Free Expo 58: A Novel by Jonathan Coe

sign of the cross). After that, the landlord protested that he had work to be getting on with, and disappeared once again into the cellar: to brood, no doubt, on the intractability of the Belgians when it came to stillions, wooden stocks and tilting arrangements.
    ‘Rum sort of cove,’ said Thomas, as they left the pub and began to stroll towards the boundary of the British site.
    ‘I did warn you. But I think he’ll be all right. You’d better keep on eye on his tippling, that’s all. He’s the sort who might be too pie-eyed to stand up by nine o’clock, if you’re not careful. And remember – no British licensing laws here. So he’ll be able to go at it for twelve hours at a time.’
    The rest of the day passed quickly. Mr Carter took Thomas to the British Council offices in central Brussels, where they had lunch in the staff restaurant. They discussed plans for a small party to celebrate the opening of the Britannia, on the second evening of the Expo itself.
    The car which came to return him to the airport contained no hostess, and Thomas was obliged to conclude that he would not see Anneke again that day; until, when they pulled up forty-five minutes ahead of his flight, he found her waiting for him outside the departures hall. By now, any hint of that brittle professionalism with which she had first greeted him had vanished. As they said their broken goodbyes, she swayed slightly from side to side in an almost girlish manner, her hands behind her back, sometimes lowering her gaze as if she did not trust herself to look him too often directly in the eye. Her eyes were green, he noticed, pale green with a hint of amber, and her smile was wide, bright and flawless. The only thing about her that was less than perfect, in fact, was the way she was obliged to dress. Stumblingly, just before they parted, he tried to say something to this effect.
    ‘I hope we will be meeting a few more times during the Expo,’ Anneke said.
    ‘Yes,’ Thomas answered. ‘Yes, I’d like to see you again.’ It didn’t seem enough, so he added: ‘Perhaps without your uniform on.’
    Anneke’s cheeks flushed crimson.
    ‘I meant –’ Thomas stammered, ‘– I meant that I’d like to see you in ordinary clothes.’
    ‘Yes.’ Anneke tried to laugh, but she was still blushing. ‘I know what you meant.’
    There was a long final pause, before she said, ‘You’re going to miss your flight,’ and then a long, fervent, final handshake before Thomas broke away and hurried inside. He glanced back at her one more time. She waved.

Calloway’s Corn Cushions
    Over the next few weeks, Thomas’s error, perhaps, was to make his excitement at the prospect of leaving for Brussels just a little too obvious. It should have been no surprise that Sylvia began to resent him for it; and her previous cheerful, resigned tolerance of their imminent separation began to harden into something more tight-lipped and melancholy.
    On the Saturday morning of the weekend before his departure, Thomas was propelled by one of Baby Gill’s more vigorous bouts of screaming out of the house and along the street in the direction of Jackson’s the chemist, in search of yet more of the gripe water for which she seemed to have developed an insatiable need. There was a sizeable queue at the counter and, resigning himself to a wait of at least ten minutes, he was not best pleased to find that the customer in front was Norman Sparks, one of his next-door neighbours. Mr Sparks, a bachelor, shared his home with his sister and was, in Thomas’s eyes, a crashing bore of the first water. Shortly after their arrival in the neighbourhood, Thomas and Sylvia had been invited round to the Sparks’ for dinner: an experiment which had not been repeated, for it had been a long and arduous evening. Mr Sparks’s sister, Judith, was a sickly woman of about thirty who barely said a word to anybody (including her brother) and retired to bed shortly after nine o’clock, even