The Terrible Privacy of Maxwell Sim

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Now, when a great chunk of the earth is exposed like this,’ Chris was saying, ‘the brilliant thing is that it tells you all sorts of stuff about the history of the area. Can anyone remember what these different layers of soil are called?’

  ‘Horizons!’ said Joe, keenly.

  ‘That’s right. They’re called soil horizons. Now, normally the top layer – this thin, dark layer here – is known as the “O” horizon, but this one would be classified as a “P” horizon, because this part of the countryside is so watery. Do you know what “P” stands for – something that you find a lot in Ireland?’

  ‘Peat?’

  ‘Peat, exactly! Then we have the topsoil, and the subsoil. Notice how the different horizons get lighter and lighter as you get further down. Even here, though, the subsoil is still quite dark. That’s because Ireland has a very rainy climate and rain is very effective in breaking down rock to form soil, and also in distributing nutrients through the soil. But the soil here is also quite sandy, because we’re at the mouth of an estuary.’

  ‘What is an estuary, Dad?’

  ‘An estuary is any coastal area where freshwater from rivers and streams mixes with saltwater from the ocean. So, estuaries form the boundaries between terrestrial systems and marine systems. They tend to have very rich soil because it’s full of decaying plants and animals. Look here in the subsoil, for instance …’

  Oh, it was impressive stuff, Max had to admit. But then, you would expect Chris to know about soil. He had been teaching geology at university level for twenty years, and now he was a senior lecturer. Max wondered if his daughter realized this. Probably not. She was starting to stare at him with the same starry-eyed adoration as his own children.

  Soon Chris, his daughters and Joe moved on, chatting away happily, making for the three stone steps which had been cut roughly into the wall, allowing people to climb up onto the walkway and thence along the grassy path to the castle itself. Lucy, meanwhile, lingered uncertainly. She took her father’s hand again and looked up into his eyes. It wasn’t at all clear that she had understood the finer points of that little lecture, but she had definitely understood something: she had understood the bonds of faith and admiration that connected Chris’s children to their father; she had understood the cheerful reverence with which they had listened to him. She had understood all of this; and Max knew, now, that she was wondering why the same feelings did not bind her to her own father. Or rather, she was now groping for those feelings, with a kind of forlorn hope. She wanted to be talked to in that way. She wanted her father to explain the world to her, with the same confidence and authority that Chris beamed out to his children with every word. As they, too, began to walk on, she looked around her, and Max knew that she was taking in her surroundings with a new kind of curiosity; knew that she was going to have questions of her own to ask him, soon, and that he would be expected to have the answers.

  It happened sooner than he had been anticipating.

  ‘Daddy,’ she began, innocently enough.

  ‘Mmm?’ said Max, stiffening himself for the impending curve ball.

  ‘Daddy, why is the grass green?’

  Max laughed, as though this was the simplest and most innocuous question in the world; opened his mouth to allow the answer to fall almost carelessly from his lips; then stopped, as he realized that he didn’t have the faintest idea what to say.

  Why is the grass green? What kind of question was that? It just was green. Everybody knew that. It was one of those things you took for granted. Had anybody ever explained to him why the grass was green? At school, maybe? What would that have come under – biology, geography? That was ages ago. Of course Chris would know, yes. He had been to a posh school, and he would know that it was something to do with … was it chromosomething, some word like that? Didn’t chromo mean colour in Greek, or Latin? Chromosomes, was it something to do with chromosomes? Or that other thing that sunlight did to plants … photo … photo … photosynthesis. Was that what made things go green … ?

  He glanced down at Lucy. She was looking up at him patiently, trustingly. She seemed very young, for a moment, younger even than her seven years.

  It was no use. Silence would be the worst response of all. He was going to have to tell her something.

  ‘Well …’ he began. ‘Well, every night, the fairies come out, with their little paint brushes and their pots of green paint …’

  God, he hated himself sometimes.

  Caroline and Miranda had finished preparing lunch some time ago, and were relaxing at the kitchen table, a bottle of red wine sitting between them, already half-emptied.

  ‘You see,’ Caroline was saying, ‘the trouble with Max is …’

  But there lay the problem. What was the trouble with Max? And even if she knew, should she really be confiding it in this woman, the wife of her husband’s best friend, a woman she barely knew? (Although she was already getting to know – and like – her pretty well on this holiday.) Wouldn’t that in itself be a kind of betrayal?

  She sighed, giving up – as usual – the struggle to put her finger on it. ‘I don’t know … He just doesn’t seem very happy, that’s all. There’s something about his life … about himself … Something that he doesn’t like.’

  ‘He’s very quiet,’ Miranda conceded. ‘But I assumed he was always like that.’

  ‘He’s always been quiet,’ said Caroline. ‘But it’s been getting worse lately. Sometimes I can’t seem to get a word out of him. I suppose he talks all day at work.’ Changing tack, she said: ‘I wonder what he and Chris have in common. They’re such different people, and yet they’ve been friends for so long.’

  ‘Well, that counts for a lot in itself, doesn’t it? Shared history, and so on.’ Miranda could sense something bearing down upon Caroline, some weight of apprehension. ‘Lots of couples go through difficult times,’ she said. ‘And Lucy seems very close to her father.’

  ‘You think so?’ Caroline shook her head. ‘They want to be close. But they don’t know how to do it. He doesn’t know how to do it.’ Attempting to drain off her wine glass, but finding it empty, she said: ‘What Lucy would really like is a brother or sister. Your Joe looks in seventh heaven, with a big sister and a little sister to play with. It’s so great, seeing the three of them like that. How families should be …’

  ‘It’s not too late, is it?’

  Caroline smiled. ‘I’m not too old, if that’s what you mean. But it’s probably too late in other ways.’ She reached for the bottle, refilled their glasses, and took what was more than a sip. ‘Ah well. Would’ve, should’ve, could’ve. The most painful words in the language.’

  How much further this conversation would have progressed, how much more dangerously confiding Caroline might have become, they would never know. At that moment the back door of the farmhouse was flung open. They could hear the distressed voices of children and adults from the garden, and now Chris rushed purposefully into the kitchen, looking harrassed and short of breath.

  ‘Quick,’ he said. ‘Where’s the First Aid box?’

  Miranda jumped to her feet.

  ‘What’s happened? Who’s hurt?’

  ‘It’s Joe, mainly. Lucy a bit as well. Baking soda – that’s what we need. Do we have any baking soda?’

  ‘But what happened?’

  Without waiting to hear the answer, Caroline ran outside on to the lawn, where a scene of chaos was awaiting her. Joe lay stretched out on the grass, motionless: at first she thought that he was unconscious. Max was kneeling beside him, a hand laid tenderly on his brow. Lucy came running to meet her mother, and flung herself at her, clasping her fiercely with bare arms which, she could not help noticing, were mottled and livid with angry crimson blotches.

  ‘What have you done to yourself, love? What happened?’

  ‘It was the nettle game,’ Lucy told her, between sobs. ‘The dare. We came back from the castle and then started playing it and Daddy was pushing Joe on the rope. He was sw
inging really hard and then he fell off and landed right in the middle of the pit. I climbed in and tried to help him out.’

  ‘That was brave of you.’

  ‘It really, really hurts.’

  ‘I bet it does. Don’t worry. Chris and Miranda will be out here, any second now. They’re finding some stuff to put on it.’

  ‘What about Joe? He was wearing shorts and everything. His legs …’

  Caroline turned to look at the figures of Joe, stretched out on the lawn, and her husband at his side. In just a few seconds Joe’s father and mother would have reached their son, tending to him, ministering to his needs. But in years to come, it would not be those next few minutes’ confusion and frantic activity that Caroline would remember. It would be this one moment of stillness: the tableau (as she would always recall it) she saw laid out before her as she turned. The prostrate body of Joe, lying so still, and so reposeful, that one might even imagine him to have died. And kneeling beside him – crying, too, unless Caroline was mistaken – her husband, fixated by the pain and distress not of his own daughter, but of another man’s child. And the strange thing about it was that, after watching Max so closely, and with so much bewilderment, during the last few days, after tormenting herself with the riddle of his unhappiness, his maladjustment, his sense of being forever ill at ease in the world, at that moment she saw him – or imagined that she saw him – in an attitude that for once suited him, and made perfect sense: she saw him as a man surrendering to a feeling that must have come so naturally, with such a healing inevitability, that it might almost have felt like a release; a man in mourning over the death of the son he had always wanted.

  11

  At 11.30 on the morning of Monday, 2 March 2009, I found myself in Reading, sitting in Alan Guest’s office. All ten full-time staff members of Guest Toothbrushes were present, including Trevor, Lindsay, David Webster and chief accountant Tony Harris-Jones. The weather outside was grey but moderate, with no immediate threat of rain. Beneath us on the forecourt I could see four black Toyota Priuses, ranged neatly in a line; sitting on a bollard next to them was a bored-looking press photographer, chatting to his colleague, a local journalist, who stood leaning against one of the cars and smoking a cigarette. The offices of Guest Toothbrushes were part of an industrial estate in the south-western suburbs. Beyond the forecourt I could see rows of warehouses and low-lying office buildings, the province of firms specializing in bathroom fittings, computer components and sports and leisure wear. A network of little roads and mini-roundabouts criss-crossed the estate, but I couldn’t see any cars using them. It was almost eerily quiet.

  As for the mood in Alan Guest’s office, I could best describe it as tense. Today was a big day in the history of Guest Toothbrushes – there were three bottles of non-alcoholic champagne on the table, along with eleven glasses – but for some reason nobody seemed to be feeling particularly celebratory. Alan, a thin, ascetic-looking, silver-haired man in his mid-fifties, had a distracted air about him. It was falling to Trevor to do most of the talking.

  ‘Now, gentlemen, we’ve been monitoring the forecasts on the BBC Weather site, and I have to say that the news isn’t too bad, for most of you …’

  I should really have been listening to this, but I wasn’t able to concentrate. My mind kept going back to Caroline’s story. For the first few days after reading it I’d been able to think of nothing else. I was so outraged, so furious with her, that every inch of mental space (do you measure mental spaces in inches? I’ve no idea) had been colonized by thoughts of how I was going to respond. I drafted dozens of emails in my head – some of them from me, some of them from Liz Hammond. I picked up the phone a hundred times, thought about calling and then put it down again. In the end, as you probably guessed, I hadn’t responded at all. How could I? What was I supposed to say? My sense of betrayal at what she had written was beyond words. And although I’d managed to calm down about it since then – to a certain extent, at least – there were still moments when my sense of injustice reared up again. I couldn’t help it. It was a completely involuntary thing. And it was happening now.

  ‘So we’re not anticipating any major meteorological upsets,’ Trevor continued. ‘Certainly not in the first half of the week. Things might get a little choppy on the crossing from Aberdeen, Max, if you leave it till Wednesday or Thursday, but I can’t see you having to do that …’

  At the same time, I had to concede my grudging admiration for what Caroline had done. I’m no literary critic (God forbid), but as a piece of writing, it struck me as .… well, competent, at any rate. No worse than many of the turgid yawn-fests she’d thrust under my nose during our marriage, in her attempt to get me to read ‘serious’ novels.

  ‘Now, as you know, we’ve allowed in our expenses for five nights’ overnight accommodation, but clearly most of us won’t be needing that. After all, there’s a competition for the first man there and back, but I think we all know who’s going to win that one.’ (Laughter, and glances in the direction of Tony Harris-Jones, whose journey would be taking him no further than Lowestoft.) ‘But if the rest of us can manage it in four days, or even three, all such savings would be much appreciated by our Supreme Leader, I’m sure. We are in the midst of a nasty recession, and times are tough out there, as everybody is all too aware.’ (The glances were directed at Alan Guest, this time, and there was no laughter to accompany them. He stared ahead, expressionless.) ‘And please, might I add, be reasonable when choosing your accommodation. No five-star establishments, please. No Scottish castles or country house hotels. Think Travelodges, or Best Westerns, if you feel like pushing the boat out. Try to keep it under fifty quid a night, if at all possible.’

  And the other thing was – how had she done it, exactly? Was she a mind-reader or something? Caroline and I had barely spoken to each other in the final years of our marriage, it seemed to me now. I had spent most of that time sitting in silence beside her, either in front of the television or at the wheel of our car, or opposite her at the breakfast or dinner table, neither of us speaking a word, and I can honestly say that I never had the faintest idea what was going on inside her head. And yet in writing that story, she had more or less transcribed my thoughts; and transcribed them, I would say, in a way that was about eighty-five per cent accurate. It was frightening. Was I really that transparent, or was she simply blessed with amazing powers of perception, which I had never suspected or noticed before?

  ‘As for the competitive element of this trip, Lindsay has been doing some more brainstorming over the weekend – she never stops, this woman: never stops – and has come up with another absolute gem of an idea. Lindsay, I’ll hand the floor over to you for a moment, if I may.’

  But there was an ironic side to this as well. Caroline would never realize it, but she’d fallen at the last fence. Those powers had failed her at the most crucial point. Because she was wrong – totally, fatally wrong – about what I’d been thinking that day, after Joe had been pulled out of the nettle pit and she saw me kneeling over him on the grass. ‘In mourning over the death of the son he’d never had’ – is that what you reckoned, Caroline? Was that the spin you’d decided to put on it? Well, listen to this: you were miles off. Not even close. And neither you nor anybody else was ever going to find out the truth, either. Not if I had anything to do with it.

  Lindsay, meanwhile, had started to tell us something about the onboard computer system on our Priuses. I really ought to be paying attention.

  ‘So what happens is, when you press the “Info” button on the fascia, you get a choice of two screens. One of them is the Energy Monitor screen, which tells you where the power is coming from at any given time, and the other screen gives you detailed information about how much petrol you’ve consumed since the trip counter was last reset. Those trip counters have been set to zero on all four vehicles, by the way, so please don’t touch them until you’re safely back here …’

  Another nasty thought had occurred to me, too. A
lot of the information which had formed the basis of that story could only have been obtained from Lucy. Especially that stuff about me not knowing why the grass was green. (Which was all perfectly true – and would still be perfectly true now.) So, yes, Caroline and Lucy must have got together and had a right old laugh, some time or other, about silly old Daddy, who knew fuck-all about the important things in life, and was always trying to bullshit his way out of difficult questions and awkward situations. Obviously, my comical ignorance about matters of general knowledge formed the basis of many of their cosy mother-and-daughter chats, these days. Well, I suppose I should be glad that I gave them something to bond over …

  ‘So what we are offering you, gentlemen, is the opportunity to win not just one but two highly desirable prizes. The first man there and back gets one of these handsome signed certificates – a beautiful addition to any office wall, I think you’ll agree – but there will also be a cash prize of five hundred pounds –’ (there were cheers, whoops and loud intakes of breath – again, from everybody except Alan Guest, whose face remained inscrutable) ‘– for the driver who does the most to demonstrate the green credentials of Guest Toothbrushes, by returning home with the lowest average figure for petrol consumption on his information screen. In other words – drive carefully, folks, and drive economically!’

  Lindsay sat down to widespread applause, and at this point the wine bottles were opened and the meeting dissolved into informality. I heard Alan take Trevor aside and say, ‘Don’t let everyone hang about – remember we’ve got that newspaper man waiting outside,’ so after just a few minutes we drained our glasses, left the office en masse and made our way down the echoing concrete staircase that led to the forecourt. Trevor, David, Tony and I were lugging our overnight bags with us.