by Kirsty Gunn
Still, ‘Shoot,’ I said again, taking a sip from my gin. ‘Terroir’, eh? What was all that about? And there was no lemon, he was right. And there was also no ice. What was going on in these places with the gin? Evan didn’t even seem to care. His hair looked like he’d had a fright – and, by the way, I might add, quite apart from its shape, sticking up in odd angles, Evan had always had such great hair, when he was a boy. Helen used to cut it herself, creating a style somehow, but relaxed-looking, just so that it would be out of his eyes. I guess, thinking about it, in a way, that family were preparing to be American years before the actual event of them moving there. The signs were in Evan’s hair. The way he wore it longer than the other boys, the way he was always in jeans and T-shirts – even in winter. He used to shake his hair back out of his eyes when he was talking to me, when we played, and when I think about it, he looked like a young American even all those years ago and well before his family moved there. These memories came back to me now, as he sat, bolt upright, at the small table between us.
‘What’s up?’ I said now, as though we were both still nine years old. He shook his head as though his hair was as long as it used to be, and all the old charm of Evan – despite the ghastly attire – flooded back. It ran right though me.
‘So good to see you, Nin,’ he said then, and I could barely bear it.
And you know, it wasn’t just Evan but all the Gordonstons had great hair. Helen, she had fabulous long hair, shiny dark hair that she just used to tie back in a pony tail, with a bit of string from a jam jar it looked like, but fabulous, fabulous. And Elisabeth had great hair. Felicity did. We used to compare at school – the colours in her hair! Toffee and blonde and treacle and honey … All those adjectives – while my own was just brown, nothing but … Is how it looked to me.
‘Why isn’t my hair brown like Felicity’s is brown?’ I used to ask my mother.
‘In the same way mine isn’t dark like Helen’s is,’ my mother would reply. ‘It’s genes, Emily. The Gordonstons are blessed.’
All that, running through me. Memory. Evan. I felt myself shaking.
‘Helen is beautiful,’ my mother would always say, especially after coming back from being next door at the Gordonstons’, when she’d been spending time with Helen in that amazing kitchen of hers, that was full of light and windows and flowers. Helen there, in that kitchen, in the midst of some pottery project or other, some silk-screen work and all the dyes were spilling into the sink – scarlet and orange and emerald and yellow.
‘She’s a beautiful, beautiful woman,’ my mother would say.
And there I was with Evan now in the grip of these kinds of past thoughts. The Gordonstons. Our families together. I was back in the past while also being very much attached to the present, too, in the body and proximity of Evan sitting in front of me, the feeling of him, as I say, running through me like water. I had to take a gulp of the ice-less and lemon-less ‘terroir’, just to keep me steady. Steady, Evan, I was thinking. Though ‘beautiful’, I could write, helping to keep myself steady, though I write it again now, ‘beautiful’, as my mother said of Helen Gordonston, all those years ago, this was not a word I could apply readily to Evan now. Despite his shaking back his hair, catching my eye. Oh no, Evan, I was thinking. Not this time, no. Not this April afternoon. Nor last, when it had still been March and we’d stayed out late, too late. Not now, not then. No, no, Evan. Don’t let me be taken, that way, back into the past. Don’t look at me, please, don’t catch my eye. Not now, not then. With me being with you here, and close, so close and both the days a Wednesday – I was realising, at that moment – for I know it was a Wednesday, writing it down now in this manner and all in a rush, because I always go to a yoga class on Wednesday afternoons and Evan had asked if he could meet me then, after the class, when it was still light. So, Evan. So. Don’t hum like that while you touch my arm, don’t catch my eye. It was only a yoga class Wednesday I am writing about here, nothing more and nothing happened, did it. Nothing then or now.
I had another sip of that ‘terroir’ gin.
‘So good to see you,’ he said again, and he took his hand away. He looked away from me, down at the table in front of us. He had something to tell me, he went on then, and it would have full import. This would weigh in heavily to the contents of the book we were ‘writing together’; it would make a difference, it would change things, he said, in our book; it was always ‘our book’ now, in his discussions. ‘Our novel’. Though, I could say, there was nothing ‘our’, to my mind, about any of this, no ‘our’ whatsoever in a story that was about him and Caroline, nothing ‘our’ in it at all but only Caroline. Only Caroline and him. This, their ‘novel’, hers and Evan’s, his – not connected to me at all but for the writing, the ‘amanuensis’ side of things.
So, Evan. So.
For he didn’t once look up again as he was speaking, only head bowed over that table as though searching it for clues. ‘Our’ this, ‘our’ that – and less of you and me, this word ‘together’, I was thinking. Less of that ‘our’, I may as well have told him. Though he was there right in front of me, the present and the past of him, so close … Still. ‘Amanuensis’, remember. I am here only as the one who is ‘getting it down’. Amanuensis, again, the writer of a story. No ‘our’ in it – and remember, Evan, too, it’s only a yoga Wednesday after all, is what I was telling myself, reminding myself, just to keep me steady. And just because it was late and had been late that night a week ago, too, that wasn’t such a big deal, anyway, it just wasn’t, nor that we were here with all our past and present very close … None of it a big deal, at all.
‘What’s up?’ I said. Because for fifteen years, fifteen years, I’ve been taking that class; it was Rosie who first introduced me to it. After we finish the session, ashtanga, we often, all of us, the whole class, go to a pizza place around the corner and I text Rosie from there, send her a message to Gloucestershire to say how much I miss her being with us, splitting a Four Seasons and having a beer.
‘What’s up?’ I was about to say again, to put some words into play between us, between our two selves, to get something started, a dialogue, to stop that feeling of Evan still running through me so that I could barely hold myself, could barely be there at all. ‘What’s up? I was about to say again but then stopped, didn’t.
Because I could see – why hadn’t I noticed before? – when he lifted his head and looked at me again that he’d been crying.
* In Further Material at the back of the book, we come upon ‘Alternative Narratives’ – another instance of another story inside this one; ideas of what can and can’t be told, etc.
four
By now Evan had been living with Caroline for nearly three months. Nearly three months of him not sleeping, not eating properly, falling in love. Nearly a quarter of a year since that first day when he’d rung the doorbell of a house in Richmond and Caroline had answered and walked down the hall in front of him, knotting up that crazy beautiful blonde hair of hers in a casual twist as she called over her shoulder, ‘Coffee?’ Nearly three months. Nearly three. Of Evan calling me, keeping notes. Of me making notes from what he told me, and adding to them, from his notes. My only way of getting to see him, I was acknowledging increasingly, was to work on this writing project we had fixed in place; all our meetings together, first at country-style pubs in West London where people wore gumboots and kept well-behaved black Labradors seated at their feet or lying quietly under the tables and sleeping, and then, gradually, at more sophisticated establishments that were barely – one ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’ notwithstanding – pubs at all, only occurring because of the book we had in hand. Time was passing.
‘Gosh, Evan,’ I said. This was the following day after that last yoga-Wednesday of a meeting that had been late at night and we’d ended up staying out even later. After I had … collected my wits. ‘It’s spring. It really is.’
We’d decided the night before that spring might have been the reason for the em
otional pitch of things, the upset, Evan’s tears. Spring, after all. It has a lot to do with most people’s behaviour, it always has, not only Evan’s, not only my own. ‘The climate has changed, Evan,’ I said. ‘The temperature. The year is moving on. And where are we in all this? This story, this “novel” of ours? I think something needs to happen, by now,’ I said. For we needed to move past the recent upset, get back to the job in hand. ‘There are leaves starting to come on to the trees,’ I continued, ‘tiny and bright green, but they are there, Evan. It’s been weeks since I first saw a daffodil. The birds are on the move, I can hear them, singing and making nests. So I think, you know,’ I said, I was resolute, I was strangely formal, ‘that you may need to speak to Caroline in some way, express …’ I added, ‘I don’t know. Something. Say something to her, I mean. Of your feelings for her. Bring some gesture into play, your thoughts out in the open. Say something … you know … You must do something to make this relationship more … concrete, somehow. More real.’
As I say it was only the day after the Wednesday of the night before but it had seemed terrifically long, the intervening time. The space between then and now the longest period of time, actually, between any of our meetings – even more than that hiatus of sorts back in the late winter into early spring, over the issue of Evan’s form of description, the personal nature of his writing style – this last twenty-four hours the greatest period of minutes we’d had apart, it felt like, for sure. I’d expressed last night what I was saying now, in less cool tones, perhaps – for we had stayed up late, had only arrived at the Child at nine thirty to begin with after Evan’s late text – but in actual fact the gist of what I had been saying then and more succinctly now I could have expressed from any time after about the first week of Evan meeting Caroline and falling in love. For we had an issue, pure and simple, of content. The wanting thereof. We both had to face it, I’d said, clearing all other extraneous matter away, Evan’s quiet tears, my own beating heart, that this whole story had lacked actual expression, action, from the start. It was clear, of course it was clear, that Evan’s feelings of love had come upon him right there at the beginning of the narrative – that lovely ‘ping’ – but after that: Nothing. And Evan had needed, from that initial meeting in Richmond, in my opinion, some kind of ‘follow-up’, was the phrase I’d used the night before, bullishly even, as some kind of a pitch.
After all, I reminded him, I had this book to write. I’d been charged, Evan had charged me, with the duties of record. The word ‘novel’, by now, as I say, making a regular appearance in the text; there were responsibilities there. There was the simple task, too, of transcribing Evan’s sayings, sentences, his meanderings about Caroline. And to turn all of this, somehow, from notes to tiny incident, into something with presence and ‘press’, a love story we might, any of us, want to read. So—
‘Aren’t you going to do anything at this stage?’ I asked Evan now. We were back in the Child. What’s that expression about getting straight back up on a horse you’ve been thrown by? That was us.
‘With the leaves coming out and so on?’ I was saying. ‘That long-ago daffodil? Aren’t you going to—’
‘Just get down what has happened so far, Nin,’ he interrupted. He drained his drink with a grim expression. ‘I’m getting in another round.’
I say again, only a day had passed but it had seemed like much, much longer. With no communication made, from him, in all that time. And not a week without incident, was my view, that had begun with, perhaps, those tears that had been shed … That was behind my expressing things to him late at night in the way I had, with some degree of ‘press’ I mean. Because a matter of some ‘press’ had occurred, I may say, something had happened. Something had. An incident, maybe not large, but an incident even so – which many would rate as significant, indicating a dramatic moment in a story, a way of it moving on.
Caroline had gone up, there it was, the fact of it, to Evan’s room.
So the fact stands, in a paragraph of its own. That she had presented herself to Evan, Caroline had, at his lodger’s quarters, she had mounted the stair. He had told me about it in the last minutes before closing time at the Child. She had stood there, late at night, and knocked on Evan’s door. So, Evan. Was my thinking. Time to ‘press’ on, alright. I’d said as much then, as they flicked the lights on and off and gathered up our glasses. For a risk had been taken. Albeit a slightly druggy, champagne-and-wine-fuelled kind of risk, but risk nevertheless, and a charming one, to my mind, undertaken by a woman late at night after a dinner party, when she was still wrapped up in the mood of cigarette smoke and white Burgundy and conversation, the sweetness of a complicated pudding still upon her lips. It meant the story could take off. Something between them could begin.
And there were leaves on the trees! That daffodil had long ago bloomed! Of course I wanted to ‘press’ Evan! It’s why I used the word, why writers who are amanuenses use it. For they do need to ‘press’ their subjects, sometimes, for details. And this was a novel, wasn’t it? Evan wanted it to be? Well then it needed those details even more. I needed them. Yet, ‘Just get down what has happened so far’ was all I’d received in return. And, ‘I’m getting another round in.’
I had noticed his old British expressions were coming back into play. It was part of the general change. There was less of the ‘Let’s do drinks’ or ‘Is there a good bar around where you live?’ and more of ‘Why don’t we head down to the pub?’ and, as I’ve just written, phrases like ‘Let’s get another round in.’ There was, too, the rather more grim British fact of those jerseys, counteracted, I suppose by the ghastly ‘sweat pants’ though I’d noticed this evening he was back into his ordinary old jeans.
‘I’ll have a single this time,’ I said. I was feeling lightheaded. This Child we’d found ourselves in again, for the second time in a row, also had another kind of tonic it turned out, only available ‘under the counter’ and it was as weird and acidy-tasting, as forceful, as the peculiar ‘terroir’ nature of its matching gin. Evan had put his hand over mine, and while he’d been talking about Caroline had inadvertently been stroking the back of my hand with his thumb.
‘You’ll have a double and join me,’ he said now, and laughed recklessly and funnily. ‘God, Nin.’ He suddenly seemed very much the old Evan. ‘You and I have known each other for such a long time …’
I watched him go over to the bar and fling the empty glasses down like a cowboy. Not a trace on display of his ruined eyes from the night before. ‘Just get down everything that’s happened so far,’ he shouted back to me from the bar, as though we were at a party and about to dance – but not to ‘Sweet Caroline’ by Neil Diamond, rather something altogether more funky. ‘Just write it down. You’re a great writer,’ he shouted out again. ‘You could get the whole book finished standing on your head.’
So much for the Seed, I thought. Other venues. This Child o’ Mine that had been the site of such revelations was manifestly, tonight, an altogether different sort of place.
The fact is that the twenty-four hours that had passed between us being there last night and now this, and the intensities around that, had been fraught. For my part I mean, I can’t speak for Evan. For Evan, I have to say, though there had been clear signs of upset after the time of it happening – his distress, head bowed over the table as though in prayer, all that which, surely, had been a result of the incident? – now it was as if Caroline going up to his room had not amounted to anything much, actually, and that the incident, an enormous one as far as his amanuensis was concerned, was not going to ‘press’ the protagonist into action one bit. He seemed happy – look at him just now, up at the bar and cheerily ordering more of that contraband tonic, jaunty as you like from the effect of that, and some kind of upbeat dance music – just to let things sit. It was as though his behaviour and mien retained no memory of the upset from the night before, as though nothing, in fact, had necessarily happened at all. It was the writer in me, then, perhap
s, I brooded, as I waited for him to return with the drinks, who wanted to move things along? Who felt frustrated by allowing an incident such as he’d revealed to simply hang? That I’d been so taken up by it, imaginatively, the sense of drama, in a sort of literary way, that I wanted to build on it somehow, make something of it. Was it that? For Evan told me what had happened last thing the previous night and then not another word about it as we left the pub and went our separate ways. Not another mention, not a text or a message … I hadn’t heard a word from him until his call this evening, quite late again, suggesting we meet. And in that time between, for me, it was nothing but imagining we might just have a novel on our hands after all, of imagining all kinds of things.
There’d been real tears, remember? Though he’d never explained them. Signs of upset as he raised his head, before he came near to telling me about what had happened in his room … Where might it all lead? So yes, I’d texted Evan in the interim, left messages – but had heard nothing from him. It was almost as though we were having some kind of stand-off or row in the period between leaving the Child in the early hours of the morning and getting his text about tonight, which we were not. In all our long friendship Evan Gordonston and I have never fought, or suffered unpleasantness of any kind. So this kind of silence that had befallen us, full of emotion … Well, no wonder perhaps, I, the pair of us, had been of the mind, tonight, like last, to go out late. No wonder, I thought, we were in the mind to drink hard.
And what had actually happened anyhow? It was difficult to say. I could begin, I had, I’d already made some lengthy notes, starting when I got home the night before lest the fact of what he had told me might overwhelm me somehow, make it impossible to continue writing at all, so carrying on writing and writing the next morning and all through the day when the silence from Evan was so loud it had almost made me feel ill. I had started a whole section by way of setting the scene, imagining context. It was an important thing to do. I must write. I must ‘get it down’, I was thinking.