The Closed Circle (25 page)

If you wanted to take a look before he does, why not go round at the beginning of the week? Mum has a doctor coming round on Monday so Tuesday would be a good bet. Any time in the afternoon would be fine.

Let me know how you get on. And how you think she's doing!

Lots of love
Doug xx

——Original Message ——
From: Claire
To: Doug Anderton
Sent: Tuesday, September 11, 2001 23:18 p.m.
Subject: Re: Visiting Rednal

Dear Doug

You're right—there's no way I'm going to find anything in those boxes; not the way they're currently arranged. Needles and haystacks don't come into it. I was only in there for about fifteen minutes and I could tell straight away that it was going to be hopeless. Thanks for letting me go there all the same. I'll just have to wait till they've all been sorted and archived, and then I'll have another look, if that's OK.

Anyway, it doesn't seem very important, now. Nothing else seems very important, all of a sudden, does it? Have you been glued to the telly all evening like me?

Your mother seemed to be in good spirits. Considering what you told me, I think she's made an amazing recovery. Sometimes she seemed a little bit confused. When I got down from your bedroom, at about four o'clock, the first pictures were just coming through and at first she thought it was one of those crappy TV movies they put on in the afternoons. She saw the people throwing themselves out of the windows and tutted and said that they shouldn't show that kind of thing before the nine o'clock watershed. But after a while she worked out that it was for real.

We sat and watched the news together for about two hours. I have to say she was much calmer about it than I was. For some reason I kept breaking down and crying. But all your mum said was that she was so sorry for the people who had died, and that America was now going to take some terrible revenge for this. I asked her what she meant and she didn't answer. In the end she just said she was glad she wouldn't be around to see what happened next.

I told her not to be so silly. What else can you say?

Incredible times.

Love
Claire.

6

Perhaps the secret was to live in the moment. Or try to find a way of doing that. Hadn't he once managed to convince himself, after all, that “there are moments in life worth purchasing with worlds”? And wasn't this just such a moment, when you looked at it from a certain angle? The sun was shining. It was a bright, crisp, late-October morning. Sunlight sparkled off the water, sending shards of light dancing in the air in fantastic patterns as the waves crashed against the shingle. It was only ten o'clock, with the prospect of a whole, leisurely day in front of him. And, to top it all, he was sitting at this wooden table, overlooking the beach, cradling a cappuccino in his hands, in the company of a beautiful, stylish, eighteen-year-old woman who for the last few days had been hanging on to his every word and even now was looking at him with unfeigned love and admiration. He could feel the envious glances of every other middle-aged man at the café. It was unfortunate—from one point of view—that she was his niece, rather than his girlfriend. But then, you couldn't have everything; and life was never perfect. Benjamin had learned these simple truths long ago.

It was autumn, 2002, and he had been separated from Emily for fifteen months.

“Three weeks, was all it took her,” Benjamin was complaining to Sophie. “Three weeks, and she starts going out with the bloody church warden. Next thing I know, he's moved in with her. Living in
my
house.”

Sophie sipped her cappuccino and said nothing, merely smiled at him with her warm hazel eyes in a way that immediately—and inexplicably— made him feel better.

“I know, she's entitled to be happy,” Benjamin said, half to himself, looking out over the ocean. “God knows, I don't begrudge her that. I certainly wasn't making her happy. Not towards the end, anyway.”

“And you're happy too, aren't you?” Sophie asked. “You like being alone. It's what you always wanted.”

“Yes,” said Benjamin, dolefully. “Yes, that's true.”

“Of course it is,” Sophie insisted, responding to the lack of conviction in his voice. “People have always said that about you. It's one of the things they've always envied in you. Even when you were at school. Didn't Cicely say that once? Something about not wanting to be stuck on a train with you, because you never said anything much, but being convinced that you were a genius and the world was going to recognize you one day.”

“Yes,” said Benjamin, for whom the memory of that conversation had never faded. “That's true too.”

It had ceased to surprise him, by now, Sophie's exhaustive knowledge, and apparently effortless recall, of just about everything that had ever happened to him at school. At first he had found it astonishing; now he was used to it, and considered it to be just one more remarkable facet of a personality which turned out, the more he got to know her, to be remarkable in every other way as well. She had explained to him, some time ago, how she had become so well acquainted with these childhood stories. She had heard them from her mother, when she was only nine or ten years old. Lois had just started working at York university; her husband Christopher was still practising law in Birmingham. For more than a year they had maintained separate households, and almost every Friday during that time, Lois and her daughter had driven down to Birmingham, returning to York on Sunday evening so that Sophie could go to school the next morning. And it was on these three-hour drives, to and from Birmingham, that Lois used to fill the time by telling her daughter everything she could remember about Benjamin and his schooldays.

“But how did
Lois
manage to know so much?” Benjamin had wanted to know. “I mean, she wasn't even there. She was in hospital for ages.”

“Exactly!” Sophie had replied, her eyes gleaming. “Don't you remember? She heard it all from
you.
Every Saturday you used to come and visit her, and take her for a walk, and tell her everything that had happened at school that week.”

“You mean—she heard all that? She took it all in? I didn't even think she was listening. She never said a word to me on any of those walks.”

“She heard it all. And she remembered it all, too.”

Benjamin had often pondered these words, during the long, wakeful nights that had become one of the many depressing features of his new bachelor lifestyle. He was ashamed to have forgotten that he and Lois had been so close, in those days. It was the oddest paradox of all: when his sister was still in post-traumatic shock, forever silent, seemingly insensate—that was when the bond between them had been strongest. However remote she had seemed, however unreachable, she had in fact never been more devoted to him, never more dependent. The Rotters' Club, they had called themselves: Bent and Lowest Rotter. But once she started to recover, they had drifted apart; and as soon as she met Christopher, the drift accelerated, until they had become as formal and distant with each other as . . . well, things were never as bad as they were between him and Paul, obviously. But still, he felt no particular kinship with his sister any more; could not recover that sense of nearness, however hard he tried to will himself towards it. Perhaps some sly process of transference had taken place, unnoticed, and the affinity he had once felt for Lois was being replaced, gradually, by his growing and deepening fondness for Sophie. That would be satisfying, on some level; would have about it something of the symmetry he tended to spend much of his life vainly hunting for: the sense of a circle being closed . . .

“It's amazing, how you remember all that stuff,” he said to her, now. “You're a walking encyclopedia of my past.”

“Someone has to keep the records,” she said, smiling enigmatically.

They finished their coffees and began to walk towards the sea. They were at Hive Beach, in Dorset, a few miles south of Bridport. Benjamin had spotted this beach, and this café, yesterday afternoon as the whole family— including Lois and his parents—had driven along the coast. “Great place for breakfast,” he had remarked—to no one in particular; but it was Sophie who had woken him at eight o'clock the next morning and said, “Come on then: breakfast at the beach!”; and so the two of them had come here together— fugitives,
compadres
—while the others were left to struggle at their rented property, bleary-eyed, with unfamiliar toasters and recalcitrant plumbing systems.

“Do you ever visit FriendsReunited?” Sophie asked, while Benjamin—an inveterate skimmer—combed the beach for suitably flat stones.

“Now and again,” he said, casually. In fact he checked it at least once a week—sometimes daily—to see if Cicely had registered. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, I just wondered if you knew what became of some of those people. Like Dickie—the one whose bag you all used to have sex with every morning.”

“Richard Campbell . . .” Benjamin recalled, aloud, as he approached the water's edge and achieved a satisfying score of twelve with his first stone. “He's probably been in and out of counselling a dozen times by now.” He turned to Sophie, who was hunched up against the autumn wind in a full-length scarlet overcoat, a blue cashmere scarf wrapped around her throat. “You know what—I reckon you'll turn out to be the writer in the family. I've never known someone with such an interest in stories. You have . . .” (he skimmed again) “. . . a very advanced sense of narrative.”

Sophie laughed. “I bet you say that to all the girls.”

“I meant it as a compliment, actually.”

“And coming from you, Benjamin, I'm sure it is.” She took a stone from his outstretched palm and attempted to skim it. It sank promptly into the water with a resounding slap. “Anyway, it's not true. I'm just interested in people, that's all. Who isn't?”

“No—it's more than that. I mean, how long did you spend reading those log-books last night? We couldn't tear you away from them.”

Benjamin, Lois and Sophie were staying with his parents for a week at a fifteenth-century castle a few miles east of Dorchester, rented out by the Landmark Trust. On arrival they had found in a drawer, among the old jigsaw puzzles, packs of cards and tourist leaflets, four substantial log-books, running to several hundred pages each, bound in green vellum, recording the experiences of every visitor to the castle for the last twenty years. The people who had stayed here seemed to conform, on the whole, to a very particular type: conservative in their values, intellectual even in their leisure pursuits.

Sophie had picked up the log books out of nothing more than passing curiosity, but had soon started to find them fascinating, as social documents if nothing else.

“If I ever do become a therapist,” she said, “I'm going to use that stuff as source material. What you've got there is a record of decades of systematic abuse. Powerless children subjected to the whims of parents who won't let them do anything for a whole week except . . . make tapestries and sing madrigals. I mean, can you imagine? Or that one who says that he got his eight-year-old son to dress up in Tudor costume and spend four days trying to learn how to play ‘Greensleeves' on the sackbut. What do you think
he's
going to be like when he grows up? Whatever happened to Game Boys and Playstations? Don't any of these people do anything normal, like watch television or go to McDonald's?”

“What about that couple—the one you read out to me last night?”

“The bondage guy? The one who complained that there wasn't a proper dungeon, and left the address of a place in Weymouth that sold chain mail and branding irons?”

“And his wife sounded so sweet. She put all those pressed flowers into the log-book, and wrote that little poem: ‘Sonnet to the Castle.' The one with twenty-three lines.”

“It takes all sorts, Benjamin. All human life is in those books.”

“I bloody hope not. God help us if that's true.”

He waited for a lull between two of the foaming breakers, then skimmed the last of the stones across the water; after which they walked on, westwards, away from the café and the car park, in the direction of the crumbling, striated cliff face. Walking erratically, buffeted by the occasional wind, stumbling on the uneven shingle, they sometimes fell against each other, and it would have felt natural to Benjamin, at those moments, to take Sophie in his arms and clasp her in a hug. A neutral, avuncular hug, would that be? Could he trust himself to keep it that way? He had to keep reminding himself that his niece—who seemed like a full-grown and very sophisticated woman, to him—was still in her last year at school. This was her half-term holiday. He must remember these facts. And remember, too, that Sophie and Lois would be leaving, driving back up to York on Friday, in two days' time. In the meantime, he should just try to savour the luxury—the fleeting luxury—of her company. That was the important thing. To savor the moment.

The castle they had rented for the week was dominated by a cavernous sitting room, which never seemed to get properly light or warm. Here Benjamin's father Colin would pass much of the day reading newspapers or playing Scrabble or Monopoly with Lois, while Sheila would busy herself in the kitchen, washing up, boiling the kettle, making tea, preparing meals, and generally allowing the time to pass exactly as she had allowed it to pass for the last fifty years. Sometimes they would go out for a walk, get extremely cold, and come back again; then they would stoke up the fire, drink tea, get extremely hot, and go out for another walk. It often seemed to Benjamin that his parents had purposely devised a life for themselves which involved nothing more dramatic than regular changes in body temperature.

Of the six bedrooms, two had already been colonized by Benjamin himself: one for sleeping in, and one to accommodate his papers and his recording equipment. His parents had merely stared, incredulous, when he arrived on the Monday afternoon with a car filled to the roof with cardboard boxes and instrument cases. He had brought with him an Apple iBook, a sixteen-track Yamaha digital mixing desk, two microphones, accoustic and electric guitars and four separate Midi keyboards and control devices. “I thought you were writing a book,” Colin had said. “What else do you need, apart from a pen and some paper?” Benjamin had answered, “It's a bit more complicated than that, Dad,” but didn't bother to explain any further. He had given up trying to make them understand.

Late in the afternoon after their walk on the beach, Sophie came up to his workroom, sat down on the bed, and announced: “I'm halfway through the second log-book. I can't take any more at the moment. Those people are doing my head in.”

“Hold on a sec,” Benjamin said. He was clicking repeatedly on his mouse, his eyes fixed on the sequencing software on his monitor. “There's a funny little ‘pop' sound on this flute sample. I'm just trying to find it and get rid of it.” He scrolled along the screen a few more times, then sat back with a sigh. “Ah well. It can wait.”

“So,” Sophie began, “are you going to tell me what you're up to in here? Rather like Grandad, I was under the impression that you were working on a book.”

“It is a book,” said Benjamin. “Look—there it is if you don't believe me.”

He pointed to a corner of the room, where two large cardboard boxes overflowed with manuscript. Sophie squatted down beside them and, seeking and obtaining permission from his eyes, she picked up a bundle of papers and began to glance through them.

“There must be about ten thousand pages here altogether,” she said, wonderingly.

“Well, that's because I've kept all the drafts,” said Benjamin. “Though it is going to be pretty long. Also, all my source material's there—stuff I wrote when I was a student, diaries from the last few years. Even some of the things I wrote at school.”

“So it's about you, is it, this book? It's a kind of autobiography.”

“No, not really. At least I hope not.”