The Closed Circle (19 page)

“I know what you're going to say,” said Frankie, her voice throbbing with feeling now. “You prayed, didn't you? You turned to Christ.”

“How did you know that?” Benjamin asked.

“It's what I would have done.”

“Well, I'd never given God much thought before,” said Benjamin. “But suddenly—almost without thinking about it—I got down on my knees, and I started praying to Him. Bargaining with Him, to be precise.”

“Bargaining?”

“Yes. I struck a deal. I said that if He sent me some swimming trunks, I would believe in Him. For ever and ever.”

Frankie looked impressed by the audacity of this tactic. And asked, inevitably: “Did it work?”

“Yes.” Benjamin stared ahead of him, mesmerized by the clarity with which the events of that day never failed to recur to him. “The locker room was absolutely silent. Then I heard the noise of a locker door, opening and shutting. I got to my feet, and walked towards the noise. The door of the locker was open. And inside was . . .”

“. . . a pair of swimming trunks,” said Frankie, her voice hushed to a whisper. “It was a miracle, Benjamin! You witnessed a miracle.”

She came closer, knelt before him, put her hands on his knees. More than anything, at that moment, he would have liked to kiss her. But it didn't seem to be what the situation required.

“And after that,” she asked “—did you keep your side of the bargain?”

“Yes, I did. I started going to church, and I continued going to church, in the face of much derision from my friends and contemporaries. Twenty-six years, I've kept that up. And when at last I found someone who shared my beliefs, I . . . well, I don't think I fell in love with her, exactly, I kind of . . . gravitated towards her. I mean, I'd known Emily at school and we'd talked about religion a little bit but actually it wasn't until I went and spent a weekend with her at university—some time in our third year, I think it was: I was at Oxford, she was at Exeter—well, that was when we first got talking seriously about it. That was also the first weekend we slept together, I seem to remember. She was a virgin. I wasn't, because a couple of years before, upstairs in my brother's back bedroom . . .”

He tailed off, and noticed that Frankie was trying to get his attention.

“Too much information, Benjamin. Too much information.”

“Yes. OK. Well then—what I'm trying to say is that faith—or what I've always taken to be faith—is at the centre of my life and also the centre of my marriage. And today, as of—” (he glanced at his watch) “—three hours, twenty minutes ago, I've lost it. My faith has gone.”

“But why?” said Frankie. “God's kept His side of the bargain, hasn't he?”

“I always thought so. Listen to this.” He took up the biography, and walked over to the front bay window, where the light was better. “‘It was at this point that Piper's sexual career seems to have reached its absolute nadir. The turning point came, according to his diaries, during a two-day trip to Birmingham to give a reading at King William's School. It was from this day on that he realized he could not continue with the habits to which he had become wearily accustomed, while still retaining any vestiges of self-respect.'”

He looked across at Frankie, to check that she was listening—which she was: although without, at this point, very much comprehension.

“You'll understand in a minute,” he assured her. “Just listen: ‘Piper recorded his impressions of Birmingham in his characteristically unsparing style: “An unspeakable excrescence of a city,” he wrote, “as if God had unwisely partaken the night before of a divine Vindaloo of horrific pungency, and promptly evacuated his bowels over the West Midlands the next morning. The people pallid, corpse-like, moronic; the buildings so ugly as to induce a state of actual nausea in the hapless onlooker.” After a few more observations like this, Piper noted that, after spending the night in the Britannia Hotel (where “the food would have disgraced the standards of a soup kitchen in the vilest slums of Victorian London”), he made his way shortly after breakfast, on the morning of his reading, to the municipal swimming baths for his daily constitutional.

“‘This custom, as we know, had less to do with the provision of healthy exercise than with the opportunity it offered him to ogle the bodies of the other swimmers with relative impunity. And on this occasion, he was certainly not disappointed. “I had only been in the water a few minutes,” he wrote, “when the rank hideousness of the baths themselves—apparently designed by some aesthetically bankrupt mediocrity in a fit of vindictive hatred against his fellow-citizens—was suddenly transcended,
brought to life,
by a
vision,
an
apparition
of manhood in its most magnificent, supra-natural form. A young negro of no more than twenty years, his thigh muscles as solid as young saplings, his buttocks tauter than the skin on a—”' Well, there's quite a lot more in that vein, anyway. I won't bore you with all the details.” He flicked over to the next page, noting that Frankie was now following his every move with rapt, wide-eyed captivation. “He follows this guy up and down the baths for a few lengths—though he can't keep up with him very well, obviously—and then trails after him as he heads off back to the changing rooms. Lots of self-loathing stuff about his own body here— ‘the mottled skin hanging off my powdery bones like the scrotum of a senile and disease-ridden roué in the final stages of decrepitude,' et cetera, I'm sure you don't need to know all that—and then we come to the crunch. The other guy strips off and gets into the shower—‘disclosing to my ravished eyes an organ of pleasure so heavy and cumbersome that I was put in mind of a prodigious Milanese salami I once saw hanging from the rafters of a trattoria high in the mountains above Bagni di Lucca . . .'—Jesus, he does go on, doesn't he?—and then Piper succumbs to his moment of weakness: ‘Suddenly, it seemed to me intolerable—unbearable—that this God-like being should pass in and out of my life so fleetingly, without leaving the smallest trace except the memory of his unattainable loveliness stamped on to my aching consciousness. I had to have—at the very least—a souvenir. It was an impulse, an instant of lunatic audacity, no more—but that was all it took, to snatch his navy blue swimming trunks from the bench where he had left them, wring them out on the floor, allow my questing nostrils (yes, I admit it!) to inhale for just a second the intoxicating smell of those dark, mysterious regions with which the cloth (o happy fibre!) had recently been in contact, and then to cram them into the briefcase where I had stored not only my own bathing things, but also the very volumes of poetry with which I was vainly hoping to impress the doubtless cow-like and torpid pupils of King William's school later that morning.'”

Benjamin closed the book slowly and thoughtfully, then sank down on to the sofa again. He stared at the window for some time, with sightless eyes, while Frankie—utterly lost for words, for the time being—waited to hear if he would complete the story.

“So that's where they came from,” he said at last. “By the time he arrived at the school, the lust had worn off and all he felt was shame, self-hatred and fear at the thought that he might be found out. So before going off to see the Chief Master, he dashed into the locker room, and chucked them into the first locker he could find. And that was where
I
found them, a couple of seconds later.” Benjamin shook his head, overwhelmed by bitterness at his own credulity. “‘The breath of God!' The breath of God, I called it! Some raddled, disappointed old man grabbing the spoils of his latest debacle and shoving them out of sight as fast as he could.
The breath of God
. . . What a fiasco. What a joke.”

He had nothing more to say. In the long, miserable silence that followed, the distant howls of Ranulph could be heard from the kitchen, protesting loudly at Irina's latest attempt to feed or dress him.

Finally, Frankie came over to sit beside Benjamin again, and took both of his hands in hers.

“Benjamin, God works in many ways, you know. Many and mysterious ways. Just because there turns out to have been an explanation for what happened, that doesn't make it any less . . . meaningful.”

“I thought it was a miracle,” said Benjamin, as if he hadn't heard her. “But there are no such things as miracles. Just random sets of circumstances, intersecting in ways that make no sense.”

“But it
did
make sense, for you . . .”

“Just chaos,” he continued, rising to his feet. “Chaos and coincidence. That's all it is.”

And nothing that either Frankie or Doug could say would change his mind, either for the rest of that day or during the middle of the night when, on three separate occasions, they found him pacing from room to room in their house with the soundless tread of a sleepwalker.

14

A visitor to the tiny Cotswold village of Little Rollright on the hot afternoon of Monday, May 22nd, 2000, would probably have been drawn there, like many of its visitors, by an interest in church architecture. She (let us suppose it is a she) would have driven the winding single-track road up to the fifteenth-century church, with a copy of Pevsner in hand, hungry for a feast of ogee heads, corner buttresses, cusped arches and embattled cornices. On her way into the church she might have noticed that, sitting on a bench against its southern wall, looking out over the village's golden cluster of houses, sat a man in his mid-thirties, and a woman in her early twenties, and that they were talking together, earnestly but brokenly, in low, murmurous voices. Supposing that her interest in church architecture was more than casual—supposing, in fact, that she could simply never get enough of niches, quatrefoils and crocketed canopies—she might have spent up to an hour in the church itself, notebook in hand, sketchpad at the ready, and when she emerged, blinking, into the afternoon sunlight which by then would only have increased in ferocity, she would have noticed that the man and the woman were still there, and still talking. Sitting slightly further apart, perhaps, and looking both a good deal hotter and a good deal more melancholy than when she had last observed them. But still there. And as she left through the churchyard gate, she might have glanced back at them for one last time, and noticed that the man was leaning forward, with his head in his hands, and was muttering some despondent words which there was no breeze, that sweltering day, to carry over to her suddenly curious ears. And then she would have walked back to her car, never to learn anything more about the drama that was being played out in the churchyard that afternoon, never to know that as she was closing the gate behind her with a squeak and a click, Paul Trotter was saying to Malvina: “I can't believe we're going to do this. I can't believe we're really doing it.”

Paul had not known what to expect of this meeting. All he knew was that he was longing to see Malvina again. They had not seen each other for almost three weeks, since the night before his trip to Skagen. While he had been away—on the morning of his conversation with Rolf on the beach at Grenen—a story about him and Malvina had appeared in the diary column of one of the broadsheets. It was couched in terms careful enough to skirt the libel laws, but the implications were plain to anybody who happened to read it; and unfortunately, this had included Susan.

She had not actually kicked him out of the house when she learned that Malvina had spent a night in the family home without her knowledge, although for a while she had threatened to do so. But Paul had been made to promise that he would not see her again, and from that day on Malvina had ceased working as his media adviser and he had stopped paying her a wage. In an email on May 8th, he had written:

*Not* to see you at all is unthinkable. That simply isn't an option, as far as I'm concerned. But you had better lie low for a while, maybe. And we had probably better not meet up for a week or two.

Malvina had answered:

Not sure I like the idea of being hidden. Though I can see your logic, I guess. I'm scared, probably, of the thought that everything between us might suddenly go pear-shaped, that feelings we worked hard to bring out into the open are going to be strangled at birth by complications, the whole nightmare of keeping the rest of the world at bay . . .

Since then, Paul had been circumspect, to put it mildly. He had told Malvina not to email him, not to text him, not to visit him. He never wondered how she might fill her time during those days, with nothing to occupy her but course-work and thoughts of their possible future together; that was not his problem. For his own part, he immersed himself in parliamentary business, volunteering for so many research assignments and social duties on his minister's behalf that relations between the two of them (which had been at breaking point for months) became—briefly—almost cordial. He spent more time at home, playing with Antonia, until he found that ten minutes was about the most he could manage without dying of boredom. For the first time in years, he contacted his brother of his own accord, and spoke to him on the telephone after hearing reports from Susan that Benjamin had started to behave oddly: he was not going to church any more, it was rumoured, and had been arguing bitterly with Emily. (Paul failed to elicit much information on this point, however, and didn't carry his concern for Benjamin's welfare to the extreme of actually going to see him.) And he wrote a number of articles for the papers about the Longbridge crisis, how successfully it had been resolved, and how adroit was the government's handling of it. He even invited himself to the factory for a photocall with the victorious directors of the Phoenix consortium—although, in the end, he only got to meet their PR spokesman, and the picture was not taken up by any of the press agencies.

In the midst of this activity, anyway, all he really wanted to do was to see Malvina again.

At last, the time came when he judged that it was safe for them to meet. He did not want it to be in London; he was convinced that his every move there was being shadowed by the press. But he was going to drive down that day from his constituency, and he suggested that Malvina take a train from Paddington and meet him half way, at Moreton-in-Marsh. They could spend a few hours together, have lunch in a pub, take a country walk. It would be quiet, and discreet, and they would both get a much-needed change of scene. The weather forecast was good. Paul looked forward to it all weekend.

He didn't like the idea of meeting her off the train—too many people around—so he waited for her in his car, parked outside the White Hart Hotel. Fifteen minutes later than expected, she knocked on his driver's window and when he opened it, bent forward to kiss him. The very smell of her, at that moment, was wonderful. Why did he always forget to ask her what perfume she wore? If he knew what it was he would buy a bottle himself, keep it by his bedside so that he could smell her whenever he wanted. He felt himself enfolded by her, tangled up in her hair, her arms reaching forward to clasp his neck. His mouth made as if to touch hers but at the last moment some uncertainty interposed itself, some register of ambiguity about their relationship—friends? colleagues? lovers?—and they ended up kissing on the cheek. But neither of them seemed to mind. They laughed and as Malvina held on to him tightly she said, “Hello. I've missed you,” and then she climbed into the car.

They talked about nothing very serious over lunch. There were dozens of well-known pubs in the area, recommended in guide books for their rich and varied menus and their old-world charm, but Paul didn't want to go to any of those: at this time of year, they would be crammed with tourists, and he might be recognized. So they went to a place on one of the A-roads, with an ugly pebbledash exterior and food straight out of the 1970s. As she struggled with her burger, Malvina was girlish, nervously chatty, seemingly as reluctant as he was to broach the subject of their shared future, if any. She talked instead about her course, the impending delivery of a long end-of-year assignment, and how one of her tutors had made a diffident but unmistakable pass at her during a recent supervision.

“Poor you,” said Paul. “That's the last thing you need—some lecherous old sod drooling all over you.”

“He's younger than you, actually,” said Malvina. “And almost as good-looking.” And her eyes laughed as she said it, thrilled by the intimacy which gave her licence to tease him.

After that they drove east, along the road towards Banbury, but after only a few minutes Paul noticed a sign to a public footpath, and pulled over into a lay-by.

“Where is this?” Malvina asked. “It looks vaguely familiar.”

Paul had no idea where they were. There were two or three other cars parked in the lay-by, from which a gate led through a patch of rough hedgerow towards some tourist attraction beyond. Malvina walked over to the gate and read the notice attached to it, which told her that these were the famous Rollright Stones, a prehistoric stone circle probably marking an ancient burial spot—but also associated, in local legend, with stories of witchcraft.

“I think I've been here before,” she said. “In fact I'm sure of it. Can we go inside and have a look?”

Paul wasn't keen. There were at least a dozen people wandering around the site already, taking photos of the weirdly shaped, pockmarked and lichen-encrusted stones.

“Sorry,” he said. “It's too risky. Let's walk somewhere instead.”

“Oh, come on—please. Just for a few minutes.”

“We'll leave the car here. We can come back later, when it's a bit less crowded.”

They set off down the main road and then took a left turn down the footpath. Soon the ground had started to shelve, and the village of Little Rollright disclosed itself before them, nestled furtively in the valley formed between swathes of hilly pastureland. The squat tower of its church shone brazenly in the afternoon light. All was quiet, now, and deadly still. No traffic noise, no tourists. They had the world to themselves.

There was a bench next to the church door, facing out over the village. After looking in a desultory way around the interior (which at least had the effect of cooling them down after their walk), and inspecting the gravestones—which were nearly all too weathered to read—they took refuge here, and steadied themselves for the conversation that could no longer be put off.

“Well,” said Malvina—who had known all along that she would have to be the one to get it started—“things have moved on a bit, haven't they, in the last few months? The balance has shifted. When we started out, I got the impression—I mean, I might be wrong about this—that all you wanted to do was sleep with me. And that gave me a feeling of control over you and I suppose I liked that, I enjoyed it. But it started to feel different for me . . . when was it? . . . on the day of the march. That night, I mean. The night I stayed at your house. I remember . . . just sitting with you on the sofa, after dinner, in front of the fire, before we went to bed. We couldn't bear even to touch each other and in a weird sort of way that's what made it feel so intimate to me: or at least, that's what made me admit to myself where we'd got to. That we'd got to the edge of a cliff, without realizing it. And then . . . Then I suppose we have Doug to thank for the rest. He told you what I was going through. And then you came round to see me, the night before you went to Denmark. And . . . well, I was surprised, I must say. Absolutely amazed, in fact. You really let yourself go that night. You said a lot of things—”

“I meant them,” said Paul, quickly. “I meant them all.”

“I know you did,” Malvina answered. “I don't doubt that for a minute. All the same, I'm not going to hold you to anything.” She glanced at him. “You know that, don't you?”

Paul said nothing. The sun was making his eyes ache and he was conscious that his shirt was becoming sticky with sweat. He was going to have sunburn by the end of the day, if he wasn't careful. How would he explain that to Susan when he next saw her?

“I was on cloud nine for a day or two after that,” Malvina continued. “Till that thing in the paper brought me down to earth, I suppose. And now it doesn't look quite so rosy. The last few weeks have been just awful. I feel I've lost all control over my life. I feel completely powerless. Do you know what that's like? Probably not.”

Paul laid his hand on hers, and tried to sound reassuring. “I know things are difficult,” he said, “but it won't be for much longer . . .”

“What do you mean?” said Malvina, suddenly angry. “How can you say that? Why won't it be for much longer?”

“Because after a while the press will lose interest.”

“Never mind about the press. What about
you
? What are
you
going to do? What are you going to do about me?
That's
the question, isn't it? Not the fucking newspapers.”

“Yes,” he said, sighing deeply, and beginning to get a sense for the first time of what she was talking about. “Yes, you're right. That is the question.”

He fell gloomily silent, then. It was not even that he was lost for words: he was lost for thoughts. All at once he was quite anchorless, adrift, with no idea at all of what he was supposed to be thinking or feeling.

“I can't have an affair with you,” said Malvina, when it began to seem that he was never going to speak again. “I can't handle it. I don't want to hurt Susan, for one thing, or your daughter. And I can't walk on eggshells all the time, never knowing when I'm allowed to phone you, never knowing when I'm going to see you next. That doesn't seem to bother you. You almost seem to thrive on it. But . . . we can't spend the rest of our lives meeting up in country churchyards, with you looking over your shoulder every five minutes to see if there's a photographer behind you, or checking your mobile to see if Susan's called.” Her voice was shrill with exasperation. “Can we?”

“No, I told you—I told you in an email, this is just a phase, until things quieten down, until they . . . sort themselves out.”

“But they're not going to sort
themselves
out, Paul.
You
have to sort them out.” In a different voice—quieter and sadder—she added, “I know that's asking a lot. And it's not me that's doing the asking, actually. You're asking it of yourself, if you think about it. All I'm saying is, it's got to the point where we have to make a choice.”

“Between?”

“Between being friends, and being lovers.”

Of course, it was just what he had been expecting to hear. But the starkness of the phrase rocked him, even so.

“Ah,” was all he managed to say, at first.

But then it started to dawn on him that the choice was not so brutal after all. What did “friendship” mean, anyway? Friendship was what they had already. An unusually intense, passionate friendship, certainly, but that was the best thing about it: that was what made it so new and exciting for him. So they hadn't slept together: well, they could congratulate themselves on that, on their self-control. He and Malvina were doing something radical, actually—what they were experimenting with was a
new kind
of friendship, and one which (he was only dimly starting to intuit this) happened to satisfy his emotional needs rather well, when placed into the context of his secure marriage and family life. He saw no need to rock any boats, for the time being. What he had with Malvina was enough. And perhaps, even, as the friendship evolved, they would find a way of adding a sexual dimension, they would feel ready for it, after a while . . . Anything was possible. Anything was possible as long as they kept seeing each other, and took things slowly.