Caroline's Bikini Read online

  At this point all I could do was reproduce in full with no editing whatsoever. Though goodness knows I had seen that there were parts of the notes, pages included, that addressed me directly like that as though it were just like the old days, living-next-door-to-each-other days and he had written me a letter, still it also wasn’t like that kind of communication, from him to me, the kind of message with questions in it and I was supposed to answer back. This really wasn’t like one of those kinds of letters from him. This ‘She’s an amazing mother’ kind of statement that had nothing to do with me at all. ‘She did tell me,’ Evan wrote on, ‘in great confidence, of course, that after she’d had her first boy she was diagnosed with some sort of depression. The next two births only made it worse so as a result she was put on medication – she showed me the bottles. “Fucking weird, huh?” she said. “That I’m high on Valium half the time? Only not high, Evan, don’t worry, because Valium is not like that, and this isn’t Valium either …”’ Nothing like a letter.

  ‘Yeah, Caroline,’ he’d said, he finished. ‘I’m telling you all this, Nin,’ he wrote, ‘as though I could help her carry the load. Oh Caroline, Caroline …’

  ‘More indie folk music stuff going on there,’ was all I said to myself in response. But nothing like Bob Dylan.

  ‘Oh Caroline, Caroline …’

  Because all of this, how it was acting upon the rest of the story, what it was doing to the overall shape and style …

  It was too much.

  All the ‘How can I ever be at home with you?’

  It was too strange, it really was.

  I decided then that I could only include it, this kind of thing, by way of small insertions, bit by bit. Because it really was –

  Too strange.

  It was. For me, getting all this. Strange. It made me feel strange. Despite Evan going ‘Hah’ and laughing. Despite him taking my hand. He’d always been a very ordinary sort of boy, when we were young. Not … poetic. Trying to be. He’d been just sort of … physical. Ordinary. The whole family on the tall side and able-bodied, if that makes sense. Full of energy, vigour, all of the Gordonstons; the sort of family who went away on walking holidays in the Alps or camping in the Highlands and doing everything with fires. Hand-knitted jerseys, despite Tom’s work in the City, that was the Gordonstons. Knapsacks. And we loved going away on holidays with them, too, sometimes. Driving up to Scotland, or down to Cornwall to cottages that Helen and my mother booked that were by the sea. It was hard for me now to reconcile the man who’d come back from years abroad, in America and then Tokyo and so on, with the boy who used to come over to my house every day wearing his Cubs jersey with the badges stapled on because Helen was never going to find the time to hand-stitch them. Hard to match up that boy with this serious man who had love and poetry on his mind sitting in front of me in The Gin Whistle having an afternoon ‘nip’ as Evan’s granny who used to live with them and looked after the two of us sometimes would have said.

  Time was passing. I could feel it, winter moving inexorably on to its conclusion and entering into a new season. We’d decided to move further out of my neighbourhood, to get away from the memory of that tonic spill, to find a fresh environment; The Gin Whistle was somewhere new.

  ‘The only way I can describe it’, I said to Evan, when we were sitting there at a long chrome and glass bar punctuated at the edges with a smashed-gin-bottles-and-their-labels feature and really feeling ourselves to be in an altogether different sort of place, ‘is that you have “fallen in love at first sight”.’ We were going through the details of that first meeting of Caroline for the umpteenth time and I’d told him what I’d decided as far as the use of his own notes was concerned. ‘I have to use that corny expression, Evan,’ I said. ‘I will even write it down, because it is true. It’s a problem, in a way, because it’s such a cliche but that’s how it happened for you, it really is. You’re like Dante and Petrarch and the rest of them, only your poetry isn’t up to the task. I’m sorry to put it like that, but it’s true. Yes, it may be very much a case of “Upon the breeze she spread her golden hair/that in a thousand gentle knots was turned,/and the sweet light beyond all measure burned/in eyes where now that radiance is rare”‡ as far as your feelings towards Caroline are concerned, and you very much wanting to have, in her walking down the hall and putting her hair into a pony tail and so on, something like “From thought to thought … Love leads me on …”§ Alright, Evan. I get that.

  ‘Because it is straight out of the late medieval tradition, your situation, of being struck by love, brought low, undone … But the quality of work that comes from all that, in our case … Well … It’s challenging, that’s all,’ I tried to finish. ‘Making art from life, you know …’ My voice trailed away.

  Because, bottom line? That’s the only thing that was certain at this point. That the story we had was based on what I might call the bang factor. BANG. Or the ‘ping’. The ‘sweet light beyond all measure’ and ‘her words had then/a sound that simple human voices lack …’ It did have all that medieval and early Renaissance aspect to it only without us being the Renaissance artists ourselves that the ‘project’ – there I was, using that noun again – needed. There was the problem exactly. For as far as the actual story was concerned, the plot, the narrative … All that. We may have had the BANG, the ‘ping’, but we’d got no further than where we’d started: Caroline, there at the front door. Careless. Tanned. Tall, with that beachy dirty-blonde hair down her back as she walks away from Evan down the hall. That’s where we were, caught in a perpetual present tense of Evan falling in love with her as she was calling out over her shoulder, ‘Shall we have a cup of coffee together? You and I? Before I show you around the house, I mean?’ Then, following naturally, easily, as though part of the same lovely unspooling of Petrarchan feeling: Two mugs. Two people. Fixed in place, a mug and a man, and a beautiful female reflection of the one to the masculine other across the breakfast bar, a heart also there fixed, and heart’s thoughts, words … Two mugs of coffee effortlessly produced and a romance fiction, too, in the grand established tradition of courtly love and the early songs of the troubadours played out through the poetry sequences and epics of the early Renaissance and beyond, while Caroline chatted on about the neighbourhood and how long they’d been living there – twisting up her hair again from where it had fallen, back into that pony tail I have already described, but all of it in place, all of it. The mugs of hot drinks between them and the breakfast bar making it all the easier, too, for her to lean in towards Evan and say, ‘I’d love you to live here with us. I really would. I don’t even know if you like the house yet, but that’s what I would love.’ Is all, that’s all. ‘For you to just stay here, with us …’ taking a sip of her coffee then, replacing the mug in front of her with its lipstick mark. ‘Wouldn’t you?’ saying, quite quietly. ‘Just stay?’

  * In many ways, this sounds pretty fancy – and notes later in the book covering ‘Literary Context’ may help here. The remark simply relates to some sense of an overarching ‘project’, as the narrator sees it, that sits behind the day-to-day story of what was going on in Richmond and adds to it, to her mind: bringing in Petrarch and all that stuff making the whole enterprise more fun.

  † There are notes on ‘Gin’ and ‘Pubs’ in the section entitled ‘Caroline’s Bikini – Alternative Narratives’ – for those who are interested.

  ‡ Taken from no. 90 in the Canzoniere; see ‘Some Further Material’, ‘Reprise’, also for a selection of verse, all reprinted with kind permission of Professor Anthony Mortimer and Penguin Books.

  § From no. 129 in the Canzoniere.

  six

  By now, despite the folk song elements, the stops and starts, the bad handwriting, and so on, I was starting to get a feel for Evan’s story, of how it contained those certain elements that spoke back to grand and epic lovelorn states of mind, how, despite the lack of ‘plot’, one might say, and actual chapters with activities crammed within them
that might move a story along, nevertheless there was, I had to admit, some texture here that was gathering around our outline, even if it was just the beginning, and feeling, and an attitude of romance and optimism that were permeating my pages.

  For they were ‘my pages’. Evan had recognised this and said as much, formally, in the Friend following the ghastly tonic spill. Despite his stab at fictionalising this project of his, adding that idea about him and Caroline meeting when they were students, in the style of a certain sort of English novel, and despite the somewhat sketchy nature of his own ‘life writing’, as some may call it now, that was possessed of a rather alternatively styled ‘indie’ poetry element, the somewhat second-rate folk song tendency as already noted, the pages that were accumulating on my desk were run from my computer, my printer. Evan had said that he was keen that I be the writer for his story, he’d said that from the beginning. And he was saying it still.

  And for my part, in terms of a feeling of emotional connectedness to the project, now that Evan had been lodging with the Beresfords for the best part of the winter, had learned of some sadness there, in the family, had been party to Caroline’s confession that she was dependent, ‘in a lovely way’ as she put it, on mood-enhancing medication – ‘stabilising, Nin, not mood-enhancing as you call it,’ said Evan, when this had all first come up in the Friend – now that Evan was ‘deep in’ as he felt he was, to life in Richmond, the dinner parties and get-togethers that went on there, the ‘fun scene’ that he overheard from his rooms under the eaves … Well, I was building a picture, as novelists like to say, that made me feel committed. I was investing in ideas of character, setting; I was writing my way into that kind of understanding. For example, though Evan would not be a guest at any of the parties hosted at the end of the District Line – not for want of being invited, he hastened to tell me, but for ‘other reasons’ that I think had to do with his own feelings of privacy and propriety – he was, as he put it, in a pun-ish way, ‘party to them’ even so, and that kind of thing gave me a great deal to think about as well. So I would write about how he would come down early in the morning on a weekend when David and the boys were still asleep to find Caroline at the kitchen bar busy planning a ‘fun scene’ – for that was the time of the week she liked to make her lists of menus and ingredients, organise guests and seating plans for the large dining-room table in Richmond, order wine – and they would have, the two of them, over one coffee after another, that time together, Caroline and Evan, they would have conversations then. ‘It’s when we do most of our talking,’ Evan said, about Thomas Aquinas or a special kind of mushroom for a risotto or a film Caroline had just seen … ‘Any damn thing,’ said Evan, expansively. ‘It’s when we really talk.’

  And yes, building a picture is what I was doing alright. Rosie would call and ask, from her studio in Gloucestershire, ‘How is Evan getting on at the Beresfords’?’ and I felt able to answer in full, actually, because there were all these details Evan was telling me and I was able to colour those outlines in, somewhat – not unlike the way Rosie herself put together the beautiful paintings of people’s gardens and dogs that she completed by commission from friends of friends in Gloucestershire, an outline here, some depth of colour there, from her converted greenhouse for which she paid ‘a fraction’, she said, ‘a fraction’ of what a similar kind of space would have cost in London had she decided to stay. ‘That brother of David Beresford, hmmm,’ Rosie might murmur, in between my talking to her about Evan’s circumstances. ‘Robert, remember I told you about him, Nin? I wonder where he is now …’ she would finish.

  More picture building there, I guess, to think about the Beresfords entire, their backstory so to speak. But for now I had my hands full with Evan and Caroline, those two, and my concerns on that front regarding the ‘relationship’ as Evan liked to call it, though goodness knows why. Because though, it’s true, there may have been all these conversations then that were ‘really’ talking, as he put it, none of them came near to Evan actually expressing his feelings for Caroline to her, or eventuated in him leaning towards her, say, or reaching to take her hand. So I had to make something, myself, of those moments, or add to them, extend the small amount of information Evan had given me into something that might be more significant. Caroline might simply pour his coffee and sometimes their hands touched, as she poured, or he took a mug from her and his skin brushed hers … And from this minuscule gesture I could generate a charge, enact in those seconds the components of a great love story in the context of a grand literary tradition if I was lucky, according to Evan, in the large sunlit kitchen of the Beresfords’ house at the end of the District Line.

  So this layering continued. Of story, plot. I was ‘getting a picture’ as I described it to Evan, without him needing at this point to supply more notes. I was ‘layering, layering’ through all our meetings in the pub – sometimes as many as three times a week, and Evan had long discovered The Gin Whistle by then, that somewhat smarter establishment than the country-style places we’d been going to previously, with their Labrador ambience and raincoats; The Gin Whistle was on the edge of Chelsea and had the long matte chrome bar already mentioned, with the special broken glass feature – it had that kind of detail. In there, at a banquette located in the corner of such a slick establishment amply provided with all kinds of very, very fancy gin, I was doing as Evan had asked me, he was speaking, and I was taking it all down. ‘Amanuensis’, exactly, remember? That lovely word.

  And detail, detail. More and more of it, small things that added up and did the job of creating incident without having to make a great dramatic fuss of it. There was the issue of the medication, for example, the quiet drama of that, and the moment Caroline told Evan about it, the ‘mood-enhancing’ aspect of whatever it was she’d been prescribed – but nothing so dramatic that it required a special section in the book. I was prepared to let that medication, for the minute, ‘go hang’* and just sit there, a quiet pulse in the text, highlighting a moment I might pick up later and use.

  And I already had plenty of Evan’s notes to give background and support the prose I was at work on – a continuation of all those papers Evan had given me the night he said he was planning to ‘drink hard’. I’d taken them home with me and filed them carefully, brought them out in sections to use. Altogether it seemed there was no shortage of material. Even so, Evan continued to pass me notes from his life, and, on our third meeting at The Gin Whistle, after many rounds of the kind of gin you didn’t ask the price of, handed me yet another manilla envelope. I took it home and pulled it out one evening when he was working late and we’d had to cancel our plans.

  In general, at first, the pages seemed like all the others, lists of clothes, places to visit, ideas for the book. Then in the midst, something different, it seemed. Another kind of writing started to occur. ‘I’ll need a place to stay while I get myself figured out,’ Evan wrote, in a set of papers that read more like a journal or diary, or an essay, than the other pages. ‘The fact of the matter is’, he wrote, ‘that I wasn’t planning to move from London ever again. Something had gone on in California, when I went out there, after Tokyo, that made me feel I needed to get myself settled, be in one place, become of fixed abode. It was something to do with someone I’d been involved with in California – don’t get me wrong, something about me, not her. It was to do, this woman told me, with the way I couldn’t be “real” with her, was her word.’ I stopped reading for a second – this new tone to the writing, it was … I couldn’t describe it – then continued. Real? I thought. Real? ‘A word that she used with her very lovely and characteristic insight and sensitivity,’ Evan continued. ‘But that’s what she had said: “You can’t be real with me, Evan, can you? You don’t, I think, know what it means?”’

  I felt strange. I put down the pages. Someone had said a very similar thing to me once, long ago. It had been a relationship fraught from the start with misunderstandings and endless recriminations followed by forgivenesses. He
had been a writer too, this person, and for a while it had seemed like we could make a go of things, but in the end his feelings about me were uncannily close to this bit of Evan’s journal.

  ‘“You don’t know what it means”’, Evan had written, reporting on what this unnamed Californian woman had said, ‘“not to have to put on some show, to somehow mask yourself. To be so damn … capable. It’s false. In the end, Evan, you don’t ring true.” I’ve remembered these words,’ Evan wrote – and my own heart was beating as I read to the end of the page – ‘I wrote them down after we broke up. So they would remind me, I suppose, of what kind of an individual I am, really, despite all the seeming so … “capable”, as she’d said. It occurred to me then that in actual fact, I didn’t want to ever, I think, ever let anyone come that close.’

  I had to stop reading at that point. I got up from the desk where I’d been drinking tea and eating an oatcake while going through the pages. I went to the window and looked out at my street. The whole effect of having this kind of material inserted amongst the rest … Having it here in my hands as background, Evan’s thoughts from long ago brought together this way … It had made me feel … peculiar. At once, I wanted to get back to where we’d been, in The Elm Tree or The Walker’s Friend or The Cork and Bottle, one of our safe, friendly, local pubs with their country atmosphere and in easy walking distance from my own flat. I wanted the familiarity … of Evan. And now, instead, there was all this new chrome-bar-Gin-Whistle-style information – as though straight off one of the labels, decorated as they were with haiku poetry or excerpts from short stories, of any of those expensively fancy Chelsea gins that one could purchase there – Dark Town, Fallen Branch were two brands I’d noted – that had come at me by way of another innocent-looking brown envelope, with a different kind of person altogether, it seemed, inhabiting the pages. And why, I thought, had we to go to a different kind of pub anyway, in a different part of town – the others no longer deemed suitable? What was that all about? Even with Evan assuring me, ‘No,’ it was nothing as silly as him being snobbish about some postcode or ‘named spirit’ or ‘designer distillery’ or whatever and that it was just that he wanted to try somewhere new.