“I'm probably going to go away for a few days soon,” he announced now: and added (although at heart he knew that this was pure fantasy), “I was thinking of asking her to come along with me.”
“Really? Where are you going?”
And Benjamin told Doug about the Abbaye St. Wandrille in Normandy; how he had been there with Emily, and how he had known, from the moment he had set foot inside the chapel and listened to the monks singing their
Complies,
that it was a place where he might one day feel completely and blissfully at home.
Doug was puzzled. “But Malvina's a woman.”
“There's a dormitory there for women,” Benjamin said. “It's outside the walls, and the female guests aren't allowed inside to eat with the monks or anything like that. But, you knowâit's still a pretty nice place to stay.”
Doug looked at him for a while, amazement and amusement struggling for precedence on his face. “Benjamin,” he said at last, “I don't know how you do it. Even when I think that nothing you say could surprise me, you still manage to pull something out of the hat.”
“How do you mean?”
“Only you, Benjaminâonly
you
âcould invite a woman to spend a dirty weekend with you at a fucking monastery!”
He laughed so hard that he fell backwards off his cushion and cracked his head against an adjoining table, while Benjamin just sat there sipping his wine and looking offended. He didn't think it was that funny, personally. But he was glad that something had cheered his friend up.
2
After Claire had been shown to her desk, she sat there for several minutes, with the first of the dozens of folders lying in front of her, unopened. She had laid two sharpened pencils next to it, and an A5 notebook, with a silky blue hardback cover and thick, roughly cut pages, which she had bought in Venice some years ago, and which contained, so far, only one piece of writing: the long letter she had composed to Miriam, describing her return to England in the winter of 1999. As for the folder, she didn't touch it. Not yet. It wasn't that she lacked the will, more that she was waiting for her head to clear. She wanted to be alert when reading this material, she didn't want the smallest detail to pass her by, and at the moment she felt anything but alert. The drive from Malvern to Coventry had been hellish: an hour and three-quarters, in the driving rain. The Warwick campus had been far busier than she was expecting, and she had struggled to find a parking space even in the biggest of the multi-storey car parks. She had arrived at the Modern Records Center fifty minutes later than the time agreed with the librarian over the telephone. Not that anybody seemed to mind: but Claire herself was flustered, disorientated. Right now, she didn't feel up to the task.
Maybe some coffee would help.
It was less than a minute's walk from Modern Records to the Arts Centre, but even in that time the rain managed to drench her. She asked for a double espresso and bought a hot chocolate as well, mainly so that she could keep her hands warm on the mug. She sat in a corner and watched the life of the university straggle before her on this Tuesday late-morning. Not many students in here, she noticed: it was more of a place where the academics and other staff came to eat. The air smelt heavily of wet, steaming clothes and dripping hair. Young, whey-faced lecturers split open packets of crisps and shared them with female postgraduates in ceremonies of would-be flirtation. Single women in their mid-fifties sat looking through their Filofaxes, and pulled dripping tea bags out of paper cups, holding them aloft uncertainly before depositing them to spread hot brown tea stains on their paper napkins.
She was back in England again: no mistaking it now. No wonder she was disorientated, then, given that forty-eight hours ago she had been sitting on a private beach near Bodden Town, beneath a tropical sun. Two days ago she had also been in a relationship (of sorts); this morning, she was single.
And probably all the happier for it, on the whole.
The holiday had got off to a good, if somewhat surreal, start. Never having flown first class before, Claire, Patrick and Rowena had over-indulged themselves wildly, drinking more than one bottle of champagne each, gorging themselves on Beluga caviar and Italian truffles, and then watching seven or eight hours' worth of movies on their personal video screens. As a result, they arrived drunk, bloated and exhausted while the other, more experienced travellers, who had spent most of the flight asleep, stepped off the plane looking in excellent shape. They were then met at the airport by George, the driver employed by Michael's business associate (whose name they never discovered), and were driven the fifteen miles or so to his villa,
Proserpina,
on the south side of the island.
Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was the tiredness, but when they first stepped inside the villa, and when their cases had been taken away by the butler, and their coats by the maid, they all three simply burst into laughter. Opulence on this kind of scale was comical: they could not summon up any other response to it.
The very size of the rooms was staggering. The main reception room was as big as a hotel lobby, with six sofas, two bars, innumerable concealed speakers connected to a central Bang and Olufsen stereo system and French windows opening on to 500 yards of private beach. The smallest of the bedrooms contained a bed that could easily have slept five, raisedâlike all the other beds in the houseâon a dais beneath a high ceiling with individual, hand-crafted oak mouldings. There were televisions everywhere, and bars everywhere (even, paradoxically, in the gymnasium). The study boasted a desk as wide as a snooker table, which faced a bank of twenty-four television screens which could be used either to provide surveillance of every room in the house, from every conceivable angle, or to watch all the satellite news and business channels simultaneously. For those who couldn't cope with the arduous twenty-yard walk to the beach, there were swimming pools indoors and out. The sunken bath in the master bathroom was, in itself, a swimming pool by any ordinary standards.
Claire spent most of the next two days on the beach, in the water, or sitting on one of the sun terraces reading. There were no books in the house, apart from a locked and alarmed glass-fronted display cabinet containing modern first editions (Thornton Wilder, Scott Fitzgerald, Steinbeck) and some eighteenth- and seventeenth-century volumes, none of which looked as though they were intended to be read; however, she had brought plenty of her own. She saw little of Patrick and Rowena, who would disappear to go diving and snorkelling for hours at a time. They met only at mealtimes, which proved to be fraught with problems of etiquette. The first night, their dinner was prepared for them by the resident cook. They felt so uncomfortable with this arrangement, and the staff who served the food appeared, in turn, to feel so uncomfortable about the guests' attempts to be friendly with them, engage them in conversation and generally treat them as living, breathing human beings rather than items of household furniture, that Claire decided she couldn't go through with it again. For the next two nights, they ate out at restaurants in Bodden Town. Even then, George insisted on driving them to their destination, and waiting for them in the car outside until they were ready to go home. Claire did her best to draw Rowena out on these occasions, but she found her cold and remote, almost to the point of rudeness. She and Patrick seemed to have almost nothing in common; there seemed to be no rapport between them except for the obvious physical one. Claire gave the relationship until Christmas at the latest.
By the end of the third day, Michael had still not appeared; and it was already time for Patrick and Rowena to fly home. They were both in their gap years between school and university, and in two days' time Rowena would be starting a temporary job at her uncle's architectural practice in Edinburgh. Patrick, chivalrously, had offered to drive her all the way there. Claire waved goodbye as George swept them off to the airport, and then spent thirty-six even more bizarre hours alone in the house, with no one for company but half a dozen servants who appeared to be under written instructions not to talk to her, although they were endlessly hovering on the edges of whichever room she happened to be in, ready to refill her glass or clear away her plate as soon as it was done with.
She began to feel more than slightly strange. She could not reconcile her sense of being entirely alone with the knowledge that she was always under surveillance (whether by the wordlessly vigilant servants, or the security cameras which switched themselves on with a click and a whirr and began tracking her progress as soon as she entered a room). She did not know what she was doing here. She felt more like a prisoner than a guest. Her sense of identity was starting to fracture. She had begun to feel like the Catherine Deneuve character in a big-budget, full-colour Hollywood remake of
Repulsion.
Michael's long-delayed arrival made a certain amount of difference, but not as much as she had been expecting. They went diving together, they swam together, they ate meals together in the evening by the side of the swimming pool. One night he took her out in a speedboat and they had dinner with a friend who had a yacht moored a few miles along the coast towards Long Coconut Point. They made love on the beach, in the bedroom and even (once, rather precariously and disastrously) on the rowing machine in the gymnasium. The only thing they didn't do, in fact, was talk. All of Claire's resolutions about confronting Michael with her growing despair about the future of the relationship were thwarted by his constant air of preoccupation, his magnificent unreachability. He could be talkative when he wanted to be: they had their usual, half-serious, half-facetious political arguments; he would discuss current affairs, the state of the economy, the looming war with Iraq (which he opposed) and even, occasionally, more trivial things like Caribbean cuisine or the education of his children (who were all at boarding school). But every attempt to shift the conversations on to an emotional level met with blankness.
Claire began to ask herself, again, why she had come to this place. In the main reception room, she watched Michael pressing a button on the remote control so that a widescreen plasma TV rose up from beneath the floor like something on the console of the Starship
Enterprise,
watched him flicking between Bloomberg and the other satellite business channels, and kept asking herself, over and over: what am I doing here?
It was not that he spent the whole time working. Whatever crisis had delayed him back in London seemed to have been successfully resolved. He only spent an hour or two every day in the study. When a call came through on his mobile, he would check the number first, and only answer about one in four. Sometimes, if Claire asked him what the call had been about, he would even try to tell her. She did not really understand business jargon, and she always got the sense that he was being fairly selective with the information he chose to share with her, but all the same, she felt that he was making a decent effort to help her understand what was on his mind. She did not feel that she was being deceived, or kept out of a loop. She knew that the company was in the process of disposing of some of its surplus land and plant: there were repeated references to premises near Solihull, just outside Birmingham. The deal seemed to be in its final stages. It appeared to be going well, and that, for Claire, was the important thing. It meant that Michael was in a good mood.
At about ten o'clock one morning, she came out of the shower and saw that Michael was sitting on the balcony outside their bedroom, overlooking the beach. Breakfast had been served and he was talking on his mobile while drinking coffee and picking with his fork at some eggs benedict. Still wearing only her dressing gown, she sat down at the table opposite him, poured some coffee into a bone china cup, and carried on reading the novel she had started the night before. Michael glanced at her, telling her with his eyes that he would not be on the phone for much longer. She lost interest in the novel after a sentence or two, and sat admiring the view instead, sundrunk and mesmerized by the subtle movements of palm trees against an azure sky as the morning breeze rustled their leaves.
“So that's definite, is it?” Michael was saying. “One hundred and forty-six is the final figure?” There were some words of confirmation at the other end of the line, and he nodded approvingly, looking very pleased with this development. “Excellent. OK. Well I think we can release that in a few weeks and there won't be much fall-out. Noâafter Christmas, definitely. Just after.”
Shortly afterwards he clicked the phone shut, smiled at Claire, and leaned across the table to kiss her good morning.
“Good news?” she asked, filling his coffee cup.
“Very satisfactory.”
She waited for him to elaborate, but it seemed he had no intention of doing so. Claire was annoyed by this, for some reason, but managed to keep her tone of voice airy as she asked: “Soâa hundred and forty-six, eh? Is that million?”
He looked up from his breakfast plate. “Mm?”
“Is that how much you're going to getâfor selling the Solihull buildings?”
“Oh.” He laughed, dismissively. “No. Not at all.”
“Don't tell me, then: it's going to be your Christmas bonus this year?”
He laughed again. It was perfectly relaxed laughter. Whatever it was that he had just confirmed over the telephone, it was nothing that caused him any embarrassment, or he felt obliged to conceal from her.
“Hardly,” he said. “Sorry not to tell you anything more dramatic, but it's just plain one hundred and forty-six, I'm afraid. We're closing down the R&D department completely. Not paying its way. We're shutting it down and selling off the plant. That means we'll be making a hundred and forty-six people redundant.”
“Oh,” said Claire. “I see. And why's that good news?”
“Because I was afraid it was going to have to be more than that. Anything over two hundred would have been a PR disaster. But a hundred and forty-six is nothing, really, is it? People are barely going to notice.”
“No,” said Claire, thoughtfully. “I suppose they won't.”
Not long afterwards, Michael disappeared inside to have a shower, leaving Claire to ponder these words. She made no attempt, this time, to pick up her novel again. Instead, she could feel a kind of numbness spreading over her. It was not new, this feeling: she realized now that it had been growing inside her all week. And what she had just heard from Michael made no difference, in a way: it was not as if this was a turning point, or a moment of revelation. Perhaps the numbness was now, at least, beginning to assume a shape; or perhaps it had become so pressing that she knew she could not ignore it for much longer. Whatever the reason, all at once she felt deeply, oppressively unhappy to be sitting there on this sundrenched balcony, the sparkle of ocean laid out before her, thousands of miles from the world she knew, the world she understood. She felt a pang of almost unbearable longing for her little terraced house on the slopes of Great Malvern.
A few minutes later she went inside, changed into her bathing costume and left the house without saying anything to Michael. She walked to the beach.
She was not outraged by anything she had heard; she was not naive; she knew what it was that Michael did for a living. People lost their jobs all the time; and this inevitably meant that somebody, somewhere, had to make the decisions which led to those job losses. It just so happened that this particular decision had been made this morning, just across the table from her, on a Caribbean island, by a man she had chosen to become intimate with, on a balcony outside the bedroom she was sharing with him. What difference did that make? It shouldn't make any difference at all. And he was right. One hundred and forty-six wasn't such a big number. You regularly saw stories in the newspapers about thousands of people losing their jobs.