Джонатан Коу - Middle England

Once I could drink of the best

The very best brandy and rum

Now I am glad of a cup of spring water

That flows from town to town

The melody carried Benjamin back, back to the last two weeks of his mother’s life, when she had been unable to speak, when she had been sitting propped up in bed in the old bedroom, and he had sat in the room with her, for hours at a time, talking at first, trying to sustain a monologue, but finally realizing that the task was beyond him, and deciding instead to create a music playlist to fill the silence between them. So he made the playlist, and put it on shuffle, and for the rest of their time together – the rest of her life – Benjamin spoke to her only rarely, but sat on the edge of the bed and clasped her hand as they listened to Ravel and Vaughan Williams, Finzi and Bach, the most calming music he could think of, wanting things to end for her on a note of beauty, and there were more than five hundred songs on the playlist, and this one didn’t come up for a long time, almost until the final day …

Once I could eat of good bread

Good bread that was made of good wheat

Now I am glad with a hard mouldy crust

And glad that I’ve got it to eat

… Lois and his father were in the house too, but they didn’t have his staying power, they drifted in and out of the bedroom, they had to keep themselves busy downstairs, making tea, cooking lunch, but Benjamin had never had any problem with inactivity, it suited him fine just to sit there, it suited his mother as well, it suited both of them just to gaze out of the window at the sky, which that day, he remembered, had been the deepest, heaviest grey, a lowering sky, an oppressive sky, perhaps merely typical of that dreary April, or perhaps, it had occurred to him, something to do with the cloud of volcanic ash which had drifted across Europe from Iceland and was making newspaper headlines and wreaking havoc with airline schedules across the continent, and it was while he was contemplating this sky, its preternatural mid-morning darkness, that Shirley Collins’s song had been plucked out at random by the iPod’s algorithm and began to tell its mournful story of ancient misfortune …

Once I could lie on a good bed

A good bed that was made of soft down

Now I am glad of a clot of clean straw

To keep meself from the cold ground

Paying attention to the words now, Benjamin guessed that this was a song from the eighteenth or early nineteenth century, and gave voice to the misery of a prisoner awaiting transportation, but the associations that it set off in his mind, tonight, had nothing to do with crumbling cell walls or rat-infested mattresses: he thought, instead, of what Doug had told him about the anger he had encountered in the last few weeks on Gordon Brown’s campaign trail, the sense of simmering injustice, the resentment towards a financial and political establishment which had ripped people off and got away with it, the quiet rage of a middle class which had grown used to comfort and prosperity and now saw those things slipping out of their reach: ‘A few years ago they felt wealthy. Now they feel poor …’

Once I could ride in me carriage

With servants to drive me along

Now I’m in prison, in prison so strong

Not knowing which way I can turn

… Yes, it was possible to extract this meaning from the words, to infer a story of loss, of loss of privilege, that resonated across the centuries, but in reality everything that was beautiful about the song, everything that reached inside Benjamin now and clawed at his heart, came from the melody, from this arrangement of notes which seemed so truthful and stately and somehow … inevitable , the kind of melody that, once you heard it, you felt as though you’d known all your life, and that must have been the reason, he supposed, that just as the song was coming to a close that morning, just as Shirley Collins was repeating the first verse in her richly accented, mysteriously English voice, a voice that cut through the words like a shaft of sunlight cutting through the waters of a wine-dark river, just as the first verse was being repeated, something bizarre happened: Benjamin’s mother made a sound, the first sound she had made for days, everyone had been assuming that her vocal cords were useless now but no, she was trying to say something, at least that was what Benjamin imagined she was doing, for a moment or two, but then he realized, these were not words, this was not speech, the voice was too high, the pitch was too varied, even though it was hopelessly unmatched to the pitch on the recording, nevertheless his mother was trying to sing , something in the tune had touched upon a distant memory for her, it was coaxing out, or trying to coax out, some primal, instinctive response from the depths of her dying frame, and as the final verse came to an end, Benjamin’s spine tingled at the sound of this other voice, this impossibly thin, impossibly weak voice which must have belonged to his mother (although he could not recall having heard her sing before, not once, in all the time they had spent together), but which seemed, at that moment, to be coming from some disembodied presence in the room, some angel or ghost which was foreshadowing the immaterial essence his mother was about to become …

Adieu to old England, adieu

And adieu to some hundreds of pounds

If the world had been ended when I had been young

My sorrows I’d never have known

*

The song was over. Quietness fell over the sitting room, and darkness hung over the river outside.

Benjamin wept, silently at first, then with short, heaving, convulsive sobs which shook his body, making his ribs ache and the little-used muscles in his fleshy stomach twitch in agonizing spasms.

When the fit was over, he continued to sit on the window seat, and tried to will himself to get ready for bed. Should he look in on his father? Surely the whisky and the emotional upheaval of the day would have sent him into a deep sleep. Yet Benjamin knew that his father slept poorly these days: that had been the case for months if not years, long before his wife’s illness. He seemed to live in a perpetual state of low-level anger, which disturbed his nights as well as his days. What he had said to Benjamin about speed cameras today – ‘The buggers are out to get money from you every step of the way’ – was typical. Colin could probably not have specified who ‘they’ were, but he sensed their arrogant, manipulative presence, and resented it keenly. Just as Doug had told him, ‘People are getting angry, really angry,’ even if they could not have explained why, or with whom.

Reaching up to close the window at last, Benjamin took one final look at the river. Was he imagining it, or did it seem slightly higher than usual tonight, and slightly faster? When he had bought this house, many people had asked him whether he had considered the risk of flooding, and Benjamin had dismissed the matter loftily, but these questions had sown a seed of doubt. He liked to consider the river his friend: a good-natured companion whose behaviour he understood, and in whose company he felt at ease. Was he deluding himself? Supposing the river were to abandon its quiescent and reasonable habits: supposing it, too, were to become angry for no simple or predictable reason. What form might that anger take?

2.

October 2010

Sophie had suffered a number of romantic disappointments over the years. Her first serious relationship, with Philip Chase’s son Patrick, had not survived university. During her MA year at Bristol she had met Sohan, the man she considered her soulmate, a handsome English Literature student of Sri Lankan parentage. But he was gay. Then there had been Jason, who, like her, had been studying for a PhD at the Courtauld. But he had cheated on her with his supervisor, and his successor, Bernard, had been so immersed in his doctoral thesis on Sisley’s notebooks that she had quietly terminated that relationship without his even noticing. So much for intellectual boyfriends, Sophie had now decided: if she was going to find someone else (and there was no particular hurry) she would try casting her net beyond the world of academia.