Free The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe Page B

can’t do without the media but I don’t understand them. And you do. You could really help me. You could act as a sort of—buffer, a conduit, between . . .”
    He tailed off, and Benjamin muttered: “They mean the opposite of each other.”
    Paul and Malvina both looked at him—it was the first time he had spoken in about twenty minutes—and he explained: “Buffer and conduit. They mean opposite things. You can’t be a buffer
and
a conduit.”
    â€œDidn’t you hear?” Paul said. “Words can mean what we want them to mean. In the age of irony.”
    Paul offered to drive Malvina to New Street Station, in time for the last train to London. He picked up the bill for dinner himself, and paid it discreetly and quickly while Malvina went to the toilet.
    â€œWhat exactly are you playing at, Paul?” Benjamin hissed, as they waited for her outside the restaurant. “You can’t
employ
her.”
    â€œWhy not? I get an allowance for that sort of thing.”
    â€œDo you know how old she is?”
    â€œWhat’s that got to do with anything? Do you?”
    Benjamin had to admit that he didn’t: it was one of the many things he didn’t know about her. In any case it occurred to him, as he watched Malvina climb into the front passenger seat of Paul’s car, that the age difference between them didn’t seem so great after all. Paul looked a good deal younger than his thirty-five years, and Malvina looked . . . well, ageless, tonight. They made a handsome couple, he conceded, through gritted teeth.
    The passenger window of Paul’s shimmering black BMW glided noiselessly open, and Malvina looked up at him.
    â€œSee you soon,” she said, fondly: but they had not kissed, this time.
    â€œKeep your pecker up, Marcel,” said Paul, who for some years had delighted in annoying his brother by introducing him to people as “Rubery’s answer to Proust.”
    Benjamin glared at him and said balefully, “I will.” His parting shot— the best he could manage—was: “Remember me to your wife and daughter, won’t you?”
    Paul nodded—inscrutable, as always—and then the car was gone, with a squeal of rubber against tarmac, and Malvina with it.
    Rain started to fall as Benjamin set off on his slow walk to the Navigation Street bus stops.

26
    Half way across Lambeth Bridge, Paul braked to a halt, steadied himself with one foot on the kerb, and rested a while to recover his breath. His thigh muscles pulsed with dull pain from the unaccustomed effort of his one-and-a-half mile ride. After a few seconds, he swung the bicycle through ninety degrees and pedalled over to the eastern side of the bridge. Just as he was dismounting, the driver of a huge bottle-green people-carrier, a vehicle more suited to transporting essential food parcels along the treacherous supply roads between Mazar-e Sharif and Kabul than taking—as seemed to be the case this evening—a rather comfortably-off family of three down to the local Tesco and back, honked her horn angrily as she swerved wildly to one side, mobile phone in hand, and avoided killing Paul by about three inches. He took no notice, having quickly come to realize that such near-death experiences were a daily occurrence in central London, where car drivers and cyclists lived in a permanent state of undeclared war. And besides, it would make a good episode for his new column, “Confessions of a Cycling MP,” which Malvina was planning to pitch next week to the editor of one of the free magazines that got distributed on the underground every morning. She was taking her new appointment seriously, and this was just one of a string of ideas she had presented to him a couple of days ago. Another was that he should make an appearance on a high-profile satirical television quiz show: she knew one of the producers, apparently, and was planning to broach the subject