by Jonathan Coe
This was true, up to a point. Guest Toothbrushes already had relationships with most of the major pharmaceutical retailers – including the supermarkets – and orders were usually taken in bulk, online or over the telephone. However, Alan had still told me that, were I to chance upon any independent outlets, I should take the opportunity to drop in and show them some of the merchandise. This was one aspect of my journey that I wasn’t looking forward to. It was a long time since I had done any cold-calling.
‘It’s a beautiful piece of design, all right,’ he said. ‘We should really get a couple of these ourselves.’
‘Oh, well, in that case,’ I said, reaching inside my jacket pocket to produce another one, ‘take these as a gift. Please. With the compliments of Guest Toothbrushes.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Absolutely.’
‘Well, that’s splendid. Isn’t that splendid, Sue?’
Mrs Byrne nodded abstractedly, but her mind was on other things. First of all she handed out the cups of tea and the home-made scones, and then she said, ‘So you have to drive all the way to Aberdeen?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, you should really call in on Alison. She’d love to see you.’
‘Oh, be quiet, Sue,’ Mr Byrne said, tutting. ‘He doesn’t have time to call on Alison. Tell me, Max, is Harold renting out the flat in Lichfield now? Because we haven’t been up to check on it for a number of years, and the last time we spoke to him, that’s what he said he was intending to do.’
‘Well, I really don’t see why not,’ said Mrs Byrne. ‘Even if he just dropped in for a cup of tea, that would be something, and surely he will be going right through Edinburgh if he has to get to Aberdeen.’
‘I don’t believe Dad’s rented it out,’ I said to Mr Byrne; and then, turning to his wife: ‘I think there’s a ring road, so I won’t actually be going through the centre.’
‘He’s missing out on a fair bit of rental income, then,’ said Mr Byrne.
‘Yes, but you can easily get to Alison’s from the ring road,’ said Mrs Byrne.
‘I’ll go and get the keys, anyway.’
‘I’ll go and fetch the street map, and show you exactly where she is.’
While they departed on these errands, I sipped my tea and munched on my scone and looked out over their back garden. It was a lovely big garden, stretching down to the edge of the reservoir in a series of falling terraces. Beyond their fence I could see the path that led around the reservoir. You could walk this path in about thirty minutes, I seemed to remember. I had done it with Alison once. I would have been about fifteen. It was not long before our families went to the Lake District together. I’d probably come round to see Chris but somehow I’d managed to end up walking round the reservoir with Alison, who was a couple of years older than me, and with whom I’d always had an odd, not-quite-flirtatious friendship. (I somehow felt that I was meant to find her more attractive than I actually did, if that makes sense.) Should I go and see her in Edinburgh? Drop in for a cup of tea? I hadn’t seen her since Chris’s wedding, more than fifteen years ago. It couldn’t do any harm, I suppose …
Mr and Mrs Byrne returned at the same time, their minds still running on parallel tracks.
‘When do you have to get to Shetland, exactly?’ Mrs Byrne asked.
‘Here they are,’ said Mr Byrne, handing me a set of keys. ‘By the way, is that your Prius outside?’
‘I suppose it doesn’t matter much, as long as I’m there by the end of the week,’ I said to Mrs Byrne. ‘Yes, it is,’ I said to her husband. ‘Only for this trip though.’
‘Well then, why don’t you have dinner with Alison and Philip tomorrow night?’
‘How are you finding it? Is it a good drive?’
I assumed that Philip was Alison’s husband. The name seemed vaguely familiar.
‘That won’t work, I’m afraid. I’m seeing Lucy – my daughter – tomorrow night. In Kendal. Yes, I’m loving it. Do you know I averaged sixty-five miles to the gallon on the way here? And the SatNav is amazing.’
‘Kendal? What’s your daughter doing in Kendal?’
‘Sixty-five isn’t bad. Mind you, there are some small diesel cars which can manage almost that, these days. How big’s the engine?’
‘Well … Caroline left me, you see. About six months ago. She and Lucy are living in Kendal now. I don’t know how big the engine is, sorry – it probably says in the manual.’
‘Oh, Max – I had no idea. You must be devastated. Why didn’t Chris tell us about it, I wonder?’
‘I heard that the acceleration is rather poor. Not much power if you want to overtake in a hurry.’
‘Yes, it’s been a … disappointment. The biggest disappointment of my life, in fact.’
Mr Byrne stared at me in surprise, until his wife tapped him reprovingly on the knee.
‘He’s talking about the break-up of his marriage, not the acceleration on his car. Can’t you listen?’ She turned to me and said: ‘A lot of relationships go through a blip, Max. I’m sure it’s only temporary.’
‘I don’t think so,’ I said. ‘They’ve moved to the other end of the country. It feels pretty permanent to me.’
‘Did you try counselling, and so on?’ asked Mrs Byrne.
‘Were you shagging around or anything?’ asked Mr Byrne.
‘Donald!’ said his wife, exasperated.
‘Yes,’ I answered. ‘I mean yes, we did try counselling, and no, I wasn’t shagging around.’
‘Max,’ said Mrs Byrne. ‘Why don’t you stay to dinner? I’ve made a chicken pie, and there’s plenty for three of us.’
‘I wasn’t being rude,’ said Mr Byrne. ‘It’s just that strange things happen to men when they hit their mid-forties. For some reason they get an uncontrollable urge to have sex with twenty-year-old girls.’
‘That would be lovely,’ I said. ‘I mean, staying for dinner, not having sex with twenty-year-old girls. Which would also be lovely, of course, but … But anyway, I’m afraid I can’t. Dinner, I mean. I’ve got … I’ve got plans for tonight.’
‘Oh dear. Well, I’ll make another pot of tea, anyway.’
She disappeared into the kitchen, leaving me and Mr Byrne alone for a few minutes. For a horrible moment I thought that he was going to attempt a heart-to-heart with me about the break-up of my marriage, but I needn’t have worried. We talked about the Toyota Prius instead. He told me about an article he’d read which claimed that the manufacturing process was so long and complicated that it actually cancelled out the environmental benefits of the hybrid engine. Also, apparently, there was a big question mark over whether it was possible to recycle the battery. He seemed to know an awful lot about it. But then Mr Byrne, like his son, had always struck me as being well informed. He was another of those men blessed (unlike me) with a hungry, enquiring mind.
Mrs Byrne was away for about twenty minutes. I wasn’t sure why it should be taking her so long to make a pot of tea. When she finally reappeared, however, all was made clear.
‘Sorry about that,’ she said. ‘I’ve been on the phone to Alison. I thought I’d call her on the off chance. She says she’s at home all week, and she’d love to see you on Wednesday.’
‘Oh,’ I said, rather taken aback. ‘Well that’s great, thank you.’
‘Philip’s in Malaysia at the moment, so she’s booking a restaurant in town for that evening, and the two of you can go out and have a cosy dinner. The boys are both at boarding school now, of course.’
‘I’m very grateful, but –’
‘Ah!’ Mr Byrne jumped to his feet. ‘That gives me an idea.’
He left the room, while I struggled to get my head around this new development. It would mean adding an extra day to my journey, catching the ferry from Aberdeen on Thursday evening and arriving in Shetland on Friday morning. Was this a problem? Not necessarily. The other three salesmen would probably have reached their destinations and gone home by then, but why should that bo
ther me? It wasn’t a race. Or if it was, I was never going to be the first one home. I was hardly the Robin Knox-Johnston or Bernard Moitessier in this scenario, after all. And besides, I was already well on course to win the other prize – the one for petrol consumption.
‘Well, that would be … that would be terrific, actually. Yes, why not? I’d love to see Alison again.’
‘And I’m sure she’d love to see you. Splendid. That’s all arranged, then.’
She beamed at me happily, and passed me another scone. I saw my own reflection leaning across to take it from the offered plate, reflected in the glass panels of the conservatory. Outside it was now almost dark. A bleak evening lay ahead of me, alone in my room in the Quality Hotel Premier Inn, yet I couldn’t bring myself to accept the Byrnes’ offer of dinner at their house. There was still a limit on how much human company I could tolerate in one day. I ate the scone in silence while Mrs Byrne talked to me soothingly, filling me in on news about friends of hers who I’d either never met or couldn’t remember meeting. Then, after a few minutes, Mr Byrne returned, huffing and puffing and carrying a big cardboard box.
‘There!’ he said, depositing it on the floor of the conservatory with an air of triumph.
‘Oh, Donald!’ said his wife. ‘Now what are you doing?’
‘This is from the attic,’ he explained.
‘I know where it’s from. What’s it doing down here?’
‘You said you were sick of the sight of it.’
‘So I am. That’s why I took it up to the attic. What have you brought it down again for?’
‘It doesn’t belong in our attic. We’ve got enough clutter up there. It’s Alison’s.’
‘I know it’s Alison’s. I keep asking her to take it away with her, and she keeps forgetting.’
‘She doesn’t forget. She deliberately doesn’t remember.’
‘Well, all right. No need to quibble. What of it?’
‘Max can take it up to her.’
‘Max?’
‘He’s going to visit her, isn’t he? Well, he can take this with him.’
‘Oh, don’t be silly.’
I looked at the box, which was so large that Mr Bryne had had difficulty carrying it by himself, and which was so full of papers that it was almost overflowing. Still, it would fit in my boot easily enough, and I could see no reason why I shouldn’t take it.
‘No, that won’t be a problem,’ I said. ‘What’s in here?’
‘All of Alison’s coursework. Nearly thirty years old, I should think.’
‘We should throw it out,’ said Mrs Byrne, ‘that’s what we should do. Burn it.’
‘We can’t do that,’ her husband said. ‘She sweated blood over this.’
‘A lot of good it did her. She never even qualified.’
‘Sue, if you remember, she did qualify. She never practised. Not the same thing at all. And she still might, now that the children are almost grown up.’
‘Practised what?’ I asked. It was so long ago now, I couldn’t even remember what Alison had been studying.
‘Psychology,’ said Mr Byrne. ‘She always wanted to be a therapist.’
This rang a distant bell. But it only served to remind me that, when all was said and done, I barely knew Alison, and had precious little shared history with her. Did I really want to spend the whole of Wednesday evening having dinner with a virtual stranger? Well, it was too late to backtrack now. Mr and Mrs Byrne were both completely sold on the idea – one of them, apparently, for weird sentimental reasons, and the other because he was itching to get shot of this cardboard box.
‘There you are – takes up no space at all,’ I said a few minutes later, lifting it carefully into the boot of the Prius. My suitcase and laptop were back at the hotel, so the only other items in the boot were two small boxes of toothbrush samples. Mrs Byrne had come out to see me off. The night was chilly and our breath steamed in the air as we stood on the front drive. I said goodbye hastily – almost rudely, perhaps – partly because I didn’t want her to catch cold, but mainly because I can’t be doing with protracted farewells. Just as I had climbed into the car and was about to start it, though, Mr Byrne came running out of the house.
‘Don’t forget these!’ he said, holding up the set of keys to my father’s flat.
Somehow I had managed to leave them inside. I wound down the window and took them from him.
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘That was a close one.’
‘Are you sure those are the right keys?’ Mrs Byrne asked.
‘Of course they are,’ said Mr Byrne.
‘They don’t look like the keys to Harold’s flat to me.’
Her husband ignored her. ‘Look after them,’ he told me. ‘It’s the only set.’
‘No it isn’t,’ said his wife.
He turned back to her and sighed. ‘Pardon?’
‘I said it’s not the only set. Miss Erith has one.’
‘Miss Erith? What are you talking about? Who’s Miss Erith?’
‘The old lady who lives in the flat opposite. She has a set of keys. She still collects the post, doesn’t she? You know – all those postcards.’
‘Postcards? You’re talking nonsense.’
‘I am not talking nonsense. He still gets dozens of postcards every year, all from the same man.’ She leaned down through the window and said to me, ‘I know what I’m talking about, even if he doesn’t. Ignore him. Have a lovely evening with your daughter tomorrow. And give our love to Alison, won’t you.’
‘Not just our love – those papers as well!’ said Mr Byrne. ‘Don’t forget those papers! Don’t let her fob you off.’
‘I won’t.’
‘And thanks for the toothbrushes!’
‘Not at all. Thanks for the tea.’
I waved goodbye and closed the window before they had the chance to say anything else. Otherwise we could have been there all night. Talking to them was beginning to wear me out, frankly – especially Mrs Byrne, who I was beginning to think might be getting a little eccentric. Her remark about postcards seemed very peculiar, for one thing. It seemed highly unlikely that anybody would still be sending postcards to my father in Lichfield, after he had been away for more than twenty years.
So – now where?
I drove into the centre of town first of all. I had Emma to keep me company, of course, but I hadn’t given her a new destination to find so she thought we were still going to Mr and Mrs Byrne’s house and her directions were rather confused. I didn’t mind. I was happy just listening to her voice.
Birmingham had changed a lot since I’d last been there. So many new buildings had gone up – shopping malls, most of them – that I couldn’t get my bearings half of the time. Eventually I found a multi-storey car park and then walked up to the new development of shops and cafés in the old canal basin. There were quite a few restaurants whose names I didn’t recognize but in the end I went to Pizza Express because it felt familiar and comforting. You always know where you are with Pizza Express.
The restaurant was busy. Everyone looked about twenty years younger than me and as usual I felt self-conscious sitting there eating by myself. I’d brought nothing to read, so I took out my mobile phone and while I was waiting for my pizza I sent a text message to Trevor. He called me back a few seconds later, using the hands-free set we had all been given to use in our cars, but which I hadn’t got around to setting up yet. The accoustics in the restaurant were pretty bad so it was hard to hear what he was saying, but I gathered that he was only about half an hour away from Penzance already, and he seemed very amused to hear that I had only got as far as Birmingham. ‘Ah well,’ he said, before we lost reception altogether, ‘as long as you’re enjoying yourself.’
I’m not sure that I was enjoying myself, exactly. When I left the restaurant it was about eight-thirty and I found a quiet corner beside one of the canals in order to make my phone call to Lindsay – the treat I had been promising myself for the last few hours. But she didn
’t answer. I left a message but maybe she didn’t get it because for some reason I never heard from her that evening.
Of course I could have driven up to Lichfield there and then, stayed the night in my father’s flat and saved Guest Toothbrushes the price of a night’s hotel accommodation. But I had a feeling that visiting my father’s flat wasn’t going to be the most cheering of experiences. I thought it was probably best to see it in the daylight. Meanwhile there was nothing much else to do but drive back to the Quality Hotel Premier Inn, and watch TV or maybe (on my laptop) the DVD of Deep Water which Clive had given to me.
On my way there, I must say, Emma and I got on famously. Especially when, as we approached the roundabout at Holloway Circus, I thought it would be funny if I tried to confuse her by driving round and round in a circle. What a laugh! ‘Next left,’ she kept saying. ‘Next left. Next left.’ Over and over, at shorter and shorter intervals, as I sped up and whizzed round the roundabout one more time. I still couldn’t get a rise out of her, though. However fast I went, however many circuits I completed, she never lost her cool. I must have gone round about six or seven times before I noticed a police car approaching from the direction of New Street Station, up Smallbrook Queensway. I made a hasty exit up towards Five Ways and from there I drove back to the hotel at a very sensible twenty-eight miles per hour.
Once I’d parked the car I checked in the boot, because while I’d been using Holloway Circus as a carousel I’d heard some strange noises coming from there. Sure enough, my antics on the roundabout had caused Alison’s cardboard box to slide about from end to end, and most of the papers that had been sitting precariously on top were scattered all over the place. The wind was now quite strong and as soon as I opened the boot some of these papers even blew out and started flying around the car park. Swearing loudly, I ran backwards and forwards in every direction trying to catch them all, but while I was doing this another gust blew up and even more of them started to scatter. I slammed the boot shut and finally succeeded, with a great deal of effort and a certain amount of help from a rather bemused passer-by, in gathering them all together again. I scrunched them up in a bundle clutched tightly against my chest and got into the back of the car to try to straighten them out and put them in some sort of order. I was out of breath and strangely disturbed by the whole episode. As far as I knew these were just ancient college essays of Alison’s, of no particular value, but at the same time I felt I had been entrusted with an important task in returning them to her, and I didn’t want to mess it up.