Caroline's Bikini Page 5

  As I say, this is not from the section I included earlier that was a kind of an outline, Evan writing out an idea for the project of a traditional romance, a love story, of sorts, some kind of a novel. No – these subsequent papers were further notes he’d made to himself. His first impressions of Caroline, his response to her ‘receding form’ … He said I could reproduce passages of this writing in full if I needed to, and I think I do. Need to. For they show, as I see it, a great deal of the Evan I was dealing with here. They show how he’s present, in his words. Deep in. As I’d told him that night in the Friend, across the country-atmosphere gloom of the place, with the rain streaming down the windows and the fake-log gas fire turned down low, across our little wooden table now spilt with tonic, ‘I know the idea of handing these pages over makes you tense but I think we need your feelings about Caroline to be contained’, and at this point I looked at him intently, ‘within this document, Evan,’ I said. ‘And in your own words.’

  What I meant, of course, though I didn’t want to come straight out with it, was that the presentation of this story shouldn’t always be mine. Enough, in fact, by now, of my version of things, I was thinking. It was a crucial point in the proceedings. Something about the aforementioned night, the tumble of the tonic, had made me realise that it wasn’t enough for me to write about Caroline – the twist of her hair and so on, that scent of oranges – it must be Evan, too, who was speaking. That man. He must be here in the account in his own words. There must be a sense of his feeling, the expression, painful as it might be for me to witness, of his thoughts about love and hope in his own syntax and prose. For though it might make me feel strange and sad and alone, sometimes, to have access to the parts of his mind he normally kept so private and apart, a reader would need this information, I could see. Evan must have his words in this story too.

  And therefore, as we have had examples before, so we have some more of his notes included here. It is where we were, where we needed to be. The former text followed by:

  ‘Everything about Caroline Beresford seems perfect to me,’ he writes. ‘She has the combination of everything that’s lovely,’ he goes on, ‘the right amount. A lot of the women I have known in my life – those in America, I suppose I am talking about, those girls I knew when I was growing up, the girls I went out with – they were “all this”, or “all that”. All pretty. Or all brainy. Or all tall, with no delicacy. Or all dainty, but with no strength. They were blonde, and then they were all blonde, all blonde and perky and smiling. Or they were dark, and all dark, with their own dark sophisticated thing going on. Caroline Beresford, on the other hand, is not “all” anything. She is a range, and in that range is my all.’

  When I’d first read that, for example, going back to what I said before, I’d had to put the page down. It was quite full on. It was rather like the earlier metatextual stuff without the metatextual element I’d been able to insert to soften it.* This was just ‘all’ – to use a word of Evan’s – feeling. And really – I had to keep asking myself, as I had since the beginning, since Evan had first told me about meeting Caroline – ‘Do I really believe “all”? All this? “My all”?’ Did I? That Evan could fall in love so deeply, so readily, so … availably … with someone he barely knew? And that it could have happened so fast, so dramatically? Did I believe that as well? That he could be ‘acting out’, as I might describe it, in the fashion of a Dante or a Petrarch or any of those individuals who feature in stories of courtly love – acting out a range of feelings and writing about them so as to make them real?

  Still, I read on. We were deep enough in, after all, Evan and I. I was deep in.

  ‘A range of qualities contained within her and all those qualities available at once.’ Evan’s notes do need to be included here, important, remember, because these are sentences and phrases that are his own. This was him writing. This was only Evan. ‘She has’, I read, ‘that easy going-outside-in-the-open-air feeling about her while also being indoorsy and intense and wanting to have big talks about society and life and art. The kind of person who wants to think about things, Heidegger’s theory of Dasein, say, we talked about that one time, or prayer. Her hair is beautiful but also a mess. She doesn’t look made up and yet she wears some sort of pink colour on her lips that makes her seem like she’s someone who puts lipstick on – but then it comes off on her coffee cup, I saw the mark. This is what she said to me, her exact words, when I met her that first day, after she’d opened the door to greet me, over the course of the time we had coffee together, for the first time, and she was showing me the house. Well, maybe not exact words, but close. I know it’s pretty close because that morning was when I started keeping these notes, and I do think this is what she said, pretty much:

  ’It’s sort of suburban where we are, Evan – but there’s loads of space’ – is what Evan’s notes show Caroline saying. ‘You can have a floor to yourself, your own bathroom. It can be a kind of studio apartment for you up there, there’s a kitchen area and so on, all that kind of thing, but you can also use the house as a whole, as a kind of a base, I guess is what you’ll be doing, before you move on’ – never guessing that Evan wasn’t ever going to want to ‘move on’ – ‘while you’re getting used to being back here, I mean, in London, it can be a home for you. You can just be, you know, at home here.’

  ‘At home’, I read, Evan now continuing in his own voice, ‘is an idea Caroline, of course, knows about.’ His handwriting really was awful. I remembered that from when we were little, too, it had come back to me while I was reading the first set of notes and materials. He used to write me letters all the time, when we were children, enclosing them in his own hand-made envelopes and posting them through the door, and they were always in a mad inky scrawl, those dear little letters from Evan to me. Even with all this time passed that handwriting of his didn’t look much better, but, you see, I was used to it. I wasn’t going to mind. ‘Love from your friend Evan Gordonston’ they would be signed off, those letters from long ago, at the end. And three kisses: xxx.

  Now we had instead: ‘Being at home, feeling at home …’ in Evan’s current handwriting that seemed just the same. ‘Making oneself at home …’ I read. ‘These are all ideas Caroline suggested to me from the outset, she’s put her mind to that sort of understanding,’ Evan wrote. ‘Not that it would have occurred to her like that,’ he continued. ‘She’s not fancily self-conscious. And yet here I am, brought up by a father who left his country, his home, for business, for finance, and a generation later, doing the same thing, leaving one place for another … So you might say I am the one who could be self-conscious. About home. About belonging, and where I might be. And if I have no knowledge of home,’ he continued in this rich, self-conscious vein of his own that I was not used to, ‘might it be that I could find it now, with this particular woman and in Richmond on the District Line? Oh Caroline, then? Might I discover the knowledge of home in Richmond now with you?’

  ‘Listen,’ I’d had to say to Evan, having read the beginning of those first notes that had been filed in various manilla envelopes and pushed across the table towards me in the Elm and had been followed by even more florid material that had been gathered together and extended towards me in the Friend, ‘it’s quite poetic, what you’ve written, but not in a good way. To that extent, you were right, Evan,’ I said, ‘to be tense in the handing over of these pages. I can understand how all this may make you feel. But still …’

  This was a few days later. We were back at The Elm Tree. That Tree, our meeting place in previous weeks, that we’d given up for the larger tables and option of Sipsmith and Portobello gins, along with the more usual Tanqueray, Gordon’s and Bombay, at the Friend.† It was as though, thinking about it now, we needed to mark a change in time by our return to an older habit. For it was like that, being back in the Elm where it was darker, larger, more cavernous than it had been in the Friend. As though, in the selection of a venue with its choice of gins and tonics, the range of wh
ich had become more obvious to me in our visits to the latter, we needed a sort of process of going back to the familiar in order to go forwards, somehow, if this narrative was to continue. All very well, I thought, the ‘in my own words, Nin’ part of all this, Evan’s idea of developing the narrative by deepening it, if you like, in his own words – but the same narrative couldn’t be mired by that either. If this book was ever, ever, going to get finished some day, move on … If I was ever going to be able to ‘get on with it, for goodness’ sake’ is the brisk expression I remember I used, then we needed to reach beyond the poetry, if I can call it that, of Evan’s feelings, into some kind of action, drama. The return to a more straightforward range of gins seemed to define this mood – a useful metonymy for something I’ve found works with writing ads, actually, and my own short stories, even – that resolution can come, sometimes, when one has cast back into past time. So in the same way I felt I could be more firm with Evan in the Elm. So I felt it was my role there to have him ‘move on’.

  For sure, the last batch of notes had been ‘poetry’, I think, was how they were intended, but in a bad poetry, diary-esque-thinking kind of mode that was running through the thing entire and needed to be nipped in the bud.

  ‘How can poetry be bad?’ Evan said. ‘Love poetry, I mean? If it’s created in a heightened state, Nin? If to the writer it is real?’

  ‘Well, that line there, for starters,’ I replied, pointing it out to him under the low cast of pub lighting: ‘“Oh Caroline, then? Might I discover the knowledge of home with you?—”’

  ‘What about it?’

  ‘It sounds like a Gilbert O’Sullivan song,’ I said. ‘Inferior folk. One man and a guitar, that sort of thing, Evan. A poor man’s Bob Dylan,’ I was getting into my stride, ‘poetry that’s nothing like Bob Dylan but only something “indie”, something avant-garde, that’s not come off, something—’

  Evan laughed, ‘Hah!’ He took my hand. ‘Oh, you,’ he said. ‘You know I’ve never been a writer!’ He squeezed my hand in a merry way, three little grips. I could feel the mood was lightening. ‘You’re the writer in the family, Nin,’ he said. ‘Only you.’

  He laughed again.

  ‘Don’t worry one bit about what I’ve written. I’ve never been good at all that,’ he continued, giving my hand another little squeeze for emphasis.

  ‘I see,’ I said. The mood had lightened for sure.

  ‘Another?’ he said, indicating our empty glasses.

  ‘Why not?’ was my reply.

  Because things hadn’t been easy since he’d first started handing over the notes, with the tension mounting, as I’ve written, that spill. But now … Well, here we were. The two of us. In so many ways just as we’d always been, and now there was this. This lighter, merrier mood, it was quite clear, and pleasant, too. I felt like we were nine again and Evan was getting me to write down the rules of one of our games. It was just like that. Evan suddenly deeply familiar again. There was one story, I remember, a sort of Famous Five he’d got me to make up when I was about eight or nine after we’d built a fort out of discarded tree branches that my father had assembled for a bonfire and we were attempting to enact the story as it were, by my inventing it and writing it down as we went along. And there was another thing, a long poem, it was coming back to me, there in the Elm, a sort of ballad based on a summer holiday the Gordonstons and our family took together in Cornwall, once, that was full of pirates, with Evan and me in the starring roles, with our own verses. We often had holidays with the Gordonstons, school holidays and summer holidays, before they moved away. That ‘Oh, you’ took me back to those projects, and to those years: my brother Felix and the way he first fell for Elisabeth on a boat ride in the Helford Estuary when he was thirteen, the time my mother and Helen organised all of us children, as well as Helen’s sister’s family, to accompany them on a pottery-making workshop in the Hebrides and Evan’s oldest cousin showing off like mad with multicoloured glazes because she’d done ceramics in fifth form. All of it, all of it coming back to me in a lovely way since that ‘Oh you’ of Evan’s. The bags packed. The picnics eaten. The Gordonstons and the Stuarts in two cars and we would stop on lay-bys for a thermos of something on the way. The ‘Oh you’ took me back alright. I felt winded by the memory of it. Lightened. And happy? Oh yes, that. I could go on and on and on.

  But Evan had other things to say as well.

  ‘It doesn’t matter that what I’ve written is rubbish.’ He’d picked up now. ‘It’s only my feelings that count. My feelings for Caroline, Nin. My response to her, after I met her that first time. That’s all I’m trying to get at here …’ He’d come back from the bar with two more of those fancier kinds of gin in hand and it seemed it was back to business as usual. He put the two glasses down on the table. ‘Just so that you can make something of them,’ he said, and sat down himself. He looked so handsome sometimes, despite his somewhat unkempt dress. ‘These are just notes, remember, to help you work. Cheers,’ he said, and had a sip. ‘I never said you should use them, Nin, word for word. That was your idea. I feel quite relaxed about all that, actually. At one point, you know, I started making things up, even, in all this, that I’d met Caroline earlier somehow. Perhaps at Oxford, or somewhere like that, that I might be the writer of that kind of very English novel, only she was too pretty and she dropped out so I lost touch. Or that I got a message from her,’ he continued, and I could see the story had taken a hold. He took another sip of his drink; it was true, he had a particular kind of Scottish handsomeness about him, that was also a bit untidy. ‘A handwritten note, it was,’ he said, ‘saying, “You remember David, well, he and I have decided that we’re going to get married …” I kept thinking—’

  ‘Stop.’ I cut him off. I came to, actually, because I’d been in a sort of dream. ‘There’s no point in making up a parallel novel, Evan,’ I said, realising all at once that he was suddenly moving dangerously close to that sort of territory. ‘We have our dance card full enough already with you telling me things every week, every few days, wanting to write it all down … We’ve that, plus already using some of these notes you’ve made … We’ve got quite enough on to be dealing with …’

  ‘You’re lovely,’ Evan said then, and I had to look away for a second. Sometimes that happened. ‘Helping me in the way you are,’ he continued. ‘No one else would do it,’ he said. ‘No one else would get it, even, what I’m trying to do here, create a record of my experiences and write a love story from it … is what we’re doing, Nin. You and I. But you do, you get it.’ He tapped my hand. ‘You do.’

  ‘Mmmm,’ I said. I slugged off the rest of my Sipsmith’s Silver like an old pirate straight out of the kind of story that I’d written for Evan once-upon-a-time when we had nothing but time and our families together and games to play. I’d started chapter one, ‘Ready’, I’d called it, but it wasn’t looking too strong. ‘All I can do is keep on reproducing the notes,’ is what I said to him by way of response. ‘The notes, the conversations we have … All I can do is keep writing.’

  Which is exactly what I did. Kept writing. While the other kind of text Evan was working on did also progress – his own ideas, that independent or ‘indie’ work of his. There continued alongside my own writing his suggestions. Our meetings. The piles of material he kept passing on, in pencil, or that biro he liked, sometimes in a really fancy old-fashioned ink pen, for me to incorporate … How the pages did continue. They piled up, scribbled and scrawled, crossed out and rewritten … Sometimes I longed for Evan just to pick up his laptop and get the gist of it down in a printed format himself; it would have released me from the onerousness of the task of reading his prose so directly, made me less connected, somehow, to its dreadful qualities and passions. That I wouldn’t have to peer at it, try to figure it, rewrite it, even … Though it hardly bore thinking about, still it would have been nice, I did reflect, if Evan had just printed out the lot and we’d committed it for inclusion as appendices or some kind of addi
tional reading, perhaps, or in extra notes I could see we were going to need, whatever. For the days were moving on. Christopher was already leaving me messages on the answerphone asking me, in his rather Tory way, to account for my time on an economic basis: ‘Marjorie says you’re late with the pet insurance copy, Nin,’ had been the last one. ‘And I am concerned for your budgeting overall. I can do spreadsheets, you know that. Call me.’ There was a feeling afoot with my friends in general that I was being careless with the practical side of things. There was more to consider in life than just some ‘project’ or other, they all said. There was the matter of ‘realities’, apparently, with my mortgage, other various financial ‘responsibilities’ that were slipping, all because of the amount of time I was spending, and I could see what they meant, frivolously, you might say, in straight transcription. Sometimes I did wonder if I should just get on the phone back to Christopher straight away and sign up for one of his rallies or other by way of diversion – an anti-tree-felling project he needed leafleting help with, he’d told me in another message. Work on pavement litter. Anything. Something. Any diversion, activity or practical idea that might be followed through by galvanising me into action, work for payment or ‘economic certainty’ as Marjorie liked to term it. Anything, really. I did wonder. That I wouldn’t need to actually have to be always writing this kind of thing down instead:

  ‘You know how we used to talk, Nin? When we were hanging out, about what it would be like to grow up and have kids? Well, seeing Caroline with her children makes me think about all that all over again.’