Authors: Jonathan Coe
We arrived in Eastbourne at about twelve o’clock. Ours was the only car parked by the front, and for a few minutes we sat in silence, listening to the wash of sea against grey shingle.
‘It’s so quiet,’ said Fiona; and when we got out, the opening and shutting of the car doors seemed both to shatter and to be absorbed by the surrounding hush: making me think – I can’t imagine why – of lonely punctuation marks on a blank sheet of paper.
As we walked down to the ocean our footsteps made a pebbly crunch; you could also, if you listened closely, hear a whispered breeze, sibilant and fitful. Fiona unfolded a rug and we sat at the water’s edge, leaning into one another. It was extremely cold.
After a while she said: ‘Where are we going to eat?’
I said: ‘There’s bound to be a hotel or a pub or something.’
She said: ‘It’s Christmas Day. They might all be booked out.’
A few minutes later, the near-silence was broken by the click and whirr of an approaching bicycle. We looked round and saw an old and very corpulent man parking his bike against the wall, then descending the steps and crunching his way towards the sea, a knapsack across his shoulder and a resolute look on his face. When he was about ten yards away from us he put down his knapsack and started taking his clothes off. We tried not to watch as more and more of his huge, pink, astonishing body came into view. He was wearing bathing trunks instead of underpants and, much to our relief, he stopped at these, then folded his clothes in a neat pile, took a towel from his knapsack and shook it out. After that he started picking his way towards the water, pausing only to glance at us and say, ‘Morning.’ He was still wearing his wrist-watch, and a few steps later he stopped to look at it, turned back towards us and qualified his greeting with: ‘Afternoon, I should say.’ Then another afterthought: ‘You wouldn’t mind keeping an eye on my things, would you? If you’re going to be here a minute or two.’ His accent was Northern: Mancunian, at a guess.
Fiona said: ‘Not at all.’
‘How old do you reckon he is,’ I asked under my breath, as we saw him wade, without flinching, into the icy shallows: ‘Seventy? eighty?’
In another moment he had submerged himself and all we could see was his reddened pate bobbing up and down. He wasn’t in for long, only about five minutes or so, starting off with some easy-going breast-stroke, then switching to a vigorous crawl as he charged up and down the same stretch of water ten or twelve times, and ending up on his back for a leisurely return to the shore. When he hit the pebbles he rolled over and clambered out, rubbing his hands together and slapping his flabby upper arms to restore the circulation.
‘Bit nippy in there today,’ he said, as he walked past us. ‘Still, it wouldn’t do to miss. Couldn’t do without my constitutional.’
‘You mean you do this every day?’ asked Fiona.
‘Every day for the last thirty years,’ he said, returning to his pile of clothes and beginning to towel himself dry. ‘First thing in the morning, as a rule. Of course, today’s a bit different: it being Christmas, and so forth. We’ve a house full of grandkids and this was the earliest I could escape, what with all the presents having to be opened.’ Fiona averted her eyes as he began the tortuous business of getting his trunks off while holding the towel in place. ‘Are you from round here?’ he asked. ‘Or just down for the day?’
‘We’ve come down from London,’ said Fiona.
‘I see. Getting away from it all. And why not. Couldn’t face a day of screaming children and Granny hurting her teeth on the walnuts.’
‘Something like that.’
‘Can’t say I blame you. Madness it is, round at our place this morning.’ He pulled his ample stomach in a few inches and fastened his belt. ‘Mind you, it’s the wife I feel sorry for. Turkey, roast potatoes, stuffing and two veg for fourteen people. That’s a lot to expect of any woman, isn’t it?’
Fiona asked if he could recommend somewhere for us to have lunch, and he mentioned the name of a pub. ‘It’ll be full up, mind, but the landlord’s a friend of mine, so if you just mention my name they might find you a corner. Tell them Norman sent you. I shouldn’t waste much time about it, either, if I was you. Come on and I’ll point you in the right direction.’
We thanked him and, once he had finished dressing and had repacked the towel carefully in his knapsack, followed him up to the road.
‘Crikey, what a lovely bike,’ said Fiona, as soon as she saw it at close quarters. ‘Cannondale, isn’t it?’
‘D’you like it? This is its maiden voyage. It was a present from my eldest: they sprang it on me this morning. I do know a thing or two about bikes – been riding them all my life, you see – and I reckon this one ought to be a beauty. Only weighs about half as much as my old Raleigh: here, look at this, I can lift it up with one hand.’
‘How does it feel on the road?’
‘Well, not as nifty as I was expecting, funnily enough. I’ve come from a little way out of town and it’s a bit of a climb. I was finding it quite hard going.’
‘That’s odd.’ Fiona knelt down and started to examine the back wheel. I looked on, bemused.
‘You’d think with seven gears I wouldn’t have any problem at all, wouldn’t you?’
She peered even more intently at a cluster of very intimidating-looking cogs and ratchets at the centre of the wheel. ‘You know, you might have the wrong sort of cassette on here,’ she said. ‘If this is designed for racing then the ratios may be too high for you. It’s all to do with the cadence. This’ll be designed for about ninety r.p.m. and you’re probably doing nearer seventy-five.’
Norman looked worried. ‘Is that serious, then?’
‘Not really. You’re in luck, because you’ve got individually replaceable sprockets. You’ll need a chain whip and a lockring remover, and then you can do it yourself.’ She stood up. ‘Well, it’s just a hunch.’
‘You can have a ride if you like,’ said Norman. ‘See what you think.’
‘Can I? Gosh, that would be a treat.’ She turned the bike round and swung herself into the saddle. ‘I’ll just go up to the roundabout and back, shall I?’
‘Whatever you like.’
We both watched as she pedalled off down the road, uncertainly at first, then gathering speed and confidence. She receded from view until the only distinct feature was her windswept trail of copper hair.
‘Getting a good bit of speed up, there,’ said Norman.
‘She’s an old hand,’ I said, surprised at the pride I took in being able to tell him this. ‘Did a forty-mile sponsored ride a couple of months ago.’
‘Well’ – he winked at me in a manly, confidential sort of way – ‘you’re a lucky bugger, that’s all I can say. No wonder you don’t want to share her with anybody else on a day like this. She’s a cracker.’
‘That’s not really why we’re here.’
‘Oh?’
‘No. We came down for … well, for health reasons, I suppose you’d call it.’ The urge to confide in someone was suddenly strong. ‘I’m so worried, I couldn’t begin to tell you. We’ve been trying to get some sense out of the doctors, but it’s been going on for months: fevers, night sweats, dreadful sore throats. I just thought a change of scene might do some good – you know, sea air, and all that sort of thing. She’d never say anything about it, but it’s been tearing us both apart; and if it turns out to be something serious, I don’t know how I’d cope, I really don’t.’
‘Aye, well.’ Norman sighed, looking away, and shuffled his feet in embarrassment. ‘I didn’t like to say anything, but now you’ve mentioned it, you do look bloody terrible.’ And just before Fiona cruised back into earshot, he added: ‘Let’s hope she doesn’t wear you out, eh?’
∗
We tried our luck at the pub he’d recommended. The dining area was very hot, very full, and very stuffy, but when we mentioned Norman’s name the landlord did indeed manage to find us a table in the corner, boxed in by a family party of eight, all of them highly boisterous except for a lanky teenager with a streaming cold. He could never quite get to his handkerchief in time, and whenever he sneezed I could see the fine droplets of saliva flying in our direction. We passed on the first course and went straight on to the turkey, which was dry, thinly sliced to the point of transparency, and served with a small mountain of waterlogged vegetables.
‘How come you know all that stuff about bicycles, then?’ I asked Fiona, as she made her first brave inroads into this daunting confection. ‘You were coming across like a real expert.’
She had her mouth full of sprout and turkey, and was unable to answer at first.
‘I did an abstract of some articles about new gear systems just a couple of weeks ago,’ she said, and then embarked upon some serious chewing. ‘I’ve got a good memory for that sort of thing: don’t ask me why.’
‘I wouldn’t have thought it fell within your brief.’
‘We have a very wide brief. It’s not just specialist journals: we cover lots of different subjects. Cycling, cybernetics, sexually transmitted diseases, space travel …’
‘Space travel?’
She noticed my sudden interest.
‘Why, is this another little obsession that you’ve been keeping quiet about?’
‘Well, it used to be, I suppose. When I was little I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up. I know probably every other boy of my age felt the same way but those enthusiasms never really leave you, do they?’
‘Strange,’ she said. ‘I never really thought of you as the macho type.’
‘Macho?’
‘Well, the symbolism of all those rockets isn’t exactly hard to fathom, is it? I’m sure that’s the appeal for the average male: thrusting your way into the unknown regions …’
‘No, that wasn’t how I felt at all. Perhaps this sounds strange, but it was the’ – I cast around for the word, failed to find it, and had to settle for – ‘the lyricism of it, I suppose, that attracted me.’ Fiona seemed unconvinced. ‘Yuri Gagarin was my real hero. Did you ever read his description of what he could see from the rocket while it was in orbit? It’s almost like a poem.’
She laughed incredulously. ‘You’re going to recite it to me now, aren’t you?’
‘Hang on.’ I closed my eyes. It was years since I’d last tried to remember these words. ‘ “The day side of the earth was clearly visible,’ ” I began, and then repeated slowly: ‘ “The coasts of continents, islands, big rivers, big surfaces of water … During the flight I saw for the first time with my own eyes the earth’s spherical shape. You can see its curvature when looking to the horizon. The view of the horizon is unique and very beautiful. You can see the remarkable change in colour from the light surface of the earth to the completely black sky in which you can see the stars. This dividing line is very thin, just like a belt of film surrounding the earth’s sphere. It’s a delicate blue, and this transition from the blue to the black is very gradual and lovely.” ’
Fiona laid down her knife and fork while I was saying this, and listened with her chin cradled in her hands.
‘I had pictures of him plastered all over my bedroom. I even used to write stories about him. And then the night he died in that plane crash’ – I laughed nervously – ‘and you don’t have to believe this if you don’t want to – but the night he died, I had a dream about him. I dreamed that I
was
him, plummeting down to earth in this burning plane. And at that stage I hadn’t really given him a thought for years.’ From the blankness of Fiona’s expression, I gathered that she was sceptical about this revelation. So I concluded with an apology: ‘Well, it made an impression on me at the time.’
‘No, I believe you,’ she said. ‘I was just trying to remember something.’ She sat back and gazed at the window, now dotted with spluttering rain. ‘Some time last year, I had to do an abstract of a piece in one of the newspapers. It was about that crash – somebody’s theory about what might have happened, based on new information. You know, post-glasnost, and all that.’
‘What did it say?’
‘I’ve forgotten a lot of it; but the whole thing was pretty indecisive, anyway, I think. Something about another plane, a much larger one, crossing his flight path and creating a lot of turbulence just as he was coming out of the cloud. Throwing him off course.’
I shook my head. ‘My theory’s better than that. Well, it’s the same theory that a lot of people have, actually. The idea is that the Soviet authorities bumped him off, because he’d seen a bit too much of the West and he liked it and he was probably going to defect.’
Fiona smiled: an affectionate but challenging smile.
‘You think you can reduce everything to politics, don’t you, Michael? It makes life so simple for you.’
‘I don’t see what’s simple about it.’
‘Well of course politics can be complicated, I realize that. But I always think there’s something treacherous about that sort of approach. The way it tempts us to believe there’s an explanation for everything, somewhere or other, if only we’re prepared to look hard enough. That’s what you’re really interested in, isn’t it? Explaining things away.’
‘What’s the alternative?’
‘No, that’s not the point. I’m just saying there are other possibilities to be taken into account. Larger ones, even.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as … well, supposing he really did die by accident? Suppose it was circumstance that killed him: nothing more, nothing less. Wouldn’t that be more frightening to face up to than your little conspiracy theory? Or supposing it was suicide. He’d seen things that nobody else had seen, after all – incredibly beautiful things, by the sound of it. Perhaps he never really came back to reality, and this was the culmination of something irrational, some madness which had been burning away
inside him
– well out of the reach of you and your politics. I don’t suppose you’d like the sound of that much, either.’
‘Well, if you’re determined to get sentimental about it …’
Fiona shrugged. ‘Maybe I am sentimental. But there are dangers in being too dogmatic, you know. Seeing everything in black and white.’ I couldn’t think of an answer to this, and concentrated instead on impaling a trio of spongy peas on the end of my fork. Her next question took me by surprise. ‘When are you going to tell me why you fell out with your mother in that Chinese restaurant?’