by Various
‘And that was the end of me, Mrs. I won’t bother tellin’ you the next bit, where I was arrested and accused of all kinds of terrible things I’d never done. You can imagine it, can’t you? And then that shrieking prison. I was banned from ever visiting Katie again for as long as I lived. And I thought, well, in that case, I hope I don’t live long.
‘But I have, see? It’s that strange, isn’t it? I suppose I could have put an end to myself with that shotgun you keep for the foxes, but I didn’t. You’ve been good to me, Mrs, and I didn’t want to spoil your kitchen linoleum. But I’ve never really seen, since that day when Katie left, what was the point of me. I think that’s why I forgot everything for so long, until that knocking began again. I couldn’t really get it into my head that I was still walking around on the earth. I’ve felt as though I wasn’t really here any more.’
Nell died in due time.
There was nobody at the funeral, except me and the Vicar, so there was a breathless quiet in the church. But I told myself that Nell, who had been so disturbed by the noise in the jail, wouldn’t have minded this. And outside, on the village green, I could hear the voices of children playing on the roundabouts and swings.
JONATHAN COE
CANADIANS CAN’T FLIRT
HAVING LEFT MUSWELL Hill in good time, and arrived at Bank station with half an hour to spare, Martin begin to walk the streets at random and very soon he was lost. He rarely came to the City, and he had a poor sense of direction at the best of times. Tonight, as fog insinuated itself around the curves and corners of this enigmatic quarter – half ancient and half modern – coiling around columns and lamp posts, advancing snake-like into narrow side streets and lamplit passageways, he stood no chance at all. The night was cold and the sky had long since turned blue-black. The traffic had thinned, and consisted now only of rattling taxis and the occasional delivery truck. Martin remembered that the restaurant was tucked somewhere towards the end of a particularly occult and shadowy street but for the moment he couldn’t find it. This whole district confused him. Every time he turned a corner he seemed to come upon a different branch of Eat or Pret A Manger, its lights dimming, the staff locking doors and sweeping up. Or was it the same branch? It was very hard to tell; they all looked identical. (This, presumably, being the point.) All he knew was that, having arrived ahead of schedule, he was now going to be late for the dinner, which was a disaster because it meant that he would be the last guest to be seated and would therefore have no choice about his place at the table. He would be lucky to sit anywhere near Lionel, and even luckier to sit next to Hermione.
Seeing the station’s illuminated sign ahead of him at last, and realising that he had walked full circle, Martin swore under his breath and now paced hurriedly towards his destination, feeling his stomach twist itself into that familiar tight knot of anxiety. Social occasions always made him nervous, especially when they were bound up with his professional life. He already knew that he was lucky to be invited to this dinner at all. The invitation had come by email over the weekend, three days before the event itself: the publicist could hardly have made it clearer that he was a last-minute replacement. And yet he was in no position to complain. Ten years ago (in fact, why kid himself, it was nearer fifteen) he had been considered a rising star in the world of letters and his mantelpiece had been cluttered with invitations, one for every night of the week. But these days he couldn’t afford to be choosy. It was almost a decade since his first – and only – novel had appeared, to cursory reviews and public indifference. His literary journalism, once considered required reading for its iconoclastic brio, had in recent years grown fatally polite and repetitive. His star was no longer rising, or even hanging in the firmament, at the summit of its arc. It was falling, plain and simple. Which made him think that even if tonight’s dinner proved – as it would, in all probability – to be an awkward occasion, it was a dinner at least, and much better than another night spent home alone, scrolling wearily through his Twitter timeline in an attempt to ward off thoughts of what might have been.
Making his unseen entrance to the restaurant itself, Martin found that the management had rendered it cautiously festive. At any time of year it was a snug, whimsical, welcoming place, carved up into nooks and corners, its atmosphere so unabashedly Dickensian that it would have been a powerful magnet for tourists were it not so difficult to find. Tonight, fires crackled and popped in the various grates; candles flickered upon the tables, embedded in miniature wreaths of holly; the heavy gilded picture frames were draped in tinsel; and Christmas carols looped almost inaudibly on the miniature speaker system, only the occasional familiar phrase or cadence rising up during short intervals in the cheerful, laughter-punctuated conversation which babbled throughout the room, most of it emanating from a cramped table for ten in a well-hidden alcove – the very table for which Martin now realised he was headed.
There were nine people already seated. The pre-eminent object of Martin’s interest, Hermione Dawes, was placed near the centre, flanked by guests on either side, wholly inaccessible. Her back was to him at the present moment, and his first impression was merely of her luscious, billowing golden hair, and her bare, equally golden arms and shoulders shining in the candlelight. She turned and smiled a brief ‘Hello, Martin’, as he approached, but there was no rising to her feet, no kiss. Really, why should he have expected anything else? Their paths hadn’t crossed that often. Although Hermione had started out as a literary journalist, her column these days was mainly about politics, which meant that she was now moving in different, probably more interesting and influential circles. Also, in the last year or two, she had come to realise the advantage of taking up positions which set her apart from her predictably liberal colleagues. She was not only stridently pro-Brexit, but outspoken in her support for Donald Trump. Her career was now doing very nicely as she rode this populist wave. She was a talented writer, no doubt, and Martin was drawn to her for that reason, but he had another reason, too: the grudging respect Hermione inspired even amongst her enemies for her dextrous use of sarcasm, her ruthless irony and devastating litotes, was matched only by her reputation for wild promiscuity. Her nickname at Oxford, it was rumoured, had been ‘Open Dawes’. Martin found this combination of abrasive politics and sexual loucheness to be incredibly titillating. He thought about it often, and shocked even himself with the grotesquerie and lurid specificity of the fantasies he sometimes entertained about Hermione at night.
After she had greeted him, the whole table fell silent. It was a silence that lasted a little too long – two or three seconds – just long enough to make it embarrassing, and to suggest the possibility that they had all been talking about him before he arrived. (Which was, in fact, true. The publicist who had invited Martin had raised the question of his perpetual bachelor status, leading to general speculation as to whether he was a repressed homosexual.) But then Lionel himself stood up, held out his hand, and said: ‘Martin, old boy. Lovely that you could come.’ And once again Martin found himself gripped by that strange combination of awe, nervousness and (though it always seemed presumptuous) affection that he had become used to feeling when in the presence of Lionel Hampshire.
Lionel Hampshire. One of the most famous writers in the country. Or at least one of the most famous ‘serious’ writers, which admittedly implied a significant lowering of the bar as far as fame was concerned. Whether or not he could be described as a household name depended very much on the kind of household you had in mind. His novels, let us say, were among the books you were most likely to discover on the shelves of Tuscan villas rented by the British during their summer holidays; and none was more likely to be found there than the book which had made his name, a quarter of a century earlier: The Twilight of Otters, his Booker-prizewinning magnum opus, although (again) whether the word magnum could really be applied to a book whose publishers had struggled to stretch it out to 200 pages is a matter for debate. Magnum or not, the novel had been a roaring success on its own
terms. It had been helped on its way by a genteel controversy over whether it should be classified as memoir or fiction, since its tremulous narrative of sexual awakening was apparently based on the author’s own adolescent memories. Now, in any case, twenty-three years after publication, and with more than one and a half million copies of the English-language edition sold, it had been officially designated a ‘modern classic’ (by its own publishers, no less) and reissued with a stylish but sober new cover illustration. It was to celebrate this auspicious event that tonight’s dinner was being held.
Martin was still not sure why he had been invited, beyond the obvious fact that somebody else must have dropped out at short notice. He presumed that it was because, three years ago, he had profiled Hampshire for the arts pages of a national broadsheet. (The article appearing, as chance would have it, on the same page as one of Hermione’s columns, right next to her delectable byline portrait.) In days gone by he would not have dreamed of accepting that commission, let alone writing the interview up as obsequiously as he had done, but times were hard and he could no longer afford to turn down such a prestigious piece of work, nor to alienate Hampshire’s publishers by composing a piece that was combative in any way. He had approached the encounter with a good deal of trepidation, all the same, because he had not always been kind to the Hampshire oeuvre. On publication of his fifth novel, an odd excursion into feminist sci-fi entitled Fallopia, Martin had reviewed it for the TLS and shown not the slightest mercy. Despite this lapse of judgement, his first meeting with the great man of letters had been cordial enough, and Martin had been relieved, in particular, by this section of their interview:
‘I never read reviews,’ Hampshire declares, stirring his macchiato with polished insouciance and smiling wryly, as if reflecting on the folly of those authors who don’t follow his example. ‘My wife reads them for me, and if it’s a good one she gives me the gist. If it’s a stinker she screws it up and throws it away.’
This, then, would certainly have been the fate of Martin’s ill-advised hatchet job. So no harm done, fortunately. And after their interview, they had remained on friendly terms: Hampshire had dropped him a short email to thank him for ‘what I’m told was a far too generous write-up’, had made a point of being nice to him at parties ever since, and had even requested his services as on-stage interviewer for his most recent appearance at the Hay Festival. It seemed, bizarrely enough, that the great writer actually liked him, and Martin, somewhat his junior in years and very much his inferior in literary status, could not quite get over the fact.
‘You’re looking in the pink,’ Lionel said now, pumping his hand and patting him on the back.
‘Really?’ said Martin, who had been in bed with a cold for most of the week. ‘You too. All that tennis, I suppose.’
‘Three times a week now,’ Lionel answered, ‘and squash on Tuesdays.’
It was true that, for a man pushing sixty, he was in excellent shape. He looked both younger and older than Martin: younger because he exercised more, carried himself more confidently, had better skin, wore more stylish and expensive clothes and a more stylish and expensive haircut; older because of the unmistakable aura of success and eminence which gave him an air of seniority, not just over Martin but over everyone else at the table.
‘When are you going to take me on at squash?’ said Hermione, who was sitting at Lionel’s left-hand side, and now turned to glance up at him with her most coquettish smile. ‘You’re always promising.’
‘You couldn’t handle me,’ said Lionel. ‘I’m sorry, but it would be an embarrassment for both of us. I couldn’t do that to you. Look,’ he continued, turning back to Martin, ‘do take a seat. I’m sorry you have to be perched at the end but we’ll all swap over in a bit and we can have a proper chat.’
Having banished Martin to the far reaches of the table in this genial manner, Lionel sat down again and leaned in towards Hermione, resuming a conversation which no doubt revolved exclusively around the finer points of squash. Martin, for his part, found that he had been placed to the right of Lionel’s editor, an earnest man in his early forties who, having entered publishing many years ago because of his youthful love of literature, and now finding that his working life was entirely taken up with sales targets and marketing strategies, was always hungry for intellectual discussion on occasions like this, and was bound to keep him pretty busily occupied in that respect. Opposite Martin, meanwhile, was Lionel’s wife, whose name he seemed to remember was June. She was younger than her husband – just the right side of fifty, he would guess – and her attractive features, although sometimes still capable of lighting up into something approaching animation, seemed more often to be settled into a look of resigned melancholy. They had met only once or twice before, so he was rather surprised that she made a point of leaning across the table to kiss him warmly – very warmly – on the cheek, and to say:
‘Martin. This is the nicest surprise. How are you, my dear?’
‘I’m very well.’
She picked up his menu from his place mat and thrust it at him. ‘We all ordered, a few minutes ago. You’d better choose something quickly.’
The menu offered traditional English food. The mention of a whole roast partridge caught Martin’s eye, and he communicated his wish to a waiter after attracting his attention with some small but humiliating difficulty.
‘Excellent move, I’m sure,’ said Oliver, the editor, sitting to his left. ‘I plumped for the trout. Not sure it was the right choice.’ He poured red wine into Martin’s glass. ‘Cheers. Good to see you again.’
Martin, Oliver and June clinked glasses and sipped.
‘Did you read,’ Oliver now said, by way of opening gambit, ‘that the morning after Trump was elected, the Canadian immigration website crashed? There was a huge surge in applications for citizenship from terrified Americans.’
‘Amazing,’ said Martin. ‘But personally I’d rather take my chance in Trump’s America than go to Canada.’
‘Why’s that?’ June asked.
‘Well, I’ve only been there twice, but it struck me both times as being the most boring country in the world.’
His listeners took a moment to digest this sweeping statement.
‘Incredibly beautiful, though,’ Oliver said. ‘That has to count for something.’
‘It’s the people, though.’
‘What about them?’ said June.
‘No sense of humour.’ And here it struck him, at once, that he had the opportunity to make a brilliant start to the evening’s conversation by rehearsing a favourite theory, one of which he was secretly very proud. ‘Have you ever met a funny Canadian? Or a funny New Zealander, for that matter? Of course not – and the reason’s the same. We’re talking about two of the most orderly, just and well-regulated countries in the world, with low crime rates and amazing natural beauty into the bargain. Two countries with a fantastic quality of life. So why would they need humour? Why would they want to tell jokes? Humour is the human race’s way of coping with adversity. Build a fair society and you don’t need it any more. For Canadians, a sense of humour is quite simply unnecessary. That’s why they’ve never developed one.’
Sounding less impressed than Martin had expected him to be, Oliver thought for a moment or two before replying: ‘Well, that’s an interesting theory, certainly. And rather a bold one to put forward, in the present company.’
‘Why the present company?’ Martin asked.
‘Why? Because Mrs Hampshire is Canadian, of course.’
June smiled at him in a reassuring way. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘Another thing about Canadians – we don’t take offence very easily.’
A burst of laughter from the middle of the table distracted them briefly. Whatever Hermione had said, it must have been more provocative than usual; the laughter was coloured by delighted outrage as well as amusement. Lionel’s laugh was the loudest and most complicit; he rocked back and forth in his chair, and came to rest, when it w
as over, against Hermione’s glimmering shoulder, resting his tousled black hair there for longer than was strictly necessary.
‘How old is that woman?’ June asked, taking in this spectacle calmly and then turning back to Martin.
‘Not sure – late twenties, I think.’
‘Hmm … thirty years younger than my husband. And yet they seem to get on so well.’ Something crossed her face – a spasm of what looked to Martin (though he couldn’t be sure, and it was gone so quickly) like agony – before she adopted a musing tone and said: ‘I look at her columns sometimes, do you? Such a strange way to make your living. A paid contrarian, I suppose you’d call her. A very modern way, that’s for sure. Very much of the zeitgeist. Last week she was positively fierce on the subject of the metropolitan elite. And yet here we all are, sitting down to dinner, as elite and metropolitan and liberal a gathering as anybody could wish for, and she seems awfully at ease with us, doesn’t she? Almost as if she was born to be a part of it herself.’
The pain seemed to flare up again, for the most fleeting of instants; then with downcast eyes she contemplated the slab of pâté a waiter had just noiselessly left in front of her.
‘When I said that thing about Canadians,’ said Martin, the words forming in halting steps, ‘I didn’t mean … that is, I didn’t realise …’
‘Don’t worry,’ said June. ‘I never take national stereotypes seriously. Although, even if we don’t have a great sense of humour, there is one thing …’ (And here she paused, parted her lips slightly, and licked them while fixing Martin with a strange, glassy stare) ‘… that they say the Canadians are very good at.’