The Closed Circle (20 page)

“Well then,” he said. “It has to be friendship. If that's all we can have, then . . . that's what it has to be.”

The words did not sound as triumphant, spoken out loud, as he had hoped they would. And they did not have the expected effect on Malvina. He felt a force-field go up around her, a protective wall of energy. Her whole body tightened. She didn't move, but it seemed as though a physical distance had immediately opened up between them.

Her voice cracked as she said, after what felt like aeons: “Then why did you say those things to me? The night before you went to Skagen? What was the point?”

“I . . . had to,” Paul answered, helplessly. “It was what I was feeling. It was the truth. I couldn't keep it inside me any longer.”

“I see.”

She stood up, and walked slowly to the other side of the churchyard. She stood there for some time, with her back towards him, looking out over the parched and baking fields. She was wearing a pale blue, sleeveless summer dress and once again Paul was struck by the
thin
ness of her, the startling weightlessness of her bones, her terrible fragility. For an instant he felt as fatherly and protective towards her as he had ever felt towards Antonia. And in the same instant he remembered, with a rush of guilt, that he had had a ludicrous fantasy in the car on the way over, which had involved bringing her to some secluded churchyard just like this and making exalted love somewhere among the gravestones. It didn't seem very likely, on the whole, that this was now going to happen. He wondered if he should go over and put an arm around her, say something to her. But now she was blowing her nose, and turning, and coming back to him. She sat beside him on the bench and sniffed a few more times. The sun passed behind a tall yew tree which folded them both in cooling shade.

At last she was able to say:

“OK, then. Friendship it is. But there's something you have to understand.”

“What's that?”

She swallowed and announced: “We can't see each other any more.”

These words, when he first heard them, made literally no sense to Paul. He wondered if she had simply spoken them by mistake.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that we cannot have a friendship—a successful, normal friendship—until these feelings have gone away. Not until we've got each other out of our systems.”

Paul's stomach was churning now. He could feel himself starting to panic. “But—how long is that supposed to take?”

“How should I know?” said Malvina, rubbing her eyes and exposing their bloodshot rims. “I can't speak for you. A long time. A hell of a long time.” She looked away, and twirled a strand of hair around one finger. In the sunlight it didn't look so black any more: it was auburn, almost. “Anyway, I'm the one who's in deepest, here. Deny that if you like, but it's true. So it has to be me who decides when we get back in touch. When I feel ready to be friends with you again. I don't want you contacting me in the meantime. I can't cope with that.”

Still bewildered at the speed with which this was happening, Paul asked: “Are we talking . . . weeks? Months?”

“I don't know. As I said: I think it'll be a long time.”

“But—” Now it was his turn to get up and start pacing between the crooked gravestones. “But this is crazy. Not long ago we were—”

“No. It isn't crazy. The way we've been trying to live the last few weeks is crazy. Think about it, Paul. I'm right. It's horrible, but I know I'm right.”

He did think about it. And they talked about it, too, for much longer, the conversation never going anywhere now, turning round upon itself in endless loops, oscillating and repeating itself, always coming back, in the end, to the central fact of Malvina's proposal, which even to Paul seemed to have taken on a dreadful, unarguable necessity. So that finally, browbeaten into a kind of paralysis, he could only sit forward on the bench with his head in his hands and repeat the same exhausted phrase:

“I can't believe we're going to do this. I can't believe we're really doing it.”

“Neither can I, to be honest,” Malvina said. “But there you go.”

“I just think . . . there
has
to be some other route we could go down, some other—”

“Paul, listen to me.” She looked him directly in the eye. “When it comes to a situation like this,
there is no third way.
Do you understand? Do you get it? Stop trying to convince yourself that there is.” She stood up, and he could see that her eyes were glistening with tears again. “Right,” she said, her voice shaking. “Walk back to the car now?”

They walked back up the hill in near-silence. At first they held hands. Then Paul put his arm around Malvina and she leaned into him. They walked like that for five or ten minutes; it was the closest they had ever come to physical intimacy. Then Malvina detached herself, and for the last few hundred yards she strode on ahead. She was waiting for Paul at the gate beside the car.

“I'm going to have a look at the stones,” she said. “Do you want to say goodbye now?”

“No, I'll come with you,” said Paul, and followed her through the gate.

There was nobody else there anyway. Despite the windlessness of the afternoon, it was not completely silent, for the stones were sited next to a main road, and every few seconds a car would speed past. None the less, as soon as they stepped inside the circle, they were both newly conscious of a great stillness; derived from nothing more, perhaps, than a sense that they had found themselves in a very ancient space, created for some sacred but now unfathomable purpose.

They stood very close to one another, not talking, not moving.

“I have been here before,” Malvina said at last. She wandered a few steps away from him. “My mother brought me here. I don't know what we were doing in this part of the world. She'd just split up from her husband; her first husband. He was Greek, he had nothing to do with this area, I can't explain it. Anyway: I remember it now, very clearly. My mother was weeping. She was doing this terrible histrionic weeping, clinging on to me, telling me what a dreadful person she was and how she was ruining my life. I must have been . . . six, maybe? Seven? No—six. That's right. I can still remember this couple staring at us, this middle-aged couple, staring at us and wondering what the hell was going on. The woman was wearing a green headscarf. It was winter.” She looked around her at the corroded, misshapen stones, as if she hadn't noticed them before. “Funny to be here again.”

Impulsively, Paul said: “Malvina, I don't know what's going to happen between me and Susan. I don't even know if we're going to survive this. Some time in the future, if I come looking for you . . .”

She smiled. “Well, of course you can do that. But I don't know where I'll be.”

“You'll stay in London, won't you?”

“I meant where I'll be emotionally. Somewhere else, I hope. Somewhere new.” Kindly now, she added: “Paul—you had a choice to make, and you made it. That's the important thing. Well done. Now go. I'll make my own way back to the station.”

“Don't be silly—it's not safe.”

“It's a beautiful afternoon. I'll walk. Let's get this over with.”

He could see that she was determined, even on this point.

Then Malvina took his hands and drew him towards her.

“Come on, then,” she said. “
Ae fond kiss,
as Robbie Burns would put it.”

But they didn't kiss, even now. They merely held each other, and Paul breathed in the scent of her hair, the warmth of her skull, and that perfume whose name he still didn't know, and the uncanny stillness of the circle reminded him of Skagen, with its unbroken silences, and he realized that he was being offered another of those moments that would never end, that would always be with him. He clung on to it fiercely, willing himself into a sense of timelessness. But he could feel Malvina pushing, pushing him gently away from her. And at last he released her and broke away.

Paul looked back only one more time as he made for the gate. It occurred to him, in a spasm of despair, that this might be his last ever sight of Malvina. Standing with her back towards him again, looking out over the fields, alone, in a pale blue summer dress, at the center of the circle; the circle of stones which watched over her, closed in on her, like the demons she had been fleeing all her life and whose nature he had never, he now realized, even begun to understand.

He turned on his heels and walked back towards the car.

He was still in a state of shock when he arrived back at the flat in Kennington. He drank the last two-thirds of a bottle of whisky and then every other drop of alcohol he could find in the kitchen. At ten o'clock he passed out on his sofa, fully clothed. He woke up again at three in the morning, with a raging thirst and an aching bladder. His head throbbed like the thumb of a cartoon character after it has been caught in a mousetrap. He wanted to be sick. Then he realized what had woken him up, and he almost shouted for joy. It was the double beep of a text message on his mobile phone. She had contacted him again. Of course she had. She couldn't go through with it, any more than he could. It was all a terrible mistake and in the morning they would see each other again. He opened the message and found that his service provider was telling him he had won a £1000 prize draw. He would have to dial a special number to claim his prize and calls were charged at 50p a minute.

13

Paul's resolve held firm. He was never quite sure if Malvina was doing this to punish him, or whether it was truly the only course she felt they could take, if she was to survive with her sanity and her sense of self intact. Either way, he respected her wishes, and made no attempt to contact her. The days without her were long and agonizing. He checked his answering machine messages obsessively, his emails every few minutes. Nothing came.

In time the days came to seem shorter, and the agony came to be less.

He acted swiftly to stop the gossip about his private life, and on June 1st, 2000 issued a statement to the press: delivered, as tradition demanded, in front of his family home, with Antonia clutching at his knees on the doorstep, and Susan standing beside him, smiling a tight, furious smile.

“After acting foolishly and wrongly,” he said, “I have made a strong decision to commit myself to my marriage, and my family . . .”

Malvina read these words in the newspaper the next day, while sitting in her college library. Feeling sick, she hurried to the toilets, but collapsed on the way and had to be taken by the assistant librarian to his office, and revived with a glass of water.

Just over a year later, in the early hours of June 8th, 2001, she was watching the television coverage of the general election results when the cameras went live to Paul's constituency. He had been re-elected, with a slightly reduced majority. His beaming, gratified face filled the screen for a moment, and Susan, who was standing by his side, leaned in to kiss his cheek in close up. The sound faded as he stepped forward to make his victory speech, and his voice was drowned out by that of the TV pundit, commenting on the strength of the challenge Paul had faced from the Liberal Democrats. The camera pulled out for a long shot, and Malvina noticed that Susan was not only clasping Antonia's hand in the background, but cradling a baby— probably another girl, judging from her pink sleep-suit—who seemed to be little more than two or three months old. So that was how they had resolved it, then. Why not? Who could say how other people's relationships worked? A phrase came to her, suddenly, out of nowhere:
You've been dead a long
time . . .
It was from a song, maybe, a song she'd heard some time last year, when she'd still been working for Paul. That was how she felt; and saw no prospect of ever feeling any different. Fuck it. She wished them well, anyway: then decided she didn't want to watch any more, poured herself another Diet Coke from the fridge and started flicking between channels.

12

12 June, 2001

Dear Philip,

I don't know if you remember me, but we were at King William's School together
back in the 1970s. All seems like a very long time ago now!

I'm writing to you out of the blue like this because sometimes I get to see the
Birmingham Post
and I like your journalism.

I live in Telford now—with my wife Kate and two daughters, Allison and
Diane—and work in the R&D department of a local firm specializing in plastics.
(I never did get anywhere with physics, after messing up that exam. Ended up
doing chemistry at Manchester. Polymers are my thing, these days, if that means
anything to you. It probably doesn't.) We've been here for just over nine years and
we're doing fine.

Telford has been in the news a bit lately. I'm sure you know all about the
Errol McGowan case, which has been in a lot of the national papers. Errol was a
doorman at the Charlton Arms hotel and pub. He fell out with a white guy who
had been barred from the pub and started getting a lot of racial abuse—through
the post, on the telephone. Anonymous
stuff. It started to turn really nasty and
Errol became convinced he was on some kind of Combat 18 death list. In the end it
gave him a kind of nervous breakdown and just over two years ago he was found
dead in somebody else's house, hanging from a door knob. He was thirty-four.

The police decided straight away that it was suicide and basically weren't
interested in hearing any other explanation. Not even when his nephew, Jason,
was found hanging from railings outside another pub six months later! People
were pretty angry about this and eventually there was an inquest. It happened last
month and you probably read about it. The coroner decided it was suicide again.
The police admitted Errol had contacted them about the death threats but they
hadn't done anything about it.

I'm writing to you because I've been sent a few things in the post here myself
in recent weeks. Two letters, and a CD—a really horrible CD, which I only put on
for about ten seconds. (And then only in the car, because I knew what it was going
to be like and I didn't want my family to hear it.)

I'm not scared about any of this. I just think there's a story here, which nobody
is telling. Sure, we live in a successful multicultural society. A tolerant society.
(Though what have I ever done, that people have to “tolerate” me?) But these
people are still out there. I know they're a minority. I know they're just jokers and
tossers, most of them. But look at what's been going on, the last few weeks, in
Bradford and Oldham. Race riots—proper race riots. Black and Asian people
being made the scapegoats, again, for something that has gone wrong in white
people's lives. So I'm thinking that maybe this “tolerance” is just a mask for something ugly and rotten which is going to flare up at any moment.

I won't go on. I expect journalists don't like people telling them what pieces
they should write. I just think it says something when people like me aren't allowed
to get on with their lives peacefully. Even now—in the twenty-first century! In
Blair's Brave New Britain.

Ah well. Get in touch if you can, if only for old times' sake.

All the best,

Steve (Richards). (Astell House, 1971–79)

Two days later, at around seven o'clock in the evening, Philip drove out to Telford. Traffic on the northbound M6 was dreadful, as always—there always seemed to be at least one lane coned off to make way for non-existent roadworks—and it was after eight by the time he parked at the bottom of Steve's drive. The houses here were even newer than most of the houses in Telford: this was a New Town, after all, one of the great experiments of the 1960s, but the estate where Steve lived must have been finished only two or three years ago. The houses were spacious, comfortable-looking, neo-Georgian. Fiats and Rovers and sometimes BMWs were parked in the driveways. It did not feel soulless, exactly: just placid, and somehow unambitious, and very, very quiet. Philip could imagine that it wasn't such a bad place to live. It just felt odd, to him (and had always felt odd, ever since he had come to know this part of the world as a boy, visiting his grandparents) that this militantly new, characterless town had so recently arrived, unannounced, without preamble, without
history,
and simply dumped itself into the middle of one of the oldest and least-known, most mysterious and recondite counties in the whole of England. It didn't belong there, and it never would. It was a breeding ground for displacement and alienation.

But Steve, it had to be said, looked neither displaced nor alienated when he opened the door with a broad smile and beckoned Philip inside. He was greying around the temples, and he wore glasses now, but the smile had not changed, and there was a youthfulness, a boyish delight about the way he tugged Philip into the living room to introduce him to his two daughters, who turned the television off without complaint and seemed genuinely intrigued by the appearance of this unassuming phantom from their father's past.

“The girls have already eaten,” Steve explained. “It's no good trying to get them to wait. Come on now, you two, get upstairs. No more telly till your homework's done. You can come down and have something to drink with us after.”

“Wine?” asked Allison, the elder of the two, who looked to be about fourteen.

“Maybe,” said Steve. “Depends how good you've been.”

“Brilliant.”

They both ran upstairs; after which, Steve took Philip through into the kitchen, to meet his wife, and to eat.

Kate had baked two pizzas—hot ones, with ground beef and chilli peppers—and dressed a crisp green salad of watercress and rocket leaves. From a wine rack under the stairs Steve chose a rich and velvety Chilean Merlot, although Philip had to switch over regretfully to mineral water after only one small glass.

“Now, Kate is going to find this really boring,” Steve said, throwing her an apologetic glance, “but I have to ask you—are you still in touch with any of those guys from school?”

“One or two of them,” said Philip. “Claire Newman, for instance— remember her?”

“Yeah, I remember. Nice girl. She used to work on the magazine with you.”

“That's right. Well, I married her, a few years after we left school.”

“You did? That's fantastic! Congratulations.”

“OK, but don't get too excited. Then we got divorced.”

“Oh.”

“It's all right. Everything worked out fine. It was just one of those . . . bad decisions. We've got a son called Patrick. He lives with me and my second wife, Carol, for various complicated reasons. Claire was in Italy for quite a few years but just recently she's moved to Malvern, so maybe we'll see a bit more of each other now. We were talking about having a few days in London together soon, going down with Patrick.”

“All sounds very grown-up and liberal to me,” said Steve. “Not sure I could handle that.”

Teasingly, Kate said: “Steve's getting more and more conservative in his old age. I've been trying to persuade him to have an open marriage for years, but he won't listen.”

He laughed this away. “But what about Benjamin? Did you ever hear what happened to Benjamin? I mean, I know this sounds crazy, but every so often I go into a bookshop, into WH Smith or something, and I go and look at the ‘T's in the paperback section, 'cause I'm still expecting something by him to pop up there any minute. I mean, we all thought he would have won the Nobel Prize or something by now.”

“Oh, I'm still in touch with Ben. See him every couple of weeks, actually. He's still in Birmingham. Works for a company called Morley Jackson Gray.”

Steve speared some rocket and said, “Sounds like a firm of accountants.”

“That's exactly what it is.”

“He became an
accountant
?”

“Well, T. S. Eliot worked in a bank, didn't he? I dare say that's the kind of precedent that goes through Benjamin's mind.”

“I remember now,” Steve said. “Benjamin worked for a bank, didn't he? Just for a few months, before he went up to university.”

“That's right. And then . . . Well, after he graduated, he'd just started this novel, and he wanted to get it finished, so he didn't want to get a proper job at first. The bank said they'd take him back for a few months, and that must have sounded like the ideal way to buy himself a bit more time for writing. But—I don't know, the novel never quite seemed to get finished, and meanwhile he got friendly with this other bloke from the bank and they formed a band—you know how Benjamin always used to write music, as well—and that started to take up more and more time, and somehow in the middle of all this, he must have got some kind of taste for all that number-crunching, because the next thing I hear, he's doing his accountancy exams and saying that the novel's gone on hold and he needs a long period of stability to get his head around it.” Philip took a sip of water and added: “And then, of course, he goes and marries Emily.”

“Who?”

“Emily Sandys. From school. Don't you remember? From the Christian Society.”

Steve shook his head. “Not my scene, really. I always assumed he was going to marry . . . you know . . . Cicely.”

His voice dropped as he spoke this name: leading Phil to wonder whether, even now, Steve still suffered from some sort of sexual guilt about the time he and Cicely had been in the school production of
Othello
together, and afterwards had had a quick fling (though fling was too strong a word for it—nothing more than a teenage grope, really, at the after-show party) which had led to the break-up of his first serious relationship. It never ceased to surprise Philip that even after two decades there were some people who could not pronounce that name without it producing a kind of
frisson:
Benjamin was one of them, obviously, but so was Claire, for some reason, and now (apparently) Steve as well. How could anyone have left such a legacy behind her, such a trail of energy, generated so unthinkingly and in such a short time?

“No one really knows what happened to Cicely,” he said, guardedly. “She went back to America and kind of . . . left Benjamin in the lurch. Took him a long time to recover from it.”

“
Has
he recovered from it?” Steve asked, after a pause.

Philip mopped up some salad dressing from his plate with a scrap of bread, and said: “Benjamin told me once—I don't know if this is true or not—that she went back to America to be with this woman Helen, and they became . . . you know . . . lovers.”

Steve's eyes widened. “
Cicely?
A dyke?”

“As I said, I don't know if it's true or not.”

Kate stood up and began to clear the plates away.

“Maybe we should change the subject,” Steve said, when she was over by the sink, out of earshot. “But there's one more thing: what happened to Benjamin's sister? The one with the boyfriend who died in the pub bombings.”

Now it was Philip's turn to look suddenly wistful.

“Yeah . . . Lois . . . Well, Benjamin doesn't talk about her much. Doesn't see her much either, I don't think. As far as I know she lives up north somewhere—York or something. I think she was ill, for quite a long time, after that happened. And then she met this guy and sort of . . . threw herself into it. Got married, had a daughter . . . Can't remember her name now.”

“Did Benjamin have kids?”

“No. They couldn't. I don't know why. Don't think they do either.” Philip was remembering, now, the last time he had actually spoken to Lois. “There was this dinner party,” he said, reminiscing aloud, while Steve frowned, doing his best to follow the rambling train of thought. “And Lois was wearing this dress. She could only have been about sixteen. I fancied her something rotten. We had this terrible food—God, can you remember what we used to
eat
back in the seventies . . . ?”

“I know.” Steve laughed, and gestured at the debris on the table. “We're all such sophisticates now.”

“. . . And that was the night . . . I suppose that was the night I got my first clue, that my mum was thinking of starting an affair with Mr. Plumb— Sugar Plum Fairy: d'you remember him?”

“I certainly do. The horny old sod.”

Philip smiled, and shook his head. “My parents nearly broke up over that. Can you imagine? It did my head in, for a while.” Steve offered to pour some more wine, and he pushed his glass forward, not caring, for a moment, that he had a long drive ahead of him later that night. “Thanks.”

“He and your mum, though: they never . . .
did
anything, did they?”

“Depends what you mean,” said Philip, swirling the wine around in his glass. “She died five years ago, and afterwards, I cleared out some of her old stuff. Dad didn't want to do it. And there were all these letters. Letters he'd written to her. They were very passionate—even if you did need a bloody dictionary to understand them. And she hung on to them, all that time. I don't know what to make of that. Don't know what it tells me . . .”

“She stayed with your dad all that time, as well,” Steve reminded him. And when Philip didn't respond, he asked: “Is he coping OK—with being on his own?”

“Well . . .” Philip smiled again; a private smile this time. “He's a great reader, that's the thing you have to remember about my dad. Always has his nose in a book. His eyesight's going, but he still reads. Every day. Novels, history—anything he can get his hands on.”