Bitter Coffee
A series of interconnected short stories from my 2018 collection "Degrees of Separation"
Bitter Coffee
(December 2016)
“Look, I’m going away for a few days after Christmas so I won’t be around.”
They were studying the dessert menus, trying to decide if they wanted another course or not. It was almost ritualistic, both of them knowing they’d had enough to eat and would settle for just coffee to round off the meal. It seemed as good a time as any to broach the subject.
“Oh? Where are you going?”
“I’ve found a little place up in the dales, on the edge of Cumbria. I’m sure it will be cold and damp and the weather will be awful.”
“So why are you going if it will be so miserable?”
“I don’t know,” he said with the tone of a man who knew perfectly well why he was going.
“I’m sure you do, David,” the younger man said with a slight wave of the menu he held in his left hand. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who knows as much about themselves as you do.”
David laughed, just a little.
“Occupational hazard,” he suggested.
A waiter, having misconstrued Christoph’s gesture with the menu as a summons, appeared, notebook at the ready. Christoph looked to David, inviting the first commitment.
“Just coffee for me please - even though I know the desserts are brilliant.”
“The same for me.”
They had eaten there often enough over the past two years or so to know the menu inside and out, and to be able to speak to the quality of almost everything on it - and the desserts were consistently superb. Had he tried to think about when they had given up eating them, David may well have struggled to be definitive. Christoph would have been the better person to ask however; all their meals were expensed and Christoph had the records.
“So?” Christoph prompted.
David wasn’t really in the mood for the interrogation he knew was inevitable; inevitable from the moment he decided on the trip to Hawes and, thus, the need to break the news to Christoph.
“I’m sorry I’ve nothing for you, Chris,” he said, changing tack. “The last thing I tried was complete rubbish. And there have been one or two other beginnings that I haven’t dared show you they’re so bad. I thought that as my mojo seemed to have gone away on holiday, I might as well try the same cure.”
“I’m not sure I believe that, if I’m completely honest.”
“Which part?”
“The part about your mojo.”
David smiled as he lifted the remnants of his wine to his lips.
“That’s because you don’t want to believe it.”
There was a sudden peel of laughter from a nearby table that diverted their attention for a moment. The interruption was good, David felt; disrupting a certain momentum that their conversation was in danger of building.
“Who knows,” he suggested, “I may just find something I want to write about while I’m walking the desolate moors…!”
“You’re not Charlotte Bronte.”
“More’s the pity, eh? Anyway, I think you should just go home. Go back to Basel for Christmas and enjoy yourself. I’ll be in touch when I get back from Hawes. Let you know if anything magical has happened. You don’t need to hang around here to hand-hold me.”
As soon as he said it, David realised the inappropriateness of the phrase. Of course that was exactly why Christoph wanted to be there, to hand-hold him. He had made that plain on more than one occasion.
“If I’m honest, I’m also worried,” David pushed on, jumping into unplanned territory in order to cover his hand-holding faut pas. “Have you even considered the possibility that my first book was just a fluke? That I might be a ‘one-hit-wonder’, and that you’re actually wasting your time - not to mention your money - on hoping there’s a follow-up coming?”
“I have never considered that at all,” Christoph said in a somewhat flat and dismissive tone, “because the person who wrote ‘An Impossible Dilemma’ couldn’t be a ‘one-hit-wonder’, as you call it. Because that person had so much to say. It was evident on every single page.”
“You are - as ever - too kind, Chris. But I fear you may be mistaken. I’m not one of your bright young things fresh out of school or college or wherever; someone who needs a helping hand - some helping cash - to get them on their feet. Compared to them I’m just an old man.” He wanted to make himself less appealing, but without going too far. “I know we’ve talked about this before, but I simply don’t need your assistance in that way. And before you say anything, I know your help is now limited to incidentals; meals like this, funding for the odd research trip, materials, whatever. But even that…”
It was a sore point, David knew that. He also knew that, where he was concerned, Christoph had struggled to keep the commercial and emotional separated. Struggled and failed. He had seen him in action with others; friend and patron one day, the next… In many ways he would have preferred such a stark transaction. It would have been cleaner, antiseptic. But Christoph had invested too much in him emotionally, and David knew that both were probably bad bets; at least one of them would certainly fail to bring him any reward. The image of a gambling addict came to mind; someone who couldn’t help themselves but to chase losers, throw good money after bad. There might be a story there if he worked on it.
The coffee arrived; one large, heavy silver pot, plus a pot of cream and a small plate of amaretti.
“Elegant, as ever,” David observed. It was a comment that could equally have been directed towards Christoph as to the coffee.
“What will you do when you go away to this miserable place after Christmas?” Christoph asked, a jarring note in his voice.
“Apart from trying to write?” David poured some coffee into both cups leaving himself space for cream. “Walk. Remind myself what nature looks like in that part of the world. Reconnect with something, hopefully. Try and keep warm!”
Christoph shook his head and looked down at his coffee.
David had history with that part of the world; history before he met Chris and fallen in to the universe of book-writing which he found consistently alien. His history in the Dales was with Diane and he needed his Swiss friend not to forget that. It was a way-marker that should have told Christoph the emotional path he was trying to navigate was a dead-end, overgrown, going nowhere. Might it have been otherwise once upon a time? David didn’t know. It was a question he didn’t want to try and answer.
“We used to spend most of our holidays there,” he carried on, hoping that the reference to ‘we’ would be sufficient. “Used to walk for miles and miles, often in atrocious weather.” He laughed as if recalling a memory, but it was hollow and false and just for show. “I daresay I couldn’t walk as far these days.”
“You could come back to Basel,” Christoph suggested, “where it will be properly winter, not this awful, damp and dark imposter you English so adore!” He didn’t try to disguise his distaste for the prospect, suddenly glad that David had forced him to make up his mind to go home. In that moment Basel seemed transformed into a sanctuary; as much as he loved England, he found it depressing. He knew he only kept coming back to see David. “We could go walking in the mountains; proper walking. See things you have never seen before. Walk the Rhine perhaps, or go skiing in Interlaken.”
David could tell that there was as much enthusiasm behind Christoph’s offer as there had been in the shallow laugh he had used to accompany his comments about walking in the rain. It felt as if they had crossed some kind of threshold bizarrely coinciding with the arrival of the coffee. He picked up his cup and sipped. It was dark and bitter, even with the cream. The emptiness of Christoph’s offer gave him a chance to press the wedge home just a little further. He could have said ‘yes’; said he would go to Basel, and the younger man would suddenly be energised, enthusiastic, move into planning mode. Whilst that would have been an easy option - and in many ways an attractive prospect - it would also have been dishonest, and David had no desire to prolong any dishonesty.
“Why don’t we do this,” he started teasing out the words, trying to arrive back at the decision he had already made in such a way as to allow it to be a joint one, an agreement. “Why don’t we catch up after I come back from my miserable, cold, depressing time in the Dales - once I have recovered from the pneumonia I will undoubtedly catch! - and see where I’ve got to. If I find that I have something that I think is good enough, that there is something I’ve started working on that could be worthy of you and your father’s continued faith in me, then fine. I will instantly come out to Basel. If not, then I really think, Chris, that it doesn’t make any sense in you wasting your time and money on me any more. I really don’t. I know that this is all to my disadvantage, but it just feels fair - and I respect you too much to be unfair to you.”
He partly meant this and partly something else, of course. There was an underlying subtext. David had delivered his statement knowing that Christoph would be able to read between his very broad lines; to know that he wanted him to accept that his own hopes and ambitions were unlikely to be fulfilled, and move on too.
“And because you are an old man who doesn’t really need our help?”
The reference to earlier in the conversation stung David a little. He was surprised.
“Money, no. But if I do manage to start on something that may indeed be worthy as a follow up to ‘Dilemma’ then I can’t think of anyone else whose help I would rather welcome.”
David left it there, an olive branch. He wanted to ensure there was as much of a distinction between money and help as there was between the two men themselves. He had never denied himself the somewhat bizarre luxury of knowing that Christoph appreciated him both as a writer and a man. It was flattering, and as a man nearly in his fifties, flattery was hard enough to come by.
He watched as Christoph nodded slowly then raised his coffee and drained it in a single gulp. It was an unusual gesture for someone who tended to savour such things, but David took it as a signal that he had, for the want of a better term, ‘a deal’. He smiled and rose.
“Just popping to the gents.”
He wasn’t sure that he needed to go, but felt the separation provided a timely bookend to their conversation. There was no need for it to drag on any longer than necessary, and the last thing he wanted was to give Christoph a way back in, the chance to muster counter arguments. David knew himself to be a weak man, and, had Christoph tried really hard, he might find himself capitulating - which could only mean that he would have to re-engineer the conversation at some point in the future.
When he returned to the table Christoph’s chair was vacant. The waiter sidled over.
“Your friend has settled the bill, Sir. He said he’d had a call and needed to go but that he would speak to you after Christmas.”
“Thank you,” said David, not bothering to take his own seat, rather pulling his jacket from where it hung over the back of the chair, “that sounds about right.”
The street light on the other side of the road flickered uncertainly and David shivered against the sudden cold. It seemed strangely quiet, even for a midweek. A taxi went by, ‘For Hire’ light extinguished but devoid of passengers. From somewhere he could hear the distorted beat of music sounding momentarily louder as someone opened a door to go in or come out.
He paused. His favourite pub was a few hundred yards to the right; a similar distance to the left, the entrance to the car park where he had left his car. He weighed up his options, but there was ever only going to be one outcome this evening. Turning up the collar of his jacket, he tried to sink within its fabric, shrugged imperceptibly, and turned left.
For links on where to buy Degrees of Separation, click here.