The Rotters' Club Read online

  But tonight’s recording proceeded smoothly, for the most part. Seascape No. 4 was a bittersweet composition lasting about four minutes, song-like in form, with the guitar playing an erratic, plangent melody over a gentle backwash of minor chords ebbing and flowing on the piano. After the verse-chorus structure had run its course, everything dissolved into a wash of lazy, wistful improvisation. Benjamin always regretted that these pieces never turned out to be quite as avant-garde as he would have liked; but he still believed that they were, in their way, original. Behind them lay a strange compound of influences absorbed from modern classical composers and the English experimental pop groups into whose busy, eccentric soundworld Malcolm had once fatefully guided him; but out of these influences Benjamin was starting to fashion something entirely his own. So much his own, in fact, that he knew he would never share these recordings with anyone—not even Philip, his closest friend—which meant that it scarcely mattered if, as this evening, he played a handful of bum notes, lost time on three separate occasions, and was interrupted towards the end of his chosen take by the sound of Acorn, his grandparents’ cat, miaowing outside the French window. The miaow was clearly audible when he played the tape back, but Benjamin didn’t mind. The composition was fixed, now, sculpted in time, in a version which at least approximated to his first intentions. He would listen to it, grow tired of it, and move on. These pieces, he already realized, were merely stepping stones at the start of a journey towards something—some grand artefact, either musical, or literary, or filmic, or perhaps a combination of all three— towards which he knew he was advancing, slowly but with a steady, inexorable tread. Something which would enshrine his feelings for Cicely, and which she would perhaps hear, or read, or see in ten or twenty years’ time, and suddenly realize, on her pulse, that it was created for her, intended for her, an that of all the boys who had swarmed around her like so many drones at school, Benjamin had been, without her having the wit to notice it, by far the purest in heart, by far the most gifted and giving. On that day the awareness of all she had missed, all she had lost, would finally break upon her in an instant, and she would weep; weep for her foolishness, and for the love that might have been between them.

  Of course, Benjamin could always just have spoken to her, gone up to her in the bus queue and asked her for a date. But this seemed to him, on the whole, the more satisfactory approach.

  His grandparents knew nothing of the fierce, undisclosed passion that was burning in Benjamin’s young heart as the three of them tucked into their shepherd’s pie that evening. As usual, his grandfather was in a facetious mood and every request for the salt cellar or the bread and butter was accompanied by atrocious wordplay, which Benjamin parried and returned as best he could. He relished the atmosphere of these simple, animated meals. His parents’ house seemed so cold by comparison. At home Benjamin hated the fact that he would have to sit opposite Paul and watch him sneering at the food, picking fastidiously over his mother’s latest well-intentioned offering. He hated the fact that his father would still be preoccupied, hours after the event, with the memory of some humiliating encounter at work. And he hated the fact that Lois wasn’t there any more. That was the worst of it. He hated that more than anything at all.

  3

  “Large feline.” Five letters, beginning with T, ending with R.

  Now come on, Philip’s father said to himself, you must know the answer to this one. A feline was a cat, he knew that for sure. A kind of cat, five letters, beginning with T? What about tabby?

  He would just double-check on the meaning of “feline.”

  “Pass me the dictionary, will you, love?”

  Barbara handed him their Reader’s Digest dictionary, without looking up, and went on reading her magazine. Or rather, she went on reading the letter she had concealed within the pages of her magazine.

  The night wind rattled against the windowpanes Sam had failed, for the third year running, to have fitted with double glazing. The television muttered its way through a regional documentary, unwatched, unnoticed, the volume turned down almost to nothing.

  “The first time I saw you, at the parent—teachers meeting, I felt as Giornado must have done, when he first glimpsed the Meninas of Velázquez. I experienced the electric thrill of which Herbert Howells writes so movingly, describing his first encounter with the Tallis Fantasia of Vaughan Williams. I knew that I was in the presence of greatness; not merely the presence of a perfect human being (perfect physically and, I venture to imagine, perfect in spirit, flawless in quintessence), but of what might also be described, without too much recourse to fancy, as a perfect work of art: for you, Barbara, are the masterpiece for which I have been looking all my life, my very own opus magnus . . .”

  feline—adj. 1 of the cat family. 2 catlike.—n. animal of the cat family. felinity n. [Latin feles cat]

  He knew all along that this was what it meant. So it had to be tabby, didn’t it? Were tabbies large? Well, Mrs. Freeman’s tabby next door was bloody enormous. Two weeks ago it had seen off a fox. So the “R” must be wrong.

  The “R” came from “Rotten.” What was the clue? “Putrid.” Six letters, fifth one “E.” He was about to look up “putrid” again when Barbara held out her hand absently and said, “Pass me the dictionary, will you, love?”

  He sighed and handed it over.

  Barbara thumbed through the pages, rapidly but with a furtive air that Sam, absorbed in his crossword puzzle, failed to notice.

  quintessence n. 1 (usu. foll. by of ) purest and most perfect form, manifestation or embodiment of a quality etc. 2 highly refined extract.

  Highly refined!

  quintessential adj. quintessentially adv. [Latin quinta essentia fifth substance (underlying the four elements)]

  He thought that she was “highly refined.” That settled it, then. Mr. Plumb—Miles, as she must learn to call him— was, in the old-fashioned sense, making love to her. She was being pursued. She had—the word came to her suddenly, unheralded, with a bewitching sense of rightness—an admirer. Her cheeks began to tingle. They burned, and she knew that she was blushing deep scarlet. Ashamed, deeply, delightfully ashamed, she slipped the letter away between the pages of Woman and forced herself to concentrate on the magazine. She mustn’t read any more. It was all wrong, horribly wrong, the whole business.

  “PRESSURE COOKERS—Some of you love them, some of you hate them.”

  “YOUR STARS CAN HELP YOU SLIM. Are you Pisces—The Indulger? Aries—The Gourmet? Gemini—The Nibbler?”

  “Cancer—The Solace Seeker: Food makes you feel good and that’s half your trouble. When the bluebird of happiness eludes you, you shrink into your shell and eat yourself better.”

  Barbara reached for another chocolate biscuit as Sam said:

  “Pass me the dictionary, will you, love?”

  Putrid adj. 1 decomposed, rotten. 2 foul, noxious. 3 corrupt. 4 slang of poor quality; contemptible; very unpleasant. putridity n. [Latin putreo rot (v.)]

  Well, there it was: rotten. Just as he had thought. But if the large feline was a tabby, as it obviously was, then this word had to begin with a “Y” and rotten would have to go. So he was looking for a six-letter word beginning with “Y,” fifth letter “E” meaning putrid.

  Got it! “YUCKEY.”

  “O Barbara, my Barbara, my paragon, callipygic enchantress, apogee of all that is pulchritudinous in this misbegotten, maculate world, will the truculent forces of peripeteia ever vouchsafe us the sweet euphoria of sybaritic congress?”

  “Pass me the dictionary, will you, love?”

  Sam gave a more irritable sigh, this time, as he handed it over. “I don’t know why you need a bloody dictionary to read that magazine,” he said. “It’s not exactly Doctor Chicago, is it?”

  Barbara stuck out her tongue. “Shut up and do your crossword.”

  He wrote “Yuckey” carefully over the letters of “Rotten,” then paused to see what difference this had made. It meant that 11 across now be
gan with “C” rather than “T.” The clue was: “electrically powered passenger road vehicle running on rails.” It had four letters and ended with “M.”

  Damn and blast it, Sam thought to himself. I could have sworn that was tram. Now that “C” has gone and spoiled everything.

  Barbara had given up on trying to understand Miles’s last sentence and was reading the letters page of Woman instead.

  “The very aptly named leader of a local hiking club is a Mr. A. Mountain!” Joanna Prior from Clitheroe had written.

  “If a cassette tape breaks, don’t throw it away,” wrote Amelia Fairney, from South Shields. “The spools can be pulled out and the tape used as party streamers or for tying up presents.”

  Sarah Day from Newbury advised: “Don’t waste electricity drying smalls in the tumble dryer. Pop them in a salad spinner and twirl it until they’re dry.”

  “In order to go to night class recently,” another correspondent wrote, “I had to let my husband cook dinner for my two kids, 6 and 4. The next morning I asked them if they had enjoyed themselves, and their only complaint was that they didn’t like the ice lollies Dad had given them for pudding. When I checked in the freezer, I wasn’t surprised. They were frozen carrots!”

  After this letter, the editor had written: “Has YOUR husband ever done anything really daft? Write in and tell us about it!”

  I wouldn’t know where to begin, Barbara thought, as she looked across at Sam, frowning over the crossword, happily unaware that he was sucking on the inky end of his felt-tip pen.

  He admitted defeat on the electrically powered passenger road vehicle and turned his attention to the bottom left-hand corner.

  “Round open vessel, for washing hands and face.”

  Five letters, beginning with “B.” That was easy. “B-O-WE-L.”

  Twenty-three across had seven letters and ended with “A.”

  “Condition of perfect bliss,” he read.

  “I must see you again,” Miles Plumb had written. “It is my belief, Barbara, my homeostatic credo , that we are destined to be one. Only when we are together, coalescent, infibulate, will I attain that fugitive condition of nirvana which has been the sole desideratum of my infructuous, miscarried existence.”

  “Pass me the dictionary, will you, love?” Barbara asked.

  She looked up “nirvana.”

  nirvana n. (in Buddhism) condition of perfect bliss.

  Sam tossed the newspaper aside in frustration.

  “Giving up again?” Barbara asked, with just the hint of a taunt in her voice.

  “ ‘Quick and easy,’ it says,” Sam grumbled, his lips and tongue now blackened with ink. “ ‘Quick and easy crossword.’ I ask you! I mean, what’s a ‘condition of perfect bliss,’ when it’s at home?”

  “I’m sure I wouldn’t know,” said Barbara regretfully, and once again struggled to bury herself in the magazine.

  When they arrived on the top deck of the bus, Claire already had the front two seats to herself. Benjamin was the first to get there. He knew that Claire would like it if he sat next to her, but instead, he took the other seat, next to the window. Doug was the second. He knew that Claire would prefer it if he didn’t sit next to her, but he did it anyway. Philip was the last, and he sat next to Benjamin. He was looking upset, but Claire was the only one to notice. The others had seen nothing unusual in his recent behaviour. And so, after sitting in near-silence for ten minutes or more, she finally stirred herself to nudge Doug and remark:

  “He’s been awfully quiet, the last few days.”

  Doug replied: “He’s always quiet.”

  “No, but he’s been especially quiet.”

  Presumably to disprove his own theory about subtlety being the English disease, Doug leaned across the aisle and said: “Hey, Philip! Come on, what’s up? Claire thinks you’re pining for something.”

  “I didn’t say that,” Claire insisted. Then, to Philip: “You just seem a bit low, that’s all. I wondered if there was anything the matter.”

  It swiftly occurred to Benjamin, staring out of the side window and as always slightly disconnected from the conversation, not only that Claire was right, but that he alone knew the cause of Philip’s recent dejection. He was worried about the band. And, indeed, with good reason. Who wouldn’t be worried about the band? Two years in the assembling, many months in the naming (and even now Benjamin thought that they had chosen the wrong name), the band was supposed to have had its first rehearsal last week, but it had been cancelled: due to lack of material, of all things. Benjamin himself, although he was supposed to be the keyboard player, had decided not to provide any songs, claiming that his own writing wasn’t suited to the fivepiece format; and all that anybody knew about Philip’s contribution was that he had been engaged for some time on an improbably ambitious piece—either an epic song, or a series of songs, no one could be quite sure—which he was constantly withholding from the scrutiny of his fellow-musicians (Benjamin, Gidney, Stubbs and Procter). Last Friday was when it had been hoped, finally, that the great work might be unveiled. But Philip had bottled out at the last minute, saying that it still needed some fine-tuning. And of course this, Benjamin thought, must be why his friend had lately been so subdued: he would be feeling both embarrassment at letting down his colleagues, and the natural anxiety of the artist as his creation nears fulfilment.

  Benjamin was wrong. Philip was worried because his parents were not speaking to each other and his father had moved into the spare bedroom.

  There were many distressing aspects to this situation. His mother had received a love letter. That was distressing. His father had found it, concealed between the problem pages of the latest issue of Woman. That was distressing, on several counts. Why had his father been reading the problem pages of Woman in the first place? Clearly because, with their increasingly frank discussion of orgasms, erogenous zones and other recondite facets of female sexuality, they were the most titillating literature to be found anywhere in the Chase household. That, at any rate, was why Philip himself read them; but it was upsetting to find that his father, twenty-seven years his senior and supposedly much better versed in the ways of the world, still shared the same prurient curiosities, and could find no better outlet for them. Philip didn’t know what the letter had said. He had asked both of his parents, but his mother wouldn’t tell him, and his father, conversely, couldn’t tell him, because he had been unable to understand a word of it, despite enlisting the help of the Reader’s Digest dictionary. The gist of it, anyway, he told Philip, is that this bloke is after your mother. He wants her in bed with him. He might wrap it up in a lot of fancy words, but that’s what it boils down to. He wants to give her one.

  That, too, was distressing, but there was worse to come when Philip found out who the letter was from. It was from Miles Plumb.

  Mr. Plumb! Sugar Plum Fairy, the creepy art teacher! Philip was studying A-level art and he had to have lessons with Mr. Plumb four days a week. How could he look him in the eye, when he knew that he was mounting an assault on his parents’ marriage? Suddenly Harding’s legendary taunt at the Girls’ School Revue—“Homebreaker!”—didn’t seem so funny. Philip’s first instinct had been to go straight to the Chief Master and tell him exactly what his head of art was playing at. But his father, surprisingly, had warned him not to do this on any account. It’s between me and him, he had said. Neither you nor the school nor your mother is going to have anything to do with it. I’m going to sort out this little creep, and I’m going to do it my way. I don’t know how, but that’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to hit him where it hurts.

  And those were the last ominous words that had been spoken on the subject. Philip had no idea what his father might have meant.

  Needless to say, he could not mention any of this to his friends.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” he answered, in a tone of abject despair. And when they looked unconvinced, he was forced to improvise: “I’m just . . . worried about this Closed Cir
cle article, that’s all. I’m not sure we’re going down the right road.”

  Doug shook his head in disbelief. “We went over all that at the last meeting.”

  “I know we did. I’m still not convinced.”

  The Closed Circle was a select debating society, composed of no more than sixteen members at any one time, drawn mostly from the upper sixth and very occasionally from the year below. Nobody outside the society knew how often it met, or where, or what exactly went on at the meetings. Everything about it was cloaked in impenetrable (and somehow infantile) secrecy.

  “The Closed Circle is a nasty, divisive bit of elitist bollocks,” said Doug. “It’s like a bunch of schoolkids pretending to be the fucking masons. It’s high time somebody did a proper exposé of the whole thing and showed these guys up for the self-important wankers they are.”

  “Have you been asked to join?” a voice asked.

  Doug wheeled around to find that Paul, Benjamin’s unsavoury little brother, was sitting directly behind him.

  “What are you doing here?” Benjamin asked. Even after three-and-a-half terms, he had still not adjusted to the horror of realizing that Paul now attended the same school, and travelled home on the same bus. There was no end to the nightmare of his continued presence.

  “It’s a free country, isn’t it?” said Paul. “Besides, there aren’t any other seats.”

  This, unfortunately, was true.