Read Online The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe - Free Book Online

pointedly at the book he was reading (a biography of Debussy) that it reached the point, soon enough, where it would have been rudeness on
his
part not to say something to her. When they began talking, he rapidly learned that she was a student of media studies at London university, visiting Birmingham for a few days to stay with friends. They must have been good friends, too, for she seemed to come and visit them regularly: after that first occasion, Malvina and Benjamin would meet (at the same place, by arrangement) at least once a fortnight—sometimes more; and before long (for Benjamin, at least) each of these encounters began to feel not like a simple meeting between friends, but a tryst. In the minutes before seeing Malvina he would feel dizzy with eagerness. When they were together, he could never finish the cake or the sandwich he would have ordered. His stomach contracted, turned into a clenched fist. Whether she felt the same way, he had no idea. Presumably she must do, or why would she have approached him like that in the first place? So his hair had gone grey, his jowls were beginning to sag, his midriff had started to expand according to some strange independent timetable of its own, which bore no relation whatsoever to the amount of food he consumed. Did that mean he would never again be attractive to women? Apparently not. There was something that worried him more than that, anyway: the aura of failure, of disappointment, which he could feel clinging to him these days, which he knew his friends had grown accustomed to but which would always, he was convinced, be immediately obvious to anyone new who happened to strike up a conversation with him. And yet—amazingly— Malvina seemed unaware of it. She kept returning to him, again and again. She had never yet refused a single invitation for coffee or a drink. She had even turned up at the reunion concert of his band at The Glass and Bottle, just before Christmas.
    What was it about him, he was obliged to wonder, that interested her so much? He was still unable to answer that question, even after the many hours she had spent listening to him, with seemingly unflagging attention, as he talked about his twenty-year career in accountancy, his rather more short-lived part-time musical career in the 1980s, and (the biggest secret of all, in some ways) the novel he had been working on for the whole of that time, which now extended to several thousand pages and felt no nearer to completion than when he had started. It seemed that Malvina had an insatiable appetite for hearing these personal details; and in return, she did let slip the occasional revelation of her own, such as the news that she too was an aspiring writer, with a growing collection of unpublished poems and short stories to her credit. Benjamin had asked—inevitably—whether she would allow him to see any of them; but so far Malvina (just as inevitably, perhaps) had not granted this request. She was probably just being shy; but in any case, curiosity was not Benjamin’s motive. He truly wanted to help her, in any way possible. At the back of his mind, all the time—unspoken, unrecognized even—was the fear that these wonderful encounters, which had transformed his life in the last few months, might come to an end at any moment. The more he could help her, the more favors he could offer, the more he might make himself indispensable to her—all of these things, he believed, made it less likely that she might one day grow tired of seeing him. And it was for this reason, finally, that he had offered to introduce her to Paul.
    Malvina’s second-year project at university was a 20,000-word dissertation on the relationship between New Labour and the media. It was a big subject: bigger than she could manage, he was beginning to suspect. He knew that she was already behind with it; he could hear the edge of panic in her voice whenever it was mentioned; and while it was hardly