by Jonathan Coe
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t expect you back so soon.’
Ted sent him off to the kitchen and took advantage of his absence by having a surreptitious look at the letter. It was to his mother, and began:
This will probably come as a surprise to you but I am thinking of coming home and perhaps staying for a little while. I hope this idea appeals to you because I know we haven’t communicated much recently, but I’ve been thinking how nice it would be to see you both again. I seem to have taken a lot of wrong turnings recently and I badly need to get away from here and think things through. I haven’t put that very well, but I shall try to explain things more…
This was all he had written. Ted was reading over the letter a second time, puzzled, when Robin came back. Anxious not to be thought inquisitive, he pretended to have been looking at the red notebooks.
‘What’s in these?’ he asked, pointing.
‘Stories,’ said Robin. He handed Ted a lukewarm plate and a knife and fork.
‘You’re still writing, then, are you?’
‘On and off.’
‘I still have that issue of the college magazine,’ said Ted, in a tone of chuckling reminiscence. ‘You know, the one we both contributed to? You wrote a story, and I did a short article.’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘My piece was about object-oriented programming. People told me it was rather humorous.’
Robin shook his head and began to eat chips with his fingers.
‘So what are these stories about?’
‘Oh,’ said Robin, wearily, ‘it’s just a sequence I’ve been working on. I don’t know why I bother, really. There are four stories, all interrelated. They’re about sex and friendship and choices and things like that.’
‘Four?’ said Ted. ‘I can only see three.’
‘Aparna has one of them. I wanted her to read it: she borrowed it this afternoon.’ He pulled apart a piece of cod and took one or two reluctant mouthfuls. Then he added, suddenly: ‘One should think very carefully before speaking. Don’t you agree?’
‘Pardon?’
‘I said, one should think very carefully before speaking.’
‘How do you mean?’
He was leaning forward, newly earnest and communicative.
‘What I mean is, a word can be a lethal weapon.’ He paused on this phrase, apparently pleased with it. ‘One word can destroy the work of a million others. A misplaced word can undo anything: a family, a marriage, a friendship.’
Ted was about to ask him why he thought he knew anything about marriage, but decided against it.
‘I’m not with you,’ he said.
‘I was just thinking how easy it was to upset Aparna today. You see, she showed me this book.’ He pushed his plate aside, once and for all. ‘It was a new book, a hardback. I could see it wasn’t a library book, so I started teasing her about it, saying, “Since when have people like us been able to afford books like that?” Then she told me she’d been given it, because one of the authors was a friend of hers. So I took the book and looked at the title page, and there were two names, one of them English and one Indian. So I pointed at the Indian name and said, I suppose this is your friend? And she stared at me and slowly took the book out of my hand, and she said, “You just gave away a lot about yourself”,’
Ted was baffled. He thought carefully and fast, anxious not to embarrass himself. What was the matter with this man, that they misunderstood each other so often? Friendship, he had always believed, was a meeting of minds, like marriage. Katharine and he not only understood each other as soon as they spoke, but frequently they understood each other even before they spoke. Sometimes he knew what she was thinking even before she had said it. Often she knew what he was going to think even before he had begun to think it. Intellectual compatibility had become one of the constants of his life, one of the givens, a habit, an assumption, like the company car, like the greenhouse – for which, he now remembered, he was meant to be buying three new panes at the weekend.
What was the purpose of this abstruse anecdote? Presumably it hinged on the fact that one of the authors of this book was Indian, and that Aparna was for some reason offended at being linked with her. But surely Aparna was herself Indian? She had a funny-sounding name. Her skin was, not to put too fine a point on it, dark. So was her hair. She didn’t have a red spot in the middle of her forehead, admittedly, but that could probably be explained away. Why should one Indian not wish to be associated with another Indian, simply because they were both Indian?
He put this question to Robin, as best he could.
‘It’s not that simple,’ said Robin. ‘You see, I’ve known her now for four years. She’s been here ever since I’ve been here. She’s been here longer than that. Six, seven years.’ His speech was halting, now, as if he had lost the habit of explaining things to people. ‘When she got here she was proud of her nationality. She even showed it off. The way you saw her dressed today – she didn’t always use to dress like that. She was popular, too, in those days: so popular that it used to make me jealous. Of course, she always had time for me. We were very close, in some ways. But still, I’d be standing talking to her outside the library and every few seconds someone would be coming by, saying hello, stopping to chat. It would be as much as I could do to get a word in edgeways. Not just students, either: professors, lecturers, librarians, the people from the canteen. You wouldn’t believe it. What you saw today was a shadow. She lives alone now. In a tower block, right on the other side of town. The fourteenth floor. I’m the only one she still sees. They’ve all forgotten her. They got bored with her.’
There descended a silence which was, it seemed to Ted, potentially interminable.
‘So?’ he asked.
‘Racism doesn’t have to be blatant. It doesn’t have to be sudden, either, and it can happen anywhere. She got tired of being thought of as foreign; she got tired that it was always the first thing people noticed about her. She only came here to work, and get her degree, and then she found that people had decided to use her to brighten up their lives. “Their bit of local colour” she used to call it. She fought hard to be taken seriously, but it hasn’t worked. And now she thinks that even I’m no different. Even I think of her that way. She’s so bitter now, with me and with everybody; and yet I can remember this kindness, this warmth, that I never found in anyone else.’
Ted, who had no idea of what to say to any of this, began to clear up the plates.
‘Do you ever feel,’ said Robin, ‘that you’ve gone through your whole life making the wrong decisions? Or worse still, that you’ve never really made any decisions? You can see that there were times when you might have been able to – help someone, for instance, but you never had the courage to do it? Yes?’
Ted paused at the doorway to the kitchen, and said: ‘You’re not really on top form at the moment, are you, Robin?’
Robin followed him through and watched as he put the plates into the sink.
‘Or even worse than that, have you ever wondered what’s the point of making decisions in the first place, when the world’s run by maniacs, and we’re all at the mercy of interests outside our control, and we never know when something terrible might happen, like a war or something?’
‘Well, you’re absolutely right, of course. Look, Robin,’ Ted turned, and said, unexpectedly, ‘you haven’t got a needle and thread, have you? I’ve lost a button.’
‘Yes. In the drawer of the dressing table.’
They went back into the other room. Ted found the needle and a reel of white cotton, and began threading it.
‘Keep talking,’ he said. ‘I’m listening to every word you say.’
‘I just feel… I need to get away and start all over again. Do you ever have that feeling?’
‘Sometimes.’ The needle had a very small eye, and Ted was finding it difficult to get started.
‘I mean, I just don’t know where the last few years have gone. I seem to h
ave achieved nothing, personally, academically, creatively. I seem to have lost all direction.’
‘Yes, I see.’ He tried sucking the end of the cotton, hoping that this would make it easier to thread.
‘I never see my family. I never hear from my sister any more. There are no jobs in universities these days. I can’t see where my thesis is leading. My relationships with women have been disastrous. I can only see the negative side of things. Everything seems flawed. Everything seems useless and futile. Do you understand what that feels like?’
Ted, having succeeded in threading the needle, and having found a spare button in the pocket of his shirt, was now taking his shirt off. It was halfway over his head as he answered:
‘Carry on. I know what you mean.’
‘I’ve been reading this book. It’s… well, I think it’s clarified a few things about what I may be going through. This woman, she talks a lot about the “I”, the importance of the “I”,’
‘The importance of the eye?’
‘The “I”, One letter. The – the sense of personal identity. You know, your sense of self, the person you are.’
‘Yes, quite.’ Ted tutted. He had not tied a proper knot, the cotton had come adrift, and now he was going to have to start all over again.
‘Are you listening?’
‘Of course I’m listening. Do you mind if I put the light on a minute? I’m having a few problems here.’
‘Well, what do you think?’ he asked, as Ted got up to switch the light on.
‘What do I think?’
‘What do you think I should do?’
‘Well –’ Ted started sucking on the cotton again, and said, ‘perhaps the problem is that you’re lonely. Have you thought about getting a girlfriend?’
‘What?’
‘You know, someone who could keep this flat tidy, and provide you with a bit of company in the evening. Not someone like Aparna, who’d only argue all the time. Someone stable and supportive.’
‘And where would that get me?’
Ted caught the note of contempt in his voice and, although he was engaged in tying another knot, looked up. He said, very seriously: ‘I know one thing, Robin. I was never really happy before I married Katharine.’
Robin avoided his eyes.
‘I never want to be involved with a woman again,’ he said, and left the room.
Ted put down the needle, considered these words, and made a mental note to write them down in his file for future reference; for they confirmed, or rather reawakened, a personal theory which he had once entertained regarding Robin. In fact it had been Katharine herself who first suggested it, back at Cambridge. ‘Don’t be stupid,’ he had said at the time, ‘Robin is as normal as you or I’. Gradually, however, the idea had come to seem less incredible, and Ted had overcome his initial revulsion. In an odd way it had even reconciled him to the closeness of Robin’s friendship with Katharine, to the obvious pleasure which they took in each other’s company. Towards the end of their last summer term, the three of them were scarcely to be seen apart. And Katharine had said to him once: ‘It would explain why he is so sensitive.’
‘Sensitive?’
‘Yes. They’re always the most sensitive.’
He had asked Robin, subsequently, whether he thought that this was true, that they were always the most sensitive, and he had said yes, it was often the case, and had added that some of the people he most admired were homosexual; which struck Ted, then, as being a shocking admission. But he had told himself, Never mind, he is simply less fortunate than the rest of us, and this display of liberalism had been the cause of much private self-congratulation. It had its limits, of course. For instance, he would never have left Robin alone in a room with Peter. Ted believed that you couldn’t be too careful, where children were concerned.
Robin came back, and opened the curtains at the window by his desk. The sky was darkening.
‘I suppose you’ll have to be getting back soon.’
‘Well, I’ve been thinking about that,’ said Ted. He had been thinking, in fact, that it would suit him to call on Dr Fowler the next morning; in which case, he wouldn’t have to visit this dreary part of the world again for more than a month. And he had been thinking, distasteful as he found the ambience of Robin’s flat, that here at least was the chance of a bed for the night. ‘You don’t seem too grand and there’s no real reason why I have to be home tonight. Why don’t I phone Katharine and tell her I won’t be back until tomorrow?’
‘If you like,’ said Robin.
This was not the flood of gratitude that Ted had anticipated.
‘Then maybe we could go out for a drink. Do you think that would cheer you up? And perhaps I could read one of these stories of yours.’
‘All right. I’ll get dressed.’
Robin took the least dirty of his clothes into the kitchen and changed while Ted was on the telephone. He returned in time to hear the last few words of the conversation.
‘Who’s Peter?’ he asked.
‘Peter? Surely I must have mentioned him, in one of the newsletters. Our first boy. Two years old.’
‘Oh. Of course.’
‘Yes…’Ted smiled. ‘He’s a grand little chap.’
Robin picked up the first of the notebooks and slipped it into the pocket of his trousers.
‘Let’s go if we’re going,’ he said.
∗
It is a warm night in mid-April; getting on for eleven o’clock. Robin and Ted have left the pub, and are setting off in a new direction, Robin leading, Ted hurrying to keep up. The people of Coventry are sleeping, now, or preparing to sleep; but they continue to walk at a breathless pace, these two friends who are no longer friends.
Up Mayfield Road, along Broadway, across the bowling green, scene of many of Robin’s private reveries. Here he has sat, on windy spring Saturdays, watching husbands and wives pass their time in skilled and light-hearted competition, sporting anoraks and headscarves. Old people, still bound to one another, still bound to the city in which they have lived, worked, grown up; in which they were born. He has watched them on windy Saturday afternoons, feeling at once both contempt and envy. He has wished to join them, to demonstrate his own skill, for he, too, has played bowls, with his mother, father and sister. Naturally he’d be out of practice, a little erratic at first. And at the same time he has wished only to leave them, because he is burning from the touch of their scared occasional eyes, fleeting but eloquent glances which phrase, unmistakably, he questions, Who is that strange man, and why is he staring at us?
Across the road and into Spencer Park. In autumn here the trees rustle, and you have to weave your way through kids playing football, with piles of clothes for goalposts. But tonight it is quiet and empty, except for a young woman out walking her dog: a bit foolhardy you might have thought, but perhaps she feels safe with the dog, an Alsatian after all, and a big one at that. She doesn’t say hello, her eyes are averted. It is very still, once she has passed. And now the lights of the city are before them, beckoning them, these two companions who have nothing to offer each other in the way of companionship, and their stride quickens again.
Across the steel footbridge, and over the railway line. There are few trains at this time of night, services to London and Birmingham and Oxford have all but ceased, but now as they cross the footbridge a goods train passes beneath their feet. It seems immensely long and noisy, making conversation impossible. A good job, then, that they have no wish to converse, although a detached observer, supposing one were to pass by, might have noticed on Ted’s face the marks of a growing unease, the strainings of a question long since framed but as yet unable to express itself. But Robin is oblivious to this nuance; he is chuckling in a secretive way at the graffiti which cover the walls of the bridge from top to bottom, from end to end. Anarchy – The Only Way Out. Say No To Cruise. I Have Seen The Fnords. Disarm Rapists. So Much To Say, So Little Paint. Wogs Out. Nigger Shit. Something about this mixture seems to appeal
to him, but the nature of this appeal clearly eludes his confidant (in whom he has no confidence), for Ted’s sidelong glances grow more and more puzzled and wary. And sidelong. So that now they have given up all converse not only of the voices, but of the eyes.
Down Grosvenor Road, a deserted warehouse to their right, houses to their left, half of them boarded up. Soon they are walking through the subway and then into Warwick Road, past the lit windows of estate agents and the door of a crowded wine bar, from which people are beginning to emerge. Robin hesitates here briefly, but soon moves on, faster than ever. Ted stops and peers in confusion at the doorway, then runs to catch up. It occurs to him, not before time, that Robin has in mind, as the mainspring and primary motivation behind this walk, the consumption of further alcohol. He puts this question bluntly, and is answered with a nod and a noise. Robin now stops again, this time to look in the window of a bookshop. He ignores the main display of paperbacks and picture-books, concentrating his attention instead on a bulky volume half hidden towards the back, in a right-hand corner: The Failure of Contemporary Literature, by Leonard Davis. A sticker attached to the front cover announces, as a further inducement to prospective purchasers, that Professor Davis is a Local Author. Robin clicks his tongue.
The precinct is all but deserted. There is the occasional down-and-out, obviously, slumped in a doorway, but you get these even in the most prosperous cities. In fact you get them especially in the most prosperous cities. The precinct has a haunted air about it at this time of night. Built for public use, designed purposely to accommodate crowds of happy shoppers, thronging, swarming, threading in and out of Smiths, Habitat, Woolworths, BHS, Top Man, and yet tonight there are only these two figures, wordless, distant, their footsteps echoing in the concrete square, their shadows faint in the fluorescent light. Where are all the old women, dragging shopping bags on wheels? Where are the young couples, window-shopping, arm in arm? Where are the punks and skinheads? Tucked up in bed somewhere, I hope, in terraced houses or high-rise blocks, hundreds of feet up in the air. They would have received little attention from these two, tonight, anyway, because they are now walking faster still, and Robin has begun to glance anxiously at his watch.