by Kirsty Gunn
Evan’s room was at the top of the house. I think I’ve written that somewhere already? That it was a big house, the house in Richmond? As many houses are, of course, out there at the end of the District Line, for it’s an old established part of town, Richmond, with inheritance a big part of the game when it comes to real estate – so large unspoiled houses, large gardens, places to park two or three cars … That kind of scale. And this house of that scale particularly so – was there talk of David Beresford being given it by a grandmother, on his mother’s side? I think that was the case, Rosie said – for the place had that lovely, lived-in feeling, of old sofas and bits of very good furniture and so on, a lovely wide stair. All meaning that Evan’s quarters, his lodgings … Well, it was more than a good-sized room, he said. More like a studio flat really, as he described it, not just a bedroom. Oh no. In New York they might even call it an ‘apartment’.* Why, I might write, in the American way, he had his own landing up there! His own bathroom – ‘naturally’, Evan was to say to me, two weeks after moving in, as though he’d been living in Richmond his entire life – ‘with a separate shower and a bath.’
That’s how big those houses are, as I say. Is why people go there, to Richmond, even if they’ve not inherited, move that far out, to the edge of West London you might say, to the end of one of the option routes on the District Line, and stay. Is why families like the Beresfords even, who you might have put down on paper for Notting Hill or Chelsea … Is why you find them out there in Richmond with the gardens that go on forever and, more recently, the patio areas with built-in barbecues and the swimming pools, yes, there are swimming pools in Richmond.
‘I mean,’ Evan said to me, right back in the beginning, when he’d first moved, ‘the house is huge, Nin.’ We were back in The Elm Tree then. I was making a list of ‘facts and practicalities’ as I called them. ‘The Caroline file,’ said Evan. ‘No,’ I replied. ‘I want facts, context. Background information, Evan,’ I said, for though we’d been to that cafe that time, it had been nowhere near the house, we hadn’t even got close. I’d had no idea about the Beresfords’ arrangement of the domestic space, decor, none of it. We’d needed to get all those details down – which is how we got on to the sheer size of his studio flat at the top of the house.
‘My own landing,’ Evan said to me that night at the Elm. His words came back to me in Child o’ Mine as I waited for him to return with our powerful cocktails that made me want to dance. They had whirled in my head, too, in the intervening hours after he’d told me the night before about Caroline going up, and I had felt so cut off from him, as though far, far away. ‘I heard a knock on the door, Nin, late, at night, and it was Caroline …’ he’d said, just before the Child was about to close. ‘She was standing on the landing outside my room and I said, quite simply, “Come in.”’
Yeah, well. Stories. Novels. That’s fiction for you. And ‘Closing time’, eh? I might have written that down, got that much recorded at least – along with that ‘Come in’. But as it turned out it wasn’t as if any of this narrative was exactly moving along at any kind of pace as a result, even though one may have expected it. Even with Caroline tired and confused and clearly taking something and it had been reacting weirdly with the drinks from the dinner party, the spirits and the wine … Still it wasn’t as if …
‘Come in,’ he’d said.
Anything had happened, had it?
Had it?
Because—
‘Oh leave it,’ Evan had said, as we’d parted, him about to disappear into the night, when I’d asked him what it might mean, her coming up, and what might have happened next.
‘Goodnight, Nin,’ is all I heard.
And then the long hours had passed. And I had felt so alone.
Well, there. It was a pub of intensities, as recently noted. Evan’s ‘Just write it down …’ now in the merry atmosphere of a place of dance over which formerly had reigned an attitude of introspection and of prayer. His former ‘There’s no need to make a big thing of it’ after Caroline had gone up, his confessed ‘Come in’.
The Child was, as I say, that kind of place.
It was a pub we’d found together that used not to be there. By that I mean it was something else before it was a pub. An electrical shop, perhaps? A shoe repair business? We’d seen it together, Evan and I, back in the winter when it was still pretty cold and we’d identified it as being somewhere good to go, along with The Swan and Seed, when the weather became a little warmer, when one might feel one wanted to be on holiday, kind of – Evan from his high-powered city job and anxieties about his relationship with Caroline; me from the exigencies of life as a freelance copywriter who lives alone and has thoughts of writing a long historical novel with research, the kind that sells, but who knows that she’ll never be able to. It was a very nice pub. About a forty-minute walk from my flat, and you might have thought we could go back to mine afterwards, if we’d wanted, that I could have made pasta, a rice dish, that we could just wander back home after some hours of sitting, talking … But as I’ve already noted, that was not to be part of this story which takes place, the unspooling of it, mostly in pubs – with outdoor seating and in – all over the West London area. Anyhow, there was no need for any alternative entertainment of that nature, because, as I say, the Child – like the Seed – had a holiday mood, quite removed from the urban edge of the Chelsea and South Kensington establishments, that took us away from thinking about domestic circumstances, so thoughts of pasta, rice – just no. It had large tables for two people. Perfect, then, for writing a ‘practical list’, which was what I had brought with me, to prompt Evan – that word ‘press’ again – into providing some more of the story now that we were together and the rent between us, my loneliness, his shed tears, trammelled up and mended. I could lay out the pages on a table that was perfect, altogether, for writing, and for taking notes. As it turned out there was to be no writing this night, it’s true – dancing was in the air! – but still I had my notes for our next meeting. I had them with me, headed: ‘Evan’s Accommodations’.
‘Just tell me’, I asked him, when we decided to go there again on a sunny afternoon later that week, ‘everything you can about the house and I’ll write as you speak.’
‘All of it? The whole set-up?’
‘Well, as you think,’ I said. ‘As you need.’
‘OK, then,’ I remember, Evan began. I’d already written down an introductory paragraph or two, so it was a case of adding to that. I began as he spoke:
‘Caroline lives in a seven-bedroom house in Richmond with a self-contained studio flat at the top of the house, and you know this, Nin, you know all this …’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘My accommodations are under the eaves,’ he continued. ‘Shall I carry on?’ I nodded. ‘That’s where I now live, of course, below the roof. The rooms of the house in general are large, airy. The garden is south-facing and the garden is huge. All the gardens in Richmond are. The house at the end of Caroline’s road … They have a swimming pool there, and one might imagine that when the nights get longer, warmer, we might sit out in the garden, Caroline and I, on a summer’s evening and hear the kids from down there, splashing around. The Caxton Taylors. Caroline knows them—’
‘But—’ I interrupted.
‘Yeah, but,’ Evan agreed, and sheepishly, I added that word to my notes, ‘sheepishly’, because—
‘Yeah, I’m getting ahead of myself,’ Evan said. ‘I am daydreaming …’
‘Go on,’ I prompted, pressed.
‘The house is nicely decorated,’ he continued then. ‘There’s a lot Caroline has done …’
‘Decorated?’ I said. ‘Like decorated new?’
‘Yeah, maybe that. Like freshly painted, you know? All the walls and woodwork. And the curtains, sofas, even the older stuff … It’s like everything in the house is really clean.’
‘Sounds fancy,’ I said, and wrote down ‘Showhome. Big rooms. Think Elle Decoration
or House and Garden. Fresh flowers in big vases. Caroline herself dresses in shades of ivory and beige and grey and the house is like that, those tones.’ I added: ‘Her blonde hair. The floorboards recently done, stripped and polished. Caroline has bare feet when it’s cold outside. Her skin carries the honey trace of a tan.’
‘When I first went there, when we had coffee that morning,’ Evan said, ‘sitting up at her breakfast bar, I thought then – wow. This place is fancy.’
‘Caroline is fancy,’ I said.
‘But that’s just it, Nin,’ Evan said, and writing this now, I remember, he put down his drink, as though for emphasis. ‘She’s not. She’s like us. There’s this elegance to her, this calm lovely thing … But then there she was, standing on the landing outside my door.’
‘And you said—’ I still had the pen in my hand.
‘Come in.’ Evan looked at me, looking deep into my eyes but my eyes for him were Caroline’s eyes.
‘Come in.’ I finally was able to write it down, as an event, as a moment on the page. Evan saying it, thinking it, reliving it …
‘Are you OK?’ Evan said to me, but he was talking to Caroline.
After the hours that had followed the evening when he’d first told me about all this, I’d put together the most general kinds of notes, starting in those long hours I’d had before seeing Evan again in which I’d had nothing to do but write, write … All these pages that I’d put together, ideas …. How she’d gone into his room, Caroline had, and told Evan all about herself. The pills, the alcohol. I’d imagined it all. How she’d talked about her marriage, how lonely she was, how scared. She’d told Evan about all the things, frankly, I’d seen coming in this story a mile off, that maybe she’d had an affair, maybe her husband had. Yes, there was the overbearing issue with David and his interest in Classical Studies, all those classes at UCL, thoughts of study towards a PhD eclipsing all aspects of their domestic life together. There was his taking of a room in Bloomsbury in association with all that and his staying there, near Russell Square, spending nights and nights away. But she was devoted to the children, Caroline was, of course she was, devoted, so the family unit was strong, wasn’t it, yet they were growing up now, weren’t they, the boys, and they didn’t really need her like they used to, nobody did.
‘And what am I doing, Evan? With my life?’ she’d said to him, that night in his room, looking up at him – by now she was sitting on his bed, she still had a wine glass from the dinner party in her hand, and was taking sips from that, while telling him everything, as though with all the time in the world. ‘I am so sorry to be like this,’ saying, over and over, ‘I am so sorry to come in on you like this with all my … crap.’
None of it, really, was so surprising. Nor Evan saying that that was alright, he understood.
‘It’s OK,’ Evan had said, and he went over and sat next to her on the bed, where she was sitting, had seated herself, after all, after Evan had said, ‘Come in,’ had gone straight over to the bed to sit down on it like that. So he sat down there next to her, and, like he often did with me, took up her hand in his hand.
‘I wish I could help you,’ he’d said.
‘Oh you do,’ she’d replied, shaking his hand up and down as if trying to bolster both their spirits. ‘You help me more than you know,’ she’d said, squeezing his hand hard and shaking it. ‘Just by being here. Just knowing you are here, in the house. Up here in the lodger’s room under the eaves … Just knowing …’
And Evan told me then – after I’d written all this down – that second when she’d used the word ‘lodger’ he’d known that he couldn’t say anything to her. About his love for her. About the story of it. About any of his feelings.
‘Your dear little lodger’s room,’ Caroline had said.
And, ‘Accommodations,’ Evan had replied.
He told me at the Seed, all this days later again, that that word was the only thing he’d been able to think of, to say. As though to soften the situation, make good that shaking hand, the fact that a married woman was sitting weeping on his bed … To make good all of that because otherwise he would fall down on the floor at her feet just as Petrarch longed to do with Laura, as Dante dreamed of so prostrating himself before his Beatrice, and say to her then: ‘Don’t you know I am here and in love with you?’ In a full expression of courtly love,† ‘Don’t you know I can’t stop thinking of you? Imagining you? Every waking minute, seeing your face, hearing the things you say? Before I go to sleep, when I wake in the morning … I can’t do anything else, think anything else … Because everywhere is you, everything I am, you, everywhere I go, everyone I see …’ All of it. Of that sort of thing. Straight out of Petrarch, Dante. But not nearly as well written.
He’d been looking at me then, too, I remember, as he was talking, looking at me, but really looking at Caroline.
‘I knew then’, Evan had said to me, as I was carefully pouring tonic into my glass so that I myself could look away, be taken out of, his false gaze, ‘that I couldn’t say a word.’
My hand was shaking.
‘But I decided I would, Nin. I did. That second I decided: I would tell Caroline of my feelings – not then, not with her so out of it and emotional, not there in my constrained “accommodations”, as I had so wittily termed them, there shutting off any possibility that she might kiss me – no. But I intended nevertheless. As you yourself have “pressed” me to do: To tell her everything, everything you’ve written so far, that is in my book, Nin. And before the week was out.’
* There are notes all about the kind of scale, the lovelinesses of Richmond, at the back of this book, and a section marked ‘Evan’s Living Arrangements’ in ‘Alternative Narratives’.
† Which we know by now is a theme running all the way through this book, Petrarch’s Canzoniere as a metaphor and inspiration for Caroline’s Bikini, and so on. It’s Further Material.
five
But that week had passed and more, and nothing had happened, had it? There’d been that difficult night Evan and I had had together, when we’d gone to Child o’ Mine late, but that was ages ago by now and here we were still, slap bang in the middle of ‘nothing’. And, as I observed him, Evan up at the bar of the Seed ordering strong drinks come to us marked ‘organic’ and ‘designer distilled’ with accompaniments of – what was this? – Grapefruit rind? Candied tamarind? – he wasn’t feeling so bad, either, about the ‘nothing’. Both of us, maybe, feeling that ‘nothing’ might just, for the time being at least, do.
It was a pub, the Seed, as I wrote a couple of pages back, that, like other places we’d been going to over the spring, was a bit further away from where I live, and was perfect for afternoon meetings, as well as being pleasant in the evenings, before it got too late. It was spacious and quiet, so easy for Evan and me to talk, and, if we wanted to – like now and I’d brought writing materials with me as I usually did – ‘get down on paper’ details of anything that might come to light. The tables were large so I could easily spread out all my notes that I’d wanted to bring along with me so that Evan could see them, that they were piling up, and that things were beginning to materialise in terms of content, despite absence of plot.
‘Impressive,’ he said, when he saw all the files and papers.
I had filled things in somewhat, as described, and when we met, before the powerful nature of the ‘organic’ drinks took hold and I’d realised that Evan wasn’t going to say anything to Caroline about her ‘coming up’ that night, to his quarters, I suggested that we make the Seed our new meeting place. It was such a relief to see Evan happy again, after those tears of a couple of weeks back, that long absence of more than twelve hours that had followed them, and it felt good to have a plan. So we decided, as though organising our project together for the first time, that he would continue to bring me notes, his pages of scribbles that he would work on in his lunch break, or late at night in his lodger’s quarters while below him blonde Caroline moved around in her house in th
e dark.
Yes, we liked The Swan and Seed. There were tall windows and big relaxed-looking sofas arranged in the Italian style – by which I mean that they were placed in corners of the room in a certain configuration favoured by the grand old Catholic houses of the Veneto and Firenze. It makes for informality and formality, both, this in-the-round seating, and is a wildly good way to sit with someone you love who does not know much about that fact, or thinks that the love you have for him is simply that of an old friend, say, two people so familiar with each other that they could be brother and sister is how long they had known each other, practically for all of their lives.
So, we sat, Evan and I, as the month went on, in those corner sofas, the spring light from the tall windows falling down upon our heads, making us drowsy if the day was fine, and as the weeks went on and the tiny leaves on the trees outside unfurled and spread themselves thick and fresh amongst the branches, the bright flowers of the season opened and bloomed.
By now it was late, late spring, and summer would be with us soon, that season of leisure and relaxation. Of sunbathing. Swimming. Yet we were, Evan and I, hardly lounging. We had a corner sofa, it was true, but I had placed a smart, square table between us, upon which we could lay down certain pages and make notes upon them, if required. How could we be at all lounging when there was so much to do? Late May and there we were deeply enmeshed in the usual conversation – who did what, and when. How did Caroline sound, when she said a particular sentence? How might Evan respond to a certain kind of silence? And I was reporting, by way of a demonstration of potential chapter headings and so on, as Evan had requested in the first place, a ‘story’ after all.
It was active, then, our status in the Seed. We were working. The emotions of the Child, the tears, the thoughts of dancing, worry, then relief … All this was put to one side because here we had this report of his, this book of mine. His account, my words. ‘Our novel’. We had this between us, and after a period of strain, those ‘emotions’ again, it was great to have something fixed and certain, this manuscript, and yes, indeed, ‘novel’ which seemed to be working well enough as description for the project these late spring days. Because more and more it was seeming to me that what had happened between Caroline and Evan, from the first moment that they met that had then been sharpened, crystallised, by Caroline coming to Evan’s room that night, made this account, yes, at last, ‘novelistic’, as the critics might say, episodic even, if pushed, and with elements of character and plot that satisfied, if I worked on it, the requirements of the genre. That pivotal visit, along with what was occurring in the Beresford family, the increasing distance between Caroline and David as exams in the Iliad and Odyssey loomed, with a huge amount of translation involved for David and long nights spent in Bloomsbury that took him far away from Richmond and the way that played out in family life, those absences of his, played out with Caroline and the three boys … These things coalescing, all helping make what we we were writing together a satisfactory narrative, despite its uncertain beginnings, something – to refer back to a much earlier and somewhat contentious remark of mine – that ‘people might just want to read’ after all.