The Closed Circle (26 page)

“Then—” (she laughed) “—I mean, this is a really stupid question—you must hate it when people ask you this—but what
is
it about?”

Normally, Benjamin did hate it when people asked him this question. (Not that many people asked it any more.) But for some reason, he was quite happy to attempt an explanation for Sophie.

“Well . . .” he said, “well, it's called
Unrest,
and it's about some of the political events from the last thirty years or so, and how they relate to . . . events in my own life, I suppose.”

Sophie nodded, uncertainly.

“It's easier to talk about the form, in a way. I mean, what I'm trying to achieve, formally—this sounds very ambitious, I know—crazy, really—is a new way of combining text—printed text—with the spoken word. It's a novel with music, you see.”

“How's that going to work?” Sophie asked.

“Well, in addition to this,” Benjamin said, flicking through the pages of the manuscript, “there's going to be a CD-ROM. And some passages you have to read on the screen; on your computer. The text scrolls down at intervals that I've programmed myself—sometimes it's normal reading speed, sometimes there'll only be one or two words on the screen at a time—and certain passages of text trigger bits of music, which will also play on the computer.”

“Which you've written yourself?”

“That's right.” Unnerved by her silence, by the solemnity with which she was staring at him, he said: “It sounds mad, doesn't it? I know it does. Maybe it
is
mad. Maybe
I'm
mad.”

“No, no, not at all. It sounds absolutely fascinating. It's just hard to get any sense of it, without . . . reading some of it, I suppose.”

“I'm not ready to show it to anyone yet,” said Benjamin, reaching out instinctively, self-protectively for the fragment of manuscript, which she handed to him.

“No. I can believe that.”

But she looked so disappointed; and Benjamin could not bear to disappoint her. It was years since anyone had shown such interest in him. He felt hugely grateful and indebted to her, and knew that he would have to repay her somehow.

“You can hear some of the music, if you like,” he said, tentatively.

“Really? I'd love to.”

“OK, then.”

With a few clicks he had brought up a folder of .wav files. He scrolled through the titles, highlighted one and double-clicked. He turned up the volume on the computer's speaker system, then sat back in his chair, arms folded, tense. He remembered the time he had played Cicely some of his music and all she had noticed was that you could hear a cat on the tape, miaowing in the background.

But Sophie was a better listener. “This is lovely,” she said, after a minute or two. The music was complex and repetitive, owing something to systems music, but with more chord changes. There was no melodic line: fragments of melody peeped out occasionally, on guitar or sampled strings or wood-winds, before submerging themselves again, absorbed into the densely contrapuntal texture. These undeveloped tunes were modal, like extracts from half-remembered folk songs. Harmonically, there was an emphasis on minor sevenths and ninths, giving the piece a melancholy undertow; but at the same time, an underlying pattern of ascending chords suggested optimism, a hopeful eye fixed on to the distant future.

After a while Sophie said: “It sounds a little bit like the record you gave Mum all those years ago.”

“Hatfield and the North, you mean? Yes, it probably does. Not the most up-to-date musical genre I could have chosen to imitate, really.”

“No, but it works. It works for you. It sounds sort of . . . sad and cheerful at the same time.” Then a new melodic idea was introduced, and she said: “Now I recognize that. You've stolen a famous song there, haven't you?”

“It's Cole Porter, ‘I Get A Kick Out Of You.'” Turning the volume down slightly, he explained: “This is meant to go with a passage about the Birmingham pub bombings. I don't know if your mum ever told you, but . . . this was the tune that was playing. When the bomb went off.”

“No,” said Sophie, looking down. “No, she never told me that.”

“For years she couldn't bear to hear it. It used to completely freak her out. She's probably over that now.” Benjamin reached for the mouse and switched the music off. “Well, that's probably enough to give you an idea.”

He knelt down by the boxes of manuscript, and tidied the papers away. While his back was turned, Sophie said: “It's going to be fantastic, Ben. I know it is. It'll blow people away. I'm just worried that it's so . . . big. Are you ever going to finish it?”

“I don't know. I thought that when I moved into my own place there wouldn't be so many distractions. But all I seem to do now is mess around on the internet and watch TV. And in the summer I finally left my job, but that hasn't helped, either. It just seems to have taken all the structure out of my life.”

“Can you carry on much longer, with no money coming in?”

“A few more months.”

“You
must
finish it. How long have you been doing this, now? You
must.
”

“What if nobody wants to publish it?” Benjamin said, flopping back into his chair. “Anyway, should I be sending it to a publisher, or to a record company? Is anyone going to be interested? Does anyone want to know? I'm a middle-aged, middle-class, white, public-school-, Oxbridge-educated male. Isn't the world sick of hearing from people like me now? Haven't we had our say? Isn't it about time we shut up and moved over and made way for somebody else? Am I kidding myself that I'm doing something important? Am I not just raking over the embers of my little life and trying to blow it up into something significant by sticking a whole lot of politics in there as well? And what about September the eleventh? How do I find room for
that
kind of stuff in there? I didn't write a word for months after it happened, or after the Americans went into Afghanistan. Suddenly everything I was doing seemed even smaller, even less important. And now it looks like we'll be going into Iraq soon. The thing is . . .” (he leaned forward, his hands clasping and unclasping) “. . . I've got to try and
remember.
I've got to try and remember how I felt about this when I first started it. Recapture some of that energy. I had so much conviction then, so much self-belief. I thought that I was putting together words and music—literature and history, the personal and the political—in ways that no one had thought of before. I felt like a pioneer.”

“That's what you are,” said Sophie; and he could tell that she meant it. “A pioneer. Remember that, Benjamin. It doesn't need to make you pompous, or up yourself. It's just the truth. Nobody else has done anything like this.”

“Yes. You're right,” he said, when her words had sunk in. “I'm not going to lose faith in it. I'm not getting clapped out. The work's only getting slower and harder because it's getting better. I know more, and I understand more. Even what's happened between me and Emily is something I can learn from. Everything—everything that happens to me is going to feed into this book and make it richer and stronger. It's good that it's taken me so long. I'm ready to finish it now. I'm not callow any more. I'm mature. I'm in my prime.”

He might have said more in this vein; but just then, there was a knock on the door. It was his mother, carrying a tea towel over her arm and wearing an expression of mingled reproof and solicitude.

“You haven't eaten for ages, have you?” she said to her son. “Come on downstairs—I've made you a boiled egg and some Marmite soldiers.”

Benjamin's eyes met Sophie's briefly. She smiled at him, a secret smile. His heart melted.

He lay awake, at two o'clock in the morning. Outside, the wind howled, and the castle's walls and flagstones did nothing but reflect the cold back at him, but still Benjamin felt sweaty and feverish. His pubic hair, through which his hand roamed restlessly, was moist. He had an erection which seemed to have nothing to do with desire, and everything to do with habit, of the most dismal and wearying sort. The prospect of masturbating—even though it was probably his only chance of getting to sleep—seemed impossibly bleak. His eyes were wide open. He picked up the mobile phone from his bedside table, turned on the backlight and learned that it was now 2:04. He groaned, and switched on the radio. It was the second movement of Bruckner's fourth symphony: his least favourite movement from his least favourite work by his least favorite composer. He switched the radio off again. In the next bedroom, he could hear his father coughing. His mother got up to fetch a glass of water from the adjacent bathroom. There were fragments of conversation. Lois was asleep, in a far-off wing of the castle. Sophie, so far as he knew, was still in the sitting room, in her pyjamas and dressing gown, freshly bathed, reading the third of the log-books by the light of a standard lamp, the fire having dwindled to a mound of flickering ashes. Benjamin had left her to it, feeling tired, and imagining, for once, that he might be able to get off to sleep quite easily, but no . . . It was the same old story. He still couldn't get used to sleeping alone.

He closed his eyes, screwed them tight shut, clenched his fist into a ball, and tried to summon up some plausible fantasy to get himself started. In desperation, he pictured the new anchorwoman on the BBC Six O'Clock
News,
and began to prepare himself for the labour involved in bringing himself to climax, but then became distracted by the image of those thousands of joyless sperm about to be left stranded on the bedsheets, expiring, gasping for breath, their destinies unfulfilled. Where had
that
mental picture come from, for Christ's sake? What did it matter anyway? Millions of the poor little sods had spent their energies on futile encounters with his wife's eggs in the last twenty years, and in the end they had fuck all to show for it. He was hopeless, in that respect. He had failed, failed. The bedsheet was the best place for them. It was the only destiny they deserved.

In any case, five minutes of mechanical exercise got him nowhere. He was about to give it up as a lost cause and turn the radio on again, when he heard footsteps on the stone staircase outside his bedroom.

Then there was a voice outside his door.

“Benjamin?” It was Sophie. “Are you awake?”

“Yes,” he called, turning over on to his side. “Come on in.”

The handle was turned and Sophie stood framed in the doorway. She was still wearing her dressing gown, and carrying one of the log-books under her arm. She came inside and sat down on the bed beside him. She was breathing fast and heavily, either with excitement, or with the exertion of running up the stairs, or both.

Benjamin switched on his bedside light.

“What is it?”

“Your friend Sean,” Sophie panted. “Sean Harding. He had a pen-name, didn't he?”

“What?” said Benjamin, rubbing his eyes now, trying to adjust to this sudden change of direction.

“Was it Pusey-Hamilton?” Sophie asked. “Sir Arthur Pusey-Hamilton?”

“That's right,” Benjamin said. “He used to write these mad articles for
The Bill Board.
That was the name he used.”

“Well,” said Sophie, beaming in triumph. “Here you are. Take a look at
that.
”

She handed him the log-book, and pointed to an entry which began half way down one of the pages. And Benjamin reached for his reading glasses, and then gasped aloud when he saw the once-familiar handwriting; and began to read.

5

Claire had been seeing Michael Usborne for more than a year, and still she didn't quite understand the nature of their relationship. But in the end, she decided that this didn't matter; that it might even be one of the things she liked about it. Certainly, it bore no resemblance to any of her previous relationships. It was extremely sporadic; it was hardly passionate (although there had been a fair amount of decent sex); and neither of the parties involved seemed to have any idea where it was heading, or indeed any interest in deciding such a thing. She knew that he saw other women (younger ones), she knew that he had sex with them, she even suspected that he paid for this service occasionally. So what? If she had been in love with him, it would have bothered her: but she wasn't, so it didn't. She also knew that he didn't regard her as wife material (not quite young enough, not quite pretty enough, not quite posh enough, not quite skinny enough): but he
was
on the look-out for a wife, and when she materialized, Claire's own period of tenure would presumably be over. That was a slightly more dampening thought. She would miss him. A little. At first. But then, she could hardly describe herself as being in too deep: this wasn't a Stefano situation, or anything like it. She liked seeing Michael, on those (rare) occasions when he was not out of the country, not down in London, not working late, not tied up for the weekend. She liked being taken out by him, she liked using his gym and his swimming pool, she liked sharing his bed. She enjoyed teasing him and arguing with him about politics and playing up to the stereotype of the left-leaning,
Guardian
-reading feminist, which was how he had chosen to classify her. (And which seemed to make him think that by spending any time with her at all he was doing something very daring and unconventional and amusing.) There were, in other words, a good many perks attached to the job of being Michael Usborne's temporary girlfriend—if that's what she was—and best of all, he made it possible for her to enjoy them without feeling cheap, without feeling that she was being used, without feeling that she was selling her soul. That at least, she thought, reflected well upon him, and for that at least she would always be grateful.

So where had this new feeling of dissatisfaction recently sprung from? She was aware of it even now, sitting in what should by all accounts have been very agreeable surroundings—the BA executive lounge at Heathrow Airport—watching Michael searching through the papers in his attaché case (open on the seat next to him) while conducting a conversation on the mobile phone clamped between his shoulder and his ear. A few weeks ago, this scene would have inspired affectionate amusement, nothing more: crazy Michael, she would have thought, always on the go, always driven, never able to sit still for a moment while there was money to be made. And yet this morning, his behaviour simply annoyed her. Was it because this was supposed to be the beginning of a holiday—their first holiday together—and so far he had shown not the slightest interest in relaxing? Was it because Patrick was there, too, and it was the first time they had met and Michael had not managed to address more than three words to him since being introduced? Or did it (as she suspected, in her heart) actually go deeper than that?

The basic problem was this. It was almost three years, now, since she had walked out on Stefano in Lucca; almost three years since she had stood on the chalk cliffs above Etretat and looked across the grey waters of the English Channel towards the country to which she had reluctantly decided to turn her defeated footsteps. She had convinced herself, that day, that it was better to be alone than to be unhappy in love; but now, three years on, that conviction was fading. Her relationship with Michael had been fun for a while. It had been a novelty, at the very least, and a way of easing herself gently back into the practice (so easily forgotten) of being intimate with another person. But she was forty-two, and she could not afford to waste much more time on someone whose interest in her seemed to be so casual. She wanted something else, now, something that was not superficial, and not part-time: she wanted a partner. Banal as it might seem, she wanted someone who would go to the supermarket with her, help her choose salad dressing, decide between different brands of washing powder and shampoo. (How jealous her glances had become, these days, when she spotted couples having precisely those bland conversations in the aisles of Tesco and Safeway.) Did Michael ever go to the supermarket, she wondered? Had he ever set foot in one, in the last twenty years? She had noticed, whenever she was round at his house near Ledbury, that his fridge (which was about the size of her own spare bedroom) was always filled with fresh vegetables, organic red meat, freshly squeezed orange juice, bottles of champagne. Where did it all come from? Since his most recent divorce—perhaps even before it—he'd employed at least two housekeepers, and presumably it fell to one of them to ensure that stocks never ran low. She could not imagine sharing her life with someone who lived like that. Real though it obviously felt to him, she could not stop herself from regarding his entire mode of being as a kind of preposterous fantasy. This holiday, for instance: a week in Grand Cayman, first-class travel there and back, and a beachfront villa—owned, apparently, by a business associate from America—at their disposal for a whole week, complete with gardener, housekeeper, chauffeur and cook. People just didn't
live
this way. It was unreal. But he refused to see it like that. Took it all in his stride, insisted it was nothing special. Extended the invitation to Patrick without even thinking about it. (The place slept fifteen, after all.) Even said that he could bring his girlfriend: Rowena, his girlfriend of six weeks' standing, who now sat reading
Vanity Fair
and drinking chilled white wine in the executive lounge and looked as though she couldn't believe her luck.

Claire sighed as the weight of all this pressed down upon her. The incompatibility between them—their absurdly polarized lifestyles and value systems—struck her that morning with dizzying clarity. Could he not see it as well? Did it not bother him, or was he just choosing to ignore it? Maybe they would get a chance to talk about these things on holiday. But the holiday had already started; and the omens, so far, didn't appear to be good.

“What about just pointing out that this is the fastest-growing area of our business and the one that offers the most sustainable margins?” Michael was saying, into his mobile. If there was any urgency or irritation in his voice, it was hard to detect. He always seemed to speak in the same way— gentle, mellifluous, persuasive—whether he was ordering food in a restaurant or (as now, it appeared) giving a dressing-down to a subordinate.

“Well, those are exceptional charges. No one is trying to hide the fact that there will be exceptional charges . . .”

Patrick stood up and wandered over to a coffee-dispensing machine. Claire's eyes followed him.

“ ‘Synergies' is a good word, yes. I don't have a problem with that. As long as we make it crystal clear that this is not about cost-savings, it's about growth.” He sighed. “I mean, is Martin really on the ball with this one? Because it feels to me that I'm writing the thing myself.”

Claire joined Patrick by the coffee machine and gave him an empty cup to fill.

“You don't have to serve yourself here, you know,” she pointed out. “That waitress over there would have brought us a refill.”

“This is quicker,” he said, shortly.

Claire tried to keep the nervous edge out of her voice as she asked: “What's your impression of Michael, then?”

Patrick thought for a moment. “He's everything that I expected him to be.”

“What does that mean?”

Handing her the coffee, he said: “How well do you know this guy, Mum? This is the last kind of person I would have thought you'd have any time for.”

She took a sip. It was scalding hot. “You're not seeing him at his best. He's very preoccupied.” As they walked back towards their seats, she added, “You've got to learn to see beyond the surface of people, Patrick. It's not about what people do. It's about their human qualities.”

Patrick didn't answer; and even to her, it sounded as though she was trying to convince herself of something that was hard to believe.

Patrick sat down next to Rowena and refilled her wine glass. She had finished with
Vanity Fair
by now and had moved on to
Condé Nast Traveller.
He leaned across and looked at the feature she was reading, illustrated with a full-colour photograph of some idyllically pastoral French scene, with what seemed to be a large château at the center.

“That looks cool,” he said. “Who lives there?”

“It's a monastery,” she answered. “Somewhere in Normandy. You can stay in places like that, you know. The monks will take anybody in. It's part of their philosophy—providing hospitality to anyone who needs it.”

“Bloody hell, so now they're touting spiritual retreats as holiday options for the stressed executive, are they? Capitalism really has conquered everything.”

“I don't see any reason why we have to put a figure on it,” Michael was now saying. “I've seen different estimates and it could be anything between nine and twenty-four. Alan's guess is nearer twenty-four and that's the one I'd be inclined to go with.”

“Our flight's being called,” Patrick said, looking up at the departures screen.

“We can't rely on an upturn in market conditions. Everybody knows that. Put it down to ‘global uncertainty.' That's the buzz word at the moment.”

“I can't believe we're flying first class,” said Rowena, slipping the magazine into her bag. “It's so exciting.”

“Are we going, then?” Patrick asked, standing up. He started collecting some of the free newspapers from a nearby table, hoovering up the
Times,
Independent
and
Guardian.
Claire noticed that one of the pictures above the masthead on the
Guardian
today showed a familiar face. The tagline next to it said: “
Paul Trotter—My grave doubts over war with Iraq.
”

“It doesn't sound to me like anyone's on top of this situation,” Michael continued. Claire was trying to catch his eye. He glanced at her and held up a finger, telling her to wait for a minute. “We're trying to restore profitability—is that such a difficult message to get across?” Now, at last, there was an audible undertone of irritation.

“You go on ahead,” Claire said to her son. “We'll meet you at the gate.” She walked with them to the door of the executive lounge, and before seeing them off she assured Patrick: “Don't worry—he won't be like this all through the holiday.”

“How do you know?” he asked.

“Because I'm going to tell him not to be.”

Patrick smiled when he heard that, pleased to see that his mother was feeling combative again. That was the best part of her, he sometimes thought: the part that had not been much in evidence for the last few years, since her return to Britain.

“She means it, as well,” he said to Rowena, as they walked down the corridor together. “She's going to give him one of her bollockings.”

“What does Michael do, anyway?” Rowena asked. “I couldn't understand a word he was saying on the phone.”

“I'm not sure what kind of company he's running at the moment. They're called Meniscus. Something to do with plastics, I think.” Patrick searched his pockets, suddenly anxious, until his fingers lighted upon his passport. “Sounded like they were trying to draft a press release, didn't it? I heard him saying something about consolidation and rationalizing. That's management-speak for closing down factories and putting people on the dole. I expect they're trying to find a gentle way of breaking it to the papers.”

While Michael continued his latest telephone call, accompanied by ever more impatient searches through the papers in his attaché case, and occasional calculations tapped out briskly on his palmtop, Claire kept one eye on the departures screen (which showed that the last call for their flight had come up five minutes ago) and rehearsed what she was going to say to him.

This is ludicrous, she would begin. How are we ever going to get to know each other, how are we ever going to
relate
to each other in a meaningful way, if you can't even put your work aside on holiday, if you can't even make the time to spend a few minutes talking to my son when you first meet him? And she would attempt to extract, as a condition of their continuing to see each other when this week was over, some sort of undertaking: that he would not spend this holiday on the telephone, that he would not hide himself away in some study for the next seven days, sending faxes and tinkering with balance sheets, while the rest of them were out scuba diving. She would present him with an ultimatum, confident that this was the sort of language he would understand. And confident, too—though she didn't know where this confidence came from, apart from her own instincts, which were usually sound—that he would not be angered or frightened off by this approach. There was a core of genuine feeling between them which he appreciated, even if it was at some deep level that he wasn't used to recognizing. She was sure of that.

“So how did it go?” Patrick asked a few minutes later, when she arrived at the check-in desk.

Claire was alone.

“I didn't get the chance to say anything,” she said. “He's gone back to the office. Said that the next few days were make or break and he couldn't trust anybody else to look after it. He's going to join us on Tuesday.”

“Promises, promises,” said Patrick. “Anyway, Rowena and I will be gone by then.” (They were not coming for the whole week, just the first three days.) He put his arm around Claire, and said: “Never mind, Mum.”

She returned the hug, and smiled an effortful smile. “Ah well,
c'est la vie.
Let's just get out there and enjoy ourselves, yeah? Get some of that Caribbean sunshine on our faces.”