Caroline's Bikini Page 4

  The PR company she’d worked for represented various stables of polo ponies – it was how she and David met, through horses; his family farmed and there was a grandmother who’d always favoured David who was a great one for the races – as well as top-of-the-range brands like Rolex and Patek Philippe and Theo Fennell jewellery … Evan had explained all this to me, and I knew what he was getting at. These kinds of sports attract a whole lot of interest from advertisers and sponsors – I’m familiar with how that works through my own advertising activities – and Caroline was the one in charge of all of that, liaising between the various people involved. Plus she didn’t just bring it together, the networking, by organising particular events – getting in the right kind of movie stars who would parade this bloodline or that, promote some particular race or the other – she was also brilliant at the writing side of things, too, the copy for the ads, the letters inviting kings and queens and princesses and Russian thugs and gangsters and goodness knows who else, London is full of these people nowadays, to the fancy polo parties and point-to-points. She could write a beautiful letter, Caroline. I saw one or two. Evan showed me. In fact I told Marjorie about the quality of the sentences I’d seen of Caroline’s and even Marjorie, with her sure knowledge of what she terms ‘good, solid selling correspondence’, was impressed. ‘Caroline sounds interesting,’ Marjorie had said.

  Anyhow, horses, horses, horses. Polo, polo, polo. And yes, it was at one such event that she’d met David Beresford – Rosie said, who’d known his younger brother, Robert, who’d gone out with a friend of hers from St Martins – so that was the connection there. Rosie said Robert had always been ‘a complete sweetie’, and that it was her friend, Amanda, who was also modelling at the time and involved in ‘Vogue-world’, as Rosie put it, who had caused the trouble in that relationship … In other words, what I am saying here is that it’s not that it was the Beresfords who had an unsteady gene as far as relationships were concerned. The father, Jonathan Beresford, and his wife Diana had been very happily married and ‘still are’, Rosie said, ‘a lovely couple, kind and solicitous and smart’ … And David Beresford was the same, she continued, I’d put all of this down in my additional notes: courteous, gentle, clever. ‘And very good-looking’ as Evan said – always a nice thing to hear: a man complimenting another man in that department – ‘Charming in the proper sense of the word’, he said, the ‘real deal’ and with a career that everyone said would go stellar. ‘Well, not that stellar,’ said Rosie to me much later, when I was adding to notes Evan had given me, ‘because after all, they live out on the District Line, at the end of the day, the Beresfords, not Notting Hill.’

  I could write about all of these details, including that slightly off remark of Rosie’s that I’ve just recorded, and the ins and outs of the Beresford brothers and their handsome and personal ways* – Rosie had also had a crush on Robert and had been very much the shoulder to cry on after it all went haywire between him and Amanda – because, as well as Rosie and Evan talking to me directly about such matters, Evan had also by then given me his first set of annotated notes about himself and Caroline and had asked me to conduct with him – first in The Cork and Bottle when we started going there, and subsequently in The Elm Tree and The Walker’s Friend, another pub in the heart of West London that was pretending to be in the country in terms of style and clientele – lengthy Q & A sessions from which I would learn ‘key facts’ about Caroline Beresford and ‘our relationship’ as he was, from even quite early on in the proceedings, somewhat alarmingly, describing his interactions as lodger to her landlady of the house in Richmond.

  These Q & A sessions, he said, and he was clear about this, would be the basis from which I would construct ‘a meticulous record’, was his description at first, then, ‘love story’, to become a possible future novel entire, based upon history and fact,† which would comprise a lively and involving narrative based upon two people who had met by chance and were now, in the manner of protagonists in some early Renaissance or medieval text, deeply in love.

  We may as well have been sipping on cider, these places we were frequenting so head-in-the-country in mood and atmosphere. We may as well have had a brace of black Labradors waiting for us and been wearing those Barbours I’ve mentioned, hung up on a hook in a wet room somewhere in the West Country or the Highlands – but no, we were drinking Tanqueray and tonic in West Kensington, minutes from oligarchs and multi-million-pound show homes that were barely lived in, owned by Chinese industrialists and mobsters, no doubt; we were there, in that particular part of town. Those other ‘streets of luxury’, as my friend Christopher calls them, in the judgemental but also slightly avaricious vaguely right-wing sort of way of his that I find a bit sketchy, may as well have been in another world, though, as far as the establishment in which we were now settled, saying ‘Cheers’ and splitting a bag of nuts, was concerned. Around us, after all, were only the kinds of people who would walk their dogs in a muddy park in early winter, with not a sheikh or Russian businessman in sight but only hearty wind-and rain-swept types calling out to each other, ‘What a day!’ from across the steamy fug of a pub lunch and real ale.

  ‘No kitten heels present’, I made, as an early note, in one of my diaries, establishing context for the writing project I’d undertaken, with a degree of enthusiasm, by now, after all, it has to be said. No ‘taster menu’ or ‘thricecombed cashmere’ here, I’d written. Only real ale and jolly remarking, ‘What a day!’ and so on. Only a mood and tone that was, depending upon the destination, pure ‘Elm’ as Evan and I came to call it, and in the same way, later, ‘the Walker’s’ and then simply ‘Friend’.

  It was indeed uncharacteristic of Rosie to make a comment like that – ‘because after all, they live out on the District Line, the Beresfords, not Notting Hill’ – because she was an artist, and so should be totally unconcerned, you might say, with money and postcodes and society … But there. She did say it, about poor David Beresford’s career, ‘Well, not that stellar,’ and it stuck, somehow. I remembered it and now that I’ve written it down twice it seems well embedded in this narrative; I’ve included it, no denying that, so something is going on there, something. It’s as though the fact of David, the handsome fact of him and his decision about his career, not to pursue it in the way he might have because of ‘other diversions’, as Evan described them, thoughts of a classics degree and so on resulting in his spending time with other kinds of people, other men and women who were not Caroline, his being concerned with other interests, priorities, as though all these details about the life he’d chosen may well contribute to the story I am writing here. Have input, I mean. Significance. And there’s the matter, too, of certain empathies around the man – that I wrote ‘poor David Beresford’ just there, instinctively you might say,‡ as though to describe something that was straitened about him, handsome and confident as he was, a sort of financial straitening of the Beresfords overall, perhaps, what I am getting at here, a feeling of there being, in their marriage and their life together, not quite enough. And this despite the big house in Richmond, and the neighbours with, as it turned out, swimming pools and health club memberships and so on, all the kind of ‘LA behaviour’ as Evan put it, that went on out there in that part of London with its off-road parking and what have you, the easy accommodation for lodging; despite the huge garden of the Beresfords, practically the size of a small private square, according to Rosie, and despite the number of bedrooms and en suites and so on in that house, a whole top floor with its own kitchen, for goodness’ sake, given over to Evan himself, despite it all … there was, nevertheless, a wanting, a lack. It was as if, expressed in all the grand sweep of real estate that was Richmond, with its acreages and historical benefits, its beauties and seasonal pleasures of parks and open spaces, there was something missing in all this loveliness, withheld from them and denied. As though, all through Caroline’s life, in its fullness, there had been left in her by now, not acceptance of her lot, her life, but on
ly the desperate desire for one portion more. As though something, as I see it, a vital thing, was still so necessary, so needed, that it would articulate always the rest that had been given as insufficient by that same small immeasurable margin that could not be expressed in words or in her heart.

  To go back to that phrase of Evan’s about Caroline, that she had about her ‘a sense of loss’ …

  And the fact that the Beresfords took in lodgers in the first place – needed to, I mean …

  Suggests that: gap. A part that was lacking, a piece missing in the whole, let me describe it as, a space, gap, the right word entirely. And that there was an aspect of her behaviour, yes, I can see it, in Caroline’s bravery about it, the circumstances that were the result of a legal career not gone ‘stellar’ but stopped short, rather, in a translation of the Iliad or of Hesiod’s Works and Days,§ in other people, scholars, professors, fellow students; the fact that she’d created a ‘fun scene’ nevertheless around this absence, shortfall, disguising it in order to make being way out there on the District Line a wonderful thing, so working with imagination and verve around ‘that gap’ – as I now found myself thinking about it – that space of missing finances and of love … Oh, Caroline, I found myself writing, in the vocative, a tense Evan was so fond of employing in his notes. To have, instead of a full portion, the need, the requirement instead to take in a stranger or sometimes a number of them into your home and have them living there with you, in your house, alongside your children and your husband, and with your husband away a good deal of the time, either on work assignments or because he is blocking out days and nights in the British Museum, to be in discussions with some Classics don from Cambridge or whoever … That you might have an unknown person living with you in the midst of your own intense domestic world … To have all of this … Want. Need. Gap. And yet be cheerful about it. To make the whole thing into a ‘fun scene’ … Well, that was the kind of person Caroline Beresford was. Barefoot in a T-shirt and groovy wrap-around skirt, thin as a rail while barely doing a stroke of exercise, one weekly Pilates class notwithstanding, because of all the running around after everybody and having the house look nice with little in the way of daily household help – ‘not really’, reported Rosie – or big cleaning agency to be on call … That was Caroline. Coming to the door in the middle of winter, but still the feeling of her being tanned and carefree and summery – that scent of oranges – just pulling her hair up into a messy pony tail as she walked down the hall in front of Evan towards the kitchen, twisting up a hairstyle with one hand as she called back towards him, ‘So nice to have someone my own age here,’ and laughing. ‘The last lot of lodgers were all international students and tiny and very foreign and exhausting. We couldn’t, you know,’ and at this she stopped, turned and gave Evan one of her radiant, straight-off-the-back-of-a-thoroughbred-and-jumping-down-on-to-a-wide-greenlawn, smiles, ‘chat.’

  That’s how I see Caroline, for sure. As Evan first saw her. Tall. Tanned, even though it’s the middle of winter. That sense of horsemanship hovering there somewhere in the background though we’re firmly in West London and nowhere near those easy miles of republican green, the lovely and endless-seeming green-blue paddocks of ‘the free State’ as a compelling Irishwoman I met recently through Christopher called her place of birth. Oh, Caroline. Caroline. With that beachy dirty-blonde hair falling down her back in a gloriously sunshiny spill before she tied it up so deftly with one hand, walking down the hall in front of Evan, calling out over her shoulder in the midst of other lines of conversation about lodgers, ‘Coffee? Shall we have a cup of coffee together, you and I? Before I show you around the house, I mean?’ – and Evan’s heart going – Bang. Right then. Or ‘Ping!’ as he put it, so charmingly, in his notes.

  ‘Yes, her receding form,’ Evan said, in The Walker’s Friend. He was a bit drunk. This was a much later conversation but it may as well have been one of the first, the first even, when he’d just handed over a batch of his notes and was feeling tense about it. The notes, the giving over of them, continued to make him tense though by now I’d had several sets from him, first in the Cork, then the Elm and now, as we were hunkered down in the Friend. ‘Let’s just go to the Friend again,’ Evan had said, when he’d called me, after three or four days had passed since he’d handed over the last batch of material, in which he’d written in detail about first meeting Caroline and was recording in a metatextual, self-referential kind of way what it was like to record that moment and what it all might mean. ‘Yes, her receding form,’ and so on, in detailed phrases and paragraphs. ‘Going to the Friend suits my mood, Nin,’ he’d said, as though to be nonchalant about the import of what he’d been giving me, the latest tranche of papers. As though it wasn’t a big deal. ‘The Friend makes sense for us both, you know it,’ he’d said.

  I’d had opinions since the outset, truth to tell, about the effect the giving over of any of his notes would have, ever since our first conversation about the process of our writing some kind of story or report together, when he’d shown me his initial pieces of writing, the beginning of what he thought was going to be his own first-person account of his love for Caroline in a great pile of papers stuffed into manilla envelopes that he’d set before me on the table between us at The Cork and Bottle, round the corner from the tube. Like then, he told me this evening, having warned me beforehand on the mobile that he felt nervous about passing over more information and was planning to ‘drink hard’ with me to get over it, that he was apprehensive about describing his feelings in ‘ink’, as he put it, notwithstanding the fact that a great deal of his scrawl was in a dodgy red biro that kept running out, with pencil additions underscored and the pencil itself in need of a good sharpen. Still as far as Evan was concerned it was all ‘down there’, his thoughts, and ‘on the page for all time’, and ‘in black and white’. He flung back the last of his Bombay Sapphire without bothering to top up with tonic as if to prove it.

  ‘Have you eaten?’ I’d responded, on the mobile when he’d called. I had been working on an ad campaign for dog food since seven that morning and had, myself, consumed nothing more than coffee and a packet of Fruitellas all day.

  ‘We could have supper?’ I’d put to him. Knowing how tense the giving of the last set of notes had made him, recognising how pale and drawn he’d become. ‘Instead of just going to the pub, I mean,’ I said. ‘I could make us supper, some rice and beans if you—’

  But, ‘Let’s just go to the Friend, Nin,’ Evan cut me off. ‘It’s tradition. We don’t need to eat, you and I. And I feel a bit nervous, you know. Having passed more of my writing your way …’ As he was, I could see, rain lashing at the window of that same pub, jammed in as we were with a crowd of people with rosy faces and in sensible shoes, pushing towards me another envelope and slurring his words, ‘Here you are, then …’ in that gesture tipping over the little tonic bottle he could have used earlier but had chosen to ignore.

  As we both watched, it seeped out the remains of its contents on the table, then over my lap. There’d been more of it left in that bottle than I would have thought.

  * Those Beresford brothers! It’s hard to put into words the effect of just saying that phrase aloud, as one that reaches all the way back to prep school days, when mothers and teachers might refer to them thus and hear the resonance of nomenclature then, a resonance that continues to the present day. ‘Do you know the Beresford brothers’ or ‘Oh, they’re the Beresford brothers, of course,’ etc. Some sibling groups just achieve that kind of consequence in a sentence I guess. ‘Personal History’ might also be interesting in this context.

  † There’s much discussion throughout Caroline’s Bikini as to the nature of the literary ‘project’ the author and her protagonist have undertaken. Essay? Life writing? Novel? See ‘Narrative Construction’ and ‘Literary Background and Context’ for further details.

  ‡ See ‘Alternative Narratives’ for further remarks regarding those involved in the story who are not Ca
roline or Evan.

  § David Beresford’s interest in classical scholarship might merit a whole novel in itself; as it is there are some details about his personal life in the section of ‘Further Material’ headed ‘Personal History’ – as well as in notes regarding inheritance, financial contingencies, etc.

  five

  Returning to the contents of Evan’s notes, a later set than those already presented with the section that had created a degree of tension, as described, resulting, eventually, in a spillage, the procurement of a wet cloth and all that a tidy-up entails, I might include here just the first page of what he gave me that night in the Friend, high, and both of us somewhat the worse for wear having not eaten properly so that the gin and tonics, Sipsmith Silver, if you please, quite fancy, had hit harder than usual and taken a real hold.