The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim Read Free

the state-of-the-art stereo system at his fancy bachelor pad in Hammersmith, he turned to the subject of John Smith’s death – which had been announced on the radio that morning – and started using it as an excuse for a series of bad-taste jokes about heart attacks. Things like this: apparently, following Smith’s first heart attack in the late 1980s, the doctors had been able to revive his heart but not his brain – so was it any wonder that they’d made him leader of the Labour Party? Caroline’s response to this attempt at humour was to persist with the contemptuous silence she had maintained throughout the meal; and apart from some tepid waves of laughter there was no reaction from anyone until I heard myself saying – slightly to my own astonishment – ‘That’s not funny, Dave. Not funny at all.’ Most of the guys had finished their lunches by now, and it wasn’t long before people started getting up and leaving, but not me and Caroline: neither of us said anything, but we both decided to stay behind and linger over our puddings, as if by some sort of unspoken agreement. And so for a minute or two we sat there in awkward, somehow expectant silence, until I made some embarrassed comment about sensitivity not being Dave’s strong point, and then, for the very first time, Caroline spoke.
    That was the same moment, I believe, that I fell in love with her. It was her voice, you see. I had been expecting something clipped and ultra-refined to go with her looks, but instead she came out with this really broad, down-to-earth Lancastrian accent. It took me so much by surprise – I was so enthralled by it – that at first I forgot to listen to what she was actually saying, and just let her voice play over me, almost as if she was talking in some mellifluous foreign language. Quickly, though, before I made too disastrous an impression, I pulled myself together and started to concentrate and realized that she was asking me why I hadn’t joined in with the jokes. She wanted to know if it was because I was a Labour supporter and I said, No, it was nothing to do with that at all. I just told her that I didn’t think it was right to make jokes about someone so soon after he had died, especially when he had always seemed to be a decent man and was leaving a wife and a family behind. Caroline agreed with me about that but she also seemed to be sorry about his death for a different reason: she thought that it had come at a terrible time for British politics and said that John Smith would probably have won the next election and might have turned out to be a great Prime Minister.
    Well, I admit that this was not the sort of conversation you usually heard in the canteen of this department store, let alone the sort that I very often took part in myself. I’ve never been very interested in politics. (In fact I didn’t even vote in the last two elections, although I did vote for Tony Blair in 1997, mainly because I thought it was what Caroline wanted me to do.) And when I found out, as I soon did, that Caroline was only working in the maternity section of the department store as a temporary measure, while she began work on her first novel, I felt even more out of my depth. I hardly ever read novels, never mind trying to write one. But in a way this only fuelled my curiosity. I couldn’t work Caroline out, you see. After spending all those years on the road, cold-calling people and trying to sell them stuff, I was fairly satisfied with my ability to size people up and decide, in the space of a few seconds, what it was that made them tick. But I hadn’t met many people like Caroline. I’d never been to university (she was a history graduate from Manchester) and had spent most of my adult life in the company of men – businessmen, at that. The kind of people who never gave away much about themselves when they talked and tended to take the status quo for granted. Compared to them, Caroline was an unknown quantity to me. I