A Touch of Love

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Well, goodbye,’ she said, after forty minutes or so.

  ‘Same time tomorrow?’ he asked.

  ‘OK. It’s been nice talking to you.’

  ‘And to you.’

  ‘Not going home for Christmas just yet, then?’ she asked, after an awkward pause.

  ‘No, not just yet.’

  ‘Had many Christmas cards?’

  ‘Not many. And you?’

  ‘No, not many.’

  Richard never got many Christmas cards, certainly not as many as he sent out, and he never sent out more than a dozen. So far there was only one card on the mantelpiece, and that was from his next-door neighbours, a small and noisy family with whom he and Miles normally had no contact whatsoever. He didn’t even know their names, for the card simply said, ‘Happy Christmas – To All at 48, from All at 49’. This year, as last year, he had replied promptly with a card saying, ‘Happy Christmas – To All at 49, from All at 48’. Every year, Richard knew, his other next-door neighbours also got a card, directed to All at 47, from All at 49, and so he was never sure whether he, too, should send a card, to All at 47, from All at 48, particularly as he knew that they were invariably swift to return the compliment, with a card to All at 49, from All at 47. (He never did speak to the small, noisy family who lived next door. Some months later, returning home in the early evening, he found their flat swarming with police and ambulancemen. In a concerted suicide, the father had shot his wife, his son, his daughter and finally himself. They left a short note which read, ‘Goodbye Cruel World – from All at 49’. The incident had made the headlines and Richard’s picture was on the third page of the evening newspaper.)

  In fact, Richard found the impersonality of these exchanges curiously touching and intimate, certainly by comparison with one of the cards he received the next day, a pretentious effort from an old school friend which contained a long-winded and unnecessary photocopied newsletter. He gave this a cursory reading before opening another envelope, which turned out to contain a card from Karen.

  It was a big card, with a detail from Monet’s Water Lily Pond on the front. ‘Dear Friend,’ it said inside. ‘Not very Christmassy, I know, but I thought you might like it all the same. Have a very Happy Christmas. With Love, Karen.’

  He showed the card to Miles, who had just joined him at the breakfast table, and said:

  ‘It’s funny, we haven’t talked about painting at all. I wonder how she knew I was crazy about Monet.’

  ‘I told her.’

  It took a while for this to sink in.

  ‘You told her? You mean you’ve seen her? When?’

  ‘I wrote to her about a week ago. I told her all sorts of things about you.’

  Richard threw down his piece of toast in frustration.

  ‘For God’s sake, Miles, why did you do that? That spoils the whole thing, it ruins the whole damn… exercise. The point was that we weren’t supposed to know anything about each other.’

  ‘Well, she asked me.’

  Richard stared at him. ‘What do you mean, she asked you? When did she ask you?’

  ‘She wrote to me. She wrote me a letter, asking lots of questions about you.’

  ‘She did that?’

  Richard pondered this information in a silence broken, for several minutes, only by his friend’s sloppy consumption of breakfast cereal.

  ‘So?’

  ‘So what?’ asked Miles, looking up.

  ‘So what did you say about me? What does she know?’

  ‘I told her what you do, what you’re studying. I told her where you come from. I told her who your favourite writers and composers and painters and pop groups were. I told her what sort of clothes you wear, what you like to eat, what you like to drink. I described your personality. I told her you were a bit pompous, and a bit conceited, and a bit greedy, and a bit arrogant, but that you were basically OK.’

  ‘I see. Fine. So now there isn’t a damn thing she doesn’t know about me. Thanks a lot.’ Another thought struck him. ‘Did you tell her what I looked like?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh, good. Well, I appreciate your restraint.’

  ‘I sent her a photograph. You know – the one of you sunbathing, in Capri?’

  Richard got up in silence and withdrew to his bedroom. Later in the morning he heard Miles leave the flat. As soon as the front door had closed, he went into Miles’s bedroom and began a patient and thorough search for Karen’s letter. It had been fairly carefully concealed, among a pile of old lecture notes in a rarely used drawer. The relevant passage, which Richard’s eyes found with determined alacrity, was as follows:

  Now you must tell me all about this intriguing friend of yours. I’ve managed to pick up bits and pieces from his letters, but he doesn’t give much of himself away. What does he look like? What does he talk like? I bet he’s from the south. He strikes me as being a bit full of himself, but nice with it.

  You may wonder what all this has got to do with our supposedly strictly intellectual correspondence. To be honest, I didn’t think I’d ever find myself getting interested in these details. ‘What does it matter,’ I thought, ‘so long as our minds meet?’ But then, inevitably I suppose, I started to get glimpses of the person behind the thoughts, the ideas, the arguments; and a very nice person it seemed too. So I thought, sod it, friendship is more important than some daft academic experiment. So please, do me this favour, Miles. Be Pandarus to my Criseyde; be Pirovitch to my Klara. Just to satisfy my curiosity, that’s all.

  Richard put the letter away, feeling mildly betrayed and wildly excited. The hours until the next phone call seemed to pass very slowly.

  That evening, they discussed the politicization of the plastic arts in the twentieth century, in the wake of those European painters (particularly the Nabis) who had chosen to involve themselves with an increasingly polemical theatre. This conversation lasted for about ten minutes, at which point Karen asked Richard if he was aware that an exhibition currently running at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham was reported to provide some striking and recent examples of what she liked to describe as ‘the politics of composition’.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I read about it.’

  ‘It would be nice if we’d both seen it. Then we’d have something more concrete to talk about.’

  ‘Well, I’m free tomorrow.’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘Let’s go tomorrow, then.’

  ‘Separately, of course.’

  ‘Obviously. You go in the morning, and I’ll go in the afternoon.’

  ‘I can’t make the morning.’

  ‘Oh. Neither can I.’

  ‘Besides,’ said Karen, with a touch of hesitation, ‘it would really make more sense if we could talk about particular paintings… you know, while we were looking at them.’

  Richard drew in his breath. ‘That’s very true,’ he said.

  They met by the bookstall at two o’clock. There they exchanged broken words – too broken to be recorded here – while their eyes took in the details of each other’s faces and bodies. For about half an hour, they looked at the exhibition, their shoulders in nervous proximity, their eyes talking a new language of quick, embarrassed glances, their heads now together, now apart, as they attempted fitfully to interest themselves in discussion of the paintings. The gallery was uncomfortably warm. Outside, they found that a light snow had started to fall, brushing the pavements and the parked cars, settling and melting on the sleeve of Karen’s coat, resting, briefly, at the tips of Richard’s eyelashes. He took her arm and they threaded through the thin crowd of afternoon shoppers, until they reached the doorway, bordered with tinsel, of a self-service café and snack bár.

  They sat at a table for two, and for the first time found themselves unable to speak. It was Karen who managed to break the silence.

  ‘So,’ she said, almost laughing. ‘We meet at last.’

  They reached for each other across the table and held hands. The snow began to thicken. Over the
café’s speaker system, an orchestral arrangement of ‘Once in Royal David’s City’ became gradually more noticeable.

  On the night before Christmas Eve, Richard cooked a Christmas dinner for Karen in his flat on the fourteenth floor of a tower block in snow-swept Coventry. Miles had gone home to his parents that morning, and Karen would be travelling up to Glasgow the next day. They had planned to have a final discussion of the ideology of Christmas, and in particular its pernicious reinforcement of the role of the family as the basic unit of a patriarchal capitalist society, but somehow the subject never seemed to come up. Instead they exchanged presents and argued over the respective merits of apple and cranberry sauce as an accompaniment to turkey.

  What they shared, above all else, by now, was an ache of physical desire, a stretched longing which could no longer be borne, like a gorgeous torture. They undressed each other slowly, fumbling with zips, stumbling over buttons, lingering over the unexpected familiarity of flesh never before seen, never before touched, never before kissed. Then their bodies began a long and intricate conversation, tentatively making their different propositions, elaborating upon them, exploring them, turning them over and over, not hesitating to follow the path of any pleasurable digression, and moving, with inexorable logic, towards a sudden resolution of all contradictions.

  They lay still, for an hour or more, skin against skin.

  ‘Comfortable, darling?’ Richard said, finally.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Very.’

  He went to fetch the portable television and set it up at the end of the bed.

  ‘Still comfortable, darling?’

  ‘Yes.’ Karen was not at all keen on being called ‘darling’, but she didn’t say anything. ‘Are you comfortable?’

  ‘Very.’

  There was a carol service on the television. The camera tracked over the faces of angelic choirboys and came to rest on the glimmer of electric candles against stained glass. Richard and Karen watched in silence.

  ‘Happy?’ she asked, halfway through ‘Away in a Manger’.

  ‘Yes. And you?’

  Before the programme was over, their eyes had begun to close.

  ‘This explains nothing,’ said Ted, barely able to suppress a cavernous yawn.

  ‘No?’ said Robin. ‘Does it not explain why Aparna and I have never slept together? Does it not explain what seems to you to be a curious self-discipline in this respect?’

  ‘No.’ Ted drained his glass; realizing, as he did so, that he had now lost all track of how much he had drunk that evening. ‘I would have thought it suggested, if anything, that you should have done.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, this is meant to be a happy ending, isn’t it?’

  Robin looked surprised.

  ‘It’s all a bit euphemistic, I suppose,’ said Ted, ‘but I thought this business at the end – I thought it meant they were falling in love.’

  ‘If you want to be picturesque about it, yes.’

  ‘So surely the whole point,’ he continued, after a difficult pause, ‘is that this Robin person –’

  ‘His name’s Richard.’

  ‘Richard, quite. That this Richard person, and this Katharine woman –’

  ‘Karen.’

  ‘Karen, exactly. That these two people, after messing around talking a lot of intellectual rubbish to each other, finally come to their senses and… fall in love.’

  Robin took a deep breath and explained, in a tone of exaggerated patience:

  ‘It’s meant to be implied, Ted, that they lose something along the way.’

  And Ted answered: ‘I think I’d like to go to bed now, please.’

  They drank up and stepped out into a dark hot summer morning. It was a long walk back to Robin’s flat, through narrow lamp-lit streets, past black buildings, down pedestrian subways and across the tatty lawns of council estates. Each was preoccupied with his own tired thoughts, and they spoke only once.

  ‘What is it?’ Ted asked.

  Robin had stopped to stare at a point roughly three-quarters of the way up a block of flats, on the other side of the ring road.

  ‘Aparna,’ he said. ‘Her light is on.’

  Ted followed his gaze.

  ‘You can tell that from here?’

  ‘Yes. I always look up when I come past here at night. Her light is always on.’

  ‘What can she be doing, at this time of night?’

  Robin did not answer, and Ted, who could not bring himself to be seriously interested in the question, did not repeat it. Once they had reached the flat, he watched in silence while Robin fetched a torn and faded sleeping bag from under his bed, and laid it on the sofa.

  ‘Will that be all right?’

  Ted suppressed a shudder and nodded. He tried to keep from his mind an image of bedtime at home, the double bed, with Katharine sitting up on one side, propped against the pillows, frowning over the last clues to the cryptic crossword, the corner of the duvet turned back in a gesture of welcome, the warm pink light of the bedside lamp, the electric blanket set to ‘medium’. Peter next door, sleeping.

  ‘Do you have an alarm clock?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, why?’

  Ted explained about his visit to Dr Fowler, and they set the alarm for nine o’clock.

  ‘I could give you a lift onto campus,’ he said. ‘You could probably do some work there, couldn’t you?’

  Robin, who was undressed and in bed by now, again said nothing. Ted assumed that he had fallen asleep. But Robin did not fall asleep for some time. He lay awake, listening to the sounds of Ted removing and folding his clothes; struggling to get comfortable; stirring, turning, breathing ever more slowly, ever more evenly. He listened until the silence was almost complete; until almost the only sound was Ted’s occasional, drowsy murmur of the word ‘Kate’.

  ∗

  Robin’s alarm failed to wake either of them, and it was well after midday when they arrived on campus. While Ted went to see Dr Fowler, Robin sat drinking coffee in one of the university’s many snack bars; but ten minutes later Ted was back, in a bad temper. His client had gone home for the weekend, leaving a note on his door saying that he would be away until Tuesday. Robin was no longer alone. He had been joined by a grey-haired, bearded, round-shouldered man; tall (about six foot four) but not as imposing as he might have been, owing to a slight stoop, unusual in one of his age (he was thirty-five, according to Robin, although Ted would have guessed that he was older). His teeth, where they were not yellow, were brown, and he never seemed to stop smoking.

  ‘This is Hugh,’ said Robin, perfunctorily.

  They took little notice of Ted, but continued to sit side by side, reading. Hugh had a bulky library book, and Robin was flicking through a newspaper. It appeared to be agitating him.

  ‘Have you seen this?’ he said to Hugh. ‘Have you seen what those maniacs are saying?’

  Ted hoped that they weren’t going to begin a political discussion, and was relieved when Hugh paid no attention; instead, looking up from his book, he had caught sight of two figures on the other side of the café.

  ‘There’s Christopher,’ he said, ‘and Professor Davis.’

  Robin looked round sharply, picked up his newspaper and got to his feet.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, ‘I want to read this in private for a moment.’

  As he hurried off, Ted turned to Hugh and asked if he could explain this behaviour.

  ‘Professor Davis is head of the English department here. He’s meant to be supervising Robin’s thesis. They try to avoid each other as much as possible.’

  ‘I see,’ said Ted, uncomprehending. ‘Are you doing a thesis too?’

  ‘No,’ said Hugh. ‘I finished mine eight years ago. It was about T. S. Eliot.’

  ‘And what have you been doing since then?’

  ‘This and that.’

  He began to read his book.

  ‘I’m an old friend of Robin’s,’ said Ted. ‘We go back several years. B
ack all the way to Cambridge, in fact. He’s probably told you all about me.’

  ‘What did you say your name was?’ asked Hugh, looking up again.

  ‘Ted.’

  ‘No, I don’t think he’s ever mentioned you.’

  This suggested to Ted that Robin must have been preserving a mysterious reticence on the subject of his early life. Now he leaned forward and said, in a low voice:

  ‘Tell me – would you say that you and Robin were close friends?’

  ‘Fairly close, yes.’

  ‘Then tell me this: what do you think is the matter with him?’

  ‘The matter? How do you mean?’

  ‘Why do you think this has – happened to him?’

  ‘Happened? What are you talking about?’

  Ted could see that he was being stonewalled. Fortunately, four years of selling computer software had, he believed, taught him to understand the psychology of situations such as this. So he asked:

  ‘When was the last time you saw Robin, before today?’

  ‘About two weeks ago, I suppose.’

  ‘Is that usual?’

  ‘Well, it’s not unusual.’

  ‘Where has he been?’

  ‘Where has he been? How should I know?’

  Ted now changed his tone, to one of calm but urgent pronouncement.

  ‘I think Robin is experiencing some sort of mental breakdown.’

  Hugh laid down his book, stared at him for a few seconds and laughed hysterically. Then he stopped, as suddenly as he had begun, and resumed his reading.

  ‘So, you don’t believe me?’ said Ted. ‘So, why hasn’t he been on campus for weeks? Why isn’t he sleeping, or eating, or washing, or shaving? Why does he never leave his flat? Why has he lost so much weight? Why did he try to make an urgent telephone call to me, his oldest and closest friend?’

  ‘Where did you say you knew Robin?’ Hugh asked.

  ‘At Cambridge.’