Джонатан Коу - Middle England

‘You came all the way here,’ said Steve, incredulous, ‘to listen to that plonker talking about –’ he picked up the printed order of ceremonies ‘– “Global Opportunities in Post-Brexit Britain”?’

‘No,’ said Doug. ‘I came because I intend to have a private word with him at the end of the evening. As for his crappy talk, I don’t know about you lot, but I won’t be staying to listen to it.’

True to his word, as soon as dessert was over and the chairman of the Imperium Foundation was rising to his feet, Doug led a well-coordinated walk-out at their end of the table. He was followed by Philip, Steve and Benjamin, who made their exit from the dining hall with much orchestrated clanging of cutlery and scraping back of benches, at the very moment when Culpepper was beginning to speak. The other fifty or sixty guests turned to look at them as they pushed their way through towards the door. It was a childish gesture, but deeply satisfying. And it was a relief, after so much stodgy food and cheap red wine, to get out into the fresh air and enjoy the last minutes of evening sunlight.

They followed the path that wound itself around the perimeter of the school buildings – most of them dating from the redbrick inter-war era and all too familiar, some of them much more recent, and oddly unfamiliar: most prominent among these was the new prayer centre, built to accommodate the thirty per cent of King William’s boys who now practised the Islamic faith. Soon they reached the grassy bank that led down to the playing fields, where the rugby posts rose up spectral and imposing in the summer twilight, like unexplained monuments from an ancient civilization. They sat down on the grass, just as they had done almost forty years ago, on a hot summer afternoon at the end of their final term, when Doug had brought cans of lager for them to drink but Benjamin had abstained, primly conscious of his responsibilities as a prefect. The memory of that afternoon made him smile now, and sent him off on a reminiscent trail.

‘Do you remember,’ he said, looking north towards the wall that enclosed the outdoor swimming pool, tucked behind the school chapel, ‘how they used to make us swim with nothing on if we forgot our swimming trunks?’

‘Oh yes,’ said Phil.

‘The amazing thing,’ said Steve, ‘is how our parents let them get away with it. Nowadays that would be a case for the police and social services. At least you’d hope so.’

‘True,’ said Phil. ‘So much of what we took for normality in the seventies would be defined as abuse today.’

‘Well, we emerged unscathed, at any rate,’ said Benjamin, to which Doug merely replied, ‘Did we, though?’ and for a while the question hung in the air, unanswered and unanswerable.

‘It’s nice to look back sometimes,’ Benjamin said at last, in a defensive way.

‘Nostalgia is the English disease,’ said Doug. ‘Obsessed with their bloody past, the English are – and look where that’s got us recently. Times change. Deal with it.’

‘Well, you don’t,’ said Benjamin.

‘Excuse me?’

‘You don’t change much. Still making huge generalizations about the English national character, I see. “Subtlety is the English disease,” was what you said last time.’

‘What? When did I ever say that?’

‘You said it here, forty years ago, when we were arguing about a headline in the school magazine.’

‘I said “subtlety is the English disease”?’

‘Yep.’

‘I remember that,’ said Phil. ‘It was when we did that story about Eric Clapton going all Enoch Powell during his gig at the Odeon.’

‘How can you remember something that happened so long ago?’ said Doug. ‘This is my point exactly – you guys are obsessed with the past. You remember it way too well and you think about it way too much. It’s time to move on. We have to focus on the future.’

‘I agree,’ said Steve.

‘I run a historical publishing company,’ Phil pointed out. ‘I have to think about the past.’

‘And I’m very focused on the future, if you must know,’ said Benjamin. ‘I’ve taken a big decision.’

Doug snorted. ‘Really? You’re going to start buying green notebooks from now on, are you, instead of blue ones?’

The others laughed, but Benjamin put a stop to that by announcing: ‘Lois and I are moving to France.’ After taking a moment to enjoy their surprise, he continued: ‘She’s left Christopher. She doesn’t want to be anywhere near Birmingham. She doesn’t want to stay in this country any more. But she doesn’t want to be alone. So I said that I’d go with her. We’re going to find somewhere in Provence – we’ve got the money from Dad’s house, as well as mine. She wants somewhere big enough to take guests. Paying guests.’ He glanced in turn at each of their faces. They looked sombre now, rather than shocked. ‘You’re all welcome, any time you want to come,’ he assured them. ‘Discount rates will apply.’

Darkness was creeping rapidly over the playing fields. From the dining hall, a distant round of applause could be heard. Doug rose to his feet, brushing the grass from the trousers of his dinner suit. He touched Benjamin on the shoulder.

‘Sounds like you’re doing the right thing there, mate,’ he said. ‘But now you’ll have to excuse me. The speech seems to be over, and I doubt if Ronnie will be hanging around for long. Time for our little chat, I think. I’ll catch you guys later.’

As he hurried off in the direction of the fading applause, Steve called after him: ‘Don’t do anything stupid!’

*

Doug’s instinct proved correct. Ronald Culpepper, in all his slimmed-down glory, was already waiting outside the dining hall, his summer overcoat slung over the arm of his dinner jacket, lamplight glinting off his bald pate as he spoke on his mobile phone in a murmurous undertone. ‘Summoning his driver,’ Doug thought, guessing – again correctly – that so distinguished a guest would not have driven to the school under his own steam, let alone taken an Uber. There would be a Daimler or some such coming to pick up him up in a few minutes. Doug would have to move swiftly.

Culpepper spotted and recognized him when he was still a few yards away, and duly arranged his features into a look of resigned contempt. There was no handshake as the two old adversaries greeted one another.

‘Ronald,’ said Doug.

‘Douglas,’ he replied.

‘Leaving us already? Not staying around to sign autographs?’

‘If you’re jealous,’ said Culpepper, ‘because it was me they asked to address this gathering, rather than yourself, perhaps think about which one of us best reflects the school’s values. Alternatively, of course, you could coerce your friends into staging a pathetic act of rebellion. Which impressed nobody, by the way. People were embarrassed by it if anything.’

‘We left for medical reasons. We didn’t think our blood pressure could survive listening to you for twenty minutes.’

Culpepper gave a pitying smile. ‘Still fighting the same old, old battles, eh, Doug? Forty years on and nothing has changed.’

‘Forty years isn’t such a long time in the scheme of things. And it’s not that the battle is “old”. It’s the same battle. The battle never changes.’

‘For you, maybe. Some of us move on.’

Culpepper looked at his watch. His driver was taking longer than he would have liked.

‘And what have you moved on to, these days?’ Doug asked. ‘Tell me a bit about the Imperium Foundation and what it stands for.’

Culpepper’s composure wavered momentarily when this name was mentioned; but he recovered it quickly enough. ‘It’s a highly respected think tank,’ he said. ‘Information about it is freely available online.’