filled me with dread, or filled the person in the dream with dread, am I the same person that I dream about?, that is one of the great unanswerables, but I can remember this feeling of dread, and it was to do with the fact that I couldn’t see the policemen’s faces, though I’m not sure if this was because they didn’t have faces, or because their faces were hidden by their helmets as they stood there, heads bowed, ready to charge, hundreds and hundreds of them now I come to picture it, or am I simply making that up, I don’t know, the clarity of it is fading, anyway, but it was a sinister image, I think they were about to charge into a crowd, truncheons in hand, to break up some demonstration or other, in fact of course that is where the image comes from, it’s because I was reading Doug’s article this week, Doug’s article for the NME about Blair Peach and what happened in Southall, that would explain it, good, and it was a terrible article, by which I don’t mean it was badly written, it was brilliant from that point of view, like all of Doug’s writing, but the things it described were terrible, unimaginable really, I wonder if he was exaggerating, somehow I can’t help hoping that he was exaggerating, although it would reflect badly on him, so anyway, getting back to this morning, that was when I woke up, in the middle of this dream, something must have woken me, I think it may have been Mum shutting the door on her way out to the school, she teaches there now, what is it, four mornings a week, she is always happier when she is working, it matters to me that everybody should be as happy as I am, even though that is scarcely possible because I am after all the luckiest person in the world, and then, as soon as I woke up, something irrelevant popped into my mind, quite irrelevant, the way it often does, and within less than the fragment of a fraction of a splinter of a second, less time even than the moment I am trying to stretch now, I had forgotten about the policemen and I was thinking about Dickie’s bag, which I haven’t thought about for years, two or three years at least, and come to that I haven’t thought about Dickie either, since he left school last summer, and by that time we weren’t calling him Dickie, of course, any more than we were calling Steve Rastus, his name was Richard Campbell, but in the fourth form, I think it was, we used to call him Dickie, it must have been meant rudely, we were somehow implying that he was fey or effeminate or something, though I don’t know why he should have been singled out in that respect, we all used to camp it up in those days, pretend to be queer or gay or whatever you want to call it, but so much of what we did now seems inexplicable, including picking on Richard Campbell, but the even stranger thing was how we all used to make a big joke out of Dickie’s bag, who started it, I wonder, well, I would guess it was Harding, that always seems to be the safest assumption, though from what corner of his twisted mind he retrieved this one I shall never know, but let’s assume it was Harding, at any rate, who decided that Dickie’s bag should become not so much an object of derision but—and it sounds crazy, I’m fully aware of that—an object of sexual desire, a sex object if you like, and the way it worked was this, Dickie would arrive in the form room every morning, carrying his bag, which was an ordinary Adidas sports bag, in black vinyl, a bit battered, but almost identical to a hundred other bags which people brought into school every morning, and then the first person who saw him would shout out “Dickie’s bag! Dickie’s bag!,” like a sort of hunting cry, and then everybody in the room would run towards Dickie and grab hold of his bag and snatch it away from him, and then they would fall upon it (why do I say they? I took part in this as well, so we snatched it away from him, we fell upon it) and what followed I can only describe as a kind of gang-rape, as the bag used to disappear beneath a sea of bodies and there would be a collective orgasmic groan and we would all take it in turns to hump Dickie’s bag, there is no other word for it, while its owner looked on despairingly, resigned by now to this obscene daily insult to which he alone, for reasons which he could probably never fathom, seemed to be condemned, and I thought about this little ritual in bed this morning and I have to confess that a smile came to my face, more than a smile, actually, I found myself laughing, chuckling to myself in bed, laughing at the sheer vindictive, childish fun of it, and I also found myself wondering, as I wonder about so many of my schoolfriends these days, what Richard Campbell is doing now and how he is getting on at university and whether he will look back on what we used to do to his bag in twenty years’ time and laugh about it himself, because the alternative, I suppose, is that it will have marked his character forever and turned him into a friendless sociopath or perhaps even a murderer or at the very least ensured that he will never be able to have a normal sex life, but that’s all in the future and don’t think I’m not going to come to that, don’t think I’m going to be neglecting the future, but right now I’m thinking about this morning, the feeling I had when I woke up and I forgot about my dream and I allowed those memories of Dickie’s bag to shimmer through my head, and then it suddenly occurred to me what a strange, expectant atmosphere there was in the house, how quiet everything was, because it was after nine o’clock, and Mum had gone to work and Dad had gone to work and Lois had gone to work and Paul would be at school, although he hadn’t even been sleeping there the night before, now I came to think of it, he was staying over at a friend’s house, which meant that his bedroom was empty, except that it wasn’t empty at all, and I should have been going to work as well, but there was a good reason why I wasn’t, which was Cicely, needless to say, Cicely had stayed the night with us last night, she had slept in Paul’s bedroom and it was the second time she had done this, but there was a crucial difference this time, namely that there was no one else in the house with us this morning, we had the house entirely to ourselves, so no wonder it felt strange and expectant, and no wonder I had decided that I was going to phone in sick and tell Martin that I’d be taking the morning off, but even so there was no time to lose, every second we had alone together was priceless, so I had to think what I was going to do, I had to think how I was going to handle this situation, because we’ve been apart a long time, Cicely and I, eight months, eight long desolate months she’s been in New York with her mother, whose play was a huge success, unfortunately for me, and although we wrote to each other every week and I flew over there to be with them for a few days in January, it’s still been difficult, being back together again, I can see that she is finding it hard to adjust, and perhaps I have been making it too obvious, at times, that I am aware of this, perhaps I have been too solicitous, too tentative, it’s part of my character, after all, oh yes, I am developing a tiny little element of self-awareness at last, and not before time some people might say (like Doug, for instance), but it meant that I was not at all sure how to proceed this morning, at first, so I ended up taking what some people (like Doug, for instance) might have regarded as the safest route, I went downstairs and made a cup of tea and took it up to her, yes, tea!, I’m sure Uncle Glyn would have had something to say about that, the multiplicity of uses which the English have found for the humble cup of tea, how many emotions we manage to hide behind it, how many subterfuges we manage to disguise with it, and I suppose tea is a legacy of colonialism as well so he would really have had a field day with that one, I’m sure, but who cares, who cares what Uncle Glyn might have said, I was not thinking about him, as I carried our two mugs up the creaking stairs, it’s the eleventh, the eleventh one that creaks most loudly, how well you get to know your own house after eighteen years, I suppose it’s not so surprising, and I was thinking about what I was going to say to Cicely when I woke her up, I was thinking about words, as usual, I am a great man for my words, I have come to believe that you can do almost anything with words but I am also beginning to learn, at least God, I hope so, it would not be before time, beginning to learn that there are some situations in which words are not the most important thing,
there are some situations which call for something beyond words, and those are the situations that tend to confound me, as a rule, and so it was this morning, when I pushed open the door of Paul’s bedroom and came in backwards with my two mugs of tea and set them down on his bedside table and I was still trying to think of what I would say to Cicely after I had woken her up, trying to get the words right, and I can’t even remember what they were, now, because it turned out that she was awake already, I soon found that out, she was wide awake and the first thing she did when I sat down on the bed beside her was to sit up, and she was naked, oh, God! she was completely naked, I was wearing my pyjamas, I must have looked ridiculous, there is nothing alluring about pyjamas, but this didn’t seem to bother her, because she sat up slowly, sleepily, and she draped her arms around my neck, her bare arms, her wonderful bare arms, I could think about those for a while, couldn’t I, but I can’t, my mind is racing on, and her mouth was half open and she planted her lips against mine and I could feel the touch of her breasts against my chest and in all the years I have known Cicely because, my God, we have known each other for more than two years now, nobody could accuse us of rushing things, it had taken us long enough to get to this point, but we were there now, we were on the very threshold of Paradise Place, and in all the years I have known Cicely this was the first time I had seen her body let alone touched it, and I put my hand to her breast and the softness and the smoothness of it were indescribable, and meanwhile this kiss, she was kissing me so tenderly, we have kissed before, many times, there was no shortage of kissing when I went to see her in New York, that’s for sure, but there was something new about this one, as if all the kisses we had had before were leading up to this one, as if all the moments we had spent together, and how many have there been?—another of the unanswerables, nobody knows what a moment is, how long it lasts, you can’t measure it, can’t talk about it, an infinite number, I suppose, we are in the realms of infinity—as if all those moments, anyway, were suddenly rushing together, converging, fusing into this one great explosive moment, which began with her draping her arms around my neck and lasted for how long, I don’t know, I have no idea at all how long we were in that bedroom together, in Paul’s bed, beneath his stupid posters, one of them a big picture of one of those girls from Charlie’s Angels, wearing a bikini and grinning blankly, and the other, unbelievably, a picture of Margaret Thatcher with the slogan “Vote Conservative!” underneath it, yes!, I lost my virginity twice, in effect, once with an item of luggage and once beneath a poster of Mrs. Thatcher, not the most auspicious start to a sexual career, I must admit, but I can’t say that I gave her much attention this morning, during those ten minutes or three hours or however long it was because I swear to you that I have never in my life seen, and never will see again, I’m convinced, anything as beautiful as what Cicely showed to me when she lay back in the bed and pulled away the duvet and held out her arms to me, there are simply no words to describe it, well, all right, there are, but they belong somewhere else, they have been claimed by Culpepper’s magazines, they don’t convey the loveliness, let alone the mystery, yes, that’s the word, the mystery of what Cicely showed to me this morning and what I reached out to touch, because after slipping out of those absurd pyjamas, I reached out to touch her and when I did, when my amazed fingertips made their first contact with that place, Paradise Place, her face changed, I was watching her face, and she smiled, and made a noise, a tiny noise, something like a whisper, and she stirred among the bedclothes but I was looking at her smile, and it wasn’t that she was smiling with pleasure, or happiness, it was a smile that went somehow beyond these things, and oh, I’m not saying that I’m the world’s greatest lover, far from it, just ask Jennifer Hawkins, for one thing, I’m not saying that I can transport a woman to the pitch of ecstasy with one touch of my fingers, but with Cicely this morning there was something about our feelings for each other, something about the things that had passed between us, over the years, something about the time it had taken us to reach this point, that made it very different, I mean different for her, because this was really my first time but it wasn’t her first time and yet afterwards she said to me that it was, in one sense, she said that it was her first time with somebody that she loved, and perhaps that’s why she smiled so mysteriously, that word again, I keep coming back to it, when I touched her, touched her between the legs, and then crouched over her, and smelled her, and then tasted her, tasted her with the very tip of my tongue, and I can taste her still, yes, the taste of Cicely is still on my tongue, not alone now, not unmixed, I can taste Cicely and Guinness, and oh, I hope the taste of her never goes away, but I shall stop now, think of something else, come back later to my first taste of her, it is too good to think about only the once, and now I am going to imagine Cicely again, walking across Victoria Square as she must be at this moment, yes, imagination and memory, that’s it, those are my two weapons in the fight against time, my pitch for infinity, as long as I have those I have nothing to fear, she is thinking about me now, I know she is, unless of course she is thinking about Helen, which is possible, that after all is the reason she wanted to go home so quickly, she phoned her mother just now, about fifteen minutes ago, and her mother told her there was a letter from America for her, a letter from Helen, so perhaps Cicely is thinking about Helen but I don’t believe she is, I believe she is thinking about me, but is she imagining me or remembering me?, I shall never know, but here’s an idea, I could imagine her remembering me, or I could remember her imagining me, and that way it could go on forever—which of course is exactly what I want!—like a hall of mirrors or indeed a Hall of Memory, yes, I like that phrase, I could use that, I could put it in a poem or use it as the title of a chapter or a tune or something, and what makes it so perfect is that I am looking at the Hall of Memory right now, because I am sitting in The Grapevine which I have noticed, only this morning, I never noticed it before, but it is situated in a square called Paradise Place, and straight through the window I can see through to the civic square, with the Masonic Hall and Municipal Bank on one side, to the left, and Baskerville House to the right, and between them is the Hall of Memory, built of Portland stone and Cornish granite, and topped with a handsome white dome (I only know about the stone and the granite because Philip told me, when he came home for the holidays and we were walking around here, he was full of information about all these buildings, seemed to have been making a proper study of them, I was chastened, as usual, because I am quite capable of living for years in a city without noticing a thing about its architecture, without even thinking that the buildings around me have been designed like works of art and have histories to them, but Philip is becoming quite a specialist in all this, and so he was telling me, for instance, about the Hall of Memory and how it was meant to be much grander than the one they finally built, in 1925, after the Great War most of the money they had set aside for it had to go towards housing instead, and in the end it only cost £35,000, and the figures are by a Birmingham sculptor called Albert Toft, and the day that it was opened more than 30,000 people queued outside to file through and pay their respects to the men who had died in the war, yes, Philip knew all of this, and it was wonderful, to walk around Birmingham with him that day and to see these familiar places as if for the first time, made new again by his knowledge and enthusiasm), and so today everything about my life seems to be changing, even the city is transforming itself around me, I am sitting in Paradise Place and looking into the Hall of Memory and suddenly it’s as if everything refers to me and Cicely, everything is a metaphor for the way we feel, somehow the entire city has become nothing less than a life-size diagram of our hearts, and I could almost shout with the joy of it, I want to run out into the square and shout to anyone who will listen, I LOVE THIS CITY!, I LOVE THIS CITY!, but as you might have guessed I’m not going to do that, it’s not exactly in character, and besides I don’t have to move yet, I’m still locked into my moment and Cicely is still walking somewhere through Vic
toria Square, thinking of me, remembering, yes, I’ve decided what it is that she’ll be remembering now, she’s remembering the day, eight days ago, when I drove down to Heathrow to pick her up, and I have to imagine what she would have thought, or felt (felt, Benjamin, felt, concentrate on feelings for a change) when she came through the gate into the Arrivals hall and saw me waiting there, picked out my face from among the crowd, how anxious I must have looked, how transparent, my yearning and my nervousness, but all of that dissolved when I saw her eyes light up in recognition and her face break into a smile and she came towards me and put her bag down and brushed her hair away from her eyes, it is always falling across her eyes, and then she hugged me, she was wearing a suede jacket, I remember the texture of her suede jacket, it had things dangling from it, what are they called, tassles or something, like a cowboy, how on earth am I ever going to be a writer if I can’t describe clothes properly, perhaps I should be a composer after all, so we hugged and then she brought her lips up to mine, it was like everything was in slow motion, I wonder if everybody was looking at us, it felt as though they were, and, oh, to be kissing her again, I could hardly believe it, it was three months since we had seen each other, I had tried not to doubt her during that time, but once or twice, it’s inevitable I suppose, you find yourself wondering, not about other men, I was never worried about that, but feelings fade, it happens all the time, or so I’m told, so I’ve read, but when she kissed me that afternoon I knew that everything was all right, she is true, my Cicely is true, true to the promises she made last summer, up on the headland, the headland at Rhîw, I am so lucky, and then we drove home, it was a long drive, the longest I have ever done in fact, and what did we talk about?, we had been writing letters, long letters, so we’d heard each other’s news, anyway I didn’t have much news, there is not much to say about my job, it is just a job in a bank, something to tide me over until I go to Oxford this autumn, although lately it has become more interesting, I’ll admit that, now that I’ve been moved out of the branch and into the regional office, but Cicely first of all wanted to know about the strikes, people in America had been telling her about the strikes, they had been reading about them in the newspapers, she had heard it all second-hand, I don’t believe Cicely herself has ever read a newspaper in her life, but from what her friends had been saying she had formed the impression that the whole country was on the point of collapse, the British papers were calling it the winter of discontent and it’s true that the weather had been incredibly bad and almost everyone in the country had been on strike, at some point, but this picture they were painting, rubbish piled high in the streets and corpses rotting in the back rooms of funeral parlours because there was nobody to bury them, I told her it was all an exaggeration, it wasn’t nearly as bad as that, but the Americans had been full of it, apparently, they were convinced that Britain was turning into a Communist state and we were on the verge of economic disaster and the army was going to have to be brought in and there was practically going to be a civil war, and Cicely had believed all of this, I could see now why Doug had sometimes been irritated by her, she is the very opposite of him, naive, credulous in some ways, but that is one of the things I love about her, she has the capacity, still, to be endlessly astonished by the world, and Doug has lost that capacity, if he ever had it, whereas I can play Cicely a piece of music, say (although not one of mine, no, I don’t think I will be doing that again, not for a while), and she is invariably overwhelmed by it, taken over, and then hungry for information about the composer, hungry for the things that only I can tell her, which I suppose is flattering to me, I mustn’t pretend that that’s not part of the attraction, but as an example, while I think of it, of her naivety, is that really the word, ignorance Doug would call it, but then that misses the innocent quality of it, the wide-eyed wonderment, whatever, the example that comes to mind is when I went to visit her in New York and I asked her one day whether Carter was still popular with the Americans, and she didn’t understand me, she had no idea who I was talking about, she had been living in this country for four months and she didn’t know the name of the President, or at least she knew it, she had heard it, but it had made no impression on her, it would not automatically have occurred to her, hearing the name Carter, that people were talking about the President, and she did not know that James Callaghan was the Prime Minister of Britain, either, but what does it matter, that’s what I want to know, what does it really matter if you don’t know what’s going on in the world around you, what difference does it make, we can’t change things anyway, nothing that Cicely does or I do or even Doug for that matter is ever going to change the world, unless of course I write something that alters the course of musical history, or Cicely’s poetry touches the hearts of a whole generation of women and changes their lives and makes her incredibly famous, because she’s writing poetry, now, she only confessed this to me a few weeks ago, in one of her letters, and then I asked her to send me some of them, and she said that most of them weren’t finished but then she did send me three, or two and a half, anyway, and they are good, really good, I am not just saying that because I am in love with her, she has an ear for rhythm and she uses words well and carefully, she is very exacting, very tough with herself when she writes, which makes her much better at writing than she ever was at acting, and makes me think that perhaps who knows one of these days we might both get something published or recorded, and we could become one of those famous artistic couples, except that I don’t want to be famous, I don’t want either of us to be famous, I just want us to live together and work together and be good at what we do, so that in forty years’ time (yes, I am going to think about the future now, it is not just by visiting the past that I can escape the present, I can use the future as well, because as Eliot said, Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time future contained in time past, and thank you Mr. Serkis for teaching me that, thank you King William’s for introducing me to so much that now echoes and rebounds inside my head, and sustains me, I am grateful, really I am, whatever I might have said and thought about you in less charitable moods), in forty years’ time we shall be living—where shall we be living?—oh, in a cottage, of course, or actually what I have always fancied is a converted mill, a watermill, down by the riverbank, somewhere in the country, not far from here, the Cotswolds perhaps or maybe Shropshire, less of a cliché, although the other possibility of course is that we have inherited Plas Cadlan, Glyn and Beatrice will surely have popped off in forty years’ time and who else are they going to leave it to?, that’s a nice thought, certainly, but I have got the watermill in my mind’s eye now so let’s run with that one, yes, there we both are, getting on for sixty I suppose, and have we got children?, God, it’s a bit early to start thinking about that, but yes, of course we’ve got children, or have had children, rather, because they will have left home by now and we are living alone again, quite alone, but even after forty years we are so untired of each other, so hungry to discover more about each other, that it’s actually a relief that the kids have gone at last, and besides, it gives me more time to work on the new symphony, because where am I in the cycle at this point, number seven or eight I should think, the works of my late maturity, it was the “Birmingham Symphony” that made my name and reputation but these quieter, more reflective, more dissonant and complex works are the ones that people will recognize, in the years to come, as the real masterpieces, and of course my settings of Cicely’s poetry!, because that’s the great thing about her starting to write, now we can collaborate, so this is going to be a true partnership, a true partnership of equals, and as well as working together at the watermill, during the daytimes, when evening falls we shall entertain, we shall give the kind of dinners that people will never forget, people will spend evenings at our house that will become treasured memories (well done, Benjamin, you’re really going for it here, you are imagining the future of the future, and what people will remember when they get there, back in their
potential pasts, my God, time present doesn’t stand a chance against this kind of opposition, it doesn’t have an earthly), and just to take one evening, for instance, who are the guests, well, obviously, there will be Philip and his wife, and Doug and his wife, and Claire and her husband, and Emily and her husband, which makes eight, plus me and Cicely makes ten, a good number, but should we have invited Steve?, why have we not invited Steve?, is it because his future seems so uncertain, after what happened last year, and I just cannot envisage where he is going to be in forty years’ time, or is there another reason, a nastier reason, for excluding Steve from my little fantasy, you can never tell, these things go very deep, and when Cicely and I went to visit him the other day there was certainly an element of hostility, I thought, of bitterness, even though he didn’t hold me to blame personally, a gulf had opened up between us, a little gulf, if there can be such a thing, but I shall be optimistic about this, I am full of hope today, convinced that everything will be for the best, so of course Steve will be there, Steve and his wife, which makes twelve in all, which is an even better number, but do we have enough bedrooms to put everybody up in?, I don’t see why not, we are talking about a bloody watermill here, for Christ’s sake, we ought to be able to run to six bedrooms, so everyone is staying the night, and it gets to be about two o’clock in the morning, and we’ve finished the last of the wine and decided to leave the clearing up for now, so Cicely and I are upstairs in our bedroom, which is right next to the river, we can hear the noise of running water as we get undressed together, and then we fall into bed, very tired but happy, so happy, and not so tired either that we don’t want to reach out and touch each other, it is not that we are at it like rabbits every hour God sends at the age of sixty-odd, no, but desire hasn’t faded, yet, not by any means, we still sleep naked, for one thing (no pyjamas!, absolutely not!, no old man’s stripey pyjamas for me at this age), and it only takes a second or two for Cicely to climb on top of me, tonight, I am hard and ready for her, just like this morning, and she takes hold of me and eases me inside her, yes, Oh God, yes, just like this morning, this morning in my brother’s bedroom, that was exactly what she did, after I had raised my head from between her legs, from Paradise Place, where I had learned so many things, uncovered so many secrets, oh, Cicely, the taste of you, will it still be the same, will everything still be the same between us in forty years’ time?, always, Cicely, always be new to me, that’s all we must ask of each other, new like this morning, new like your body which I had never seen before but today I saw all of it, you gave me all of it, your beautiful young tall pale slender body, when you sat astride me I reached up and began to kiss your breasts and your hair fell across my face, the hair which you made me cut off all those years ago and I still have it, oh yes, I shall never throw that bag away, and this morning your blonde hair fell across my face, so that I had not just your nipple but some of your hair in my mouth too as you reached down and touched me and pulled me towards you and squeezed me inside you and then with your other hand you touched my cheek, drew my face up towards you again so that we could kiss, the softest kiss, the gentlest kiss you would ever believe, and in all the years I have spent trying to imagine how it would feel to be inside a woman, this was nothing like it, no, I had never even been close, because it wasn’t just the sensation, it wasn’t just the clinging of your skin against my skin, no, it was the generosity of you, the givingness of what you were doing with your body (that’s it, yes! Now I’ve found out that it’s generosity that turns me on), and, watch out, Benjamin, you are rushing on, rushing on towards the end now and you can hold back for a little bit longer, I think, don’t lose this moment, don’t, don’t lose it, it may never come back, quick, think of something else, like that line, for instance, that line you just quoted, where did it come from?, it’s both familiar and unfamiliar, it feels like something that’s always been around in my head but I hadn’t thought of it for a long time, and now I’ve got it, yes, of course, it’s a song by Hatfield and the North, “Share It,” how appropriate, everything is appropriate today, everything is coming together, but it’s odd that I haven’t listened to that record for so long, it used to be my absolute favourite, I’ve had a soft spot for them ever since I went to see them at Barbarella’s, more than four years ago now, I have no trouble remembering the date, it was just two days before Malcolm died, and that reminds me of something that happened on Monday, three days ago, when I was walking through the cathedral square, with Cicely, as it happens, it was my lunch hour and until she goes back to school, in a week or two, she always comes to meet me in my lunch hour, and on this occasion we were walking through the square, hand in hand, which is how we always walk these days, and we passed this guy sitting on a bench, drinking from a can of something or other, Ansell’s I think it was, he had a red face and a big beard and to be honest he smelled a bit, I just thought he was a wino at first, but then I stopped walking and something clicked into place and I looked back at him and then I turned, drawing Cicely with me, and I went up to him and I looked him in the eye and said, You don’t recognize me, do you?, and he stared back at me, he had this slightly glazed look to him, I think he’d been drinking for an hour or two, and he said, No I don’t— who are you, you cunt? and I said, You’re Roll-Up Reg, and he said, I know who I am—who are you?, and I told him that he’d come with me to Barbarella’s all that time ago with Malcolm, and when I mentioned that name it was as if some kind of light-bulb went out behind his eyes, they went dark, and he drooped forward on his bench, almost slumped, and when he looked at me again he said, I remember you, you’re the Tory cunt, but there was no laughter in his voice when he said it this time, and he didn’t speak for quite a while after that but eventually he raised his head and sort of looked me up and down, took the measure of me, and said, You’ve grown up a bit since then, haven’t you?, and I didn’t know what to say to that, so I introduced him to Cicely and he shook her very nicely by the hand and said, politely but very deliberately, enunciating every word carefully, the way that some alcoholics do, It’s an honour to meet you, you must excuse me if I say anything out of order, the fact is, I’m an uncouth and ill-mannered cunt, and Cicely just laughed and assured him that whatever he said was fine, and he turned to me and said, Are you giving it to her?, and in fact the answer to that was still technically no, but I don’t think he expected me to tell him, anyway, because he asked me next what I was doing these days, and when I told him that I’d got a temporary job working for a bank and then I was going up to Oxford he just laughed and said, So you never did read The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, then, and I knew what he was getting at so I became a bit defensive and said, T. S. Eliot worked for a bank, you know, and Roll-Up Reg said, Yes, and he was a cunt, as well, but I could tell he was only joking, and then we both went quiet and I was about to say goodbye and move on when he asked me, How’s that sister of yours?, so I told him about Lois, as briefly as I could, saying as little as possible about the bad times and telling him that now, just in the last few months, she really seemed to have got her act together, and she even had this new boyfriend, a lawyer called Christopher, her first boyfriend since Malcolm, and completely different from him, too, the polar opposite in every respect, and Roll-Up Reg nodded and said that was nice, he was glad for her, but I could tell that I had depressed him by reminding him about all of this, and sure enough suddenly his eyes were full of tears and he sort of fell forward and Cicely grabbed hold of him and sat next to him on the bench, she had to support him, practically, he was leaning on her shoulder as he looked at me and said, It was my fault, you know, it was my fault they went to that pub, if it wasn’t for me Malc would be alive today and he would have married your sister and none of this would have happened, they were going to go to The Grapevine and then I told them not to, I can remember the conversation now, I told him it would be full of cunts in suits, it was all my fault, I killed him, I killed him, and I had to kneel down beside him and say, No, Reg, No, I didn’t know whether to call
him Reg or Roll-Up actually, neither of them seemed to come very naturally, but I said, No, you’re not to blame, no one’s to blame for something like that, it’s fate or destiny or God or something, and he pulled himself together and squeezed my shoulder and said, Yes, you’re right, and Cicely gave him a Kleenex and wiped his face down a bit and he said again, You’re right, son, you’re right, it’s God, and I said, Yes, it is, and he said, He’s cunt, isn’t he?, and I thought about what He’d done to Malcolm and what He’d done to Lois and what He’d done to the rest of us as a consequence and I said, Yes, He is, Reg, He’s a complete and utter cunt, and I laughed and Reg laughed and Cicely laughed, too, she didn’t know what it meant, for me, to say that, she doesn’t know the truth about me and God, I’ve never told her the story of the miracle, maybe I will one day but not yet, and besides, there are other miracles in my life now, like the miracle of Cicely herself and how she made me feel this morning, so then we said goodbye to Roll-Up Reg, he sat up on his bench and he took us both by the hands, and he said God bless, he said God bless both of you, you cunts, and then we walked on, and it would be good, wouldn’t it, if that was the last time I’d seen him in my life, there would have been a nice sense of closure about it, but as it happens he seems to sit and drink his Ansell’s in the cathedral square most days, and I see him almost every lunch hour, not to speak to, though, we just wave hello or we make a bit of eye contact, but no, there will be no tidy rounding-off of that particular story, I’m sorry to say, whereas it was different with Steve, when Cicely and I went to visit him last Saturday, early in the afternoon, there was a definite sense of finality about that meeting, which did not start well in any case because Steve was out when we arrived, he was still at work and so we had to sit there for a while with his parents, Mr. and Mrs. Richards, and of course they hate Cicely because they think that she made their son unhappy, all that time ago, when they were in Othello together—it all started then, oh yes, everything started then!—because it was after that that Steve split up with his girlfriend, Valerie, who by all accounts was very nice, so you can imagine that the situation was pretty tense, as we all sat there waiting for him to come home, and I didn’t make things any better because I was nervous, too, it’s shameful to admit it but yes, I was nervous, we were in Handsworth and for years my family had brought me up to believe that Handsworth was a sort of no-go area, some dark outpost of colonial Africa which had somehow got transplanted to Birmingham, and they had managed to convince me that my car was bound to get broken into if I left it parked in the street, or we would come back to it after half an hour and find that it was sitting on bricks or something, but I have to say that I saw very little evidence for these theories, not that Handsworth is at all similar to Longbridge, no, you can feel the difference, not just in the number of black people on the streets or all the different languages you can see in the shop windows or the different kinds of food for sale, it goes somehow deeper than these things, yes, I admit it, it was like a foreign country to me but I liked it for that very reason, and found myself thinking how strange it was, what an indictment, that I could share the same city with these people and yet I had had no contact with them in all my eighteen years, apart from Steve, of course, and how difficult it must have been for him, how very surreal and disorientating, to have arrived at King William’s and found that he was the only black boy there and that we all made fun of him and called him Rastus, God, we’re a fucked-up country, I’m beginning to see that, now, perhaps I really should have been listening to Doug all these years, anyway, that’s why I had been feeling nervous, absurdly, but it didn’t last for long because Mr. and Mrs. Richards were very welcoming, whatever they may have thought of Cicely, they made us tea and they asked her questions about America, and they told us about Steve’s job, which does not sound like much of a job, I’m afraid, he is only working in the local chip shop, but as they said he has to get whatever work he can and save up towards next year’s fees because if he is going to retake his A-levels he will have to go to sixth-form college, and they will have to pay for that themselves, and they told us that he might get a pay-rise soon because the shop is hoping to expand, they want to put in a few tables and chairs at the back and turn it into a proper little restaurant, and when I heard that I asked them what the name of the chip shop was and they told me, and when they told me I felt my heart sink but I didn’t say anything and just then Steve came in anyway, the shop had closed at two-thirty, and he was so pleased to see us, he broke into this enormous grin, he hadn’t seen me since that terrible day last year, the last day of term, and he hadn’t seen Cicely for even longer than that, he seemed especially pleased to see Cicely, and she stood up when he came in and hugged him with real affection, real fondness, he seemed quite overwhelmed by it, Cicely has that effect on people, they forget what she is like, and we didn’t stay long in his parents’ house, I’m pleased to say, because I’m afraid I found it oppressive, it was a friendly place, warm and tidy and full of lovely strange cooking smells, but I’m afraid the smallness and the poverty of it depressed me, yes, it’s shocking, isn’t it, but I realized then that Steve’s family were by far and away the poorest of all my friends,’ it embarrassed me, and it embarrassed me that I had my own car parked outside, a Mini which was only two years old, which my parents had basically given me, although I was paying them a token amount towards it every week out of my wages, and as the three of us walked towards Handsworth Park I felt ashamed for having everything given to me so easily, my job at the bank and my place at university and everything else, when Steve seemed to have almost nothing, at the moment, and only a year ago it had seemed that we were all in the same position but perhaps that was just an illusion, perhaps the playing field was never really level and life would always in fact be easier for someone like me, I suspect that is the case, nothing changes, nothing has changed, and I’ll tell you something else that hasn’t changed, as well, he is still in love with her, yes, Steve is still in love with Cicely, I saw it that afternoon in Handsworth Park, it was obvious, obvious to me anyway, though I didn’t say anything to her about it afterwards and I think it’s possible that she didn’t even notice, she often doesn’t notice these things, it’s not that she takes it for granted that people will always adore her, it’s just that she lives her life at this pitch all the time, always conducts her friendships at a level of intimacy which is completely normal for her but not for most people, so she doesn’t realize how special she has made them feel, it was the same with Helen in America, Helen obviously worshipped her, had never met anyone like her, her father was in the same play as Cicely’s mother so naturally they were thrown together a good deal, and it was fascinating for me, those few days in January, to spend time with them both, God it was cold, that’s the main thing I remember about it, I have never felt cold like the cold you get in New York in January, and there was one night in particular I remember when the three of us were supposed to be walking from Cicely’s mother’s apartment to some cinema or other, and we literally couldn’t make it, even with all our coats and scarves and gloves and hats it was too cold and the snow was too heavy so we stopped off at this hotel instead, it was called the Gramercy Park, we went into the bar and ordered whiskies and we never made it to the cinema at all, we just sat drinking at the bar all evening, it was an amazing evening, and an amazing place, full of these old actors, there was this man there, I could swear it was Vincent Price, sitting at the bar by himself most of the night and even he couldn’t take his eyes off Cicely half of the time, she draws people towards her, somehow, is always getting into conversation with strangers, and I was, yes, fascinated that evening to see the quality of the friendship between Cicely and Helen, who was from the West Coast, and so not like a New Yorker at all, I was told, I don’t know anything about America but apparently there is this big divide between the East Coast and the West Coast, and Cicely and Helen had known each other two or three months now, so thinking about it they had spent far more time together than she and I e
ver had, which might have explained the intimacy between them, the sense of a private language from which I felt excluded, private jokes, private phrases, and not just in words, either, there were private looks and private smiles, and I’m not saying it was the same with Cicely and Steve that afternoon in Handsworth Park, I’m just saying, well, what am I trying to say, exactly, that I felt jealous, I suppose, on both occasions, I felt that I was being denied the whole of her, I did not like sharing her with someone else, even when I knew that there was nothing but friendship involved, and when I knew that it was greedy of me to want to keep Cicely all to myself, she is so special, so precious, everybody should be allowed some time with her, everybody in the world, but it’s true, I can’t deny it, “a hatred for you spat like a welding flame,” that was how I felt both times, towards Helen in the Gramercy Park Hotel on that snowy New York evening and towards Steve in Handsworth Park that bright Saturday afternoon, the last Saturday of April, just five days ago, but it seems a long time, already, as I said, there was this sense of finality about it, this overtone of hail and farewell, I feel that we have lost Steve, lost him to something, what can you call it?, history, politics, circumstance, it’s a horrible feeling, actually, a feeling that our time together at school was a sort of brilliant mistake, it was against the normal order of things, and now everything is back to how it is meant to be, Steve has been put back in his proper place and it is monstrous, not just to think that this has happened, but to think how it happened, if somebody really did screw up his chances in that exam, and the worst thing is we shall never know, for certain, we can never really know whether Culpepper slipped something into his drink that day, taking his revenge for all the times Steve had showed himself to be better than him, no, we shall never know the truth about that or so many other things, and yet somebody obviously thinks that Culpepper is to blame because one night last year his car was torched, somebody came round to his parents’ house in the middle of the night and smashed the car window and threw a petrol bomb inside, the whole thing was completely gutted, it brought a smile to everybody’s face when we heard that, it just seemed like the least he deserved, but again, nobody knows who did it, it seems that secrets simply beget more secrets, and everything just gets more and more unknowable, the disappearance of Claire’s sister is another case in point, I don’t believe Claire will ever get to the bottom of that, any more than I will ever know exactly what made Harding tick or whether I will ever see him again now that he’s gone to Germany for a year without even telling any of us which university place he has taken up, he is lost now, lost to us, bent on some strange solitary course of his own, but going back to Culpepper’s car, my personal suspicion is that Doug had something to do with it, by which I don’t mean that he went round there in the middle of the night and threw the bomb in himself, but maybe he knows some people who do that sort of thing and he told them the story, put them up to it, if you see what I mean, but I can’t know this for sure, can I, we can never know anything for sure, and every time I mention anything about it to Doug he just ignores me or changes the subject, he did this very noticeably on Sunday, for instance, yes, we saw Doug on Sunday as well, this has been a great week for reunions, he was up from London for the weekend with his new girlfriend, Marianne, and he was full of stories about the Southall riots, he was there, of course, right in the thick of it, I’m beginning to think it is Doug’s destiny always to be at the centre of things, just as it is my destiny always to be offstage whenever the main action occurs, always to wander away at the most important moment, drifting into the kitchen to make a cup of tea just as the denouement unfolds, he had written a piece about it and sent it to the NME, not really knowing if they would use it, they have used three or four of his reviews now but he is not what you would call a regular contributor, so he showed me the typescript on Sunday and today, I see, having bought the NME on my way here with Cicely, they have printed it, amazingly, in the Thrills section, not the full version I notice, they have cut out all the stuff about his father, which is a shame, that was the most moving part of the article, I thought, because his father was also attacked by a policeman on a demo, and he was also hit over the head with a truncheon and although it didn’t kill him like it killed Blair Peach, Doug thinks that his father has changed since then, his personality has changed, he can’t prove of course that this has anything to do with the injury, but not only does his father now get headaches, migraines, which he never used to do, and not only does he find it harder to read for long periods of time, but there is something worse than that, Doug thinks, he says that his father has lost what he calls the will to fight, because there are changes afoot at Longbridge, apparently, this new chairman called Michael Edwardes, who my father thinks is a hero sent by the gods to rescue the company from the evil union barons, and Doug seems to regard as the devil incarnate, he is closing down some of the factories and setting new productivity targets and Doug says that in the old days his father would have made sure everybody was out on strike by now but instead he just seems to be going along with it, and Doug thinks this is all to do with the crack on the head he got down in London eighteen months ago when he went to join the Grunwick picket line, but perhaps the people at the NME thought that was too speculative, or somethng, anyway, they cut it out, but it is still a good article, very powerful, even someone like me, someone who likes to think the best of the police, can see that there must have been something very wrong that day, it was the Special Patrol Group again, the same group that was involved in the Grunwick demonstration, Doug told me, they are the worst, the most violent and out of control, and the trouble started after the meeting in the town hall was already under way, the National Front were holding an election meeting there, in the heart of Southall, a provocative place to hold a meeting, it has a large Asian community, and thousands of demonstrators had arrived to protest about this, most of them peacefully, by all accounts, although an event like that is never entirely peaceful, and sure enough some fighting broke out and that was when the SPG vans started to arrive, and then Doug and Marianne decided to get out while the going was good, so they began to head off with a lot of the other protesters, looking for a way to get to the station, and there was just one road, one road which was not cordoned off and so they tried to get down there, there was a big crowd of people where it joined with the Broadway, mainly Asians, but they squeezed their way through and then walked on for a bit but then they heard people shouting behind them, so they looked back up to the top of the road and suddenly all these policemen were pouring out of the SPG vans, they had truncheons and riot shields, and they were piling into the crowd, laying into them, indiscriminately, black or white, it didn’t matter, and suddenly everybody was running, running down this street towards Doug and Marianne, and if they couldn’t get down the street itself they were jumping over walls and fences into people’s gardens, or trying to get through the alleys between the houses into the relative safety of the streets on either side, but the police were too quick for most of them, and Marianne says she saw this guy down on the floor, he was a white guy, and there were four policemen systematically kicking the shit out of him, he had his hands over his groin, and a woman went up to these policemen, a woman in her late twenties or thirties, and she said something like, Stop that, you ought to be helping him, and one of the policemen just ran up to her and whacked her in the face with his truncheon, felled her to the ground, and they both went to help her, they managed to carry her into somebody’s garden and lie her down and put a handkerchief to the wound, because she was bleeding quite badly, it is all in Doug’s article, all of these details, it is the best thing anyone has written about that riot, if there is any justice it will make him famous or at least mean that the NME will ask him to write more things for them, he is doing well, very well, it is only his first year as a student but Doug is going to succeed, I can see that, if any of us is going to succeed it will be him, and I was impressed with Marianne, too, it was a brave thing to do, to help that woman with her
wound, in the midst of all that chaos and violence, they managed to stay with her until the ambulances began to arrive, and then they visited her in hospital the next day, she was all right, she survived, which is more than can be said for Blair Peach, poor guy, he was only thirty-three, a New Zealander, and he died from his head wounds in the early hours of the next morning, Doug is convinced that the policeman who did it will never be caught, an inquiry is being set up but he says it’s bound to be a whitewash, the state always looks after its own, that’s the kind of thing he says these days and Marianne smiles indulgently at him, I think she shares his beliefs but she has more of a sense of humour about them, and Doug told her on Sunday that this was to do with class, it’s always easier for upper-class people to see the funny side of things, he said, because nothing is ever really important to them, nothing is ever a matter of life and death, and I can see the truth of that but it hasn’t stoppd him from going out with an upper-class woman, I notice, Marianne has this fabulously posh accent and her father apparently has an estate in Hertfordshire and another one in Scotland somewhere, they are an odd couple in some ways but they seem very happy together and it occurs to me, now, that Doug has always had a thing about posh women, there was that secretary he met in London the first time he went down there, he was always boasting about the night they spent together, you would think that nobody had ever had sex before or since, he made it sound like Emmanuelle, Last Tango in Paris and The Kama Sutra all rolled into one, well, perhaps it was, but I’ve never been envious of Doug and I’m certainly not now, because even he could see, even he could see on Sunday what is happening between me and Cicely, how much feeling there is between us, he said it was almost palpable, you could sense it just being in the same room as us, and he took me aside at one point and asked what on earth had happened when I went to visit her in Wales, and I told him that I didn’t know, it had just happened very quickly, perhaps it was something to do with that beautiful house, Plas Cadlan, or more likely all it needed, for me and Cicely to realize that we were meant to be together, was just to meet somewhere else for a while, somewhere away from school and all its associated crap and nonsense, and as soon as that happened we could just see, it was obvious, it was as if the waters had suddenly cleared, and I told him that it was a fantastic feeling, a weird feeling, actually, to be living your life at this level of happiness, I felt giddy with the excitement of it, I was having trouble sleeping at night, and I have butterflies in my stomach, too, now that she is back, there is a kind of urgency about life, suddenly, a sense that everything is at stake, now, do or die, make or break, everything is important, every moment, including this moment which to anybody watching me from the other side of the pub must seem totally mundane, just a young bloke in a suit raising a glass of Guinness to his mouth but no, this is one of the great moments of my life, I know that, which is why I am going to stretch it, stretch it until it snaps or bursts, and there was the same urgency about the way we made love this morning, after Cicely had climbed on top of me, and I had entered her, at last, at last!, I had found my way to Paradise Place, I looked at her face and what I saw there, it was fear, almost, it was a kind of excitement bordering on fear, fear of what?, I know, yes, I know now, because I was feeling it too, it was fear of the past, fear of how the past might have turned out, because we came within a whisker, Cicely and I, of missing each other altogether, we might never have found each other, if I had not decided to walk to Plas Cadlan in the middle of that storm last summer, and the thought of that, the thought that we might never have reached this point after all, oh, it was almost unbearable, insupportable, and it must have occurred to us both at the very same time, because she grabbed my hair and we lunged for each other, suddenly, all the tenderness was gone and we were biting into each other’s mouths so hard it was almost painful and then Cicely began to shake and to make these noises, I thought she was crying at first, it wouldn’t have surprised me, I felt like crying, in a way, but it wasn’t that, these were different noises, animal noises, as she began to rise and fall on top of me, rise and fall, her whole body drawn up into this pillar of flesh, and now she is moving faster, faster and faster, her teeth are clenched and I can see the veins, now, the blue veins standing out on her wrists as she clutches my arm, squeezing me until it hurts and we are nearly there now, so nearly, but there is one more thing I must think about before we get there, one more attempt to stretch this moment and it is something I have been putting off all this time, because I feel so guilty about it, but I can’t do that any more, I have to confess it, it is about Steve, and my job, because after I had been working at the bank for just a couple of months, the manager called me into his office and told me that they were moving me on, they were fast-tracking me, as he called it, and I was going to be moved to the regional office in Temple Row, as a Loans Officer, and I could hardly believe this, I had already been moving through the ranks much too fast, I’d only had to open the post for about three days and then I was put straight on to the counter, the other people working there couldn’t understand it, they couldn’t help but be resentful, even though they were a nice bunch of people, really, a very nice bunch, but it was all part of the bank’s scheme, apparently, to take bright young students like me and show us as much as possible of how things operated before we went to university, so that we became so fascinated, I suppose, that when we graduated we would come straight back to work for them, well, I have no intention of doing that, I can assure you, but it now seemed that the next stage in this process was to transfer me to the regional office and let me work as a Loans Officer and so that’s what I did, starting two days later, and now instead of coming to Smallbrook Queensway every morning I go to Temple Row instead, and I love it there, I have to say, it’s my favourite part of Birmingham, I love St. Philip’s Cathedral, which we can see out of our office window, and the Grand Hotel beyond it in Colmore Row, and I love going to sit in the square at lunchtime with Martin and Gil, I love the solid dignity of all those banks and insurance buildings, what would Doug have to say about that, I wonder, I can hear it now, another one of those ten-minute lectures on selling out to the establishment, but I don’t care, it is good architecture, they are fine buildings (and so is St. Philip’s itself, which Philip tells me was built in 1715 and is the first example of Italianate design in the city, it was designed by a man called Thomas Archer and it is the smallest cathedral in England, what a grand sight it must have been, back in the eighteenth century, standing proud on its ridge with long views down across Colmore Row, which was then called New Hall Lane, towards the great estate of New Hall itself, and it was then that the wealthy builders and manufacturers put up their houses around the new churchyard as well, and what is now called Temple Row began to take shape, only in those days it was known as Tory-Row—there you are, Doug, what a gift, run with it!—and on the opposite side of the square, just a few years later, they built the Blue Coat Charity School, to provide education for the city’s poorer children, yes, that building is handsome as well, it stands as a monument to the enlightened spirit of those who designed it, this city has been blessed, over the centuries, with good and enterprising and compassionate leaders, there is the Cadbury family, for instance, who built a whole village for their workforce at the turn of the century, Bournville, it is called, and they even made sure that everyone had a decent amount of land so that they could grow fruit trees and spend their leisure time gardening rather than going down to the pub, the Cadburys were teetotallers and there are still no pubs in the whole of Bournville, seventy years later, Philip tells me, but I am just trying to distract myself, now, it is time to forget all this local history and return to the unpleasant matter in hand), so then, after just a week or so’s training, it was announced that I had become a fully fledged Loans Officer, and instead of having to deal with members of the public over the counter I now sit in one corner of a bright, open-plan office, with Martin and Gil, my new colleagues and my new friends, which reminds me, I told Martin that I would be in at two
o’clock, it’s almost time I was going, but Sam has gone to the bar again so it won’t do any harm to have another swift half, and every day we get applications from all over the city, small companies send us their business plans and ask us for loans, anything from one to fifty thousand pounds, to help them expand their operations or buy new equipment or premises, and it seems ridiculous, doesn’t it, that just because I have a place at Oxford the bank trusts me to make these decisions, I don’t even have A-level maths and I have never studied economics, but every day I sit in judgement on these people, I play God with their hopes and ambitions, and though I know I am trying to do the job fairly, the bank always wants me to be strict, they don’t want to lend money out unless they can be sure of a return, and we usually reject two out of three applications, and last week Gil handed me a big file from the Handsworth branch and said, Go on, Ben, you can do this one, and it was a fish and chip shop which wanted to put in a few tables and chairs to make a little restaurant area, for God’s sake they only needed a couple of thousand pounds but the figures didn’t really add up and it looked as though the business was struggling anyway and they’d exceeded their overdraft limit for the last eighteen months, so I said no, it was as simple as that, I just put a big red stamp on it and then I found out on Saturday afternoon that this was the place where Steve worked and if the scheme had gone ahead he would have got a pay-rise, it wouldn’t have been much I dare say but it would have meant something to him, so there you are, I’ve just managed to put yet another obstacle in his path, without even realizing it, oh shit shit shit, I’m a terrible terrible person, as Cicely would no doubt say, but she doesn’t say that any more, I’ve noticed, no, she is cured, cured of her insecurities, I have done that for her, I am going to allow myself to take full and wholehearted credit for that, so I have achieved something, something already in my short life, I have made another person happy and it turned out that it was the easiest thing to do in the world, all I had to do was follow my own strongest desires, my keenest instincts, and look where it led me in the end, to my little brother’s bedroom, my little brother’s bed, where Cicely and I made love this morning, and yes, we are there, now, there at last, my lovely naked Cicely is clinging on to me and I can feel myself gripped by those beautiful, subtle, supple muscles between her legs, rising and falling, rising and falling, and our mouths are locked together, tighter and tighter, until, yes, really, it happened today, Cicely and I looked for Paradise Place and we found it together and when we found it we discovered that it was a place full of laughter, not tears, when the moment came it was like a burst of light, a burst of white light as if I’d been staring too long at the sun, and then the sun came back into focus only it wasn’t the sun it was a yellow dot only it wasn’t a dot it was a yellow balloon, my yellow balloon, the one I lost all those years ago, my earliest memory, I could see it again, touch it again, it wasn’t lost at all, and then suddenly I remembered where I was, who I was with, and I looked at Cicely and we were still for a hot endless moment and then we fell together on to the bed and rolled in each other’s arms and then we laughed, oh, we laughed as though we would never stop, at last all the fear was gone, and the frustration was gone, and the longing was gone, and the missing each other was gone, and everything was funny, all of a sudden, everything seemed hilarious, like the fact that we had done it for the first time in my little brother’s bedroom, and that we had done it on election day, because, yes!, there is a general election today, the fate of my country hangs in the balance, and that is hilarious, too, and yes I refuse, from this moment onwards, to worry about anything any more, to take anything seriously any more, there has been too much of that, we have all been too sad for too long, and nothing is going to go wrong ever again, not for me or for Cicely or for Lois or for anybody, it’s all a joke, everything is a big wonderful joke, like that song which I have carried in my head for so many years—