The Closed Circle (38 page)

Thinking these thoughts late one morning, shortly before lunch, as he sat on a hillside bench high above the valley with the milk-white splendour of the abbey stretched out beneath him, Benjamin found himself being approached by the mysterious guest.

“All right if I join you?” the man asked, breathing fairly heavily from the exertion of having strode up the hill.

“By all means. My name's Benjamin, by the way.”

“Good to meet you, Benjamin,” said the man, shaking him by the hand as he sat beside him. “And do you mind if I ask you something I've been meaning to ask ever since I arrived?”

“Feel free.”

“What on
earth
has brought you to this Godforsaken hole?”

This was not what Benjamin had been expecting to hear; and for a moment he could think of nothing to say in reply.

“That seems . . . an odd phrase to use,” he stammered, in the end, “about a monastery.”

“Well, it's very pretty here,” said the man. “I'll give it that.” Belatedly, he held out his hand in return. “Michael's the name: Michael Usborne. Pleased to meet you. Did you read about this place in
Condé Nast Traveller
too?”

It was time to go home. Benjamin was sure of that now. Not just because of the new arrival, although that was reason enough in itself. Usborne had chosen to come to St. Wandrille, apparently, because the press were hounding him following the revelation of the pension scheme he had negotiated for himself after bringing yet another once-successful company almost to the point of liquidation. Benjamin had never heard of Michael Usborne, and was not really interested in the details, but it seemed that he had made something of a career out of this kind of thing. His latest pay-off, all the same, was considered so outrageous that the news had spread beyond the ghetto of the financial pages and made it on to the front of three of the national broadsheets on the day it was announced.

“I've had bloody journalists camped on my doorstep ever since,” he said. “How do these people find out where you live? Well, they're not likely to track me down here, at any rate. My spiritual side has been a well-kept secret up till now, and long may it stay that way. Thank Christ for monks! What would we do without them, eh?”

Even before this development, however, Benjamin had been starting to feel a growing sense of confidence, a growing resolve, and the beginnings of an impatience to rejoin the world at large. The symptoms, at first, were not dramatic. He had started walking into the village every day to buy a newspaper and read more about the progress of the war. He had gone to the shop at the rear of the monastery grounds and browsed through the large CD selection; and instead of just buying (as had been his intention) recordings made by the monks themselves, he had bought half a dozen classical CDs as well. He was ready to listen to music again.

One of the albums he bought was a new recording of Honegger's oratorio
Judith.
Benjamin still remembered how it had been playing on the radio when he drove away from Claire's house in Malvern in the summer of 2001, how he had turned the radio on just in time to hear the “Cantique des Vierges,” and how moved he had been by it, by the memories it rekindled. Claire had been so kind to him that evening, given him such good advice. She had always been kind to him, now that he thought about it, and he'd never given her much in return. How blind he had been, for so many years, where Claire was concerned! He had always been a little frightened of her, he realized now. She was very much his equal—more than his equal, in most respects—and he had never really been brave enough, perhaps, to enter into a relationship with a woman like that. He and Emily had huddled together behind the screen of their religion, and if she'd never had much to say about his writing or his music, well, that had suited him, in many respects. He didn't like to be challenged. Claire would challenge him, every step of the way. If he wrote something that was no good, she would tell him. But surely that was what he needed. Surely that was what a real friend—a loving friend—would want to do for him. Was he big enough, yet, to cope with it?

He would go to see Claire, as soon as he got back to the Midlands. Pay her a friendly visit, and see what came of it, see where it led them. Listening, now, to the music which he had come to associate with her, and which he had found so serendipitously in the monastery shop, he knew that it was absolutely the right thing to do.

But then . . . then there was also Malvina.

Benjamin sighed, and rolled over in bed. Moonlight peeped in around the edges of his threadbare curtains. How could he compare Claire and Malvina? Well of course, he couldn't. And it was ludicrous, by any rational standard, to suppose that Malvina might make a suitable partner for him. She was twenty years younger than him, for a start. And he hadn't actually seen her for almost three years—although he'd had a text message from her as recently as last October. He could imagine the contempt of his friends and family, if they were ever to become lovers; the sad shaking of heads over silly old Benjamin and his nervous breakdown and his mid-life crisis. (The same contempt
he
had felt for his brother, in fact, during the nightmarish episode—thankfully long over—when Paul and Malvina had themselves been on the point of having an affair.) And indeed, he couldn't explain to
himself
—had never been able to explain—why he had always felt so close to Malvina, from the very first time he saw her. It had little to do with desire, although that came into it. He just felt helplessly, irresistibly drawn to her, as if by some elemental force. Feelings like that couldn't, and shouldn't be ignored. He had never felt anything like that for Claire. Never.

Thinking of text messages stung Benjamin into action. He got out of bed and, for the first time in more than three months, he plugged his mobile phone into the mains and recharged the battery. As soon as it was turned on and the recharging icon started flashing, he waited for it to beep. But, anticlimactically, it remained silent. If any messages had been sent since his disappearance, they must have been deleted by his server some time ago.

He climbed back into bed, and pulled the coarse blankets tight under his chin. Claire and Malvina . . . Malvina and Claire . . . The two names, the two faces, spun around inside his head as he sank into sleep.

The next day, as Benjamin said his farewells to Père Antoine, they talked at some length about books, about poetry, about music. Benjamin told him about the CD he had bought the day before.

“Arthur Honegger,” said the brisk, friendly, academic-looking young monk, “was an interesting man. Before I came here, I used to listen to his music a lot. Not the big oratorios so much, but the symphonies. The five symphonies. Do you know them? There is a very . . .
religious
spirit behind that cycle of symphonies. Number three, the
Liturgique,
never failed to move me. It used to shake me to the core, actually. And you know, although his parents were Swiss, he was born very close to here.”

“Really?” Benjamin liked to hear about coincidences of this sort. It made him feel that he was on the right path, that he could start to see the patterns behind things.

“Yes, he was born in Le Havre. You can probably still see the house. I expect there is a plaque or something. Are you going back that way?”

“I was going to go to Paris,” said Benjamin, “and take the Eurostar.”

“Take the ferry,” Père Antoine advised. “You'll be able to walk straight on to it this evening, no need to book. And on your way, you can stop for a little while, and pay your respects to a great composer.” He put his arm around Benjamin, and clasped him affectionately as he said goodbye. “Good luck, then, Mr. Trotter. And remember, when your poems are published, don't forget St. Wandrille!”

“I won't,” said Benjamin. And meant it.

Benjamin stood on the cliffs above Etretat. High on the chalk. It was a clear evening, and the ocean lay smooth and somnolent. A windless evening, on which it seemed possible to believe that the whole world was at rest. He was not to know that thousands of miles away, in Baghdad, statues of Saddam Hussein were being toppled by cheering crowds as the Americans declared the invasion to have been a success, or that hundreds of miles away in the other direction, on another clifftop above the Irish Sea, on the Ll
n peninsula in North Wales, Paul and Malvina were making plans to escape together while Susan Trotter, in the kitchen of a barn conversion on the rural outskirts of Birmingham, wept over the collapse of her marriage. It's not possible to know everything, after all.

It was half past six in France—half past five across the Channel—and apart from an elderly couple who had walked past him a few minutes ago, arm in arm, Benjamin had seen no one else on the cliff path. He was alone, and free to think: as indeed he had been free to think for the last few weeks and months. But he was bored with this freedom, by now: or rather, worn down by the responsibilities it conferred. Freedom, he was starting to believe—or absolute freedom, at least—was overrated.

He thought, once again, about Claire, and about Malvina. Benjamin found it hard to retain a strong visual memory of people, even the women he was drawn to. When he thought of Malvina he thought of their long confidential meetings at the Waterstone's café—of a time when he had been employed, and married and (he realized now) happy. His feelings for Malvina were infused with the memory of that happiness. When he thought of Claire he thought of a time late at night when he was driving away from her house, and had listened to Honegger's “Cantique des Vierges” on the radio, and had seen the reflection of a yellow full moon in the rear-view mirror of his car. For Benjamin, this was a primal image, an archetype: only by keeping it always in his sights did he feel that he could successfully navigate, from now on, the treacherous waters of his life. And yet somehow, between these two very different, irreconcilable options, a choice now had to be made. Claire and Malvina. Malvina and Claire. How could it ever be done?

He would stand by the decision he had reached earlier that day, on the bus from Yvetot to Etretat.

He took out his mobile, and wrote a quick text message.

U'll probably think I'm mad, but have just realized something: we belong together! Why fight it any longer? Am coming back 2 c u NOW. Ben xxx

Then he sent the message, and walked down the chalk path into Etretat, ready to catch a bus to Le Havre; hoping as he did so that he would have some time to spare before the ferry departed, so that he could stand a while outside the house where Honegger was born, and pay his
hommage.

2

8 April 2003

Dear Prime Minister,

It is with great regret that I feel I must tender my resignation as a Member
of Parliament.

I am doing so entirely for personal, rather than political reasons. Almost three
years ago, as you may recall, certain rumours about my private life appeared in
the newspapers. I acted swiftly to stop them, and deeply regretted any embarrassment they may have caused to the party. More recently, I am sorry to say, my
private life has again become difficult: and this time, rather than let the newspapers get there first, I have resolved to take pre-emptive action. (A concept with
which you will be familiar, I'm sure!)

In short, I have decided to leave my wife, Susan, and our two young daughters. Such a step, as you must imagine—being a husband and father yourself—
cannot be taken lightly. I have no doubt that, when the press comes to hear about
it, I shall be vilified. So be it: this is the media culture we choose to live in. But I
am not prepared to let the party su fer as a consequence.

It goes without saying that it has been an honor to serve the Labour party,
and you personally, over the last seven years. I truly believe that yours has been,
and will continue to be, a great radical and reforming government. History will
look back on your achievements in health, public services and education with
unqualified admiration. If I may add a more personal judgment relating to New
Labour's first years in office, I would say that our crowning glory has been to
release the party from the deadening clutch of the trades unions, and to start earning the trust and respect of the business community. It was your genius to recognize that these difficult tasks must be begun, and your courage that has inspired us
all never to waver from the chosen path.

As you know, I have never been disloyal to the party, in any parliamentary
vote. Six weeks ago, I voted against the rebel amendment on the Iraq war. At the
time of my writing this letter, the American-led invasion of Iraq seems on the
point of achieving its aim of dislodging Saddam Hussein from power. If this does
indeed happen, in the next few hours or days, I would like to congratulate you,
again, for holding fast to your principles. The military campaign seems to have
been swift, efficient and responsible.

None the less, I feel greater unease about this war than about anything else
you have led the party into during your period of office. Was toppling Saddam
Hussein indeed the aim? That was not how we presented the matter to the British
people. And once he is toppled, what will follow? There seems to be an assumption
that the Iraqis, having been bombed to pieces by us, will turn around and welcome
us as heroes and saviours as soon as Saddam is gone. Am I alone in considering this
an unlikely scenario? My great fear is that we have not even begun to imagine the
possible consequences of this Middle Eastern adventure.

I think that I have, in the time since making my decision to resign, acquired a
certain clarity which was somehow difficult to attain while I was committed to
forging a career in the hothouse atmosphere of Westminster. And the main consequence of this, so far, has been a growing sense that our war with Iraq is impossible
to justify. Saddam's Iraq posed no imminent or direct threat to the British people;
he had no proven links to international terrorism or the September 11th attacks;
we have broken international law; we have weakened the authority of the UN; we
have alienated many of our European partners; and, most seriously of all, we have
confirmed the worst prejudices of the Muslim world as to the contempt and indifference which they believe the Western people feel towards their beliefs and their
way of life. Further terrorist attacks on the West—and on Britain in particular—
which before this war were merely likely, are now inevitable.

Voting against the rebel amendment, and for the invasion of Iraq, was the
only political act of my career on which I look back with shame. It was such a huge
misjudgment, in fact, that it forced me to look hard at my motives for making it;
and when I did so, I realized that a complete revolution had taken place in the
relationship between my political and personal priorities. It was this realization
that led directly to the decision to leave my wife, and so, unavoidably, to the decision to resign.

Please forgive me, Prime Minister, for any distress, embarrassment or political damage which my actions might cause. You will read this letter, I suspect, with
mounting disbelief and anger. But after giving all of these matters much thought,
I am convinced, finally, that I have done the right and honorable thing.

In continuing friendship and admiration.
Yours truly,
Paul Trotter.

From: Paul Trotter
To: Susan
Sent: Tuesday, April 8, 2003 11:07 p.m.
Subject:

Dear Susan

There is no kind way of saying this, so I might as well be direct. I am still in love with Malvina and I have decided to leave home and be with her. I have sent a letter of resignation to Tony. She and I are going to leave the country for a while and then I shall be back in touch. In the meantime of course you must continue to use our joint bank account and credit cards.

Tell the girls that their father loves them and will see them soon.

I'm so sorry.

Paul.

Malvina buzzed the entryphone of Paul's Kennington flat at a quarter to twelve that night.

“What are you doing here?” he said from the doorway, as she reached the top of the staircase. “I said I was going to pick you up in the morning. You're not supposed to come anywhere near this place.” Then he saw that she was crying, and put his arms around her trembling frame. “What's happened? What's the matter?”

“My mother,” sobbed Malvina. “My stupid, lying, fucking mother.”

“What about her? What did she do now?”

In a daze, Malvina walked towards the sitting room and said: “Did you send your letter to Tony?”

“Yes. I did it this afternoon.”

“Fuck,” she murmured. “What about Susan? Have you said anything to her?”

“I promised you,” said Paul, “I was going to tell her today. I sent her an email about half an hour ago.”

“Fuck,” said Malvina again, more forcefully this time. “
Fuck.
”

She collapsed on to the sofa, and smothered her face in her hands, and her whole body shuddered with weeping.

“Darling,” said Paul, sitting beside her, stroking her hair. “What is it? Just tell me.”

“We can't be together any more,” said Malvina. “It's over. I can't see you again.”

“What are you talking about? Why not?”

It took Malvina several minutes to compose herself, to dry her eyes and wipe away the watery snot that was leaking from her reddened nostrils, to reach a point where she felt able to tell her story. She rested her head on Paul's shoulder for a while and then she sat up and faced him, taking hold of both his hands, locking him into her gaze.

“I told my mother about us,” she said. “It was the first time I'd told her. She went crazy. Ballistic.”

Paul sighed. “But you knew that was going to happen. You always said she'd react that way.”

“I know, but this was different. It wasn't just . . . the fact of what's happened between us. It's worse than that. It was when I mentioned
you.
”

“What do you mean?”

“It was when I told her your name.”

Paul said nothing; unable to imagine, at this moment, what Malvina could be trying to tell him.

“Paul,” she said at last. “She's been lying to me. My mad bitch of a mother has been lying to me, the whole of my life.”

He stared back at her. “About what?”

“About me,” said Malvina. “About who I am.”

Susan picked Ruth up from nursery, and picked Antonia up from school half an hour later. Back at home, she plonked them both in front of the television and started to prepare their dinner. She put three sausages in the oven, along with some fried potatoes shaped like smiley faces, and left some frozen peas in a bowl of shallow water ready for microwaving. When the sausages seemed to be cooking nicely, and the girls were uncomplainingly watching a wildlife programme fronted by a slightly manic young woman with spiky hair, she realized she had a few minutes to spare and popped into the study to check emails.

There was only one message. It was from Paul. She read it once, quickly, and then shut the computer down.

Antonia heard a crash of glass and came running into the study.

“What happened, Mummy, what happened?”

“Nothing, darling,” Susan said, her hands and voice shaking. A large Stuart Crystal vase lay shattered next to the far wall—where Susan had thrown it, with all her strength—and the lilies it had contained were strewn among the fragments, in a spreading pool of water. “I knocked it off the shelf by accident, that's all.”

“Can I help you clear up?”

“And me!” said Ruth, joining her elder sister in the doorway.

“No, it's all right.” Susan knelt down beside them and hugged them fervently. “You go back and watch the television. I'll see to this mess. It's my fault. It's dangerous for you with all this glass around.”

The girls disappeared and Susan stood quite still in the middle of the study for a while, waiting for the trembling to stop. She made no attempt to gather up the fragments of glass, or to mop up the water which was sinking deeply into the carpet.

Ten minutes later the smell of burning sausages sent her rushing into the kitchen. The room was filled with smoke and the alarm had gone off, beeping with an obscene insistence that had the girls smothering their ears and shouting, “Too loud, too loud!” Susan turned off the oven and pulled out the grill pan containing the charred sausages. She didn't know how to stop the alarm so she climbed up on to one of the work surfaces, ripped it from the ceiling and pulled the battery out.

“Mummy, are you all right?” Antonia said, when Susan had dropped back down to the floor with the neutralized smoke alarm in her hand. “You keep doing silly things.”

“I'm fine, darling, fine.” She put her arm around her elder daughter and guided her back towards the sitting room. “I've just got a lot to think about today, that's all. Never mind. I'll do you some fish fingers instead.” She glanced at the television screen, in front of which sat Ruth, transfixed by a children's news programme which was broadcasting images of a statue being pulled to the ground by a jubilant mob. “What's all this about?”

“There's been a big war,” Antonia said, knowledgeably. “In Iraq. But it's over now, and everything's going to get better.”

Susan looked at the faces of the crowd and wasn't so sure. So this was how it was going to end. Or perhaps start. The Iraqis looked exhilarated, to her, but also stunned. And there was a kind of mania in their eyes. A kind of fury: the fury of a people who had been granted freedom, of sorts, but not on their own terms; a people whose liberation had come too brutally, too swiftly; a people who would never feel kindly towards those who had freed them; would never trust their motives. A people who did not know what to do with their freedom, yet, and would soon turn their energies into hatred against those who had bestowed it on them, uninvited, unasked.

Watching the cloudy television screen through tear-filled eyes, Susan knew, at that moment, exactly how they felt.

“No, nothing,” said Paul. “More than thirty messages about my resignation, but nothing from her.”

He switched off his laptop, disconnected his mobile from the USB port and locked the doors of his car. It seemed that you had to come to this point—the highest point on the peninsula—to get any mobile reception at all. He had been checking his emails every half hour, waiting to see if there was a message from Susan. But she had made no attempt to contact him so far.

“Perhaps she never got it,” Malvina suggested.

“I'll check again in a little while,” Paul said. “Come on—we might as well go for a walk while we're up here.”

It was half past five on the evening of Wednesday, April 9th, 2003: an evening of impossible stillness, where the buzzing of a fly amongst the heather could seem like an event of consequence. Paul and Malvina were walking on the headland above Rhîw, at the westernmost tip of the Ll
n peninsula in North Wales. It was the remotest place he could think of: no one would be likely to recognize him here. Besides which, he had been seized, unexpectedly, by a pressing desire to revisit the places he had last seen as a child, on the caravanning holidays he had enjoyed (or rather endured) with his family back in the 1970s. These places were part of his history. Part of Malvina's, too, he now realized. They had driven up from London the night before, starting from Kennington at two o'clock in the morning, and arriving in time for breakfast at a café in Pwllheli. After that they drove on and a few hours later checked into an otherwise deserted bed and breakfast, in the tiny, inaccessible seaside village of Aberdaron.