Expo 58: A Novel

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Ealing four-double-nine-three,’ a familiar voice answered.

  ‘Tony?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘It’s Thomas here. Thomas Foley!’

  ‘Thomas! By Jove, it’s a clear line from Brussels, if that’s where you’re calling from.’

  ‘I wish that I was, old man. But I’m in Tooting.’

  ‘Tooting? What the devil are you doing there?’

  ‘Home for the weekend. Come to see how Sylvia and the baby are getting on.’

  ‘So the prison authorities at the Motel Expo gave you compassionate leave, did they?’

  ‘Something like that. But look, what happened to you? Why did you just up and leave?’

  ‘Got my marching orders. You heard about the ZETA fiasco, did you? They couldn’t get that replica home fast enough.’

  ‘But aren’t you coming back?’

  ‘No. They terminated my contract. Two days later I was back at the Royal Institution, pushing papers around my desk. I say, though, how’s Emily shaping up? Have you seen her?’

  ‘Yes, I saw her the other night. Took her to a concert as a matter of fact.’

  ‘Did you, begad? Well, you haven’t wasted much time. You could have allowed a bit of a cooling-off period, you know.’

  ‘Oh, it’s not like that at all. She’s pretty sorry you’ve gone, if you ask me.’

  ‘Ah, she’s a nice girl all right. But there was no future in it anyhow. I’ve no intention of upping sticks to the United States. And besides, in my absence, this new secretary has arrived at the RI, and she’s an absolute corker! In fact I’m taking her to the flicks tonight.’

  ‘Really? Well, it doesn’t sound as though you’ve wasted much time either.’

  ‘Oh, you know me – easy come, easy go.’

  ‘Ah well, I was going to ask you out for a pint tonight, but it sounds like your hands are full.’

  ‘I hope they will be, before the evening’s over, yes. Sorry, that would have been nice, but – on this occasion, no can do.’

  ‘Oh well. Keep in touch, won’t you?’

  ‘Of course I will, old man. Of course I will.’

  After he had replaced the receiver, Thomas sat at the telephone table in thoughtful silence, until he became aware that someone was standing in the gloom of the hallway behind him. He turned round. It was his mother. Beneath her arm she was clutching the old leather satchel.

  ‘Can we speak for a few minutes?’ she asked.

  ‘Of course. Weren’t you enjoying the programme?’

  Without answering, she led him back into the dining room. They sat down opposite each other at the table.

  ‘Your wife is not happy,’ said Mrs Foley bluntly.

  Thomas, taken very much aback, could think of nothing to say.

  ‘She is lonely, she misses you, and now that you are home for a short time, you behave badly towards her. Don’t try to deny it.’ (He had been about to protest.) ‘What is going on? Why are you treating her this way?’

  ‘I don’t know . . . It’s nothing, I’m just finding it hard to adjust. Everything at the Expo is so different, so much . . . bigger than here.’

  ‘You’re running around with other women in Brussels?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Not really?’ She reached out and touched his hand. ‘Tommy, you’re a good boy. Always have been. Everybody likes you. Don’t turn into your father.’

  ‘I won’t, Mother. Is that what you brought me in here to tell me?’

  ‘No. I brought you in here to show you something.’ She began to open the satchel, while Thomas looked on curiously. It was made of smooth light-brown leather, but this had clearly become very worn over the years: it was scored with scratch-marks and mottled with darker stains. Given that it appeared to be many years old, it surprised him that he could not remember ever having seen it before.

  ‘Is that yours?’ he asked.

  ‘Of course it’s mine,’ she said. ‘This is the bag in which I used to take my books to school when I was just a child. I never showed it to you before. Grandma kept it until she died, and since then, it’s been in my bedroom all these years.’

  Opening the satchel, she revealed that its contents were sparse: just a handful of papers, postcards and photographs. Thomas reached across and picked up one of the postcards. It showed an impressive cathedral-like building in the Late Gothic style, with highly detailed corbels and statues in canopied niches. The photograph had been taken in black-and-white, clearly, but then colourized by an artist. There was no handwriting on the back of the postcard: just a printed caption which said ‘LEUVEN, STADHUIS’.

  ‘That is the famous town hall,’ said Mrs Foley. ‘I don’t know how we came to have that postcard. These were the few things that my mother managed to collect from the house and take with her on the night that we escaped. Here.’ Now she handed him a tiny, creased and indistinct monochrome photograph. ‘This was our house. The house where I grew up.’

  Thomas looked closely at the picture. It was hard to make out much detail. He could see a farmhouse and a number of other farm buildings clustered neatly around a central courtyard. The roof of the main farmhouse appeared to be thatched. Behind the farm buildings could be seen a row of trees, beneath a grey sky which loomed heavily over the steeply sloping roofs: the picture had been taken from a low angle. To the far left of the photograph was what appeared to be the edge of a field, in which you could just about glimpse the heads of two cows.

  ‘It looks . . . not how I’ve always imagined it,’ he said. ‘It looks tidy. Well kept. Prosperous.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Mrs Foley. ‘My father was a successful man. He made a lot of money from that farm. He worked hard and employed many people in the area. You cannot see it,’ she continued, pointing at the photograph, ‘but just behind these trees was the river. The Dijle. It was not a big river, at that point, more like a brook or a canal, but it was where we used to go and play, when we were children. Come on, I’ll show you.’

  She unfolded another piece of paper. It was an old map, the colours so faded, and the creases and folds untouched for so long, that it could barely be read. Mrs Foley started to trace a path along the paper with her finger, following the ribbon of light blue that curled and wound its way through the centre of the map.

  ‘So,’ she said. ‘This is Wijgmaal, which in those days was just a small village. Maybe it is much bigger now, I don’t know. This village was where I used to go to school. There is a bridge . . . here, and from that bridge, you used to be able to walk down to the footpath beside the river. I used to walk along this path every day, to school in the morning and back home again in the afternoon. Coming home, you would follow the path for about ten minutes, about half a mile, and then you saw these trees – the ones in the picture, these great big sycamores, you see them? – on your right. Just after those trees, there was a beautiful field, which in the summer was full of buttercups – tall ones, meadow buttercups, I think they are called. A whole field of brilliant yellow. All you had to do was walk across this field and that brought you to the back of the farm.’ Her forefinger rested on a point on the map where someone had marked a cross in pencil. ‘Right there. This was where we used to live.

  ‘I came to London with my mother – Grandma – in 1914. I think it was late in September when we got here, when we started to feel safe again. We left my father and my two brothers behind at the farm in Wijgmaal. I did not learn what had become of them for some months. Every day Grandma used to tell me that Papa would be joining us soon, and that Marc and Stefan would be with him, and we would be all together again. But I waited and waited and nothing happened. It was Papa’s brother Paul who came and told us in the end. Mama sent me out into the street to play – we were living in the East End in those days, in Shadwell – and she heard the whole story from Uncle Paul that afternoon but she d
idn’t tell me everything. Not then. I was only ten years old. But I did learn that I wouldn’t be seeing my father and brothers again. It seems the Germans were closer than we thought when Mama and I made our escape. Another few hours and we would have been too late. They killed Papa and they killed Stefan. Marc managed to escape but he died too, later in the War. They looted the farm and took everything of any value, and anything they could eat or drink, and after that they burned it to the ground. Uncle Paul said there was nothing left of it any more. Not a single beam or a single brick.’

  Mrs Foley fell silent. Thomas thought about what she had told him, but he could not turn it into a mental picture: when he tried to imagine his grandfather and his uncles being gunned down by German soldiers, the blazing thatched roof of the farm in the background, nothing vivid or real would come into his mind. Instead, he found himself presented with a memory, a memory from his own childhood, something he had not thought about for many years: the little flat in East London, two or three storeys above a butcher’s shop, where his grandmother used to live, and where he used to visit her, sometimes, with his mother, when he was only five or six years old. After that he remembered one visit, one visit only, to some sort of hospital or nursing home where she was staying and where she had seemed much younger than all the other patients. She had smelled strongly of some violet-scented perfume and when she had leaned in to kiss and hug him he had recoiled slightly and tried to avoid contact with the enormous, prominent mole on her left cheek . . .

  The door to the dining room opened and Sylvia came in.

  ‘Wouldn’t you like the light on in here?’ she said, turning on the overhead lamp. ‘You can hardly see what you’re doing.’ She came forward and peered with interest at the map spread out on the table. ‘What’s this? Looking for buried treasure?’

  ‘Mother was just showing me where her parents’ farm used to be,’ said Thomas. ‘Here – this is what it looked like.’ And he passed his wife the tiny, blurred square of black-and-white photograph.

  ‘I want Tommy to go there while he is in Belgium,’ Mrs Foley now announced, with her characteristic brusqueness and emphasis.

  ‘Really?’ said Thomas. ‘I thought you specifically said . . .’

  ‘I know. But I’ve been thinking about it, and I’ve changed my mind.’

  Thomas nodded slowly. ‘All right. But why don’t you come with me?’

  ‘No. I don’t want to come. But it would mean something to me, to know that you have been there, and stood on the same ground where the farm used to stand. I would like a photograph of you, standing there. Taken in the yellow field – if there is still a yellow field.’ There was a pleading look in her eyes, now, which was entirely new to him. ‘Will you do that for me?’

  ‘Of course I will, Mother.’

  ‘I think it’s a lovely idea,’ said Sylvia. ‘Now – does anybody want coffee?’

  While Sylvia was in the kitchen, putting the kettle on to boil, Mrs Foley gathered up the map and the papers from the table and put them back in her old school satchel, saying to her son as she did so: ‘Don’t forget what I told you.’

  ‘I won’t. You’ll get your photograph.’

  ‘Not about that. Remember: Grandma and I never saw my father again. I grew up without him. She grew old without him. Life was more difficult for both of us. Don’t make your wife and daughter go through anything like that.’

  And with those words, she finished securing the buckles on the satchel and handed it across the table to him, in a manner that was almost sacramental.

  The morning of Sunday, 3 August 1958 opened in a blaze of sunshine. In London, it was the first really warm day of the summer. Thomas and Sylvia decided that it was too hot to cook a roast lunch, so they put the lamb joint aside until the evening, and prepared a green salad, with ham and pickles, which they ate with Mrs Foley in the garden, while Baby Gill played contentedly in the sandpit which Mr Sparks had finished building just a few weeks earlier. Mr Sparks and his sister Judith were out in their own back garden, eating a simple lunch of cold beef sandwiches. It was rare to see Judith out of doors: even today, she had covered her legs with a thick woollen blanket. Such was the benign influence of the good weather, Thomas had forgotten yesterday’s fit of animosity towards his neighbour, and they chatted for a few minutes in a friendly, casual sort of way, while Sylvia enquired most solicitously after Judith’s health. After that, it was time to walk Mrs Foley to her bus stop.

  When they had seen her safely onto the Leatherhead bus, they continued on to Tooting Common, with Thomas behind the pushchair and Sylvia, after a while, taking him by the arm. Sylvia was concerned that, even with the hood of the chair pulled up, Gill would become grumpy under the heat of the afternoon sun; but it seemed that nothing was destined to spoil their mood that day. The baby behaved herself perfectly. They bought ice creams from the van parked on the Common and sat on the grass to eat them, watching the hordes of younger people passing by, towels and swimming costumes tucked under their arms, on their way to the Lido in self-absorbed pairs and excited, giggling groups.

  If only every Sunday, every day, in London, could be like this, Thomas thought. For half an hour or more he and Sylvia lay down together on the grass, holding hands, their eyes closed against the sun as it shone down on them benignly and uninterruptedly from a pale-blue sky. To Thomas, Brussels seemed further away than ever before, and he realized with a shock that he had no desire to return to Belgium tomorrow. Now, suddenly, it was the Expo, and everything that had been happening there, that seemed distant and unreal, and his life at home – his life with Sylvia and Gill – was what he wanted to cling onto.

  That night, lying awake in bed beside Sylvia, he rested a tentative hand on her hip, and then, in a slow, supplicating sort of movement, he began to slide her nightdress up to expose the lower half of her body. When he had attempted this manoeuvre the night before, Sylvia had turned away and rebuffed him coldly. Tonight, although she made no immediate gesture of acquiescence, neither did she resist. When the nightdress was rolled up around her waist, Thomas eased his hand gently between her legs and felt the hot, expectant wetness. She turned towards him, and they kissed. Eagerly, but not wanting to repulse her with a display of undue haste, he wriggled out of his pyjama jacket and trousers. Dropping them to the floor on his side of the bed, he switched on the bedside lamp, and made as if to kiss her again. But she drew back.

  ‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

  ‘Can we not have the light on? I’d like to see you.’

  ‘Please,’ Sylvia said, ‘I’d rather not.’

  Thomas smiled, and kissed her forehead.

  ‘So modest,’ he whispered. ‘So well brought up!’

  He turned off the light and then Sylvia, as if roused to unexpected passion by his teasing, pulled her nightdress roughly over her head and wrapped herself around him, her arms and her legs clinging to him in a tight, almost desperate embrace. He entered her swiftly and their lovemaking, accompanied by deep, furious, hungry kisses, was soon over. Thomas reached his climax in less than a minute, Sylvia soon afterwards. But even when they were done, she continued to cling to him, and they lay closely entwined for all the time it took her to drift off into sleep. Only when Thomas heard her breathing grow slower and more regular, until it evolved into a familiar, very soothing and very gentle kind of snore, did he dare to ease the weight of her head carefully from his shoulder, and slide his arm free from the place where it had been sweetly trapped beneath her neck.

  Slightly disturbed by the movement, Sylvia murmured something indistinguishable through her drowsy breath and then quickly sank down into an even deeper and more contented sleep. But Thomas was not so lucky. He lay awake for a few minutes and soon realized, with a sense of weary acceptance, that he probably had several wakeful hours ahead of him. Every position that he tried to adopt felt awkward. His mind raced with fleeting impressions of all his strange
experiences from recent days, and he felt weighed down with dread at the thought of leaving for Brussels early in the morning. He rolled over and lay on his front but could still not get settled. To compound his discomfort, there was something at the bottom of the bed that was annoying him. With his big toe he could feel something – something small and unidentifiable, a little pellet of soft and sponge-like matter. He could not for the life of him think what it was. After brushing it backwards and forwards with the tip of his toes for a minute or two, he finally reached down and retrieved it with his hand. But he was none the wiser for exploring it with his fingers. What on earth could it be?

  Wide awake now, and impelled by a nagging curiosity, he swung his legs out of bed, put his pyjamas and slippers on and went to the bathroom, taking the foreign object with him. Once there he yawned, turned the overhead light on, and examined it in horror.

  Too many statistics!

  ‘Are you all right, Mr Foley?’ Shirley said. ‘You look as though you’ve seen a ghost.’

  She placed a pint of Britannia on the table in front of him and Thomas turned away from the window – through which he’d been staring sightlessly – to nod his thanks.

  ‘You’ve been looking strange ever since you got back from London,’ she added.

  ‘Really? Oh, it’s nothing. Think I might have picked up a bit of a bug on the plane or something.’

  ‘Well, you be careful – summer colds, they’re the worst.’

  He took his first sip of the beer as she walked away, back to the bar, and reflected that her turn of phrase, unoriginal though it was, might contain a germ of truth. Had he been seeing ghosts? Where was the reality in these surroundings, after all? The Britannia was a fake: it was a fake pub, projecting a fake vision of England, transported into a fake setting where every other country was projecting fake visions of their national identity. Belgique Joyeuse, indeed! Fake! Just like the Oberbayern! Fake! He was living in a world constructed entirely out of simulacra. And the more he thought about this, the more ghostly and unstable everything around him began to appear. These people waiting to be served at the bar, and sitting at the tables: were they real, or were they fake? Were any of them as they seemed? A few days ago he had believed that Mr Chersky, whose arrival he was awaiting now, was a friendly young Muscovite writer and journalist who wanted his editorial advice; now, apparently, he was supposed to accept that he was a top-ranking officer in the KGB. Which was the truth, and which the lie? Maybe Shirley was a ghost. Even Emily was playing a part, now that he thought of it: she too was nothing more than an actress, pretending to be an ordinary suburban housewife for the benefit of visitors to the American pavilion. Maybe every single person in the Britannia this Tuesday lunchtime was an actor, too, hired by Mr Radford and Mr Wayne as part of some elaborate, insane masterplan to confuse and disorientate him.