The Closed Circle (2 page)

As for Patrick, well . . . I want to see as much of Pat as I can, while I'm here,
obviously. He is so grown up now. Of course, we have been writing and emailing
each other constantly, and last year he came out to Lucca for a few days, but still—
it surprises me every time. I can't tell you what a peculiar feeling it is, to look at
this
man
—he may be only fifteen, but that's what he seems like, now—this tall
(rather skinny, rather pale, rather sad-looking) man and know that once he
was . . .
inside me,
not to put too fine a point on it. He seems to have a very good
relationship with his father, I must admit. I envied them the ease with which they
talked to each other, shared jokes together. Blokes' stuff, maybe. But no, there was
more to it than that. I can see that they look after him well, Philip and Carol. I
have no grounds for complaint there. A little jealousy, maybe. But then, it was my
choice, to try my luck in Italy again, and leave Pat with his father. My choice.

And now to my final piece of news, and in some ways the most momentous—
or disturbing, maybe. I saw Benjamin again. About an hour ago. And in the
strangest circumstances, I have to say.

I had been given the lowdown on Ben the night before. Still working for the
same firm—a senior partner now, and I should think so too, after being there for
so long—and still married to Emily. No kids: but, well, everyone has given up
asking about that. Phil said that they'd tried everything, and been down the adoption route as well. Medical science baffled, etc., etc. Neither of them is to blame,
apparently (which probably means that, deep down, without being able to say it,
each blames the other). And in Benjamin's case, as with children, so it is with
books: he's been labouring (!) for years to produce some shattering masterpiece, and
so far, nobody has seen a word. Though everyone still seems touchingly convinced
that it will appear one of these days.

So, that's the story so far. And now picture me, if you will, looking through
the History section of Waterstone's on High Street. Only been back here a day and
a half and already I can't think of anything better to do. I'm right next to the part
of the shop that is set aside for the ubiquitous coffee-drinkers. Out of the corner of
my eye I can see a girl who's facing me—
very
pretty, in a paper-thin sort of way—
and opposite her, with his back to me, is a grey-haired guy who I assume at first
must be her dad. I guess the girl must be about nineteen or twenty, and there's a
touch of the Goth in the way she dresses: she has lovely hair, black hair, thick and
long and straight, half way down her back. Apart from that I don't take much
notice of these two to start with, but when I move over to look at the books on one
of the display tables, I notice her reaching down to get something out of her bag,
and I notice the way her black T-shirt rides up to expose her midriff, and I notice
the way that
he
notices this, quickly, surreptitiously, and all of a sudden I recognize him: it's Benjamin. Wearing a suit—which looks odd, to me, but of course it's
a working day for him, and he must just have slipped out of the office for a
while—and looking, in that instant, altogether . . . What's the word? I know
there is a word this time, a perfect word for the way men look when they're in that
situation . . .

Ah . . . I remember. “Besotted.” That's the word, for how Benjamin looks.

And then he notices me; and time seems to slow down—the way it always
does, in the moment you recognize someone you weren't expecting to see, and
haven't seen for a long time, and something shifts inside you both, some sort of
realignment of your expectations of that day . . . And then I'm walking over to the
table, and Benjamin is standing up, and
holding out his hand,
of all things,
holding his hand out
so I can shake it. Which of course I don't do. I kiss him on
the cheek instead. And he looks confused and embarrassed, and straight away he
introduces me to his friend; who is also standing up, by now; and whose name, it
transpires, is Malvina.

So, what
is
the situation, there? What's going on? After five minutes' broken
conversation—not a word of which I can remember—I'm none the wiser. But in
what is already establishing itself as a pattern, in the last couple of days, I do have
something in my hand that I didn't have before. A flyer. A flyer for
another
event
taking place on Monday December 13th. It turns out that Benjamin's band is
playing that night.

“I thought you split up ages ago,” I say.

“We've reformed,” he explains. “This pub's celebrating an anniversary.
Twenty years of live music. We used to have a residency there, and they've asked us
to come back and play, for one night only.”

I look at the flyer again, and smile. I remember the name of Benjamin's band,
now—“Saps at Sea.” Named after a Laurel and Hardy film, he once told me. It
would be fun to see them again, in a way, although I never cared for his music
much. But I'm speaking the honest truth when I say: “I'll come if I'm still in
town. But I may have left Birmingham by then.”

“Please do,” Benjamin's saying. “Please do come.”

Then we say the usual awkward stuff about it being nice to see you, and so
on, and next minute I'm out of there, with never a backward glance. Well,
OK, then—one backward glance. Just enough to see Benjamin leaning towards
Malvina—who he introduced to me as his “friend,” which was all the explanation
I got—and showing her the flyer and telling her something about it. Their foreheads are practically touching over the table. And all I can think of as I hurry
away is: Benjamin, Benjamin, how can you be doing this to your wife of sixteen
years?

In my old bedroom
St. Laurence Road
Northfield
Saturday, 11th December, 1999
Night time

This trip just gets worse and worse. It happened more than three hours ago,
and I'm still shaking all over. Dad is sitting downstairs, reading one of his terrible
old Alastair Maclean novels. He wasn't remotely sympathetic. Seemed to think the
whole thing was my fault anyway. I don't think I can stay in this house any longer.
I shall have to leave tomorrow, find somewhere else to stay for a while.

I'll tell you what happened, briefly. I was longing to see Pat again today, and
he was supposed to be playing football for the school in the morning. It was an
away game, against a team in Malvern. So I said I'd pick him up from Philip and
Carol's house, and drive him over there myself. Much against his better judgment,
Dad let me borrow his car.

We went south along the Bristol Road and then took a right turn when we got
to Longbridge, through Rubery and along towards the M5. It was pretty weird,
being alone in the car with him—weirder than it should have been. He's very
quiet,
my son. Maybe he's just quiet when he's with me, but somehow I don't
think that's the whole story. He's an introvert, for sure—nothing wrong with
that. But also—and this was what really unnerved me—when he
did
start talking, the subject he chose was the last thing I'd been expecting. He started talking
about
you,
Miriam. He started asking questions about when I'd last seen you, and
how Mum and Dad had coped with it when you disappeared. I was dumbstruck,
at first. Simply didn't know what to say to him. It wasn't as if any of this had
arisen naturally in the course of conversation: he brought it all up, quite abruptly.
What was I supposed to say? I just told him that it was all a long, long time ago
now, and we would probably never find out the truth. Somehow we had to live
with that, find an accommodation with it. It was a struggle: something we both
battled with, me and Dad, in our
different  ways, every day of our lives. What else
could I tell him?

He fell silent, after that, and so did I, for quite a while. I was a little freaked
out by that conversation, to be honest. I thought we'd maybe be talking about life
at school, or his chances in the football match. Not his aunt who had vanished
without trace ten years before he was born.

I tried not to think about it any more, tried just to concentrate on the road.

Now, there's another thing I've noticed about this country, Miriam, in the
few days I've been home. You can take the temperature of a nation from the way it
drives a car, and something has changed in Britain in the last few years. Remember I've been in Italy, the homeland of aggressive drivers. I'm used to that. I'm
used to being cut up and overtaken on blind corners and sworn at and people
yelling out that my brother was the son of a whore if I'm going too slowly. I can
handle it. It's not serious, for one thing. But something similar has started to happen here—only it's not that similar really, there's an important
difference: here,
they really seem to mean it.

A few months ago I read an article in the
Corriere della Sera
which was
called “Apathetic Britain.” It said that now Tony Blair had been voted in with
such a huge majority, and he seemed like a nice guy and seemed to know what he
was doing, people had breathed a sort of collective sigh of relief and stopped thinking about politics any more. Somehow the writer managed to link this in with the
death of Princess Diana, as well. I can't remember how, I can remember thinking
it all sounded a bit contrived at the time. Anyway, maybe he had a point. But I
don't think he really got to the heart of the matter. Because if you scratch the surface of that apathy, I think what you find underneath is something else
altogether—a terrible, seething frustration.

We weren't on the motorway for long—only about twenty minutes or so—but
even so, I started to notice something in those twenty minutes. People on the
motorway were driving
different ly. It's not just that they were driving faster than
I remembered—I drive pretty fast myself—but there was a kind of
anger
about
the way they drove. They were tailgating each other, flashing their headlights
when people stayed in the outside lanes for a few seconds longer than they should.
There seems to be a whole new class of driver who just takes up residence in the
middle lane and won't be shifted, and that really seems to infuriate everybody else:
people drive about five yards behind them for a while, pressuring them to move,
and then, when they don't move, they swing out into the outside lane and swing
back in again before it's really safe, cutting into their path. And there were drivers
who were happily cruising along at seventy and then, when they noticed that someone was overtaking them, they would accelerate, up to eighty, eighty-five, as if it
was a personal a front to suggest that a P-registration Punto might overtake an S-registration Megane, and they weren't going to stand for it; as if it was an
insult to the rawest and tenderest part of them. I'm exaggerating, perhaps, but not
massively. This was a Saturday morning, after all, and surely most of these people
were heading off to the shops, or just out to enjoy themselves, but there seemed to be
a collective fury building up on this motorway. It felt tense and pressurized, as if
all it would take was for someone to make one really bad mistake and it would tip
us all over the edge.

Anyway: we arrived at the school, and battle commenced. Patrick was playing
somewhere in midfield, and the game seemed to keep him pretty busy. He was self-conscious with me watching him, and was trying to look tough and grown-up, but
then there was also this permanent frown of concentration on his face which wiped
about five years off him and almost cracked my heart at the same time. He played
well. I mean, I don't know anything about football, but it looked to me as if he was
playing well. His team won, 3–1. I almost froze to death, standing there on the
touchline for an hour and a half—there was still frost on the pitch—but it was
worth it. I've got a lot of ground to make up with Patrick, and this was a start,
definitely. Afterwards I'd assumed we would go off and have lunch somewhere,
but it turned out he had other plans. He wanted to go back on the coach with his
school friends, and then he was going round to the house of this friend of his,
Simon, the goalkeeper. I couldn't very well say no, even though it took me by surprise. Within a few minutes the boys had showered and the coach was gone and
suddenly I was left in the middle of Malvern all by myself. With the rest of the
day to kill.