Caroline's Bikini
Caroline’s Bikini
An Arrangement of a Novel
with an Introduction
and Some Further Material
by
KIRSTY GUNN
For Pamela
Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Introduction
Ready
one
two
three
four
five
six
Steady
one
two
three
four
five
six
Go!
one
two
three
four
five
six
Finishing Lines
Some Further Material
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by the Author
Copyright
Introduction
There’s a quality of clear blue water contained in summer heat. It’s there in that phrase, ‘at last they came to the sea’, which I can imagine writing in some short story or other. Or in ‘she could smell the coolness of the swimming pool from where she stood at the edge of the grass’ … which could be a line from this novel. It’s a quality of refreshment, of relief. The idea of water, after the force of the sun, as salvation, restoration. Equilibrium regained, the story can go on.
In other sentences, too, there’s the same feeling, in ‘the river was a bright blue line run through a dry landscape’, say, or ‘the lake lay waiting for them, at the end of a long hot drive’. Or it’s even part of ‘the plastic hosepipe flicked beads of water against the grass’ – which almost certainly could have come out of another short story I’ve written, as well as that lovely lake. Refreshment again, you see? Relief. But more than anything, more than those other ideas, I might think now about that earlier phrase: ‘She could smell the coolness of the swimming pool from where she stood at the edge of the grass.’ Adding: ‘Though it wasn’t close, the pool, in her mind she seemed to inhabit it already in the long seconds before she walked into it and let its blue silks and depths cover her, let her be gone.’
Yes, I can see that. Imagine writing it. Along with details of that pool at the end of a garden, surrounded by a large area of pale grey slate. There’s a tree to one side in thick full leaf, like a painted tree; no wind stirs the branches in this flat, arched, midsummer heat.
So runs my introduction to what follows here, a body of water set in the midst of things. And in these pages, amongst the houses and gardens of West London laid out in sections and chapters, you will find it, in time, a particular pool, large and deep and well maintained. It’s there near a certain house which you’ll come to quite soon, which features, in many ways, at the heart of this story, and much later, should you choose to go there too, by the time you’ve come to the end of the ‘novel’ as I do see it – despite some discussion about that definition of fiction that features in various meetings that take place throughout Caroline’s Bikini – you’ll find some additional sections that you may also want to visit as part of your reading. In those appended pages, you’ll discover background information about the people in this book – and if you want to read more about them, which could be fun, well, there they are. There are also some notes in that part of the book about love stories and where they’ve come from and why this ‘novel’ which is about to follow – in one inevitable page after another – comes from a tradition that many regard as the largest kind of love story of all.
But let me not run away with myself.
For now, let’s get back to the idea of a house, a large garden and cool chlorinated water that’s somewhere near. It might be in a park, in a school, in a recreation area at the edge of a sports ground, or, in this story, set in a specific part of London where the streets are wide and the gardens expansive, just down the road. But either way, somewhere, in summer, there’s always a swimming pool. And here, for now, in someone’s garden, it’s happening, that pool …
It’s started. It’s starting now:
Ready.
Steady.
Go!
Ready …
one
‘Alright,’ I said. ‘I’ll try …’ ‘But I’ve never done this sort of thing before,’ is what I would have said next, I’m sure, as it still seems a strange kind of thing to do, be involved in this kind of writing, the sort of project that was being suggested to me by Evan now.
‘I really need you to write this story down for me, Nin,’ he was saying, in no uncertain terms, if I think about it fully. ‘Really, I do …’ – and yes, it did feel like a new kind of idea for me, this, a different sort of way to spend my time. It did. It felt new.
Because though, it’s true, I have published various pieces before – short stories, bits in books and essays and so on – I’ve never taken on someone else’s narrative, had that kind of a role. ‘Amanuensis’ they would have called it in the old days, and I’ve always loved that image of Milton with his daughters; the scene by the bed: the poet and those steady scribes of his, waiting for them to come in after a night of composition with his chunks of iambic pentameter at the ready and them being there to write it all down.* ‘Ghostwriter’, some people might say now. ‘Biographer’, maybe. Though neither of those terms are quite right, they’re not, for the kind of thing Evan Gordonston was asking me to do.
I’ve known Evan a long time. I’ve known all the Gordonstons actually, practically forever, well, for most of my life. My mother was great friends with Helen Gordonston, and I went to school with Felicity, Evan’s younger sister; his older sister, Elisabeth, went out briefly with my brother when they were in sixth form.
So … ‘forever’, yes, seems a pretty realistic description, in terms of giving the feeling of how long I’ve known Evan.† There was a massive time lapse, of course, between back then and now, when this story happens, because they all went off to live in America, the Gordonstons, when Tom, Evan’s handsome father, got transferred there for his job. Not that any of this is particularly relevant, but to provide some kind of context here is what I’m doing, I suppose. That Evan was not unknown to me, I mean, as one might think a person might be unknown to a ‘ghost-writer’, say, who was going to create a narrative from that person’s life, until they started work on the writing and got to find things out so that the person felt like a familiar … I already knew Evan.
So yes, ‘amanuensis’ could be a good word. I was closer to the subject than is usual in these things. Like one of Milton’s daughters, kind of, though the words Evan wanted me to write down, all about his unrequited love for the woman who would ‘change my life forever’, is how he first put it to me, from the moment he moved in as a lodger to her house in Richmond, were hardly the stuff of Paradise Lost.
Despite our close friendship, though, Evan himself was someone I’d lost touch with over the years. I had, I had lost touch, even though the family were still counted as friends by my own, with Christmas cards and calls and all of that. My mother, for example, had a summer with Helen on Cape Cod one year; my brother, when he was a postgraduate student in San Francisco, looked up Elisabeth; my father continued to send difficult crossword puzzles and books about highly evolved and researched kinds of modern history to Tom because that’s what they had always talked about – ‘I am fond of Tom,’ my father would say, ‘even though Helen and Margaret are the real friends’ – so we kept abreast of the Gordonstons. We did. Yet, the fact is that I personally hadn’t seen Evan through all that time he’d been away, or talked with him, or even emailed, not really, until he decided to come back to London to live, many, many years later. And, yes. He was like a
different person, then, in a way, because I hadn’t seen him since he was a boy,‡ and the one time I’d been to America he’d been on a posting in Japan and his mother told me then that he loved it there, in the States, and might not come back – so there was some correspondence that ensued from that remark, from that period in Evan’s life, between me and Felicity and what Felicity said about it … Even so, now, here we both were, the two of us grown up and old, and yes, of course, so different, in a way, but actually also completely the same. Because of the way our two families had always been, I suppose. All the keeping ‘abreast’.
So there he was, back in London the first time, before he came back, proper, I mean – this when he was still at the point of deciding whether he was going to make that very move, ‘back home’, as he put it to me in his new rather American way of saying things,§ though his voice in general sounded to me just the same when we were having that first gin and tonic, a drink we were going to find would serve as a sort of leitmotif set against the events and decisions that would unfold over the following months – and it was as though he’d never been gone. At that stage, he was only in town for a day or two; he was ‘putting out feelers’, was how he described it; the business of working out whether he could do the sort of things for some banking headhunting outfit he was working for that they wanted him to do. Though I shan’t even get started there – and can’t make any kind of that sort of background detail a part of all this.
For as I said to Evan when he first put the idea of this project to me: ‘Don’t expect me to have ONE IOTA’, I said, in capitals just like that, ‘of interest,’ I said, a kind of pun, given his line of work, ‘or put any time WHATSOEVER’, in capitals again, ‘into the writing of a backstory.’ Because establishing some kind of working life history/economic/financial context, or whatever … is NOT what I am going to do. ‘There’s not the faintest knowledge that I possess, Evan,’ is what I would have told him, ‘about banks and finance and the people who are employed at these kinds of places, that I can put to work here’ – this, despite the fact, as I said, that our family have known the Gordonstons for years and Tom was a banker, for goodness’ sake, so it should have been no surprise that his son would follow him into that line of work and how our two families got on, in a way, is anyone’s guess – though we did, there you are, we just did, our two families, the bankers and the writers, we were close, we still are, just ‘abreast’, so I suppose there might be some kind of understanding in this strange account about how that other life runs along invisibly under this one, of the world and its worldly ways, after all.
I write – a bit more information may be needed here, writing is in the family – book reviews. Fiction, non-fiction, the literary end of things I suppose you could say. My father and mother are both academics, historians, and they write, and my brother, who went out with Elisabeth Gordonston and is also an historian, writes big commercial books about Soviet Russia. Along with the reviews, I myself try to write short stories, and sometimes they sell. There was a collection came out several years ago; there was another. And I get something published in a magazine here and there, or something goes on to the radio, maybe, but I keep writing the reviews in the meantime. There’s also some other work I have, with a sculpture workshop in East London – I go over there, what? About once every couple of weeks, and write catalogue copy and promotional stuff, and I work on the front desk – and there’s some copywriting, too, for a small ad agency, that my friend Marjorie who’s very successful at that sort of thing organised for me ages ago because goodness knows I need the money, though I am not very expert at it because you have to write the kind of copy, Marjorie tells me, ‘that sells’ and mine goes off a bit, it tends to, on a whim. Anyhow, I am diverting, because, yes, Evan was right. I could work on this project he was suggesting to me in quite definitive terms. I could. For I imagine novels, I imagine them all the time, planning these stories that no one would be interested in, as I do realise, and my publishers say the same, so having a subject in this case that was not limited to my own imaginative outline, but was someone else’s story … Well, maybe Evan was not so very ‘out of the ball park’, as he might, in his American way, say, suggesting it to me after all.
‘Listen,’ I’d said to him, a couple of weeks earlier, and in a way I might think of the story, proper, beginning here. ‘I have an idea.’
We’d met at the pub at the end of my road, which is right by the tube, because Evan was in a bit of a rush on that first trip back to London when he was ‘putting out feelers’, as he described it, and had just come over for one night and was running around interviewing with various companies, I think, or organising how it would work for him at the London branch of his New York office.
‘When you move back to London,’ I said to him then, at my local, ‘it will take time. Time to get to know people again, to find your feet. To settle in. London takes time, to do all that when you’ve been away; it’s not the same city that you left. But,’ I added, ‘you’ll be fine. And here’s what I suggest you do: A friend of a friend of mine has a big and rather stunning, so I understand, house, in Richmond. I don’t know her – the friend, I mean, Rosie’s friend – but Rosie told me she has lodgers and that it’s quite a fun scene there. That’s a quote, by the way: that it’s a “fun scene”,’ I said. ‘I’m quoting Rosie talking about her friend; it’s how the friend and Rosie both describe things there. I think it means there are lots of parties,’ I continued, ‘but I also think it means that it’s a relaxed place to live. There are children, three boys, but they are well behaved and relaxed, too, if you know what I mean. There’s none of that crazy homework-scheduling-tiger-mother stuff going on and the friend is relaxed and glamorous and loves meeting people. Rosie knows all this,’ I said, ‘because she is moving out of London and was thinking for a while that she might be a lodger there herself – have a room and then be able to afford to rent in the country and have a studio nearby …’ I was talking this way, rambling, as though Evan knew Rosie, which he didn’t, though he may well have known people she knew.¶ ‘She said,’ I continued, ‘“This friend of mine has lodgers and it’s a ‘fun scene’.” Because I know, yes I know …’ I continued, ‘one always thinks that being a lodger …’
‘Yeah,’ Evan interrupted. ‘Exactly.’
Because of course everyone does know that when one thinks of being a lodger one can’t imagine anything close to being involved in a ‘fun scene’. In fact, the opposite is the case, that lodging is not a ‘fun scene’ at all but a rather more lonely, cut-off kind of human condition. A scene of being somewhat removed from the society one inhabits, actually, crouched and perching at the edge of other people’s lives, inhabiting a corner of their home but not fully living there with them; as though one may have a job and even friends but that when one returns at night to those ‘lodgings’ one is, in fact, remote from that rich network of connections.
‘Yeah.’
So the lodger comes in to a family that is not his own family, quietly taking himself upstairs while below in the kitchen happy times rage on without him; he goes upstairs quietly; to his room, to his single bed.
No wonder, then, that Evan said that ‘yeah’. No wonder, I thought.
What we didn’t know though, Evan and I, what we weren’t close to knowing when we first discussed his possible living arrangements that night in The Cork and Bottle, over what would become our ‘signature drink’, a gin and tonic of various brands and strengths and volume, was that it would lead, one day, to me writing these words, Evan on the phone, constantly, it seemed, to ask how I was getting on, now that he’d tasked me with and I’d accepted the job of writing it all down, the story of what was to happen with him in Richmond. Because who would have known? Who could have? That my saying those words, casually, actually, about lodging, would eventuate in a love affair, a large, large love that, in a way, looking at literature past, is represented by one of the most expansive and intricate forms of the romance genre|| and expresses mor
e than any other type of writing a commitment to that love by way of a review of a life in all its important and absorbing but meaningless details. We didn’t come close, as I was talking Evan into an arrangement that he would eventually make, having met with Rosie first, the three of us, to discuss it in full, and Rosie making the requisite phone calls to get the process started, to knowing that this talk of lodging was to be the beginning of something, a narration, a process towards a story that would happen in such a strange, invisible kind of way that many people might think nothing much was even happening at all.
‘Alright,’ I’d said, remember? After having had that first conversation with Evan about an idea that came from my old friend Rosie that in turn became the beginning of the next conversation and the next that all led, from hearing about their house in Richmond, to the Beresfords, to Caroline Beresford … It’s where this story first began.
* As mentioned in the ‘Introduction’, there are some ideas for further reading at the back of this book, in the section marked ‘Some Further Material’. This includes various bits of quite interesting information about the context of Caroline’s Bikini, how it might, if you like, fit – though that sounds like a pun! – the shape of other literary pursuits. When you’ve finished reading the actual story you might want to look at the section on ‘Narrative Construction’, for example, which details the set-up of the ‘project’, as the narrator refers to it here. See how you feel when you’ve got to the end.
† And here I am again, you see, referring to those notes at the back – but really, there’s no need to read the section, ‘Personal History’, until later. All the ‘Further Material’ speaks back to the story anyhow, as you’ll see in time. So from now on I’ll simply just refer to the sections by their titles on the pages here.