The Closed Circle (12 page)

“I'm going out to the shops,” she said. “We can have fish tonight, is that OK? And I'm going to get some more wine. Have a bath or something. We've got to leave in about an hour if we're going to get to Cannon Hill on time.”

He nodded, but didn't move. Finally she said: “There's a ladder in the garage. At least there used to be.” She touched his shoulder. It felt bony and thin. “Why do you want to do this, Pat? What's it all about?”

He removed her hand; but gently. “I don't know. It's to do with you and Dad, and why you split up, and . . .” He turned away, heading down the stairs. “I don't know. I just want to.”

“You won't find anything,” she called after him. “He threw everything away.”

But Claire was wrong.

When she came back from the supermarket half an hour later, she found Patrick—still unbathed, still wearing the T-shirt and boxers in which he had slept—sitting on the bare floorboards of Miriam's old room. Somehow he had managed to carry a massive, old-fashioned leather trunk down from the loft, and he was sitting beside it. The trunk had been padlocked, but he had wrenched the lock apart with a pair of pliers. He had removed about half the contents of the trunk, which lay scattered on the floor around him. Claire stared at them, unbelieving. Her mouth dropped open and she was drained of breath.

Here were things she had not seen for more than twenty years. Her sister's clothes. Her books and ornaments. A little treasure box she had brought back from John O'Groats, filled with plastic jewellery. Old magazines, copies of
Jackie,
with pictures of seventies pop stars clipped out and dotted with holes where Miriam had drawing-pinned them to the wall. David Bowie and Bryan Ferry. A man's purple shirt which had once been one of her most precious possessions, although no one had ever learned why. And diaries. Two or three volumes of diaries, written in blue biro in her looping, girly handwriting.

Claire reached for these first.

“You haven't looked at these, have you?” she said. She had remembered that they would be meeting Doug Anderton at the rally. She didn't want Patrick to know that Doug's father had been involved in the disappearance.

“No,” he answered. He had found dozens of photographs of Miriam— Miriam and Claire—slides mainly, and he was holding them up to the grey light framed by the uncurtained windows.

“Good,” said Claire, and opened the diary for 1974, flipping the pages, too shocked to read anything properly, and dropping the book altogether, letting it fall to the floor with a slap, when she came upon pages brown with fingerprints—the prints of her own, fourteen-year-old Bovril-stained fingers—and her eyes filled with acid tears, tears like needles, the kind she thought she had forgotten how to cry.

21

—— Original Message ——
From: Malvina
To: btrotter
Sent: Thursday, March 30, 2000 3:38 p.m.
Subject: Rally for Longbridge

Hi Ben

Yes, I think I've persuaded your brother to come—though of course he is terrified of doing anything which might be seen to be critical of the party, and Tony in particular—so shall certainly be there myself.

It would be lovely to meet up. Waterstone's café, for old times' sake? I could probably be there by ten.

See you there, unless I hear to the contrary.

Love
Malvina XoX

Benjamin arrived first, inevitably. He bought himself a cappuccino and a pain au chocolat, and a large mocha for Malvina, because he remembered that that was what she liked.

He was ten minutes early; she was five minutes late. He filled in the time by reading two Inland Revenue leaflets: one about changes in the way that consolidation adjustments were to be recorded, the other about how to recover advance corporation tax by way of offset against mainstream corporation tax liability. It was as well to keep up with these things. By the time that Malvina arrived, her mocha had gone cold, and she had to order another one. Her cheeks were icy to the touch when he kissed her. He prolonged the kiss for as long as he could, breathing in her perfume, which instantly brought back to him the memory of all their earlier meetings, and the weird, vaporous hopes he had built around them.

Once they were seated opposite each other, he found that he could think of nothing to say to her. His embarrassment seemed to be contagious, and for a while they sat in clumsy silence.

“So,” Malvina said at last, after two or three sips of her warming drink, “what do you think will happen today? D'you think it's going to achieve anything?”

“Well—I don't know . . .” Benjamin seemed nonplussed by this question. “I just thought it was a sign that we could . . . you know, carry on being friends.”

Malvina held his gaze for a moment, then smiled. “I didn't mean that. I was talking about the rally.”

“Oh. Oh—that.” Benjamin looked down at the frothy surface of his coffee. Was there no end to the ways in which he could humiliate himself? “I don't know. I think it'll be a memorable day. I think people will feel inspired, and encouraged, probably. It won't change anybody's mind, though, will it? The powers that be.”

“No. Of course not.” More brightly, she said: “And what about your work? How's that going? Have you written much, in the last few weeks?”

Malvina was one of the few people in whom Benjamin had confided any details of his
magnum opus.
Even then, he had not been able to talk about it to any depth. He had told her the title—
Unrest
—but as soon as he began trying to explain what he hoped to achieve with it—why he considered it to be unique, and groundbreaking, and necessary—words became inadequate; he could hear himself speaking, but the phrases issuing from his mouth seemed to bear no relation to the ideal, pristine form which the work continued to take inside his head. He wanted to tell her that it was the most important thing in his life; that it was driving him mad; that it was an unprecedented marriage of old forms and new technology; that it would change the relationship between music and the written word for ever; that he hadn't written a word or composed a note for months; that sometimes he felt it was the only thing that was keeping him alive; that he could feel himself losing faith in it, as in so much else . . . But there seemed no point, no point in expressing any of that to this beautiful, unfathomable woman who was sitting opposite him licking traces of coffee from her fine, wine-dark upper lip.

“So-so,” he ended up saying, lamely. “I keep plugging away at it.”

Malvina smiled, and shook her head. “What are you, Benjamin—the king of understatement? You've been writing this thing for
twenty years.
Are you ever going to allow yourself a little pat on the back? It's incredible, the way you've stayed with it. God, if I write just five lines of a poem and then get stuck for an idea, I usually give up and throw it away.” She sat back and looked at him, beaming, almost with pride. “How do you do it? What keeps you going?”

And after a moment Benjamin answered, quietly: “I've told you that before. The very first time we met.”

Malvina glanced down into the depths of her coffee cup. “Ah, yes—the mysterious
femme fatale.
The love of your life. What was her name again?”

“Cicely.”

“And the idea behind this book is . . . Can you remind me?” Benjamin said nothing, so she continued: “That's right—she's going to read it one day and realize that you're a genius and she was crazy to leave you, and then she'll come running back. Something like that, wasn't it?”

“Something like that,” said Benjamin, his face suddenly grim, withdrawn.

“Benjamin,” Malvina said—urgently, now—“I may not know what I'm talking about here, but has it ever occurred to you that being abandoned by her was the best thing that could have happened to you? That you may have had a narrow escape?”

Benjamin shrugged, and sipped the dregs of his cappuccino.

“I mean, if it makes you carry on writing, all well and good—that's probably the only thing that keeps you sane, anyway—but otherwise, I wish you'd forget this stupid business. There comes a point where you just have to draw a line. And in your case I'd say you'd passed it about two decades ago.”

It was impossible to say whether Benjamin was even hearing this advice or not. He simply changed the subject, by asking: “What about you? Getting anything written at the moment?”

“Oh, yes, I'm still . . . ‘plugging away,' as you'd put it.”

“I don't know how you find the time,” said Benjamin, “with everything else that's going on in your life.” (Although he did know how she found the time, really: it was because she was young.)

“Well, you know,” she answered. “Late nights. Black coffee. I'm trying to write more stories, but I can never seem to manage more than a few pages. They're just fragments. I don't know what I'm going to do with them.”

“Have you shown them to anyone?”

“No. I'd be too embarrassed.”

“Maybe you should.”

What Benjamin still wanted, of course, was to read them himself: anything to bring himself back into a kind of closeness with her. But he could tell that she would never agree to this. He clutched, instead, at the thought that he might be able to help her in some more practical way, even though a few moments' clear-eyed reflection would have told him that this too was impossible.

“I know someone you could show them to,” he said. “A friend of mine: Doug Anderton.”

“Yes, I know Doug. At least, I've spoken to him on the phone. He just got a new job, didn't he?”

“That's why I mentioned him. He's literary editor now. Why don't you send your stuff to him?”

Malvina frowned. “What would be the point? He just commissions articles and book reviews, doesn't he? They wouldn't publish stories or anything like that.”

“Sometimes they do,” Benjamin insisted. “And besides, he told me that publishers keep phoning him up and asking him out to lunch, now. So if he liked your stuff, he could mention it to them, couldn't he? And they're always going to want to do him a favour, to make sure they get good coverage. The whole business is a racket. You might as well take advantage of it.”

It came out sounding pretty plausible, he thought, considering that he didn't really know what he was talking about. And Malvina—who was always swift to believe that the world operated in this way—looked more than half convinced.

“Maybe . . .” she murmured.

“Anyway,” said Benjamin, “you'll be seeing Doug in a minute.”

“Really? He's coming on the march today?”

“Of course he is. His dad was a shop steward at Longbridge, remember? I was going to meet him at New Street Station in about twenty minutes. Can you come along?”

“I don't know yet. I don't know where I'm meeting Paul.”

The answer to that came quickly enough. Malvina and Benjamin finished their coffees, stepped out into the damp, bone-chilling morning and joined the thickening crowd as it headed out along New Street in the direction of the Bristol Road. Already the human river was busy and fast-moving, even though this was just a tributary to the main current. There were banners everywhere you looked (“Don't Let Rover Die,” “Save Our Jobs,” “Blair Doesn't Care”), and all of the city's life seemed to be here: pensioners were walking with teenagers, Bangladeshis alongside whites and Pakistanis. It was a good atmosphere, Benjamin thought, even if everybody did look decidedly cold. He kept close to Malvina, partly for fear of losing her in the crowd, partly because he wanted to; so she was not able to hide her reaction when a text message from Paul came through. She seemed irritated, even a little hurt, but not in the least surprised.

“Oh,
Paul,
” she said to the phone, slapping it shut and putting it back in the pocket of her leather jacket.

“What's up? He hasn't bottled out, has he?”

“Says he's got too much paperwork to get through.” She looked away, biting her lip. “
Shit.
It would have done him so much good to be seen here. Why couldn't I get him to believe that?”

“My brother's a coward,” said Benjamin, as if to himself.

She looked at him sharply. “Do you think so?”

Benjamin shrugged. “Sometimes.” Then he added: “I know I shouldn't say that to you.” And, more quietly: “I know you're fond of him.”

“Yes,” Malvina admitted. “Yes, I am. That doesn't mean he can't be a complete arsehole sometimes.”

“So he's staying down in London, is he?”

“No,” said Malvina. “He's at home. I'm going to join him there later.”

“Oh.” Benjamin was taken aback. “And what does Susan think about that?”

“She doesn't know. She's gone to her parents' for the weekend. With Antonia.”

“You're staying the night?”

“Yes.”

“Cosy,” said Benjamin, investing the word with a good deal of meaning.

“You think it looks bad?”

“Don't you?” He gave a short laugh. “You're supposed to be the one who understands how the media works. Can you imagine what would happen if the papers found out?”

Malvina turned and looked at him earnestly. There was a sudden intensity to her voice, and in her eyes, that struck Benjamin as almost comical. “I'm not having an affair with him, you know. I'm not sleeping with him. And I never will.”

He couldn't think of anything to say. Except, after a brief pause: “I believe you.”

“Good,” said Malvina. “Because it's God's own truth.”

There were five of them, in the end, marching together towards Cannon Hill Park: Benjamin, Doug, Malvina, Philip Chase and his second wife Carol. They kept an eye out for Claire and Patrick, but so far there was no sign of them. There were tens of thousands of people, now, walking solemnly along the Pershore Road, the mood of the crowd defiant, resolute, rather than noisily militant. Benjamin had been expecting it to be a mainly local demonstration, but there were Trade Union banners from all over the place: Liverpool, Manchester, Durham, York. The groundswell of support for the saving of Longbridge was clearly massive and widespread, even though some attempt seemed to have been made—by the usual suspects— to hijack the demonstration: every so often the air would ring with that ubiquitous cry of street protest, as English as the first cuckoo of spring: “SOcialist Worker! SOcialist Worker!” Leading Doug to exclaim, gleefully: “This is
fantastic,
isn't it? It's just like being back in the 1970s.”

Phil and Carol walked arm in arm, with Phil carrying a “Keep Rover Running” banner high above his head. Malvina gravitated towards Doug, and after a while began a low, confidential conversation with him: Benjamin assumed that she was bringing up the subject of her writing. Somehow, once again, even in the company of two of his oldest friends, he found himself excluded, consigned to another, private universe, thrown back on his own imaginative resources. He could never work out how it happened, but it always did. If Emily had been there, he supposed, he could have talked to her, or at least held her hand. But she was tied up with work at home: the church-warden, Andrew, was coming round that morning, and they were going to deliver copies of the parish newsletter together. She had considered coming to the rally instead, but Benjamin had managed to talk her out of it. He didn't want her to meet Malvina.

“What was she talking to you about?” he asked Doug, as soon as Malvina was out of earshot, and he had regained his friend's attention about three hundred yards from Cannon Hill Park.

“Oh, this and that,” said Doug. “Your fuckwit brother, mainly. I told her he needn't bother cosying up to me any more. Appearing on the books pages is hardly going to raise his profile. Only about ten people read them, and eight of those are the people who write them, as well.”

“Did she mention her short stories?”

“She said something about that, yes. I wasn't really listening.”

Not for the first time, Benjamin was disturbed to see that Doug wasn't making the slightest attempt to appear interested in his new job. He never spoke about it except with contempt. It was starting to feel as if it might only be a matter of time—and not much time, either—before he walked out on it altogether.

“They're crazy,” he said, “to have sidelined you like that. I mean, you could have written something great about this rally. Did they send anyone else to cover it?”

“They're letting me do it. Allowing me a swansong. Phil said I could go back to his place afterwards and use his computer. I'm not sure I can be bothered, to be honest.” He sighed, his breath steaming in the drizzly air. “I don't know what I'm going to do about this, Ben. Make the best of a bad job, I suppose. Which reminds me—do
you
want to review something?”