The Closed Circle (22 page)

Benjamin looked at her intently. “By her, I take it you mean—”

Claire nodded. “Cicely.”

There was another long silence, as her name—the forbidden, never-to-be-spoken name—hung in the air between them. Finally, Benjamin enunciated one word, with great emphasis and feeling.

“Bollocks.”

“It's not bollocks,” said Claire, “actually. And you know it isn't.”

“Of course it's bollocks,” Benjamin counter-argued. “We're talking about something that happened when we were at
school,
for Christ's sake.”

“Exactly. And you're still not over it. You're still not fucking over it! And what's more, Emily knows that, and she's known it all your married life, and it's probably torn her apart in that time.”

And she told him what she had noticed at the concert, about the change that had come over him when he sat at his keyboard and played the opening bars of
Seascape No. 4
, how a different look had come into his eyes, remote, unseeing, an intensity of gaze directed not at anything in the room but into his own self, into the past, and how the look in Emily's eyes had changed with that music, too, how she had stared at Benjamin for a moment and then down at the ground, all her enjoyment in his performance, all her pride, suddenly evaporating, leaving her bereft, her eyes hollow with loneliness and regret.

“And incidentally,” Claire added, “whatever happened between you and that woman?”

“Woman? What woman?”

“The one you were with when I saw you at the café. The one you introduced to me as your ‘friend.'”

“Malvina? What about her?”

“Well, you seemed pretty intimate with her, I thought. And she had a touch of the Cicelys about her, I couldn't help noticing.”

“What are you talking about?” Benjamin was incredulous. “She's got black hair!”

They lapsed into silence for a few seconds, both trying to regain some poise.

“I wasn't . . . criticizing you or anything,” Claire began, apologetically.

Benjamin muttered: “Nothing came of it,” and there was no mistaking the ruefulness in his voice. To him, this transient friendship was still one of the defining emotional events of his recent life.

“So what did happen? Did you stop seeing her?”

“Not just that. She started having an affair with Paul.”

Claire winced and shook her head. “That's rough.”

“I know,” said Benjamin, drinking again, consciously allowing his self-pity to be fuelled by the wine.

“No,” said Claire. “I mean—that's rough on
her
. Jesus, that's not something I'd wish on my worst enemy.” She paused, and then made a decisive pronouncement: “You need to say something to Emily about this.”

“About Malvina? What's the point? It was nothing. I haven't seen her for ages.”

“Not about that, necessarily. About why it started. What made you do it. I mean, clearly you have some need, some emotional need, that Emily isn't satisfying at the moment and that's . . . well, that's something you should talk about, isn't it? Because she probably feels the same way anyway. Will she be awake when you get home tonight?”

“Probably. She usually sits up and reads.”

“Well then, promise me this, Ben. Promise me that when you get home tonight, before you go to sleep, you just say to her, ‘Emily, we have to talk soon.' That's all it takes. Do you think you can do that?”

Benjamin shrugged. “I suppose so.”

“Promise me you'll do it?”

“Yes, I promise.”

And after that, they talked about other things. About Claire's decision to go freelance as a technical translator, what a relief it had been to get out of that student house in London, and how there was more call for business Italian in the Worcester and Malvern area than you would imagine. About how, in any case, most of her work could be done over the internet now, so that the contacts she'd made in London and Lucca were still useful to her, and she was already making more than enough to cover her tiny mortgage payments: which meant that she still felt a little precarious now and again, and sometimes woke up in the middle of the night having the odd panic attack, but things were all right really. And they talked about her son Patrick. How quiet he was, how introverted. How Claire was starting to believe he was far more damaged by her divorce from Philip than she had ever imagined. How he talked incessantly, obsessively, about his aunt Miriam whom he had never met because she had disappeared in 1974, at the age of only twenty-one, never to be seen again, despite the best efforts (apparently) of the West Midlands police force. It was as if, Claire surmised, the separation of his parents had left him with some void, some obscure but bottomless void in himself, which he was trying to fill by seizing on this mythical, lost figure from recent history, and making her some kind of totem of everything that was absent from his own experience of family life. He collected photographs of her, pumped his mother for memories and anecdotes whenever they talked.

“How old is he now?” Benjamin asked.

“Seventeen. Takes his A-levels this year. Then he wants to do biology at university. I've no idea whether he'll get the grades.”

He caught the undertow of anxiety in her voice and said, “Don't worry. I'm sure he'll be all right.”

“I know,” said Claire, who was hardly likely to be reassured by anything that Benjamin said, on this or any other subject. They were standing by the gate to her little front garden, and it was getting on for midnight. An almost-full July moon hung in the sky. Benjamin looked at it and remembered, as he always remembered, that there had been a full moon that night, too, the night after he had made love to Cicely in his brother's bedroom. A yellow moon, like the yellow balloon of his childhood memory. He had sat out in the garden and looked at the moon and tried once again to savour his moment of perfect happiness and had already, in some obscure way (or was this just the wisdom of hindsight?), felt it slipping away from him. He had never seen Cicely since then, never once set eyes on her since she had left him sitting alone in The Grapevine with Sam Chase, after she had just spoken to her mother on the telephone and heard that there was a letter from America waiting for her, a letter from Helen. The next day he had phoned her mother himself and learned, incredibly, impossibly, that Cicely was already on a plane to New York. What could have been in the letter? He didn't know, preferred not to think about it, could not bring himself to remember anything more about that conversation with her mother, so that his last real memory of Cicely, relating to Cicely, was of the half-hour or so that he had spent sitting outside in his parents' garden, looking at the yellow moon, and ever since then he had measured his life in full moons, had never been able to look at a full moon without thinking of that night, and he now calculated, swiftly, without really having to think about it, that this was the 265th full moon since then. And he couldn't decide whether that made it feel like a long time, or no time at all, or both . . .

“Benjamin?” Claire was saying. “Are you OK?”

“Mm?”

“I seem to have lost you.”

“Sorry.” He became aware that they had been on the point of saying goodbye, and gave her another of those brief, botched kisses.

“Good boy,” she said. “Now have a lovely time in Normandy. It might be just what you both need. It might work wonders.”

Benjamin was unconvinced. “Maybe,” he said. “But I don't think so.”

“Go to Etretat,” said Claire.

“Where?”

“It's on the coast, next to Le Havre. There are these fantastic cliffs. I was there two winters ago: just before I came back home. It was bloody freezing, but the view is something else. I stood there for hours, high on the chalk . . .” She tailed off, remembering. “Well. It's just a suggestion.”

“All right. We will.”

“And don't forget—don't forget what I told you. What you've got to say to her.”

“Yes, I remember,” said Benjamin. “‘Cut and blow dry, please.' ”

Claire assumed he was joking, at first. Then sighed when she realized that he wasn't, and decided that there was no point in putting him right.

“Do you ever wonder why I bother with you, Ben?” she asked. “I do, sometimes.”

There was no answer to that, of course. But even Benjamin had noticed, and been touched by, the self-mocking sincerity with which Claire had said it, and a few minutes later, as he drove away from Malvern, towards the midnight lamps of the M5, he experienced a small epiphany. He tuned the car stereo to Radio 3, and recognized the music they were playing: it was the “Cantique des Vierges” from Arthur Honegger's oratorio
Judith.
Of all the useless gifts with which life had lumbered him, none was more useless, he sometimes thought, than his ability to identify almost any snatch of music by a minor twentieth-century composer, and yet he was glad, on this occasion, because he realized that he hadn't listened to his ancient cassette of this work for ten years at least, and although most of it was pretty unmemorable, this passage had once been one of his favourites, something he would turn to when he felt that he needed consolation, which the ethereal simplicity of its gossamer, child-like melody never failed to afford him. And now, looking into his passenger wing-mirror and seeing the yellow moon reflected, and beneath it the lights of Malvern (one of them, he knew, the light from Claire's sitting-room window), and hearing this tune, again, this tune which had once been so familiar and important to him, he felt a glow of pleasure, of comfort, at the thought that he and Claire remained friends even after two decades. But there was more than that: for at this moment he admitted to himself, for the very first time, that there had always been a desire on Claire's part for something bigger than friendship, a prospect which must have scared him, before now, else why would he have denied it for so long, suppressed the knowledge so ruthlessly? But tonight, suddenly, he didn't feel scared by it. Nor did he want to turn the car around, drive back towards Malvern, and spend the night with her. The feeling which came over him wasn't as simple as that. It was merely that the combination of Honegger's limpid melody and the yellow moon which was so much an emblem of his most primal wishes seemed tonight to take on the aspect of a sign: a pointer towards his own future—at the centre of which, distant but ever-present, ever-dependable—was the gleaming lamplight from Claire's cottage. As the radiant certainty of this swept over him, Benjamin found himself shivering, and having to pull over to the side of the road to brush hot tears away from his eyes.

He sat by the roadside until the music had finished, breathing deeply, before swinging out again on to the carriageway and resuming his northbound journey; back to the city, the house, the bedroom where Emily would be sitting up, yawning over an unread novel; her whole being—every look, every movement—a lexicon of unspecified reproach.

9

18 July, 2001
Etretat

Dearest Andrew,

I promised you a postcard from Normandy. Well—lucky you, you are going
to get rather more than that. I'm booked home on a ferry which doesn't leave for
another two days and quite frankly I have had enough of driving around the
countryside looking at monasteries and cathedrals so I am just going to sit in the
hotel until then, and try to think things through, and calm myself down. I've got
a lot of
stuff to sort out in my head, but don't worry about me: I'm fine. Whatever
else happens—and I know there's going to be a lot of pain to get through in the
next few days and weeks, a lot of “difficulty” as my beloved counsellor would call
it—I've come to a decision and I'm going to stick to it.

And in case you're wondering why the whole of that paragraph was written
in the first person singular, the answer is easy: I'm here by myself. Benjamin has
gone. He went yesterday. I think he's gone to Paris, but I'm not sure about that
and to be perfectly honest I couldn't care less. He's turned off his mobile and that
suits me fine as well. I'm cross with myself for trying to ring it yesterday, in fact.
What would we say to each other anyway? I have nothing to say to him at the
moment. Absolutely nothing at all.

Our marriage is over.

Meanwhile—let me tell you a little bit about the holiday from hell.

Perhaps “hell” is putting it a bit strongly—as far as the first ten days were
concerned, anyway. “Purgatory” probably gets it about right, though. Then again,
the whole of the last year has been a kind of purgatory for me—longer than that,
even. I suppose the pain has just been building up and intensifying to the point
where it became unbearable. Unbearable for me, at any rate. Sometimes I wonder
whether Benjamin ever feels any pain: real pain, I mean. No, that's not true—he
has felt it, in the past, I know he has, because of what he told me, years and years
ago, when we were still at school, about the thing that happened to Lois and how
he helped her to recover from it. I don't doubt that he su fered over that, that he
shared her su fering, very deeply. Every week, he used to visit her, I remember,
without fail, and that must have marked him. So he can feel things deeply, he is
just good at masking it: he has a lot of self-control, Benjamin—a very British
quality, some people might say, and probably one of the things that drew me to him
in the first place. (Benjamin thinks that our whole relationship is based on religion
but it's not, that's just nonsense, it's a convenient story he likes to tell to himself to
explain why things have gone wrong.) But anyway, something has changed about
Benjamin, since that day down by the canalside, when he told me the story of Lois
and Malcolm. (You remember me telling you about that? God, I feel I have told
you my whole life story—and the life stories of practically everyone I know—
during the last year or two, and you have been so patient, listening to every word.
You are such a good listener, dear Andrew. There aren't many of them around!)
It's as if something has frozen him in time, so that he's stuck at one particular
moment and he can't move on, he can't shift himself. I even think I know what did
it—or who did it, more to the point—but that can wait for another time.

Now, if this was one of my emails (and how many emails have I written to
you in the last eighteen months or so? My guess is more than a hundred) I would
delete most of what I've written so far and try to focus on what I wanted to tell
you. The crux of the story. But instead I have gone back to the steam age of pen
and ink and it constrains me to do my thinking on paper—which I have to say
feels more like a luxury than a constraint. Writing this is probably good therapy
for me—that's what I mean to say. I could always call you on the telephone after
all; and we're bound to see each other in a few days' time, aren't we? So I don't
even need to post this, really. But I'm pretty sure that I will.

So: my final week in purgatory, by Emily Trotter. Or Emily Sandys, as it
looks like I shall soon be calling myself again. Where to begin?

The first ten days, as I said, were bearable at least. I can't tell you much about
them because they all start to blur into one. Car journey followed by sightseeing
followed by car journey followed by lunch followed by car journey followed by walk
followed by car journey followed by check into hotel followed by dinner, and so on
and so on and so—endlessly!—on. I think it was all the driving I hated the most
because the roads here are pretty quiet and straight and there is something
uniquely desolate (you've never been married so you wouldn't know this) about the
knowledge that you're turning into one of those middle-aged married couples you
always swore you wouldn't turn into, driving for hours side by side, eyes fixed on
the road, without a word to say to each other. “Ooh look—cows,” I would almost
find myself shouting out, just to break the ghastly silence. I mean, it wasn't quite
as bad as that, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, we did Rouen, we did Bayeux, we did Honfleur, we did Mont-St-Michel and along the way we had it up to here with bouillabaisse and brandade de
morue and chateaubriand
.
Not to mention vin rouge because it became increasingly obvious as the week went on that it was only the prospect of getting drunk as
a skunk every night that was stopping us both from giving it all up as a bad job
and going home. Or strangling each other, for that matter. And all the time—this
was what made it all so incredibly tiring, for me—I was trying my hardest to jolly
things along in my jolly, Emily-ish sort of way. I suppose I've spent most of the last
eighteen years trying to do that, one way or another, and where Benjamin's concerned it's bloody hard work at the best of times. Well, these aren't the best of
times. In fact the last twelve months have been the worst of times, and here it was
just the same. Those long, miserable silences of his. Eyes fixed on the middle distance, thoughts fixed on . . . what? I don't have the faintest idea—even now, even
after eighteen years of marriage! Every so often I would find myself asking, desperately, “Are you depressed about something?” To which he would inevitably
reply, “Not really.” And I would ignore that and say, “Is it your book?,” and then
more often than not that would make him fly off the handle and start shouting,
“Of course it's not my book!,” and so it would go on . . .

I'll tell you what made me so angry this time. It was the realization that it
was only towards me that he ever behaves like this. If you see him with his other
friends—like Philip Chase, or Doug and Frankie—he suddenly comes to life,
suddenly seems to remember, for some reason, how to be funny and how to be sociable and how to have a conversation
.
Just in the last few weeks, that's really started
to annoy me. As a small illustration of this—why am I in Etretat at all? Because
Benjamin wanted to come here. And why did he want to come here? Because
Claire told him all about it, when he went for a cosy little tête à tête with her a
few weeks ago; from which he returned at about one in the morning, the worse for
drink, and looking all pleased with himself. Now Claire is my friend, as much as
his. More than his, in a way. Did he invite me along? No. And they must have
talked for about five hours. When was the last time he talked to me for five
hours—or one hour—or five minutes? It's things like this that have made me
realize that a lot of the time I don't even seem to exist for Benjamin any more. I
don't even make it on to his radar.

Maybe this sounds petty to you. But when it's been going on for months, when
it's been going on for years, it stops being petty. It becomes huge—the biggest thing
in your life. (And it's got nothing to do with whether he believes in God or not,
whatever he likes to say.) And the day before yesterday, I suppose it just got too big
for me to handle.

This was what sparked it off.

Ironically, it had probably been the best day of the holiday so far. Or at least,
for me it had: until I realized I'd been deluding myself. We'd had lunch in Le Bec-Hellouin, which was nice enough (actually more than that—the apple tart was to
die for), and then we'd driven up to St. Wandrille, which is a beautiful little village in the Seine valley, with a famous old tenth-century Benedictine monastery.
We parked the car in the village and had a long walk up the river—about three
hours altogether, I should think. And half way through the walk we found this
simply magical-looking old building. It was some kind of old farm outbuilding, but
the rest of the farm seemed to have gone ages ago, and it was standing by itself
only about twenty yards from the banks of the river. It was almost completely
derelict and frankly looked a little bit dangerous, but still, we poked our heads
through the windows and then found that the door wasn't locked or anything, so
we stepped inside and had a little look around. It was full of weeds and stinging
nettles but you could still get a sense of what it might be like if someone came along
and did it up. I looked at Benjamin and could have sworn that he was thinking the
same thing. We'd always talked (or had until recently) about getting a place in
France or Italy, escaping from the big city, somewhere he could find peace and
quiet and at last get this wretched book of his finished. And although this building
was an absolute ruin, you could tell that once it had been restored, it would be
simply perfect. We even talked about where the dining room would go, and where
he could put all his computers and recording equipment and that kind of
stuff. It
was a proper conversation, for once. And afterwards, when we walked away from
it, back down the river towards St. Wandrille, we looked back at the house (I'd
started to think of it as a house), and the sun was just sinking behind the roof, and
the water looked all cool and glimmery in the twilight, and it just looked the most
wonderful and romantic place, and I took Benjamin's hand and then—a real
miracle, for a change—he held on to me for a good five or ten minutes, before he
sort of let my hand slip and drifted off on a path of his own. (He always does that.)

It was about eight o'clock when we got back to the village, too late to have a
look around the monastery except from the outside. Benjamin was all excited
because he'd read in one of the guide books that you could go on retreats there, but
the office was all closed up and there was no one he could ask about it. But we were
still in time for Complies, at nine o'clock. I didn't think Benjamin would want to
come with me, because as you know he hasn't been anywhere near a church for
more than a year, but much to my surprise he was up for it. Maybe (this is what I
thought at the time) seeing that magical house and talking about maybe trying to
find out who owned it and buying it and doing it up had made him feel closer to
me, at last.

Anyway, we went inside the chapel and took our seats. It's a beautiful chapel, I
have to say, converted from an old tithe barn, with a fabulous beamed ceiling and
everything arranged with absolute simplicity. There was no artificial lighting of
any sort and although it was still quite bright outside, the chapel itself was full of
shadows now, with just the palest, goldest, reddest traces of sunshine glowing
around the windows. (No stained glass here.) There were about thirty of us in the
congregation and after we had all been sitting there for about ten minutes the
monks filed in. They were totally absorbed in the ritual, totally intent, didn't seem
to register that we were there at all. Perhaps that was just my impression. Their
cowls were grey and the hoods were up so you couldn't see their faces most of the
time. There were probably more than twenty of them. When you did see their faces
they looked somehow both very serious and very cheerful at the same time. And
they had the most wonderful voices. When they started chanting, these long, beautiful lines of melody just seemed to flow out of them, rising and falling, almost as if
they were improvising until you listened closely and realized there was a wonderful
logic to it. It was the most restful and most spiritual and the purest-sounding
music I think I've ever heard. Benjamin said afterwards that it made even Bach
and Palestrina sound decadent! I took away a leaflet with some of the words on it
and this was one of the hymns they sung. (They sung it in Latin, of course.)