Authors: Jonathan Coe
Dorothy smiled. ‘You’re right, of course. One’s inclined to forget that not everyone’s as sceptical as you …’
‘It surprises me to hear you say that,’ said Henry, leaning back and loosening his belt with a pleasurable grimace. ‘I’m not a sceptic by nature. If anything I’m an idealist. And besides, I happen to believe most of what the nutritionists are saying at the moment. The difference is that I tend to be heartened rather than alarmed by the social implications.’
‘Meaning?’
Henry paused, absently wiping gravy from his plate with a finger. ‘Put it this way: did you know that over the next five years we were planning to scrap free school meals for more than half a million children?’
‘Not calculated to be a very popular move, I wouldn’t have thought.’
‘Well, there’ll be an outcry, of course, but then it’ll die down and something else will come along for people to get annoyed about. The important thing is that we save ourselves a lot of money, and meanwhile a whole generation of children from working-class or low-income families will be eating nothing but crisps and chocolate every day. Which means, in the end, that they’ll grow up physically weaker and mentally slower.’ Dorothy raised an eyebrow at this assertion. ‘Oh, yes,’ he assured her. ‘A diet high in sugars leads to retarded brain growth. Our chaps have proved it.’ He smiled. ‘As every general knows, the secret of winning any war is to demoralize the enemy.’
The meal concluded with apple-quince bread pudding, smothered in a honey and ginger sauce. The apples, as usual, were from Dorothy’s orchard.
∗
Ingredients:
Modified starch, dried glucose syrup, salt; flavour enhancers monosodium glutomate, sodium 5-ribonucleotide; dextrose, vegetable fat, tomato powder, hydrolysed vegetable protein, yeast extract, dried oxtail, onion powder, spices, flavouring; colours E150, E124, E102; caseinate, Eioz; caseinate, acidity regulator E460; emulsifiers E471, E472(b); antioxidant E320.
Once when I was about twenty-five, I came home to visit my parents for the weekend. There were many such weekends during my time at university, but this one stands out because it was then, for the first time, that I noticed how drastically their eating habits had changed since I was a child. It started, probably, when I was eleven and they decided to send me to a fee-paying school. From then on they never seemed to have enough money. My father’s rises in salary were small and infrequent, and I think he continued to wish that they had bought a house in a less expensive area. My mother, at this point, went from part-time to full-time teaching. And yet it was a point of honour with her that there should be a hot meal on the table for us every evening. Increasingly, these meals were starting to come from packets, and in the mid
1970s
this process was accelerated when they bought a small deep-freeze which was kept in the garage. My father, far from complaining, had developed quite a taste for this sort of food, partly because it bore a resemblance to the lunches which he enjoyed with his colleagues at the office canteen every day. I remember coming home that weekend and finding that the deep-freeze was stacked with more than twenty cartons of one of the Brunwin Group’s more lethal inventions: hamburger fritters with chips. All you had to do was shove the whole tray in the oven, and
voilà,
you had an appetizing meal on your plate in about twenty minutes. He explained that this came in very useful on the two evenings a week when he had to cook for himself, when my mother was working late at the school, supervising extra games. I said that it didn’t sound very balanced to me, and he explained that he supplemented it with two more Brunwin delicacies, viz. a powdered soup for starters, and then a strawberry or chocolate flavoured instant whip for pudding.
Ingredients:
Sugar, hydrogenated vegetable oil, modified starch; emulsifiers E477, E322; flavourings, lactose, caseinate, fumaric acid; gelling agents E339, E450a; whey powder, stabilizer E440a; colours E110, E160a; antioxidant E320.
All those years, I see now, my father was clogging his arteries up with saturated fats. He would die of a heart attack, not long after his sixty-first birthday.
Does this mean that Dorothy killed my father?
∗
Dorothy’s record of success in pig management was just as impressive. These are only a few of the difficulties she was able to surmount:
1. CLUMSINESS: As soon as she started taking her sows off the earth, away from straw and into concrete stalls, she found that their chain of instinct would be upset: they would become clumsy and often lie on their own piglets while suckling.
SOLUTION: To fit a farrowing rail, allowing piglets access to the teat without getting close enough to be crushed.
2. CANNIBALISM: Denied the opportunity to exercise their rooting instincts, the sows started to eat their own piglets.
SOLUTION: To fit them into closely confined farrowing crates where they could neither move nor turn around, their movements usually restricted by a device known as the ‘iron maiden’. The piglets would then be lured away from their mothers with an infra-red light. This would reduce the weaning period to two or three weeks, instead of the more usual eight.
3. DISEASE: Unfortunately the piglets treated in this way became subject to severe pulmonary diseases which could only be partially halted by antibiotics and rigid temperature controls.
SOLUTION: Embryotomy. It was discovered that living piglets could be cut from the womb of their dead mother in aseptic conditions in order to establish what was to become known as a ‘minimal disease herd’.
4. TAIL-BITING AND BOAR-TAINT: Weaned piglets moved into densely stocked pens soon develop aggressive behaviour, of which tail-biting is the most obvious example. ‘Boar-taint’ is the strong, unpalatable taste which is alleged by some butchers (notably the supermarket chains) to be found in meat from male pigs.
SOLUTIONS: Tail-docking and castration. Preferably to be done with a blunt instrument, as the crushing action helps to reduce bleeding.
5. DEFORMITY: Dorothy once conducted a survey of 2,000 of her pigs kept on concrete floors, and found that 86 per cent suffered from lameness or serious damage to their hoof horns.
SOLUTION: None. As she once drily remarked to a journalist from
Farmers’ Weekly,
‘I don’t get paid for producing animals with good posture.’
∗
One evening when I was about thirty-seven, I came home to my flat carrying a small plastic bag, half filled with provisions from the local supermarket. I had a pint of milk, some cans of soft drinks, a packet of chocolate biscuits, four Mars bars, a loaf of bread, and one serving of the Brunwin Group’s ‘Heat’n’Eat’ Bangers and Mash, which I put in the oven at once, before transferring my other purchases to the fridge or the food cupboards
.
Twenty-five minutes later, when it was time to turn the oven off, I fished the packet out of the waste bin to check that I had followed the instructions correctly: and that was when it happened. It was, I suppose, a sort of epiphany. You have to remember that at this stage I hadn’t spoken to anyone for more than a year: I may have been going mad, but I don’t think so. I didn’t start laughing hysterically, or anything like that. None the less, I experienced what you might call a rare moment of lucidity: a flash of insight, very subtle and fleeting, but enough to produce a lasting change, if not in my life, then at least in my diet from that time onward.
It wasn’t so much the picture on the front, although that in itself might have given me pause for thought. A family of four were shown gathered around the dinner table: the healthy, white-teethed paterfamilias, two ruddy-cheeked children beaming with anticipation, and their young, pretty mother, her face lit by an almost beatific glow as she laid the last helping of Bangers and Mash before her husband, as if this meal, the final, crowning triumph to a day of honest toil and wifely achievement, offered the ultimate confirmation of her own self-worth. Such fantasies are thrust upon us every day, and I’ve become immune to them. But on the back of the packet was a photograph I was not prepared for. It was captioned ‘serving suggestion’. It showed a portion of Bangers and Mash on a plate. The Bangers took up one half of the plate, and the Mash took up the other. The plate was on a table, and there was a knife and a fork on either side. And that was it.
I stared at this photograph for some time, while a nasty suspicion began to creep over me. All at once I had the feeling that someone, somewhere, was enjoying a monstrous joke at my expense. And not just at my expense, but at all our expenses. I suddenly took this photograph to be an insult aimed both at myself and at the world in general. I pulled the plastic tray out of the oven and threw it into the bin. It was the last Brunwin meal I ever bought.
I remember being hungry that night.
∗
On his way back from the Lake District, only ten miles or so from the farm, George stopped his car by the side of the road and stood for a while at a gate, looking out over the moors. He was reasonably sober, and had no hangover (he never got hangovers these days), but still managed to feel weighed down by a curious heaviness, a sense of foreboding. As usual, he was nervous about seeing his wife again; and to make matters worse, they would be entertaining her insufferable cousins Thomas and Henry the next evening, along with a couple of senior managers from Nutrilite, the Brunwin animal-feed supplier. He was supposed to have discussed a provisional menu with the cook, but had forgotten all about it. Dorothy would probably be furious.
He had been away for three days: three wasted days, because he had come to no important decision regarding his marriage, even though – now he came to think of it – that had been the purpose of the trip, originally. He knew, at least, that he would never be able to leave Dorothy and live with the knowledge that she retained control of the farm; and in that case, it seemed there was nothing for it but to carry on as before. There were always the animals, of course. Pathetic though it might seem, he did not feel that he was completely wasting his life as long as he was able to bring some kind of comfort to the creatures who had suffered the worst of his wife’s abuses. He was already looking forward to seeing them again, to revisiting the cowshed and drinking their health from the whisky bottle he kept hidden behind the loose bricks in the wall.
It was late in the afternoon when he arrived home. Dorothy’s car was parked in the yard but he was able to sneak round to the kitchens without being seen. The cook was sitting at a table with her feet up, reading a magazine. She did not give a guilty start and resume working when George appeared: it had long been the case (although he never noticed it) that he had absolutely no authority over his staff.
He asked if everything was in order for the dinner tomorrow night, and she told him that it was all under control, that they would be having veal, and that Dorothy herself had chosen the calf and carried out the slaughter less than an hour ago.
George felt suddenly sick. He ran to the cowshed and kicked open the door.
Herbert was not yet dead. He was hanging by his legs from a beam, and blood was dripping from the thinnest of cuts in his neck into a bucket on the floor, now three quarters full. His eyes were milky, pale and sightless. Otherwise, the cowshed was empty.
Beginning to whimper, George ran back to the farmhouse and found Dorothy in her office, tapping away at a computer keyboard.
‘Hello, darling,’ she said. ‘Home already?’
When George didn’t answer, she said: ‘I’m sorry about your little friend, darling, but he was really the leanest and best-looking of the bunch. It had to be him.’
She swung around in her chair, looked at him, sighed, and left the room. A minute or two later she came back, carrying a shotgun.
‘For God’s sake,’ she said, handing him the gun. ‘Finish him off if you want to. He won’t taste as good, but who cares? Anything to spare your feelings.’
George took the gun and left. Dorothy went back to her keyboard, and listened out for the shot. In fact there were two, a few seconds apart.
‘Idiot,’ she muttered. ‘He can’t even hit a calf from three feet away.’
She was never able to establish, with absolute certainty, which of her farmworkers fed the story to the
News of the World.
She ended up sacking a troublesome middle-aged labourer called Harold, but that was very much by way of killing two birds with one stone, because his lungs were giving out from inhaling too much crop spray and he wasn’t much use to her any more. It was unlikely to have been him, on the whole. In any case it was only a small story, tucked away on page nine: a few lurid, joky paragraphs under the headline KINKY FARMER IN CALF-LOVE SUICIDE PACT. Her PR people assured her that no one would take it very seriously, and indeed the whole incident was all but forgotten after a few months.
This would have been in June, 1982.
June 1982
1
The word existed, I knew. I just couldn’t think of it.
…
panache … polish … style …
My aim was to catch the 3.35 train, but this review had taken longer than expected, and now I was running late. Clumsily I stuffed five days’ worth of clothes into a holdall, along with a couple of books and my writing pad. I’d been hoping to phone the copy through to the newspaper before I left, but there wasn’t time now. It would have to be done when I got to Sheffield. It was always the same: always those last couple of sentences, the even-handed summation, the ironic parting shot, which took such a disproportionate toll on one’s time and effort.
I scribbled a note to my flatmate, locked all the doors, and then, bag in hand, climbed the wrought-iron stairs which led up to street level. It was a hot, windless summer day, but because I hadn’t stepped out of the flat for more than forty-eight hours – the time it had taken to read the book and formulate my responses to it – the sunlight and the fresh air seemed immediately invigorating. Our basement flat was in a side street not far from the Earl’s Court Road, just a few minutes’ walk from the tube station. It was a lively area, a little overcrowded, a little seedy; its restless bustle and activity could sometimes be overwhelming, but this afternoon it really lifted my spirits. Suddenly I began to feel, for the very first time, that I might be setting out on a great adventure.
Getting from Earl’s Court to St Pancras required a tedious journey of twenty minutes on the Piccadilly Line. As usual I had a book open in my hands, but I couldn’t concentrate on it. Currents of anxiety and anticipation shivered through me. It would be strange to see Joan again: at least, not just to see her (I did that nearly every Christmas, when we both went home to visit our parents) but to spend time with her, to become reacquainted. On the telephone she had sounded friendly, confident, authoritative. The invitation to come and visit had been thrown off easily, almost as an afterthought, and it occurred to me now that she probably saw nothing very significant in it – just another house guest to be fleetingly accommodated within what sounded like a busy working schedule – whereas for me it was a development of enormous import and promise: a chance to rediscover the youthful and optimistic self which I had somehow mislaid during that absurd marriage, and to which Joan was now, in effect, the only surviving witness.
These were my thoughts as I travelled towards King’s Cross; or some of them, anyway. Much of the journey, to be honest, was spent looking at the women in my carriage. Not only had I been divorced for eight years, but I hadn’t made love to a woman for more than nine, and I had in the meantime become an inveterate starer, appraiser, sizer-up of possibilities, my every glance heavy with that furtive intensity which is the hallmark of the truly desperate (and dangerous) male. It quickly became obvious that there were only two serious objects of interest on this occasion. There was one sitting further down my row of seats, next to the doors – small, composed, expensively dressed: the classic, Grace Kelly-style icy blonde. She’d got on at Knightsbridge. And then down at the other end of the carriage was a taller and more ascetic-looking brunette: I’d noticed her on the platform at Earl’s Court, but then, as now, it was hard to make out her features behind the curtain of fine dark hair and the newspaper in which she was clearly absorbed. I looked at the blonde again, a risky, sidelong gaze which – unless I was imagining it – she caught and held for a fragile moment, her eyes responding without encouragement but also without rebuke. At once I launched into a fantasy, my favourite fantasy: the one in which it turned out, miraculously, that she was getting out at the same stop, continuing on to the same station, catching the same train, travelling to the same town – a series of coincidences which would bring us together while usefully absolving me from the need to take events into my own hands. And so the closer we came to King’s Cross, the more I willed her to stay on the train. At every stop I felt the onset of a hollow, tightening dread, and the prospect of falling into conversation with her started to seem more and more desirable, just as her face and figure appeared to take on an extra degree of almost-perfection. Leicester Square. Covent Garden. Holborn. I was sure she was going to get out at Holborn, but no, if anything she seemed to be settling even more comfortably into her seat, her very posture now assuming an air of seductive languor (we were the only passengers left in our half of the carriage and I was getting thoroughly carried away by this stage). Just two more stops. If only … If only … And then we were pulling into King’s Cross, and as I looked at her, unashamedly now, it was suddenly obvious that she had no intention of getting out even here: I was the one who was about to shatter the fantasy, and to make matters worse I stole a final glance, just before the doors opened, and she looked back with a light of lazy inquiry in her eye, unmistakable and transfixing. As I stepped down on to the platform my limbs were leaden; cords of feeling bound me to the train, prohibiting, elastic. It pulled away; I turned, failed to glimpse her; and for the next few minutes, as I made my way to St Pancras, bought my ticket and killed time at the newsagent’s kiosk, there was a deadness in my stomach, the bruised sense of having somehow survived yet another in a sequence of tiny tragedies which threatened endless, daily repetition.
Sitting in a carriage of the Sheffield train, waiting for it to shift into motion, I brooded on this humiliating incident and cursed the ill-luck – if that’s what it was – which had stamped me for ever as a man of imagination rather than action: condemned, like Orpheus, to roam an underworld of fantasies, when my hero Yuri would not have hesitated to plunge boldly towards the stars. A few well-chosen words, that was all it need have taken, and yet I couldn’t even think of them: me, a published writer, for God’s sake. Instead I was stuck here dreaming up scenarios of ever-spiralling ridiculousness: the latest of which involved the object of my attraction suddenly realizing that she had missed her stop, leaping out at Caledonian Road, hailing a taxi and arriving just in time to jump on my train as it pulled away from the platform. Pathetic. I closed my eyes and tried to think of something else. Something useful, for once. The word: that was what I should be concentrating on, the elusive word … It was vital that I should have that final sentence sorted out before arriving in Sheffield.
… the necessary
grace …
necessary
zest
…
esprit …
This stratagem proved surprisingly successful. I became so preoccupied that I never heard the guard’s whistle blow; barely noticed the train starting to move; was only dimly aware of the door to my carriage sliding open to admit a breathless, flustered figure who collapsed into a seat just a few rows away from me. It wasn’t until we were speeding through the outskirts of London that I registered her presence, looked up, and recognized her as the dark-haired woman from my tube journey. The inevitable thrill of excitement lasted only a fraction of an instant. It was superseded by something much more powerful: a fantastic emotional shockwave, compounded of delight, confusion and, at first, stubborn disbelief. For how could it possibly be true that she appeared to be reading – no, not her newspaper, but a slim, hardback novel with my photograph on the cover?
∗
It’s every author’s dream, I suppose. And since it happens rarely enough even in the life of the literary celebrity, imagine how much more precious it would seem to the young, unknown writer like myself, hungry for any kind of evidence that his work has impinged on the consciousness of the public. The brief, respectful reviews I’d received in the papers and the literary journals – which I’d learned, in some cases, almost off by heart – paled into insignificance in the face of this sudden hint that the wider world might be hiding something else altogether, something unsuspected, alive and arbitrary: a readership. That was my first feeling. And then, of course, came the realization that I had finally been presented with the longed-for opportunity, the foolproof excuse, the perfect doorway into conversation: for it would surely be impolite
not
to introduce myself in these circumstances. The only question was how, and when, to make my move.
I was determined to be subtle about it. It wouldn’t do simply to blunder up, sit down opposite her and say something crass like ‘I see you’re reading one of my books’ – or, even worse, ‘I admire a woman with good taste in literature’. Far better to arrange it so that
she
made the discovery. Well, that shouldn’t be difficult. After a few minutes’ hesitation I got up and moved to a seat just across the central aisle from hers, taking my luggage with me. This in itself was enough to make her look up and watch me with surprise; perhaps even annoyance. I said, ‘Just trying to get out of the sunlight’ – a meaningless remark, given that my new seat was just as much in the sunlight as the old one. She said nothing; just smiled half-heartedly and returned to the book. I could see that she was on about page fifty, roughly a quarter of the way through: only a few pages from what was (or so I had thought when writing it) the most riotously funny scene in the whole novel. I sat back and kept a discreet watch on her from the corner of my eye; taking care, at the same time, to ensure that she had a good view – should she care to glance up – of my profile, seen from much the same angle as had been chosen by the studio photographer whose services I had myself engaged at considerable personal expense. Ten or twelve pages went by, in as many minutes, without producing anything in the way of visible amusement: not even the distant echo of a smile, let alone those helpless spasms of laughter I had fondly imagined the passage provoking in its readers. What on earth was the matter with her? In hardback, my novels sold a pitiful number of copies – five or six hundred, or something – so how had this one managed to fall into the hands of someone so obviously unattuned to its tone and methods? Looking closely at her face for the first time, I noticed the lack of humour in her eyes and the line of her mouth, and the traces of a solemn pucker which had creased her brow into a permanent frown. She read on. I waited another five minutes or more, with growing impatience. I shifted ostentatiously in my seat, even got up twice to take unnecessary items out of my holdall in the luggage rack above me; and finally I was reduced to the expedient of feigning a loud coughing fit, which went on until she looked across at me with wary expectancy, and said:
‘I’m sorry, are you trying to attract my attention?’
‘No, no, not at all,’ I said, conscious of a furious blush starting to inflame my cheek.
‘Would you like a cough sweet?’
‘No, I’m fine. Really.’
She returned to the book without another word, and I sank back into baffled silence, scarcely able to credit how difficult this was proving. The situation had gone beyond embarrassment into the realm of helpless stupidity. My only remaining option was to say: ‘Actually, I
was
trying to get your attention.’
She looked up and waited for me to explain.
‘It’s just … that book you’re reading.’
‘What about it?’
‘Well, don’t you notice anything about the photograph on the back?’
She turned it over. ‘No, I don’t see …’ And then, looking from me to the photograph, from the photograph to me, she broke into an incredulous smile. ‘Well, I’ll be …’ It lit up her whole face, this smile; changed everything at once, so that she was suddenly welcoming and radiant. Then it turned to laughter. ‘And you just sitting there … I mean, this is incredible. I’m a
huge
fan of yours, you know. I’ve read all your books.’
‘Both of them,’ I corrected.
‘Both of them, absolutely. Well, I mean, I’ve read the first one, and now I’m reading this. And enjoying it hugely.’
‘Do you mind if …?’ I gestured at the seat opposite her.
‘Do I
mind
? How could I possibly … I mean, this is so extraordinary. It’s – well, it’s every reader’s dream, really, isn’t it?’
‘And every writer’s,’ I said, moving across to her table.
For a while we just smiled at each other, shyly, uncertain how to start.
‘I was watching you, just now,’ I said. ‘You were reading that big scene, weren’t you – at the wedding?’
‘The wedding, yes, absolutely. It’s such a marvellous chapter, too – so moving.’
‘Mm: do you think so? I was really hoping that it would be funny, you see.’
‘Oh, but it is. I mean, it’s, er, moving … and funny. That’s what’s so terribly clever about it.’
‘You didn’t seem to be laughing much, that’s all.’
‘No, I was; I was laughing on the inside, really. I never laugh aloud at books. It’s just a thing with me.’
‘Well, you’ve made my day, anyway.’ That smile again; and a captivating lightness when she tossed back her hair. ‘I’d introduce myself, of course, except that you already know who I am.’
She took the hint. ‘Oh, I’m sorry, I should have told you before. My name’s Alice. Alice Hastings.’
∗
The train was approaching Bedford. Alice and I had been talking for perhaps half an hour; I’d been up to the buffet car and treated her to a sandwich and a cup of coffee; we’d exchanged views on the Falklands War and the merits of various contemporary authors, finding ourselves in agreement in both instances. She had a lovely, rather equine face, a long, graceful neck and her voice was full, fruity, deep. It felt wonderful to be enjoying female company again. The last few years had been so desolate in that respect: that hopeless marriage to Verity, then the decision to go to university in the mid 1970s, where I found, despite my official designation as a ‘mature’ student, that my fellow undergraduates all seemed to have such a gift for slipping in and out of physical relationships that I, by comparison, ended up feeling like a gawky adolescent. Perhaps that’s why the writer’s life had always seemed so attractive: the refuge it offered for the socially backward, the gleaming legitimacy it conferred upon solitude. Patrick had hinted as much when he made that crack about there being no ‘sexual dimension’ to my work; but I pushed that recollection aside. I still burned from that conversation, couldn’t imagine when I would next feel equal to the task of facing him again.