Coventry Read online

  *

  Summer comes: the marsh is dry, and warm underfoot. We take off our shoes to walk to the creek and swim. It is often windy on the marsh. The wind pours out of the flatness and the vastness, from the radial distances where the blue of the sky and the blue of the sea converge. The creek lies between the marsh and the beach, a desolate expanse of sand pockmarked with shells. It is a long, narrow declivity, good for swimming: we remove our clothes, anchoring them against the wind as best we can. I am shy of my body, even in this deserted, primeval space. It is the body of a nearly forty-nine-year-old, but it doesn’t feel that way. I have never felt myself to be ageing: on the contrary, I have always had the strange sensation as time passes that I am getting not older but younger. My body feels as though it has innocence as its destination. This is not, of course, a physical reality – I view the proof in the mirror with increasing puzzlement – but it is perhaps a psychological one that conscripts the body into its workings. It is as though I was born imprisoned in a block of stone from which it has been both a necessity and an obligation to free myself. The feeling of incarceration in what was pre-existing and inflexible works well enough, I suppose, as a paradigm for the contemporary woman’s struggle towards personal liberty. She might feel it politically, socially, linguistically, emotionally; I happen to have felt it physically. I am not free yet, by any means. It is laborious and slow, chipping away at that block. There would be a temptation to give up, were the feelings of claustrophobia and confinement less intense.

  The water in the creek is often surprisingly warm. After the first shock, it is easy to stay in. It is perhaps thirty metres long and I swim fast and methodically up and down. I don’t like to talk or mess around when I’m swimming; or it might be more accurate to say that I can’t imagine being able to mess around, can’t imagine being free from my own rules and ambitions, and more accurate still to say that I’m frightened of what might happen if I were. Instead I set myself a target and count the lengths. My husband dives in and swims for a little while, slowly, without particular direction. Then he turns over and lies on his back and floats, looking at the sky.

  *

  One day, over the summer, my parents send me an email. They have some furniture they’re getting rid of; they wonder whether I want it. I reply, thanking them and declining. A few weeks later, my mother calls and leaves a message. She would like to speak to me, she says. She says she misses the children.

  My daughters are an interesting hybrid of characteristics I have always believed to be irreconcilable. They are opinionated, but empathetic too; scarifyingly witty, but capable of gentleness and mercy. They don’t waste these finer qualities on adults all that often – friendship is the ground on which they’re currently building their lives. But they’ve been anxious about my presence in Coventry. They aren’t familiar with war as the model for human relationships. They aren’t used to things remaining fixed enough for the possibility of their destruction to be created. My parents’ behaviour has caused them anger, but their forgiveness comes fast after it, like a dog chasing a rabbit: there’s barely a beat between accusation and clemency. I’m vaguely aware that something is lost in the speed with which they accept wrongs being set back to rights. Is theirs to be a world without feuds, without lasting conflict, without Coventry, but also without memory? I tell them they are free to communicate with and see their grandparents as often as they please – they are old enough for that to be a reality – but that I myself don’t wish to re-enter that arena. I don’t want to leave Coventry. I’ve decided to stay.

  They nod their heads, slightly mystified. They don’t understand why I care so much. They don’t understand why it matters. These are old things, old arguments, old people: it’s so much ancient history. It is as though a moss-encrusted monument had suddenly tried to explain itself to them. I say to them, the thing about time is that it can transform the landscape without improving it. It can change everything except what needs to change.

  They fidget, roll their eyes, check their phones.

  That’s really depressing, they say.

  *

  My husband and I have a plan, which is to visit certain artworks in the British Isles. I have spent a lot of time looking at art in other places but I have never seen, for instance, Stanley Spencer’s paintings in the chapel at Burghclere in Hampshire. I have never visited Henry Moore’s house in Much Hadham. I have never laid eyes on Simone Martini’s Christ Discovered in the Temple, housed in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool. We’d like to do a tour that takes all these highlights in.

  It’s a good idea, though I don’t know if it will ever become a reality. It’s hard to find the time. There’s always something, some new development, some incident or issue, some theme that needs attending to: the story still insists on telling itself, despite our best efforts to block our ears. If it does happen, one place we’ll have to go is Coventry. In the aftermath of war, a generation of artists worked to create something afresh in the blasted city. A new cathedral was designed by Basil Spence to stand beside the ruins of the old: Benjamin Britten wrote his War Requiem to be premiered at its consecration. Graham Sutherland designed a vast tapestry for the interior; John Piper made the baptistry window, with its nearly two hundred panes; and John Hutton made his expressionist Screen of Saints and Angels. People were suspicious, apparently, of the cathedral’s modernist design: when what you’re used to is irretrievably gone, it’s hard to believe in something new. But they suspended their disbelief. The new things came to be, became reality. What needed to change was changed, just as the old things were destroyed – not by time, but by force of human will.

  On Rudeness

  In a world as unmannerly as this one, how is it best to speak?

  In the airport, there are crowds of people at passport control. An official is present: his job is to send them into the right queues. I have been watching him shout at them. I have watched the obsessive way he notices them, to pick on them. When I get close enough, I speak to him.

  There’s no need to be rude, I say.

  His head jerks around.

  You’re rude, he replies. You’re the one who’s rude.

  This is a place of transit: there are all sorts of people here, people of different ages, races and nationalities, people in myriad sets of circumstances. In this customs hall, there are so many different versions of living that it seems possible no one version could ever be agreed on. Does it follow, then, that nothing that happens here really matters?

  No, I’m not, I say.

  You are, he says. You’re being rude.

  The man is wearing a uniform, though not a very impressive one: a white short-sleeved synthetic shirt, black synthetic trousers, a cheap tie with the airport’s insignia on it. It is no different from the uniform a bus driver might wear, or someone at a car-rental desk, someone who lacks any meaningful authority while also being forced into constant interaction with members of the public, someone for whom the operation of character is both nothing and everything. He is angry. His face is red, and his expression is unpleasant. He looks at me – a woman of forty-eight travelling alone, a woman who doubtless exhibits some signs of the privileged life she has led – with loathing. Apparently it is I, not he, who has broken the social code. Apparently it was rude of me to accuse him of rudeness.

  The social code remains unwritten, and it has always interested me how many problems this poses in the matter of ascertaining the truth. The truth often appears in the guise of a threat to the social code. It has this in common with rudeness. When people tell the truth, they can experience a feeling of release from pretence that is perhaps similar to the release of rudeness. It might follow that people can mistake truth for rudeness, and rudeness for truth. It may only be by examining the aftermath of each that it becomes possible to prove which was which.

  The queue moves forward. I reach passport control, and I pass through it, and the man is left behind.

  *

  In recounting this incident
afterwards, I find myself running into difficulties. For instance, I find myself relying on the details of the man’s physical ugliness to prove the badness of his character. Searching for a specific example of someone else’s being upset or offended by him, the only person I can prove he offended is me. On another day, a perfectly polite man is probably to be found directing the crowds in the customs hall, assisting the elderly, apologising for the crush, helpfully explaining things to people whose English is uncertain: he would make a good story about individuality as the basis for all hope.

  By telling this story, I am trying to substantiate my fear that discrimination and bullying are used against people trying to enter Britain, my country. There are many people who don’t have this fear. To them, my story proves only one thing, which is that I once met a rude man in an airport. I might even have inadvertently made them pity him. I, the teller of this tale, would have to demonstrate that under the same circumstances, I would have behaved better. In the event, all I did was criticise him. I made him angrier; perhaps he took it out on the next person in the queue. To top it all off, I admit that he accused me of precisely the same failing: rudeness. Anyone hearing the story will at this point stop thinking about the moral problem of rudeness and start thinking about me. I have damaged my own narrative authority: might I be to blame after all? By including that detail – true though it is – I am giving the man a platform for his point of view. In most of my stories, I allow the truth to look after itself. In this one, I’m not sure that it can.

  For all these reasons, the story doesn’t work as it should. Why, then, if it proves nothing, is this a story I persist in telling? The answer: because I don’t understand it. I don’t understand it, and I feel that the thing I don’t understand about it – indeed the mere fact of not understanding – is significant.

  *

  Another day, another airport. This time the situation is clearer: my country has recently voted to leave the European Union, and rudeness is rampant. People treat one another with a contempt that they do not trouble to conceal. The people in uniforms – the airport officials – exercise their faux power with uncommon ugliness, while the rest of us look suspiciously at one another, not sure what to expect of this new, unscripted reality, wondering which side the other person is on. It is already being said that this situation has arisen out of hatred, but it seems to me that if that is true, then the hatred is of self.

  The uniformed woman at security bangs the grey plastic trays one after another on to the conveyor belt with a violence that seems to be a request for attention. At every opportunity, she makes it clear that she has relinquished self-control: her nature has been let loose, like an animal from its cage. She abuses, without exception, every person who passes along her queue, while seeming not to address any single one of them: we are no longer individuals; we are a herd enduring the drover’s lash, heads down and silent. She looks unhealthy, her face covered with sore-looking red spots, her shapeless white body almost writhing with its own anger, as though it wishes only to transgress its boundaries, to escape itself in an act of brutality.

  The person in front of me in the queue is a well-groomed black woman. She is travelling with a child, a pretty girl with neatly plaited hair. She has put two large clear bags of cosmetics and creams in her tray, but this, apparently, is not allowed; she is permitted only a single bag. The uniformed woman halts the queue and slowly and deliberately holds up the two bags, looking fixedly at their owner.

  What’s this then? she says. What’s this about?

  The woman explains that because two of them are travelling, she has assumed that they are entitled to two bags. Her voice is quiet and polite. The little girl gazes ahead with wide, unblinking eyes.

  You assumed wrong, the uniformed woman says. Her horrible relish for the situation is apparent. She has been waiting, it is clear, to fasten on someone and has found her victim.

  You don’t get away with that, she says, grimacing and shaking her head. Where do people like you get your ideas from?

  The rest of us watch while she makes the woman unpack the bags and then decide which of her possessions are to be thrown away. They are mostly new and expensive-looking. In another situation, their scented femininity might have seemed to mock the ugliness of the woman superintending their destruction with folded arms and a jeering expression on her face. The passenger’s varnished fingers are shaking as she scrabbles with the various pots and jars. She keeps dropping things, her head bowed, her lower lip frowning. The uniformed woman’s unremitting commentary on these events is so unpleasant that I realise she is half-demented with what would seem to be the combination of power and powerlessness. No one intervenes. I do not inform her that there is no need to be rude. Instead, as I increasingly seem to in such situations these days, I wonder what Jesus would have done.

  My travelling companion – a painter – is the politest person I know, but I have noticed that he does not often take up arms on another person’s behalf. He dislikes conflict. When it is our turn in the queue, the uniformed woman stares at the bag he has placed in the tray. It contains his tubes of paint. They are crumpled and bespattered with use, and there are so many of them that the bag can’t close at the top. She folds her arms.

  What are those, she says.

  They’re paints, he replies.

  You can’t take those through, she says.

  Why not, he asks pleasantly.

  The bag has to close at the top, she says. That’s why not.

  But I need them to paint with, he says.

  You can’t take them through, she says.

  He looks at her in silence. He is looking directly into her eyes. He stands completely quiet and still. The look goes on for a very long time. Her eyes are small and pale blue and impotent: I did not notice them until now. My friend neither blinks nor looks away, and the woman is forced to hold herself there as the seconds tick by, her small eyes open and straining. During those seconds, it seems as if layers of her are being removed: she is being simplified, put in order, by being looked at. He is giving her his full attention, and I watch the strange transformation occur. Finally he speaks.

  What do you suggest I do, he says, very calmly.

  Well, sir, she says, if you’re travelling with this lady, she might have room in her bag.

  Neither of them looks at me – they are still looking at each other.

  Would that be acceptable? she says.

  Yes, he says, I don’t see why not.

  I proffer my bag, and the woman herself transfers the paints from one bag to the other. Her hands labour to do it with care and exactitude: it takes her a long time. Finally she seals the bag and lays it gently back in the tray.

  Is that all right, sir? she says.

  Now that he has won this victory, I want him to use it to reprimand her, not just for her behaviour towards the black woman in the queue but for all the wrongs her behaviour represents; for the fact that it’s safer to be him, and always has been. He does not reprimand her. He smiles at her politely.

  Thank you very much, he says.

  It would have been a shame to throw them away, wouldn’t it? she says.

  Yes, it would, he says. I appreciate your help.

  I hope you enjoy your holiday, sir, she says.

  *

  Society organises itself very efficiently to punish, silence or disown truth-tellers. Rudeness, on the other hand, is often welcomed in the manner of a false god. Later still, regret at the punishment of the truth-teller can build into powerful feelings of worship, whereas rudeness will be disowned.

  Are people rude because they are unhappy? Is rudeness like nakedness, a state deserving the tact and mercy of the clothed? If we are polite to rude people, perhaps we give them back their dignity; yet the obsessiveness of the rude presents certain challenges to the proponents of civilised behaviour. It is an act of disinhibition: like a narcotic, it offers a sensation of glorious release from jailers no one else can see.

  In the r
ecollection of events, rudeness often has a role to play in the moral construction of a drama: it is the outward sign of an inward or unseen calamity. Rudeness itself is not the calamity. It is the harbinger, not the manifestation, of evil. In the Bible, Satan is not rude – he is usually rather charming – but the people who act in his service are. Jesus, on the other hand, often comes across as somewhat terse. Indeed, many of the people he encounters find him direct to the point of rudeness. The test, it is clear, is to tell rudeness from truth, and in the Bible that test is often failed. An unambiguous event – violence – is therefore required. The episode of the crucifixion is an orgy of rudeness whose villains are impossible to miss. The uncouth conduct of the Roman soldiers at the foot of the cross, for instance, can be seen in no other light: anyone thinking that Jesus could have done a bit more to avoid his fate is offered this lasting example of humanity’s incurable awfulness. They know not what they do, was Jesus’ comment on his tormentors. Forgive them.

  *

  In the United Kingdom, the arguments rage over the rights and wrongs of the Brexit referendum result. I begin to think this is what it must be like to be the child of divorcing parents. Before, there was one truth, one story, one reality; now there are two. Each side accuses the other, and amid the raised voices, the unappeasable points of view, the vitriol and distress, the obfuscation and exaggeration and blame, the only thing that is demonstrably clear is that one side is ruder than the other. It seems to me that even if you didn’t know what they were arguing about, you would have to come to that conclusion.

  In the aftermath of their victory, the winners are markedly unmagnanimous. They brand those who voted the other way as a liberal elite, patronising, self-interested, out of touch with real life. The liberal elite are characterised as bad losers, as though the vote were a football match. When they protest against or complain about the result and its consequences, they are immediately belittled and shouted down. In the weeks before the vote, the eventual victors’ own handling of language resembled a small child’s handling of an explosive device: they appeared to have no idea of its dangers or power. They used phrases like ‘We want our country back’ and ‘Take back control’ that were open to any and every interpretation. Now they complain that they have been misrepresented as racist, xenophobic, ignorant. They are keen to end the argument, to quit the field of language where only the headachy prospect of detailed analysis remains, to take their dubious verbal victory and run for the hills. They have a blunt phrase they use in the hope of its being the last word, and it is characteristically rude: ‘You lost. Get over it.’