‘No, it’s just a little house.’
‘Just right for one, is it? Or is there room for someone else?’
‘Hugh, I didn’t realize how late it was getting,’ said Emma, looking at her watch. ‘It’s been a lovely meal, it really has. It’s going to take me a while to get home, with the roads and everything. Can I see the story now?’
He got up and pointed to his bedside table.
‘There it is,’ he said. ‘I’ll make a start on the washing-up while you’re reading it.’
He left the room. Emma carried her cup of coffee over to the bed and sat down. She held the notebook against her open palm for a while. Then she turned the pages carefully and began to read as fast as the untidy handwriting would allow.
After about fifteen minutes Hugh returned and sat on the bed beside her. Emma seemed to have finished reading: she was staring thoughtfully at the last page.
‘Well, are you any the wiser?’ he asked, leaning back against the wall.
‘Yes,’ said Emma, ‘I think so. These things were obviously on his mind. That moment, when Lawrence says that killing yourself is a good idea, because it shows that you have control over your own life… Isn’t that relevant to what Robin did?’
Hugh shook his head.
‘He was just playing around. This is the least relevant of the stories to anything that Robin really thought. He’d lost interest by then. If he’d meant it to be serious he would have written it completely differently: which is more or less what he says there.’
He turned a page and pointed to some lines scribbled in pencil.
THIS STORY IS ALL WRONG, Robin had written.
Get rid of Humpage. Find a different device.
Humour inappropriate.
Keep basic plot but scrap last two paras and make whole story hinge on final conversation between Lawrence and Harold.
They discuss the merits of suicide in detail and at length. Lawrence begins by quoting Simone Weil, as an illustration of their different approaches to life:
‘Two ways of killing ourselves: suicide or detachment.’
‘Who’s that?’ said Emma, indicating the unfamiliar name.
Hugh edged closer and peered at the handwriting.
‘Some French woman,’ he said. ‘Let’s have some more wine.’
‘I’m driving,’ said Emma, too late to stop him filling her glass.
‘You don’t have to.’
She did not notice that he had said this. The rest of Robin’s notes appeared to have been added much later; they were in biro, and the writing was larger but even more difficult to decipher.
Further quotations from SW. (Is this what has happened?) ‘For those whose “I” is dead we can do nothing, absolutely nothing. We never know, however, whether in a particular person the “I” is quite dead or only inanimate. If it is not quite dead, love can reanimate it as though by an injection, but it must be love which is utterly pure without the slightest trace of condescension, for the least shade of contempt drives towards death.’
‘Emma,’ said Hugh. ‘Emma, look at me.’
‘When the “I” is wounded from outside it starts by revolting in the most extreme and bitter manner like an animal at bay. But as soon as the “I” is half dead, it wants to be finished off and allows itself to sink into unconsciousness. If it is then awakened by a touch of love, there is sharp pain which results in anger and sometimes hatred for whoever has provoked this pain. Hence the apparently
Here the writing ended. And as Emma was trying to understand these words, to think why Robin might have copied them down, she felt the touch of a hand on her shoulder. A hand was stroking her bare shoulder, inside her blouse. Then the weight of Hugh’s body was against her and the hand was sliding downwards, down towards her breast. She pushed him away and stumbled to her feet.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’ she asked, trying to quell the tremor in her voice.
Hugh didn’t answer. She looked at him sternly, saw the need and the loneliness grained on his face, and could not find it in her to be angry.
‘That’s not why I came here. You must know that.’
He stood up, but came no closer. ‘I’m sorry. It was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t think.’
Emma pondered these words for a little while, then sighed. There seemed nothing more to say.
‘I’d better go now.’ She took her jumper and coat from the bed; drifted towards the door.
‘No, Emma, please don’t go. Please stay. I’m sorry. I told you – I wasn’t thinking.’
She was already on the stairs now, but turned to reply, ‘Then start thinking, Hugh. A little New Year’s resolution, maybe – for both of us. Let’s both start thinking now.’
Her voice barely reached him as she opened and closed the front door. When she had gone, Hugh took brief, rueful stock of the remains of their meal strewn over the table, then sank onto the bed, dizzy; bewildered at Emma, at Robin, at himself; his head throbbing with wine.
∗
Sleep did not come easily to Emma that night, but when it came, it was deep and restful. She awoke to a brilliant midday light, flooding her bedroom, sheening the walls and the ceiling with a warm, clean white. She stretched slowly in the single bed, smothered in comfort; and the events of the previous night, when they began to resurface in her mind, seemed distant and unreal.
She had breakfast in the sunlit sitting room. The Sunday delivery had brought more cards, and it was not until she had finished with these and the memories they evoked that she found herself thinking of the words Robin had added to his last story. She could remember them only very indistinctly. She did not know what had happened to the notebook. She had meant to bring it away with her but presumably in her confusion she had left it with Hugh.
Emma was soon distracted from these thoughts by a commotion in the street outside her window. An engine was revving up loudly and persistently, spurred on by cries of encouragement from what sounded like a small crowd of people. She went to her front door and looked. Directly opposite her house, a van which had been parked on an incline overnight was stuck in the snow. The back wheels were spinning, and eight or nine people, including the neighbours from both sides, were trying to push it out.
‘Do you need a hand?’ she shouted, running over.
‘We’re nearly there, love,’ said the man who lived in the house opposite Emma’s, and whose son owned the van. ‘One more push and we’ve done it.’
Amid a clamour of voices, laughter, instructions, panting and struggle, with the engine roaring and the wheels sending up fountains of snow into their faces, they heaved at the van and cheered as it swayed into motion. They watched as it toiled up the hill, and finally made it to the crest.
‘Keep going, Ron!’
‘Keep your revs up, son!’
Then they all clapped and cheered again as the van disappeared from view, billowing exhaust fumes.
The neighbours remained in a ragged group, chatting, their breath steaming in the air, arms folded, shifting from foot to foot in the cold.
‘Everybody come inside,’ said Ron’s father. ‘Come inside and have a drink.’
His wife saw that Emma was hesitating, standing uncertain at the edge of the road while the others kicked the snow off their shoes and started to go into the house. She took her gently by the arm and smiled at her.
‘Come on, love,’ she said. ‘It’ll warm you up.’
Emma was still dazzled by the sudden cold, the sunlight reflected from the icy road and the back windows of the van, the surprising hilarity of the whole gathering. She had a vague recollection that she had been going to think about something important, before she had come outside.
‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thanks, that would be lovely.’
POSTSCRIPT
by Aparna
Wednesday 28th October, 1987
Sometimes, after long absence, you return to a place which has painful associations, and this can be an unpredictable experience
. You have certain expectations: that a particular street, or room, or café, once revisited, will inspire a particular feeling, and you are surprised when it fails to do so. And what is still more surprising is the sudden pang of memory provoked by scenes and locations which you would never have credited with such power to wound. It was like this when I returned to Coventry. All the places I had dreaded seeing again – my flat, the streets through which I had used to walk home from the bus, the university campus where most of my belongings were stored – they left me cold: I breezed in and out of them, level-headed and resolute. But then in the afternoon, having an hour or two to spare, we drove over to another part of town, where Robin had lived. It was a more upmarket district altogether, and in these neatly kept terraces and comfortable family houses, the rather sad diffidence with which they took their place in the world, I found echoes of Robin’s melancholy presence. It was a cold and sunny autumn day, a day of sharp outlines, and those streets seemed very real again: I had been beginning to hope that I had imagined them. We parked the car and I took Josef to see the front door of Robin’s flat. It had been re-let; the new tenant came to the window and stared warily at us. There was very little I could say. I had told Josef the story already and he knew something of what I was thinking and he didn’t try to break in upon my silences.
Several months after Robin died a Spanish student who had once been friendly with me at the university wrote me a letter inviting me to her wedding. I accepted the invitation and travelled to Spain, knowing that I would never come back to complete my studies. Borrowing money from my parents I then spent nearly ten weeks visiting Spain, France and Germany, which was where I met Josef. He was a good friend to me, bringing me much happiness, such happiness as I had never expected or even thought possible, after all I had been through, all I had seen. It surprises me that I do not think of him more often now. That day was our last day together, and it filled my head full of Robin, so that I had nothing to spare even for the pain of parting; but for this I think we were both grateful, in the end.
I have not made up my mind about Robin. I still don’t know whether I could have helped him. I tried to show him kindness, although I realize now that I showed him too little, too late in the day. We should have spent less time talking and less time arguing and less time thinking about our books and more time thinking about each other. Perhaps we should have shared the same bed, and comforted each other in the night. But he was bad at choosing friends and should probably not have chosen me. As his friend I should have told him that nature never designed him for a separatist, that he would never have been made welcome by the people he admired, that the road he was travelling was merely the road to a lonely exile. Or somebody else should have told him this. One of his other friends.
Just as day was fading into twilight, we returned to the car and began the last stage of our journey together. As we drove out of Coventry I said my quiet farewells to this city which has been twice devastated, once by the bombs of a foreign army, once by the impact of a recession which was orchestrated by politicians, and which has bitten in the last few years, really bitten, spreading inertia and indifference, eating away at the work and the livelihood of the, people. Yet these people remain cheerful and humorous; they look on the dark side of life but are no more complaining than any of their countrymen. I got the impression, when I was living there, that nobody was thinking very hard. And as I left, I wanted to wind down the window of Josef’s car, and shout at the top of my voice: You should think, think, think about what is happening all around you. Think until your heads hurt with the effort and the worry of it. Thinking is not always dangerous, you know. It killed Robin but it will not kill you.
I didn’t shout, anyway. It was a cold afternoon and we kept the window of the car closed. It was cold on the plane, too, as it came in to land; when I first saw the lights of my city, a chill began to shake my whole body, and when I thought of the faces of my father and mother, it was with a mixture of longing and fear. I had not forgotten that home can be the strangest place of all.
Jonathan Coe, A Touch of Love
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