The Closed Circle (11 page)

Doug pressed a button to end the call, took the phone over to the mantelpiece and laid it there in a gesture of preternatural calm.

“Well?” said Frankie, unable to bear the suspense any longer.

Doug was staring at his own face in the gilded mirror.

“That woman,” he said at last, his voice hoarse, and strangely remote. “That woman Janet. She's going to have to get her hearing tested.” He turned to look at the circle of bewildered faces. “Political editor? No. Deputy editor? No.” Then, gathering breath, he bellowed: “
LITERARY
editor. Do you hear me?
LITERARY—FUCKING—EDITOR.
They want me to commission book reviews. They want me to spend every day putting novels into fucking jiffy bags and sending them out to . . . to . . .” He spluttered, lost for words, and then started reeling around the room in a frenzy, yelling as he did so: “The
cunts.
The fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking, fucking
CUNTS
!”

In the absolute silence that followed, Benjamin almost imagined that he could hear the words echoing around the room and dying away. Nobody could think of anything to say, until Coriander turned to her mother and gravely whispered: “What's a tunt? What's a futting futting futting futting tunt?”

It was the longest sentence she had ever spoken. But Frankie did not think it was the moment to remark on this; or to mention the fact that her husband had just disqualified himself from sex again, for at least the next three weeks.

22

Claire, who could be more or less garrulous in the right company, sat at the kitchen table opposite her son and tried to think of something to say.

It was becoming obvious to her that she was out of practice at motherhood. Ten years ago, when Patrick was just five, she wouldn't have believed such a thing to be possible. It was not just that loving him, in those days, had come as naturally to her as breathing: of course she still loved him, as much as she ever had. The difference was that she no longer knew how to behave around him. The process had begun, she knew, even before she had left for Italy. Already, when he was only nine or ten, she had felt herself losing her footing, not knowing quite what tone to strike: she hadn't understood his burgeoning obsessions, the sports he became fixated on, the clothes he felt compelled to wear. She could see that this wasn't happening between him and Philip; not to the same extent; and that was one of the reasons she felt it was sensible—or at least permissible—to let him move in with his father and stepmother, while she set off on her Italian adventure. By the time that was over—by the time she arrived back in Birmingham five years later (home-sick, absurdly, for a place she didn't even like that much)—an even greater distance had opened up between them. That was inevitable, she supposed: he had visited her, in that time, and she'd come back to England at least twice a year, but still, he had changed, grown away from her, immeasurably, almost beyond recognition. The wordlessness she had already been starting to feel in his presence became more and more acute.

It was the first time she had been back to her father's house since December. On that occasion, she had moved out after only four days, then stayed two nights at a hotel in Birmingham and spent Christmas with friends in Sheffield, friends from her university days. There was no way she could have lasted a minute longer. This weekend, however, Donald Newman was safely out of the country: living it up in the second home in France that he was always bragging about, these days, and which she had no intention of ever visiting. It sounded as though, since retirement, he spent more and more time there: but then she knew little about his current arrangements, and cared less. Some clever stockbroker friend had made him a few thousand in the nineties, apparently, and that had enabled him to pick up this picturesque ruin somewhere outside Bergerac. Bully for him. He was welcome to it.

It was Patrick who mentioned him first, as it turned out.

“Grandad keeps this place pretty well, doesn't he?” he remarked, looking around the orderly kitchen. “For a bachelor, I mean. An old geezer like him.”

“Nothing else to do, I suppose. Anyway, I think he gets some skivvy in to do it for him. I'd be very surprised if he knew one end of a vacuum cleaner from another.”

Her son smiled. She wanted to say something nice to him—how good his hair looked, now that he was wearing it a bit longer, how glad she was that he didn't seem to have had any body parts pierced yet—but the phrases wouldn't form. Instead she thought about the evening ahead, the two places she was going to have to lay at that table, the meal they would later be eating in thick suburban silence, and felt suddenly afraid that she couldn't go through with it.

“Look, Pat, shall we go out tonight? Drive out to the country, find a pub or something?”

“Why? I thought you'd bought some food.”

“I have, but . . . you know.” She gestured with her eyes. “This place.”

“We can liven it up,” said Patrick. “Put some candles on the table. I brought some music.”

While Claire rummaged in drawers to find a tablecloth, her son took a ghetto blaster out of his holdall and connected it to a wall socket. He flicked through a wallet of CDs and clicked one into the machine. Claire braced herself, anticipating some monstrosity, but heard instead a piano figure in a minor key, pulsing, insistent, tango-like, surrounded soon by cunningly woven lines for violin and cello and bandoneon.

“That's nice,” she said. “What is it?”

“Astor Piazzolla,” said Patrick. “Thought you might like this one.” And then, with a short laugh: “Of course, it's not what I listen to by myself. Normally I only ever listen to big black gangsters singing about raping their bitches and being strung out on crack. I just keep this one as a standby, for the old folk.”

“You watch what you're saying,” Claire warned. “You're treading on sensitive ground, there. I shudder to think what the other people in that house say about me.”

It was March 31st, 2000, and Claire had come to Birmingham that weekend to take part in tomorrow's protest against the Long bridge closure: a huge, city-wide demonstration, which was to begin with a march from the centre of town, with more crowds joining along the way to converge, finally, on a rally in Cannon Hill Park. Claire's home, at this time—not that she thought of it as home, or as anything other than a momentary staging post—was a house in Ealing, west London, which she shared with three graduate students in their early twenties. She'd found a temporary job as a sort of glorified accounts clerk, processing invoices for a firm which imported Italian furniture. The whole set-up was decidedly grim. She felt as though her life was a tape which someone had just rewound by about fifteen years.

“They take the piss out of you, do they?” asked Patrick.

“It's not quite as blatant as that. They're much too polite. But you can tell from the way they look at me that they're wondering if they should get a Stannah stair-lift installed one of these days, or buy me one of those foot-spas for my birthday.”

She put a saucepan on to the hob for the pasta, and started chopping onions and tomatoes. Patrick poured her some wine and asked if he could have some.

“Of course you can. You don't have to ask that.”

Patrick wandered out into the living room and was gone for a few minutes. Claire peeped through at one point and saw that he was looking at the family photographs on the mantelpiece. Except that “family” photographs was not the right word for them. There were no pictures of Mr. Newman's daughters, there: no mementoes of the missing Miriam, or the errant Claire. Just photographs of Donald and Pamela, a tracking of their life together, their ageing: the wedding picture, the holidays in Scotland and the Scilly Isles; the two of them outside the Bergerac cottage, Pamela looking bowed, shrunken. She'd surrendered to cancer just eight months after they bought it. In the centre of the mantelpiece was a silver-framed portrait of her, A4 size. It must have been taken some time in the fifties, before the children came along. Dark hair, pearl necklace, a cocktail dress in black or navy blue. She was smiling the unknowable smile that people wear for the camera. Patrick lifted the picture, tilted it away from the light, appraised it intently; as if it was going to yield up some family secret.

“So,” he said, returning to the kitchen, wineglass in hand, “are you actually speaking to Grandad at the moment?”

“There's been no official declaration of hostilities,” said Claire. “It's just that I never phone him, and he never phones me. Or almost never. I mean, he was perfectly civil when I asked if I could stay here for the weekend. Though he thought my reason for coming to Birmingham was ludicrous.”

“Well, he never was much of a revolutionary, was he? Can you imagine Grandad going on a demo? It would have to be in favour of bringing back hanging for people who hold hands in public before marriage.”

“Or making fox-hunting part of the National Curriculum.” She smiled, not so much at the jokes as at the warmth they were promising to generate between them. “Anyway, what about you? Are you going to come along tomorrow?”

“Yes. 'Course I am. It's important, isn't it? A lot of people's jobs are at stake.”

“Is your dad going?”

“Yep.”

“Your step-mum?”

“I should think so. Carol's pretty worked up about Longbridge, like everybody else. You going to be OK with that?”

“Oh, sure. I've got a lot of time for Carol.”

“Some of Dad's friends'll be there, too. Doug Anderton? D'you remember him? He's coming up from London. And Benjamin's tagging along, I think.”

“My God,” said Claire, “that really
will
be weird. A proper little King William's reunion. I haven't seen Doug for donkey's years. And I think the last time we were all together was at our wedding.”

“Benjamin was best man, wasn't he?”

“That's right. He made an absolutely disastrous speech. Full of quotations from Kierkegaard—which might have meant more to the audience if he hadn't insisted on reciting them in the original Danish—and then some elaborate joke which hinged on a confusion between Rimbaud the poet and Rambo the Sylvester Stallone character. Nobody had the faintest idea what he was talking about.” She sighed, fondly. “Poor Benjamin. I wonder if he's changed.”

“I thought you saw him just before Christmas.”

Claire resumed chopping, and said merely, “We didn't get much of a chance to speak,” in a tone which implied—to her son, at least—that there was nothing more to be said on that subject.

The evening went well. Patrick managed to dig out three more CDs that met with his mother's approval, and there seemed no need to resort to her fall-back plan, which had been simply to cut their losses and watch television when they ran out of things to say to each other. In fact—perversely—Claire ended up feeling that it had gone almost too well. Which is to say that tonight, for the first time, she started to notice something strange about Patrick's behaviour: that it was too thoughtful, too considerate, too much predicated on her own needs and responses, which he was adept at second-guessing. There was a curious stiffness, a curious unease, about the way he carried himself, she realized—almost as if he believed himself to be role-playing, an actor in somebody else's script. Perhaps this was just the characteristic self-consciousness of adolescence; but there seemed more to it than that—there was an extraordinary
watchfulness
about Patrick, a sense that he was waiting for the world to show him how to behave, to disclose his own personality to him before he could begin to inhabit it. Was this what they—she and Philip—had done to him, by splitting up when he was just three, and then shunting him backwards and forwards from parent to parent for years afterwards? He was
missing
something, she was beginning to see that now, missing some vital component. Something she couldn't yet identify, although she knew it was more than a question of family stability.

Patrick poured her a last glass of wine and brought it to her on the living-room sofa.

“Here you are,” he said. “I'm going to bed, now. Don't sit up all night getting pissed.”

“I won't.”

He leaned down to kiss her. His cheeks were downy, with the first traces of a baby beard.

“It's been nice tonight, hasn't it?” she said.

He folded her in a hug. “Yes, it has.”

As he straightened up again, she let the wine give her courage and asked: “You're OK, are you, love? Phil and Carol look after you well, do they?”

“Of course they do. Why, don't I look OK?”

They were too vague, too complicated, the anxieties that had been stirring within her for the last few minutes. All she could say was: “You look pale, that's all.”

Patrick smiled defensively. “We all do,” he said. “Me and all my friends. It's all that junk your generation keeps feeding us.” In a quieter voice, he added: “We're the pale people.”

Without explaining what he meant, Patrick blew his mother one last goodnight kiss; and then she noticed, before he went up to bed, how his eyes lingered again on the mantelpiece photographs.

After her shower the next morning she came out of the bathroom to find that he had opened the door of Miriam's old bedroom, and was standing inside.

She followed him in.

“Not much to see, is there?” she said.

It was just as she had last found it: no furniture, bare floorboards, whitewashed walls. Not a room at all, but a statement: a statement of absence. She imagined her father coming in here every day, standing quite still in the centre, breathing in the nothingness of it. Thinking about Miriam, as he must have thought about her every day, unmoving, inscrutable. Why else would he keep the room this way? It was spotless, too: as conscientously dusted and hoovered as every other room in the house. She could see his logic, even as it repelled her. This was a missing person's room.

“Where's all her stuff?”

Claire shrugged. “I don't know. I've got some of it: you know, the pictures you've seen, a few other bits and pieces, bracelets, a hairbrush, that sort of thing. Some toys—” (she thought her voice was going to crack, but recovered herself) “—from when she was little. I think Dad threw the rest away. Gave away all her furniture, I know that. There were a lot of other things—photograph albums, all her diaries. I don't know what became of them. They've gone for good.” She paced the length of the forlorn, tiny room in three short steps, and stared out of the window at the back garden, frugal and obsessively tidy like everything else at this house. “Do you talk about her much?” she asked. “I mean, do they ever mention her—Philip and Carol?”

“No.”

“But
you
think about her, don't you? I can tell that you do.”

Patrick said, “She may still be alive.” And all at once his voice was pleading.

Claire turned on her heel and left the room. “Let's not go there, OK?”

They were out on the landing together now. Patrick pointed up at the trap door in the ceiling.

“How do I get up there?”

“You can't.”

“All it would take is a ladder.”

“There's nothing there. Just junk.”

She stared at him, willing it not to happen. She didn't want this to be his mission.
She
couldn't go through it all again, for one thing; and it was dangerous for him, too. He was too young, too vulnerable to take on something like this.