Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  * The notes on ‘Narrative Construction’, later, refer to modernism and its ideas of ‘making it real’; see the section on William Carlos Williams and the American modernist tradition in particular.

  † There are notes later on ‘Alternative Narrative’ that address ideas of the novel form.

  two

  For sure there were developments by now. The story was proceeding, of that there was no doubt, I had the pages to prove it, but I also had to admit that there was a sort of undoing about our activity at the same time; like knitting come undone. I’d been worried about Evan for some time, that developments themselves weren’t doing him any good, that all the talk was somehow occluding him. The jerseys weren’t the half of it. Since I’d seen him again, even that first time when he’d just come back from the States and though, of course, he couldn’t have been anything like the same boy I’d last known all those years ago, still it had occurred to me then, right away, that there was something held back about him, something doubting and unsure. He needn’t have been quite so … restrained. Is what I’d thought then. So resistant to possibilities, options. He had always been a quiet boy but not … ‘restrained’, no. That wouldn’t have been a word I would have used to describe Evan. Yet, and I’d seen this from the start, it was as if he had become, in his time away … careful, wary, even. And I was worried to see that. And, as the weeks went on, I continued to worry.

  This concern took two forms. One: Concern over the condition of Evan himself, whether he’d been eating properly, getting enough fresh air, seeing people and going out, etc. – to the cinema or to, I don’t know, various drinks parties, perhaps, or get-togethers, meeting work friends, other friends, for lunch, an evening at the theatre … All the activities we might embark upon ourselves, are supposed to, and expect others to be interested in, although, when I think about it, other people who might do all that are not like Evan.

  And then there was: Two: The condition of the story itself. ‘Our novel’, Evan kept saying. By now, I’d filled a couple of notebooks with all sorts of ideas and themes, a novel’s ‘ballast’ as I’d thought of it earlier. There were a range of questions I’d come up with that I might ask Evan at some point in my writing, about his life, and about why he’d made the decisions he had – to stay on in the US after finishing school there, why he’d decided then not to come back to London or go on to university in the UK but, rather, become American in the way people do when they move there for any length of time. That had happened to his lovely parents after all, and his sisters. It was still something my own family could not quite let go, the fact that our beloved next-door neighbours had gone away and stayed away, that the history crossword puzzle evenings for my father and Tom, my sharing homework with the girls, my mother’s painting classes with Helen and all their long, long conversations together, were all things of the past. We’d always believed, my family and I, that the Gordonstons would simply go to New York for a time, and then come home again. We’d never foreseen that, instead, their letting that decision stay open with them would make them the kind of people who ended up not so much making a decision to stay as just never returning, and when you talk to them you notice they’ve started doing things like saying ‘I guess so’ instead of ‘Yes, I agree’, or, ‘Get me some of that, will you’ instead of ‘Could I trouble you to …’ or ‘Please’ and so on. Whatever. All that. Manners. Expressions. Their accents changing slightly and they start softening the sounds of some consonants so that when they say a word like ‘city’ it comes out as ‘ciddy’. Though in all those respects, I have to say, Evan sounded pretty much the same as he’d always done, his sentences unfinished, short, a bit mumbly. Deeply, deeply familiar to me so that even with all my worries about his dress and appearance and now wariness, he seemed unchanged, in the most straightforward way, at heart, the same Evan I had always known.

  Still, even with these many kinds of insertions, reflections, the book was in no sort of ‘condition’, as I just expressed it. Despite me filling in all the gaps I could between the Gordonstons, past and present, memories of letters sent, phone calls exchanged between the two families through the early years; once, a visit by my mother when she went to stay for two weeks on her own and came back with a whole new range of quite alternative-looking outfits, and so on, such was the influence of Helen Gordonston upon her. Still, even with this kind of thing occurring, lists, etc., questions put about, facts laid down; despite my writing, the notebooks being filled, so very many pages addressed to the deliberations of, and written in, our various meetings in the pubs and associated establishments in the, now, Chelsea and South Kensington area … We weren’t getting anywhere, were we? There were all these details filled in but there was also a lack of ‘substance’, a certain kind of fiction editor might call it, a quality about the whole that kind of said: So what? And you’d think I had some kind of issue with this business of Evan’s residency in America – which I don’t – as though it had something to do with the story – which it doesn’t, not really – to the extent that you might think Evan had never come back, the way I’ve written so much about him being away, right here for example – which he had. Because, yes, his parents had stayed on in the truly formal way and taken citizenship and his father had a Chair at Yale and so we’d lost them, my parents and brother and I, who had always loved the Gordonstons, to that far country … But Evan had come home. He was with me again. And none of that should have been surprising to anyone in my family either, that the Gordonstons had stayed over there,* not at all surprising because the Gordonstons had been talking that way for a while, my mother reported, when she came back from that visit of hers, the Cape Cod holiday this was, way back, in the early years, when they’d first moved out there, and it had been confirmed even as far back as then, and as the years went on, in her many conversations with Helen Gordonston about their lives and families … How much the Gordonstons loved it there. My mother came home that time wearing a brightly coloured sort of artist’s smock she’d bought with Helen in Provincetown and announced to us all at Heathrow, when she got off the plane: ‘The Gordonstons will never be coming back. I can feel it. I’ve seen their life out there. I just know they won’t return to the UK now.’ It had been clear to my mother, she always says, from a summer morning in Truro, is her memory, sitting at the breakfast table under a big wide blue Cape Cod sky when Helen had said, ‘Give me some of that bacon, will you?’ to someone, Tom, or one of the kids, or my mother even. ‘That bacon looks good,’ and my mother had thought then: They’ve become American, the Gordonstons. It was in that form address of Helen’s. That ‘Give me …’

  ‘They won’t be coming home,’ my mother said.

  For sure, writing myself in a slightly American style, the writing had always been ‘on the wall’, as they say, writing it down here on a page as I believe I’ve used the expression before, to say that, as America pulls people in, so it pulled in that lovely family of ours – and therefore it was a surprise perhaps, yes, a surprise – I hadn’t expected it at all – that Evan would return the way he did. ‘I’ve decided to come back, Nin,’ exactly how he put it. And my feeling when he said that, my reaction? I can’t describe it. When I thought, I really had thought, that he would be away, stay away, forever. And why, I do also wonder? Did he come back, when his parents and his sisters never did? I kept returning to that theme. As I went on with the book, the work he wanted me to do, the question kept on at me, and sometimes I tried asking him but he didn’t really reply. Oh, it was ‘work opportunities’ this, or ‘career expansion’ that. But none of the reasons he gave really computing, adding up, none of those reasons anything I could use in ‘our’ story. Only this word, ‘Why?’ It kept on at me, as the pages mounted up on pub tables between us, and our meetings went on. Why did you come home, Evan, tell me, why? Like in a song, but nothing like one by Neil Diamond. After all that time away, come home again, why? When, as the years had gone on, and his parents were fully committed to staying over there, in New
York, and Felicity had got a job in Manhattan after graduating and my brother had stopped calling Elisabeth, and emailing her, and Evan and I had long stopped writing … When all the people he had grown up with apart from me had gone their own way and kind of forgotten him really, ‘moved on’ is what they say in the States, I know … Still, here he was, my dearest, oldest friend, come back from being so far away, and … Why, Evan? I was wanting to say, over and over, and more, as the weeks went on, turned into months. Looking at that old rag-bag jersey of his, at his hands, the way they fiddled with the tiny tulip-shaped tonic bottles on the table in A Tulip’s Edge, or with the hip and square tumblers of the same sort of neat artisan gin also served under the silver vaulted ceiling of the Whistle, looking at his dear, familiar face … Still, Why, Evan?, saying, but in my mind only, and not out loud to the dark but increasingly spring-affected pubbish air. Why? When you had no reason, did you? When you had no reason to come home at all?

  And as I say, these factors around the story were adding to the mounting worry over the ‘condition’ of Evan in general. His dress, appearance. Along with the state of ‘Caroline’, the manuscript, as I was thinking of it as. The way it was not adding up to anything, yet clearly taking its toll. And as one picks things up and reads into them for worrying information so I, too, after the somewhat confrontational conversation in the Edge, as we went on to call it, when I had talked about the fact that most of the feelings that we have in this life go unspoken, alluding to this story of his about an unexpressed love, of a great feeling that goes unrequited, and wondering whether there would be readers for such a thing in this age of ‘streaming movies’ and the ‘televisual’ and endless series of paedophilia and sex break-outs and celebrity drama … When I had been quite unreserved in my opinion on that score – after, how many gins? A lot. So my concerns about Evan had me picking up on his increasing reservation, distance, and worrying also about that. After that somewhat headon spring night, it seemed a long time passed between the reading of those stapled notes with the diary-like addition and meeting again in The Kilted Pig, during which I read all of the other pages, completing what I thought of as the opening section of ‘our novel’, a long time, several days.

  It was true, I added them up: those ‘several days’. It was a full week. The night in the Tulip’s Edge when he passed over that manilla envelope, before I’d even known there was a place three doors down that we would be visiting when we next met, had been a Thursday, and then it was a full seven days and still I hadn’t heard a word. And it was strange, it was, for so much time to have passed, for me and Evan. And by then, as I’ve already written, in those seven days, it had become, it was, fully spring.

  I’d got as far, at home, as getting down that opening section, mapping out for the book a kind of shape. I’d decided that the main part of the first half would comprise notes that Evan himself had made about moving to the Beresfords’ – what that was like, meeting Caroline and David and the boys, and names, and friends, what the house was like, the area, all those first impressions – though not much of that kind of detail had made it into what I’d written up to this point. Still, my plan had been – and I had talked to Evan about this – that I would ‘map out’ that ‘kind of shape’: Evan arriving in Richmond, Evan settling in, Evan getting to know Caroline – those endless cups of coffee! It was all there, in draft. I would have included the times she would seem to be there in the hall just when he came in at night from work and they would stand around for ages having a ‘catch up’ as she put it, or how if she wasn’t going out and David wasn’t due home at any hour soon, she’d be making a drink for them both, and would also put in, occasionally, Evan finding himself sitting down to join her and the boys for a kitchen supper, a ‘nursery tea’ Caroline always called it though the children were teenagers by now and barely around themselves, much … There it was, the ‘shape’. All these details about Evan and Caroline fitting together to form a backbone to the story though it was clear to me, in the general time frame of things, in terms of Evan’s presence in Richmond, Caroline was mostly out.

  Even so, I could write, I had written already in draft, the meetings would accrue, accumulate – in pages and in paragraphs, in writing of detail. They would, despite my concern about the ‘novel’, inexorably grow. There would be, too, I would write them in, the kinds of conversations Evan and Caroline would have at those times of their ‘catch ups’, ideas shared, plans made. And then, so went my thinking even further, once all this was set down as ‘a given’, as I said firmly to Evan one lunchtime when we’d long since reverted to our more regular meetings and were having a ‘Ploughman’s’ – yes, even in the smart environs of Chelsea and South Kensington a pub such as The Kilted Pig with its gins named after various kinds of Highland Scottish dance, Schottische and Dashing White Sergeant and so on, may offer to customers the option of a ‘Ploughman’s’, that familiar half pint and cheese-and-pickle sandwich arrangement so familiar to those who remember ‘old London’ as some might call it,† only Evan and I were having Dalreavoch Waltz and Wild Thyme tonic with crisps instead – once it was all ‘in place’, I continued, we would, the pair of us, have a good solid base upon which to rest the bulk of the narrative. ‘Evan’s fundamental narrative’, I was thinking of it as, because the details, when in place, would be the base upon which could sit a further investigation, of sorts, wherein I might ask him questions of a more philosophical and psychological nature, have a set of close psychoanalytical lines of interrogation that would open up further pathways to novelistic planning and so would introduce Evan himself as a fully drawn and realised character who might carry the whole weight of the proceedings if love went unrequited and we had to go down that path.

  There then was the triumphant plan! A plan! As I had it so figured! Well, in fact …? Only arrogance, call it. Fanciness, kind of. Thinking that just because I could write ad copy, easy as jump, for some insurance company or other, or just because I could whisk out an entire campaign for dog food without even drawing breath … I could do the same for this project of Evan’s. Who did I think I was? That these processes of mine, thoughts and ideas for a structure, were necessarily going to make it on to the page … Just on the basis of my planning them? That some kind of organisation on my part was going to be able to make Evan so real that I could show more and more of him by writing him, that he would become that same man to the reader I knew so well, the man they would also come to know and love? The presumption – hah! – that I could do any of that with ease. Write that Evan Gordonston. That person. Him. With his messy brown hair and a look that was always surprised when he saw me – ‘Oh, hello, Nin!’ as though I was the last person he expected, but smiling even so, ‘Oh hello’ – that Evan. The one with the bad jerseys. Him. It was ‘fanciness’, alright. To think that I could make him be someone the reader knew as well as I knew him, that I could do that by writing. I look upon myself having that idea now … some kind of ‘plan’ … and can only laugh. To think that, as I so envisaged it, I would be able to create a portrait of someone so vulnerable and in need of this one particular woman, this Caroline, that I would be able to show in his need of her what it was this one particular woman contained to make him so want her, what it was about her that drew from him the feeling that no other woman could hope to embody, even women he had known – that diary entry still played upon me – or a woman he knew now, whom he knew very well and always had known, still write what it was about this other person that had so taken him, filled him with thoughts and dreams and ideas of love that no other kind of book would do … Because, of course, it was not as easy as that. Was it? When I sat down to write it, to get beyond the ‘plan’. When I tried to get down on a page what it was about this other woman that had taken him so very far away that he’d stopped eating, was getting thinner and raggedy and wan-looking, though spring had arrived, and it was warmer, lighter … Of course it wasn’t easy at all.

  Even so, I maintained my hopes. That by writing I would neve
rtheless come to understand this dear friend of mine and his great love. Have the answer to certain questions about Evan – that ‘Why?’ of mine – and more, in a fully realised portrait and account of his relations and dealings with the beloved object who resided, playing landlady to his lodger, in Richmond. That I could come to understand the nature of unrequited feeling in the Petrarchan sense of it‡ embodied in this man, this close, close and oldest friend from childhood, so known to me as we were so known to each other that we could just sit, for an hour or two at a time without speaking sometimes but comfortable even so, to be just sitting, looking out the window, maybe, or saying small inconsequential things, in The Gin Whistle as we began, at the beginning of spring, then briefly Grapes of Wrath before finding ourselves more permanently in A Tulip’s Edge, The Kilted Pig and then, latterly, in that same season, the relaxed and spacious Swan and Seed with loads of outdoor seats though we rarely used them.

  Therefore I kept at my work. To write on. The familiar, the known, underpinning things. With no option, is how I felt it, but to continue. And Evan, as I write, as I thought, must come to see, to accept, to realise, be given over to, in these, our relaxed and gin-drinking and crisp-and nut-munching times together, the comforts of the cloak-and-hiddenness of love. Given over entire and somehow I must get all that down, too. Those moments of: ‘Eh?’, saying, sometimes, when I might ask of him: ‘Do you want to go out for a walk?’ or ‘It’s raining, shall we have another gin?’ Startling him, ‘What?’ out of reverie when I tapped his arm and said, ‘Are you hungry? We could always decide on breakfast one morning, or find that cafe on the outskirts of Richmond that we went to that one time, you remember, you were keen that I went there? We don’t always have to stay holed up in a pub, Evan,’ and he just shook his head sadly, No, as though he’d hardly heard me.