The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

‘I think he blamed me for it, in a way. At any rate, we haven’t spoken to each other since.’

‘I know. He told me.’ Her voice became lower, more earnest. ‘Look, Max, can’t you and Caroline patch things up? Everyone goes through difficult times.’

‘Do they?’

‘Of course they do. Philip and I are going through one now.’

‘Really? In what way?’

‘Oh, he’s always travelling. He barely talks to me when he’s here. Can’t stop thinking about work. But business is everything with him, I knew that when I married him. That was part of the deal, and I suppose that, looking at things from a purely material point of view, I’ve done very nicely out of it. You know, you have to make compromises. You have to … settle for things, sometimes. Everybody does it. Couldn’t you and Caroline see that? I mean – it’s not as if either of you was unfaithful or anything, is it?’

‘No, that’s true. If that’s all it had been about, things would probably have been easier.’

‘So what was it about?’

I took a sip of wine – actually, more of a gulp – while I wondered how to put this.

‘There was one thing she said to me, before she left. She told me that the problem was me. My own attitude, towards myself. She said that I didn’t like myself enough. And that if I didn’t like myself, other people found it difficult to like me as well. She said it created a negative energy.’

Before Alison had a chance to reply, our main courses arrived. Her fillet of John Dory looked pale and delicate next to my slab of blood-red venison. We ordered another bottle of wine.

‘I won’t be able to drive after this,’ I said.

‘Take a taxi,’ said Alison. ‘You could probably do with a break from driving, after the last couple of days.’

‘True.’

‘Why exactly are you driving to Shetland, anyway?’ she asked.

And so I began telling her about Trevor, and Guest Toothbrushes, and Lindsay Ashworth. I told her about Lindsay’s ‘We Reach Furthest’ campaign, about the four salesmen all setting off in different directions for the extreme points of the United Kingdom, and the two prizes we were supposed to be competing for. And then I got sidetracked and told her about my detour to Lichfield to see my father’s flat, how eerie and desolate it had felt; about Miss Erith, and her facinating stories, and her sadness at the passing of the old ways of life; her weird, solemn, almost inexpressible gratitude when I had made her a gift of one of my toothbrushes. I told Alison, too, about the bin liner full of postcards from my father’s mysterious friend Roger, which was now in the boot of my car, and the blue ring binder full of my father’s poems and other bits of writing. Then I told her about driving on from Lichfield and stopping in Kendal to see Lucy and Caroline, and how I’d planned to get the ferry from Aberdeen the next day, but Mr and Mrs Byrne had persuaded me to come to Edinburgh instead.

‘Well, Max,’ she said, holding my gaze for a few moments. ‘I’m glad you came, whatever the reason. It’s been too long since we saw each other – even if it’s only happened because my parents steamrollered us into it.’

I smiled back, uncertain where this was leading. Rather than responding to everything I had just told her about my journey, it felt as though Alison was getting ready to move the conversation into a different gear altogether; but then she seemed to think better of it. She arranged her knife and fork neatly on her plate and said:

‘We’re a strange generation, aren’t we?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean that we’ve never really grown up. We’re still tied to our parents in a way that would have seemed inconceivable to people born in the 1930s or 1940s. I’m fifty, now, for God’s sake, and I still feel that I have to ask my mother’s … permission, half the time, just to live my life the way that I want to. Somehow I still haven’t managed to get out from under my parents’ shadow. Do you feel the same?’

I nodded, and Alison went on:

‘Just the other day I was listening to a programme on the radio. It was about the Young British Artists. They’d got three or four of them together and they were all reminiscing about the first shows they’d done together – those first shows at the Saatchi Gallery, back in the late nineties. And not only did none of them have anything interesting to say about their own work, but the main thing they talked about – apart from the fact that they’d all been shagging each other – was how “shocking” it had been, and how worried they were about what their parents were going to say when they saw it. “What did your mum say when she saw that painting?” one of them kept being asked. And I thought, you know, maybe I’m wrong, but I’m sure that when Picasso painted Guernica, with its graphic depictions of the horrors of modern warfare, the main thing going through his mind wasn’t what his mum was going to say when she saw it. I kind of suspect that he’d gone beyond that some time ago.’

‘Yes – I’ve been thinking the same thing,’ I said, eagerly. ‘Take Donald Crowhurst: he already had four kids when he set out to sail around the world, even though he was only thirty-six. You’re right, people were so … so grown-up in those days.’

‘What days?’ Alison asked; and I realized, of course, that she had no idea who Donald Crowhurst was.

Perhaps it was a bad idea to start telling her the story. Or rather, it would have been a good idea to tell her the story of Donald Crowhurst, if I could have stuck to it. But before long, I was no longer telling her about his doomed round-the-world voyage, but explaining all the parallels I had started to see between his situation and mine, and how strongly I was coming to identify with him. And although she didn’t seem to understand more than about half of what I was saying, I did notice that she was starting to look even more worried than before.

‘What’s the matter?’ I said. ‘Why are you looking at me like that?’

‘This man Crowhurst,’ said Alison. ‘He set out to sail around the world even though he was totally unequipped for it; he realized he couldn’t manage it so he decided to fake the whole thing; and then he realized he couldn’t go through with that either, so he went mad and committed suicide – is that right?’

‘More or less.’