Caroline's Bikini Read online

  ‘And yet …’ I said, when I’d regained my composure. ‘And yet …’

  Because of course he was right, the same people who read ads and know about modernist American poetry didn’t necessarily also need to know about Evan and Caroline Beresford, did they? In this I was in agreement with Evan. And it’s how I’d seen things back at the beginning, as well, when we were just getting started with all this. Yet here I was now, with my oldest friend whom I’ve known since I was four, and the pages piling up and the country pubs left far behind us now that we had the far more swanky kind of establishment in our sights – split glass bars and all the rest of it – and despite everything I’d said in the past, my reservations about introspection, those ponderings of the ‘real’, now that Evan seemed to be having doubts himself about whether the story had anything more to it than being just a private account of a lodger and his landlady, I had become the one who was starting to think differently. That the writing itself, so to speak, the fusing of a modernist aesthetic and life as we were living it coming together on the page in one literary gesture was the thing we were achieving. Weren’t we? I thought so. Right here in the kind of place that gave you a stick of rosemary with which to stir a fancy tonic and a gin that was labelled after one of London’s best known streets. Goodness me, it seemed like it. In this work of ours I was starting to feel ‘deep in’.

  ‘Deep in’ was the phrase we’d bandied about earlier, when I’d told Evan about how I was adumbrating the details he was providing me with, about coffee mugs and morning conversations and so on, to provide more context, and he’d encouraged me to do that, go ‘deep in’ with descriptions and background for life in Richmond. And talking of ‘deep’, I hadn’t been able to shift Petrarch from my mind, either. Or Dante. I couldn’t shift the whole tradition of courtly love and my consideration of how it played out in post-Romantic culture. In films. Books. Or on TV. Or, for that matter, in the way the same tradition is expressed in the lives of other people I’ve known, friends, and, through reading, writers and characters alike who don’t have a great deal going on but make a great deal out of what they have. So yes, I could see that novelistic thinking, which was what Evan had been getting at, what he wanted to achieve, despite lack of anything going on, was where we were headed. Word made, if you like, flesh. In that, he’d put himself in a tradition, you might say. He’d seen, as it were, the writing on the wall. After all, there’s nothing so lively or romantic going on with Beryl in ‘At the Bay’ either, is there, that you’d think a whole dramatic story could occur from it? Or with Will Ladislaw and Dorothea in Middlemarch, come to that.† They are just hoping, hoping, those characters, that love might take shape, happen … And that hoping is all, for them, as well as for us, the readers. It’s what the whole thing, story and words, is about.

  Back in the Cork in the winter, I’d been adamant, ‘I just don’t think anyone will read your book,’ I’d said then. I said it again now – in a pub that was peculiar with decor, overwrought with tartan trim and cornicing inlaid with sets of miniature bagpipes and violins – irrespective of my growing certainty, being ‘deep in’, that there could be something of a ‘novel’ here, with the pages that had accumulated, all that context – that though it was true I was now wavering somewhat in this judgement, the fact that nothing much was happening by way of plot was an issue still.

  ‘But it will be a book, nevertheless,’ replied Evan. ‘Plot or not. It will be, Nin.’

  So alright, ‘book’, so ‘novel’. I would have to start trying to be relaxed about his terminology. And after all, time had passed, as they say in the movies, winter turned to spring. The nights were getting lighter, warmer. I’d called Evan at work the first Thursday in March because by then I’d finished what I might describe as a sort of ‘opening draft’ of the first section and though only a week had passed since we’d last got together it seemed like much longer. That last time we’d met at A Tulip’s Edge it had been because the fashionable Grapes of Wrath, which we’d found that night when the Whistle had been too crowded and, to use Evan’s word, ‘peopled’, was also too busy. It was the nature of these smart Chelsea-minded establishments with their ‘bespoke’ this and ‘handcrafted’ that to have crowds not kept at bay but positively welcomed; we’d never get a seat at the bar. A Tulip’s Edge on a Thursday evening in spring would also be, I’d predicted, far too busy for the conversation and sort of Q & A Evan would be after.

  So I’d suggested an alternative over the phone that was only three doors down but promised quiet and calm.

  ‘Shall we go to The Kilted Pig?’ I’d asked him. ‘They have that same sort of artisan gin with heather in it that you liked that time at the Whistle, only it comes in tiny red bottles, with tartan labels, and it’s quiet. There’ll be no such crowds as we had to deal with at the Tulip. I found out about it online. They have crisps, made of beetroot and turnip …’ I continued. ‘There’s—’

  ‘Sure,’ Evan said, without me having to persuade him further. And, ‘You’ve read more of my last manuscript, right?’

  ‘We can talk about that when we meet,’ I’d replied.

  The time between seeing him last and now had seemed long because of that reading. For as well as completing the entire opening section of his account, I’d also read a great deal more of his fountain-pen-written notes, including more of that personal material that spoke back out of his past, referring obliquely to those disconcerting remarks about the ‘real’, and then a whole folder’s worth of something that read as a detailed narrative centred upon his time of moving to Richmond. So yes, the time in between seemed long indeed. Evan had delivered ‘quite something’, I was planning to tell him, that would be my phrase, when we met. ‘Those pages of yours are quite something,’ I would say, because they were.

  ‘But for Caroline …’ is how he’d started the second folder. Bold. Declarative. ‘But for Caroline’ and there were many, many pages to follow and all of them ‘quite something’ in this manner, all loaded with this quite portentous tone, ‘But for her …’ I’d started though, and knew I would have to finish. It was the nature of our work together, that I would ‘get it all down’. Though Evan’s writing was large and crazed and there was so much of it, and I had whole folios of stapled work before me on my lap, I knew I must get through it all, take notes on the lot and do a massive amount of transcription. ‘But for her … I wouldn’t know what it was to feel scared,’ I read, for example. ‘For myself, I mean, to be scared around another person, to so want to be around them that anything else was going to be like sickness or death. Here I was,’ I had read on, ‘back in London, in this part of London near enough to where I’d lived when my family was all here but that was like a place I’d never known before, never been in, visited, even – a part of London right at the end of a tube line, for chrissake, as they would say in the States. And where am I?’ and so on, writing. ‘Who am I? You might say being in the States is how it feels to be in Richmond, actually.’

  There were pages and pages of this sort of thing, discursive and declarative both. ‘Like being in Connecticut or someplace,’ he wrote. ‘Yeah, it did remind me of Connecticut, when I came out here that first time. It’s a similar kind of place, you might say, sitting out on the commuter belt of a big city, only connected to it by a sort of railway with the kinds of little stations along the route that might have flowerpots and, nearby, a place to park your car, all those little stations on the line out to Caroline’s with guys in suits getting off the train half cut, like in a John Cheever short story, coming home on a summer evening from a works drinks party or having a half in a pub in the City before getting the 7.22 and their wives there at the station to meet them like it was 1963. Man,’ Evan had written. ‘It had been years since I’d been living in Britain, since I’d been back. I was like a stranger in my own home town.’

  I’d had to put a question mark in the margin there. Evan had created a persona, sure, influenced perhaps by those men in the John Cheever short stories
that he’d referenced, based on his years of living abroad, and that was quite American in voice and tone from having had all that time there, growing up, and then living there. But the problem with it was that I couldn’t hear Evan anywhere in the midst of it, as being part of the narrative. All the John Cheever stuff, those sentences and phrases, ‘half cut’, the fictional aspect of the flowerpots and so on … It wasn’t like him. Not like I’d been able to hear him even in that other strange section I’d read earlier, about a past relationship that had gone wrong. This ‘Man, it had been years’ etc. simply didn’t tie up with the boy, the person, I knew. I’d determined to discuss it with him, when we met at The Kilted Pig. But the minute I saw him again, in a jersey with holes, as though he’d found it in a rag bag somewhere, I thought I’d better pull back my opinions somewhat.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I said instead.

  For some weeks now I’d been increasingly concerned about Evan. He had always been a bit on the slight side, but now he definitely had about him the appearance of someone who had lost weight. His personality, often given over to jokes and a bit of banter, now was tending almost permanently to the serious, only ever wanting to talk about Caroline. My earlier ideas vis-à-vis possible entertainments for us both that might relieve the repetitions of the pub visits – that we might have a pasta supper, go to a cafe and eat a sandwich even – these had disappeared, worn away into nothingness like the holes in the jumper before me. Evan was wasting away.

  ‘You know,’ he said now, as if he’d been reading my mind, ‘all those years I lived in the US I always felt so robust. I didn’t ever think of myself as an ex-pat.’ He’d already ordered in the drinks, they were sitting there on the table in front of us, two tiny tumblers with the tonic presented in a cut-glass-stoppered bottle for us to share. I’d texted him details of The Kilted Pig as he knew nothing about it, even though it was actually quite near the Whistle, three doors down, actually, it was that close. Still, the modern facade could have passed him by, I’d thought, if I’d simply directed him towards the former and left him to find it on his own. Modern, sleek things have never made much impression on Evan. Even so, despite having some prior knowledge of the place – that word ‘artisan’ again coming into play – here he was dressed in an ancient jumper as though he were still in the Friend. No matter the content of his last pages and what he had written about Connecticut and New York-style flowerpots and so on, I thought how he couldn’t look more British if he tried.

  ‘Whenever I met any of those other guys from the firm who were over in New York for a conference or something – I had nothing to talk to them about,’ he was saying now, ‘about the weather or whatever, the cricket … I had no questions for them, no, I had nothing to say. Only it turns out now I could have asked them all, each one of them, this question: You don’t know this woman, do you, who’s about the same age as us? Married to a lawyer who’s with Lloyds, I think it is, or maybe Citibank? Beresford, his name is. David. He set up a big operation for one of them in Hong Kong, no? You don’t know Caroline Beresford? Because I just thought … You might have run into her. You’d remember her. I just thought you might know her is all.’

  I was puzzled. Evan was doing a thing he’d played with in some of the earlier pages I’d read, imagining he’d known Caroline for much longer than he had, that they might have been students together or whatever, to give himself more action, perhaps, in the story, more things to do and say. But one thing to write it, now here he was actually talking this way to me in real life this way, fiddling around with time, changing it. Making it seem, in this conversation with me now, that he’d known the Beresfords when he’d been living in New York, as though he’d already known Caroline then, and for a long time. It was strange.

  Back on the page, taking liberties, slightly, with the truth … well that was strange enough. But speaking this way with me directly, someone who really had known him for all this time, before he moved to America and worked in New York, who’d known him since he was five years old so really knew him, I mean, pretending he had this different, other kind of life with other people in it … Yes, it was more than strange. Making all these alterations to his biography, a detail here, a fact differentiation there. And the only feature not changing in any of it? Caroline. Everything altering, shifting, moving, even the surefire stuff about him I knew so well, all of it seemed suddenly up for grabs, except for one woman, Caroline. Caroline stayed. She was there, just the same, in all the fullness, reality, of her self and name. Caroline. Throughout all the words, all the paragraphs, all the sentences, she was just … present. In the midst. You know those lines Petrarch writes? ‘So I, alas, my lady, sometimes roam,/seeking in other faces you alone,/some semblance of the one true form …’? Well, that just about sums it up, what Evan was doing. That despite the time changes and the fanciful idea of a persona who was also Evan having known her in a past life of them being students together … Despite the smearing together the real and unreal so that Evan had become someone who could have asked these British bankers he’d met on Wall Street whether they knew someone he hadn’t even met yet in real time because he had created another reality altogether in which he could have asked them and could then tell me, his oldest friend, about that … Nevertheless, there was Caroline. For sure it was complicated, these other things Evan was writing and saying changing the texture of our story, somewhat, and its terms. I was right to feel confused. Did he actively want me to start thinking that the facts were the fiction and vice versa? I wondered. Was this all part of his new belief in the ‘novel’, perhaps? That he wanted me to believe that both versions were real? Or did it not matter either way because I wasn’t even in it, the story? I took a sip of the Pig’s hand-muddled Lewis heather and seaweed gin. Had I simply become inconsequential as far as my reading of fact or fiction was concerned? No longer part of Evan’s life, if you like? Not a person who featured? After all, he seemed to be suggesting in these various comments and writings, just because I’d taken on the job of recording Evan’s love story didn’t mean I necessarily would have a place in it. What on earth, really, would have given me that idea?

  After that meeting conducted beneath the shadows of bagpipe-encrusted cornicing with the drinks, as it were, still reeling in my head, I went home determined to assemble what would become an additional notebook for this ‘novel’. For if I was to get involved in full-on fiction now, I thought the next morning, in the clear light of day, these remarks of Evan’s turning and thickening the more straightforward reportage of events, I would need way more experience of structure and form than I currently had under my belt. With no more than the short story genre in my ‘toolkit’ as they say now, a contribution here or there in some book, plus ad work, I was going to have to learn how to manage a certain tone and approach that was long fiction’s bread and butter, but that to me, copywriter with limited literary publication on my CV, was strange fruit. And, anyhow, I still wasn’t sure, was it necessary? This veering off into the fanciful? Would it actually be of interest at all?

  ‘Self-indulgent’ had been the scary phrase I’d used. We’d had quite a lot to drink, and, as usual, on an empty stomach because Evan wasn’t keen to go on somewhere else and have something to eat, or come back to my place so I could make us my standard platter of oatcakes and cheese.

  ‘I’ve got to get back to Richmond,’ he kept saying, before ordering another round.

  ‘If you don’t give this project some air,’ I had been reminding him, ‘let alone deliver on content, create some kind of space around it, the account of your feelings for Caroline, the whole thing is going to be …’ and that’s when I’d used the phrase: ‘self-indulgent.’ I said it again, recklessly perhaps, as we stood outside the pub saying goodnight.

  ‘I know,’ said Evan, then. ‘You’re right,’ said Evan. The sign of a pig dressed in full Highland regalia swung over our heads as he considered things. ‘You are always right.’ He clapped both hands on my shoulders. ‘Where would I be with
out you, Nin?’ he said, ‘I wonder?’ And then, instead of thinking and talking to me further about the perils of being self-indulgent in this book we were writing together, simply gathered me up in a warm, gin-ish hug, tugging me on the ear as though I were a sort of pet. ‘God …’ he said, moodily, looking out into the night. We really had had about … what? Six? Of those strange kelpy heatherish gins? Five each? On an empty stomach? Maybe six. ‘Where would I be without you?’ he said again. Then, ‘See you tomorrow,’ and he walked off down the street.

  It was spring by now, as I say, fully spring and warm enough to be out without a jacket. The sky was dark, but dark light, if that makes sense, and clear and lovely, the traffic strangely abated, so for a minute it was as though I was caught in a timeless place, neither here nor there, country nor town, London nor New York nor Hong Kong nor anywhere … Just me, the trees, the scent of blossom, a warm sky darkening into night. I had a lot on my mind and yet nothing. ‘Where would I be without you, Nin?’ I was between. In the middle of my life, but caught between its moments so I was both here and not here, in the midst, but looking on.

  ‘In this second of being,’ I murmured drunkenly to myself, parsing Virginia Woolf and a way of reading fiction that is constructed of individual moments rather than some big ‘story’ or other, a row of lamps was how she put it. And in that moment of saying those words, thinking about them, I knew too, undoubtedly, that, fiction or not, truth or invention, whether or not I would actually assemble into the overall text those notes of Evan’s tonight, I was fully committed to this novel of his, the story, whatever it would be, of living, of love. Yes, I went home and I went straight to bed as the night took hold around me, but I was determined, as I drifted off, that my commitment made this story, as well as Evan’s, mine.