Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘I see.’ Addressing Barbara now, he said abruptly: ‘Are you familiar with Morales?’
‘I don’t think so,’ she answered, nonplussed.
‘You don’t know
The Virgin and Child?’
‘We don’t get out to pubs much,’ said Sheila.
‘You misunderstand me. It’s a painting. It hangs in the Prado. I only mention it because –’ (tilting his head, now, to look at Barbara even more closely, appraisingly) ‘– the resemblance is quite striking. From a certain angle, you’re her very image. The likeness is quite uncanny. Positively… thaumaturgic.’
After another nervous glance at her companion, as if to seek confirmation that this was really happening, Barbara ventured: ‘I wanted to ask about my son. My son Philip. I wanted to know how he was coming along.’
‘Then you must be…’ Mr Plumb paused, as if to savour the taste of the words on his palate ‘… Mrs Chase. Mrs Barbara Chase: how it trips off the tongue. The thrill of the Chase, ha, ha!’ Following which note of near-hysteria, his tone grew suddenly serious. ‘Your son, Madam, is a child of most singular gifts. A dexterity with the brush which can only be described as prodigious. An imagination both antic and phantasmagoric. And above all, he evinces, in my view, the most refined aesthetic sense; the most profound responsiveness to beauty in all its myriad forms. Whence he acquired this unique sensitivity has always been a mystery to me. Always, that is, until tonight.’ His voice acquired, at this point, a kind of tremulous urgency which could hardly be other than comic, and yet Barbara still found herself staring deep into his eyes, captivated. ‘But of course, now everything becomes clear. How could Philip not respond to beauty, when he must have been surrounded by it, in the shimmering form of Mrs Barbara Chase, every day of his short, but happy – oh, so very happy – life?’
The brief, uncomfortable silence which followed this remark was broken by Sheila, who asked: ‘What about Benjamin? Benjamin Trotter.’
‘Competent draughtsmanship,’ said Mr Plumb, coming swiftly down to earth. ‘A fair facility with light and shade. He tries hard. That’s about all there is to say.’
Barbara became conscious, for some reason, of the other parents still waiting in line behind them.
‘I suppose we mustn’t keep you,’ she stammered. ‘I’m glad Philip’s doing so well. I would have liked to talk some more.’
‘We will,’ said Mr Plumb, his stare growing ever more piercing and earnest. ‘We will meet again. I’m quite, quite certain of it.’
For a delirious instant, Barbara thought that he was going to kiss her hand. But the moment passed, and she hurried away, turning only once, involuntarily, to catch another glimpse of him as he began talking to the next anxious mother.
Sheila was snorting with amusement. ‘What a creep! Who does he think he is, Sacha Distel or something?’
She looked at Barbara, expecting her to share the joke. But her new friend seemed remote, lost in thought.
‘D’you fancy coming to dinner on Saturday?’ Sheila asked, on a sudden impulse.
‘Dinner?’
‘Yes. Come round to our place. All of you. I’m sure Ben would like it. He’s always talking about your Philip. Does he have any brothers or sisters?’
‘No, Philip’s the only one.’ Barbara swallowed; her voice, which had become cracked, was returning almost to normal again. ‘That sounds lovely. I’ll have to ask Sam first.’
They found him still talking with Colin and Mr Warren, the games master, but no longer about sport. Somehow they had progressed to politics, and were railing against the incompetence of Edward Heath’s government. They shook their heads at the scandal of a nation held to ransom by obstreperous, strike-happy miners, the shame of a once-great country reduced to measures more often associated with Eastern Europe or the Third World: power cuts, petrol rationing, three-day weeks. There was to be a general election soon, on February 28th, and Sam Chase and Mr Warren had already made up their minds: Heath would have to go. He had proved himself unfit to govern.
Colin was horrified. ‘You’re voting for Wilson? You’re going to let the socialists back in? You might as well just give the miners the keys to the ruddy country and let them get on with it.’
Mr Warren told him that, given the chance, the only Tory he would vote for – the only one with any integrity – was Enoch Powell. But Powell had by now publicly distanced himself from the party, in protest at Britain’s entry into the EEC, and would not be standing in the election.
‘That man should be listened to,’ said Mr Warren, emphatically. ‘He’s a scholar and a visionary.’
Sam nodded. ‘And a Brummie to boot.’
Half an hour later, in the car home, Colin Trotter was still fuming silently at this new evidence of the British electorate’s terminal fecklessness. ‘Wilson!’ he would mutter, every so often, half to himself, half to his wife, but she took little notice. She was wondering why Benjamin, a bright enough boy in her opinion, had made so little impression on any of his teachers. The subject preoccupied her so thoroughly that they had almost reached Longbridge before she thought to tell Colin: ‘Oh: I invited the Chases to dinner next Saturday.’
‘That’s nice,’ he said, barely registering.
As they drove through the last few streets, he noticed that the windows of the grey, somnolent houses were uniformly darkened.
‘Another power cut,’ he said, his voice quiet and bitter with incredulity. ‘I don’t believe it. I don’t bloody believe it.’
Neither did Benjamin, who they found a few minutes later reading back issues of
Sounds
by candlelight in his bedroom, combing them for references to Henry Cow. The electricity had failed at 8.45, shortly after he had packed his brother off to bed, a quarter of an hour before his film was due to start.
6
On the night of the dinner party, Lois was in a bad mood. It was the first time for many weeks that Malcolm had not taken her out on a Saturday, and although she could hardly find fault with his excuse (it was his best friend’s stag night), she still took it upon herself to feel poutingly, irrationally aggrieved. Now she would have to spend the evening sitting around the dinner table making polite conversation with two total strangers, not to mention this awkward, gangly friend of her brother’s who never seemed to take his eyes off her.
And Philip was, without doubt, behaving rather oddly. The truth was that for several weeks he had been nursing a minor crush on Lois, and the sight of her this evening, in a sleeveless orange dress which could only be described as low-cut, was putting him under a lot of strain. He had been placed opposite her at the dinner table, so that her breasts loomed large, white and goosepimpled, exactly in his line of vision. He knew that he was staring fixedly in their direction, his lips moist and parted, a look of besotted fascination etched on his face, but was powerless to do anything about it. As for conversation, his abilities in that area – always limited when there were girls around – had tonight deserted him altogether. He appeared to have forgotten most of the words in the English language. A simple request for the salt cellar had already emerged as gibbering nonsense, and he was terrified at the thought of attempting anything else. Now he and Lois had lapsed into a sepulchral silence compared to which, down at the other end of the table, the atmosphere seemed riotous. In what amounted, for him, to a fit of extravagance, Colin had bought not one but two bottles of Blue Nun to accompany the meal. Add to this the fact that the Chases, by some happy chance, had arrived with a gift of the very same wine, in a litre bottle no less, and the stage was set for a scene of almost orgiastic excess. All of which was small consolation to Philip, confined as he was to orangeade and unable to think of a single comprehensible remark to address to his dining companion, who was by now chatting quite freely with Sam Chase. Straining to overhear a few fragments, Philip glimpsed, at last, the prospect of an entry into the conversation, and took his courage in both hands.
‘What is the name of your goldfish?’ he asked.
Lois stared at him. Although nobody else had stopped talking, it seemed to Philip that a new silence had descended, even colder and deathlier than before, and quite irrevocable. After what felt like aeons, she repeated:
‘What is the name of my goldfish?’
Philip stared back, and swallowed hard. He had misjudged the situation; he had misheard; something, anyway, had gone terribly wrong. In a few moments Lois had turned away, with a contemptuous toss of her head, and he was left to contemplate, once again, the pallid gorgeousness of her breasts, in the now absolute certainty that this was as close as he would ever get to them.
(Typically, Paul had witnessed the whole incident, and would later inform Philip with demonic glee that the word he had mistaken for ‘goldfish’ was in fact ‘Colditz’, since Sam and Lois had been discussing the popular TV series of that name. This explanation, by the time he heard it, was somewhat beside the point as far as Philip was concerned. Lois clearly regarded him as some kind of simpleton, and they were to exchange no more words, not only for the rest of that evening, but for the next twenty-nine years, as it happened.)
Lois excused herself and disappeared up to her room after dinner, which eased Philip’s tension slightly. He began at last to be infected by the grown-ups’ high spirits. Sheila and Colin in particular were on sparkling form, fired by the success of the meal which had, they quietly admitted to themselves, been a gastronomic triumph. After
hors d’oeuvres
of salt and vinegar and cheese and onion crisps, served in tupperware bowls, they had moved on to a course of melon slices, topped with glacé cherries and washed down with generous glassfuls of Blue Nun. It was followed by sirloin steak – each portion charred, with exquisite calculation, almost but not quite to the point of unrecognizability – served with chips, mushrooms, salad and unlimited dollops of salad cream, while the Blue Nun, needless to stay, continued to flow in a Bacchanalian torrent. Finally, fat wedges of Black Forest gâteau, doused remorselessly with double cream, were thrust before the swollen bellies and glazed eyes of the satisfied diners, and the Blue Nun began to flow faster and more freely even than before, if that could be considered possible. Places were swapped so that Sam and Colin moved next to each other, and soon they began to supplement their wine with what was indisputably the Trotter household’s alcoholic
pièce de résistance:
Colin’s homemade light ale, which he brewed in a forty-pint plastic keg in the cupboard under the stairs, using a kit from Boots the Chemist. The cost, as he was always ready to point out, worked out at a little under 2p per pint: an astonishing price to pay for a drink which differed hardly at all from the commercially manufactured beers, except that this one tended to come out of the keg looking cloudy and green, with a head that took up at least two-thirds of the glass and an afterburn like fermented WD 40. Stoked up by a couple of glasses of this lethal concoction, the men fell to discussing the Irish question, dividing their contempt equally between the supine Northern Ireland Secretary, Francis Pym, and the ‘bloody Catholic killers’ who had caused all the trouble in the first place. Their voices began to take on a vengeful, exasperated edge. Naturally enough, the women ignored this discussion. They had more pressing, more personal things to talk about.
‘You know your art teacher,’ said Sheila, leaning confidentially towards her elder son. ‘The one with the moustache?’
‘Mr Plumb?’
‘Is there anything… Is there anything strange about him at all?’
‘We call him Sugar Plum Fairy,’ Philip volunteered. ‘That’s his nickname.’
Barbara’s face fell. ‘What, you mean he’s… one of them?’
‘No, of course not,’ said Benjamin, laughing. ‘We only call him that ’cause he’s such a pansy. He’s randy as an old goat, actually.’
‘He’s having an affair with Mrs Ridley,’ Philip stated, with great authority.
‘And who’s Mrs Ridley?’ Barbara asked, in an offhand way.
‘She teaches Latin at the Girls’ School. She and Plumb went on a school trip last year and that’s when it started.’
‘They went to Florence with the sixth form,’ Paul added. His knowledge was second-hand, but he had no intention of being left out. ‘And they had it off in the hotel every night.’
‘Language!’ said Sheila, turning a furious gaze on her son. ‘In front of guests.’
‘It’s only what Lois told me.’
Philip had begun to laugh irresistibly, at the return of some priceless memory. He turned to Benjamin and said:
‘D’you remember what Harding did? The night of the Girls’ School Revue?’
‘Oh yes!’ Benjamin’s eyes shone, as they always did when recounting a Harding story. He savoured the rooted attention of his mother and Mrs Chase. ‘At the Girls’ School Revue last term, Mr Plumb and Mrs Ridley were in a sketch together. And when they got up on the stage, Harding stood up in the middle of the audience, and shouted…’ He paused, looked to Philip for confirmation, and they both exclaimed in unison:
‘Homebreaker!’
Their mothers were gratifyingly shocked.
‘What happened?’ said Sheila, her hand to her mouth. ‘Surely he could have been expelled.’
Benjamin shook his head. ‘Nobody said anything about it.’
‘Harding always knows what he’s doing,’ said Philip. ‘He always knows just how far he can go.’
His father’s voice, meanwhile, was getting louder and louder as the alcohol continued to work its unsubtle magic.
‘I’m not one for making predictions,’ he bellowed, and Barbara groaned inwardly, for this was his invariable prelude to making predictions. ‘But I’ll tell you this, and I’ll stake my life on it: the Irish business’ll be over – over and done with – two years from now.’
‘Anyway,’ Benjamin was asking his mother, ‘why do you want to know about Sugar Plum Fairy?’
‘Oh, he just seemed a bit of a character, that’s all.’
‘Shall I tell you why?’ Sam continued. ‘Because the IRA haven’t got the guts for a real fight.’
‘He’s certainly got the gift of the gab, hasn’t he, Barbara?’ said Sheila, reluctant to drop the subject of Mr Plumb. ‘A bit of a way with words.’