A Touch of Love

by Jonathan Coe

  ‘Are you all right?’ Amanda said. ‘Are you safe?’

  She took him in her arms and held him tight. And Lawrence was shocked, more shocked than he had ever been in his life, by the fervour in her voice, by the depth of feeling which it betrayed, by the warmth and firmness of her arms as they clasped him and rocked him gently. He looked at her face, which was tearful, and wondered who she was and why she seemed to care so much for him. And he wondered, too, how this unexpected development would fit into his theory. He thought and he thought, as she rocked him back and forth, but still he could not decide whether everything he believed had, at a stroke, been disproved, or whether all that it meant was that another decision, perhaps the most important yet, had just been made on his behalf.

  Emma’s first impulse on finishing the story was to telephone Robin. She was quite convinced that it could not be used against him, but she would like to have had certain questions clarified, there and then: there was something about it which left her uncomfortable, something about its intention, its position, which she did not understand. She could either go to the nearest call box, or she could wait until she got home; the problem with the second of these options, of course, was that Mark would probably listen in to the conversation. In a more lucid, or calmer moment, she would have stopped to consider how odd it was that she felt embarrassed at the thought of her husband listening to her as she made a business call to a client. But now, she did not even pause to reflect on the assumption which must have lain behind this embarrassment: the assumption that her husband would not have liked Robin, would not have liked him at all, had they met.

  And so she attempted to phone Robin from a call box on her way back to Coventry; but there was no answer.

  Two streets away from home, she parked the car for about ten minutes and sat in the dark, rehearsing her lines in the forthcoming argument. Where have you been? You realize it’s after ten. I had to go to Warwick. What for, work? Yes, sort of. I suppose you’re angry that I haven’t made you any supper. No, I don’t expect you to wait on me hand and foot, and besides, I’m quite capable of cooking myself a meal when I need to; it’s just nice to have some vague idea of where one’s wife is at ten o’clock on a Friday evening, that’s all. Well, would you like me to draw you a map of my route, with a complete timetable attached? Look, don’t hassle me, Emma, it’s been one of those days. Fine, join the club.

  Silence.

  She felt suddenly frightened to be sitting, alone, in that dark summer street, and when she started the engine again the noise seemed deafening. Then as soon as the house came into view she could see that there was nobody in. She felt relieved, and then immediately wary and cross with herself, because all those hateful suspicions which she had projected onto Mark at once began to seep through the cracks in her own fragile consciousness. Why should he be working late on a Friday night? It was a long time since that had been part of his routine; she had to cast her mind back to his houseman days. Perhaps he had gone tp get something to eat from the Chinese round the corner. But the burglar alarm was switched on, the curtains were drawn back, and the whole house, as she paced, like an intruder, from room to darkened room, had a dead and empty feel to it.

  She made herself a sandwich, watching her reflection in the kitchen window, poured herself some milk, and found that she could touch neither. She shivered in the stillness. The fridge was humming quietly, and outside, from several gardens away, she could hear a dog barking.

  By the time Emma found herself climbing the stairs, a serious unease had overtaken her. She had the sense of a malevolent presence in her home, a sense of intrusion and watchful hostility; it was more stressful, more threatening even than the experience of lunching with Alun and being bullied by him in that wearying legalistic way. Again she paused at the top of the stairs and listened closely to the nervous hush. Then she went into the bathroom and washed quickly and carelessly. Finally she hesitated before her bedroom door, wondering why it was closed, trying to remember whether she had closed it before leaving for work. She never normally closed the bedroom door before leaving for work.

  She opened the door and turned the light on. Immediately Mark sat up in bed and blinked at her, and Emma made the mistake of screaming: only a short, high, quiet little scream, but a scream none the less.

  ‘What the hell’s the matter with you?’ he said.

  She sat down on the very edge of the bed.

  ‘You frightened me. I got frightened, I don’t know why. I thought there was somebody in the house.’

  ‘Well there was. Me.’

  ‘Yes, I know. I thought you were out.’

  ‘Out? Where would I be at this time of night?’

  He made a bit of a show of sitting up, adjusting his pyjama top, pulling the quilt slightly further over to his side. Emma, who had taken off her shoes as soon as she got in, began to unbutton her skirt.

  ‘I’m sorry, did I wake you?’

  ‘I was nearly asleep, yes.’

  ‘It’s a bit early to go to bed, on a Friday.’

  ‘I was tired.’

  ‘Why, has it been a busy day?’ It was strange how convenient these ritual questions could be, occasionally, as ways of buying time and building up defences.

  ‘Busy enough.’

  Emma waited for him to ask where she had been, but he didn’t. She undressed down to her underwear and then put on a dressing gown.

  ‘Aren’t you coming to bed?’

  ‘Not yet. I made myself a snack. I thought there might be a film on television.’

  ‘Well,’ he said, as she left the room, ‘try to be quiet when you come back up.’

  But two hours later, when Emma came to bed, Mark was not yet asleep. There had been a film, as it turned out, and it had been quite watchable. As she got into bed beside him, Mark did not move and did not say anything, but she sensed that he was still wakeful, and she allowed her hand to rest gently against his shoulder. When this produced no response she said, ‘I’m sorry I was so late getting back tonight.’

  He turned over and hugged her.

  ‘That’s all right,’ he said; but he still did not ask her where she had been, and the moment of reconciliation, which she had been so tensely anticipating, was very transitory.

  ‘Has it been such a bad day?’ she asked, wanting to hear him talk.

  ‘Oh, it was OK. I feel I’m fighting a losing battle, though, as usual.’

  There was a long pause, during which she could tell that there was something he very badly wanted to say to her. When it came, it was not at all what she had expected.

  ‘I had lunch with Liz today.’

  ‘Liz?’

  ‘Liz Seaton. You know, paediatrics. You met her once.’

  ‘Oh.’

  ‘You don’t remember?’

  ‘I don’t remember meeting her. I remember the name. You talk about her occasionally.’

  ‘Do I?’

  ‘Yes. Her name seems to crop up. You see her a lot, do you? For lunch, and so on?’

  ‘No, not a lot. Very rarely, in fact.’

  ‘That’s funny, then, isn’t it?’

  ‘What’s funny?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny that you should talk about her so much if you hardly ever see her.’

  ‘I don’t talk about her that much.’

  ‘Why are you telling me this, anyway? Did anything interesting happen at this lunch?’

  ‘No, it was just a lunch, that’s all.’

  ‘So why mention it? Why is this the most pressing thing you have to tell me at one o’clock in the morning when we haven’t spoken all day?’

  Mark disentangled himself from the embrace, which had become more and more distant, and sat up.

  ‘For God’s sake Emma, I was making conversation. I was telling you something about my day, like husbands and wives are supposed to do. That’s reasonable, isn’t it? I mean, it would even be nice if you did it occasionally. Tell me something. Tell me about your day. Where did you have lunch?’<
br />
  ‘It was nothing special. I took some sandwiches to Memorial Park,’ said Emma, after a slightly too obvious hesitation. Fearing the silence which immediately threatened to descend, she explained: ‘I wanted to think.’

  ‘Think? What about?’

  ‘Oh, just a case.’

  ‘I see. Anything interesting?’

  ‘Yes. Yes, it is interesting.’

  At that particular moment, Emma had never felt less interested in the whole business of Robin and the allegations which surrounded him. And this feeling persisted until the morning, so that she read Ted’s letter, which arrived during breakfast, with a tired absence of surprise and disappointment which only a few days earlier would have been unthinkable.

  ‘The Beeches’,

  34 Bellevue Rise,

  Wokingham,

  Surrey.

  Dear Mrs Fitzpatrick,

  I must first of all apologize for my delay in writing this letter. Rest assured that this has been due, and due only, to the seriousness with which I have been considering your request for information.

  The news concerning Robin has come to me, as you can hardly fail to be aware, as a terrible shock. I still shiver to think that we had been drinking together – that he had been sitting, worse still, in the passenger seat of my car – only hours, minutes before he committed this atrocious deed (though one must remember, of course, that a man is innocent until proved guilty). Perhaps this seems ungenerous of me, ungenerous to someone whom I thought, in naivety, that I knew well: but the explanation is simple, you see – I have a son of my own.

  Almost without realizing it, I think I have already set out my reasons for declining to testify on Robin’s behalf. (And I should perhaps tell you that I will be making a similar reply to Mr Barnes, who, as you might possibly know, is acting for the prosecution.) I feel too closely implicated in the events of that horrific day; I do not feel, yet, that I can achieve the necessary detachment. My wife agrees with me, and I feel sure that you too, as a woman, will understand.

  Finally, if I wish you luck in your conduct of Robin’s case, I must also express the hope, as a lifelong believer in honesty and fair play, that justice comes to be done.

  Yours faithfully,

  Edward Parrish.

  ∗

  By the time of Emma’s next visit to Port’s, a small revolution had taken place, beginning with the failure of that embrace in her bedroom in the small dark hours of the previous Saturday morning.

  Very little had been said, between Mark and herself; neither of them felt that the subject was yet ready for discussion. But she knew, now, that he loved another woman, and she had allowed it to be shown that she knew. Conversation between them had in fact all but ceased, on any topic. All week he had been finding excuses for working late, for eating out at night, and on Wednesday he had not come home at all. On Thursday evening they had had a short but conclusive argument: Mark had announced, with a clear knowledge of the significance of what he was saying, that he would not be coming to the wedding of Emma’s old college friend Helen at the weekend. She would have to go on her own.

  Meanwhile Emma found, at work, that she was pressing on with a kind of mechanical energy, and actually getting things done more quickly than usual; but at the same time she was aware that she was not bringing sufficient intelligence, sufficient thoroughness, sufficient engagement to bear on her work. By Friday, she was past caring. She had almost forgotten that she was meant to meet Alun at lunchtime and was nearly a quarter of an hour late. He made his annoyance very obvious.

  ‘If you don’t mind me saying so,’ he said, pushing towards her the white wine and soda which he had, without asking, already ordered, ‘you don’t look too good. I’d say you’d been losing out on sleep. Am I right?’

  She shrugged her shoulders. ‘I wasn’t aware of feeling tired.’

  ‘Got a lot on at the moment?’

  ‘No, not much. We’ve been getting through it all quite steadily.’

  ‘And –’ he shot her an intrusive glance ‘– how are things at home?’

  ‘So-so,’ she said defiantly.

  ‘I see, you don’t want to talk about it. Fair enough. We’ve got other things to talk about, I suppose. Did you bring the story back?’

  ‘Yes, I’ve got it here.’

  She took the notebook out of her case, and it lay on the table between them. Emma realized that she could remember very little about the story and secretly scanned the first page, like a child about to be tested on the contents of an essay.

  ‘You see what I mean about this, then, do you? You see why it throws a totally new light on the kind of man you’re defending?’

  ‘Not really. It’s just a story.’

  ‘No it isn’t, though. That’s precisely what it isn’t. For a start, the hero bears a great deal of similarity to Grant himself. The same occupation, the same lifestyle, the same homosexual tendencies.’

  ‘Now wait a moment –’

  ‘Just let me have my say, Emma, let me have my say.’ She sipped her drink, shocked by the readiness of his impatience. ‘Not only that, but it puts forward a system, a philosophy of life, which many ordinary people would find offensive and irresponsible. The hero of this story abdicates all responsibility for his actions and even for his sexual behaviour. Furthermore he is rewarded for it, since no harm comes to him and he ends up in the arms of a woman who loves him. The police are treated as laughable and no effort is made to argue that one should face up to the consequences of the way in which one treats other people. The story accepts a perverse sexuality as being normal and even goes so far as to celebrate the confusion and unpleasantness which it brings about. On top of that, it projects a cavalier attitude towards terrorism.’

  Emma fingered her glass and tried to think hard before speaking.

  ‘There are things about it I don’t understand,’ she said, ‘but I don’t think you’re giving it a chance. I think it’s meant as a bit of a joke.’

  She was going to have to try harder than this, she knew.

  ‘Does he strike you as someone who has much to joke about at the moment?’ Alun asked.

  ‘Of course he hasn’t, at the moment. But I thought this was written some time ago, wasn’t it? Anyway, when I say it’s a joke… I don’t just mean that he’s trying to be funny. I mean some of it’s serious. Isn’t there a bit – about halfway through, where somebody says… I mean, there are these two people talking, aren’t there? And one of them says – well, I can’t quite remember what, it’s somewhere in the middle, though…’

  She began to flick through the notebook, panic having frozen her voice; but Alun took it firmly from her hands.

  ‘Why should we argue about the story, anyway, especially if you can’t remember it very well? There’s no point in quibbling over details. The point is this – what does it tell us about the person who wrote it? Is it written by a person who seems trustworthy, or attractive, or well balanced, or… normal? Are those words you would use about the writer of this story?’

  Emma admitted, reluctantly, ‘Not the first words, no.’

  ‘Quite. And yet you trust him.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Emma, ‘I do.’

  ‘I don’t understand you, sometimes. I really don’t.’

  ‘You still want me to get him to plead guilty, don’t you?’

  ‘You know the advantages.’

  ‘Yes, I know the advantages.’

  ‘But you won’t do it?’

  ‘Don’t think you can scare me, Alun. I like to make up my own mind about these things.’

  ‘You mean you haven’t made up your mind?’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  And yet she knew that when Alun excused himself and left after only another five minutes, it was because he had already begun to sense victory. She could not understand why she was starting to give in, why Robin now seemed so unimportant, why she had come so badly out of an argument with a lawyer who she knew (or would have known, until recentl
y) was no match for her. For a while she felt angry with herself; and from within this anger a thought, a forbidden thought, arose and, before she was able to suppress it again, had made itself very clear: she wished that she had never agreed to take Robin’s case on, in the first place.

  ∗

  A small Anglican church in suburban Birmingham; Saturday morning, getting on for noon; drizzle; the blazing July weather nothing but a memory.

  Emma, who did not see Helen nearly as often as she would have liked, had been looking forward to the wedding for some weeks. She had bought a new hat and a new dress especially for the occasion, but as soon as she stepped inside the church (wondering, from the complete absence of people outside the porch, whether she had come to the right one) she realized that she was overdressed. She had forgotten that Helen was not popular with her own family, most of whom now lived in Wales and could not be bothered to make the journey down. As for the groom’s relatives, they were a sorry-looking bunch; some were clearly sulking at the fact that they were having to wear suits and ties on a Saturday morning and were looking crumpled and hung-over. So far less than twenty people had turned up. Emma ignored the attentions of the usher and went to sit by the first familiar figure she could see, a great-aunt of Helen’s whom she had once met at a birthday party. They said hello to one another but she could tell that the aunt did not remember who she was, and they had no further conversation. At least this way, not knowing anyone, she did not have to apologize for Mark’s non-appearance.