Authors: Jonathan Coe
‘How can they do this to you?’ I stammered. ‘I mean, it’s crazy, putting you away like this. You’re an old man: what do they hope to achieve?’
Findlay shrugged. ‘I’ve had a lifetime of this sort of treatment, Michael. You stop asking questions. Thankfully I remain sound in mind and body, so I shall survive the ordeal, you can be sure of that. But talking of survival’ (and here his voice sank to a whisper again) ‘I hear on the grapevine that the members of a certain eminent family are steeling themselves for a tragic loss. Mortimer Winshaw is fading fast.’
‘That’s sad. He’s the only one who was ever nice to me.’
‘Well, I smell ructions, Michael. I smell upheaval. You know as well as I do the nature of Mortimer’s feelings towards his family. If he leaves a will there may be some nasty surprises for them in it; and of course, if there’s a funeral, Tabitha will be expected to attend, and it will be the first time
she’s
seen any of them for a very long time. You should keep your ear to the ground. It might make for an interesting chapter in your little chronicle.’
‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘I mean, thank you for all your help.’ There was a valedictory feeling in the air, suddenly, and I found myself trying to make a speech. ‘You’ve been to a lot of trouble. I – well, I hope you got something out of it, that’s all: you know, whatever it was you wanted …’
‘Professional satisfaction, Michael. This is all that the serious detective ever asks from his work. This business has been nagging away at me for more than thirty years: but all my instincts tell me that it will be unravelled soon, very soon. I’m just sorry that the forces of law have intervened to stop me from playing an active part.’ He took my hand and held it in a fragile but determined grip. ‘For the next two months, Michael, you’re my ears and eyes. Remember that. I’m relying on you now.’
He smiled bravely, and I did my best to smile back.
3
Christmas Day dawned cloudy, dry and without character. As I stood at the window of my flat overlooking the park, I could not help thinking back, as I thought back on this day every year, to the white Christmases of my childhood, when the house would be swathed in my mother’s homemade decorations, my father would spend hours on his hands and knees trying to locate the one faulty bulb which was preventing our tree from lighting up, and on Christmas Eve I would sit by the window all afternoon, awaiting the arrival of my grandparents who invariably drove over from their neighbouring suburb to stay with us until the New Year. (I mean my mother’s parents, for we had nothing to do with my father’s; had not even heard from them, in fact, for as long as I could remember.) For a few days the atmosphere in our house, usually so quiet and contemplative, would be lively, boisterous even, and it’s perhaps because of this memory – and the memory of the fabulous whiteness which could always be relied upon, in those days, to blanket our front lawn – that there was still an air of unreality about the grey, silent Christmases to which in recent years I had become numbly resigned.
But today would be different. Neither of us could stomach the thought of eight hours’ Christmas television, and by mid-morning we were in a hired car heading down towards the South Coast. I hadn’t driven for ages. Luckily South London was more or less empty of traffic, and apart from a close shave with a red Sierra and a bruising encounter with the edge of a roundabout just outside Surbiton, we managed to get out into the countryside without serious incident. Fiona had offered to drive, but I wouldn’t hear of it. Maybe this was silly of me, because she was feeling (and looking) better than she’d done for weeks, and if anything I think I’d been more upset than she had by the absurd mix-up over the results of her tests at the hospital, when she’d turned up for her appointment only to be told that it had been cancelled, and somebody was supposed to have telephoned her about it, and the specialist who was supposed to be dealing with her case was at a protest meeting to complain about the administrator’s decision to close down four surgical wards immediately after Christmas, and could she please come back in a week’s time when everything would be sorted out. I couldn’t contain my frustration when she told me this story, and no doubt my frenzy of shouting and foot-stamping had shaken her far more badly than her nervous taxi ride and wasted three-quarters of an hour in the clammy hubbub of the outpatients’ waiting room. I suppose I was out of practice when it came to dealing with a crisis. Anyway, she’d recovered – we’d both recovered – and here we were, gazing in rapture at the barren hedgerows, the converted farmhouses, the diffident rise and fall of dun-coloured fields, like two children from an inner-city ghetto who had never been let out into the countryside before.
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?’