The Closed Circle Read Free Page B

how can you be doing this to your wife of sixteen
years?
    In my old bedroom

St. Laurence Road

Northfield

Saturday, 11th December, 1999

Night time
    This trip just gets worse and worse. It happened more than three hours ago,
and I’m still shaking all over. Dad is sitting downstairs, reading one of his terrible
old Alastair Maclean novels. He wasn’t remotely sympathetic. Seemed to think the
whole thing was my fault anyway. I don’t think I can stay in this house any longer.
I shall have to leave tomorrow, find somewhere else to stay for a while.
    I’ll tell you what happened, briefly. I was longing to see Pat again today, and
he was supposed to be playing football for the school in the morning. It was an
away game, against a team in Malvern. So I said I’d pick him up from Philip and
Carol’s house, and drive him over there myself. Much against his better judgment,
Dad let me borrow his car.
    We went south along the Bristol Road and then took a right turn when we got
to Longbridge, through Rubery and along towards the M5. It was pretty weird,
being alone in the car with him—weirder than it should have been. He’s very
quiet,
my son. Maybe he’s just quiet when he’s with me, but somehow I don’t
think that’s the whole story. He’s an introvert, for sure—nothing wrong with
that. But also—and this was what really unnerved me—when he
did
start talking, the subject he chose was the last thing I’d been expecting. He started talking
about
you,
Miriam. He started asking questions about when I’d last seen you, and
how Mum and Dad had coped with it when you disappeared. I was dumbstruck,
at first. Simply didn’t know what to say to him. It wasn’t as if any of this had
arisen naturally in the course of conversation: he brought it all up, quite abruptly.
What was I supposed to say? I just told him that it was all a long, long time ago
now, and we would probably never find out the truth. Somehow we had to live
with that, find an accommodation with it. It was a struggle: something we both
battled with, me and Dad, in our
different  ways, every day of our lives. What else
could I tell him?
    He fell silent, after that, and so did I, for quite a while. I was a little freaked
out by that conversation, to be honest. I thought we’d maybe be talking about life
at school, or his chances in the football match. Not his aunt who had vanished
without trace ten years before he was born.
    I tried not to think about it any more, tried just to concentrate on the road.
    Now, there’s another thing I’ve noticed about this country, Miriam, in the
few days I’ve been home. You can take the temperature of a nation from the way it
drives a car, and something has changed in Britain in the last few years. Remember I’ve been in Italy, the homeland of aggressive drivers. I’m used to that. I’m
used to being cut up and overtaken on blind corners and sworn at and people
yelling out that my brother was the son of a whore if I’m going too slowly. I can
handle it. It’s not serious, for one thing. But something similar has started to happen here—only it’s not that similar really, there’s an important
difference: here,
they really seem to mean it.
    A few months ago I read an article in the
Corriere della Sera
which was
called “Apathetic Britain.” It said that now Tony Blair had been voted in with
such a huge majority, and he seemed like a nice guy and seemed to know what he
was doing, people had breathed a sort of collective sigh of relief and stopped thinking about politics any more. Somehow the writer managed to link this in with the
death of Princess Diana, as well. I can’t remember how, I can remember thinking
it all sounded a bit contrived at the time. Anyway, maybe he had a point. But I
don’t think he really got to the heart of the matter. Because if you scratch the surface of that apathy, I