The Closed Circle (32 page)

“You never got in touch,” she said, quietly accusing.

“You told me not to. I took you at your word. You told me,” he reminded her, “that we couldn't be friends again until we were . . . over each other.” Malvina looked away. “Has that happened, do you think?”

She shook her head. “No. I don't think it has.”

Paul thought about this for a moment: it wasn't what he had been expecting to hear, and it seemed to leave them with little else to say to each other.

“Anyway,” he muttered, “this event's been a bit of a let-down, to be honest. I was just on my way out.”

And now Malvina said something even more unexpected. “I'll come with you.”

The noise of the party seemed to die away, leaving Paul and Malvina alone together: as if suddenly transported back to the same isolation, the same absolute stillness, as the day they had last seen each other, standing at the centre of the ancient circle formed by the Rollright Stones.

“What about . . . ?” Paul looked across at the producer. He was hemmed in at the bar, deep in flirty conversation now with two of the young women who may or may not have worked for the magazine.

“He'll be OK,” said Malvina and, taking Paul's arm, propelled him in the direction of the cloakroom.

As he helped her on with her winter coat he allowed himself briefly to caress her fleshless shoulders, and when he touched her, even fleetingly, he could feel her leaning in towards him, as if impelled. He knew at once that the long silence between them had been an aberration, a foolish mistake. And he knew it was an absolute certainty that they would sleep together that night.

The only person who saw Paul and Malvina leaving the party together was Doug Anderton. He was standing by himself, leaning against a wall, composing in his head the first few sentences of an article for Sunday's paper.

He had not been looking out for Paul, although he knew he was probably in the room. His gaze was fixed, instead, on a scene unfolding in the corner of the restaurant nearest to the entrance, where the young couple who had arrived just behind Paul in a white stretch limo were enjoying the attentions of a crowd of journalists and photographers. This couple, whom Paul had not recognized, had last year been two of the contestants on Britain's most popular primetime reality TV show. For weeks they had kept the public guessing as to whether or not they were going to have sex with each other on camera. The tabloid papers had devoted hundreds of column inches to the subject. Neither of them had talent, or wisdom, or education, or even much personality to speak of. But they were young and good-looking, and they dressed well, and they had been on television, and that was enough. And so the photographers kept taking pictures, and the journalists kept trying to make them say something quotable or amusing (which was difficult, because they had no wit, either). Meanwhile, Doug could not help noticing, right next to them, waiting for his wife to emerge from the ladies', the figure of Professor John Copland: Britain's leading geneticist, one of its better-selling science writers, and regularly mentioned as a potential Nobel prizewinner. But no one was taking his photograph, or asking him to say anything. He could have been a cab driver, waiting to drive one of the guests home, as far as anybody else was concerned. And for Doug, this situation encapsulated so perfectly everything he wanted to say about Britain in 2002—the obscene
weightlessness
of its cultural life, the grotesque triumph of sheen over substance, all the clichés which were only clichés, as it happened, because they were true—that he was, perversely, pleased to be witnessing it.

Doug watched the distinguished professor standing patiently with two coats over his arm, and watched the celebrity couple, basking in their tenuous fame, and he was as hypnotized, in his own way, as the tabloid journalists who were desperately trying to coax an interesting remark out of them. As he tried to commit every detail of the scene to memory, it was only out of the corner of his eye that he noticed Paul Trotter leaving the restaurant with his arm around Malvina, their heads together in a halo of self-absorbed intimacy. Though that, when he thought about it, was interesting too.

9

Munir was, by nature, a man who worried about things. The list of things he would worry about at any given time was endless: the well-being of his brothers and sisters, for instance, or the inadequacy of his pension plan, or the threatened cutbacks at work, or the damp patch above his bathroom window, or the creaking of his joints whenever he stood up after prayer, or the overdue library book he couldn't find any more, or global warming. But at this particular time—in the third week of December, 2002—there were two things that gave him extra cause for concern: the looming certainty of war, and the state of Benjamin's mental health.

“This country is going mad,” he said to Benjamin one evening, during the commercial break in the middle of the ITN news. “And so are you, if you ask me. Why did you sell all of that equipment? It was your pride and joy.”

“Because I need the money,” said Benjamin.

He went into the kitchen to put the kettle on. Munir followed him.

“But you'll never finish the book now.”

“I'll finish the
book,
” Benjamin corrected him. “I'm just getting rid of the music. It was all getting far too complicated anyway.”

“But I thought that was the whole point!”

Benjamin paused in the act of turning the kettle on, looking ahead of him while he searched for the
mots justes.
“I've decided to go for radical simplicity,” he said.

They returned to the living room. The coffee table in front of the sofa was strewn with travel guidebooks, covering every part of the globe from Thailand to Alaska. Benjamin was planning a trip. The trouble was, he couldn't decide where he should go first, and there was too much choice.

“Do you realize,” he said, “that just by selling that reverb unit I've got enough money to pay for a ticket on the Trans-Siberian railway? First class!”

Munir snorted. “What are you going to do on the Trans-Siberian railway?”

“Look out of the window.”

“At what?”

“I don't know . . . Trans-Siberia, I suppose. Or there's Bali. South America. The Cape Verde Islands. The world's my oyster.”

Munir wasn't convinced. “Well, I only ever ate an oyster once, and it made me sick. Forgive me for saying so, Benjamin, but you are trying to run away from yourself. And it won't work.”

“I'm not trying to run away from myself. I'm trying to run away from . . . this!” He gestured around him at the flat, its sparse furnishings, ancient wallpaper and grubby paintwork. “I'm running away from Birmingham. From boredom. From failure. What's wrong with that? It's about time, isn't it?”

Munir sat down and turned up the volume on the television again. “Start small, Benjamin, that's all I would say. Don't bite off more than you can chew this time.”

They watched the special report on Iraq's Weapons of Mass Destruction and then muted the volume when the sports news came on. Neither of them had the slightest interest in football.

“Ha!” said Munir contemptuously, “So now the Americans have got a 12,000-page document to go through and
still
they admit that they can't find any proof that these ridiculous weapons exist. Is there anyone in the world who can't see that this is just an imperial adventure, that they are determined to establish a power base in the Middle East and these weapons are just a trumped-up excuse for doing it?”

Benjamin agreed, but said: “What can we do, though? Once these people are voted in, they can do anything they like. We're stuck with them.”

This seemed to infuriate Munir more than anything. “I hear that on every side, nowadays! Defeatism. Apathy. It's not good enough, I'm telling you. What about mobilizing ourselves, demonstrating, writing letters to parliament, signing petitions?”

“What about it?”

“Well, it worked for Longbridge, didn't it? You were in Cannon Hill Park that day. So was I. Didn't it inspire us? Didn't it change the course of events?”

Benjamin shrugged. “Who knows whether the government took any notice, really? Maybe things would have turned out that way even without the rally.”

He picked up the remote control again and flicked channels. For a few minutes he and Munir watched an American comedy show. It was about four rich single women who lived in Manhattan, and met regularly over lunch to discuss the most intimate details of their sex lives. Benjamin liked this programme. He had never met women like this in his life, and suspected they were little more than some screenwriter's fantasy, but he craved the lifestyle they enjoyed and was grateful for these voyeuristic glimpses into their louche, privileged milieu. Besides which, he fancied two of the stars.

Within a few seconds, however, Munir was tutting over the bad language and the brazenly provocative frankness of the dialogue. Soon he had to stand up and pace the room, unable to listen any more.

“Turn it off,” he said. “This programme is a disgrace.”

“Oh, come on,” said Benjamin. “It's only a bit of escapist fun.”

“No, I find this unbelievable,” Munir insisted. “These women are sitting down in a public place, talking to each other about ways of giving oral pleasure to their men, as if they were discussing knitting patterns or recipe books. One of them—that one there—has openly admitted to having sex with five different partners in one week! What respect, what
respect
are these women meant to feel for themselves, for their own bodies? What is happening to society, when this kind of thing is allowed on our screens? What goes through the minds of the people who make it? Look at this, Benjamin!” He walked right up to the screen and pointed at it, as one of the characters gave a practical demonstration of her technique, using the neck of a wine bottle. “
This
is America today. A land of degenerates! Is it any wonder that the rest of the world has started to despise them? What kind of . . .
probity
can we expect from a nation that conducts itself in such a way? This is a country that professes one thing and then does the opposite—but in full view of everybody! It preaches religion and morality but then its women behave like whores. It forces other countries to disarm but then it spends all of its money building up the most terrifying arsenal of nuclear and conventional weapons on the planet. It spits in the face of the Muslim world and stampedes through the Middle East in its thirst for the oil to fill its petrol-guzzling cars and then it professes astonishment that a man like Osama bin Laden can exist and believe what he believes. And this—
this
is where our Prime Minister tells us our allegiance lies. With a nation of cowboys and call-girls!” He sat down on the sofa, exhausted by his own rhetoric, and ran a distracted hand through his hair before concluding: “I'm not a man who likes swearing, Benjamin—you know that—but this country is screwed. This whole world is bloody well screwed, as far as I can see.”

Benjamin struggled for something to say. For some reason the phrase, “It's a point of view” hovered on his lips. But in the end he just muttered— to himself more than Munir—“I've got to get away from here, you know. I've got to get away soon.”

He decided to take his friend's advice, and make his escape in small, manageable steps. A good way to begin, he thought, would be to spend a few days down in London. He didn't want to stay with Doug and Frankie this time, however. He wanted to get away from all of that, from everything associated with his past life. He wanted to be alone.

Susan's brother Mark had a flat in the Barbican Centre, which stood empty during his frequent absences from Britain. His work for Reuters meant that he spent most of the year abroad: currently he was in Bali, reporting on the authorities' attempts to track down the terrorists responsible for the recent night-club bombing. Susan and her daughters sometimes used the flat when they went down to London, and she had often suggested to Benjamin that he should take advantage of it too. Now, he thought, might be a good time to take her up on the offer. He could stay there over Christmas, for a start. Anything would be better than Christmas alone with his parents.

He went to visit Susan the following afternoon. He thought it would be better to ask her in person, and besides, he liked spending time with his little nieces. He arrived late in the afternoon, and found that both girls were preparing to help their mother decorate the Christmas tree. It was so heavy that Susan could barely lift it, and the foot of the tree needed to be sawn off before it would fit into its stand. Even Benjamin, the world's worst handyman, believed he could help with that one. He laid the tree out on the floor of the high, vaulted sitting room and set to work with a saw while the two girls looked on. He felt himself swell with pride beneath their admiring gaze.

“There was . . . something . . . I wanted to ask you,” he said to Susan, surprised to find himself gasping for breath after only about thirty seconds' work. “I was . . . wondering if . . . Mark's flat was free . . . at the moment.”

“As far as I know,” she answered. “Why, did you want to use it?”

“I think I need . . . a break,” Benjamin panted. “Thought I might go down to London . . . for Christmas.”

He felt something cool and moist on his forehead. Antonia, thoughtfully, had run off to the kitchen and returned with a wet wipe, which she was using to dab the beads of sweat away from his crimson face.

“That ought to be fine. I mean, you never really know from one day to the next where he's going to be. He told me that if the war starts they'll call him back and he'll be going off with British troops to Iraq. But anyway, the flat's empty now. The only thing is, I don't have a key. Paul's got it.”

“Paul?”

“Yes—Mark gave him the key, in case there was an emergency, or something. I don't think he ever goes there. Do you want me to call him about it?”

“That would be great . . . when you've . . . got a minute.”

“I'll do it right now.”

Susan made for the kitchen, and after a few more strokes with the saw, Benjamin decided to down tools and join her. He was ready for a break, even though he had only sawn through about half of the trunk. The girls stayed behind, laying their Christmas decorations carefully out on the carpet in readiness for the great moment when they could start hanging them on the tree.

“He's not answering,” said Susan, putting the receiver down with a sigh. “God knows why I thought that he would, actually. I can only ever get through to him about one time in ten.”

(Paul heard the mobile ring, in fact, but didn't answer it. As it happened, he was in Mark's flat at the time, his fingers working neatly to unbutton Malvina's blouse.)

Susan looked at Benjamin and her face was suddenly twisted with pain. “I've become a single mother, Ben. How did that happen?”

“It's not that bad, is it? Is that how it really feels?”

(Paul lay back on Mark's bed and Malvina kneeled over him. She undid the last of the buttons herself and slid the blouse from her shoulders.)

“It's worse than that, in a way. If I was a single mother at least I could be looking for somebody else—terrifying though that would be. But I'm stuck in this no man's land at the moment.”

“Perhaps you should leave him,” Benjamin ventured; conscious, as he said it, that it was not his place to be making this suggestion.

“I don't
want
to leave him,” said Susan. “I don't want to be out there again. I don't want the girls to lose their father when they're still so young. And I did choose to marry your brother, after all. Because I loved him—for some stupid, unfathomable reason. In fact I still do.”

She sniffed and blew her nose, turning away so that Benjamin would not see the tears in her eyes, as Paul, one hundred miles away, reached up to touch Malvina's shallow, naked breasts, and caressed her nipples until they were hard and standing.

“He's not seeing anyone else again, is he?” Benjamin asked.

“How would I know? I don't think so. He's been quite attentive, the last few weeks, by his standards. I sort of . . . dread it happening, and yet another part of me wants it. It would force the issue, I suppose. It would set me free, in a way.” She blew her nose again. “But I don't know if I
want
to be set free. What would come after that?”

Antonia appeared in the kitchen doorway.

“Come on, you two,” she said. “We're all ready to start decorating now.”

She took Benjamin's hand entreatingly and led him back to the Christmas tree, while Malvina pulled off Paul's shirt and started to unbuckle the belt on his trousers.

Benjamin found the rest of the trunk easier to saw through, and within a few minutes the tree was raised into place. Next came the difficult process of threading the string of fairy lights around the branches. Ruth had already trodden on one of them by mistake, and cracked the bulb.

Malvina helped Paul to wriggle out of his trousers and tossed them aside, then pulled down his boxer shorts in a greedy movement. Now naked except for her panties, she lowered herself towards him and let the rough lace come into contact with his straining, impatient penis, rotating her hips, resting herself against him heavily.

“What do you think should go on first, love?” Susan said to Antonia, ruffling her hair. “Father Christmas?”

“No, let's do the baubles first.” She took a silver one and a golden one, and hung them from two of the branches, frowning with concentration, her tongue peeping out from between her lips. As she did so her father groaned with pleasure at the first touch of Malvina's mouth on his penis, her tongue running wetly along the shaft.

“What about you, Ruthie? Are you going to put something on?” Ruth looked doubtful, so Benjamin passed her a little angel, its glittering wings slightly askew, and she did her best to balance it on one of the branches. She jumped back in shock when her finger was pricked by the pine needles.