The Closed Circle

  “Well,” said Sophie, beaming in triumph. “Here you are. Take a look at that.”

  She handed him the log-book, and pointed to an entry which began half way down one of the pages. And Benjamin reached for his reading glasses, and then gasped aloud when he saw the once-familiar handwriting; and began to read.

  5

  Claire had been seeing Michael Usborne for more than a year, and still she didn’t quite understand the nature of their relationship. But in the end, she decided that this didn’t matter; that it might even be one of the things she liked about it. Certainly, it bore no resemblance to any of her previous relationships. It was extremely sporadic; it was hardly passionate (although there had been a fair amount of decent sex); and neither of the parties involved seemed to have any idea where it was heading, or indeed any interest in deciding such a thing. She knew that he saw other women (younger ones), she knew that he had sex with them, she even suspected that he paid for this service occasionally. So what? If she had been in love with him, it would have bothered her: but she wasn’t, so it didn’t. She also knew that he didn’t regard her as wife material (not quite young enough, not quite pretty enough, not quite posh enough, not quite skinny enough): but he was on the look-out for a wife, and when she materialized, Claire’s own period of tenure would presumably be over. That was a slightly more dampening thought. She would miss him. A little. At first. But then, she could hardly describe herself as being in too deep: this wasn’t a Stefano situation, or anything like it. She liked seeing Michael, on those (rare) occasions when he was not out of the country, not down in London, not working late, not tied up for the weekend. She liked being taken out by him, she liked using his gym and his swimming pool, she liked sharing his bed. She enjoyed teasing him and arguing with him about politics and playing up to the stereotype of the left-leaning, Guardian-reading feminist, which was how he had chosen to classify her. (And which seemed to make him think that by spending any time with her at all he was doing something very daring and unconventional and amusing.) There were, in other words, a good many perks attached to the job of being Michael Usborne’s temporary girlfriend—if that’s what she was—and best of all, he made it possible for her to enjoy them without feeling cheap, without feeling that she was being used, without feeling that she was selling her soul. That at least, she thought, reflected well upon him, and for that at least she would always be grateful.

  So where had this new feeling of dissatisfaction recently sprung from? She was aware of it even now, sitting in what should by all accounts have been very agreeable surroundings—the BA executive lounge at Heathrow Airport—watching Michael searching through the papers in his attaché case (open on the seat next to him) while conducting a conversation on the mobile phone clamped between his shoulder and his ear. A few weeks ago, this scene would have inspired affectionate amusement, nothing more: crazy Michael, she would have thought, always on the go, always driven, never able to sit still for a moment while there was money to be made. And yet this morning, his behaviour simply annoyed her. Was it because this was supposed to be the beginning of a holiday—their first holiday together—and so far he had shown not the slightest interest in relaxing? Was it because Patrick was there, too, and it was the first time they had met and Michael had not managed to address more than three words to him since being introduced? Or did it (as she suspected, in her heart) actually go deeper than that?

  The basic problem was this. It was almost three years, now, since she had walked out on Stefano in Lucca; almost three years since she had stood on the chalk cliffs above Etretat and looked across the grey waters of the English Channel towards the country to which she had reluctantly decided to turn her defeated footsteps. She had convinced herself, that day, that it was better to be alone than to be unhappy in love; but now, three years on, that conviction was fading. Her relationship with Michael had been fun for a while. It had been a novelty, at the very least, and a way of easing herself gently back into the practice (so easily forgotten) of being intimate with another person. But she was forty-two, and she could not afford to waste much more time on someone whose interest in her seemed to be so casual. She wanted something else, now, something that was not superficial, and not part-time: she wanted a partner. Banal as it might seem, she wanted someone who would go to the supermarket with her, help her choose salad dressing, decide between different brands of washing powder and shampoo. (How jealous her glances had become, these days, when she spotted couples having precisely those bland conversations in the aisles of Tesco and Safeway.) Did Michael ever go to the supermarket, she wondered? Had he ever set foot in one, in the last twenty years? She had noticed, whenever she was round at his house near Ledbury, that his fridge (which was about the size of her own spare bedroom) was always filled with fresh vegetables, organic red meat, freshly squeezed orange juice, bottles of champagne. Where did it all come from? Since his most recent divorce—perhaps even before it—he’d employed at least two housekeepers, and presumably it fell to one of them to ensure that stocks never ran low. She could not imagine sharing her life with someone who lived like that. Real though it obviously felt to him, she could not stop herself from regarding his entire mode of being as a kind of preposterous fantasy. This holiday, for instance: a week in Grand Cayman, first-class travel there and back, and a beachfront villa—owned, apparently, by a business associate from America—at their disposal for a whole week, complete with gardener, housekeeper, chauffeur and cook. People just didn’t live this way. It was unreal. But he refused to see it like that. Took it all in his stride, insisted it was nothing special. Extended the invitation to Patrick without even thinking about it. (The place slept fifteen, after all.) Even said that he could bring his girlfriend: Rowena, his girlfriend of six weeks’ standing, who now sat reading Vanity Fair and drinking chilled white wine in the executive lounge and looked as though she couldn’t believe her luck.

  Claire sighed as the weight of all this pressed down upon her. The incompatibility between them—their absurdly polarized lifestyles and value systems—struck her that morning with dizzying clarity. Could he not see it as well? Did it not bother him, or was he just choosing to ignore it? Maybe they would get a chance to talk about these things on holiday. But the holiday had already started; and the omens, so far, didn’t appear to be good.

  “What about just pointing out that this is the fastest-growing area of our business and the one that offers the most sustainable margins?” Michael was saying, into his mobile. If there was any urgency or irritation in his voice, it was hard to detect. He always seemed to speak in the same way— gentle, mellifluous, persuasive—whether he was ordering food in a restaurant or (as now, it appeared) giving a dressing-down to a subordinate.

  “Well, those are exceptional charges. No one is trying to hide the fact that there will be exceptional charges . . .”

  Patrick stood up and wandered over to a coffee-dispensing machine. Claire’s eyes followed him.

  “ ‘Synergies’ is a good word, yes. I don’t have a problem with that. As long as we make it crystal clear that this is not about cost-savings, it’s about growth.” He sighed. “I mean, is Martin really on the ball with this one? Because it feels to me that I’m writing the thing myself.”

  Claire joined Patrick by the coffee machine and gave him an empty cup to fill.

  “You don’t have to serve yourself here, you know,” she pointed out. “That waitress over there would have brought us a refill.”

  “This is quicker,” he said, shortly.

  Claire tried to keep the nervous edge out of her voice as she asked: “What’s your impression of Michael, then?”

  Patrick thought for a moment. “He’s everything that I expected him to be.”

  “What does that mean?”

  Handing her the coffee, he said: “How well do you know this guy, Mum? This is the last kind of person I would have thought you’d have any time for.”

  She took a sip. It was scalding hot. “You’re not seei
ng him at his best. He’s very preoccupied.” As they walked back towards their seats, she added, “You’ve got to learn to see beyond the surface of people, Patrick. It’s not about what people do. It’s about their human qualities.”

  Patrick didn’t answer; and even to her, it sounded as though she was trying to convince herself of something that was hard to believe.

  Patrick sat down next to Rowena and refilled her wine glass. She had finished with Vanity Fair by now and had moved on to Condé Nast Traveller. He leaned across and looked at the feature she was reading, illustrated with a full-colour photograph of some idyllically pastoral French scene, with what seemed to be a large château at the center.

  “That looks cool,” he said. “Who lives there?”

  “It’s a monastery,” she answered. “Somewhere in Normandy. You can stay in places like that, you know. The monks will take anybody in. It’s part of their philosophy—providing hospitality to anyone who needs it.”

  “Bloody hell, so now they’re touting spiritual retreats as holiday options for the stressed executive, are they? Capitalism really has conquered everything.”

  “I don’t see any reason why we have to put a figure on it,” Michael was now saying. “I’ve seen different estimates and it could be anything between nine and twenty-four. Alan’s guess is nearer twenty-four and that’s the one I’d be inclined to go with.”

  “Our flight’s being called,” Patrick said, looking up at the departures screen.

  “We can’t rely on an upturn in market conditions. Everybody knows that. Put it down to ‘global uncertainty.’ That’s the buzz word at the moment.”

  “I can’t believe we’re flying first class,” said Rowena, slipping the magazine into her bag. “It’s so exciting.”

  “Are we going, then?” Patrick asked, standing up. He started collecting some of the free newspapers from a nearby table, hoovering up the Times, Independent and Guardian. Claire noticed that one of the pictures above the masthead on the Guardian today showed a familiar face. The tagline next to it said: “Paul Trotter—My grave doubts over war with Iraq.”

  “It doesn’t sound to me like anyone’s on top of this situation,” Michael continued. Claire was trying to catch his eye. He glanced at her and held up a finger, telling her to wait for a minute. “We’re trying to restore profitability—is that such a difficult message to get across?” Now, at last, there was an audible undertone of irritation.

  “You go on ahead,” Claire said to her son. “We’ll meet you at the gate.” She walked with them to the door of the executive lounge, and before seeing them off she assured Patrick: “Don’t worry—he won’t be like this all through the holiday.”

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Because I’m going to tell him not to be.”

  Patrick smiled when he heard that, pleased to see that his mother was feeling combative again. That was the best part of her, he sometimes thought: the part that had not been much in evidence for the last few years, since her return to Britain.

  “She means it, as well,” he said to Rowena, as they walked down the corridor together. “She’s going to give him one of her bollockings.”

  “What does Michael do, anyway?” Rowena asked. “I couldn’t understand a word he was saying on the phone.”

  “I’m not sure what kind of company he’s running at the moment. They’re called Meniscus. Something to do with plastics, I think.” Patrick searched his pockets, suddenly anxious, until his fingers lighted upon his passport. “Sounded like they were trying to draft a press release, didn’t it? I heard him saying something about consolidation and rationalizing. That’s management-speak for closing down factories and putting people on the dole. I expect they’re trying to find a gentle way of breaking it to the papers.”

  While Michael continued his latest telephone call, accompanied by ever more impatient searches through the papers in his attaché case, and occasional calculations tapped out briskly on his palmtop, Claire kept one eye on the departures screen (which showed that the last call for their flight had come up five minutes ago) and rehearsed what she was going to say to him.

  This is ludicrous, she would begin. How are we ever going to get to know each other, how are we ever going to relate to each other in a meaningful way, if you can’t even put your work aside on holiday, if you can’t even make the time to spend a few minutes talking to my son when you first meet him? And she would attempt to extract, as a condition of their continuing to see each other when this week was over, some sort of undertaking: that he would not spend this holiday on the telephone, that he would not hide himself away in some study for the next seven days, sending faxes and tinkering with balance sheets, while the rest of them were out scuba diving. She would present him with an ultimatum, confident that this was the sort of language he would understand. And confident, too—though she didn’t know where this confidence came from, apart from her own instincts, which were usually sound—that he would not be angered or frightened off by this approach. There was a core of genuine feeling between them which he appreciated, even if it was at some deep level that he wasn’t used to recognizing. She was sure of that.

  “So how did it go?” Patrick asked a few minutes later, when she arrived at the check-in desk.

  Claire was alone.

  “I didn’t get the chance to say anything,” she said. “He’s gone back to the office. Said that the next few days were make or break and he couldn’t trust anybody else to look after it. He’s going to join us on Tuesday.”

  “Promises, promises,” said Patrick. “Anyway, Rowena and I will be gone by then.” (They were not coming for the whole week, just the first three days.) He put his arm around Claire, and said: “Never mind, Mum.”

  She returned the hug, and smiled an effortful smile. “Ah well, c’est la vie. Let’s just get out there and enjoy ourselves, yeah? Get some of that Caribbean sunshine on our faces.”

  4

  Having decided that what he wanted to write was not an article, but a whole book about the British far right and their rise in popularity during Blair’s second term, Philip spent almost fifteen months collecting material. Then, one morning in September, 2002, he sat down to start work on the first chapter, and three days later—having written 243 words and played 168 games of Freecell on his computer—he resigned himself to a dismal fact: he was never going to do it. For two decades he had produced nothing longer than 2,000 words; had never bothered with any argument so complicated that it couldn’t be pitched to the features editor in a few seconds. “About Town with Philip Chase” might have become a tired old formula from which he was desperate to break free, but it was also—unfortunately—all he was capable of. A man must work within his limits, he concluded.

  After abandoning this project, he did not look at the notes he had amassed towards it for almost two months: not until he received a letter from Benjamin, in the second week of November. That was what prompted him to boot up his computer at work one morning, and reopen the folder labelled BNP Book.

  What chaos he found there! How had he ever hoped to fashion something coherent out of this random selection of press cuttings, photographs and taped interviews? There were three sub-folders, labelled Neoliberalism, Fundamentalism and Nationalism. These, he seemed to remember, had been the three strands he was trying to weave together in the course of his treatise. He had been hoping to argue that they could all be traced back to the same source: that the proponents of each system were driven by the essentially primitive impulse to inhabit a self-contained world, insulated from anyone with whose beliefs or way of life they felt uncomfortable.

  The neoliberals [he had written] are seekers after purity just as much as the fundamentalists or the neo-Nazis. The only difference is that they are not setting out to create a nation state based on religious or genetic principles. The state they are building (which is rising up all around us, even as I write) is supra-national: global travel being one of its defining characteristics. Its geogra
phical features are exclusive hotels, exclusive resorts, gated communities of wildly expensive houses. Its inhabitants will not travel by public transport, and will only use private hospitals. The impulse which drives these people is fear of contact with, and contamination from, the great mass of humanity. They wish to live among them (or rather, they have no choice in the matter) but use their money to put up as many screens as possible, as many boundaries as possible, in order that they need only come into meaningful contact with people of their own economic and cultural type. The way that New Labour has got into bed with these people—domestically, through things like the Private Finance Initiatives—and in foreign policy, through their support of Bush and the neo-cons in America—shows that it basically supports them in their elitist and divisive objectives. Small-scale, social democratic initiatives in health and education are a smoke-screen, a sort of lip-service paid to old style Leftism, in order to camouflage the real nature of the New Labour project.

  After this, he had added a note to himself: Ask Claire why her boyfriend was having dinner with Paul Trotter!!

  Philip sighed as he looked over this material again. That last paragraph was all well and good, he thought, but it was meant to be the conclusion of the book, and he could never remember quite how he was supposed to arrive at it. What was the path he had hoped to trace, leading from those terrible letters Steve had been sent, to this damning indictment of current mainstream politics? It was to do with the nature of modern fascism, the way the nationalist movement in Britain had splintered, and now based itself not just upon old-fashioned race hatred but a far more tangled, far more slippery matrix of beliefs. The way that the battle-lines, which had seemed so stark and simple back in the 1970s, were now almost impossible to define with any clarity. Among the new British fascists, for instance, he had found that there were a number of thinkers (using the term in a fairly loose sense) who no longer advocated violence against the black or Asian population, and no longer talked about forced repatriation or tighter immigration controls, but who argued, instead, that white racists should form themselves into small, close-knit, rural communities, become self-sufficient, develop a quasi-mystical relationship with nature and “the land,” and generally have nothing to do with a decadent, urbanized, multicultural modern society. None of which, admittedly, was likely to appeal much to the young skinheads who still made up a large part of the movement, whose milieu was the inner city and whose liking for violence and hooliganism was queasily romanticized by these theoreticians as a modern version of the “warrior” spirit inherent among the Aryan people. It did, however, mean that strange, uncomfortable affinities were beginning to emerge between elements of neo-Nazi thinking and aspects of the Green movement.