Джонатан Коу - Middle England

‘Now I’ll have to stay here with you.’

‘Why?’

‘You can’t be alone on Christmas night.’

‘Why not? I’m alone every other night. You do what you like, don’t worry about me. The last thing I want to be is a burden.’

Having to calm his father’s repeatedly expressed fear of becoming a ‘burden’ was one of the few truly burdensome things about being in his company. But Benjamin had learned that there was nothing to be gained by arguing. He picked up the bag of presents and escorted Colin to the car.

*

Lois and Christopher, Sophie, Benjamin and Colin sat around the lunch table, teetering, gravy-soaked towers of turkey and vegetables rising up on the plates in front of them, paper crowns on their heads. The atmosphere was bordering on funereal.

‘We’re doing this for Dad,’ Lois had insisted to her brother in the kitchen.

‘He doesn’t want us to. The whole thing’s a complete waste of time.’

‘Well, thanks a lot. That’s really helpful. I could have stayed at home, then.’

‘Isn’t this your home? Nobody seems to know nowadays.’

They ate in near-silence. Benjamin tried reading out some of the jokes from the crackers, but they felt lumpen, with all the sparkle of random quotations from one of the gloomier Ingmar Bergman films. The only person to smile was Sophie, and that turned out to be not in response to the joke, but a text message.

‘Who was that from?’ Lois asked, as only a mother could.

‘Ian,’ Sophie answered. ‘Just wishing me a Happy Christmas.’

‘Where’s he spending it, then?’

‘With his mother.’

‘New boyfriend,’ Christopher explained to his father-in-law, pronouncing the phrase loudly and slowly in the mistaken belief that Colin was going deaf.

‘Good-oh,’ said Colin. ‘Not before time. You could do with some grandkids, you two.’

Sophie took a sip of wine and said: ‘Jumping the gun a bit, aren’t you, Grandad? He’s not even my boyfriend. We’ve only been on two dates.’

‘Well, somebody’s got to continue the family line,’ Colin blundered on. ‘The rest of you haven’t exactly excelled in that department.’

‘Give it a rest, Dad …’ said Benjamin.

‘There are five of us around this table. Is that it? Is that the best you lot can manage? Your mother and I had three kids. I thought there’d be a few more little Trotters in the world by now.’

The silence that followed this outburst was more awkward and profound than ever. Everyone else around the table knew something that Colin didn’t: Benjamin already had a daughter, who lived in California, from whom he was estranged.

‘I’m sure Paul will soon find someone in Tokyo,’ said Lois. ‘He’ll probably come and visit you in a few years with a whole army of pretty little half-Japanese children.’

Colin scowled and attacked his sprouts.

After lunch, they went for a walk – all except Colin, who crashed out on the sofa with the Radio Times and complained that there was nothing on television.

‘What do you think I bought you this for?’ Benjamin asked, waving Colin’s present at him. It was a DVD of Morecambe and Wise Christmas specials.

‘I don’t want to watch old stuff.’

‘Yeah, but you don’t like any of the new stuff.’ Benjamin crouched down by the television and inserted the DVD. As he did so, a vivid memory recurred: Christmas Day 1977, thirty-three years earlier, when he and his family had sat down to watch these two comedians’ final show for the BBC. His grandparents had been there too, and in laughing along with them Benjamin could remember feeling this incredible sense of oneness, a sense that the entire nation was being briefly, fugitively drawn together in the divine act of laughter. ‘Twenty-seven million people used to watch this, you know,’ he reminded his father.

‘Because we only had three channels.’ Lois had entered the room, and was standing behind him. ‘And there was nothing else to do. Are you ready? It’ll be dark before we set out at this rate.’

The four of them set off together, strolling through the quiescent back streets which only the occasional muted display of Christmas decorations or fairy lights made less ordinary today. Soon Benjamin was lagging behind, lost in his private thoughts as usual. Sophie noticed and lingered, waiting for him to catch up.

‘Everything OK?’ she asked.

‘I’m fine.’ He smiled and put his arm around her briefly, rubbing her back in a clumsy gesture. ‘Thanks for my present, by the way. So thoughtful.’

‘You don’t really like him, do you?’

Sophie had given Benjamin a copy of Fallopia that she had bought on the night of Sohan’s interview with the two famous writers. It was inscribed, ‘To Benjamin – All the best, Lionel Hampshire.’

‘Well, the reviews for this one have been a bit … mixed,’ Benjamin said. ‘But I’m looking forward to it. What was he like, in person?’

‘Just what you’d expect.’

‘Oh dear.’

They had arrived at the Tolkien museum, and behind it the little stretch of grassland that had recently been designated ‘The Shire Country Park’, both of which set off a train of thought in Sophie’s mind. ‘That was the night,’ she said, ‘that Sohan pointed out how “Sarehole” was an anagram of “arsehole”. How could we all have missed that for so long?’

Benjamin didn’t answer. He was looking ahead at Lois and Christopher, walking arm in arm in a way which almost gave them the air of a happily married couple. He was annoyed with his sister for making that sarcastic comment about the dearth of TV channels in the 1970s, which undermined (without her realizing it, probably) one of his most cherished early memories. It was still a cornerstone of his belief system that Britain had been a more cohesive, united, consensual place during his childhood (all that had started to unravel with the election result of 1979), and the fuzzy glow he still got from watching seventies comedy shows was proof of that, somehow. But of course, for Lois, none of that could be expected to register: for her, that decade had been a time of tragedy, of horror. He told himself that he must never forget that, and never stop making allowances for it.

A sharp reminder awaited him when they returned home, in any case. Colin had given up on Morecambe and Wise and was watching the BBC news. He looked stricken. Lois sat down beside him, while Benjamin went into the kitchen to put the kettle on.

‘You all right, Dad?’ she asked.

‘It’s that woman,’ he said, tonelessly, eyes not leaving the screen. ‘That girl in Bristol. The one who went missing last week. They’ve found a body now. They haven’t said it’s her, yet, but … Well, who else can it be?’

Lois said nothing, but her whole body tautened. Christopher sat down on the arm of the sofa and put his hand on her clenched, twisted shoulder. This was the tableau Benjamin saw when he re-entered the room: his sister frozen, with a man on either side of her.

‘What her parents must be going through,’ Colin said, looking up at Christopher now, his eyes pale and liquid. ‘I know exactly how they feel.’ Now he clutched his daughter’s arm with a quick, violent passion. ‘Years ago, we almost lost her, you know.’

Benjamin watched, hesitated, realized that he had no role, and withdrew. As he made silently for the kitchen, he could hear his father repeating: ‘We almost lost her.’

6.

January 2011

After the sex, Sophie fell into a deep sleep, and when she awoke she did so very slowly, late in the morning, becoming aware first of the grey light filtering through the curtains, and then the satisfying ache in her tired limbs and then the rough, sandpaper-like texture of Ian’s unshaven face as he brushed against her cheek and kissed her.