Jonathan Coe - The Accidental Woman

PENGUIN BOOKS

THE ACCIDENTAL WOMAN

Jonathan Coe was born in Birmingham in 1961. His most recent novel is The Rain Before It Falls . He is also the author of The Accidental Woman, A Touch of Love, The Dwarves of Death, What a Carve Up! , which won the 1995 John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, The House of Sleep , which won the 1998 Prix Mdicis tranger, The Rotters Club , winner of the Everyman Wodehouse Prize, and The Closed Circle . His biography of the novelist B.S. Johnson, Like a Fiery Elephant , won the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for best non-fiction book of the year. He lives in London with his wife and two children.

The Accidental Woman

JONATHAN COE

PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS

Published by the Penguin Group
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First published by Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd 1987
First published in Penguin Books in 2000
This edition published 2008

Copyright Jonathan Coe, 1987
All rights reserved

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance
to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental

The moral right of the author has been asserted

Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publishers prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser

EISBN: 9780141916880

Contents

1. Beforewards

Take a birth. Any birth.

Arriving on the threshold of womanhood (for it is she, as chance would have it) Maria finds herself in Mrs Leadbetters study. Mrs Leadbetter the headmistress. She beamed at Maria and waved her to an armchair. Outside it was dark.

I wont keep you long, she said. I wanted to say this only: that we are proud of you, Maria. The first of our girls in fifty-four years to have won a place at Oxford. What an opportunity stretches before you. How excited you must be.

Maria smiled.

One doesnt like to crow, said Mrs Leadbetter, but the boys school this year has secured only three places. Out of twelve entrants, this represents only twenty-five per cent. And yet out of our two entrants, you represent fifty per cent success. You must feel very proud.

Mrs Leadbetter had a peculiar face, very brown and wrinkled. She was a stout woman. Her breasts resembled nothing so much as two Dundee rock cakes (bonus size) of the sort sold in the bakery just around the corner, although strictly speaking this was a comparison which Mr Leadbetter alone was entitled to draw. Maria anyway took no notice of her, her mind running on the school motto, Per ardua ad astra , which she could read, upside down, on Mrs Leadbetters headed notepaper.

In less than a years time, Maria, you will be going to Oxford, the old woman continued. It is a city of dreams. I went there myself, of course. Yes, I can remember doing my Christmas shopping there once. Have you any idea, Maria, what an exciting time of your life approaches? Freed from schools closed world, you fling yourself pell-mell into the giddy whirl of life, in the company of lifes gay young things on the doorstep of their dreams.

Maria did not believe a word of this, of course. She was inexperienced, but not stupid, and in the last few years she had begun to notice things, and to withdraw, unimpressed, from the society of her school friends, her former playmates. Miserable Maria, they had started to call her. Moody Mary. Childish nicknames, thats all. Shit-face. Snot-bag. Their invention was inexhaustible. Marias reserve infuriated Mrs Leadbetter, as usual.

You are a quiet girl, Maria. You have a silent and studious disposition, admirable in one so young. You channel your youthful high spirits into the peaceful streams of the intellect, the passive contemplation of the great works of art and literature. You are placid, imperturbable.

Maria was thinking furiously of a way to be rid of this maniac. She craved her lamp-lit bedroom.

All I wanted to say, Maria, is that I and all the staff, all of us here at St Judes, are behind you and rooting for you, and are pleased and proud with what you have done. We want your time at Oxford to be the glorious start of a life rich in achievement and fulfilment. You must begin even now to prepare yourself for it, psychologically and spiritually. Think daily on your success, Maria, and what it will mean for you. Look forward to it with joy and anticipation. Be thrilled.

A hard thing to ask, that, of Maria, whom little thrilled, not even the darkness through which she walked that evening on her way to the bus stop. It was a cold night, and school was empty, but for the cleaners to be seen at work in bright windows. The homeward traffic hummed, the chill breeze swept, Maria shivered.

Beneath the street lamp which marked her bus stop she could see that Ronny was waiting for her. She sensed also that it was going either to rain or to snow, soon, perhaps before she had finished her walk up the long hill. She was too tired to feign pleasure on being greeted by him.

I thought Id wait for you, said Ronny. He added, when they were on the top deck of the bus together, driving past the closing shops, the dark offices and factories, Just think, a year from now, we will be in Oxford together.

Ronny, said Maria, why did you apply to go to Oxford? You told me once that you never wanted to go there.

I applied because you will be there.

But supposing I hadnt got in, and you had? Where would have been the sense in that? You did a very dangerous thing, Ronny, because you tried to calculate how things would turn out in the future.

But I was right.

Supposing I were to die before then.

Here you are to imagine a short silence.

I love you, Maria.

And yet you know that I think you are very foolish. If you think you can control your life in this way, then why dont you find another girl, one who knows what you mean by those words.

This advice stung Ronny to what we in the trade refer to as the quick. However, he ignored it as usual.

When the bus reached the terminus, they performed a small ritual, as follows. Ronny asked Maria if he could walk her home, Maria refused, Maria descended from the bus, Ronny remained on it, and he then rode all the way back to school and beyond, for his home did not lie in the same direction as Marias, no. Accompanying Maria on her bus home involved for him a detour of some twenty-three miles, and the loss on a good day of some seventy-four minutes which could have been usefully spent on homework or on indulgence in pop-eyed sexual reverie. He would arrive home horrendously late, to a cold supper, to the wrath of his parents, to the scorn and taunts of his brothers and sisters. But he suffered all this gladly for Maria. So thats two clowns we have met already.