Caroline's Bikini Page 3

  three

  The notes Evan passed me, three weeks after that meeting, that were to be ‘background reading and research’ were, I have to say, inadequate. I’m going to insert some of them here, as I told him I would, as part of this book – which I wasn’t expecting to do, as I’d thought with the big corporate job, and so on, his position with the Beresfords, he would want to be invisible, kind of – though I do remember that he’d had the notion, too, at the beginning of the affair, that he was going to write ‘the whole damn thing’ himself, so actually perhaps he didn’t want to be so invisible after all. Even so, with me ‘attached’ to the project, as they say in the film business, and lending distance in that way, I would have thought I might, by changing some names here and there, be inclined towards protecting him to some degree. Isn’t that what always happens in novels? That one protects the fact by using fiction? At one point, for sure, I did consider switching location – moving the whole locus amoenus as it were, to South London, say, or to Australia or Texas or the North Island of New Zealand, somewhere where they get a bit more sun – especially for the whole part towards the end that involves a swimming pool, watersports, a bikini, etc.

  But no, Evan said, ‘I want to be in it, Nin – the entire story, with my full name and all my feelings on show’, and, as I say, I thought, well alright, ‘background reading and research’ after all, and so here are some of the notes now, that he made, though to my mind there’s not enough story in them and too much of Evan, and to that extent I know for a novel they won’t really do:

  ‘About six weeks ago,’ Evan wrote, ‘I moved back to London, to an area some people might describe as suburban. I use that term “suburban” quite definitely – because London doesn’t think of itself as a metropolis with suburbs – though we may read articles in magazines about the various areas being village-y or whatever; still, no one talks much about Richmond, say, as a suburb, in the way that people talk about “out in the’ burbs” in New York. It’s just a term we don’t use. In other places where I’ve lived – New York, Tokyo, for a bit, Chicago – you get suburbs in these places i.e.: –’

  At this point, when I read that ‘i.e.’ I thought, O-ho, we’re in trouble here, Evan! No one is going to want to read a narrative of yours in this kind of condition. You don’t see an ‘i.e.’ in an ad, or in a short story, you just don’t, or in any of the kind of writing for that matter about which I think of myself as having some kind of knowledge, and you certainly wouldn’t see it in a love story, or romance, which is what you want to create here, Evan, is it not? Still, I let him continue for now.

  ‘That notion of the big city’, he carried on, in his terrible scrawl, ‘holding itself to itself and the rest of the outside clinging on for dear life to the periphery of it, to the concept of “big city”, getting “into town” to go to dinner or a show … is not a London notion. No. London suburbs have not been thought of in those terms. Yet I have found there ARE places here like that, after all, that are indeed suburban in appearance and nature, in … lifestyle. For it is “lifestyle” I am getting at here, and when my dearest and oldest friend, Emily Stuart, told me about her friend Rosie having a friend who had a big house out in Richmond, and that this friend of a friend took in lodgers, because there was loads of space, when the friend of a friend, as it were, told my friend that she had a room available, in that house, and that it was, as she put it, a “fun scene” living there … I thought it seemed like a sensible thing to consider it, that the arrangement might take care of things while I was getting settled, moving back to London after so many years away.

  ‘Actually,’ he continued, ‘it was quite a strange thing to do. The company would have put me up somewhere much more central until I got sorted out, I could have gone anywhere. But something in me went “ping!” when the lodger idea was suggested. My own belief is that it was the intervention of fate.’

  I loved the ‘ping’. I said to Evan, ‘I loved that “ping!” of yours, in your notes. I loved the way you let yourself go a bit, with it, but’ – this all in The Cork and Bottle, some two weeks or so after I’d started working on his story – ‘I have to tell you …’ And I looked at him quite severely then, ‘I do have to tell you, Evan, that we’re going to go steady on the “fate” and “myth” side of things. It’s too much. It’s too rich. It will put people off.’

  For yes, we were back in my local. It seemed, despite my various pretty much unexpressed ideas about alternative venues, we couldn’t manage other kinds of meetings. We’d reverted, Evan and I had, we had, straight away, as mentioned before, to old methods of behaviour, our old ways and habits. Not that we went to pubs back then, of course, when we were children, only that we’d always had a tendency to repeat activities, play the same sorts of games, over and over, and so on, have certain places we’d meet up at, plans we’d make that we’d stick to, day after day the same. Weeks of going over to his house, say, and Helen leaving out a certain sort of tea. Or after school every day for about a year visiting the V & A to look at the Renaissance rooms, then drawing the grand contents up in detail in special notebooks that we had. Or else my mother said we could use her garden room as a studio, and we had six months of growing tomatoes there and then painting murals of them on the walls.* We liked the familiar in that way. And it wasn’t for want of trying, now, either, to be different. There had been that early morning meeting in a cafe, when the project first began, out on the outskirts of Richmond, when Evan had wanted me to go there for ‘context’.† Not that Evan ever suggested going there again, but he often talked about a lunch, that I could go into Mayfair and meet him near where he worked and we could go to some fancy place there and talk and make notes about what we were calling by then ‘our project’, not novel, not then, and have three courses and the company would pay. He was always saying we could do that. But I always seemed to have some writing deadline or whatever – the gallery needed me for a catalogue, there was a pet food campaign Marjorie had passed on to me – and anyway, I had nothing pretty to wear. That night in the Cork I was just wearing my usual old jeans and a flannel shirt and that was fine, but you go into the West End and everyone looks amazing. They’ ve got the hair, the tailored outfits. The bags. And yes, I own a dress, or two, a skirt, but I never seem to wear any of that kind of clothing, just the shirts and the jeans, so what was the point, really, of changing what was familiar?

  ‘Let’s just meet over here,’ I said to Evan instead, meaning this part of town, just to be local, and he always came. I could make him supper at home, for that matter, I thought, though may not have said, back in the beginning,‡ because really, with all we had to discuss there was no need for another kind of fancy lunch, or we could go out for supper somewhere nearby – all these alternative plans Evan and I often had. But in the end we just found our routine and kept to it. There was that leitmotif of the gin I’ve mentioned. Those crisps or nuts. No need to do any of those other things, then, when we had our habits that we were used to. So instead of doing anything out of the ordinary, I would just meet Evan off the tube after work, the one down at the end of my road, and there he was, that second of his familiar, familiar presence, taking shape out of the crowd that rose up the steps before me, his lovely breaking smile, ‘Hey!’ like he’d never expected to see me only there I was. And, ‘Let’s go to the pub,’ he would say, as in the spirit of ‘Why would we do anything else?’ and though there was no glamour there, at The Cork and Bottle at the corner, nor at The Elm Tree or The Walker’s Friend, our subsequent destinations through the dark winter months, yet it was what we did, where we went, who we were.

  ‘But I like that the whole thing felt fated,’ said Evan. ‘And it was, Nin. Why, if it wasn’t, didn’t I just get the company to sort me out with a flat or whatever? Why, if it wasn’t fated, did I even think – despite the “fun scene” – that I wanted to live with another family, be a lodger?’

  ‘You were just confused,’ I said.

  I was looking at him, thinking
about all this as he was speaking. ‘You were still jet-lagged,’ I said, for something to say, because his appearance, as I could see, was a bit worn and a bit pale.

  ‘Long-term jet lag then,’ he interrupted. He fished out the lemon from the bottom of his glass and chewed on a corner like it was a little sandwich. ‘Listen,’ he said, after he’d eaten that tiny portion and swallowed it. ‘We’ll have to get the fate aspect into the story.’ He paused. ‘Predestination. Yes, fate. Like it or not. What I call the Big Bang factor, Nin. It was a big thing. I walked in that door in Richmond and everything changed …’§

  I picked the lemon out of my own glass and tore it in half. I was still thinking about his clothes. He was in a smart suit, a tie, all the rest of it, but he looked faded, somehow, drawn.

  ‘People might read it that you were just lonely,’ I said. ‘That the house in Richmond, way out there on the District Line, seemed warm and welcoming and you were only recently back from—’

  ‘But how could I be lonely?’ Evan said, and he took my hand that was holding the rest of my own torn lemon. ‘When I have you who I’ve loved for so long?’ he said.

  I guess I had to give him his due at that point. Sometimes writing does that, puts the words in and you can’t ‘write’ past them. So with that ‘ping!’ I had loved in his notes. I couldn’t deny it. I couldn’t erase it in any way and now it was just there. So then I had also to allow for the fate element, the ‘myth’ as Evan was now dangerously starting to describe what had started as ‘project’.¶ So, ‘OK,’ I said, that day, and I, too, ate the lemon; from that day onwards, whenever it was available I always would. And so here follows accordingly some more of his notes, those ideas he thought we could build into something that might have pretensions to being some kind of fable or ‘myth’. Because all I could manage at that moment, after he’d spoken, was that ‘OK’. It was all I could do to say it, after he’d said what he’d just said, to eat that lemon through.

  ‘I’ve always been outgoing but in a retiring sort of way,’ Evan wrote. ‘I’ve had friends, girlfriends … It’s just that I tend towards feelings of boredom, and can’t keep the momentum of the relationship in train. I hear a kind of humming in my head is the problem, with most people; it reminds me of my father. I remember how he used to hum around the house when my mother had friends in, how he would hum and never settle. Only when his best friend from next door was over, Alastair Stuart, the historian, would you see him perk up – they used to do crosswords together or have discussions about history and historical philosophy, related literature, and whatever Alastair was writing – only generally around people, there was that humming of his. And we always knew, we kids, there was someone coming around to the house unless it was Alastair, because of it, him starting suddenly to hum, in a quiet, involved, deliberate sort of way. Anyhow, for me, meeting Caroline Beresford there was none of that business. There was no humming whatsoever.’

  Caroline. ‘Sweet Caroline’ I started singing quietly to myself, privately, though this nothing like humming, of course, oh nothing like. It was a song with all the words. ‘Sweet Caroline’, in my head because by now, at home, even when I wasn’t with him or reading his notes, I was getting so used to hearing Evan talking about having met someone whose name was Caroline, Caroline – the name in that terrific Neil Diamond song that everyone still loves. I would sing the whole thing quietly, start to finish, just to myself, back in those early days, even the ‘Hands … Touching hands …’ crescendo part that everyone gets so worked up about.

  At this point, in the story, I confessed to Evan, having read his first set of notes for the first time, I had had to get up and actually put The Best of Neil Diamond on the CD player, that particular track. I turned it way up and sang along and danced.

  ‘It was great,’ I said to Evan. ‘It’s such a great song.’

  ‘Let’s go out dancing together, sometime, ourselves,’ he said. ‘What a wonderful idea. And that chorus – it’s perfect for us! We’ll find a place that has a jukebox or some kind of ancient DJ who can play it for us and we could dance along and sing …’

  ‘It might be the kind of track that a young party host would have on his playlist,’ I said, letting the idea develop in a lovely way, that Evan would break from our already so established routine and go dancing. ‘You know, the kind of host that he might play the song in some kind of ironic, post-modern fashion …’

  We both of us looked around us in the pub, both of us the same second. Thinking the same thing: Is there a jukebox here somewhere? But of course there wasn’t.

  The pub we were in that night, The Elm Tree, wasn’t that kind of pub. I’d found it after realising that the Cork was too cold. It was more of a village kind of place, like we were all pretending to be in Oxfordshire somewhere because it faced on to a Green that’s only about a five-minute walk away from my flat but still it’s like another part of London altogether, the Green a bit like a village green, you might say, and there were dogs allowed inside and people who had been walking them, in gumboots and with Barbours on. It was further away from the tube than the Cork, the Elm, and maybe that short walk was part of it. The facing on to the Green. For it was quiet and sweet and old-fashioned inside and marked a new development in our proceedings, a slight change of mood.

  ‘No jukebox,’ Evan and I both said in unison. And then we laughed.

  That seemed like a while ago, I thought subsequently, all those nights going through Evan’s notes, Neil Diamond notwithstanding. Those early conversations. Early, early thoughts. By now we’d left even The Elm Tree behind us and the writing, Evan’s writing, was taking us on. So ‘Caroline’, I read, in the spirit of that onward-moving narrative. Here we go again:

  ‘I used to even think “My Caroline”,’ Evan wrote, ‘though she wasn’t “my” anything.’ His handwriting really was appalling. ‘She’d said “hi” to me, she’d put out her hand. Yet that, as far as I am concerned, was enough. That was that. She said then that since I was back in London, I ought to come and stay for just as long as I needed while I found my feet again. She said, “Can I get you anything, coffee, tea? Before I show you around the house?” And I said yes, and we drank coffee together, standing looking out through the big plate-glass “ranchers”, they would call them in the States, these big sliding doors, that led out to the enormous Richmond garden.’

  Evan’s descriptions were clear, they were good. That part of his writing was sound, I liked it.

  ‘The house was indeed enormous,’ he finished, in this first section of his notes, ‘just as Rosie and Nin had said it would be. Everything about it was on a large scale. The kitchen, Caroline’s kitchen where she made the coffee and where we stood, looking out at a lawn that was the size of a bowling green, with big trees and flowerbeds and so on …

  ‘“It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” said Caroline. “But we are in the suburbs here so it’s not as crazy as it seems.”

  ‘“I think it’s lovely,” I said to Caroline then. I wanted to say to her: “I think you are lovely.”’

  ‘But you didn’t,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, no,’ Evan replied. ‘I could never do that.’

  * Those ‘Personal History’ notes come in again here; the details about the shared childhood in Twickenham, etc.; children’s activities.

  † The section entitled ‘Alternative Narratives’ may be of interest at some stage, though no need to worry about it now.

  ‡ Again, this is to do with an ‘Alternative Narrative’, as indicated at the back of this book; here referring to an earlier part of the story, before Evan had even met Caroline, and the author had various ideas about how her protagonist’s time might have been spent.

  § ‘In ‘Courtly Love’ a section headed ‘Unrequited Love as a Creative Act’ might be of interest.

  ¶ ‘Narrative Construction’ – particularly that note regarding the various descriptions and massive variations in Evan’s mind as to the nature of the work under review – might be of interest h
ere.

  four

  The Beresfords, Rosie said, had begun with a very happy marriage. They’d had the ceremony, a really big, fancy affair – more of a house party, she described it, than a wedding – in Thailand, back in the days when everyone had holidays that were proper holidays and could also go away for big parties and occasions and not be on their phones all the time and answering emails or having to rush back to London after taking no more than a week’s break for some deadline, or meeting. They were married at a time when people, by comparison, Rosie said, could take it easy.

  Caroline had been a PR director then, for a company representing, mainly, thoroughbred racing stables and stud farms in Ireland; though she herself was not Irish but had been brought up – ‘deep in the home counties’ was how she herself put it to Evan when he asked – with ponies, and had been on horseback since the age of three, so there was ‘nothing she didn’t know about horseflesh’, was the way Evan described her to me, when he was first wanting to describe Caroline to me on one of those early meetings when we were still going regularly to The Cork and Bottle, that first pub just round the corner from where I live. Yes, it was there, and he was ordering our third gin and tonics at the bar when I learned all of this ‘key background stuff’, as Evan put it, about Caroline Beresford’s upbringing, background, her family, and current situation with David, her handsome lawyer husband who had been on track to make a fortune in the City but had become derailed somewhere along the line, and now all he wanted to do was read ancient Greek literature and start translation classes in the Classics department at the University of London where he’d enrolled as a part-time student and, for that reason, had rented a small flat just off Russell Square. ‘He’s told Caroline on a number of occasions that as far as he’s concerned, they can dissolve their marriage now and he could start over,’ Evan reported. ‘He could happily go back to university full time and work towards a PhD, he’s said, more than once – but then he and Caroline sit down and talk about the kids and the house and the horse Caroline keeps in Berkshire … And he loves horses, too, apparently … And then they decide not to dissolve things but to stick to the marriage after all, in the meantime, and see how it goes. But yeah,’ Evan said, looking into his drink, and stirring the ice cubes with his finger as though he were the husband of Caroline himself, with worries on his mind about their marriage and whether he and his wife had anything in common, not handsome David, with his glasses pushed down at the end of his nose and his long legs stretched out in front of him, some ancient text on his lap and a tequila to hand. ‘Things used to be great between them,’ Evan said, ‘but that was a while ago, you can tell. Caroline has a sadness around her, a sense of loss.’