The Closed Circle (9 page)

Malvina tapped him on the shoulder at this point and handed him the phone.

“Have a word with this guy,” she said. “Philip Chase. From the
Post.
”

Paul didn't recognize the journalist's name and his first response— thinking of a conversation he'd had with Malvina almost a week ago, about starting to build up a media profile in America—was to grab the phone and yell excitedly: “Hello, Washington!”

“Philip Chase here,” said the nasally accented voice at the other end. “Calling from Birmingham. Sorry if you were expecting Woodward and Bernstein. Is that Paul Trotter?”

“Speaking,” said Paul, flatly.

Philip reminded him that they had been at school together—information in which, at that moment, Paul was not the slightest bit interested. He told Philip about the television programme he was about to record—information by which Philip, for some reason, did not appear to be remotely impressed. Philip, sensing that Paul was not in the mood for a lengthy conversation, asked him what he thought of yesterday's news from Birmingham. Paul, his mind still running on chocolate exports rather than motor industry redundancies, replied that it was good news for the industry, good news for Birmingham and good news for the whole country. There was a shocked pause at the other end of the line: obviously, Philip had not been expecting him to express himself quite so pithily.

“Can I just get things clear, Paul?” Philip asked. “You're saying that you're happy about this announcement, are you?”

Paul glanced at Malvina joyfully and took a deep breath before saying, as loudly as he could—and in a horrific mockney accent—“I should coco!” Then, reverting to his own voice—but even now barely able to keep a tremor of excitement out of it—he added: “And you can quote me on that!”

After which, it hardly mattered whether he managed to say it on the programme tonight or not.

A chauffeur-driven car took them back towards Kennington. It was more comfortable than a black cab. The seats were deeper, plusher, upholstered in some sort of yielding imitation leather that swished arousingly whenever the sheerness of Malvina's black tights shifted against it. Streetlamps spotlighted her face at amber intervals. The arresting, beckoning action of traffic lights—a set every few yards, it seemed—rocked her body backwards and forwards beside him. Paul's thoughts were fuzzy with the vodka he'd knocked back in the hospitality room after the recording. He was elated, borne aloft by the realization that his first brush with show business had been so successful. (By which he meant that it hadn't been a disaster.) He wanted to show his gratitude to Malvina, the woman who was bringing him all this. The woman who had stood constantly beside him, smoothing things over—intervening, expertly, whenever he had tried to communicate with all those baffling media types. The woman who had phoned Philip Chase as soon as Paul had been called on to the set—sweating with the knowledge that he had just committed another outrageous gaffe (would those rivulets of panic show up on camera?)—and had managed to resolve the whole situation in a few moments, explaining what Paul had really meant to say, showing it up for the comical misunderstanding it was. How had he ever managed to do without her? What would happen if she abandoned him now? He wanted to hug her: but the thin tautness of her body— always wired, never relaxed—forbade him. He wanted to kiss her, too. Perhaps that would come later. For the time being he merely said:

“Do you think it went well tonight?”

“What do you think?” she answered, turning her head a fraction, brushing away the hair that fell over one eye.

“I think it went well. I think I was on pretty good form, actually. That's what your friend said, isn't it?”

“Well, not exactly. What he said was, ‘It's OK, we can probably edit around you.'”

Paul looked downcast for a moment. Then thought about it a little longer, and burst into tipsy laughter. “Jesus. I was
shit,
wasn't I?”

“No,” said Malvina, kindly. “All they said was, they could edit around you.”

She brushed the rogue strand of hair away again, and allowed her eyes to meet Paul's briefly—having carefully avoided doing so, for the last few minutes—and Paul seized upon this crumb of intimacy, resting his hand on her lean, nylon thigh, stroking it, caressing her knee, as she looked down at his hand impassively, with what looked like almost out-of-body detachment.

“You're the best thing that's ever happened to me,” he blurted out.

Malvina smiled and shook her head. “No I'm not.”

Paul pondered his own words. “You're right. I suppose winning that election was the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“What about your wife? Your daughter?” He didn't answer, so she continued: “Paul, you're going to have to get real.”

“Real?” He sounded as though the word was new to him. “About what?”

“About everything. You're living in a fantasy world at the moment. You're so screened off from what's happening in the real world, it's frightening.”

“Are you talking about Longbridge?” he asked, with a curious frown.

“Partly I'm talking about Longbridge, yes. I mean, I may not be the most politically . . .
conscientious
person in the world, but even I can see that thousands of people losing their jobs is more important than how much cocoa they have to put in a chocolate bar before they can sell it in Antwerp, for God's sake . . .” She took hold of his hand and removed it from her knee, which it had still been clasping limply. “But that's not all. You have to get real about me, as well.”

“Meaning . . . ?” said Paul, leaning closer, and beginning to think, with a shift in his heartbeat, that the moment he had been anticipating for so long was about to arrive.

“Meaning, that sooner or later you have to decide, Paul, what it is that you want from me.”

“That's easy,” he said, and stroked her hair gently, two, three times before putting his lips to the tiny, immaculate curve of her ear and whispering: “I want to make love to you tonight.”

It may only have been a whisper, but it was still loud enough to make their driver switch his car stereo on. His radio was tuned to some late-night AOR station, playing the theme song from the film
Arthur.

Malvina drew away. She said nothing, for some time, merely fixing Paul with a look that seemed at once to convey rejection, sadness and even (unless he was just deluding himself) a little bit of reluctantly suppressed desire. But then all she said was: “I don't think you've really thought this through.”

24

This was only the second time Benjamin had visited Doug's house. Doug and Frankie's house, he supposed he should call it. Or perhaps just Frankie's house, since it had been in her family for two or three generations, and Doug had simply married his way into it. After his first visit, Benjamin hadn't wanted to come again: it had been too upsetting. He didn't want to have his nose rubbed in it any more, the knowledge of all that Doug had won for himself. But Emily had enjoyed her weekend down there, and Doug and Frankie had invited them again, and Benjamin, besides, ended up finding himself unwillingly drawn to the place: realizing that he had finally reached the point where the most he could ask was to be allowed—if only for a couple of days—to scavenge like a starveling cat for whatever scraps he might find of the life he had once imagined himself leading. That life—only ever conceived by Benjamin as an abstract ideal, but now concretized by Doug, with his skyrocketing career and fortuitous marriage—included (among many others) the following elements: a house worth something in the region of two or three million pounds, spreading over five floors, tucked away in a hard-to-find backwater between the King's Road and Chelsea Embankment, as pretty and quiescent a spot as you were ever going to find in central London; four implausibly attractive, good-humoured and cherubic children (two of them not Doug's own, it must be said); and an extended household which seemed to be populated almost exclusively by young, desirable women—au pairs, child-minders, home-helps, twentysomething East European refugees of every description who judging by their looks could just as easily have found employment as high-class escorts or porn stars; and to top it all, of course, Frankie herself. The Hon. Francesca Gifford, a former catwalk model (with an old black and white portfolio to prove it), and now something big in charitable fund-raising on the Chelsea circuit, a somewhat ill-defined and mysterious occupation (profession?), but one which certainly seemed to keep her busy between pregnancies.

Frankie was blonde, slender, probably in her late thirties but looking about ten years younger, with the sing-song voice and slightly terrifying smile of the devoted Christian, which is exactly what she was. Her Christianity, at least, gave her something in common with Benjamin and Emily, whom she liked but appeared to regard—collectively—as little more than another charitable object deserving of her compassionate attention. Benjamin sensed this and resented it deeply, but was annoyed to discover that it didn't stop him from fancying the pants off her. Merely being in her presence gave him a secret thrill; and that, perhaps, was the last and most decisive reason for agreeing to come down for the weekend.

When he wandered into the kitchen early on Sunday morning (three days after the recording of Paul's television triumph), Benjamin found that Frankie was the only other adult to have risen. Her five-month-old, Ranulph, was jigging up and down on her lap, the traces of some unidentifiable mucus-like baby food smeared over most of his face, his hands, his upper torso and his mother's white towel dressing gown. Frankie herself was attempting to drink some coffee but every time the cup got anywhere near her lips the baby's jigging would upset it, and mostly it ended up either on her lap, her feet or the floor. There was a brushed steel, digital radio on one of the shelves, tuned quietly to Classic FM, and—as usual—Benjamin could recognize the music: it was Ravel's
Introduction and Allegro,
a work which for him always seemed to evoke images of an unattainable paradise and so felt particularly appropriate in this setting.

“You're up early,” said Frankie; and her second thought was, “Gosh, I must look simply terrible.”

Benjamin was never able to say anything gallant if he thought it might make him sound lecherous or sexist. This was a failing to which he had been prone for more than twenty years. So instead of protesting, “No, you look fantastic actually”—as perhaps he should have done—he merely asked: “Did you sleep well?”

“So-so,” said Frankie. “But it doesn't help when there's a certain gentleman who won't leave your nipples alone all night.”

It flashed through Benjamin's mind for a second that she was talking about Doug, so acute was his current tendency towards sexual envy; but then Frankie smiled sweetly down at her baby son, just in time to put him right. Benjamin went over to put the kettle on, in order to hide his confusion.

“Emily needs a cup of tea before she can face the world,” he explained. “We thought we'd get up and go to the ten o'clock service.”

“Oh good, I'll come with you,” said Frankie. “It's so nice to find a couple of Duggie's friends who don't regard going to church as some sort of perversion.”

They went to the morning communion at St. Luke's Church in Sydney Street, and here, for a brief hour, Benjamin was able to immerse himself in ritual and forget the pressure of dissatisfaction which at all other times he felt mounting up and threatening to overwhelm him. Leaving the church he made eye contact with Emily—even that was rare enough, these days—and they smiled warmly at each other, drawn into temporary closeness. After which, they loitered outside in the sunshine, having nothing much to say to each other, while Frankie busied herself talking to other members of the congregation. Most of these people, presumably, she saw every week or so, but upon meeting it still seemed necessary to hug them with tremulous passion, like old friends from whom she had been separated for long, lonely decades. She appeared to know everybody, and to be regarded on all sides as some kind of saint: people clustered around her, hovered on the fringes of her conversations, as if purely to have the privilege of touching her. Her two older children had stayed at home, but she was carrying Ranulph in front of her in a baby-sling—his face pressed smotheringly into her bosom—while Coriander Gifford-Anderton, her two-year-old daughter, clutched Emily's hand and waited in patient silence, sometimes looking up and down the sunlit street warily; gloweringly sceptical of the world she was in the process of having bequeathed to her.

“OK,” said Frankie, rejoining them, the breathless social round completed. “Where to next?”

“I was hoping to look at some shops,” said Emily.

“Oh, Mummy!” Coriander protested, hearing this. “You promised the tarousel.”

“It's
carousel,
darling.
Ka, ka.
She has trouble with her
c
s, for some reason,” she explained.

“Where's the carousel?” Benjamin asked.

“Oh, she just means the little roundabout in the park down the road.”

“I don't mind going there,” said Benjamin—seizing what he thought would be a chance to spend more time alone with Frankie and her daughter. “You can spare me for a bit, can't you, Em?”

“Gosh, that's nice of you!” said Frankie. At once she took Emily by the arm and began steering her hurriedly away. “You lucky girl,” she added to Coriander, “getting Benjamin all to yourself.” And to Emily: “Come on then, I'll show you that new fabric shop I was telling you about.”

Coriander felt for Benjamin's hand and clasped it uncertainly as they watched the two women walk off together in the direction of the King's Road. It was hard to tell which of them felt more shocked or abandoned.

On the way to the shops, Frankie made a quick call to Doug, who was still in bed. The conversation was short, flirtatious, enigmatic, and had something to do with swearing. Afterwards she explained to Emily: “Duggie's been in a shocking mood all week because I'm on a sex strike.”

“A sex strike?” said Emily, swerving off the pavement to avoid a crazed middle-aged platinum blonde on roller blades who appeared to be jabbering to herself, although it turned out she was just negotiating some kind of flight deal on her hands-free mobile phone. The “day of rest” thing didn't seem to have caught on in Chelsea.

“To stop him swearing all the time,” Frankie explained. “You know, I've only just noticed how much he does it. In front of the children, as well, that's the problem. Not Hugo and Siena so much—I mean, for goodness' sake, they hear worse at school already—but Corrie's been coming up to me recently and saying things like, ‘Mummy, what's a dickhead?' and ‘What's a wanker?' and—well, much worse, actually, so I've told him that it's got to stop. Every time he swears in front of the kids he misses out for another day. Two days for the F-word, and three for the C-word. Access denied.”

“Aren't you punishing yourself as well?”

Frankie laughed. “Not really. It's never much fun, is it, having sex only five months after you've given birth? You probably remember.”

She realized her mistake as soon as the words were out of her mouth. But then, people always seemed to forget that Emily and Benjamin didn't have children of their own. Perhaps because they were so good with everybody else's.

“Look at me, Benjamin, look at me!”

Coriander stood triumphant at the top of the highest slide—the one that was only supposed to be for children older than five—and waited until Benjamin had come closer, until she could be certain that she was the focus of his adoring, undivided attention. Then she launched herself down the slope, her eyes even then never leaving him, checking that not for a moment should he allow himself to be distracted. She didn't notice that a toddler was already sitting at the bottom of the slide, not quite knowing how to get off, and there was a brief, spectacular collision as she crashed into him with outstretched legs and kicked him off on to the rubberized asphalt. Benjamin rushed over, picked him up and dusted him down. He cried a bit but didn't seem too upset, and his father, sitting on a nearby bench reading the business section of the
Sunday Telegraph,
didn't even notice.

There were lots of fathers in the playground that morning, and lots of children seeking attention and not getting any. Coriander, despite the absence of her parents, was not doing badly in that respect. Most nannies, it would appear, had the day off on Sundays, and the deal was that fathers got to spend quality time with their children in the playground while the mothers stayed at home and did whatever it was they couldn't do during the rest of the week when their nannies were looking after the children. In practice this seemed to mean that the children were left mainly to their own forlorn, bewildered devices while the fathers, heavily freighted not just with newspapers but also pint-sized paper cups from Starbucks and Coffee Republic, attempted to do on the playground benches exactly what they would have done at home, given the chance.

Coriander wanted to go on the see-saw next. While he was pushing her up and down, Benjamin looked across at a pair of diminutive swings in the corner and watched a curious drama unfold. There were two little girls on the swings, but neither of them was doing any swinging. One of them, a grave-looking toddler with pale eyes and brown ringlets, was sitting bored and motionless while her father leaned against the metal frame of the swing and scoured the pages of the
Herald Tribune.
The other girl—not at all dissimilar in looks and colouring—was trying to give her swing some much-needed momentum with thrusts of her own body, but hadn't got the hang of that move yet. “Daddy, Daddy!” she started calling, but her father didn't hear her, and besides, he had a cappuccino in one hand and, in the other, a mobile phone on which he seemed to be talking to a business colleague in Sydney. Pushing the swing in these circumstances was clearly out of the question. Both the girls' swings were completely at rest when this second father, concluding his call, took a final swig from the coffee cup, tossed it in the rubbish bin, lifted one of the girls into his arms and headed off in the direction of the playground gate. What interested Benjamin about this situation was that he had
not
picked up the girl who had addressed him as “Daddy.” She remained in one of the stationary swings, staring with mounting distress at the receding figure of the man who was presumably her father. Meanwhile the
Herald Tribune
reader read on, happily unaware that his own daughter was in the process of being benignly abducted.

Neither of the adults seemed likely to notice the mistake, and the little girls seemed to be too stunned to say anything, so Benjamin ran over and intercepted the cappuccino-drinker at the playground gate.

“Excuse me,” he said. “It's really none of my business, but—I think this girl might not be your daughter?”

The man glanced down at the toddler in his arms. “Shit,” he said. “You're right. This isn't Emerald.” He hurried back to the swings and accosted the other father just as he was folding up his
Tribune.
“Is this yours?” he asked.

“Daddy!” Emerald held out her arms, her cheeks glistening with tears. There was a hasty swap-over, much shamefaced laughter, and then, just as Benjamin was returning to the see-saw, the playground gate squealed open again and a familiar, unexpected figure burst in, pulling a visibly reluctant three-year-old girl behind her.

“Susan!”

“Benjamin? What on earth are you doing here?”

“I'm here with Doug's daughter. We're staying down here for the weekend.”

“Is this her?” Susan asked, looking down at the little girl sitting in mute bewilderment at the bottom end of the see-saw. “This is Lavender, is it, or Parsley or whatever she's called? Right.” She picked up Antonia and plonked her at the other end. “Go on, then, you two—play. That's what you've been told to do, so get on with it. Bloody hell, I sound like Miss Haversham, don't I?”

She sat down on a bench and patted the space next to her.

“What are you doing in London, though?” Benjamin asked.

“We've driven down for the day. Took us two-and-a-half hours. And all because of your
bloody
brother. Jesus, I don't know why I even listen to him. Yesterday afternoon he suddenly
announces,
completely out of the blue, that we all have to come down today so Antonia can be dragooned into playing with Doug Anderton's children. Apparently it's important that they become bosom buddies—never mind the little fact that they live 120 miles apart. Everything has to revolve around him and his
bloody
career . . .”