Authors: Jonathan Coe
Such a shame Lawrence never lived to see it happen. But I shall do his memory proud.
We must never forget that we owe it all to Margaret. If ambition turns to reality, it will be thanks to her, and her alone. She is magnificent, unstoppable. I’ve never known such resolution in a woman, such backbone. She cuts her opponents down as if they were so many weeds blocking her path. Knocks them aside with a flick of her finger. She looked so beautiful in victory. How can I ever repay her – how can any of us even begin to repay her – for all that she’s done?
November 18th 1990
The call came through at about 9 p.m. Nothing had been decided yet, but they were starting to canvass opinion among the faithful. I was one of the first to be asked. The poll findings are grim: she gets more and more unpopular. In fact it’s gone beyond unpopularity, now. The plain truth of the matter is that with Margaret as leader, the party is unelectable.
‘Dump the bitch,’ I said. ‘And fast.’
Nothing must be allowed to stop us.
1
October 1990
1
‘The fact is,’ said Fiona, ‘that I don’t really trust my GP. From what I can see, most of his energy these days goes into balancing his budget and trying to keep his costs down. I didn’t get the sense that I was being taken very seriously.’
I did my best to concentrate while she was telling me this, but couldn’t help keeping a watchful eye on the other diners as the restaurant started to fill up. It was beginning to dawn on me that I was underdressed. Hardly any of the men were wearing ties, but everything about their clothes looked expensive, and Fiona herself seemed to have been much more successful in judging the mood: she wore a collarless, herringbone-patterned jacket over a black cotton T-shirt, and cream linen trousers, cut a little bit short to show off her ankles. I hoped she hadn’t noticed the worn patches on my jeans, or the chocolate stains which had been ingrained on my jumper for longer than I cared to remember.
‘I mean, it’s not as if I’m some flappy little thing who comes running into his surgery every time I get a cold,’ she continued. ‘And this has been going on for nearly two months now, this flu or whatever it is. I can’t just keep taking days off work all the time.’
‘Well, Saturday’s probably his busiest day. He was bound to be rushed.’
‘I think I deserved more than just a pat on the head and a few antibiotics, that’s all.’ She bit into a prawn cracker and sipped some wine: an attempt, it seemed, to wash the irritation away. ‘Anyway.’ She looked up and smiled. ‘Anyway, this is very nice of you, Michael. Very nice, and quite unexpected.’
If there was an irony intended, it managed to pass me by. I still couldn’t quite get over my amazement at the thought that I was actually sitting with another person – a woman, no less – at a table for two in a restaurant. I suppose part of me, the most vocal and persuasive part, had simply given up believing that such a thing might happen: and yet it could hardly have been easier to accomplish. I’d spent the previous evening slumped in front of the television, almost mad with boredom even though my intentions had been admirable enough. Over the last few years I’d accumulated a pile of unwatched videos, and it had been my hope that this time I’d find the stamina to get through at least one of them. But it seemed that optimism had got the better of me again. I watched the first half of Cocteau’s
Orphée,
the first thirty minutes of Ray’s
Pather Panchali,
the first ten minutes of Mizoguchi’s
Ugetsu Monogatari,
the opening credits of Tarkovsky’s
Solaris
and the trailers at the beginning of Wenders’
The American Friend.
After that I gave up, and sat in front of a silent screen, steadily making my way down a bottle of supermarket wine. This continued until about two o’clock in the morning. In the old days I would have just poured myself a final glass and gone to bed, but now I realized that this wasn’t good enough. Fiona had called by a couple of hours earlier and I hadn’t even answered when she knocked; she would have seen the light under my door and must have known that I was ignoring her. And now suddenly, sitting by myself with only the television’s dumb flickering to combat the darkness, it seemed ridiculous to me that I should prefer these blank, unresponsive images to the company of an attractive and intelligent woman. It was anger, above all, which drove me to perform an impetuous and selfish act. I went directly on to the landing and rang the bell to Fiona’s flat.
She answered after a minute or two, wearing a light, Japanese-style dressing-gown. An expanse of freckled breastbone was exposed, sheened thinly with sweat although I for one thought the temperature had dropped quite sharply this evening.
‘Michael?’ she said.
‘I’ve been really unfriendly these last few weeks,’ I blurted out. ‘I came to apologize.’
She looked puzzled, of course, but managed to take it in her stride.
‘That’s not necessary.’
‘There are some things – possibly there are some things you ought to know about me,’ I said. ‘Things I’d like to tell you.’
‘Well, that’s wonderful, Michael. I certainly look forward to that.’ She was humouring me, I could tell. ‘But it is the middle of the night.’
‘I didn’t mean now. I thought maybe … over dinner.’
That seemed to surprise her more than anything. ‘Are you asking me out?’
‘I suppose I am.’
‘When?’
‘Tomorrow night?’
‘OK. Where?’
This put me in a corner, because I only knew one local restaurant and didn’t want to go back there. But there wasn’t much choice.
‘The Mandarin? Nine o’clock?’
‘I look forward to it.’
‘Fine: well, we could either get a taxi from here, say ten minutes beforehand, or actually it’s not very far to walk, and then we could maybe stop on the way …’
I realized that I was talking to a closed door, and went back to my flat.
Now Fiona was spreading plum sauce over a pancake with the back of her spoon, and filling it with thin strips of duck and cucumber. Her fingers worked neatly.
‘So, Michael, what are these revelations about yourself that you’ve been bursting to tell me? I’m agog.’
I smiled. I had been nervous all day, thinking how peculiar it would be to share a meal with someone again, but now I was beginning to feel quietly euphoric. ‘There are no revelations,’ I said.
‘So last night – that was just a subtle way of getting to see me in my dressing-gown, was it?’
‘It was just an impulse, that’s all. It had only just occurred to me how strange my behaviour must seem. You know – the way I keep myself to myself, how I barely answer you sometimes, all the time I spend watching things on the television: you must wonder what on earth’s going on.’
‘Not really,’ said Fiona, biting into her folded pancake. ‘You’re hiding from the world because it frightens you. I frighten you. You’ve probably never learned to form real relationships with people. Did you think I wouldn’t be able to see that?’
Wrongfooted, I tried to bite into my pancake, but I hadn’t folded it properly and the contents spilled out just as I was about to put it into my mouth.
‘You have to work at these things, that’s the point,’ said Fiona. ‘If it’s depression we’re talking about then let me tell you, I’ve been there. But, you know … Take that bike ride I went on the other week. Agony, it was. Complete bloody agony. But at least I met some people, went for a drink afterwards, got a couple of dinner invitations out of it. It may not sound like very much, but after a while you realize … there’s nothing worse than being on your own. Nothing.’ She sat back and wiped her fingers on her napkin. ‘Well, it’s just a thought. Perhaps we shouldn’t get heavy this early in the evening.’
I wiped my fingers too. Huge amounts of plum sauce seemed to come off and smudge the napkin with great brown patches.
‘You made a good choice here,’ said Fiona, glancing around the restaurant. It had a comfortable atmosphere, somehow intimate and convivial at the same time. ‘Have you been here before?’
‘No, no. I just read about it somewhere.’
But this, of course, was a lie, since we were in the very place where my mother and I had had the last, explosive argument from which our relationship was yet to recover. I had vowed never to come back here, fearing that someone on the staff might recognize me and make some embarrassing reference – for we had created quite a scene at the time – but now, finding myself both calmed and exhilarated by Fiona’s company, this anxiety seemed preposterous. It was after all one of the most popular restaurants in the area, and when I thought of all the thousands of customers who must have come and gone during the last two or three years … Really, I was flattering myself to suppose that anybody might have found the incident at all memorable.
A waiter came to clear our plates. ‘Good evening, sir,’ he said with a slight bow. ‘How nice that you come back again after all this time. Your mother is well?’
I sat speechless for a while after he had gone, unable to meet Fiona’s eyes which were laughing even as her mouth remained politely quizzical. Then I admitted: ‘Well, yes, I did come here with my mother once. We had a terrible row and … well, it’s not something I really wanted to talk about.’
‘I thought that was the whole point of this evening,’ she said. ‘To tell me things.’
‘Yes, it is. And I will. It’s just that there are certain things, certain areas …’ This was coming out badly, and it was clear that if I was to regain her confidence, a major gesture was called for. ‘Come on, you can ask me anything. Anything at all. Ask me a question.’
‘All right then: when did you get divorced?’
I put my wineglass down in mid-sip, spilling some on the table. ‘How did you know about that?’
‘It was on the cover of that book you showed me.’
And yes, it was true: I’d wasted no time in trying to impress Fiona by showing her a copy of my first novel, the dustjacket of which did indeed contain this little nugget of personal information. (Which had been Patrick’s idea: he said that it made me sound more interesting.)
‘That would have been in 1974, believe it or not,’ I said. I could hardly believe it myself.
Fiona raised her eyebrows. ‘What was her name?’
‘Verity. We met at school.’
‘You must have married very young.’
‘We were both nineteen. Neither of us had been out with anyone before. We didn’t know what we were doing, really.’
‘Are you bitter about it?’
‘I suppose not. I just look on it as my misspent youth: genuinely misspent – not taking drugs and sleeping with lots of different people, which would probably have been good fun, but this … perverse drive towards conformity.’
‘I’ve never liked the name Verity,’ said Fiona decisively. ‘I knew someone called Verity at college. She was prissy. Set a great value on telling the truth but I don’t think she ever told it to herself. If you see what I mean.’
‘You think names are important, then?’
‘Some names. Some people grow to resemble their names, like owners and their dogs. They can’t help it.’
‘I came across a curious one today. Findlay. Findlay Onyx.’
I had to pronounce the two halves quite distinctly before Fiona could be sure what I was saying. Then I explained to her how the name had come to my attention.
Earlier in the day I’d gone out to the newspaper library in Colindale to chase up further reports concerning the death at Winshaw Towers on the night of Mortimer’s fiftieth birthday. You may remember that the local newspaper had promised to keep its readers informed of every development. I had naïvely expected from this that there would be a series of stories dealing with the subsequent investigation in some detail. But, needless to say, I had reckoned without the fact that the Winshaws happened to own the newspaper in question, and that Lawrence Winshaw was Grand Master of the lodge which also numbered several representatives of the constabulary among its most influential members. Such an investigation had either not been reported, or, more likely, had never been undertaken at all. There was only one item of interest, a brief sequel to the report which I had already seen, and that was more cryptic than enlightening. It said that no further information had come to light, but that police were anxious to interview a private detective who was known to operate in the area – the aforementioned Mr Onyx. It seemed that someone answering to the description of the dead man (who had still not been identified) had been seen dining with the detective at a restaurant in Scarborough on the evening of the burglary attempt; furthermore, according to a local solicitor who had been acting as proxy for Tabitha Winshaw, Mr Onyx was known to have visited her at the Hatchjaw-Bassett Institute on at least three separate occasions earlier in the month, presumably on business. For good measure the report added that he was also wanted for questioning on three counts of gross indecency under Section 13 of the Sexual Offences Act (1956). After that, there was no further mention of the mysterious incident. The lead item in the next edition concerned an unprecedentedly large aubergine which had been grown by a local gardener.
‘So, that would appear to be that,’ I said, as we were served with a plate of steaming king prawns, heavy with ginger and garlic. ‘This guy was nearly sixty, it said, so there’s not much chance of him still being around. Which means the trail has more or less gone cold.’
‘Becoming quite the little detective yourself, aren’t you?’ said Fiona, spooning out a modest portion. ‘Is there any point to all this, though? I mean, does it really matter what happened thirty years ago?’
‘Somebody thinks so, obviously, if they’re prepared to break in to my publishers and follow my taxi home.’
‘But that was more than a month ago now.’
I shrugged. ‘I still reckon I’m on to something. It’s just a question of where to start looking next.’
‘Perhaps I could help you,’ said Fiona.
‘Help me? How?’
‘I’m used to doing research. That’s what my job is, really. I write abstracts of articles from the scientific press, and then they’re indexed and put into this huge reference book which usually winds up in university libraries. The name Winshaw comes up quite often – you’d be surprised. Thomas, for instance, he’s still involved with quite a few of the big petrochemical firms. And then of course there’s Dorothy Brunwin – wasn’t she a Winshaw, originally? Every year there’s a whole stack of pieces about some wonderful innovation she’s thought up, some new way of processing various disgusting parts of a chicken’s anatomy and passing it off as meat. We go back all the way to the 1950s, so I could check out all the contemporary references – you never know, there might be a clue buried in there somewhere.’
‘Thanks. That would help,’ I said, and then added (equally insincerely): ‘Sounds like interesting work. Have you been doing it for long?’
‘I started … just under two years ago. It was a few weeks before my divorce finally came through.’ She caught my eye and smiled. ‘Oh yes, you’re not the only one to have screwed up on that front.’
‘Well, that’s a relief, in a way.’