by Kirsty Gunn
For this was Evan now and I had to accept it. More and more vague. Becoming, yes, quite thin. Just as able as ever to crack the odd joke and make me laugh – ‘I have never believed in the concept of a three-course meal,’ for example, after six bags of Guatemalan hand-salted nuts in the Edge – as well as the odd and quiet remark that would make me sit up straight in attention – ‘Achilles, as you know, a boyhood hero of mine, is still a character who holds a great deal of interest for me,’ late against a low-level soundtrack of piobaireachd one night in The Kilted Pig, for example, or, in the same place, ‘A butterfly’s life is quite long enough’ – and ‘I agree’ would always be my reply.
So these frail phrases, words, to show the life of us two, together. And like butterflies, themselves, my poor thoughts, going, flitting, drifting … Lighting upon this memory or that, some idea. Because I knew, deep down, that ‘the cloak-and-hiddenness of love’ was no mere metaphor for Evan, for me. But rather that these curious comments of his I so loved, along with our silences, our easy sitting, as the rain hit the red-beaded glass windows of the Edge, or sun shone down upon our heads in the grand and lovely rooms of The Swan and Seed, as, while the weeks passed on and we came, occasionally, to sit outside there in the warmth, sometimes, our jackets and jerseys cast down on the seats beside us … All this, this cloth and gin and temperature, and bags of various kinds of toasted and roasted nuts, occasionally unusually wrapped, split between us … All this could come to be as nothing. Next to the reality of Evan’s mind, his thoughts, his imagination and imagining that meant, I felt, I feel, that he was so wrapped up in hiddenness and love I may never see him again.
‘Let’s go in,’ he always said, those early spring days, even as the sun continued to shine and everyone else at The Swan and Seed was out enjoying the weather. ‘We’ve been sitting here long enough. We’re better inside.’
* For they did, remember? That’s already come up: How the Gordonstons left London when the author and protagonist were still children, and stayed there. Details about how both families manage being apart, when they are such good friends, are in the notes titled ‘Personal History’ under ‘Family’.
† There are notes about ‘Old London’ in the section ‘Personal History’; see also ‘Pubs’.
‡ Without going overboard, there are some details about Petrarch and Laura, creativity and desire, and the Canzoniere at the back of the book – all pretty interesting, but very much an option as far as the extent of any additional reading is concerned. It’s more of that theme again: unrequited love.
three
There were reasons, then, extended and Petrarchan, for having so many of those ‘Q & A’ sessions, as Evan termed them, that I was pressed to arrange with him in order for us to be able to catch up and fill in key content areas for the book we were writing that I did, for myself, also want to arrange. For how else, I was starting to think, more and more, was I to see Evan if not to find out more about his situation with Caroline? I asked myself that particular question often. Why else would he come out into the world, it was starting to seem? If not to arrange for the love story to be developed – ‘got down on the page’ as Evan bluntly put it – would I see him at all? So my ‘Let’s meet up for a Sipsmith and Fever Tree’ suggestions – to be American about it, to match his habits, I suppose, that way they all have over there, of calling drinks by their manufacturers’ names and not by sheer alcoholic description, so ‘Tanqueray’, so ‘Hendrick’s’, etc., as they say in New York – were all there to make it seem casual with Evan, as though casual, casual, casual, might have been the only way, so caught, so entranced was he by life out at the end of the District Line, we could justify a meeting. Sometimes I did wonder, if I had not had the wit to suggest it, or he had not had something urgent about Caroline he needed to relay, would he even call me, speak to me? Hence my nonchalant ‘Shall we get together?’ messages left on his mobile when my heart was beating, actually, sometimes so much I thought that the modest baseball-sized organ nestling within me was just going to jump clean out of my chest.
And all during these weeks, Evan was becoming paler, more grubby-looking. For those old jeans and jerseys … They were getting more and more worn, more threadbare and stained. Even when we’d arranged to meet straight after work and he still had a suit on, he managed to convey an old-jeans-and-jersey appearance; his hair sticking up and him rummaging amongst it as though he’d just woken up; in all, in general, a pretty poor state of affairs.
By now it was always daylight when we met. With spring upon us in all its glory, aforementioned flowers and blooms at every corner and in every park, so these were daytime meetings we were having now, as I may as well describe them. With the clocks gone forward; darkness fled. So it was, in that spring light, I could always clearly see in detail the exact state of Evan’s repair, as it were, in the longer lighter evenings bright as day I could look straight at him, observe all his familiar aspects and ways. We tried not to stay out late again, as we had that night at the Pig, and often, too, we’d try and get together on his lunch break, or on a morning when he didn’t have any meetings scheduled, though never again was there to be a cafe involved as we’d gone to a cafe once, on the outskirts of Richmond, all those months ago, for ‘context’, and all we’d done was talk about our past, when we’d been children and living next door to each other in Twickenham, a part of London that wasn’t that far away, actually, from the very place where we’d been sitting.
So ‘Yeah,’ Evan would say, or ‘OK, then,’ to my various proposals to visit this pub or that. And, ‘Yeah,’ myself, when he told me there was something about Caroline he needed me to write down. Yeah, yeah, and again another yeah. Yeah to A Tulip’s Edge or more often now to The Swan and Seed. Yeah, yeah, to The Gin Whistle, still, or ‘Let’s go back to the Pig.’ Because, as I say, never once did we vary our destinations that much, or did he come around to mine, and though he invited me to go out to the house in Richmond on a number of occasions, for some supper this, or kitchen tea that, because Caroline would love to meet me, he said, an old friend and all that … And oh yeah, yeah, I kept thinking, as though I might go out there, as he said he would like me to … I knew deep down I never would. There were the occasional evenings through the spring when I would also say ‘Yeah’ to his suggestion that I meet him near where he worked, in one of those pubs in Mayfair with names like The Cask or The Vault or The Chambers and they were lively enough, with all the after-work crowd, those places, on a spring evening when the weather was warming up, everyone out on the pavement and drinking and smoking like it was the eighties. But it was only ever a ‘Yeah’ and no more, just a slight variation on our usual routine, and afterwards, after a gin or two, we wouldn’t do anything else.
‘Hi,’ I would say, on those occasions. I would see him through the crowd. A lone figure, not checking his phone, but just standing, in that way he used to stand when he was a boy, waiting for the next thing to happen. So standing now, and waiting for my ‘Hi’, just the same, actually, as he’s always been.
‘Hi,’ I would say and then we’d order, gin this, gin that, nothing much ‘artisanal’ going on in Mayfair though very pleasant it was without it, even so, and Evan would fill me in on what was going on with Caroline, how much ground they’d covered that week – in a smile exchanged, or a brushing of her arm against his arm that had been registered by both parties, or in the recognition of a particular word that had been expressed – ‘love’, for example, as in ‘Would you like a coffee?’ and ‘Oh, I would love that’ – all this in their brief meetings in the kitchen in Richmond, or when Evan came in the front door. Or there’d be more content he’d want to pass over to me on the conversation side of things, about the kinds of subjects he and Caroline had covered over elevenses at the weekend, say, and then there’d be some discussion between the two of us as to whether there was, as Evan put it, ‘anything between’ him and Caroline on the basis of one or two of those get-togethers of theirs from which he could ex
trapolate further meaning.
‘Well,’ I would often say, jamming up against him for lack of space on the pavement outside The Cask, everyone shouting around us, and leaning in to each other and laughing. ‘Well …’ I would say again, thoughtfully, as though I was going to say something else, but in fact I wasn’t. And he would carry on, Evan would, describing various conversations between him and Caroline giving rise to all kinds of busy and commanding thoughts that would engage him and I would say ‘Well’ again, sometimes, for encouragement, all the time wondering if there might be a table inside where Evan and I might be happier, on our own and indoors and away?
I write that ‘never once did he come around to mine’ – apart from one time, right at the beginning of all this, soon after he’d arrived back in London from America – and that’s entirely true. For the fact that something happened on one particular visit when this story hadn’t even begun is of no consequence to the plot or narrative,* no reason to get into it here, maybe never in this account. After all, my part in the writing is to comply – those daughters of Milton, remember? In the same way, I was to ‘comply’ – with Evan’s ideas and requirements as far as content is concerned, and also, for that matter, with the form of this story. There was no earthly reason to go putting in early information here that serves no part in a narrative about Evan’s love for Caroline. What would be the point? This is his story, not mine; his love, his feeling for Caroline and what was going to happen with that, and, as I’ve recorded, his reaction when I told him something rather straightforward about the quality of his own written work that had led to a gap, a breach in our communications, those long days when I hadn’t heard from him, not a text or a call. With all that going on, and more, why would I start writing now about some evening that’s not even included in the first section of this book, referring to something that happened before the beginning of it even, before he moved to Richmond, met Caroline? If I was to start writing about one particular night back there in the winter, in the depths of that dark time – well, I’d never finish this section that’s in hand. I would go back there, I would want to, be there with Evan and I would never want to leave. I would stay.
With that in mind, then, I’ll put that ‘scene that took place’ – is how I’d described it on a page in an early notebook that I’d since stopped using – aside. ‘Scene’, for ‘scene’ is how it was, as though what happened that night were some kind of play. As though it wasn’t real. For sure there’s no space for such scenes here, not in the sense that Henry James describes them, in his quite famous essay about theatre and novel writing, that phrase of his: ‘the divine principle of the Scenario’ … No. Though Evan has talked about this book at times as being something that’s a bit like a play, well a monologue really, with the figure of a tall blonde woman at the back of the stage making gestures, coming towards the front of the stage to speak sometimes, and a man responding to her but neither of them hearing each other … Even so, theatrical as that set-up may be, the other particular ‘scene’ I was referring to hardly fits the rest of the drama anyhow which is all about Evan and Caroline with no interest whatsoever in addressing something that took place in the sitting room of my flat back before this story begins. Instead, I’ll introduce at this juncture another more pertinent meeting that occurred when the clocks had switched forwards and the evenings became suddenly much lighter. Yes. That time. ‘Spring forwards’, as we say, to remind ourselves how to set the clocks, adding one whole hour and with it changing the day. So writing, quite suddenly away from the winter solstice with a low lamp burning late at night in the sitting room of my flat, the doorbell ringing as if to startle me but in fact I’d been expecting it, and springing forwards instead to a time when it seems as though a much larger light were shining on us all – and this included Caroline and Marjorie and my parents and Felix and everyone I’ve mentioned in this story – as though, quite suddenly, one day in spring, we were, all of us, living in a different world.
By now I’d well and truly got into the thinking of Evan’s ‘novel’ as he was happy to hear me calling it, though for the most part there was nothing much made up about it – apart from the odd ‘intrusion’, as I thought of certain pages myself, when Evan wanted to apply a little magical fictional realism to his narrative and have me include these in the account, or when I found myself adding details that I hadn’t personally witnessed, the details of Caroline’s dress and hair, filled in somewhat from Evan’s more general outline, the arrangement of the kitchen with its expansive breakfast bar that overlooked the large green garden with its borders and old oaks and maples. Some rose trellis, I believe. And so on. There was plenty of this kind of thing that I was writing about quite freely in my paragraphs and pages, adding here and there where Evan had just told me about the general circumstances of the set-up in Richmond, or where I had inferred.
He was, for sure, barely leaving his lodger’s quarters these late spring days, as they were at this stage of the proceedings, except to work, or meet me early to talk about Caroline. It had been ages, ages, since we’d been out late. Something about the night was going to trouble us, was in both our minds, I believe, since that time I’d been forthright about his chances of getting a readership for this story and we’d had too much to drink … Something about that night, then, had made us wary of the spring weather, the warmth, the softness of the dark. We’d tried to keep our meetings to the light.
Yet here he was, one evening towards the end of March, calling up well after nine o’clock – actually it was a brief text – to ask if we could meet at the Child o’ Mine, a place quite near the Seed, where we’d only ever been in the afternoon.
Of course I said ‘Yeah.’ As I’ve already noted, Evan had been looking increasingly peaky. At our last meeting, the day before, he had been wearing an old maroon-coloured jersey that had stains on the front, nasty stains that had worked their way into the wool of the jersey and he hadn’t seemed to care about it one bit. Now, though, he looked even worse. His outerwear had the appearance of something spilt recently, down his trousers, down his front. Also, the jersey was not only stained, but was fraying at the cuffs and around the neckline – I mean, pieces of textile were unravelling from Evan at these places; the jersey was coming away. When I looked closer I could see a hole, a large hole under the arm, and, in general, evidence of … on his shirt, on his jeans … significant thinning.
He was ‘wearing’, in other words, Evan was. Wearing thin. Wearing, too, or ‘coming away’ as a seam comes away from the sleeve, or a hem will fall. This whole affair with Caroline, if I could call it an ‘affair’, these ‘chats’, brief brushings, of a hand, a fingertip, an arm … They were taking a toll. The day before I’d seen this man who was my oldest friend in the world wearing a very nasty-looking item, but it was nothing as bad, nothing, as what he had on this evening. I doubted whether this freshly stained, unravelling thing was even wool.
And worse. For when he took that off, the outer garment, if I can even call it that – Child o’ Mine was like The Swan and Seed that way, it could get warm indoors – there was an equally unpleasant T-shirt underneath. And all this with tracksuit bottoms – ‘sweat pants’ as they say in America – and trainers.
‘God, Evan,’ I said to him then. ‘You never used to wear this kind of stuff.’
‘You mean these old sweat pants?’ he’d replied, barely looking at me, he was pouring the tonic into the large tumblers of gin, ‘locally produced’ apparently, so-called ‘terroir’, he’d already ordered.
‘Exactly,’ I said. The word ‘incredulously’ comes to mind. ‘Sweat pants,’ I said. ‘The kind of clothing that even goes by the name “sweat pants”, Evan. You’d never be in that kind of kit in the past. What’s happened to you, boy?’
‘There’s no lemon,’ said Evan, as if I hadn’t spoken. He took a sip. ‘Tastes alright though.’ He looked like he was in a kind of a dream. Dressed in unrecognisable clothes, as though he himself could barely be recognised. The ‘s
weat pants’ might have been peeled off the legs of a homeless person, I could talk about them forever. They, too, had stains – though in this case the stains were mainly old. Old indeed. Much older than the crusted muck that sat on Evan’s chest, that I could see he displayed to the world as though it were some kind of badge, a badge of honour worn bravely across the front of his maroon.
‘Hi,’ said Evan, as though I had only just sat down.
‘Hi back,’ I replied, about to say something else, about his shoes, about those ‘pants’ again, but he put his hand on my arm to stop me.
‘I’ve something to tell you,’ he said. ‘Thanks for coming out so late.’
He was drawn and pale, I’ve written that already. Illlooking, actually, though he’d reported in an earlier meeting that he had no symptoms; he was only drawn. It’s true, he certainly seemed to have lost a great deal of weight. Slight in all areas may be a good description, through the arms and torso; his hair sticking up like always, like a little boy, as I said before, as though he’d just woken up. He looked awful.
‘Good God, Evan,’ I said. ‘Shoot.’
I wasn’t fazed, despite the appearance side of things, despite his sense of drama, the lateness of the hour. After all, Evan was always reporting that he had ‘something to tell’; usually it was ‘something big’ and then I would write it down and it didn’t seem that big a deal at all.