The Closed Circle (21 page)

Kate came back to the table carrying a plate of strawberry cheesecake, and for a while the two old friends forced themselves to stop talking about their schooldays. Philip learned, instead, how Kate and Steve had met in their last year at Manchester university, how Kate had interrupted her career to bring up the girls but was now looking for a way to get back into teaching as soon as she could, and how Steve had found himself a niche working in the research laboratory of a local firm, based on an industrial estate just outside Telford, trying to make advances in the field of biodegradable plastics.

“I
am
the R&D department, basically,” he explained. “Me and a part-time assistant. It's frustrating that we don't have many resources, but they're a good company—really into what I'm trying to do.”

“Unfortunately,” said Kate, spooning out the cheesecake, “they can only afford to pay him peanuts. That's the real problem.”

“I didn't think plastics
were
biodegradable,” Philip said, feeling rather simple-minded as he did so.

“Well of course they're not,” Steve said. “They're synthetic. But we might be able to
make
them biodegradable, or photodegradable, in time. They've developed some plastics that are soluble in hot water, for instance. Cellophane is biodegradable—did you know that? The trouble at the moment is that the degradation takes such a long time.”

“What about recycling? Isn't that the answer?”

“Well, it's not easy, because people chuck all their plastic stuff away together, but then it all has to be recycled in different ways. So someone has to sort it all. Thermoplastic polymers and thermosetting polymers can't be recycled in the same way, for one thing.”

“I've got a feeling,” said Kate, “that Philip doesn't know what you're talking about. Any more than I do, to be honest.”

“No, but I can tell that what you're doing's important,” said Philip.

“It's too important, actually, for the place where I'm working. Too big, in a way.”

“Do you think you could move on to somewhere else? A bigger firm, with more money for that sort of thing?”

“These people have been great, but . . . yeah, it's crossed my mind.” Steve reached for the cafetière and started pouring coffee. “I'm keeping my eye on the job adverts, put it like that.”

Just before Philip left, Steve handed him a large jiffy bag. Inside were some sheets of handwritten paper, and a CD. The handwriting was ragged and erratic—a mixture of lower-case letters and capitals, scrawled with a blotchy blue biro. The CD seemed to have been manufactured on the cheap: the black-and-white cover looked as though it had been reproduced on a photocopier, and featured the usual neo-Nazi iconography of skulls and swastikas. The title was
Auschwitz Carnival
and the band was called “Unrepentant.”

“Lovely,” said Philip, scanning the song titles briefly.

Conscious that Allison and Diane were lingering in the hallway, looking on with some curiosity, Steve said: “Look, Phil, it's been a great evening. Fantastic to see you again. Don't let's spoil it by talking about stuff like that.”

“OK,” said Philip. “I'll check it out in the next couple of days.”

“Be good if you could write something.”

“I'll see what I can do.”

They smiled at each other, now, and Philip offered to shake Steve's hand; but Steve embraced him instead, and clapped him gently on the back.

“Let's stay in touch from now on—yeah?”

“Will do.”

Philip kissed Kate goodnight, and kissed both of Steve's daughters, and looked back at them as they stood waving in the doorway when he walked down to his car. It had a good feeling about it, that family, he thought on the drive home; and this made him even sicker with fury the next day when he read the letters Steve had been sent, with their references to his “white slut wife” and his “deformed children, half-white and half-nigger.” He only listened to a few minutes of the CD, turning it off in the middle of the second track. Without having to reflect for a moment longer, he knew that he owed it to Steve to find out more about this. He would have to write a piece. A series of pieces. Maybe something even bigger.

11

MINUTES
of a meeting of
THE CLOSED CIRCLE
held at Rules Restaurant, Covent Garden
Wednesday 20 June, 2001

Strictly Private and Confidential

An inaugural meeting of THE CLOSED CIRCLE was held at the above venue on the above date. The members present were:

Paul Trotter, MP
Mr. Ronald Culpepper, MiF, EMBA
Mr. Michael Usborne, CBE
Lord Addison
Prof. David Glover (London Business School)
Ms. Angela Marcus

Drinks were served in a private room at 7:30 p.m. All the members being well known to each other, no introductions were considered necessary. Dinner was served at 8 o'clock and the business of the meeting began at 9:45 p.m.

It having been previously agreed that the nature of the CIRCLE's business, and the manner in which it was to be conducted, required that there should be no chair, informal opening remarks were addressed by Mr. CULPEPPER.

These remarks were brief, and consisted principally of congratulations directed towards Mr. TROTTER on his recent re-election as a Member of Parliament. A toast was proposed to Mr. TROTTER's continued parliamentary success. Mr. CULPEPPER's sentiments were warmly echoed by the other members of the CIRCLE.

The remainder of the business consisted largely of an address by Mr. TROTTER.

In his address, Mr. TROTTER proposed to lay out the principal aims and undertakings of THE CLOSED CIRCLE. In doing so, he paid warm tribute, first of all, to Mr. CULPEPPER, with whom he had enjoyed a long friendship and association for more than twenty years. He informed the other members that the name, “THE CLOSED CIRCLE,” had been chosen as an act of remembrance, in memory of a society to which he and Mr. Culpepper had both belonged when they were at school, and where they had first met.

He then recalled the circumstances which had led him to found the Commission for Business and Social Initiatives (CBSI) earlier in the year, beginning with his grave decision to resign as Parliamentary Private Secretary to a Minister of State in January. Mr. TROTTER dismissed press speculation that his working relationship with said Minister had degenerated beyond repair. He insisted, rather, that after more than three years he had begun to find the role of Parliamentary Private Secretary increasingly constricting, and had resolved to find a more fruitful outlet for his ideas, which had always tended towards the more radical fringes of the party's thinking.

Once freed from the restrictions imposed by his responsibilities towards his Department, the setting up of a Commission had seemed an appropriate way to proceed. Although he was at pains to remind fellow-members that the CBSI had the full support of the party leadership (by which he meant both its wings—or, as some preferred to call them, factions), Mr. TROTTER reiterated that his intention had always been for the Commission to remain totally independent and totally free-thinking. Only in this way, he remained convinced, could it hope to achieve its aim: which was, he reminded them, to find ways in which the involvement of the business community in the provision of public services could be promoted to a greater extent even than the Labour party had achieved in its first term.

The purpose of THE CLOSED CIRCLE, Mr. TROTTER maintained, was to support the work of the Commission, not to undermine or circumvent it. Nonetheless, the six members of the CIRCLE had been chosen from the eighteen members of the Commission for a specific reason. The Commission was essentially a public body, whose membership details were in the public domain and whose proceedings were being documented by the press. It had been necessary, therefore, to draw its membership from the full spectrum of political opinion. Obviously, this made it a lively forum for debate, and there was no question that any member of the CIRCLE might wish to stifle such debate. However, it could be—and indeed had been— argued that there was scope, within the bounds of the Commission itself, for a further forum: a sort of circle-within-the-circle, in which those members who were attuned to the most progressive currents of policy-making could express their views freely, in an informal and unguarded manner, knowing that their remarks would be addressed only to like-minded thinkers, and that their words would not be open to misinterpretation or censorship.

The aim of the CIRCLE, then, was to create a space within the Commission where the most radical and far-reaching ideas could be floated for the first time. It would remain clandestine only so that its members had more freedom to speak their minds, not less. Mr. TROTTER reminded his fellow-members that private finance initiatives had now made their way into the public sector in ways which would have been unthinkable ten years ago, under the Conservative government. Responsibility for substantial areas of health provision, state education, local government, prison services and even air traffic control were now in the hands of private companies whose duty of care lay towards the interests of shareholders rather than the general public. In order to advance this programme even further—to “roll back the frontiers of the state” to a point which even the author of that phrase (Margaret Thatcher) would not have recognized—members of the CLOSED CIRCLE were going to have to think the unthinkable, and imagine the unimaginable. His own task, as an enabler, was simply to provide them with a context in which this could be possible.

Mr. TROTTER concluded his address at this point and asked the other members if they had any questions.

Ms. MARCUS asked if the existence of the CIRCLE was known to the Prime Minister. Mr. TROTTER replied that it was not. The Prime Minister was keenly interested in the work of the CBSI, but was not aware that some of its members had formed themselves into a supplementary body. Nor was there any intention to make him so aware.

Lord ADDISON inquired as to the proposed frequency of the CIRCLE's meetings. Mr. CULPEPPER offered his suggestion that the CIRCLE should meet twice as often as the Commission itself: viz., once shortly after each meeting of the Commission, to share responses to the meeting, and once shortly before the next meeting, to discuss strategy. This proposal was generally approved.

Mr. TROTTER reminded the other members of the CIRCLE that the next meeting of the Commission would concentrate on the subject of the railway network, in view of the current crisis at Railtrack. Loss of public confidence in the wake of a series of fatal rail accidents had resulted in an operating loss of £534 million. There had been speculation that the government might renationalize the railways in response to public opinion, but Mr. TROTTER insisted that this was not an option. It was more likely, he said, that the company would be put into administration, although no detailed plans for a replacement had as yet been drawn up. Lord ADDISON voiced the opinion that this was an “extraordinary” state of affairs. He asked if Mr. USBORNE, one of whose companies was contracted to maintain large sections of track in the south-east, had received any confirmation of this information. Mr. USBORNE replied that he was somewhat “out of the loop,” having resigned his position as CEO of Pantechnicon some two months earlier, following concern over breaches of safety regulations, mounting redundancies and falling share prices.

Professor GLOVER asked Mr. TROTTER to clarify his own position on this subject, since he remembered reading remarks attributed to him in the newspapers last year, which could have been interpreted as critical of the management of the privatized rail companies. Mr. TROTTER replied that his remarks had been taken out of context and did not represent his real views.

At this point Mr. TROTTER was called away to receive a fax. He explained to the other members that he had recently secured a contract to write a weekly column for a national newspaper, recounting his experiences of fatherhood, and the writer who composed the column for him had agreed to fax it over to the restaurant this evening for his approval prior to publication. He apologized to the other members of the CIRCLE and told them that he would return in a few minutes.

Meanwhile Mr. CULPEPPER expressed his commiserations, belatedly, to Mr. USBORNE on his enforced resignation from Pantechnicon. Mr. USBORNE thanked him for his concern, and admitted that he had been disappointed that his efforts on behalf of the company had been undervalued, and his conduct misrepresented in parts of the financial and popular press. For his own part, he was proud of the way he had streamlined the company and made considerable savings in human capital. However, he was able to reassure Mr. CULPEPPER that he had received, on the whole, satisfactory compensation for his distress, and had subsequently been offered a range of other chairmanships and executive posts, from which he was currently in the process of choosing. Ms. MARCUS expressed the hope that he had invested his compensation payment wisely and Mr. USBORNE informed her that he had used it to add to his private property portfolio.

There followed an informal discussion on the subject of remuneration packages, and the meeting broke up in great good humour at 10:55 p.m.

It was agreed that the next meeting of THE CLOSED CIRCLE should be held on Wednesday, 1 August 2001 at the same location.

10

Claire was crouched to one side of the garden path when Benjamin arrived, snipping away decisively at the offshoot of some prickly, grey-green plant which, as usual, he was completely unable to identify. The squeak of the garden gate made her look up. She smiled and rose to her feet in a lithe, youthful movement. The evening sun was low and shone full on her face, exposing crows' feet and laughter-lines. But her skin—tawnier, more Mediterranean than Benjamin remembered it—was pulled tight still over strong cheekbones, and the cut of her greying hair was neither severe nor merely sensible: it followed the curve of her cheek in a fashionable bob, and made her look young—eight, ten years younger than he knew her to be.

“Hi, Ben,” she said, briskly, and gave him a short kiss on the cheek. He tried to hold her in a hug as she did it, but the embrace dissolved rapidly, after a second or two. They both took a half-step back.

Claire shielded her eyes and regarded him coolly, appraisingly.

“You're looking good,” she said. “Filled out a bit. You used to be a skinny thing.”

“It happens,” said Benjamin. “You look good, too. Very good, in fact.”

The compliment provoked a smile that was half gladness, half polite-ness. “Come on in,” she said, and turned to lead the way back towards the house.

It was a tiny, redbricked cottage, part of a modest row which nestled against the shoulder of the hill beneath the Worcester Road, the houses staring down with practised indifference over the rough expanse of parkland that lay beneath them. The front door gave directly on to a sitting room filled with unsorted clutter, through which it was just possible, with a bit of ingenuity, to trace a path through to the kitchen and finally towards a paved yard and small, as yet untended patch of back garden.

“Must've been a hassle,” Benjamin said, “moving in here, all by yourself.”

“I did have removal men to help me. Besides, I do everything by myself, these days. You soon get used to it.”

“Still—” he looked around at the half-dozen or more packing cases that filled the sitting room and threatened to spill their contents on to the floor—“you need a day or two, don't you, to get your breath back, after something like that? Before you start putting everything in order.”

“I moved in four months ago,” said Claire. “Don't you remember? I always was an untidy cow.” She cleared a space on the sofa for him by removing a plate of half-eaten toast and a week-old copy of the
Guardian
's “Society” supplement. “Luckily,” she added, “I live with someone who's pretty tolerant about that sort of thing.”

“I thought you lived on your own,” said Benjamin.

“That's what I meant.” That taut smile again. “Now—tea, coffee?—Or shall we just go to the pub?”

As they began the steep climb up Church Street towards Great Malvern, Benjamin said, musingly: “I'm trying to remember when it was that we last clapped eyes on each other.”

“It was in Birmingham, about eighteen months ago,” Claire reminded him. “We ran into each other in the Waterstone's café.”

“That's right. I'm sorry I didn't have much to say for myself. To be honest, it was such a surprise, seeing you there, that . . . well, I didn't know what to say, really.”

“You had the presence of mind to give me a flyer for your concert, anyway.”

He didn't seem to notice the cutting edge to this remark. “That was a good evening, too. It was a shame you couldn't come.”

“I
was
there actually, for a while.”

“You were? But I never noticed you.”

“No, I just sort of—lurked in the background.” She glanced at Benjamin, who seemed hurt by this revelation. “Sorry, Ben, I should really have come over and said something to you. But I was feeling a bit strange—I'd only been back in the country a few days—and . . . oh, I don't know. It was a weird evening. You looked as though you were in another place.”

“It was a big night for me.”

Benjamin frowned, readjusting his memories of that bitter-sweet occasion.

“Try not to judge me, Ben. It was very, very peculiar seeing you again like that. I probably shouldn't have gone.”

“What was so peculiar about it? I haven't changed that much, have I?”

“Jesus,” said Claire, exhaling deeply. “If you really can't work that one out, then . . . Well, in that case—” (and now there was real amusement in her smile, as well as fondness) “—in that case, no: I can honestly say that you haven't changed at all.”

As they neared the top of the street—Benjamin complaining all the way (“Couldn't we have brought the car?”)—a pub called The Unicorn loomed into view, and beyond that the dramatic, almost vertical rise of the bracken-clad hillside. Benjamin, who had not been to Malvern since he was a child, was moved by the sight of the grey escarpment silhouetted against a pale blue, cloud-scattered, early evening sky. For a moment—having been depressed, at first, by his glimpse of Claire's new living conditions—he felt strangely envious to think that she had chosen to make this place her home.

“I like it here,” he said. “There's something quite majestic about it, in fact. In a small, West Midlands sort of way.”

“It's not bad.” Claire conceded, taking Benjamin's arm to steer him away from the pub and along the curve of the Worcester Road. “I can't say this was where I was planning to end up. Milan, maybe. Prague. Barcelona. That was the sort of thing I always had at the back of my mind. Maybe tonight we could be having a drink at the . . . Café Alcantara in Lisbon— fabulous place, I went there once with a would-be boyfriend—all done up in art deco—the café, I mean—just a few steps away from the Atlantic water-front. Instead, here we are.” She stopped outside a doorway. “The Foley Arms Hotel in Malvern. Just about sums us up, doesn't it, Benjamin? Just about what we deserve.”

They sat on the sun terrace, which offered a vertiginous prospect of the Severn valley, heat-hazed, limitless, drenched in evening sunlight, and Benjamin thought that he would be hard pressed to exchange this view even for the best that Lisbon had to offer. But he kept this reflection to himself. Instead, when Claire returned from the bar with a bottle of warmish white wine and two glasses, he said (unable to keep a note of irritation out of his voice): “Anyway, how can you say that I'm looking good? I'm in a terrible state. For more than a year now I've been going through the most dreadful crisis.”

“Benjamin, your whole life is a dreadful crisis. Always has been, probably always will be. Nothing new there, I'm afraid. And you're looking good. Sorry about that, but there you are.” She handed him a full glass and added, more kindly: “OK then, what's the matter? What is it this time?”

“Me and Emily,” said Benjamin, sipping his wine and looking away from her, gazing abstractedly at the view.

Claire drank too, and said nothing.

“My marriage is falling apart,” he added, in case she hadn't caught his drift. But there was still no answer. “Well, aren't you going to say anything?”

“What is there to say?”

Benjamin stared at her in exasperation, then shook his head. “I don't know. You're right. Probably nothing.”

“I went through all this with Philip, you know. I do know what it's like. It's bloody horrible. And I'm sorry, Ben—really, really sorry. But I'm not going to tell you that I couldn't see it coming.”

Benjamin leaned forward, his gaze becoming more and more doleful. “I just feel so . . . so . . . what is the word?”

“Guilty.”

“Yes.” He glanced at her, surprised. “I feel guilty. I spend every minute of every hour feeling guilty. How did you know that?”

“Because, as I said, you haven't changed a bit. And I always knew that when something like this happened, guilt would be the thing you did. The thing you were best at. You have a talent for guilt, I reckon. Which has lain dormant, for quite a while, but now you're probably going to make up for it.”

“But what have I got to feel guilty about? Why should I feel guilty?”

“You tell me.”

“I haven't been unfaithful to Emily.”

“No?”

“I haven't slept with anybody else, at any rate.”

“That's not quite the same thing.” She sighed. “What happened? When did it start?”

“It started last year,” Benjamin said, and then told her the story of Francis Piper's diaries, and how they had revealed to him the prosaic truth about the “miracle” in which he had believed, fervently and secretly, for twenty-six years.

This was a lot for Claire to absorb. “You mean—you don't believe in God any more?”

“No,” said Benjamin, emphatically.

“Well,
that's
a bloody relief for a start. Come on, I'll drink to that!” And she tried to clink glasses, but Benjamin would not return the gesture.

“You don't seem to understand,” he said. “It's not just the shattering of an illusion—though that's bad enough, I have to say. It's what this means for me and Emily. We don't have it in common any more. She believes. I don't. But that was the only thing that was keeping us together.”

“But you're still together. Aren't you? A year down the line. That has to count for something. That has to mean that you've got other things to build on.”

“You'd have thought so. But it hasn't been like that. It's been a terrible year. Awful. We hardly speak to each other any more. At home we can just about cope because we're both out at work all day, and then, you know, there's the telly, and I can go upstairs to write, and so on. But next month we're going to Normandy for a couple of weeks and I'm
dreading
it. Trying to share your life with someone when you feel no . . . closeness, no intimacy—there's nothing worse than that.”

“Nothing?” said Claire, archly. “Famine, maybe? Getting blown apart by a suicide bomber?” She looked down, with a quiet smile. “Yeah, I know. Self-righteous. I haven't changed that much either.”

Benjamin reached out to touch her hand; but the attempt, as usual, was fumbled, and she didn't really notice.

“So why are you still with her?” she asked.

“That's a good question.”

“I know. It's not as if . . . I mean, it's not as if there are children to worry about.”

“True.” He shook his head. “I don't know the answer to that one, Claire. Why am I still with her?”

“I'll tell you if you like,” she said, topping up his glass. “Because you're scared, maybe? Because you've been with her for eighteen years and it's the only way you know how to live? Because it suits you, in lots of ways? Because you've got your own little room at the back of the house with your desk and your computer and your recording stuff and it's all too nice to leave? Because you can't remember how to use a washing machine? Because watching some crappy programme about gardening with someone else is not quite as depressing as watching it by yourself? Because you're fond of Emily? Because you feel loyalty for her? Because you're afraid of ending up sad and lonely?”

“I wouldn't end up sad and lonely,” Benjamin insisted, defensively. “I'd probably find someone else, anyway.”

“What—just like that?”

“I don't know . . . In a few months, or something.”

Claire looked impressed; or pretended to. “You sound very confident about this. Anyone in mind?”

Benjamin hesitated for a moment, then leaned forward. “There is someone,” he confided. “She works quite near our house. She's a hairdresser.”

“A hairdresser?”

“Yes. She's gorgeous. She has this really . . . angelic face. Angelic and sophisticated at the same time, if that makes any sense.”

“And how old is she?”

“I don't know—late twenties, maybe, something like that.”

“Name?”

“I don't know. I haven't actually—”

“—spoken to her,” said Claire, finishing off his sentence with the weariest of inflections. “Christ, Benjamin, what are you
like
? You're in your forties, for fuck's sake—”

“Only just.”

“And you've got a crush on a bloody
hairdresser
who you've never spoken to? This is who you're seriously considering as your future life partner?”

“I didn't say that.” Claire noticed that he was having the decency to blush, at least. “And you shouldn't prejudge people, anyway. She looks very intelligent. I reckon she's probably a Ph.D. student, doing it to make money or something.”

“I see. So you envisage having a few serious conversations about Proust and Schopenhauer between shampoos, do you?”

If she was expecting Benjamin to rise to the bait, she was disappointed. He merely looked more and more downcast. “What's the point?” was all he muttered, bitterly, after a while. “I'm so bloody out of practice. I wouldn't even know how to get into conversation with someone like that.”

“It's not difficult to get into conversation with a hairdresser,” Claire pointed out. “All you have to do is go in there and ask for a cut and blow dry.”

Benjamin spent an unexpectedly long time pondering this phrase, as if Claire had just revealed to him some secret password that would unlock a hidden door on to a world of unimagined possibilities.

“Just a thought,” she felt obliged to add, somewhat embarrassedly. “You look as though you could do with a trim, to be honest.” Then she hesitated, feeling that it was time to shift things on to a more serious plane. “Benjamin . . .” she began, tentatively. (This was going to be difficult.) “You know what the problem is, don't you? I mean, the real problem.”

“No,” he answered. “But I'm sure you're going to enjoy telling me.”

“I'm not, actually.” She took a long, anxious sip from her glass. “The thing is . . . you're not over her, are you? Twenty-two years later, and you're still not over her.”