Authors: Jonathan Coe

The Rotters' Club (50 page)

BOOK: The Rotters' Club

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Mirthless merriment, sickly sentiments
So commonplace, it would bore you to tears,
Give me non-stop laughter, dispel disaster
Or The Rotters’ Club might well lop off your ears

– and no wonder people were staring at us on the bus into town as if we were mad, everything we saw, every time we looked out of the window made us burst into laughter and it was the same when we came into The Grapevine and the first person we saw was Sam Chase, Philip’s father, I started laughing with gladness because I hadn’t seen him for years either, and I knew that he was happy now too because his wife has stopped having her affair with Sugar Plum Fairy, I don’t know how he put a stop to it but he did, Philip told me, and he was just sitting in the pub by himelf, reading a novel, it was
Ulysses,
actually, who would have thought it, and he seemed so pleased to see us, and he bought us drinks, and he watched us together and when Cicely went to make her phone call he said, That is the most beautiful girl I have ever seen in my life, and I said, I know she is, and that made me laugh, and when Cicely came back from making her phone call he said, You two are quite simply the two happiest people I have ever met, and that made us both laugh, and after Cicely had gone home to read her letter from Helen he said to me, Benjamin, he said, I’m not one for making predictions, and that already made me laugh, because we have all noticed, everybody who knows Sam has noticed that whenever he says he’s not one for making predictions, it always means that he’s about to make a prediction, and today he said Benjamin, I’m not one for making predictions, but this is a special day and today I’m going to make two, so I said, Oh yes?, and he said, Number One, and he held up his finger, Number One, you and Cicely will have a long and happy life together, and of course I laughed at that, because I know that it’s true, and then he held up another finger and said Number Two, and then he pointed at the newspaper someone had left on the next table, it was a copy of
The Sun,
with a big picture of Mrs Thatcher on the front page, Number Two, he said, that woman will never be Prime Minister of this country, and then we both roared with laughter and clinked our glasses and he said, Come on, son, I’ll buy you another, and it seemed to me then that not only does God exist but he must be a genius, a comic genius, to have made everything in the world so funny, everything from Sam and his crazy predictions right down to the dark beery circle my glass has just left on this green coaster.

On a clear, blueblack, starry night, in the city of Berlin, in the year 2003, the restaurant at the top of the Fernsehturm continued to revolve. Sophie, the only daughter of Lois and Christopher, and Patrick, the only son of Philip and Claire, gazed through their picture window at the Volkspark Friedrichshain, more than three hundred metres beneath them.

Neither of them spoke for a while. They sipped their Riesling and looked out of the window and thought about Benjamin.

Finally Sophie said:

– What a mess they’re making of that park. You can’t even see the fountain in the middle. Who wants to look at a pile of scaffolding?

– It’s like this whole city. One big building site. The same as London.

– I know. Why is the world so restless with itself, these days?

Then Sophie found herself looking around the restaurant at the other customers. There were a couple of men dining by themselves. One was taking out his glasses to study the menu, the other was tipping brown sugar into his coffee cup from a paper sachet. Their actions seemed banal: but how was anyone to know what storms, what torrents of ideas and memories and dreams were raging through their minds at that instant? She looked at their sad, preoccupied faces and thought again about her Uncle Benjamin, the rapturous joy he had known on that far-off day, and all that had happened since.

Patrick noticed the sudden shadow of melancholy in her eyes and said:

– Oh, come on, Sophie, don’t look that way. It was a beautiful story. It was full of nice things: friendships, jokes, good experiences, love. It wasn’t all doom and gloom.

– Yes. Yes, I know. It’s not that, really. It’s just that it was so long ago. They were all so young. And Benjamin and my mother went through so much.

– But look at her now. She’s doing fine. Things could hardly be better for her. And for us.

– I know. That’s all true.

– And it even has a happy ending.

– Except that it doesn’t feel like the ending, to me.

– But stories never end, do they? Not really. All you can do is choose a moment to end on. One out of many. And what a moment you found!

And Sophie nodded slowly, and said:

– Yes. He was lucky, wasn’t he, to have felt that way? Lucky Uncle Benjamin! To have known happiness like that, and to have held on to it, even for a moment.

– And lucky us, said Patrick. To be able to share in it, still, after all this time!

Then Sophie rallied, and saw that he was right, and after catching the eye of the wine waiter she turned back to Patrick and smiled her widest smile, full of hope and anticipation. And she said:

– All right, then: now it’s your turn.

Acknowledgements

The following books proved informative, helpful or inspiring in writing this novel: Chris Upton,
A History of Birmingham
(Phillimore, 1993); Chris Mullin,
Error of Judgment: The Truth about the Birmingham Pub Bombings
(Poolbeg Press, 1997); Peter L. Edmead,
The Divisive Decade: A History of Caribbean Immigration to Birmingham in the 19505
(Birmingham Library Services, 1999); Martin Walker,
The National Front
(Fontana, 1977); Mike Cronin (editor),
The Failure of British Fascism: The Far Right and the Fight for Political Recognition
(Macmillan, 1996); John Tyndall,
The Eleventh Hour: A Call for British Rebirth
(Albion Press, 1988); David Widgery,
Beating Time
(Chatto and Windus, 1986); Julie Burchill,
I Knew I Was Right
(Heinemann, 1998); Michael Edwardes,
Back from the Brink: An Apocalyptic Experience
(Collins, 1983); Jonathan Wood,
Wheels of Misfortune: The Rise and Fall of the British Motor Industry
(Sidgwick and Jackson, 1988); Bernie Passingham and Danny Connor,
Ford Shop Stewards on Industrial Democracy
(Institute for Workers’ Control, 1977); Jack Dromey and Graham Taylor,
Grumvick: The Workers’ Story
(Lawrence and Wishart, 1978); Michael Dummett (chairman),
The Death of Blair Peach: The Supplementary Report of the Unofficial Committee of Enquiry
(National Council for Civil Liberties, 1980); David Petrow,
The Bitter Years: The Invasion and Occupation of Denmark and Norway, April 1940-May 1945
(Hodder and Stoughton, 1975).

Section 1 of ‘The Chick and the Hairy Guy’ contains quotations from genuine lonely hearts advertisements in
Sounds
(1973). Section 3 of ‘The Very Maws of Doom’ contains quotations from the magazines
Woman
(1976) and
Take a Break
(1996). Section 18 contains quotations from
101 Ways to Improve Your Word Power,
by Hugh Enfield (The Dickens Press, 1967),
Word Power from the Reader’s Digest
(Reader’s Digest, 1967),
Twenty-five Magic Steps to Word Power,
by Dr Wilfred Funk (Fawcett Publications, 1959) and
Word Power: Talk your Way to Life Leadership,
by Vernon Howard (Prentice-Hall, 1958).

Extract from
Watership Down
by Richard Adams reproduced by permission of Penguin Books. Extract from ‘Burnt Norton’ by T. S. Eliot, from
Collected Poems 1909-1962
by T. S. Eliot reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of T. S. Eliot and Faber and Faber Ltd. Extract from ‘Sonnet for Zulfikar Ghose’ by B. S. Johnson, from
Poems
1 by B. S. Johnson, reproduced by kind permission of the Estate of B. S. Johnson, and Hutchinson.

‘I Get a Kick out of You’, words and music by Cole Porter copyright 1934 Harms Inc., USA, Warner/Chappell Music Ltd, London W6 8BS, lyrics reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd. ‘The Remembering’, words and music by Jon Anderson, Steve Howe, Chris Squire, Alan White and Rick Wakeman copyright © 1973 Topographic Music Inc., USA, Rondor Music (London) Ltd, W6 8JA, lyrics reproduced by permission of IMP Ltd. ‘Share It’, words and music by Richard Sinclair and Pip Pyle copyright © Williamson Music International, USA, reproduced by permission of EMI Virgin Music Ltd, London WC2H0QY.

The Rotters’ Club,
by Hatfield and the North, released in 1975, is available on Virgin Records (CDV2030). The section of this novel called ‘Green Coaster’ was inspired by the song of the same name by The High Llamas, from their album
Snowbug
(V2 Records, VVR1008972.).

Thanks for general help, advice and encouragement must also go to: Philippe Auclair, Daniel Coe, Janet and Roger Coe, Laura Gumming, Paul Daintry, Helena Dela, Charles Drazin, Artemis Gause-Stamboulopoulou, Simon Gidney, Tanja Graf, Andrew Hodgkiss, Tony Lacey, Barèt Magarian, Janine McKeown, Ivor Meredith, Tony Peake, Pernilla Pearce, Nicholas Pearson, Guy Perry, Ralph Pite, Pip Pyle, Nicholas Royle, Dave Stewart, Richard Temple and staff at the Modern Records Centre at Warwick University, Tony Trott, Adama Ulrich, Francis Wheen, Conrad Williams and Gaby Wood.

Special thanks to Carlo Feltrinclli and his family for their generous hospitality in Gargnano, Brescia Province, where a large part of
The Rotters’ Club
was written.