The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe Read Free Book Online Page B

talking—
regrettably, my much-loved sister—about you. You have been my silent companion
all these years and somehow throughout that time I have clung to the fantasy that
my words might somehow be reaching you, and I feel now that the time has come
to let that fantasy go. Tomorrow I shall check out of this hotel and move on to
another town and tonight I shall reach the end of this letter, at last—this long,
long letter that I will never send because I have no one real to send it to—and
when that’s done I shall close the Venetian notebook in which I’ve written it and
put it away somewhere safe. Maybe someone else will read it one day. I so wish it
could have been you. But that’s the very wish, I see tonight, that’s been holding me
back. My wish that you could hear me. My wish that you could read me. My wish
that you were still alive.
    I have to start again. Back to the beginning. Which means that I must start
by doing the hardest thing of all—the thing I’ve been resisting all this time—and
give up hope.
    Can I give it up?

I think so. Yes, I can.

Yes. There. It’s done.

And for that, dear Miriam, please forgive

Your loving sister,
    Claire.

PALE PEOPLE

28
    Pale people were filling the streets of London on the last night of the twentieth century. In tightly packed crowds, they pushed and pressed their way down towards the river Thames, to stare in wonder at the new London Eye, and to wait for the astonishing firework display—the so-called “River of Fire”—that the authorities had promised them. It looked dangerous, so many people crammed on to Whitehall and the Embankment at the same time. There had been doom-mongers prophesying for weeks that casualties were inevitable, that the gathering of such large crowds was bound to lead to human tragedy. These same people had, for even longer, been predicting that on the stroke of midnight the world’s computer systems would collapse.
    â€œI’m glad I’m here,” said Sheila Trotter, “and not there. I wouldn’t be there for the world.”
    Benjamin looked up from his work and glanced at his mother, unobserved. Even in her late sixties, she continued to surprise him. She would prefer
this,
would she, this lifelessness, this deathly quietude, to the party atmosphere of central London tonight? The four of them, sitting in the old living room in Rubery, the house his parents had lived in for the last forty-five years, with not a word to say to each other? Six of them, he supposed, if you counted his sister-in-law Susan, upstairs putting little Antonia to bed: but she was hardly adding to the celebratory mood, anyway. Susan was a conflux of resentments tonight—furious that her husband, Benjamin’s younger brother Paul, was not with them. The fact that there was a chance of glimpsing him on television in a few minutes’ time only seemed to fuel her rage.
    Emily, Benjamin’s wife, was offering to pour his mother another half-glass of Cava. “Go on, Sheila love,” she was saying, “it’s not every day you get the start of a new millennium, is it?”
    Benjamin seethed inwardly at the idiocy of this comment, and reached for the pile of CD cases stacked up before him on the dining table. He took out another CD and slotted it into the external CD-writer he had bought a few days ago. He was making back-up files of everything on his computer, and it was a time-consuming business. Most of the music files, for instance (an accumulation of at least fifteen years’ composing, sequencing and recording) took up more than ten megabytes, and there were almost a hundred and fifty of them.
    â€œDo you
have
to work, Ben?” his father was saying. “I can’t believe you can’t take a few hours off, tonight of all nights.”
    â€œGive up, Colin,” Emily said, resignedly. “He’s just doing it to prove a point. He doesn’t want to