Выбрать главу

By the same author

The Accidental Woman

A Touch of Love

The Dwarves of Death

What a Carve Up!

The House of Sleep

The Rotters’ Club

The Closed Circle

The Rain Before It Falls

The Terrible Privacy of

Maxwell Sim

JONATHAN COE

VIKING

an imprint of

PENGUIN BOOKS

VIKING

Published by the Penguin Group

Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

www.penguin.com

First published 2010

Copyright © Jonathan Coe, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Halclass="underline" copyright © 1970, Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, reproduced by kind permission of Hodder and Stoughton Limited.

Every effort has been made to trace copyright holders and to obtain their permission for the use of copyright material. The publisher apologizes for any errors or omissions and would be grateful to be notified of any corrections that should be incorporated in future editions of this book.

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-670-91894-2

Man is a lever whose ultimate length and strength he must determine for himself.

— Donald Crowhurst, quoted in The Strange Voyage of Donald Crowhurst, by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall

Geography no longer matters because there is no near or far, the monetary sheath enclosing the globe has destroyed the geography of distances.

— Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine

One day I will die, and on my grave it will say, ‘Here lies Reginald Iolanthe Perrin; he didn’t know the names of the flowers and the trees, but he knew the rhubarb crumble sales for Schleswig-Holstein.’

— David Nobbs, The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin

Through words, she offers us her shaming revelations.

Through words, she gives us her terrible privacy.

— James Wood, writing about Toni Morrison in the Guardian, 18 April 1992

Contents

Sydney–Watford

Including WATER: The Misfit

Watford–Reading

Including EARTH: The Nettle Pit

Reading–Kendal

Including FIRE: The Folded Photograph

Kendal–Braemar

Including AIR: The Rising Sun

Fairlight Beach

Salesman found naked in carGrampian Police patrolling the snowbound stretch of the A93 between Braemar and Spittal of Glenshee on Thursday night spotted a car apparently abandoned at the side of the road just below the Glenshee Ski Centre.On closer inspection it became clear that the unconscious driver was still inside the car. Clothes belonging to the middle-aged man, who was almost naked, were found scattered throughout the vehicle. On the passenger seat beside him were two empty whisky bottles.The mystery deepened as the policemen inspected the boot of the car and found two cardboard boxes containing more than 400 toothbrushes, as well as a large black bin liner filled with picture postcards of the Far East.The man was suffering from severe hypothermia and was flown to Aberdeen Royal Infirmary by air ambulance. He was later identified as Mr Maxwell Sim, aged 48, of Watford, England.Mr Sim was a salesman employed on a freelance basis by Guest Toothbrushes of Reading, a company specializing in ecologically friendly oral hygiene products. The company had gone into liquidation that morning.Mr Sim has made a full recovery and is believed to have returned to his home in Watford. Police have not yet confirmed whether they will press charges for drink driving.Aberdeenshire Press and Journal,Monday, 9 March 2009

Sydney–Watford

1

When I saw the Chinese woman and her daughter playing cards together at their restaurant table, the water and the lights of Sydney harbour shimmering behind them, it set me thinking about Stuart, and the reason he had to give up driving his car.

I was going to say ‘my friend Stuart’, but I suppose he’s not a friend any more. I seem to have lost a number of friends in the last few years. I don’t mean that I’ve fallen out with them, in any dramatic way. We’ve just decided not to stay in touch. And that’s what it’s been: a decision, a conscious decision, because it’s not difficult to stay in touch with people nowadays, there are so many different ways of doing it. But as you get older, I think that some friendships start to feel increasingly redundant. You just find yourself asking, ‘What’s the point?’ And then you stop.

Anyway, about Stuart and his driving. He had to stop because of the panic attacks. He was a good driver, a careful and conscientious driver, and he had never been involved in an accident. But occasionally, when he got behind the wheel of a car, he would experience these panic attacks, and after a while they started to get worse, and they started to happen more often. I can remember when he first started telling me about all this: it was lunchtime and we were in the canteen of the department store in Ealing, where we worked together for a year or two. I don’t think I can have listened very carefully, though, because Caroline was sitting at the same table, and things between us were just starting to get interesting, so the last thing I wanted to hear about was Stuart and his neuroses about driving. That must be why I never really thought about it again until years later, at the restaurant on Sydney harbour, when it all came back. His problem, as far as I can remember, was this. Whereas most people, as they watched the coming and going of cars on a busy road, would see a normal, properly functioning traffic system, Stuart could only perceive it as an endless succession of narrowly averted accidents. He saw cars hurtling towards each other at considerable speeds, and missing each other by inches – time and time again, every few seconds, repeated constantly throughout the day. ‘All those cars,’ he said to me, ‘only just managing not to crash into each other. How can people stand it?’ In the end it became too much for him to contemplate, and he had to stop driving.