Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  But it was also clear that at some point I was going to have to tackle that ‘nothing’ that still hovered like a litup neon heart at the centre of our story: the ‘nothing’ that happened the night Caroline went ‘up’. I knew that. I was aware. As a writer I had a responsibility, was the way I thought of it, to the reader, the publisher, the critics, bookshops … To deliver on something coming out of that nothing, that the current state of affairs could not go on for much longer, that these pages, intriguing though they may be, were not limitless. At one point, I was clear, Evan was going to have to make a decision about where he was going with all this, what he was going to do. We’d had our time in the dark, as it were, of him saying and also not saying, expressing and also not expressing, what he felt; months passing since that midwinter day Evan had first knocked on the door and seen Caroline for the first time, winter into spring and now nearly into summer, yes. Summer with its swimming and swimsuits on its way.

  ‘You can’t stay silent about your emotions forever,’ I told him, the square and useful table firmly between us. ‘You have to speak. Tell Caroline. Especially now that it’s been some time since she’s been to your room …’

  My voice trailed off. I looked out the window. Italians and old Catholic families know the benefit of room arrangement. The sofa was perfectly positioned for me not to have to face Evan while I spoke. I could look away while still being intimate with him, could speak freely while maintaining formality, be that amanuensis, thanks to the exact siting of the pub furniture; to feel pain and be friendly both.

  ‘You love her and you must tell her so,’ I said then, and turned back to give Evan what, in a certain kind of novel, would be described as ‘a bright smile’.

  Now it was Evan’s turn to look away. That sounds like a line in a novel too: ‘Now it was Evan’s turn, etc.’ As though this whole thing were premeditated, had been rigged from the start. That word of his from before – ‘scene’ – with all its connotations of artificiality, is what I seem to be suggesting, a sort of choreographed formality, as though our very meeting had been arranged as a sort of play, a description of something that had already happened and was now to be enacted in faithful reproduction. Altogether, I was thinking: It was as if the more I wrote about Caroline, thought about her, the situation, everything that was going on, the less I felt myself to be me. Not that I was turning into someone else, only that I had become someone who was less and less, someone not so much a person with feelings of her own as a writer who had done their research, who wasn’t even an author, not even the sort who might stand behind the action and direct it – what’s that expression critics use? ‘Pull the strings’? Not even that. Only reporting, researching, note taking. That was who Emily Stuart was now. Only ‘amanuensis’ – to another’s words, another’s drama, another’s life, Evan Gordonston’s, and him thinning and disappearing, too, in a different way, becoming slighter and more and more badly dressed, wasting away before my eyes, as the shape of my papers, by contrast, took materiality and bulk and form.

  And where were we, in all this? As the tall windows looked down upon us and the sofa held our forms in its comfortable embrace? Where? Is what I continued to think as the weeks went by, as I swirled my curious gins of one type or another, less ‘terroir’ now and more hand-produced, or ‘curated’, as one young man behind the bar at the Seed informed me, ‘Slow River’ and ‘Dundee Gold’ and ‘The Minister’s Choice’s, and mixed in with tonic from the small and expensively crafted bottles on sale that you could take home with you if you wanted to. And, ‘I don’t know what to do, Nin.’ Evan saying, ‘I don’t know that I can do … anything, you see. I may love her but I can’t tell her so,’ and me answering ‘You must’ – because Evan was going to have to ‘do’ something, any minute, he would have to make this story go ahead and become a book. He was going to have to confess to Caroline, make a statement to her about his feelings, or embrace her, invite her in some way to understand how he felt, put his hand to her cheek, in a gesture of care and tenderness, or gather her up somehow, or lean in towards her, or take her fingers in his hand, or squeeze her hand or – I don’t know – something. Something was going to have to ‘take place’ – finally to come together to be a book.

  Or not.

  I suppose there was the issue of that as well, hovering in the midst, a ‘nothing’ in itself, that ‘or not’. But is it possible for something NOT to happen in a novel, I was asking myself in the notes I was making in my flat, late at night. And after all, it wasn’t actually as though ‘nothing’ had happened either, even though I’d started to think, after Caroline had gone up and nothing further was forthcoming from Evan, that nothing was the reality here. Because, look. There was the state of him. Of Evan himself. That was a thing that had happened, wasn’t it, as a result of love? Evan had changed. He was now officially very thin and very pale and was dressing in peculiar ways – those ‘sweat pants’ weren’t the half of it – and he was taking days off work and dreamy, often, in his attitude now, when we met. He was less inclined to make jokes, make me laugh. He had become serious, less likely to think about, for example, let alone suggest, going dancing.

  I noticed it as the days became brighter, this alteration, a sort of – ironical, given the season – fading. Even when I met him after work he would have a skewed look about him, as though his suit had become twisted on him, slightly back to front somehow, the buttons of his jacket wrongly fastened, or his cuff and trouser hems half down. I thought: That kind of turn-out wasn’t ‘nothing’, that was for sure. To be dressed that way with the sort of job he had … Evan’s body was telling a story of emotion having taken hold and there was no way any career in finance was going to intervene. He was in love with Caroline and that was the story, his story, the whole story. There was nothing ‘nothing’ about it.* He couldn’t stop thinking about her,† imagining being with her, writing about her, recording various minute details.‡ ‘Today she wore her hair running down her back like a waterfall’ was one sentence I’d underlined in something he’d written down, with a view to giving the whole some serious editing; ‘Today she wore a dark lipstick like plums’ another. So, yes, nothing wasn’t nothing. Not one bit. It was all adding up to one big something. And on top of that something – and I had to keep this in mind – Caroline had already gone up, in my mind and in reality, she’d gone up, uninvited, for the reason of her own need, to his room.

  ‘That’, I said to Evan, ‘is the key here.’ We were back in the Seed. Since the days had been getting so much warmer it was like we couldn’t stay away. We’d realised there was so much of that space inside, was part of it, and no one except us, it seemed, keen to be there as they were all outdoors. No music played, there was none of that kind of distraction. All the entertainment was taking place outside and as it became warmer shadows seemed to deepen in the corners of the Seed and we quite liked that, Evan and I, to be that far away from other people and the light.

  ‘That she came up to your room’, I said, ‘is key. That she was unhappy and she told you so. That she spoke of the strains in her marriage, of her medication. And that she sat on your bed.’

  Evan nodded. He looked down into his empty glass. The glasses in the Seed were tiny. He seemed barely able to suggest another round, a nut, a piece of lemon that he might eat it through. This was my friend, my oldest friend, before me, so lost and so undone, and all because of a woman he loved who had come to his room to importune him and who had been, as I’d written down before, that close to him, so very close.

  ‘In the context of all that’s been going on here,’ I said, in firm tones, for I needed to be firm, my heart was breaking, ‘and I am not being ironic, Evan,’ I said, ‘because a lot has been going on –’ I gestured, ‘in this pile of pages in front of us –’ I indicated certain papers for his attention, a section marked ‘Caroline’s Confession’, for example, other whole sections describing Evan’s life in Richmond, David’s mounting interest in classical composition, the three boys�
� homework schedules, lists of friends, Caroline’s hairdresser appointments, a new sofa bought, the kitchen counters replaced, and so on, and so on … ‘All this indicates a whole lot has been happening,’ I said. ‘But the visit to your room …’ I faltered, ‘that’s something we can build on.’ I went to take a sip of my drink, but my glass, too, was empty. ‘It makes the novel, her coming in on you like that, into the sort of thing people might really become involved in, with action of that sort, and drama and so on. The alcohol. Pills. Caroline coming up …’ I said. My voice was firm, but I felt I could hear it shaking …

  Still, I went on. I had to. For the sake of what we were trying to do here, I had to do that, irrespective of how difficult it was for me to ‘press’ on. Still I must. ‘Press’. ‘Her confessing to you, confiding … It makes it a love story,’ I said. ‘A novel about the two of you being together, in your room, a story about Caroline and you and all she is to you, all she can be …’

  Evan sat, he was quiet. His tie was hitched around his neck like a hangman’s knot.

  ‘Evan?’ I said. ‘Evan?’ It was as though he hadn’t heard me. My tremulous voice, my saying these sentences and phrases I felt I had to say …

  ‘Are you listening to me at all?’

  Later, after getting home that night, writing everything down – what I’d said, what Evan hadn’t said – feeling the effect of the four or five Dundee gins from the Seed’s vast stores, and on an empty stomach … I did wonder about this moment in the book. Where it was going, yes, as always. But where we were going, too. The two of us. Going. Whether we could bear it, actually. To be the Evan Gordonston and Emily Stuart who sat in a pub that had now become familiar, sitting in a way that by now we had been trained to so sit, in the Italian fashion, to be at once very close together, very very close, and also far away.

  ‘Evan.’

  Evan Gordonston.

  Sitting together in the grand Catholic style, beneath tall windows.

  ‘Are you listening to me?’

  Saying.

  ‘Evan?’

  Finding ourselves together, so often, Evan and I, in that aforementioned grand style, sitting, and so close …

  But far away from each other as well.

  Speaking, or trying to, but sometimes not speaking at all because we did not have to, two old, old friends who have known each other since childhood …

  And no need to speak then, with all that past behind us, to say any words. And then sometimes we would just catch each other’s eyes and smile.

  ‘Endings’, as someone said, some novelist maybe? ‘are for weaklings …’

  So, then, The Swan and Seed. A familiar place for us to be, that spacious room with its tall windows, broad sofas, its quilted tapestries of rampant swans. So the weeks went on. A love affair discussed, dissected. Questions were asked against feather-filled cushions. Lists made. There in The Swan and Seed, just as we’d had lists made and writing achieved in Child o’ Mine, A Tulip’s Edge. And so on. And so on. The Gin Whistle. The Kilted Pig. Time passing. Seasons’ change. There was Grapes of Wrath, and before that, too, The Elm Tree and The Walker’s Friend, still time passing, always passing. The Cork and Bottle, passing still. Wound all the way back to winter’s dark, time, and forwards again to the fullness of late spring, summer in the air and an intense gin from Suffolk with ‘hints of pomegranate’ served in tiny tin tumblers with a tonic that barely fizzed and a pea placed carefully in the bottom, no ice cubes at all. How far we’d come, Evan and I from the black Labrador beginnings of our story. So far to find ourselves now somewhere with an ending still quite far away. A place all of tall windows and grey sofas, of natural light and the sun coming down upon our heads as we sat indoors. While the rest of the world drifted outside to the pavement and the music was taken up there that would make others want to dance, not us, for there we remained, set in among the grey sofas in a grey room, no matter how sunny it was outside, we were set, Evan and I, in pale shades of grey.

  * See ‘Reprise’/‘Petrarch’ and ‘Courtly Love’, it’s all in the back of the book.

  † As before, ‘Reprise’.

  ‡ ‘Reprise’ again, for it’s all in the back of this book if you want to know more …

  six

  By now it was indeed nearly summer, but, yes, I, too, was wearing pale grey. As grey as grey, as winter’s skies, and cold rain showers, as grey as Evan who may have been dressed in jeans, alright, but had on a greyish jersey as well; a ‘jumper’ we would have called it when we were little, wearing jumpers my mother had knitted for both of us in matching wools, both of us going exploring in the green beyond the end of our road, before the new houses were built there. By now we were both of such similar colours, Evan and I, in mood and appearance all in the hushed tones of shadows, of the grave. And this despite the long days, the light and warmth … It was as though we were both fading away: me into writing, becoming someone who did nothing more than report other lives, and Evan because of his simple but devastating unrequited love for Caroline Beresford, a woman who, though she lived right there with him in a large house in Richmond, may as well have been a young girl attending a Florentine church in an early fourteenth-century poem,* a glittering icon herself in some cathedral there, all gold and candlelit and burning, while her lover loitered in some shadowy corner unseen by any saint or mother of God … So we continued. All grey, grey, more grey. Late May gone into June and soon it would be July and the schools breaking up and everyone away on holiday then; every day it was getting warmer and warmer.

  The Beresfords, Evan said, had been invited to a party.

  ‘A party?’ I said, jolted into awareness.

  Indeed, a party – he’d seen the invitation, he said – with cocktails and beach towels and swimwear, a suburban sort of thing, in Richmond, with shades of LA.

  ‘A pool party, Nin,’ Evan said. ‘Imagine it.’

  ‘Well …’ I stirred the remains of a drink in my glass.

  ‘That’s not for the likes of us, Evan,’ I replied.

  For he had not, of course he had not, been invited. It was an invitation extended to the Beresfords at No. 47 from the Caxton Taylors down the road at No. 23. All of Chestnut Way would be going, Evan said. Homeowners, that was to say, and their families. Not lodgers. That kind of party would be another kind of scene altogether.

  ‘Hmmm …’ I continued. For this kind of talk seemed irrelevant. We were only to continue sitting there, it seemed, fabricating together our ‘story’. Fabricating, writing … Exempt from all invitations, simply sitting quietly like old, old people in the new place I’d found, a small and singular establishment named The Pincushion (‘and Thistle’ it also said in brackets, though we never referred to it that way), on my way back from the Seed one night. It was the kind of pub with no outdoor seating whatsoever but only a single room, though spacious enough, with little in the way of lemon rinds and nuts and tamarinds, or fancy decor and Italian sofas … A perfect place, you might say, for those of us who have no pool parties to go to, no place in the sun, who prefer to dress in grey.

  There, in the cool interior, we continued. I had my papers. Evan had his ideas. It was a good choice, this new find of mine, for our meetings. It had the quietness, the table space we needed. It had the kind of interior that seemed never to have felt a breath of fresh air. I had first glimpsed it after a particularly intense evening with Evan at the Child, when he’d wanted to go back there, to that place of tears and confession, to go through some journal extracts with me – all based on details of Caroline’s weekly schedule following the night she went ‘up’, that was all shopping and telephone calls and lunches with friends. She’d said, ‘I’m so sorry about last night,’ to Evan the next evening, when they passed each other at the front door and he was coming in from work and she was leaving to meet friends for drinks. She’d given him a hug and said, ‘I’m sorry I was so ghastly last night, but you’ll forgive me, won’t you?’ Sounding so light-hearted and merry, Evan reported, in jou
rnal notes, that it was hard to believe she’d been upset the night before, adding, ‘It’s these pills the doctor has me on,’ with a radiant smile. ‘Honestly, I think they make me completely mental! I should be locked up!’ and laughing. Evan noted in fountain pen after this section of reported speech that he hadn’t known what to say. Her scent was everywhere, he wrote, something orangey and bright. She was wearing a tiny dress and cardigan and high, high gold sandals, running out the door and on her way to the car, calling back over her shoulder, ‘The boys have had tea but there are some oven chips left over if you fancy them! Let’s catch up tomorrow before you go to work! I’ll be up early and we can grab a coffee!’