The House of Sleep

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE HOUSE OF SLEEP

‘A novelist who gains in range and reputation with every book’ Pat Barker,
Sunday Times

‘Packed with brilliant comic set-pieces… his affectionate nostalgia for student life has you cringeing in embarrassed recognition. And no-one, save perhaps David Lodge, marries formal ingenuity with inclusiveness of tone more elegantly’
Time Out

‘An obliquely funny, intensely humane novel’
Daily Telegraph

‘Coe navigates the river Lethe with intelligence and verve, never allowing the more metaphysical aspects of his tale to interfere with a cracking good plot and a fine cast of characters…
The House of Sleep
never disappoints – Coe has once again produced a dream of a novel’
The Times

‘Skill, verve and range… there are bits which make you laugh out loud and others which make your heart ache’
Guardian

‘A book of many marvels… Coe has a genius for making characters so immediate, so frail and yet courageous that one is overwhelmed by the urge to give them a huge hug’
The Oldie

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His most recent novel is
The Rain Before It Falls.
He is also the author of
The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up!,
which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize,
The House of Sleep,
which won the 1998 Prix Médicis Étranger,
The Rotters’ Club,
winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and
The Closed Circle.
His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson,
Like a Fiery Elephant,
won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

JONATHAN COE

THE HOUSE OF SLEEP

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

First published by Viking 1997
First published in Penguin Books 1998
This edition published 2008
1

Copyright © Jonathan Coe, 1997
All rights reserved

The author and publisher wish to thank the following for permission to reprint copyright
material: HarperCollins for an extract from
The Echoing Grove
by Rosamond Lehmann;
‘Good Morning Heartache’, words and music by Irene Higinbotham, Ervin Drake and Dan
Fisher. Copyright © 1946 Northern Music Corporation/MCA Music Inc., USA. MCA
Music Ltd, 77 Fulham Palace Road, London W6. Used by permission of Music Sales Ltd.
All rights reserved. International copyright secured; Routledge & Kegan Paul for extracts
from
Gravity and Grace
by Simon Weil (trans. Emma Craufurd)

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject
to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent,
re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s
prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in
which it is published and without a similar condition including this
condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

978-0-14-191834-1

Contents

Awake

Stage One

Stage Two

Stage Three

Stage Four

REM Sleep

APPENDIX 1
: Poem

APPENDIX 2
: Letter

APPENDIX 3
: Transcript

Author’s note

The odd-numbered chapters of this novel are set mainly in the years 1983–4.

The even-numbered chapters are set in the last two weeks of June, 1996.

‘I do get confused about time. If one loses one’s emotional focus’ – she stopped, struggled, went on huskily –’that’s what happens. Aeons – split seconds – they interchange. One gets outside the usual way of counting.’

Rosamond Lehmann,
The Echoing Grove

Awake

I

It was their final quarrel, that much was clear. But although he had been anticipating it for days, perhaps even for weeks, nothing could quell the tide of anger and resentment which now rose up inside him. She had been in the wrong, and had refused to admit it. Every argument he had attempted to put forward, every attempt to be conciliatory and sensible, had been distorted, twisted around and turned back against him. How dare she bring up that perfectly innocent evening he had spent in The Half Moon with Jennifer? How dare she call his gift ‘pathetic’, and claim that he was looking ‘shifty’ when he gave it to her? And how
dare
she bring up his mother – his
mother,
of all people – and accuse him of seeing her too often? As if that were some sort of comment on his maturity; on his
masculinity,
even…

He stared blindly ahead, unconscious of his surroundings or of his fellow pedestrians. ‘Bitch,’ he thought to himself, as her words came back to him. And then out loud, through clenched teeth, he shouted, ‘BITCH!’

After that, he felt slightly better.

∗

Huge, grey and imposing, Ashdown stood on a headland, some twenty yards from the sheer face of the cliff, where it had stood for more than a hundred years. All day, the gulls wheeled around its spires and tourelles, keening themselves hoarse. All day and all night, the waves threw themselves dementedly against their rocky barricade, sending an endless roar like heavy traffic through the glacial rooms and mazy, echoing corridors of the old house. Even the emptiest parts
of Ashdown – and most of it was now empty – were never silent. The most habitable rooms huddled together on the first and second floors, overlooking the sea, and during the day were flooded with chill sunlight. The kitchen, on the ground floor, was long and L-shaped, with a low ceiling; it had only three tiny windows, and was swathed in permanent shadow. Ashdown’s bleak, element-defying beauty masked the fact that it was, essentially, unfit for human occupation. Its oldest and nearest neighbours could remember, but scarcely believe, that it had once been a private residence, home to a family of only eight or nine. But two decades ago it had been acquired by the new university, and it now housed about two dozen students: a shifting population, as changeful as the ocean which lay at its feet, stretched towards the horizon, sickly green and heaving with endless disquiet.

∗

The group of four strangers sitting at her table may or may not have asked permission to join her. Sarah couldn’t remember. Now, an argument seemed to be developing, but she did not hear what was being said, although she was conscious of their voices, rising and falling in angry counterpoint. What she heard and saw inside her head was, at that moment, more real. A single, venomous word. Eyes blazing with casual hatred. A sense that she had not so much been spoken to, as spat upon. An encounter which had lasted – two seconds? –less? – but which she had now been replaying, involuntarily, in her memory for more than half an hour. Those eyes; that word; there would be no getting rid of them, not for a while. Even now, as the voices around her grew louder and more animated, she could feel another wave of panic swell inside her. She closed her eyes, suddenly weak with nausea.

Would he have attacked her, she wondered, if the High Street had not been so busy? Dragged her into a doorway? Torn at her clothes?

She raised her mug of coffee, held it a few inches from her mouth, looked down at it. She stared at its oily surface, which
was shimmering perceptibly. She clasped the mug tighter. The liquid steadied. Her hands were no longer shaking. The moment passed.

Another possibility: had it all been a dream?

‘Pinter!’ was the first word of the argument to catch her attention. She willed herself to look across at the speaker and concentrate.

The name had been pronounced in a tone of tired incredulity, by a woman who was holding a glass of apple juice in one hand, and a half-smoked cigarette in the other. She had short, jet-black hair, a prominent jaw and lively dark eyes. Sarah recognized her, vaguely, from previous visits to the Café Valladon, but did not know her name. She was later to find out that it was Veronica.

‘That’s just so typical,’ the woman added: then closed her eyes as she puffed on her cigarette. She was smiling, perhaps taking the argument less seriously than the thin, pasty, earnest-looking student sitting opposite her.

‘People who don’t know anything about theatre,’ Veronica continued, ‘
always
talk about Pinter as if he’s one of the greats.’

‘OK,’ said the student. ‘I agree that he’s overrated. I agree with that. That’s exactly what proves my point.’

‘It
proves
your point?’

‘The British postwar theatrical tradition,’ said the student, ‘is so… etiolated, that –’

‘Excuse me?’ said an Australian voice next to him. ‘What was that word?’

‘Etiolated,’ said the student. ‘So etiolated, that there’s only one figure who –’

‘Etiolated?’ said the Australian.

‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Veronica, her smile broadening. ‘He’s just trying to impress us.’

‘What does it mean?’

‘Look it up in the dictionary,’ snapped the student. ‘My point is, that there’s only one figure in postwar British theatre
with a claim to any kind of stature, and even
he
is overrated. Massively overrated.
Ergo,
the theatre is finished.’

‘Ergo?’
said the Australian.

‘It’s over. It has nothing to offer. It has no part to play in contemporary culture, in this country, or in any other country.’

‘So what – you’re saying that I’m wasting my time?’ Veronica asked. ‘That I’m out of tune with the whole… Zeitgeist?’

‘Absolutely. You should change courses at once: to film studies.’

‘Like you.’

‘Like me.’

‘Well, that’s interesting,’ said Veronica. ‘I mean, just look at the assumptions you’re making. For one thing, you assume that just because I’m interested in the theatre, I must be studying it. Wrong: I’m doing economics. And then, this whole conviction of yours that you’re in possession of some kind of absolute truth: I… well, I find that a very
male
quality, is all I can say.’

‘I am male,’ the student pointed out.

‘It’s also significant that Pinter is your favourite playwright.’

‘Why’s that significant?’

‘Because he writes plays for boys. Clever boys.’

‘But art is universal: all real writers are hermaphrodite.’

‘Ha!’ Veronica laughed with delighted contempt. She stubbed out her cigarette. ‘OK, do you want to talk about gender?’

‘I thought we were talking about culture.’

‘You can’t have one without the other. Gender’s everywhere.’

Now the student laughed. ‘That’s one of the most meaningless remarks I’ve ever heard. The only reason you want to talk about gender is because you’re scared to talk about value.’

‘Pinter only appeals to men,’ said Veronica. ‘And why does he appeal to men? Because his plays are misogynist. They appeal to the misogyny deep within the male psyche.’