A Very Persistent Illusion

by L. C. Tyler

  ‘Two nil,’ I say confidently.

  ‘And the scorers?’ He raises an eyebrow.

  ‘Henry and . . . er . . . Pires,’ I say.

  ‘Would that be the same Pires that we sold to Villarreal last summer?’ he asks.

  ‘Could be,’ I say.

  ‘It was Van Persie and Clichy,’ he says with a shake of his head. ‘Jesus, are you some sort of closet Spurs supporter or something?’

  ‘No, but thank you for calling me Jesus.’

  ‘Do you know how often you make that so-called joke?’

  ‘Southend lost again,’ I say quickly. Southend are Dave’s Other Team, and he’s followed them since he was about three. These days he is an occasional visitor to Roots Hall in the same way that I am to the Emirates, but he does the whole Southend thing, including buying the grotty away shirt and hating Colchester. As you know, whichever football team you support, you get to hate one other team, free of charge. Arsenal fans hate Spurs. Celtic fans hate Rangers. Man City fans hate United. If you support Southend, you are allowed to hate Colchester United, which is a nice bonus but doesn’t really compensate (in my opinion) for having to support Southend week in, week out. Colchester fans in their turn have a chant that goes:

  We hate Southend and we hate Southend

  We hate Southend and we hate Southend

  We are the Southend haters.

  ‘Yeah, they got stuffed,’ he says, but with less feeling than when he was talking about Paul and Megan.

  ‘Colchester look set for promotion,’ I add, wondering if it is possible to twist the knife just a bit more. Like I say, Dave’s a good mate.

  ‘No, they don’t.’ He shakes his head again. ‘One sports writer said they were good enough for the Premiership, now everybody is jumping on the bandwagon and tipping them to be promoted. Confucius, he say – where one dog pisses, many dogs shall piss.’

  The sayings of Confucius are another one of our regular games. Some sayings like: ‘Man not buy round, good friend spit in his beer’ (one of mine) are funny only when you’ve had so much to drink that almost anything is funny. Others like: ‘Where one dog pisses, many dogs shall piss’ (one of Dave’s) are surprisingly true at all sorts of levels.

  ‘If you are going to talk about important stuff,’ Dave continues, ‘at least get your facts right. Colchester lost on Saturday and all Colchester fans are going to hell by next Wednesday morning. Thus is it is written. Whose round is it anyway?’

  ‘Yours,’ I say.

  ‘What are you having? A pint of Shires?’ This is one of Dave’s boring so-called jokes, Shires being a fictitious brewery from a soap opera about farming folk.

  ‘Time for a Tiger,’ I say, which is an obscure literary reference as well as an instruction to get me some alcoholic refreshment.

  ‘Tiger it is then, mate,’ says Dave, completely unharmed by his close brush with culture.

  He waddles off, piloting his large frame expertly through the crowd and onwards towards the bar. Dave does not exhibit grace under most circumstances, but when he’s getting in his round he’s a nice little mover.

  I probably should be with Virginia this evening, bearing in mind I’m planning to two-time her on Thursday (an arrangement firmed up with Lucy over lunch). Virginia thinks, however, that Dave is an immature slob and a bad influence on me, so avoids these little get-togethers. An evening of Fat Dave reminiscing on, say, Ian Wright’s greatest goals or the ten grossest things he has seen at the cinema (not necessarily on the screen), would result in murder, or at least bring on a potentially fatal Number Two (Sorensen-Birtwistle Revised).

  Fat Dave (Birtwistle) is the joint inventor of the Sorensen-Birtwistle Revised Classification and is personally responsible for its chief imperfection, namely that the most lethal form of disapproval is the so-far undiscovered and purely hypothesized Number One. Number One is defined as Virginia actually physically killing me on the spot. Number Two (also as yet unencountered in real life) entails my hospitalization for greater than forty-eight hours and possible lingering demise. And so on and so on, as I may have observed before. Twenty-Three is disapproval so mild as to be unnoticeable by a third party and during which sexual intercourse is theoretically possible. The problem, as you will see, is that we should have started with zero as being total calm and worked our way upwards, with an infinite number of higher degrees of girl-rage available to us. We have, for example, no numbers left to cover Virginia running amok and murdering both me and Dave, which we definitely should have allowed for. But the Sorensen-Birtwistle Revised is now so long established (seven or eight months) that to change it would be immensely confusing for either of us, particularly when we are drunk, as we usually are when we get round to using the scale in earnest. We’ll need another beer or two before we start on that topic tonight.

  ‘There you go,’ says Dave, slamming the open and foaming bottle down on the table. ‘So when are you next seeing Virginia?’

  ‘Weekend,’ I reply, mistiming a suck and feeling the ice-cold beer drip from my chin. I blame Dave. ‘You’ve shaken this beer up, you silly tart.’

  ‘No, it’s just that after two sips, you’re already too drunk to know where your mouth is.’

  I mime hilarious and uncontrollable laughter. But I am ignored.

  ‘Shouldn’t you tell her?’ Dave says, as if returning to an earlier subject.

  ‘Tell her what?’

  ‘About Lucy.’

  ‘Nothing to tell,’ I say.

  ‘You’ll come unstuck,’ he says.

  ‘I’m not stuck, so I can’t come unstuck,’ I say.

  ‘Moron,’ he says.

  ‘Sorry, Dave, I can’t quite put my finger on it, but something tells me you don’t approve, do you?’

  ‘Not up to me, mate,’ he says in a way that suggests that it is really. ‘But if I had a girlfriend like Virginia . . .’

  There is a long contemplative pause during which we just drink with focused, deadly accuracy and don’t look at each other that much.

  ‘Whose round is it?’ asks Dave.

  ‘Yours,’ I say.

  * * *

  ‘Spain,’ says a bored voice at the distant end of the phone.

  ‘Hi, Digby! It’s Chris. Chris Sorensen,’ I say.

  There is a pause as though somebody is quickly riffling through a card index or similar.

  ‘Ah . . . Christian Sorensen, Royal Society for Medical Education . . . yes, of course . . .’ There is another pause, then a cautious: ‘So, how can I help you exactly?’

  ‘It’s George Magwitch,’ I say.

  ‘Inevitably,’ says Digby Spain. There is another pause. I don’t remember him being quite this laconic before.

  ‘You were very supportive of him over the faked-research issue.’

  ‘It wasn’t faked,’ he says quickly. ‘Others misused his data. Others misquoted him. But his original research stands up to scrutiny. I was happy – my newspaper was happy – to be able to set the record straight, and I was grateful to you for the briefing you gave us.’

  ‘He wants to set the record straight again. This time he wants to talk to you himself. The court cleared Dan Smith, but that does not necessarily mean that Professor Magwitch’s evidence against him was in any way biased or at fault. It doesn’t amount to the gross-misconduct charge Smith is threatening to bring.’

  ‘Not sure I can necessarily help you this time, Christian. I’ve already told—’

  ‘He wants to talk to a journalist,’ I interrupt, before we start to get too negative. ‘Somebody we know and whose impartiality we can trust. I’d like him to talk to you. Exclusively to you.’

  ‘And he’s actually willing to do that?’

  ‘He will be. I’ll speak to him and give him your number.’

  There is another long pause.

  ‘You know, Christian, I can’t promise how this will come out. I can only talk to him and make up my own mind.’

  ‘A lot of people have made up their minds already.
All I’m asking, Digby, is that you give him a fair hearing. From what you wrote before I think we can rely on your integrity.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Fine?’

  ‘Tell him to call me. I’ll see what I can do.’

  I breathe a sigh of relief. ‘I won’t forget this,’ I say.

  ‘Possibly not,’ he replies.

  4

  Wonderful West Sussex Again, 25 April this Year

  Virginia’s family are ordinary. It is possible that, at some stage in the past, they set out quite deliberately to become the typical middle-class English family. If so, they got commendably close.

  Her father worked for years for a medium-sized insurance company before retiring, averagely early, to a medium-sized town halfway along the south coast. They live in one of those nice semis in one of those nice roads that you can find in any town in the South of England – mock Tudor, overblown tea roses in the flint-walled front garden, ruthlessly weeded, spirit-levelled lawn at the back, well-oiled mower in the tidy garden shed. You can tell that he considers himself a bit of a lad but, the moment you saw him, you’d know that his idea of risk taking would be to claim for two cups of coffee on his expenses when the rules said he could claim for one. And then he’d probably lose sleep over it. He’s the sort of person you’d trust. He’s the sort of person you’d want looking after your insurance, in the days when insurance was what he did. He’s been careful with his own money too. He can’t have earned that much with the company he worked for, but he managed to pay to send Virginia to a good school and to buy a nice house in an expensive town – and, now I come to think about it, to purchase the occasional Rolex for members of his family. It just shows that honesty can sometimes pay.

  These days he has an adequate pension and amuses himself with military history. He was, at some time, briefly in the Suffolk Regiment and writes occasional articles for specialist journals on that and related matters. He has been working for the past fifteen years on a guide to the battlefields of England, and family holidays have long been thoughtfully located in bits of countryside that were worth fighting over. He does not do casual unless you count a sports jacket and tweedy tie as casual.

  Daphne, Virginia’s mother, worked as a secretary for the same insurance company until she married Virginia’s father and was thereafter able to devote the rest of her days to hand-rearing Virginia into what she is today. Virginia was their only foray into childbearing, suggesting either that they thought they’d hit the jackpot first time, or that they thought they had missed it by so much that it wasn’t worth having another punt.

  Daphne is quite short, quite plump, and can usually be found smiling at somebody or something with absent-minded curiosity. Her main mission in life these days is to remember where she put her reading glasses. I have never heard either of them utter a disparaging word to each other or to any third party, which makes you wonder where Virginia gets it all from. One day I shall ask them whether she was left on their doorstep in a bundle of rags by a passing troop of gypsies.

  But I shall not ask them today.

  Yes, it’s another Saturday and another drive down to Horsham. Today we are on time and there is almost no tension at all in the car as we leave the A24 at Broadbridge Heath and head into town. We are in Sussex only for the day because Virginia has some work thing to go to tomorrow in London and a booking at the dodgy but tolerant Brighton hotel with a heavy-duty bed is therefore not required. Virginia seems relaxed – almost radiant. I have remembered both to buy and actually to bring her father’s birthday present. Nothing can go wrong.

  ‘So, Hugh,’ I say to Virginia’s father, once all of the greetings are out of the way and the birthday present (for Tuesday) and the bottle of wine (for today, unless he has something better in stock, hopefully) are being handed over. ‘So, Hugh, what are you working on at the moment?’

  ‘It’s a piece for History Today on the Minden Regiments,’ he says, straightening his tie. ‘An important anniversary is coming up, as you know.’

  ‘12th Foot, 20th Foot, 23rd Foot, 25th Foot, 37th Foot, 51st Foot,’ I say, ticking them off on my fingers (with a tricky switch to the other hand, still clutching the bottle, for the 51st Foot).

  Out of the corner of my eye, I see Virginia mouthing ‘brown-nose’ at me and casting her eyes towards the ceiling. Hugh just says: ‘Quite so.’ He thinks everyone ought to know who the Minden Regiments are and that most people do.

  Over lunch, Hugh explains (and not for the first time) his admiration of Napoleon. The little Corsican is one of those characters who appeals to the most unlikely people. There’s nothing in Hugh, to look at him, that would make you think he would like to set himself up as emperor or invade Russia in the winter, but he clearly thinks well of people who do these things.

  ‘It was his ability to carry out the bold and completely unexpected move,’ Hugh is saying, ‘at least in his early battles. Wellington was a journeyman by comparison – the slow, careful build-up, plenty of reconnaissance, plenty of staff work. Waterloo was a man of talent facing a man of genius, and mere talent won, I’m afraid.’

  Out of the corner of my eye I can see Virginia yawning. I frown at her and she does an extra-big yawn and then looks sideways at me. I wonder if I can get away with sticking my tongue out, but decide maybe not yet.

  ‘. . . rescued by bloody Blücher and his Prussians!’ Hugh is saying, doubtless concluding some amusing anecdote.

  I smile encouragingly at Hugh, who looks puzzled, so maybe it wasn’t an amusing anecdote after all. I move quickly to a sympathetic frown and say: ‘Quite so,’ in what strikes me as an unfortunate and unintentional parody of Hugh’s own style. Fortunately, nobody seems to have noticed this. Unfortunately, I still have no idea what Hugh was talking about.

  ‘I think it’s probably true,’ I say, neatly sidestepping the ranks of inconvenient, blue-coated Prussians, ‘that mere talent usually wins over genius.’

  Hugh looks genuinely interested. ‘Does it?’ he asks earnestly. ‘Maybe you could give me some examples?’

  ‘Marlborough . . .’ I say, not being able to think of anyone else for the moment but keenly aware that I am already out of my depth.

  ‘In which battle?’ asks Hugh.

  I try to remember whether it was Saxe that Marlborough fought against at Blenheim. If so, then hardly a genius . . .

  ‘Or take Montgomery, for example,’ I say, stumbling on blindly.

  ‘That’s terribly interesting,’ he says.

  I hear Virginia give a suppressed snigger in the background. I flash her a look of disapproval because, as I’ve said, I rather like Hugh and Daphne and I don’t like Virginia mocking her father. Hopefully, Hugh did not hear the snigger.

  ‘You may be right about Montgomery,’ Hugh continues quickly. ‘Rommel was by far the superior tactician. It would have been interesting to see what he could have done with the resources that Montgomery was given. Now, can I pour you some more of this Chablis? Then I’ve got a very good and rather unusual Meursault Rouge to follow, if you don’t mind my saving your generous gift for another occasion. Don’t worry about the Sussex police and their breathalysers. That daughter of mine, sniggering to herself over there on the far side of the table, can drive you back to London.’

  * * *

  But instead she has driven me to Worthing. I am not quite sure why, but after lunch she suggested heading down here for an hour or so, and we are now crunching along the beach, weaving an easy course between a few hardy souls who are absorbing the spring sunshine this evening. A damp breeze is drifting fitfully off the choppy, colourless sea and people are burrowing into bags to find jerseys and anoraks. Ahead of us, but still distant, two children are arguing on opposite sides of a complex sandcastle that must have required planning permission.

  Virginia pauses in her progress towards Shoreham or Brighton or wherever we are heading. The wind blows her hair this way and that, but she does not seem to notice.

  ‘Chris,’ she says
, ‘Mum thinks Dad’s got another, woman.’

  I can think of a number of responses to this. ‘Fair enough,’ is the first one to spring to mind. What I actually say is: ‘Surely not?’

  ‘It happens,’ she says, possibly thinking of her own Julian disaster.

  ‘What exactly did she say to you?’ I ask.

  ‘Not a lot. She’d had a bit too much wine at lunch. When we were washing-up, she suddenly told me she’d found a strange letter to Hugh from a Woman.’

  This, I should add, is another of the charming old-world customs that Virginia’s parents maintain: after lunch, the girls wash up.

  But still, a Woman.

  ‘With a capital W?’ I say.

  ‘That was the way she described her.’

  ‘And the strange letter said?’

  ‘I don’t know; it was something about their meeting up. That’s as far as the discussion went, I’m afraid. Mum had equally sudden second thoughts, cancelling out the original ones. She said that maybe it didn’t matter after all and passed me a saucepan to dry. It was the large one with string round the handle.’

  ‘Maybe it doesn’t matter,’ I say.

  Virginia shrugs.

  We resume our walk, wondering whether it matters or whether it doesn’t. It’s a tricky one. Neither of us has as yet come to any conclusion. But the idea hangs there, like the mild pain in your chest that you ought to get checked out, but that is, quite possibly, just a mild pain in the chest. So for the moment we’re ignoring it, but deep down I don’t think this one is going away for good.

  We are now closing in on the two sandcastle builders. They are in similar swimming trunks: one pair red, one pair green. The nearest child is a slightly taller version of the other. You do not have to be Mendel to work out that they are probably older and younger brother. The younger (green) version is around five. The older (red) one already looks a bit of a thug and proves it by taking a poorly aimed swing at his sibling just as we draw level. ‘Well, I think it’s a horrible castle,’ he says, and he concludes what seems to have been a long and helpful discussion on the subject by stomping on a section of outer ramparts with his bare foot. It’s an irrefutable argument, in my view; you have to admire him for that. I wait, however, to see whether the smaller one has the guts to kick him where it hurts. But he just snivels a bit. So my money’s on the red one, if anyone’s still taking bets.