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
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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.
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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.