Caroline's Bikini Read online

  When I thought about it, standing there by the window, then wandering around my flat, going back to the window, looking back inside, pacing, turning, I thought: Something had been wrong right there and then, back in that first meeting in The Gin Whistle actually. Something changed; the mood, always jaunty in the past, talking of Caroline, talking of Richmond and the atmosphere there, was now turned down a notch, the gins and tonics in that swanky place so fancy you couldn’t remember the ornate names of them, so thin-measured were they and so redolent of a whole range of organic matter. That night Evan had passed me the notes he had been wearing a dark blue, a navy, jersey and beaten-up old jeans that looked like he’d had them forever. His face was creased with tiredness and his grey eyes looked sad. ‘I don’t know what I’m doing, Nin,’ he’d said to me. ‘Help me, can you?’

  I ran a bath and gave the whole subject of Evan my full attention. It was a different person I’d seen on our third visit to the Whistle, that fancy place; there was no doubt about it. In the light of my reading of him, I could establish that for sure. Though he’d been very much himself when I’d called earlier and though I’d thought then I could almost manage this latest departure of his into something more like an essay or journal writing, with an essay’s prolix manner, to convey various thoughts from the past, now I realised I had a strong feeling about it, his sentences and words: I wanted to throw away all of the notes. Somehow, all at once, thinking about me and Evan and how I could always guess what he was thinking, was going to say, how that had been something in our friendship, part of our very … relationship – that loaded word, though loaded, in this case, with nothing – since the absolute beginning, when we were children together was …

  Well, I couldn’t ‘go there’ as they say in the States.

  Evan.

  Evan.

  Evan.

  I just couldn’t.

  I poured Chanel No. 5 bath gel into the running water and thought instead about his blue jersey, those jeans, how I had a jersey that colour myself and jeans that were as old. Sometimes, I thought, I felt Evan and I could have been twins. ‘I know you understand,’ he’d said to me that night, tired, because of course I did, I did understand what it was to love someone and they had no idea that you did and then you had to make up some long-winded story about it.

  All that: ‘All you that hear in scattered rhymes the sound/of sighs on which I used to feed my heart’, as Petrarch begins his own ‘long-winded story’ … Oh, I knew all about that. I understood alright. I got into the bath, lay down and closed my eyes.

  The next day, I called him – it was a Thursday – and we arranged to meet.

  ‘I’d say let’s go out for supper but I’m just not hungry,’ Evan said. More and more, it was occurring to me, and I nearly said something along those lines, that Evan’s behaviour and mien was seeming to match, increasingly, that of the famous Florentine poet of the fourteenth century about whom we’d had so much discussion. More and more it was a case of: ‘the sound/of sighs’. Not being able to eat, or sleep. ‘Vain hopes … vain sorrows’, and so on. Just roaming around thinking of a woman he loved and thinking, too, of the words that would turn the love into something ‘real’.

  ‘But it might do us good, to have a bowl of soup at least,’ I said. ‘Gin and tonics are great but—’

  ‘Let’s just meet at the Whistle again,’ he said. ‘Like last time. It was perfectly good. I enjoyed it.’

  ‘Alright,’ I replied, moody. ‘I suppose it will do.’

  As it was, however, we went to another place altogether, Grapes of Wrath, three doors up. The old Whistle was too crowded – that smashed-glass feature at the bar drew an arty crowd – and this time I was the one who was tired. Christopher had been on the phone reminding me about my mortgage again; he said we were living in ‘dangerous days’ and any minute could find ourselves evicted for non-payment of any day-to-day bill as was happening to ‘perfectly respectable people all over the UK’, he’d said this morning, with every day passing some poor soul being turned out of his or her home and an oligarch moving in, buying up the whole neighbourhood at the same time, just like that. As a result, somewhat stricken with anxiety by his words – Christopher had always been a compelling public speaker – I’d worked all that day and very hard on a campaign for dog food, the same campaign as before, but now the company wanted to market a top-of-the-range menu for ‘pampered pets’. I’d been going at it with no holds barred – so why would I want to be bothered standing at a crowded chrome bar, matte or not, was my thinking. The campaign involved foil tins of pet food that had been created to look like ready meals from Marks and Spencer but in miniature. I’d been sent them at home, in order to render them authentically in long copy and subheads, along with a list of ingredients, and how best to serve them: warm, with a little sachet of the crunchy biscuits that were also supplied, as a side dish. The whole thing was ornate and weird and exhausting to write about. I’d had to keep remembering to eliminate the second person from my copy, as in ‘You are going to love’ – you are – ‘these tasty mouth-watering dishes …’ etc. I was really tired. Around four, with Marjorie texting me, in her advertising company sort of way: ‘Copy due end of play tomorrow’, I changed out of my old red top and put on a grey, long-sleeved button-down shirt. I found my baseball boots where I’d pushed them behind the linen basket and grabbed a jacket from the hook on the front door. The minute I stepped outside into the air I registered that it was warmer than it had been. Could it be spring?

  It took about half an hour to walk to meet Evan. The noise from the crowds at The Gin Whistle reached me as I approached. There were people standing drinking outside but it was easy to see him standing apart, off to one side, and, I saw at once, in the same dreadful jeans.

  ‘This is too busy for us,’ I said. ‘Come on …’ I led the way up the road to Grapes of Wrath, not an old pub, but not, thank goodness, new. We could make ourselves at home here, I thought. It would surely have a proper, old-fashioned and substantial gin. I started to say something about the weather, how warm it was, but Evan interrupted, before we’d even sat down he put his hand on my arm in an urgent sort of way, and scrunched up his eyes as though in pain.

  ‘I’ve been wanting to ask you,’ he said, his face in a grimace. He looked about seven years old. ‘Did you read those latest notes of mine and what do you think? Is there a project in all this or not? Lately, I’ve been starting to feel this whole thing is a waste, of you, of me, of our time.’

  ‘Steady,’ I said. My breathing felt tight, like it was suddenly hard to take in air. ‘Less of the “you” and “me”,’ I said, in a strange tone of voice I barely recognised. ‘Let’s rewind, shall we?’ I said to Evan. ‘Let’s get back to Caroline.’

  * ‘Personal History’ describes more of Evan’s American idioms and suggests ways the author’s advertising work may have also influenced her own writing.

  Steady …

  one

  The seasons were changing. Right back at the beginning, when it was still the middle of winter, I’d had to tell Evan that I didn’t think anyone was going to be much interested in this book of his. ‘Evan,’ I’d had to say then. ‘A story about your love for a woman you barely know, who you saw, standing in a doorway in Richmond and “ping”, to use your own lovely word – that was it, love at first sight – well …’ My voice trailed off. There’s that phrase: at a loss for words. I was ‘at a loss’. But it was still dark then, morning and night. The days were short.

  Now it was getting warmer. And it had been a long time since I’d expressed that view; for we now had a substantial project in hand. A whole section had been completed since Evan had first mentioned meeting Caroline – and it seemed so casual, now, looking back on that, the way he just ‘mentioned’ the fact that he might want to write something about that, meeting her the effect it had had on him and might I help. It had seemed so casual and yet there had been nothing casual about it. We’d had a gin or two and then Evan had sa
id, ‘Please help me with it, Nin. This is writing I won’t be able to do on my own,’ and I’d said, ‘Alright, I’ll try’ – remember? All this now felt like a long time ago and here we were with this pile of pages accumulated between us, and whether or not anyone would want to read them … That no longer seemed relevant.

  I looked back fondly on the days when we were meeting at the kind of pub with muddy gumboots at the door. I looked back. Country thoughts: braces of Labradors and terriers tethered to posts, retrievers allowed indoors after a good day’s work out on the hill, clustered at the fire in lodges or beneath tables in country inns … These ideas had been nourished by the rural sort of hostelry Evan and I had been frequenting, back in the winter when it was cold, and it had been comforting, somehow, calming, to be so nourished. The idea that the pair of us might be deep in the countryside straight off the back of a shoot or point-to-point and with little thought of the sophistications of a matte chrome bar, for example, or the kinds of gin I could now see people were interested in, in the more fashionable parts of town … Well, it was a lovely idea. Those Barbours hanging on hooks, the proper sort I mean, before they became silly and fashionable … I myself did own one of the old Barbours, inherited from an aunt, and I had worn it on occasional country weekends when Marjorie used to invite me down ‘to make up numbers’ for some party or other, this before the advertising had both of us, to carry on the country and hunting analogy, in its maw, and Marjorie had had plans of marrying and having ‘a whole squad of children’ as she put it, and moving to Wales or the West Country. She’d always been an excellent cook and could happily have fed an army, let alone a ‘squad’ of her own – only she’d never met the person she would have the ‘squad’ with, that mythical handsome farmer she had in mind, and so instead had focused all her domestic abilities and skills on creating an extremely attractive one-bedroom flat in Chelsea. I thought fondly now of how I wore the Barbour, not only with her, in those far-off house party days, but very occasionally, too, in the early winter weeks with Evan when our writing together was just beginning and this was a ‘project’, we called it, that we shared. How many of us ever have life turn out in the way we expect, was where my thinking took me when I thought about that particular piece of outerwear, or me, or Marjorie, in careful detail. Experience throws up surprises at every turn.

  Evan had seemed so relaxed then, back in the winter, by comparison with how he was, I could see, now. There was more colour in his cheeks back then, as though the country atmosphere of those pubs suited him. When we were children we would spend a lot of time outdoors, in hardy clothing and gumboots, so perhaps the whole atmosphere in The Walker’s Friend and those other places felt comforting to us because they were somehow familiar. Now our destinations were very different. That chrome bar – matte – of The Gin Whistle. That Grapes of Wrath followed swiftly by A Tulip’s Edge, neither of which carried straightforward gin or tonic but it all had to be special-shaped bottles with labels that had haikus on them or extracts from short stories. We were in another world. And the ‘project’, whether or not anyone was ‘going to be interested’, had taken us both into its depths. Evan was now talking ‘novel’. Back in the lovely Cork and Bottle, he had said that his reaction to meeting Caroline would have meaning in ‘a written-down account’, was how he put it, in which he would have a role through his position as lodger in her home; his unspoken feelings and attitude towards her would have voice, he said. ‘A presence on the page.’ Now, though, more and more he was describing what was happening as being, first ‘a good story’, and then ‘well, a novel, really, Nin’. Fixing me with a particular kind of look. ‘Is what this is shaping up as, don’t you agree?’

  He’d raised the issue after I’d been talking to him about form, reminding him of the amount we’d written together since starting back in January, when he’d moved in to Richmond, of its shape and narrative momentum, or lack of it. I’d reminded him of how I’d raised the question early on, of the writing’s ‘relevance’ to the general reader, and Evan had countered that it didn’t matter that nothing had been said, by him, of his feelings for Caroline, that it didn’t change the fact that as far as he was concerned we still had a great story here.

  ‘Most of the strong feelings we have go unspoken,’ I agreed one evening in the kind of place where I should have been wearing a little black dress. I remember we were sitting quite close together on two very spindly little chairs. It was like we were trying to keep our balance. That was A Tulip’s Edge. Ever since Evan had fallen upon The Gin Whistle, with the delivery of that particular set of notes that had … bothered me, somewhat, we’d taken to meeting in a more Chelsea-minded part of town. It had been a move, smartish, that made me aware of the way we both dressed, Evan and I, that was articulated in the decor of not only the Whistle but also Grapes of Wrath, that temporary holding place with its illuminated bar that seemed to make of the gin-bottles light bulbs lined up along the shelf, and now this tulip-inclined establishment with its ‘artisan’ gins and demanding furniture.

  ‘Most of the important thoughts we have about our lives … We don’t say them out loud,’ I said, the fine and precarious structure of the chair wavering beneath me. ‘But that’s not the point, Evan,’ I continued. ‘The fact is that people, when they read, want to read something that has substance and ballast.’ I was back on the theme of content. Less introspection, more action had been my driving thoughts ever since Evan had given me those pages about his sense of, as he described it, the ‘real’. For that kind of thinking would not our story make, was how I saw it. I wanted to have him see it, too.

  ‘Readers like resolution, conflict, drama …’ I went on. ‘And you’re talking about making this into a novel, your situation in Richmond, and what you think about the situation, but I have my challenges with that. “Story” or not, Evan. Or “novel”, to use your new term … We still need a proper plot here. That’s what people want from the genre: narrative. Drama and action and maybe some research, too, you know, historical research? Don’t get me wrong. I’m committed. As I’ve said, it won’t stop me writing, wondering whether people will find this interesting or not. The project is interesting I think, and it’s building up, we have the whole first section done. But “novel”, Evan? If it’s a novel readers will want more. They’ll want more than you seeing Caroline Beresford in a Richmond doorway. Novels want more!’

  I finished off my drink and stood to get another round in. Back in the dear old Cork the gin was straightforward, as I’ve mentioned, pub gin, pub tonic. Bombay. Gordon’s. When did it get to be life got so fancy? Now here we were somewhere, and alright so there was no ‘matte chrome bar’ at A Tulip’s Edge, but just look at the place, at the gin. There was a fake library along one wall featuring books about tulipomania and tiny lamp-lit cubicles on another, each one filled with all kinds of gin named after districts in Amsterdam where the tulip craze first took hold. There was shaved ice in a bowl and the tonic had some herb or other. ‘Slivers of a “Citrus Gesture”?’ the guy behind the bar had put it to me when I’d asked for lemon. What were Evan and I, in our kind of clothing, doing there?

  ‘Most people watch TV series now anyhow, instead of reading novels,’ I continued. ‘And when they do, read, I mean, then believe me, Evan,’ I felt flushed and hectic, ‘they want fiction to have stuff from the newspapers in it, the culture that’s around them. You think that culture is Richmond? Positioned where it is? Last stop on the third tube option on the District Line? Think again.’ I was walking away, still talking. I felt like I had a lot to say. Those herbs in the tonic may have been stimulants. ‘People want certain kinds of locations, characters,’ I called back at him. ‘Paedophilia and wars, sex change and reality TV … That’s a small example, of course; still I’m talking content, again, and lots of it.’

  ‘But I don’t care,’ Evan replied, when I returned to the table with fresh drinks and a small bag of tissue-wrapped nuts for us to share. Tissue-wrapped nuts, for goodness’ sake!

>   ‘I just want this story written down, Nin,’ he continued. ‘About Caroline. About my life in relation to hers. Who knows?’ he remonstrated. ‘Who knows?’ He was rather wound up himself. ‘It may turn out that I don’t even have a life, that that’s what my unrequited love for Caroline has made me see. That I don’t have anything else I am really busy with or living for. Apart from you, I mean. I’m like an empty shell.’

  ‘Mmmm.’ I took a large sip of my Portobello Road and its strange-tasting tonic. And then I took another one. If I smoked, and if I was allowed to in a pub, I would have been lighting up a cigarette right then. ‘Apart from you’, indeed. What was he thinking of? I’d be taking a fag from the pack, right now, yes, a singular, deadly, good old-fashioned fag, and sticking it in my mouth. Striking the match and inhaling. Just to be doing something, anything, fiddling with a cigarette and smoking it, rather than have those words – ‘Apart from you, I mean’ – rushing through my head.

  Yes, Evan had made his point. He’d made it alright. He’d done what I said doesn’t happen in stories, oh, he’d done that. Reminding me that words do happen, they can go to work on the page and wreak an effect. He’d proved it: ‘It may turn out that I don’t even have a life, that that’s what my unrequited love for Caroline has made me see,’ he’d said, and more, showing in a sentence just how good words can be at making things real. ‘No ideas but in things’* – remember, that old chestnut? Sure, you might think I would know about the effect of a good sentence well enough not to be shocked by its application now – this from the advertising programmes I create, those various campaigns, the pet food and so on. Others for insurance. Sports shoes. As well as from having a good education in English literature. You’d think I might be blasé, I mean, about how easy it is to create desire and facts and resolution out of a well-turned phrase, to give meaning and shape to life because people need life insurance and new shoes and cat food and read the poetry of William Carlos Williams.