Caroline's Bikini Read online

  ‡ More of that ‘Personal History’ later – for there is lots of information in the notes about the writer’s family and neighbours, friends, her childhood spent with Evan’s family, etc.

  § And in that same section you’ll find remarks about Evan’s patterns of speech following time spent in America, along with other notes of personal interest relating to the London society of Caroline’s Bikini.

  ¶ As before, see that ‘Personal History’ section – with particular regard to the network of friends under the heading ‘Personal Social History’.

  || ‘Narrative Construction’ will give you more to think about later, including the section marked ‘Literary Background and Context’, but no need to get into all the intricacies of this now.

  two

  There are notes Evan supplied me with, when he told me that at first he’d been planning to write, himself, about the whole thing – coming back to London, going to live in Richmond, realising that something in his life was starting, something important, something that felt ‘big’ as he put it – this, before he thought it would be better if I could be involved and so on, be the one who would ‘get the story down’ as he later described my role to me, when he had relinquished the idea of being the actual writer in favour of focusing on his actions as participant in the whole affair.

  The first set of papers were delivered to me by bicycle messenger the day after he’d confessed that he was not only in love with Caroline Beresford, but so in love that he could no longer think about anything else, couldn’t eat properly, wasn’t sleeping regularly. In other words, as he’d remarked upon, himself, he was showing all the symptoms of someone who is really almost beside himself with romantic feeling, is almost out of control with it, who has been struck, as the ancients would have it,* by fate as though by a dart from Cupid’s bow. Petrarch comes to mind in all this, his love for Laura, and Dante was similar, there was Beatrice in his case, both of them forerunners for a cultural phenomenon that ran rife through the early world, right through the Renaissance and beyond, right up to a toothpaste commercial in the early eighties having a similar kind of conceit: one bright white smile from a pretty girl and the boy on the bicycle is hurled off it, flat on his face.† So, yes, was Evan also hurled. He had told me, and it was like a confession, a few weeks before.

  It had been a wintry morning, a Monday, and I remember thinking how odd it was that Evan had called so early to suggest we meet for coffee at a place he said was really nice, out in Richmond, on the outskirts there. I remember asking if it couldn’t be somewhere a little more central, that it would be easier for me to get to, that it would be quicker to get back home afterwards, too – I had a book review for one of the big papers I needed to finish and it was important; I didn’t want to mess them around by filing it late.‡ And I also remember thinking how strange it was – a Monday morning and that Evan wasn’t at work.

  ‘But please,’ he said. ‘It’s important, the Richmond part. Please come out here to the area where I now live and lodge. It’s an important part of what I have to tell you, Nin. Richmond, you know. It has a role.’

  Nin this, Nin that. I’ve always been Nin to Evan though everyone else calls me Emily, as I was christened but don’t necessarily prefer. That’s Evan Gordonston for you, right there: sticking to a childhood name because that’s what he’d first called me when we met and I was four.

  ‘It has a role,’ I said to him then, ‘because that’s where you now live, sorry, “lodge”. It has a role because it’s Richmond. It’s not important, Evan, for any other reason but for the fact that it’s where Caroline Beresford lives. Yes, I’ll come out there,’ I said. ‘I’ll need to take the District Line, or perhaps there’s a bus. But don’t think for one moment I don’t know precisely why you’re asking me. You want to give me backdrop. You want to set it in context, all the stuff you’ve been telling me about this woman who lives there. I haven’t told Rosie, by the way, like you asked me to and I won’t tell her. The whole thing is kind of out of control,’ I said. ‘But yes, alright. Though I feel like I know everything there is to know about the set-up there already, I’ll come to Richmond anyhow, your cafe on the outskirts.’

  It’s true, I did feel like that because, before the big confession, bit by bit, Evan had told me, it seemed, everything, about him and ‘where’ he was ‘at’, as he put it, with Caroline Beresford. When we were children it was always like that, too. I remember from back then how he could never keep anything to himself but had to let me know straight away: his eighth birthday party when his mother said he could take seven friends to Thorpe Park as a surprise and we wouldn’t know until we got there, only of course I did§; the time he rescued a kitten from a skip and was going to keep it in his wardrobe until he could find a good home and no one was to know, only I did, and told him he would need to tell his parents about the kitten right then and there if it was to stay; there were various gifts and outings I wasn’t ever supposed to know about, but did; the list goes on. Now he was an adult and back in London again he’d been keeping me in these same old loops: ‘I’m taking colleagues to Nobu for a dinner party next Thursday and the chef there is going to cook the whole thing right at the table and I want you to come as my partner, Nin, but you’re not to say a word because none of them have the slightest idea …’ And then announcing it to everyone at the outset, etc., etc…. That kind of thing. Before he fell in love with Caroline, this is, before he’d met her. ‘I have bought your birthday present ten months in advance’ was another example, this just two days after he’d arrived back in London and the first time he and I had seen each other after a gap of … goodness knows how many years but there it was, he had reverted to his childhood habit of impulsive gift buying for Christmas or birthdays, but always telling me well beforehand what it was. So, ‘I have bought a certain kind of shoe for you, Nin, that I think you’ll enjoy,’ he’d told me, ‘in a strange and interesting colour. I am letting you know now because I am guessing how pleased you’ll be with them when your birthday comes along.’ So, too, then, of course I knew everything about him falling in love with Caroline Beresford. I knew everything about that.

  Is it the sort of thing that can often happen to a lodger, I wonder? To a lonely person, coming and going, with a life on the periphery, somehow, with a job that is not so compelling as to make that person want to commit to a flat or house of their own; or otherwise so demanding and isolating that one never has the opportunity to go looking for a home, there’s always too much work to do, and so who is stuck on the lodger-ladder; always outside looking in? I do wonder. For Evan was vulnerable to both sets of circumstances those first few weeks when he was back in London after living in the States for so long. He had me, but I was about all he had. The other friends from all those years ago had pretty much faded away, married, had families and moved to the country, or even further, to Scotland or to Wales, prompted by a feeling that London had become too impossibly expensive nowadays, turned over to the super-rich and no longer that much fun, or for similar reasons they had simply changed, moved into different lives.¶ And even I had my responsibilities, on that front, in order to meet the financial pressure of living in the Capital, the need to constantly keep up with the work for the gallery and the ad campaigns, along with the occasional writing of the short stories and so on, coming up with ideas for novels and having unproductive meetings with my publishers – so though I was always at the end of the phone, an email or a text, Evan must have still felt how he didn’t have a whole load of people to spend time with – and on top of that, other friends my friends knew, though also friends of mine, might not be so easy to get to know. There was Rosie now, for example, away in the countryside, and unlikely to come into town; and another friend, Christopher, had become involved with local politics and a creepy right-wing organisation that had strong opinions about tree felling and street cleaning, important issues both but I felt uncomfortable about the way his politics seemed to be bending around them and knew they would dista
nce him from Evan. There was my other friend, Marjorie, but she was a bit like me, always writing – though in her case it was copy for a pet food giant that kept her chained to impossible deadlines that she couldn’t afford to break because they paid the mortgage on her extremely pretty one-bedroom flat in Chelsea – so I barely saw her at all, let alone would manage to plan a get-together with her and me and Evan and other people. It was always dogs and cats and the spillover work that also came my way when there was a rush on, and it seemed there was always a rush.

  So yes, Evan was alone a good deal of the time. He could meet friends through work, no doubt – though are friends from work true friends? Especially in that kind of work Evan was involved with? That cut-throat world of finance and manipulation, could there be real associates there who might become intimates? I am not so sure. And yes, he would have met people in his general day-to-day dealings in the way all of us do so meet – the shopkeeper at the end of the road, the dry-cleaner, and in my case the postman, with whom I have a great deal of contact due to my job|| – but in general he was a man quietly coming into a family home in Richmond at the end of his working day, hearing the cheer going on in the kitchen, that happy chaos of family life, as I may write it, which sounds like a cliche but actually isn’t, and going straight upstairs, silent as a silent brown mouse, lonely and afraid, up to his lonely room at the top of the house where he lodged alone.

  Because, I write it, he was afraid. Afraid of the feelings of his own large heart. From the first moment he’d met Caroline, from the moment he’d heard her voice, even, on the phone when he’d called the number Rosie had given me to pass on to him, a charge had been set, a switch turned. She’d said, ‘Oh, hi! You’re Evan! Yes, I’ve been expecting you …’ – and something caught, he told me, his breath, the beat of his heart. He’d faltered, ‘I …’ – but she’d simply, smoothly said, in that voice of hers, ‘Come on by to the house when it suits you. After work sometime? I am always in. I never go anywhere’ – which was actually just a great big charming lie because women like Caroline are never ‘always in’ but are out all the time, they can’t help it. People like Caroline Beresford are the kind of person everyone wants to see.

  That changed, of course. As I found out. As the weeks went by, and the story grew. As the first days of Evan moving to Richmond became many, many days and then weeks and a season changed, and another, Caroline would find herself staying around the house more and more; evenings, daytime, parts of the weekend … Stories change, they move on. It’s what makes them stories.

  ‘I keep seeing Caroline around the house and it’s hard not to think about her,’ Evan told me, when it was clear by his appearance that he was deep, deep in love.** ‘She says, “Hi, do you feel like a coffee? Come into the kitchen” – and that’s that. I have to go in there and be with her. I must try and drink the coffee. Act normal around her. Oh, Nin. I must try.’

  So there, the combination then, of Evan’s vulnerability, fresh back to London after years away, and the lovely ease, the grace, of Caroline … was how things started for him, I know. And, in his way of things, he started telling me about her straight away, bit by bit, but it all came out over gin and tonics at various pubs and bars, in so many respects the story formed entire over the underpinning of that particular kind of cocktail, with Tanqueray or Gordon’s or Bombay Sapphire or Sipsmith’s or any number of the branded and unbranded gins and their accompanying designer tonics that now load the shelves and mirrored bars of West London and beyond, indicating from the first time he told me about her the depth of his love; each one after another, the glasses lining up, and many of them doubles, with crisps, or set against a bowl of nuts.

  He’d gone along to meet Caroline, as she’d suggested on the phone, after he’d rung the number Rosie had texted me to give him. ‘He’ll have a great time there,’ she’d said to me, after I’d told her he had called. It was to be a ‘fun scene’ after all, remember, that she’d described? Rosie knew Richmond well, she’d grown up there – and no, it wasn’t Chelsea or Notting Hill or Knightsbridge, where Evan could have so easily landed, courtesy of that fancy firm of his, but it was lovely Richmond nevertheless with an elegant house there of much coming and going, of parties and drinks and get-togethers and suppers. And already, as I have mentioned, something in Evan had been … prepared. By the sound of Caroline. By her intake of breath. By her voice. The tone of her voice. He chose a Thursday evening, to go there, to take the District Line to Richmond. It was in the early winter; he’d been back in London for a week. There was no snow but it was bitterly cold.

  At that point, his suitcases not yet unpacked, if you like, he was living at the Connaught, if you believe it – I repeat: this is what these finance companies are like. He was larking about in a junior suite there, on the first floor of the hotel facing towards the front, with a little sitting area, and a dining table and four chairs. Evan would order in Chinese food, for those first few days of his ‘homecoming’ as I put it, and we ate spicy prawns with noodles, looking out over Carlos Place and drinking Chinese beer, me feeling so damn glamorous, myself, all because of his weird job and the way these companies ‘put’ their employees ‘up’. Anyway, it must have been no more than a week of that, when he left his rooms there to get first a taxi, then, because of traffic, the District Line, out to Richmond, to that ‘fun scene’, and one of the children had answered the door, the youngest boy, Freddie, ‘who is twelve’, Evan told me, but Caroline came right up behind him and extended her hand. ‘Hi, I’m Caroline,’ she’d said. And – BANG.††

  She was wearing – in my mind she wears it still – a white T-shirt and one of those skirts you pull around yourself and tie up and they look amazing. She was tall, Caroline is tall, and she was just wearing that, the skirt and the T-shirt and with bare feet and long tanned legs, though it was January. She didn’t even have a cardigan on.

  ‘Come in,’ she said to Evan and he stepped into the hall.

  The scent, the scent of that house, of Caroline herself, was like oranges, he said later. The whole house full of that kind of deliciousness. Oranges. Orange trees. Orange blossom. Summer in winter, fruitfulness in the dark and cold. Evan walked in the front door of the house in Richmond and, well, I’m writing it down now, it was there in his own writing, in some of the early notes, his ‘life changed’.

  ‘OK,’ I said to him, this after the first set of notes had been sent, when my involvement in the project had already arisen as an issue between us. ‘So just suppose I say, yes, that I’ll get the whole thing down in an overall draft, all of it, how it started, even the oranges. How her holding out her hand to you to say “hi” was the beginning of some kind of … big thing, I suppose, is how we might describe it. Let’s just suppose …’

  ‘Yes,’ Evan said, and I want to write ‘eagerly’ – though I hate the laziness of adverbs, but adverbial was how he was being, rather, the night he actually proposed I write the story for him, the story of his love, all his little gestures so attentive and desperate and wild. Like in the way he’d said, ‘Nin, Nin, Nin, you’ve GOT to do this for me. Please. I’ve never asked you for anything like this before—’ when he’d first brought it up, the idea of a kind of literary project we might work on together.

  ‘“Anything like this?”’ I said to him, quoting him back at himself. ‘You’ve not asked me to do anything for you in the past, altogether. We’ve not seen each other for decades, Evan. So “Nin”, yourself,’ I said. ‘You don’t need to be so dramatic and rhetorical about it. We haven’t seen each other for, approximately, all of our adult life, so I need to get a handle on this, a grip. It sounds interesting but … I don’t know, Evan. If I’m up to it, I mean. Writing it down, getting it down right, having you in there, getting Caroline in …’

  ‘Oh, you will. You will. You’ll make it all come together,’ he replied. ‘Just say you will, Nin. Please. Say.’

  ‘Say this, say that,’ I murmured, in the manner of a sage or a wise old man. The pub was
cold. It was always cold in The Cork and Bottle and I was starting to think perhaps we should go somewhere else.

  But for now, ‘Let’s have another gin and tonic,’ I said.

  * There’s that concept of being felled by love’s arrow, and so on – and there is much of that kind of information at the back of this book, as well as metaphors and practices of a formal romantic tradition under the heading ‘Courtly Love’.

  † See also the notes on Petrarch and Dante in ‘Literary Background and Context’.

  ‡ Book reviewing is one aspect of an author’s life. There’s more in ‘Personal History’ about this: freelance writing, perilous and interesting.

  § ‘Personal History’ contains a sample of the sorts of outings and activities the narrator and protagonist used to be involved in together when they were children, practical and creative activities encouraged by their mothers, who were both good friends and influential in the upbringing of each other’s children.

  ¶ More ‘Personal History’ for later, perhaps, especially the section entitled ‘Old London’?

  || In ‘Personal History’ we learn more about the kinds of people one may meet regularly when one lives alone and as a freelance writer.

  ** People often do look different when they have fallen in love, for better or for worse. In Evan’s case his appearance followed the trajectory of an early Renaissance lover; from the moment he was struck by the appearance of his beloved he started to lose his looks. See, later: ‘Courtly Love’.

  †† Note the use of those capital letters – BANG – and the use of space following the appearance of the word, the fact that further text does not follow on from it but that the word sits out alone. This is worth a footnote, alright. Again, that word, its presentation, its dramatic appearance following the dash … All denote a marked and singular event on the page. See, if interested and later, the note for ‘Courtly Love’ for further information regarding that BANG, as well as other relevant material, notes on Petrarch and Dante, all of it. The ‘all’ of the story seeming to occur – the BANG, the recognition of emotion, the sense of pain – at the same time, in that second of the sighting, like an arrow as they used to write it, Cupid’s dart, in that first smarting glance, the look of love. These details most important. So, BANG. Yes. It is a good word for what’s happened here.