Джонатан Коу - Middle England

In the meantime, a stroke of good fortune had come her way: at the end of the summer term, a colleague from Birmingham university had emailed, inviting her to apply for a two-year teaching fellowship there. She applied; she got it; and in August 2010 she packed up her room in Muswell Hill and drove herself and her possessions up the M40, back to the city where she had been born. And having no better alternative, for the time being, she moved in with her father.

Christopher Potter was living, at this time, on a leafy street in Hall Green, a street that branched diagonally off from the Stratford Road but seemed far removed from its constant processions of north-and southbound traffic. It was a semi-detached house and he was supposed to be sharing it with his wife, but in effect he lived alone. For many years the family home had been in York, where Lois was a librarian at the university, and Christopher practised as a personal injury lawyer. In the spring of 2008, with their only daughter then living in London, and with the health of Christopher’s mother and both of Lois’s parents in decline, he had suggested they moved back to Birmingham. Lois had agreed – gratefully, it seemed. Christopher had sought, and obtained, a transfer to his firm’s Midlands office. They had sold their house and bought this new one. And then, at the last minute, Lois had made an amazing announcement: she did not want to leave her job, she was not convinced that her parents needed her to be close by, and she could not bear the idea of returning to the city where, more than thirty years earlier, her life had been derailed by a personal tragedy that still haunted her. She was going to stay in York, and from now on they would just have to see each other at weekends.

Christopher had accepted this with as good grace as he could muster, on the basis (never made explicit) that it was only a temporary state of affairs. But he wasn’t happy, he did not like living alone, and he was delighted when Sophie told him about her new job, and asked if she could move in for a while.

Sophie herself found it strange and unsettling to be back home with her father. She was twenty-seven and it was no part of her life plan that she should still be living with one of her parents. She had quickly grown to like the overcrowded, improvised, somewhat self-satisfied cosmopolitanism of London, and wasn’t yet convinced that she could find its equivalent in Birmingham. Christopher was affable and easy to talk to, but the atmosphere in the house was oppressively quiet. She quickly started to welcome any opportunity to get away, even it was just for a day or two; and if a trip down to London was involved, she would be doubly grateful.

On Thursday 21 October, then, she left the university campus promptly at 3 p.m. She was in good spirits: her seminar on the Russian romantics had been a success. She was already popular with her students. As usual, she had driven on to campus. Her grandfather Colin, his eyesight now being too weak for driving, had recently made her a gift of his ailing Toyota Yaris. (The days when he bought British out of patriotic duty were long gone.) She was booked on a late-afternoon train to London and, in order to save money, was using the slower, cheaper route that went through the Chilterns and ended up at Marylebone station. First of all, she had to drive to Solihull station and park the car. She had envisaged a quiet and leisurely progress along the arterial roads, taking pleasure in driving through a city which – unlike the capital – was as easy to navigate by private as by public transport. But she had not allowed for some heavy traffic, and after half an hour or so began to worry that she would miss her train. As she drove up Streetsbrook Road she put her foot down hard on the accelerator and the car reached thirty-seven miles per hour. It was a thirty-mile limit, and a speed camera flashed as she drove by.

*

Leaving the train at Marylebone, she found that she had time to walk to her rendezvous with Sohan. She cut across the Marylebone Road into Gloucester Place and then wandered through the half-empty back streets, with their tall, creamy Georgian houses, until she reached Marylebone High Street. Here it was livelier and she had to shuffle and swerve through the crowds of early-evening pedestrians. Listening to the different languages on the street, she was reminded of a time a few years earlier when Benjamin, too, was still living in London. Colin and Sheila had come down to see him and she had gone for dinner with her uncle and grandparents to an Italian place in Piccadilly. ‘I don’t think I heard a word of English spoken on the way here,’ Colin had said, and she had realized that the thing he was complaining about was the very thing she most liked about this city. Tonight she had already overheard French, Italian, German, Polish, Urdu, Bengali and a few others she couldn’t identify. It didn’t bother her that she didn’t understand half of what people were saying; the Babel of voices added to the sense of benign confusion she loved so much: it was all of a piece with the general noise of the city, the kaleidoscope of colour from traffic lights, headlights, brakelights, streetlamps and shop windows; the awareness that millions of separate, unknowable lives were temporarily intersecting as people criss-crossed through the streets. She savoured these reflections even as she quickened her pace, glancing at the time on her phone screen and worrying that she was going to be a few minutes late reaching the university building.

Sohan was already waiting for her at a table in the Robson Fisher bar, a dimly lit enclave frequented mainly by postgrads and teaching staff. In front of him were two glasses of Prosecco. He pushed one towards Sophie.

‘Goodness,’ he said. ‘You’re looking pale and sickly. Must be that terrible Northern climate.’

‘Birmingham is not the North,’ she said, kissing him on the cheek.

‘Drink up, anyway,’ he said. ‘How long since you’ve had one of those?’

Sophie took a long sip. ‘We can get it where I live, you know. It arrived in about … 2006, I think. Are the celebrities here yet?’

‘I don’t know. If they are, they’ll be in the Green Room.’

‘Shouldn’t you join them?’

‘In a while. There’s no hurry.’

Sohan had invited Sophie along – for moral support, as much as anything else – to watch him chair a public discussion between two eminent novelists, one English, the other French. The Englishman, Lionel Hampshire, was famous after a fashion – at least in literary circles. Twenty years earlier he had published the novel which had won the Booker Prize and made his reputation: The Twilight of Otters , a slender volume made up partly of memoir, partly of fiction, which had somehow caught the spirit of its time. If nothing he had written since then had measured up to its success (his latest, a bizarre excursion into feminist sci-fi called Fallopia , had just received a panning in the literary press), he did not seem unduly concerned: the prestige surrounding that early prizewinner had been enough to keep a lucrative career afloat ever since, and he still carried himself with the air of one whose laurels provided a solid resting place.

The French writer, on the other hand – Philippe Aldebert by name – was an unknown quantity.

‘Who is he?’ Sophie asked.

‘Oh, don’t worry, I’ve been reading up,’ said Sohan. ‘Big star over there, apparently. Prix Goncourt, Prix Femina. He’s written twelve novels but only a couple of them are published here – you know what the Brits are like: they don’t appreciate Johnny Foreigner coming over to the land of Dickens and Shakespeare and telling them how it should be done.’

‘Are you nervous about chairing?’ Sophie asked.