The Closed Circle (23 page)

Before the day ends, we ask you
Creator of all things,
In your endless goodness,
Watch over us, guard us.

Keep far away from us
The dreams and nightmares of the night,
Enslave our enemies
So that nothing may sully the purity of our body.
Exalt us, all-powerful Father,
Through Jesus Christ our Master,
Who reigns for ever, with You,
And with the Holy Spirit. Amen.

And all the while they were singing this I could feel Benjamin leaning in even
closer, and when the service was over and we left the chapel in the dusk, we held
hands again as we walked back to the car. And I was sure that everything was
going to be all right.

So, we got back to the hotel—this hotel, the one that Claire recommended—
and went down to dinner, and while we were waiting for the first course to come I
looked at Benjamin and I could see that his face was transformed since the morning.
There was a light in his eyes now, some sort of sparkle of hope, and I realized then
how dull his eyes had been looking for months, how dim and lifeless. I wondered
whether it was the service that had done it—whether it had done anything to rekindle his faith at all, because I can't believe that anyone could hear that singing
and not feel some kind of intimation, not catch some little glimpse of divinity behind it. But I didn't say anything about that. I just said something bland like, “Did
you enjoy yourself today?,” and that was all he needed. He started to open up at last.

“I'm sorry,” he said. “I've been so depressed lately.” And he said that for
months he hadn't been able to get any sense of the future, couldn't find anything to
look forward to. But today, he said, he'd seen something: something he knew he'd
never be able to have, but at least he knew it was real, at least he knew it existed,
and that gave him hope, somehow, made the world seem more bearable to him,
now that he knew it was there, even if it was out of his reach.

“Like a kind of symbol?” I asked.

He looked doubtful about that, but said: “Yes.”

So I leaned forward and I said, “Ben, it doesn't have to be just a symbol. It
doesn't have to be a pipedream. Anything's possible, you know. Really.”

And I meant it. I mean, just on a practical level, we paid off our mortgage in
Birmingham years ago, and we could sell our house for a fortune now. We could
have bought that ruin, done it up, and still had enough money to live on for years.
That's what I was thinking.

But Benjamin said, “No. It could never happen.”

And I said: “Well come on, then. Think about it—step by step. What would it
involve?”

“Well,” he said. “I'd have to learn French, for one thing.”

“Your French is pretty good,” I told him. “And it'd soon get better if you had
to use it all the time.”

“And I'd have to do a hell of a lot of training.”

It's true that Benjamin is useless at DIY. He can tell César Franck from
Gabriel Fauré after a couple of bars, but he can't put up a coat rack to save his life.
But I wasn't going to be defeatist about that. Like I said, it felt as though anything
was possible today.

“You could do a course,” I said. “There are evening classes in that sort of
thing.”

“What, in Birmingham?”

“Of course there are.”

He thought about this for a while, and then he started to smile, and the gleam
in his eye started to get brighter, and he looked at me, and he said: “Right now, I
can't think of anything that would make me happier.”

“Right then,” I said, and my stupid heart was almost bursting. “Let's do it.”

And he stared at me, and said: “What, both of us?”

“Of course both of us,” I said. “You don't think I want you to live in that
house without me, do you?”

And then he stared at me some more, and said: “I'm not talking about the
house.”

I waited a second or two and said: “What are you talking about, then?”

And he said: “I'm talking about becoming a monk.”

Sorry, I had to break off from writing for a minute then. I've been scribbling this
down like a madwoman for about two hours, and I needed to take a break.

Just then, when I put it down on paper, it almost seemed funny to me. I
promise you, it didn't feel that way at the time.

What did I say? I can't really remember. For a while I think I must have
been too shocked to speak. In the end my voice was just very quiet—that happens to
me, I've noticed, when I'm angry about something—I mean really angry—and I
just said something like: “I might as well not be here, mightn't I, Benjamin? In
fact, you'd prefer it that way.” Then I got up, threw a glass of water over him—
that was surprisingly satisfying—and went upstairs to our bedroom.

He followed me up and knocked on the door about two minutes later. And that
was when the fight began. And it was a fight
.
I don't mean we attacked each other,
physically, but there was a lot of shouting—enough to get someone from the hotel
sta f running upstairs and asking if everything was all right. I told Benjamin
everything that I'd wanted to tell him for years: that he showed me no respect, that
he paid me no attention . . . At one point he even had the nerve to drag
you
into
it, saying that he thought we saw too much of each other, and I just had to yell at
him, Well what do you expect, when my husband looks right through me every day
as if I'm invisible, when he just acts as though I'm not even there?

It ended with me telling him I didn't want to see him again. He packed some
things and I think he checked into a single room for the night. When I went to bed
myself I imagined that in the morning I would maybe want to speak to him, try
and find a way of making things better. But as soon as I woke up, I realized that I
didn't. It was true: I really didn't want to see him again. Anyway he wasn't down
at breakfast and after breakfast the receptionist told me that he'd checked out and
he'd left a message to say that he was going to Paris. Where he can stew, as far as
I'm concerned. At least he had the decency to leave me the car so I've got a way of
getting back home.

Home. For which I suddenly feel a great longing.

It will be nice to see you when I get back, dear Andrew. At least I won't have
to tell you this whole sorry story face to face.

I used to think it would be different  if we'd had children, or if we'd pushed
our case a bit harder at the adoption agency, but I don't even think that now, I
think they would have just got caught in the crossfire and the poor little things
have had a narrow escape.

What a mess. Eighteen years—eighteen years of life together and it ends like
this.

I suppose it's always a mess. Perhaps this isn't even as messy as most.

Will you take me out for a drink some time very soon and make sure I get
totally sloshed, please?

Sealed with a kiss.
In friendship,
Emily
xxx

8

Wednesday, August 1st, 2001 was the thirteenth anniversary of Claire and Philip's divorce. It was not normally an occasion that they celebrated, but this time, since they were down in London anyway—staying at a hotel in Charlotte Street with Patrick for two days—they decided to make an exception. Neither of them knew the names of the London restaurants that were considered fashionable these days, so they chose Rules in Covent Garden, which was mentioned in several of the tourist guides. At eight o'clock they settled into the heavy velvet banquettes, studied the menus, and prepared themselves for an evening of red meat, winter vegetables, rich, dark sauces and rust-colored claret. Outside, on the streets of London, it was a thick, sultry evening, and the evening sunshine was still warming the flagstones of the piazza and the tables of the pavement cafés. Inside the restaurant, with its dimmed lighting and atmosphere of careful formality, they might have been dining at a gentlemen's club one autumn night back in the 1930s.

Patrick had chosen to stay in the hotel watching television. They were not used to talking together without him, or having the luxury of being able to choose any topic of conversation that happened to present itself; and they responded in the way that many married—and indeed divorced—couples respond to this situation.

“Do you think Patrick's OK?” Claire was the first to ask. “I mean, he doesn't seem to be working very hard. He's very laid back about these exams.”

“That's because he's on holiday! And anyway, he's got months and months to get ready for them.”

“And he looks so
thin.
”

“We do feed him, you know. Have been doing for some considerable time.” Philip added, more earnestly: “Don't look for a problem, Claire, when there isn't one. Life's complicated enough as it is.”

Claire pondered this advice doubtfully, before asking: “Does he ever talk to you about Miriam?”

Philip was scanning the wine list. “He doesn't talk to me much at all, to be honest.”

“I think he has a thing about her.”

“What sort of thing?” asked Philip, looking up.

“Well, last year—the morning of the Longbridge demonstration—he insisted on getting all her stuff out of the attic at Dad's house. And after that we talked about her . . . disappearance. Talked about it for ages, actually. Of course, I didn't tell him everything about who she'd been seeing—” She broke off. “I'm sorry, Philip, is this subject boring you?”

Philip's attention had wandered. He was looking at the receding figure of a youngish, dark-haired man in a sharp tailored suit, who had just breezed through the restaurant purposefully and disappeared upstairs in the direction of the private rooms.

“That was Paul,” he said. “Paul Trotter. I'm sure it was.”

Claire did not seem very interested. “This is probably the kind of place he comes to all the time. Do you want to go and say hello?
I
certainly don't want to speak to him.”

“No,” said Philip, turning round to face her again. “Sorry—carry on with what you were saying.”

“I was just saying,” Claire resumed, rather testily, “that we talked about her disappearance that morning, and—well, it reopened a whole lot of stuff, as far as I'm concerned. Stuff which I've been trying not to think about, since then—for the sake of my sanity as much as anything else, because I went down that road a long time ago, and all it achieved was . . . Phil, are you
listening
to any of this, or not?”

“Of course I am,” said Philip, snapping to attention again.

“What's your problem, then? Your eyes keep glazing over.”

“Sorry. It's just that . . .” He took his glasses off, and rubbed his eyes in a distracted gesture. “Seeing Paul just now . . . And hearing you talk about Miriam . . . I don't know, it sparked something off. There's something at the back of my mind—some connection between those two. It keeps coming and going—you know, like
déjà vu
?”

“What sort of connection?” Claire asked. Her voice was eager, suddenly.

“I don't know,” said Philip. “Like I said, it keeps coming and going.” He picked up the wine list again. “Don't worry, I'm sure it'll come back to me.”

“I've nearly finished the article,” Philip was saying, a couple of hours later. “But really I've only just been scratching the surface. The thing about these neo-Nazi organizations is . . . you
can
just dismiss them as the lunatic fringe: you know, Holocaust deniers and that sort of thing—nutters, basically. But then, look what's been going on in the north these last few months. Not just the race riots, but the number of council seats the BNP has been winning off the back of all that unrest. Now, the way the BNP's marketing itself at the moment is very interesting. They've been watching New Labour, I reckon, and they're targeting women voters, and middle-class voters. Half their candidates seem to be women, these days. What's different is that you only have to peel back the marketing and you come bang up against something
really
ugly—like that CD. But the white voters in Burnley and Bradford aren't doing that. We've all become too used to taking things at face value, you see. There's no spirit of inquiry any more, we're just
consumers
of politics, we swallow what we're given. So it's actually about the way the whole country is going, the whole
culture.
Do you see? That's why it has to be a book. I can take the far right as a starting-point, but it's going to be about much more than that.”

“Sounds fascinating. Have you got the time to do it?”

“I'll have to make the time. I've got to move on, Claire. I can't go on writing ‘About Town with Philip Chase' for the next twenty years. Everybody's got to move on some time.”

“We're all so restless now, aren't we?” Claire said, almost crossly, as if the whole of her generation had just at that moment started to irritate her. “Our parents stayed in the same jobs for forty years. Nowadays no one can sit still. Doug's changed jobs. I've changed jobs—and countries. Steve wants to get a new job, by the sound of it.” She thought for a moment, and added: “D'you know, I can only think of one person who never seems to move on.”

“Benjamin,” said Philip, without needing to be asked.

“Benjamin,” she repeated, quietly, and sipped at her coffee.

“Well,” said Philip. “At least he's moved on from his marriage, now.”

This provoked a curt laugh. “But he hasn't
moved on,
has he? He's been kicked out. That's just so typical of him. He creates an impossible situation and then he just . . .
festers
in it until somebody else does the dirty work of putting it right.” Her anger—if that's what it had been—was quickly spent, and now she asked in a more kindly vein: “How is he, anyway?”

“Oh, all right,” said Philip. (Benjamin had moved in with him three days ago.) “Out at work most of the time, which is a great relief. Predictably, he's gone a bit bonkers, but I imagine that's only a short-term thing. He keeps talking about becoming a monk.”

“A monk? He hasn't got religion again, has he?”

“No—I think it's more of a lifestyle choice.”

“Poor Benjamin. How long's he going to stay with you? Is Carol OK about it?”

“Well, not over the moon, exactly. But he can stay as long as he wants, I suppose.”

“I worry about him,” said Claire; which, as far as Philip could see, was merely stating the obvious. “Do you think he's
ever
going to finish this book?” she asked; and then voiced an even more dangerous question. “Do you think it even
exists
?”

“Well, let's ask his brother,” said Philip, and stood up to waylay Paul, who was passing through the restaurant again on his way out. “Paul!” he called out, cheerily, offering his hand. “Philip Chase.
Birmingham Post
— and, indeed, King William's School. We spoke on the phone last year. How are you?”

Paul shook his hand limply, thrown into visible confusion by this chance encounter. He was flanked by two other men, at this point. One of them was tall, grey-haired, imposing: he was dressed like a businessman but his weathered features, paradoxically, suggested a predilection for the outdoor lifestyle. He looked as though he was no stranger to yachting clubs and Jamaican beaches, and seemed to be a good twenty years older than Paul. The other man not only looked older still—being almost completely bald, for one thing—but was massively corpulent, with a stomach of kingly girth and darting, watchful eyes made apparently tiny by the fleshiness and jowly rotundity of the face in which they were deeply sunk. Philip would never have recognized him in a million years. But it was this man who happily exclaimed:

“Chase! Philip Chase, as I live and breathe! What the hell are you doing here?”

Realization dawned slowly, and Philip again held out an uncertain hand. “Culpepper?” he said, tentatively. “It
is
you, isn't it?”

“Of course it is. Good grief, I haven't changed that much, have I?”

Could this be the same person who had once competed with Steve so fiercely for the title of
Victor Ludorum,
the top athletics trophy in the school? The transformation was bewildering.

“Not really, it's just that you've . . .”

“Oh, I know. I've put on a few inches round the midriff, over the years. Who hasn't? Mind if we join you for a minute or two?”

The other man was introduced to them as Michael Usborne, but before anyone had had the chance to sit down, Paul Trotter—looking more uncomfortable by the minute—glanced impatiently at his watch and announced that he had to leave. Culpepper, meanwhile, suggested that instead of ordering more drinks at the table, they should all move on for liqueurs at the bar of his hotel, which was only a few minutes' walk away. Claire and Philip agreed—impelled (as they admitted to each other later) almost entirely by morbid curiosity to find out what had become of this legendary
bête noire
from their schooldays.

Paul said goodbye to them in the street, and saved his final words for Culpepper. “Well, enjoy having a drink with your
journalist
friend, won't you?” he said.

If there was a hint involved, Culpepper seemed to take it. He shook Paul's hand solemnly.

Afterwards, as they were walking up the Charing Cross Road towards Centrepoint, they could talk of nothing at first except the extraordinary change in Culpepper's appearance.

“I can't
believe
it,” Philip kept saying. “The man was a dynamo at school, whatever else you thought about him.”

“So what happened? Years of four-course business lunches taken their toll, d'you think?”

“Must've done. He seems to be on the board of about a dozen companies, so I suppose that means twelve times as much food. Anyway,” he said, in a gently accusing voice, “you could have asked him yourself, if you hadn't spent the entire hour locked in conversation with the captain of industry. What were you talking about, all that time?”

“I thought he was a nice guy,” said Claire. “Bit of a smoothie, but nothing too obvious. He was telling me all sorts of stuff. He's had some really bad luck recently. Hasn't even got a job at the moment.”

“Claire, do you realize who Michael Usborne
is
? Don't you ever read the business pages?”

“Of course I don't read the business pages. Who reads the business pages? My cat poos on them.”

“Michael Usborne,” said Philip, as they dodged a trio of drunken teenagers gesturing noisily at the driver of a vacant black cab, who clearly had no intention of picking them up, “was CEO of Pantechnicon until earlier this year. He was responsible for half the railway track in the south-east. It was the second job he'd had running one of the privatized railway companies: his speciality is to cut the workforce, economize on safety procedures and then usually get the hell out of the boardroom before the shit hits the fan, which it usually does a few months later. He ran that company into the ground and I think they paid about three and a half million to get rid of him. Before that he was in telecommunications and he did exactly the same thing. And before that it was a distillery. The man's a serial wrecker of companies.”

Claire said nothing in reply to this. She stopped outside the window of an electrical shop and looked at the gleaming racks of stereo systems, lap-tops and DVD players. It was still open, even at this hour, and a young guy in denims—he looked as though he might still be a teenager—was loading himself up with cardboard boxes while his friend signed a credit card slip. The consumer boom was still in full swing, then.

“Why do they have all these shops next to each other, selling the same things?” she wondered aloud. “It can't be good for business.”

Philip sighed and asked: “He wasn't coming on to you, was he?”

“What does it matter to you?” she said. “Are you my guardian angel all of a sudden?”

“He's had about four wives as well, you know.”

“He's been married twice,” she corrected him. “And he told me that he was always on the lookout for good technical translators, so I gave him my business card.” Something else occurred to her. “Oh—and he asked me up to his hotel room. But I told him I wasn't in the mood.”

“Dirty old man,” Philip muttered. “Still, at least he can't pester you much in Malvern.”

“Funnily enough, he's got a house near there—in Ledbury,” said Claire. “He invited me down next weekend.”

“You're not going, are you?”

They had reached the lobby of their hotel. Claire headed for the lift, pressed the button for the third floor and turned to Philip, with a kind of weary resolution in her voice: “I'm forty-one, you know, and I can make my own decisions. I'm also single, and to be perfectly honest, I don't get hit on much any more. Perhaps you've forgotten what that's like. So if some good-looking guy—who also appears to be good company—and also happens to have a house near me with not one but
two
indoor swimming pools—wants to invite me there, for whatever reason, it's up to me whether I go or not. On top of which, I haven't had a shag for . . . well . . .” She tailed off as the lift arrived. They both stepped inside, and Claire didn't finish that particular sentence. She just said: “Well, there are some things you don't even tell your ex-husband.”