The Terrible Privacy Of Maxwell Sim

4

For the second and final leg of the journey, Charlie was supposed to have had the aisle seat, and I should have had the window. Poppy said that she didn’t mind where she sat, but I didn’t really believe her. Everybody prefers a window seat, don’t they? So I insisted that she took the seat by the window. I was determined to make the journey as comfortable for her as could be. I was determined to do everything in my power to make the best possible impression on her. I was determined to make her like me.

‘By the way, I suffer from clinical depression,’ I said, as soon as we were settled.

Poppy seemed completely unfazed, to my relief. She just looked at me for a few seconds and said, ‘Yes – well, I guessed it was something like that.’

‘Really?’ I said. ‘It’s that obvious?’

‘Let’s just say I have a nose for these things.’

And after that, at least, the information was out there; it was something understood between us. She was the first person (I mean apart from my employers, and my GP, and my Occupational Health Officer – the first friend, I suppose is what I’m trying to say) with whom I had felt brave enough to share this shameful secret. And if I had been expecting her to edge away from me, retreat into wary silence, ask a stewardess if she could be moved to another seat, or anything like that, I had been wrong. It seemed to make no difference to the way she thought of me. I felt intensely grateful for that, and immediately it seemed to establish an odd sort of intimacy – a settled, comfortable sort of intimacy – which meant that conversation between us, which I had thought would be nervous and forced, seemed from then on to unfold with a rhythm that was entirely natural. To be honest, we did not talk in the next few hours nearly as much as I’d assumed we would. We sat for much of the time in the sort of companionable silence you would expect from an elderly couple who had been married for thirty years – just like that couple I’d seen at the restaurant in Sydney harbour, sitting together on the same side of the table so that they could share in the view rather than talk to each other. A couple of hours into the flight (about two a.m., Singapore time, it would have been) that’s how we were: me flicking through the different movies on the little seat-back screen in front of me, sometimes commenting on them to her, not really able to settle on anything, while Poppy, having spent a few minutes writing up a brief report on her laptop, was now using it to pass the time with what seemed to be some kind of incredibly complicated three-dimensional Sudoku.

More importantly, though, in the idle moments between these activities, we would talk.

‘What about jet lag?’ I asked her at one point.

‘Mmn?’

‘In this job of yours. Surely your body clock must be all over the place. Is it ever a problem?’

Poppy shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem to be. Sometimes when I’m at home I wake up a bit early. Sometimes a bit late. It’s not a big deal.’

I sighed enviously. ‘What it must be like to be young.’

‘You’re not in your bath chair yet, Grandad.’

‘Well, it’s going to take me a day or two to recover from this trip, I know that. And I have to get over it as quickly as possible because later this week I’ve got a decision to make.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. It’ll be six months since I’ve been off work. I have to go into the department store and see their Occupational Health person, and tell her whether or not I want to come back. And even if I say that I do, she might decide that I’m not well enough, which will probably give them an excuse to …’ (it took me a while to remember the euphemism) ‘… let me go. Which might well be what they’re hoping for anyway.’

‘And do you?’

‘Do I? Do I what?’

‘Want to go back.’

I thought about this for a few moments, but it was too hard a question to answer directly. My thoughts raced ahead, instead, to everything that would be waiting for me when I got home: the bleak, chafing February weather, the empty flat, the pile of junk mail on the other side of the door. Oh yes, it was going to be bad. Just then, it didn’t even feel as though I could face that lonely homecoming, let alone the decision that would have to follow it.

‘You know, I still have this fantasy,’ I said, eventually, ‘that I’ll get home, and she’ll be there waiting for me. Caroline. She’s still got a key, you see, so it could happen. I open the door, and as soon as I open it, I know that she’s back. I don’t see her at first, but I can tell that there’s someone in there – the radio’s on, there’s a smell of fresh coffee in the kitchen. The place is warm, and tidy. And then I see her, sitting on the sofa, waiting for me, reading a book …’ I turned towards Poppy again. ‘It’s not going to happen, is it?’

All she said was: ‘You know, I’m sure you’ve been seeing a therapist, but is there anyone else you can talk to about these things? Someone in your family, say?’

I shook my head. ‘Mum’s dead. She died young – more than twenty years ago. Dad’s a lost cause. We’ve never been able to talk much. I don’t have any brothers or sisters.’

‘Friends?’

I thought about my seventy friends on Facebook. Honesty compelled me to admit: ‘Not really. I’ve got this friend called Trevor. He used to live nearby, but he’s moved away now. Apart from that …’ I tailed off, suddenly wanting to change the subject, or at least the focus of attention. ‘What about you? Do you have any siblings?’

‘Nope. I’ve got my mother, but she’s a bit … self-absorbed, shall we say. She doesn’t really “do” other people’s problems. And Dad ran off some time ago, when she caught him having an affair.’ Another laugh – more rueful, this time. ‘He could have done with the services of a good adultery facilitator, now I think of it. What a pity we weren’t in business then.’

‘So you’re like me, then?’ I said – perhaps a little too eagerly. ‘You don’t really have anyone you can talk to.’

‘It’s not quite like that,’ said Poppy. ‘You see, I have my uncle. My uncle Clive.’

She abandoned the Sudoku now, and closed down the programme, so that all I could see on her laptop was her desktop wallpaper – which appeared, rather bizarrely, to be a photograph of some sort of catamaran, a very old one, half-decayed, a ruin of shattered plyboard and flaking paint, lying abandoned somewhere on a tropical beach. My eyes rested curiously on this for a while, as she told me more about her uncle, and why she liked him so much. She told me how her mother had sent her to this posh boarding school in Surrey at the age of thirteen; how she was supposed to be just a weekly boarder, and come home every Friday evening, but her mother was often out of the country so she would go and stay with her uncle instead; how she came to cherish and look forward to these visits; how Clive (who lived in Kew) would take her almost every weekend to the cinema, or the theatre, to concerts and art galleries, introducing her to worlds which before then had been closed to her. And how, if he wasn’t seeing her at the weekends, he would write long letters to her, letters full of news, full of humour, full of fun and information and anecdote and, above all, full of love.

‘And you know what?’ she told me. ‘I still read those letters. I still take them with me everywhere.’

‘Everywhere?’

‘Yes. Even on these trips. I’ve got them right here.’ She tapped her forefinger against the laptop. ‘I scanned them all in. And all the photos he used to send me. This one, for instance – this is one of Clive’s.’ She was pointing to the photograph of the washed-up boat. ‘Well, he didn’t take it or anything like that,’ she explained. ‘It was taken by an artist called Tacita Dean. The boat’s called Teignmouth Electron.’

‘Teignmouth?’ I said. ‘That’s in Devon, isn’t it?’

‘That’s right. Where Clive and my mum grew up.’

‘So why do you have it on your desktop?’

‘Because there’s an amazing story associated with it. The story of a man called Donald Crowhurst.’ She gave a yawn, protracted and involuntary, before remembering to cover it with her hand. ‘Sorry – I’m really sleepy all of a sudden. Have you heard of him?’

I shook my head.

‘He was the man who sailed round the world in the late sixties. Or at least said he did, but actually he didn’t.’

‘I see,’ I said, totally confused.

‘I’m not explaining this very well, am I?’

‘You’re tired. You should go to sleep.’

‘No, but it’s a great story. I think you should hear it.’

‘I’m fine. I’ll just watch a movie. You’re too tired to talk. Tell me the story in the morning.’

‘I wasn’t going to tell you the story. I was just going to read you what Clive wrote to me about it.’

‘It can wait.’

‘Tell you what.’ Poppy tapped a few keys on her laptop before passing it over to my table, and then reaching beneath her own seat where she had stashed her pillow and blankets. ‘You can read his letter. There it is. It’s a bit long, sorry – but you’ve got plenty of time, and it’ll do you more good than watching some terrible rom-com for a couple of hours.’

‘Are you sure that’s OK? I mean, I don’t want to look at anything that’s … too private.’

But Poppy assured me it was OK. So while she snuggled down under the blankets, I placed her computer on my lap, and looked at the first page of her uncle’s letter. It had opened up in Windows Picture and Fax Viewer, so that I could still see the creamy yellow of the notepaper on which he had written it, and even make out the faint swirling watermark behind the handwriting. The writing itself was crisp, angular and easily legible. I guessed that he had been using a fountain pen. The ink was navy blue, shading almost into black. As I started reading the first sentences I felt a slight pressure against my left shoulder, and looked down to see that Poppy had placed her pillow next to it and settled her head there. She looked up at me, just briefly, as if to ask permission with her eyes, but at the same instant her eyelids flickered and closed, and already she had slipped into a deep, unshakeable sleep. After a few seconds, when I felt it was safe to do so, I breathed a goodnight kiss into her hair, and could feel my own body tingle with happiness.