The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe

Author:Jonathan Coe
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307428264
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

9

18 July, 2001

Etretat

Dearest Andrew,

I promised you a postcard from Normandy. Well—lucky you, you are going to get rather more than that. I’m booked home on a ferry which doesn’t leave for another two days and quite frankly I have had enough of driving around the countryside looking at monasteries and cathedrals so I am just going to sit in the hotel until then, and try to think things through, and calm myself down. I’ve got a lot of stuff to sort out in my head, but don’t worry about me: I’m fine. Whatever else happens—and I know there’s going to be a lot of pain to get through in the next few days and weeks, a lot of “difficulty” as my beloved counsellor would call it—I’ve come to a decision and I’m going to stick to it.

And in case you’re wondering why the whole of that paragraph was written in the first person singular, the answer is easy: I’m here by myself. Benjamin has gone. He went yesterday. I think he’s gone to Paris, but I’m not sure about that and to be perfectly honest I couldn’t care less. He’s turned off his mobile and that suits me fine as well. I’m cross with myself for trying to ring it yesterday, in fact. What would we say to each other anyway? I have nothing to say to him at the moment. Absolutely nothing at all.

Our marriage is over.

Meanwhile—let me tell you a little bit about the holiday from hell.

Perhaps “hell” is putting it a bit strongly—as far as the first ten days were concerned, anyway. “Purgatory” probably gets it about right, though. Then again, the whole of the last year has been a kind of purgatory for me—longer than that, even. I suppose the pain has just been building up and intensifying to the point where it became unbearable. Unbearable for me, at any rate. Sometimes I wonder whether Benjamin ever feels any pain: real pain, I mean. No, that’s not true—he has felt it, in the past, I know he has, because of what he told me, years and years ago, when we were still at school, about the thing that happened to Lois and how he helped her to recover from it. I don’t doubt that he su fered over that, that he shared her su fering, very deeply. Every week, he used to visit her, I remember, without fail, and that must have marked him. So he can feel things deeply, he is just good at masking it: he has a lot of self-control, Benjamin—a very British quality, some people might say, and probably one of the things that drew me to him in the first place. (Benjamin thinks that our whole relationship is based on religion but it’s not, that’s just nonsense, it’s a convenient story he likes to tell to himself to explain why things have gone wrong.) But anyway, something has changed about Benjamin, since that day down by the canalside, when he told me the story of Lois and Malcolm.

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