The Closed Circle (36 page)

“I told him how it was Benjamin who had rediscovered him, how he'd come across that entry he'd written in the log-book in Dorset, and I asked him if he'd remembered writing it. And he said, oh yes, that was him all right, but he didn't write those kinds of things any more. He said Arthur Pusey-Hamilton was dead and buried. I asked him how closely he'd identified with the character and he said very closely: he had this theory that in order to satirize something, or in order to parody it properly, you really had to be in love with it, on some level. He told me that he'd developed this theory in a big book he'd been working on, a history of English humour, starting with Chaucer and coming up to P. G. Wodehouse. He talked a lot about all the books he'd written. None of them had been published. But then he said that he'd ‘renounced' humour, like someone would say they'd given up smoking or converted to a different religion. Apparently he'd spent some time in a monastery—there you are, another link with Benjamin—and he told me about this saint called Saint Benoit and how the monks tried to live according to his rules, and one of them was not to make jokes, and another was not to laugh too often. He said that laughter wasn't holy, wasn't dignified. Those kinds of words—holiness, dignity—seemed to have become important to him. He used them a lot.

“So I took him up on that. I said that I couldn't see there was anything holy about drugging Steve Richards to make sure he didn't pass his physics exam, or that there was much dignity in victimizing one of the teachers—we had this maths teacher for a while, called Mr. Silverman—just because he was a Jew. And as for working with a bunch of Nazi thugs like Combat 18, or putting money into bands who wrote songs celebrating the Holocaust— well, I couldn't see how any of that could be justified with the kinds of words he was using. But that argument didn't seem to worry him. He said that he'd made mistakes in the past, he didn't deny that. But he said that he actually admired the skinheads and the people who took ‘race war' seriously—that was the phrase he used, race war—people who took it to the streets. He said he didn't call them thugs, he called them warriors, and the Warrior Spirit was part of our heritage, part of our folklore. So I said to him, ‘What about the riots in Bradford and Burnley and Oldham a couple of years ago, when these people were out of control and were beating people up, Pakistani and Bangladeshi guys in their sixties and seventies—grandfathers! What was so great about that?' And he said that violence was terrible but if it was the only way to reach your goal then it was justified. He said that he approved of those riots and thought they were a positive step and that was when I began to think that he was a little bit delusional because he started claiming that he'd helped to provoke them, that some of the things he'd written on the internet had been influential in getting them started.

“And I said, ‘Well what is this goal, anyway? I don't understand. What is it you're trying to achieve?' And he said that the only thing the Aryan people had ever hoped for was to be able to live the way they wanted, in peace, and in harmony with nature. So I said, ‘What's stopping you, then?' And he said that it couldn't happen while the land was suffering. He said the land was suffering because it was being raped and polluted by the big corporations, and it was overrun with aliens, people who had no respect for the land and no right to be here, and it was the big corporations and the political establishment who were in collusion to keep things this way, because this was what their power was based on. The usual conspiracy theory nonsense. He said it was a way of perpetuating an evil, materialist culture and it was all based on usury, and of course he reckoned the Jews were behind it all.

“And that, apparently, was why he had become so interested in Islam and had convinced himself that
jihad
was the new way forward. Not that he seemed to be learning how to fly an aeroplane or taking part in any suicide bombing missions or anything. But he did claim to have met Osama bin Laden, who he called ‘Usama,' for some reason. I suppose to prove that he was on better terms than the rest of us. That was the point I decided he must have gone completely mad. He said that al-Qaeda and the Aryan warriors were basically on the same side because the real enemy was America and the Zionists who ruled the world but I'd sort of stopped listening by that stage. But he was in favour of the war in Iraq, apparently because he thought it would inspire more terrorist attacks on the West and this was a good thing.

“I had one last crack at it and said, ‘But what about all the Iraqi civilians who are being killed in the war?' and again he just said that this was very sad, but war was a tragic necessity and much more blood would flow before things were put right again. And he told me to read an essay he'd written called ‘Violence and Melancholy.' It was on the internet with all his other stuff, he said, on some website that his friends had set up for him. I was glad to hear that he had some friends, all things considered.

“Well, we didn't talk much after that. He went off to make me some tea and I looked at his record collection. That was pretty impressive too. A few thousand albums, all in alphabetical order, all on vinyl. I think he'd got most of Western classical music pretty well covered. When he came back in I remarked on this and I pointed out, ‘Not much “Oi!” music here then, is there?' He put on the record that was already on the turntable—it was Vaughan Williams, ‘Norfolk Rhapsody Number One'—and he listened to it in silence while we were drinking our tea, and his face changed while he was listening to it, he stopped looking aggressive and paranoid, and this kind of beauty came over him, he came closer to smiling, for a few minutes, than I'd seen him all afternoon. But when it finished he looked very sad and he told me that he must have listened to that music thousands of times, tens of thousands of times, but he never grew tired of it. It was one of his mother's favourites, he said. So I reminded him that Vaughan Williams was a socialist and would have hated him and everything that he believed. But he said that politics like that were superficial, and you could tell that the composer's real beliefs were in his music. There didn't really seem to be any answer to that.

“Just before I left I told him what had happened to Steve Richards, how he'd landed this great new job and moved his family to Birmingham and then just a few months later the whole department had been closed down. (Which I believe, Claire, was the work of an ex-boyfriend of yours—am I right?) And Harding said he was sorry about that but the real trouble was, Steve didn't really belong in this country, he'd be happier if he went back to where his own people were. His ‘folk,' as he liked to call them. I lost my temper when he said that and just told him he was a fucking idiot. And I remembered something that Doug had said about Harding once, that it would be depressing to meet him again because he'd probably have turned into a quantity surveyor, but nothing could have been more depressing than this, to think of all that cleverness, all that humour, all that mischief, and see the place it had led him to, in the end. So sad. I asked him if there was a Mrs. Harding, and he said there had been, for a while, but she'd died. And I took one more look around the house and shuddered to think what a mean and bitter and
lonely
little life he'd made for himself—you know?—but I couldn't manage to feel sorry for him. You couldn't
reach
him, that was the problem, so how could you feel sorry for him? He'd put himself beyond that. I didn't shake his hand, I just said goodbye, and on the way out I said, ‘Give my regards to Usama, won't you? Ask him if he'll do an interview for the
Birmingham Post
one of these days.' And he said something back to me in Arabic. I asked him what it meant and he translated it for me and said it was from the
Qu'ran.
It meant, ‘Show us the Straight Way, the way of those on whom You have bestowed Your grace, whose portion is not wrath, and who do not go astray.' ”

“Then I drove off. He didn't wave or anything, but he stood there in the doorway, watching me go. That was the last I saw of him.”

The warm evening drew on. They lit candles on the balcony, and after their meal they sat there, Claire, Philip and Stefano, until the sun had gone down and the bars had started to close and the city of Lucca had fallen almost silent. Just a few voices, raised in farewell, and passing footsteps on the cobbled streets. Already the events of spring 2003 seemed to have taken place aeons ago.

It was long after midnight when Claire said: “I don't know what we can learn from Sean's story. I don't think it makes what I was saying any less true. If there is an exception to what I was saying, it's not Sean, it's Benjamin.
That
I would probably admit. You can't blame anyone for what happened to him. There's no chain of cause and effect there. Nobody forced him to fall in love with Cicely and waste twenty years of his life obsessing over her. He's entirely responsible for that.”

Philip said: “But the thing is—Benjamin's happy now. He's got Cicely again, hasn't he? And that's all he ever wanted.”

“I don't believe he's really happy.”

“Have you seen them together?”

“I went round there once. I couldn't handle it. She was sitting there in her wheelchair, ordering him around like a fucking dog. The
temper
on her . . .”

“It does that to you. That's one of the things that MS does.”

“Well, I couldn't handle it.”

“But you see, he's
happy,
Claire. He's writing again—did you know that? And playing music. I think that's great. I mean, if you'd seen him a few years ago . . . Or think about the time when he disappeared, and went to Germany, and nobody heard from him for months.”

“Maybe . . .”

“That's the thing, you see. We've all ended up with what we wanted, in our different ways. You, me, Doug, Emily. Think about it. We've all lived happily ever after.”

4

The Munich Train

In the foothills
Snow streaks the black fields.
Dusk steals over empty balconies, shuttered houses solemn
With mystery, where children
(I am forced to think) grow and parents love
In terrible privacy.

Augsburg. Ulm.
Already in my head
These names throw dark blue shadows
Sad as Sunday afternoons.

Parallel to the track, now
A liquid channel runs. Sheets of ice
Hover on its greygreen, and beside it the grass
Is the beige of carpet in a done-up flat
Someone has been
Trying too hard to sell.

Köln. Mannheim. Stuttgart.
In any of these places
A home could be found
Or made. But equally,
Pale, hinting light glimmers still
Behind the distant Alps, and that sun soon will
Brush its lips across the downy shoulders
Of towns I've not imagined yet:

No choice at all
When choice is infinite.

Benjamin stood in a corner of the
Drogerie
and held up the two packs of condoms, one in each hand, trying to decipher the German instructions. There was clearly some important difference between them, but he couldn't imagine what it was. Size? Texture? Flavouring? He had no idea.

He had never used a condom before. Incredible, when he thought about it, but true. He and Cicely had not used any protection at all, that day—somewhat recklessly, in retrospect—while Emily had been on the pill to start with and after that . . . well, there had been no need in the first place, as it turned out. So it would be a new experience for him. All the more important, then, that he made the right choice.

Still he hesitated. He remembered an embarrassing incident, back in the 1980s, after Saps at Sea had played a successful gig at an arts centre near Cheltenham. In the van on the way back to Birmingham the five of them had played a game called “Deprivations.” The challenge of this game was to name supposedly widespread activities which you yourself—to your shame, perhaps—had never performed. For every other member of the group who
had
performed them, you were awarded a point: which meant that the more points you were awarded, the more freakish you were likely to appear to the other players. Benjamin had won the first round, scoring a maximum of four points by admitting—to howls of incredulity—that he had never had sex while wearing a condom. Furthermore, he went on to win the next ten rounds, each one again with a maximum score, by confessing that he had never used cocaine, never smoked cannabis, never smoked a cigarette, never had sex outdoors, never driven a car at more than eighty miles an hour, never had a one-night stand, never played cards for money, never played truant from school, never drunk more than three pints of beer in one night and never forgotten his mother's birthday. In addition, none of the other players ever managed to score the maximum of four points, because no matter what they admitted to never having done, Benjamin hadn't done it either. There had been only one moment when it seemed there might be an exception to this rule—when Ralph, the drummer, confessed dolefully that he'd never had sex with two women. “Ah!” Benjamin had exclaimed in triumph. “Now—I've done that.” But then it had to be explained that Ralph was referring to having sex with
two women at the same time.
For which he only won three points.

Benjamin looked at the two packs again, and realized, with a sinking heart, that it probably didn't matter which one he bought. He'd been in Munich for three weeks now, and had hardly spoken to a living soul, let alone a woman who might want to go to bed with him. He tried again to deduce the meaning of the unfamiliar words, and ended up putting them both in his shopping basket anyway. He had a German dictionary back in his flat, after all.

The English Garden in Winter

The English Garden in winter
Stands almost empty. Beneath my feet,
A slushy mix of ice and mud.
The river here is Alpine,
And even in July it's mountain-cold.
A solitary bird skims the surface, wary.
What sort of bird? I'm not quite sure.

Hard to see, amidst these greys,
These leafless trees (the names of which
Escape me) how, in the summer, flowers might bloom,
And women lie, along this bank,
Naked—so I'm told—
While full-clothed businessmen snatch lunch
And furtive glimpses, hungry-eyed.

What flowers would those be, then?
The ones that plan to bud among the spikes
Of this squat bush I can't identify?
Shivering, I wonder where's the rain
Long threatened by this Munich sky,
And feel my ignorance.
I must move on, from this unlucky town,
Hung low with clouds I might describe
In detail if I had the terminology.
The beauty of those sundrunk girls
Is real enough, in my imaginings.
But winter in the English Garden
Freezes me today with two brown certainties

I won't be here,
When they arrive to show it,
And I shall never make a nature poet.

Benjamin had not written poetry since he was at school. He knew that he was out of practice at it, as at so many other things. But after the twenty-year debacle of
Unrest
—the mound of paperwork it had generated, the hundreds of wasted hours spent wrestling with MIDI interfaces and sequencing software—he had no appetite for anything more technologically advanced than a biro and an exercise book, or any literary form more complex than a sonnet. Every day, after hauling himself out of bed at about ten or eleven o'clock, he would go to one of the bars or coffee shops near the university, and settle down to write. Most days he wrote nothing. Usually he had a hangover from the night before. In the evenings he would find a cinema showing English-language films and then he would go back to his flat and drink most of a bottle of wine and try to write again. When the poetry wouldn't come, he would try to write something else—prose reminiscences, often, of episodes from earlier in his life—but he never kept any of these outpourings. Often he could scarcely be bothered to read them through in the morning. The paucity of his own experience had started to disgust him. He had nothing to write about. And whenever this realization hit him hardest, late at night, he would drink more than one bottle of wine. He developed a taste for spirits: Islay malts in particular, although they weren't easy to find in Munich, and cost a fortune. One memorable night (or rather, one night about which he could remember nothing afterwards) he drank three-quarters of a bottle of Talisker and was sick into his shoes: a fact he did not discover until he tried to put them on the next morning. He knew it was time to stop. But didn't.

His German failed to improve. His social life failed to materialize. His money started to run out. He began to feel nostalgic for Morley Jackson Gray, for the office banter and the comfortable routines of the working day. He had his mobile phone with him. The battery had been flat for weeks but he could easily have charged it up. He could have phoned Adrian or Tim or Juliet at the office; he could have phoned his parents or his sister or his niece; he could have phoned Philip or Doug; he could have phoned Munir. But the battery stayed flat. Benjamin was determined to reinvent himself before any of these people saw him again. He would return in some kind of triumph.

Sexyland

My gaze is fixed upon her breasts
Because there is less shame in that
Than looking in her eyes.

They're cobalt-blue (her eyes, that is)
And glazed with sadness, anger, boredom—
Something, anyway, that makes of her
A human being. Which isn't what we want—
Not me, nor any of the men (all young, I note)
Who watch her from the shadows,
As they sip the foul red wine that's priced
At thirty euros. (By the glass.)

In laudable conformity, perhaps, to EC laws,
She's democratic, scrupulous and fair.
Divested, now, she leaves the stage
And offers up an eyeful of her ample charms
To each of us in turn.

I'm seventh in the queue.
The music having pumelled through
Another sixteen bars, she crash-lands
On my lap, or thereabouts.
Her pelvis sways, not quite in touch with mine,
And not quite mechanistically, though I've no doubt
Her mind is somewhere else.
(Somnambulant. Yes, that could be the word.)
And in my face—a nipple. Which
The bard in me feels honour-bound to sketch.

And yet, there isn't much to say, about this thing
With which she fills my field of vision.
It's round, and pink,
One of a perfect pair unless I'm much mistaken,
And has (on this I'd lay a bet) been sucked on
Fervently, not many hours ago,
With closed eyes and liquid, greedy lips,
By the infant son whose crumpled face
Already she must long to kiss again.

The visit to the lapdancing club made him realize that he was getting close to rock bottom. Most days now he was finding it hard to get out of bed at all. He reckoned that he had put on about a stone in weight. He had given up shaving and proved to himself conclusively that he looked even worse with a beard than he did without one. He developed an addiction for internet pornography and began to indulge in strange auto-erotic practices which involved plastic coathangers, Ben & Jerry's ice cream, the leather belt of his trousers and a spatula. He noticed that the female students who frequented the cafés in Schellingstrasse, singly and in groups, had started to recognize him and would never sit at a table next to him if they could help it. He was doing well if he produced more than six lines of poetry in a week.

He was astonished to find how much he missed Emily. That was the most unexpected thing of all. Increasingly he was fantasizing not about romantic encounters with topless undergraduate sunbathers in the English Garden, but evenings spent at home with Emily, side-by-side on the sofa, reading or watching television. He discovered that the very thing he had once wanted to escape was now the thing he most fiercely desired. The knowledge of this broke upon him one morning before dawn, as he lay in bed, wide awake, tangled up in bedsheets that had not been washed for weeks, and suddenly, without warning, he found himself howling with loneliness in the middle of the night, sobbing as he could not remember sobbing since he was a child. He cried so much he thought that he would never stop, cried until daybreak, until his chest ached with the unending force of the convulsions.

Benjamin left his flat that morning, and checked into a hotel for one night while he decided what to do next. At breakfast the following day he read the English newspapers—it was ages since he had read a newspaper— and learned not only that America and Britain had invaded Iraq without the legal sanction of a UN resolution, but that Baghdad was already on the point of falling to the allied troops. The indifference with which he received the news alarmed him. He wanted to be feeling something. He realized that he was at a turning point: was it time to reconnect himself with the rest of humanity, or was it time to isolate himself still further? Which in turn prompted another question, one that he had been carefully avoiding: why, in more than three months of joyless travelling, had he so far refrained from doing the obvious and visiting the Abbaye St. Wandrille? The answer to that was simple, if he was brave enough to look it in the eye. He could not bear the thought of going there because it would remind him of Emily; remind him of the time they had visited it together, and walked along the riverbank in the late afternoon, and attended
Complies
at nightfall. It would reek of her absence.

But that was where he had to go.

Checking Out

When I checked out of the Hotel Olympic,
I said to the receptionist in my still-halting
German, “I'd like to check out please,”
But being tired forgot—at just that moment—
That I must return the key, which was in a trouser pocket.

Well. Groucho Marx, Stan Laurel and Buster Keaton,
Performing a unique triple act at the height of their powers,
For one night only,
Could not have had the same effect.
She laughed and laughed.
She laughed and laughed and laughed and laughed.
She laughed and laughed and laughed.

Asking whether I had used the minibar,
She could barely speak for laughing.
I had given her the key by now, but all the same,
As she counted my banknotes, she was hard pressed
To work the till for laughing at this funny Englishman
Who had left it in his pocket while checking out.
She would dine out on this story for weeks,
And even now she laughed while giving me my change,
And as she took my suitcase to the store
Behind her desk, she laughed and laughed,
And laughed and laughed and laughed.

And they say the Germans have no sense of humour.