The Closed Circle (33 page)

“Careful, love!” Susan said. “Those things are sharp, remember?”

Ruth looked seriously at her index finger and sucked it until the pain went away. She kept throwing her mother solemn glances, as if rebuking her for not having told her, already, that the world was such a dangerous place. Her mouth quivered and she was on the verge of tears but she blinked them back. Benjamin took her in his arms and squeezed her tightly, kissing the top of her head and breathing in the warm, almondy odour of her hair.

Paul parted the lips of Malvina's vagina and inserted his tongue. He savored the hot, salty tang as her juices leaked into his mouth. He took her engorged clitoris between his teeth and bit it gently, teasingly. Her back arched and she cried out with tormented pleasure.

The telephone rang.

Susan went to the kitchen to answer it. “Take it in turns now, you girls,” she called back to them. “And watch out for those sharp needles!”

She was away for a few minutes. Benjamin and the girls managed to hang up several more baubles in the meantime, and then Antonia and Ruth lost interest and started wrapping each other in tinsel instead. Then they wrapped Benjamin in tinsel and laughed when they saw how funny he looked, and Malvina lay spreadeagled on the bed like a starfish as Paul lay between her legs and entered her, and Susan appeared in the kitchen doorway again and said, “Ben—can I have a word with you?”

“Sure,” he said, and sashayed towards her, expecting her to laugh at the sight of his head wrapped in tinsel, with a plastic reindeer perched on top, the way Ruth had arranged it. But Susan was looking serious, almost apprehensive.

“Is everything all right?” he asked.

“Yes, everything's fine.” She turned and led him back into the kitchen.

“Who was that?”

“That was Emily.”

“Emily? What did she want?”

“Well, it's good news, actually. At least, I hope you'll think it's good news.”

Benjamin waited, in expectant silence, until Susan told him:

“She's pregnant.”

He had no idea what to say. The radio in Susan's kitchen, he noticed, was playing the third of Poulenc's Christmas motets. Slowly, he removed the reindeer from the top of his head, and began to unwind the tinsel.

8

Benjamin vanished shortly before Christmas. He gave no explanation to his friend and neighbour, leading Munir to wonder whether he had caused offence that night, by launching into his diatribe against Western values. But he couldn't believe that this was the real reason for Benjamin's departure, since they had had so many similar conversations before. Something else must have done it. It remained a mystery.

It had happened very suddenly. The morning after visiting his sister-in-law, Benjamin borrowed a car from somewhere, and spent more than an hour filling the boot, the back seats and the passenger seat with cardboard boxes crammed full of papers. He drove away at nine o'clock in the morning and did not return until late at night. He came back on foot, having apparently returned the car to its owner. It was after midnight when he knocked on Munir's door and presented him with the keys to his flat.

“I'm catching an early flight in the morning,” he said. “I don't know when I'll be back. Look after the place for me.”

“Where are you going?” Munir asked.

Benjamin hesitated, before telling him: “My ticket's to Paris. But I'm not going to stay there long. After that, I don't know.”

And that was all he would say. When Munir came home from work that night, he went upstairs to Benjamin's flat and found that it was far from empty. Benjamin had left most of his clothes, most of his books, most of his CDs. His computer was still there, although all of his papers had gone. It looked as though he was intending to come back, but it was impossible to guess when.

But Benjamin had made no arrangement with their landlord to keep paying the rent. One Saturday morning early in January, 2003, Munir heard noises in the hallway and discovered that the landlord had appeared, with two of his sidekicks, and was in the process of changing the locks on Benjamin's flat and removing all his remaining possessions. Munir protested, but to no avail: the lease had expired at the end of December, letters had gone unanswered, and the flat was going to be made available for reletting immediately. Munir managed to salvage some of the books, most of the CDs, the computer, the television, and some of Benjamin's clothes. Everything else—including the furniture—was taken away.

But the flat was not relet. It was not even redecorated, as the landlord had promised. It remained empty, and became the site of strange meetings, mysterious comings and goings. It was the start of an uneasy, fearful time for Munir. Where had Benjamin gone? If he had taken his mobile phone with him, it never seemed to be switched on. His parents phoned for information and Munir was unable to provide any. Meanwhile, upstairs, there were footsteps late at night, voices in the small hours, cars and motorbikes pulling up outside the front gate after most decent folk had gone to bed. Once there was the sound of a fight and once, at three o'clock in the morning, Munir was convinced that he'd heard a woman screaming, waking him out of a deep sleep. He found himself lying awake, now, most nights, listening for these sounds, his heart thudding in the darkness. When he grew weary of lying there, alert and wakeful, his mind racing with speculations about what might have happened to his friend and what nefarious business his landlord might be conducting on the premises, he would turn on the radio and listen to the World Service. Whatever he heard just fuelled his anxiety. The news was getting worse and worse. The British government seemed to be expressing nothing but ever more slavish support for President Bush and his bellicose rhetoric. More and more troops were being sent to the Gulf in readiness for an invasion. Besides his weekly attendance at
salat al-jama'ah,
Munir would now often get up and pray in the middle of the night, in the spare bedroom where he had put down a mat expressly for this purpose. In his
du'a
he would ask Allah to have mercy upon the world and not to plunge it into a terrible war. He would say these prayers aloud, feeling more alone and friendless than ever as the words tumbled from his mouth and slipped away unheard into the darkness of the Birmingham night.

Munir knew that he was not the only person who opposed this war. Knew, in fact, that the majority of British people were on his side. He took some comfort in the great rallies that were held, in every major city, on February 15th. He stood side by side with his fellow citizens and listened to rousing speeches and clapped and cheered, and when he got home late that afternoon he watched the news on Benjamin's television and saw that an even greater crowd, a vast crowd, had gathered in Hyde Park in London. But in his heart he knew that the Prime Minister would not listen to any of these protests. An unstoppable process had begun. History—whose end had been announced, prematurely, by some writers more than a decade earlier with the defeat of Communism—was gathering terrible momentum, swelling into a pitiless, fast-flowing river which would soon burst its banks, and millions of people, Munir feared, were going to be swept along in its current towards an unknown fate over which they had no control.

Strangers continued to arrive at the house after dark; footsteps continued to be heard, thumping dully up and down the staircase. Munir thought about phoning the police, but knew that he had nothing definite to tell them, and believed that they would not take him seriously. Instead, he positioned a chair near to the window of his ground-floor flat, and spent many evenings sitting there, with an eye half on the television, half on the street outside. It was a sorry state of affairs. He had become a curtain-twitcher, and it made him feel very old.

One night, a few days after the February peace marches, a great fog descended on the city. Munir, sitting at his window and periodically peeping out through a crack between the curtains, could not even see as far as the garden gate, a mere five or six yards from the front door. He could, however, hear footsteps in the street outside. Somebody had been loitering there for five minutes or more. Whoever it was had a peculiar gait, halting and irregular. It was even possible that he had heard more than one pair of footsteps, although there had been no voices this time. After a few more minutes he decided to investigate. He took his roll-up umbrella from the coat rack—it was quite heavy, and perhaps not completely useless as a weapon—and stepped out into the murky winter darkness.

Fog wrapped itself around the amber street lamps in drifting spirals. Munir lived on a quiet street: there was no traffic noise tonight, and as soon as he opened and closed his front door, he could hear the person who had been lingering outside turn and walk away. He hurried down to the garden gate and listened more closely. The receding footsteps did not sound fast; they sounded effortful, and—again—somehow irregular. After a few seconds they faded to nothingness, and the invisible stranger had gone.

Munir was not satisfied. He decided to wait by the garden gate for a while. He stepped out on to the street and sat down on the low wall that bordered his scrap of front garden. The brickwork was freezing: a sharp pang of cold transmitted itself instantly through the thin serge of his trousers and spread across his buttocks. This is how you get piles, he reminded himself; but after a while the pain subsided, and he remained sitting there, shivering somewhat but none the less enjoying the raw freshness of the misty outdoors. He tended to overheat his sitting room, and realized now that it had been too close and airless in there.

Before long he heard footsteps again.

He knew it was the same person. The steps were heavy, slow and careful: the sort of steps you would associate with an old man. Whoever it was had been scared off, apparently, by Munir's arrival, but had now changed his mind and was coming back towards the house. Munir stiffened and rose to his feet and peered out into the gloom, tightening his grip on the umbrella. After a few seconds, he caught a glimpse of a human figure, still half-obscured by the shifting fog, little more at first than a blur of denser blackness, its outline fuzzy and ill-defined. Then, as the shape came closer, he realized that it was not a man at all.

It was a woman, walking slowly but with fixed, inexorable purpose, leaning heavily on a walking stick and looking ahead of her with eyes that gazed forward with bulbous intensity—like the eyes of some startled, nocturnal creature—but appeared to see nothing. She was wearing a dark brown overcoat in fake fur which came just below the knee, revealing strong calves and ankles sheathed in woollen flesh-coloured tights. Her head was wrapped in a scarf, knotted beneath her chin. Her face was pale, thick with powder, and her swollen lips glistened with ample coatings of dark red lipstick. The face was bloated and sickly, and the woman's figure was stout, but there was about her, at the same time, something formidable and imperious. The heaviness of her body suggested strength of character; so too did the unrelenting evenness with which she stared ahead of her. As Munir rose slowly to his feet, and watched this massy apparition emerge from the coils of fog, he felt apprehensive, intimidated.

The woman stopped a few feet away from him and placed her whole weight on the stick, breathing heavily. Her fishy, protuberant eyes rested on Munir and she gathered the breath to speak.

“Do you live here?” she said.

“Yes,” Munir answered.

“Does Benjamin live here?”

Because the answer to that question was complicated, and because he thought that she might want to rest, and because he was curious to find out more about her, Munir said: “You seem a little tired. Would you like to come inside for a moment?”

The woman shook her head. She repeated her question, and Munir explained that Benjamin had lived at this address until recently, but that he had disappeared two months ago, and nobody knew where he had gone. He apologized for not being able to tell her more.

Something inside the woman seemed to shrivel at this information. Her body curled in upon itself. She seemed to dwindle in stature before Munir's eyes.

“Thank you,” she said.

“I'm trying to make contact with him all the time,” he added. “If I manage to speak to him, would you like me to pass on a message?”

“Just tell him,” said the woman, turning to leave, “that Cicely was asking after him.”

Munir did not recognize the name. It meant nothing to him. In bewildered silence he watched the cumbersome body recede, laboriously, until the blankets of fog swirled around it and carried it away from view, like curtains closing upon the final act of a long-enduring drama.

7

Soon enough, for Paul and Malvina, Mark's flat became more than the place where they had sex. They began to think of it as home; their shared home. Which is not to say that they started going out and choosing new wallpaper or buying toasters and coffee-makers. But it was where they met, every day, for hours at a time, not just to make love but to talk, to eat together, to drink wine, to watch television. It was the place where they began to invent themselves as a couple.

It had never been Paul's intention to come here in the first place. That night in early December, they had left the “Sharpest Men in Britain” party and gone for a quick meal at Joe Allen's, a restaurant just a few streets away, much favored by actors and minor celebrities. Before they had even ordered, Paul's mobile beeped and a text message came through: it was from Doug Anderton.

Old habits die hard, eh Paul? I thought you were sharper than that. Take care Doug

“Oh, shit,” Paul said, after reading the message.

“What's wrong?” Malvina asked.

“Someone spotted us leaving together.”

He closed his eyes and screwed them tight shut, willing himself to believe that this wasn't happening. Were they going to have to go through all this again? He looked at Malvina, who was gazing at him worriedly, trustingly, and he was helpless in the grip of the desire that coursed through him; his sense of all the time they had wasted, all the time they had to make up. And then his hand had closed on the keys in his pocket—the keys to Mark's flat in the Barbican—and at once he knew that this was the solution. It was miles from Kennington; the press knew nothing about it, and would never find him there. It was convenient, and it was safe, and it was empty.

They had taken a taxi there just an hour later, and stayed the whole night.

The pattern they quickly evolved for themselves—Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights spent at the flat, and some lunchtimes when Paul's timetable allowed it—was disrupted too soon by Christmas and the New Year. Malvina stayed at the Barbican for most of that time, but Paul was obliged, for decency's sake, to spend at least two or three days in the Midlands with his wife and daughters. He even had to endure an evening in Rubery with his sister and parents, which turned into a crisis meeting about the disappearance of Benjamin. Paul, personally, couldn't see what the fuss was about. His brother was a grown man of forty-two. He could look after himself. He didn't buy the notion that he was having some kind of nervous breakdown, brought on by the fact that his wife (from whom he had been separated for more than a year) was pregnant by her new boyfriend. Lois seemed to consider it significant that he had driven up to York, shortly before leaving the country, and left all his papers with her daughter Sophie— whose bedroom was far too small to accommodate them all. But again, Paul couldn't see what was meant to be so ominous about that. It had always been obvious to him that Benjamin was wasting his time writing this never-ending novel. Now, at last, he had woken up to the fact. Wasn't that a cause for celebration? Nobody else seemed to think so. The rest of the family told him he was being heartless; but he wasn't, really. He was just feeling impatient because he missed Malvina's naked body so much.

January was an idyllic month. There was little parliamentary business to distract him, and they were able to spend long days and nights together. At the same time, Paul was helping to draft the final pages of the report from his Commission for Social and Business Initiatives, which would, he was convinced, be well received by the leadership and generate considerable attention in the press. The report was prefaced by a quotation from Gordon Brown, taken from the
Financial Times
of March 28th, 2002: “The Labour Party is more pro-business, pro-wealth creation, pro-competition than ever before.” It strongly recommended that the role of private firms in the public sector be extended still further, with special emphasis on health and education. It advised that GPs' surgeries, for instance, should be encouraged to contract out their payrolls and support services to the private sector. Likewise, the governing bodies of state schools should start hiring privately run management teams. “The vital ingredient that the public sector continues to lack, and the private sector is well equipped to provide [Ronald Culpepper had written] can be summed up in one word: management.” The objection that such initiatives had notably failed in the recent past—in the case of the privatized railways, for instance—was firmly rejected as “defeatist.”

The completion of the report was celebrated at a special meeting of The Closed Circle in the first week of February, 2003. The only absentee, on this occasion, had been Michael Usborne, who was caught up in crisis talks with the board of Meniscus Plastics. Since his appointment as CEO, despite his radical programme of rationalization and forced redundancies, which had already involved closing down an entire R&D department at the Solihull plant, the company's share price had started to fall and operating costs appeared to be soaring. It seemed likely that he would have to resign again, and he was in the process of renegotiating the finer points of his compensation package. Paul had phoned him about it earlier that afternoon and it sounded as though he was in good spirits. And so was Paul himself, when he left Rules Restaurant shortly after eleven o'clock. He texted Malvina from his taxi and asked if she could be at the Barbican flat by midnight.

But when he arrived there himself, at about 11:30, he got a nasty surprise. He turned the key in the lock only to find that the lights were already on, and his brother-in-law Mark was sitting on the sofa watching CNN.

“Paul?” he said, rising to his feet. “What are you doing here?”

Paul mumbled some excuse about being on his way home from a dinner in the City, and deciding to check up on the flat because it was such a long time since he'd been there. Then he asked if he could use the toilet and once inside the bathroom he looked around for traces of Malvina and frantically tried to remember if she had left anything of hers in the bedroom. He knew there were some condoms in the drawer of the bedside table. He would have to try and remove those as soon as possible. In the meantime he sent her a quick text telling her that she should turn around and go home immediately.

“So, what brings you home?” he asked Mark, returning to the sitting room. “A few days' holiday?”

“No—Reuters have decided that they don't need two people out in Indonesia any more. One of the Bali bombers has confessed now but apart from that there's nothing much else going on. They're pulling a lot of us back in case we all need to be sent out to the Middle East.”

“I see,” said Paul. “So you're going to be here for a while?”

“All depends on President Bush, really. And your own much-esteemed party leader, of course.”

“Then, how long . . .” (Paul tried to make the question sound casual) “... how long do you think it'll be?”

Mark looked at him curiously, and laughed. “I rather thought
you
might be able to tell me that, Paul. Aren't you supposed to be voting on it soon?”

In the next few weeks, it seemed that everybody wanted to know which way Paul was going to vote on the war. The Commons debate was due to be held on February 26th. A bland motion had been tabled, reaffirming endorsement of UN Security Council Resolution 1441, and expressing support for “the government's continuing efforts in the UN to disarm Iraq of its weapons of mass destruction”; but of much more interest was the moderate cross-party amendment, tabled by Labour's Chris Smith and the Conservatives' Douglas Hogg, which insisted that the House “finds the case for military action against Iraq as yet unproven.” There was no prospect of the government being defeated; but people were talking about a substantial backbench rebellion, which would significantly weaken Tony Blair's authority and might even cause him to rethink his apparently uncritical support for President Bush. Of course, it was well known who the diehard anti-war campaigners were; but there were also dozens of Labour backbenchers who had yet to express a definite opinion either for or against an American-led invasion of Iraq, and Paul was one of the most high-profile of these. Journalists would waylay him whenever he got near the Palace of Westminster, anxious to know if he had made up his mind yet; the government whips would buttonhole him in the Palace corridors, dropping none-too-subtle hints that a vote for the amendment would be bad for his parliamentary career; while, back in the Midlands, the members of his constituency party—who were solidly anti-war—pressed him to vote in their interests and muttered about possible deselection if he failed to do so.

As far as Paul was concerned, however, the single most persuasive voice in the anti-war camp came from much closer to home. It was Malvina's.

Losing their access to Mark's flat had been a serious blow. Malvina no longer had a place of her own in London; her mother's relationship with her boyfriend in Sardinia had—like all her mother's relationships—ended badly, and Malvina had been told to leave the Pimlico apartment as a result. For her own part, she didn't seem especially upset about it. Now that she was seeing Paul again, nothing seemed capable of puncturing her happiness. Two of her poems had recently been accepted by a little-read but prestigious literary magazine, and this had simply added to her euphoria. On the downside, her mother was back in London too, but Malvina seemed to be taking a robust approach to that situation.

“Perhaps you could move in with her for a while,” Paul had suggested.

“You've got to be kidding. I don't even know where she lives.”

“What?” he said, incredulous. “Don't you ever see her?”

“Not if I can help it. If she wants to see me, she can call my mobile, and we can go for a coffee. That's as close as I want to get.”

“Have you told her about us?”

“No way. Maybe when things are a bit less . . . complicated between us. But there's no hurry. It makes no difference to me what she thinks of me any more.”

In the meantime, Malvina had moved into a house in Mile End, which she shared with three other ex-students. There was absolutely no prospect of Paul visiting her in that environment, and in the face of continued enigmatic emails and text messages from Doug Anderton, he remained paranoid about taking her back to the flat in Kennington. Instead, they found an out-of-the-way hotel near Regent's Park that was not too expensive, and not too depressing, and began meeting there. Malvina would make the bookings, and pay with her credit card, and Paul would reimburse her in cash. It was all right as a stopgap, but soon they would need to find a more permanent arrangement. Neither of them had any ideas. And after more than two weeks of this, Paul was beginning to despair.

The hotel was hardly stylish, and seemed to be about thirty years overdue for a refurbishment, but one advantage was that every ensuite room boasted an enormous bath, and it was in one of these that they lay together on the evening of February 25th, 2003. Malvina was at the end with the taps. They were drinking Prosecco, and while Malvina reclined with her feet propped up against Paul, one foot on each shoulder, he stroked her gently between the legs, his soapy fingers creating a soft lather amidst her pubic hair. It was not done in a sexual way, to bring her to orgasm; there was something friendly and easy-going about it, although judging from the way that Malvina stirred sometimes, and shifted her weight, and every so often let out a small sigh or moan, it did seem to be having a pleasurable effect.

“I can't understand,” she was saying, “what's holding you back. You know what you
believe.
So there's only one way you can possibly vote tomorrow, isn't there?”

“It's a huge thing, to vote against your own party. It's not something you do lightly.”

“But—‘the case for military action is as yet unproven.' It's just a simple statement of fact, isn't it?”

Paul fell silent. “Did you notice the way the guy on the desk looked at us tonight?” he said, after a while. “I wonder what he thinks is going on.”

“Pretty bloody obvious what's going on, I would have thought,” said Malvina, with a satisfied chuckle.

Paul said, almost querulously: “You're very
relaxed
about all this.”

“All what?”

“All this . . . deception. Booking into a hotel, signing in under a different name, all the paraphernalia of having an affair. It doesn't seem to faze you.”

“Why should it?”

“I was just thinking . . . All that time ago, that day in Oxfordshire: you told me then that you'd never have an affair with me.”

“Times change,” said Malvina. She sat up and took a sip from her Prosecco. “So do people. And besides, the alternative's worse.”

“What alternative?”

“Not seeing you.”

Paul said, “That's not the only alternative.” He paused now, choosing his words carefully. “I think I've made my decision, you know.”

Malvina smiled, and leaned forward, and kissed him tenderly with her open mouth. “That sounds good. Is it one I'm going to like?”

“I think so. I think I'm going to leave Susan.”

She drew back again, surprised. “What?”

“I'm leaving her. I want to be with you all the time. It's the only way. Aren't you pleased?”

Malvina struggled for words. “Well . . . yes, but . . . you don't have to do that, Paul. I'm happy with what we've got at the moment.”

“Why? Why are you happy with it?”

“I don't know, I just am. It's working. I've never asked you to leave Susan, have I?” She laughed uncomfortably, and to fill the wounded silence her words seemed to have provoked in Paul, she said: “I thought you were talking about the war.”

Paul continued to say nothing; just drank his Prosecco in resentful sips.

“When were you thinking of telling her?” Malvina asked.