by Jonathan Coe
‘The TWA and West Berlin bombings were simply the tip of a lethal iceberg. Twenty westerners have been killed recently in attacks at Rome and Vienna airports, which were certainly the work of pro-Libyan (if not actually Libyan) groups.’
‘Yes, but what I can’t take is the hypocrisy whereby these deaths attract all the publicity and outrage: because the victims are westerners, the United States feels obliged to make a big noise about it. What about, for example, the hundreds of Palestinians murdered within the last year in the Sabra and Chatila camps by pro-Israeli “terrorists” (if we have to use the word)? Anyway, we haven’t yet touched upon the part played by our own government in this little fiasco. Why do we alone, of all the European countries, have to find ourselves implicated in an act which Gorbachev has quite rightly characterized as a “crime of banditry”? How can Thatcher allow aircraft to take off on a mission like this from bases in East Anglia and then turn round and praise the residents for showing “courage” in a situation over which they have no control? And then we have to put up with being thanked by Reagan, for God’s sake: “Our allies who co-operated in this action” (this is word for word) “especially those who share our common-law heritage, can be proud that they stood for freedom and right, that as free people they have not let themselves be cowed by threats of violence.” “Free people” – did you hear that? Were we asked? Did we give permission? In a poll conducted on Tuesday 15th, 71 per cent of British people said they thought that Thatcher was wrong to have let the bases be used (a decision which was taken, incidentally, in accordance with an agreement thirty-five years old, no details of which have ever been published). The same night, two thousand people hold a candlelight vigil in Whitehall to protest against the bombing, and the police arrest 160 of them for “obstruction”, With a huge tide of public opinion against them, the government wins an emergency debate on the Libyan issue by a majority of 119. And we are “free”, according to President Reagan. We are “free people”, Well, I’m sorry, I don’t feel free any more. I feel powerless, and frightened, and angry.’
‘Well, perhaps we’d better not talk about politics any more. It seems to be a bit of a sore point with you at the moment.’
‘You could say that, yes.’
‘Is there anything else which you would say is worrying you? Anything more personal? Your continued failure to sustain a relationship with a lover, for example?’
‘Well now, let me see. It’s true that my track record in this respect is disappointing-or not so much disappointing, perhaps, as catastrophic. I would say that, taking into account my various dalliances over the last few years and their consistently grisly conclusions, I have reasonable grounds for despair.’
‘How do you explain your inability to cope with romantic involvements with women? Does it have anything to do with an unreciprocated attachment, far in the past, from which you have never really recovered?’
‘Well, maybe I am just making excuses for myself, but it does seem to me that I still spend an inordinate amount of time (considering that it all happened five years ago) thinking about Kate.’
‘When you say that it “all happened”, what are you referring to, exactly?’
‘I’m referring to the fact that nothing happened. That is what happened, five years ago, and I am still kicking myself for it. Which is another reason why seeing Ted was the very last thing I needed, just now.’
‘And what was it about Kate that you found so attractive?’
‘I don’t know how I’m supposed to answer that question. One conceives obsessions and then clings to them: reason doesn’t enter into it. She was beautiful and intelligent, for what it’s worth, but the world is full of beautiful and intelligent women, many of whom I don’t find attractive. I suppose retrospectively I can see that we were very well suited, and it galls me to think I wasn’t bright or brave enough to realize this at the time. Like many people, I like carrying around a sense of lost opportunity with me, it gives my life some sort of aesthetic aspect, and it is a good excuse for feeling unhappy when things are not going well. I can say to myself, “If only I had married Kate”, and pretend that this is the real problem.’
‘Is it not the real problem? You mentioned that you have been involved in other affairs. Are you saying that there was nothing fundamentally wrong with these relationships, except for your own destructive wrong-headedness, your insistence on continuing to live among the ruins of a shattered romantic obsession?’
‘Not at all. That would imply that the blame attached to me, whereas the fault was always with the woman, in each case, invariably. Since I have been at this university, I have been involved with three, or perhaps four, or maybe five, or is it two, different women, and each one has been guilty of the same crime: that of not being Kate. Now if this could have been remedied, everything would have gone swimmingly, I assure you. Meanwhile it seems to be a vicious circle which no woman is capable of breaking. Perhaps I should have an affair with a man.’
‘But there is someone who is capable of breaking it, isn’t there? What about Aparna?’
‘There was a time, I admit, when I first came here, when I first met her… we seemed to get on so well, everything seemed to be working. I didn’t think about Kate then, it’s true, even though it was all so recent. I wasn’t happy, exactly, but excited, very excited. We both were. Now I can’t even remember when that feeling started to fade. She became so frustrated, so tired of not being taken seriously, and I was no help to her, then. Today we seem further apart than ever. What have I got to offer somebody like that? I look inside myself and I see this emptiness at the centre, and I don’t know how it happened and I don’t know what to do about it. It scares me almost to death.’
‘This is called making excuses for yourself. You have a lot to offer her: she needs you as much as you need her. Go and see her now, and apologize for what you said yesterday, and everything will be all right.’
‘Do you think I should? We didn’t really get the chance to talk properly yesterday. It would be nice to talk to her again. I’d like to know what she thought of my story, my third story, my favourite; she usually has something interesting to say about them. Perhaps I should go and call on her tonight, and ask her what she thought. Yes, I could do that now.’
‘Excellent. A decision. Things are looking up.’
‘In the more immediate term, though, I must go to the lavatory. I must have had about twelve cups of tea today already. No question of waiting until I get back to the flat, I’m afraid; it will have to be done here and now, in broad daylight. Still, there are only those two to see me, and they seem to be fairly absorbed in their game. Furthermore, I can see a discreet clump of rhododendrons, which will suit my purpose perfectly. Excuse me for one moment. This will take no time at all.’
FOUR STORIES BY ROBIN GRANT
3. The Lovers’ Quarrel
On a railway line somewhere between Warrington and Crewe, a train comes to an unexplained halt.
It had been sitting there for about a quarter of an hour before any of the passengers started to talk to one another. During that time there had nevertheless been a perceptible increase in the level of noise: the shuffling of feet, the crying of children, the rustle of packets of crisps, the clicking of angry tongues. Then a few isolated remarks:
‘Typical, isn’t it?’
‘All that modern technology, and where does it get you?’
‘I wouldn’t mind if they just told you what was going on.’
‘Thirty-five minutes late we are, already.’
From these unpromising seeds tentative conversations began to grow: nothing special, in most cases, just the occasional anecdote about particularly outrageous delays suffered at the hands of British Rail. The sort of story that everybody seems to have stored up, somewhere.
But at a table for four in one of the non-smoking carriages, a more interesting discussion was about to take place. On one side were sitting two doctors, eminent consultants from the Midlands, travelling d
own from a weekend’s fishing in Scotland (it was a Sunday evening in late August): handsome, middle-aged, quite kindly looking men. On the other side were sitting two students, who were yet to get acquainted. One of them was called Robert – he came from Surrey and was about to start an MA in English at Birmingham University; the other was called Kathleen – she came from Glasgow and was doing a Ph.D. in biology at Leicester. The review section of the Sunday Times, which one of the doctors had been reading, was now lying on one of the tables, and Kathleen’s eyes were fixed on the front page. Noticing this, the doctor pushed it towards her, and said:
‘You can borrow it if you like.’
She smiled. ‘No thanks. I never read newspapers.’
‘You seemed to be reading this one.’
‘Actually I was just looking at the picture,’ she said. It was another big feature about the war – military history dusted down again and spiced up to cater for some bizarre but apparently widespread Sunday-morning appetite – and at the top of the page there was a picture of Field-Marshal Montgomery standing in front of a huge tank. ‘I was just thinking of how obscenely phallic those things are. Sometimes I think that war is just another thing men have dreamed up as a way of showing off their erections in public.’
One of the doctors looked shocked and squirmed a little. The other merely smiled knowingly.
‘Do I detect a women’s libber in our midst?’
Robert looked up from his book, which he had not really been reading.
‘That term went out years ago,’ he said.
‘Women’s lib, feminism, call it what you like. The young lady knows what I mean.’
‘The thing about women’s lib, as far as I’m concerned,’ said his friend, ‘is that it’s all right within limits.’
‘Exactly! My sentiments exactly. You’ve put your finger on it there, you really have.’
Kathleen stared at them in amazement, and Robert said:
‘Liberation within limits? That seems to me to be a completely meaningless concept.’
Their expressions were puzzled.
‘I mean, you either liberate people or you don’t, as far as I can see.’
‘Liberate them from what, though?’
‘Exactly. I mean, what have women got to be liberated from?’
‘Oppression,’ said Robert.
‘Yes, but what do you mean by that?’
‘A lot of this so-called oppression,’ said the other doctor, ‘is all in the mind. It’s all a lot of nonsense.’
‘It would take hours to explain,’ said Robert. ‘Days. Anyway, why hear it from me? Why not ask a woman?’ They all turned to look at Kathleen.
‘Yes, come on, it won’t do to keep out of this, you know. You can’t let your boyfriend do all the talking for you.’
She leaned forward. ‘My boyfriend? My boyfriend? My God, I’ve never set eyes on the man before, I sit next to him on a train, and you assume he’s my boyfriend. The assumptions people make. The bloody assumptions!’
‘I didn’t mean to be forward,’ the doctor said. ‘I just thought… well, I don’t know what I thought.’
Kathleen sat back again, and her voice took on a more pensive tone.
‘No, actually that’s quite interesting. Quite revealing, really. This man and I have said nothing to each other on the whole journey – what’s your name by the way?’ she asked, turning to him.
‘Robert.’
‘I’m Kathleen. Hello.’ They shook hands. ‘We haven’t exchanged a single word, all evening, and yet you still jumped to the conclusion that we were a couple. So obviously you don’t expect couples to talk to each other. Obviously your idea of a couple, whatever else it includes, doesn’t involve the possibility of two people having any kind of rapport, or any wish to communicate with one another. That’s odd, isn’t it?’
‘Now you’re putting words into my mouth, though. After all, supposing you two were… you know, together or something… well, you can’t expect two people to have things to say to each other all the time. There is such a thing as a companionable silence. You shouldn’t take things so… literally. That’s the trouble with you feminists, you see the worst in everything, you take everything to extremes.’
‘Extremes?’
‘“Moderation in all things” has always been my motto.’
‘Exactly,’ said his friend. ‘Moderation in all things. Live by that, and you can’t go wrong. It covers the lot: work, play – even politics.’
They sat back and smiled; and as they did so, the train shuddered to a start, and there was a collective sigh of relief throughout the carriage. Some passengers cheered sarcastically.
‘Moderation in all things?’ said Kathleen, so aghast that she ignored the long-awaited resumption of movement. ‘Are you saying that a moderate amount of truth, or fairness, or justice, or happiness, is enough? You mean as long as people are moderately free from the danger of starvation, or the threat of torture, or the possibility of being killed by nuclear weapons, then we should all be happy? That strikes me as being a very strange point of view, actually. A very extreme point of view, if I may say so.’
Robert and Kathleen decided to leave the train at Crewe, on the off-chance of catching a faster one coming south on a different line. As they sat drinking coffee in the station café, he said to her:
‘I must say I really admired the way you handled those two old fogeys in there. They really deserved it.’
‘Oh, they weren’t so bad, I thought. In a way they meant well. There are more harmful sorts of stupidity, after all.’
‘I didn’t help you out much, did I? I just sort of… left you to it.’
‘I didn’t need helping out,’ she said. ‘You see, the thing about men is… My boyfriend, for instance: now he would have tried to help me out, and he would have blown it. He just would have fudged the issue.’
‘Your boyfriend?’
‘Well, my ex-boyfriend. It’s funny, he used to hate seeing me get into arguments. He always used to be afraid that I’d come out worse from them, but the only ones I ever really lost were when he joined in on my side.’ She smiled. ‘I’m not bitter about it, his motives were good.’ Then a frown. ‘At least, I think they were. The trouble with him was, it was always so hard to tell what he was thinking. That wonderful capacity men have for angry unexplained silences. I always used to say that Jim’s problem was that you could read him like a book: only it was one of those books where you get stuck on page fifteen and just can’t get any further.’
‘You mean you feel you never got to understand him at all?’
‘There were things… areas I never understood, Like –’ She leaned forward earnestly. ‘Listen – you’re a man, aren’t you?’
Robert nodded.
‘Have you been out with women?’
He nodded again.
‘Well, this is how it seems to me: men – some men, anyway, the ones who’ve at least got something going for them – want their girlfriends to be strong and independent, to be good at getting on with people, to be interesting and lively and resilient. Right? But when it comes down to it, don’t they rather resent it when these qualities actually express themselves? Don’t they feel a bit embarrassed and… challenged?’
‘Do they? I suppose they do, sometimes. It sounds as if you have something specific in mind, though.’
‘As I said, I’m not bitter,’ said Kathleen, still smiling; and then repeated, more quietly, to herself, tapping the table with her forefinger. ‘No, I’m not. I’m not.’ She looked at Robert again. ‘It just used to piss me off, though, that – once, there was a time, and this is what finally did it – he took me out to meet a couple of his friends, a man and a woman, and I got on really well with this guy, we had a really good evening. Then we get home and he accuses me of flirting – flirting, for God’s sake, with his best friend. I couldn’t understand it. I said, “What’s the matter, didn’t you want us to get on, didn’t you want me to talk to him? I thought the whole i
dea was for us to become friends.”’
‘What he probably envisaged,’ said Robert, drily, ‘was friendship within limits. He sounds to me like a believer in moderation in all things.’ But he realized that this was an inadequate response, and added, ‘And that was what split you up, was it?’
‘It turned into one of those petty quarrels. Lovers’ quarrels: boring, sulky things where nothing much gets said. He apologized in the end. Or at least, he told me not to take any notice of him, because he was just being difficult.’ She pondered this, and shook her head. ‘That was an amazing thing to admit…’
Robert said, ‘Now if you had been friends, and not lovers, that quarrel wouldn’t have happened, because he wouldn’t have felt he had any vested interest in you. He wouldn’t have felt he had property rights over you.’
‘Friends, lovers – what’s the difference?’
‘Sex, I suppose. I take it you were sleeping together?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, there you are. It changes things completely, doesn’t it? Sex implies possession.’ He finished his coffee, and snapped his plastic spoon in half. ‘Take it from me: a friendship without sex would have made all the difference. All the difference.’