by Kirsty Gunn
In this way, then, we continued. Away from others, out of the season’s time, cut off from the world. I had my work, my writing of this down, my life. Despite Christopher and Marjorie who otherwise I might have completely forgotten about phoning me on a weekly basis to please go out, get some sun, meet up with them, take on extra advertising work or whatever, I was pretty deeply involved by now in the project of Evan. ‘This book of his is taking all my time,’ I texted Christopher when he sent me a message: ‘???’, and, ‘I’ll get back to the pet food campaign next month,’ I promised Marjorie in the same way, and ‘No he doesn’t want to,’ as I left as a message on Rosie’s machine, after she’d left one on mine telling me that she thought I should tell Evan to leave Richmond. Despite all these imprecations, suggestions, commands, even, from friends. ‘It’s crazy you’re spending so much time with Evan,’ Christopher had said to me, point blank, after calling me one night to invite me on a street-cleaning rally and barbecue. ‘And what about work?’ he’d added, the old practical sums-and-ledgers side of him coming out once again to play. ‘It’s not as if you can afford to pass on the assignments Marjorie sends on to you. And when were you last at that liberal gallery of yours, too, for that matter? She tells me you’re doing nothing with your time that’s economically viable or sound.’ As was true. I wasn’t. I’d forgotten all about my catalogue research and writing and my going along to man the front desk in Hoxton. I’d forgotten when Marjorie had last emailed me a pitch. Yes, I was aware of all the work outstanding, outstanding, in my capacity as a freelance writer, even so I was unable to do anything but go through and through Evan’s many pages of notes, and writing, and my own. Sorting, sifting. Telling Christopher I’d call him back. Arranging. Texting Marjorie, ‘Soon.’ Trying to make, all the time, of so many quick hugs and merry laughs a great love story, grand drama, a novel that would light up the reader with excitement and sense of increase.†
One thing I had, and it was important, was a list of all the elements comprising Evan’s quarters under the eaves. I needed these elements for ‘context’. There we were, going through the list, on a warm night in late June, the only people in The Pincushion, a strange kind of place, when I look at it objectively – what a name for a pub! – for why were we there, in the back streets of Acton, not close to Richmond, and certainly far away from me? It was a list made up of items, contents … that were contained within ‘My Lodger’s Quarters’, as Evan had headed up one of his pages. There was a flatplan neatly drawn up in a kind of grid to show the different features of the room – ‘Bed Area’, ‘Window Recess’, ‘Door Entranceway’, etc. – all details that had come into play the fateful night Caroline, emotional, tired, influenced heavily by both alcohol and prescription medication, had gone up to Evan’s room and knocked on the door and he had said, ‘Come in.’
All these elements were to provide, as he put it, ‘key context’.
‘Key context? What do you mean?’ I’d said it too, when he first brought up the phrase months and months ago, when this whole thing first began.
But Evan had just smiled, sadly and mysteriously. As though ‘context’ were all.
As I say, by now an invitation had arrived at the Beresfords’. It had come in a week or so ago, for a party down the road that was to be held in early July. I wasn’t sure why this particular invitation was so relevant – after all, the Beresfords received a great number of party, dinner, drinks invitations – but it seemed to have taken hold of Evan’s imagination even so. He had mentioned it several times, ‘Imagine. A “pool party” in London, Nin! Can you imagine it?’ and ‘Can you even think of such a thing?’
I had to shake my head. I couldn’t. We were sitting in a reproduction nineteenth-century tavern in Acton – how far away from a ‘pool party’ could we be? From all that glamour? Blue water? A fully developed patio area with built-in barbecue and booth seating? The very idea of it, the lit-up afternoon picture of it … All belonged somewhere else, far, far away from where my own imagination resided. Such a party was nowhere near where our book was set, as far as I was concerned, in a street of family houses, with traditional gardens, trees in leaf. But still Evan kept returning to it, perhaps it was all those visits to California he’d alluded to in that strange writing, the confessional notes about a failed relationship in Palo Alto, that so took him up, a reminder of a past life. Or maybe it was simply the excitement of the invitation itself, printed in bright colours on thick, expensive card, the dress code ‘Swimwear’ there on the bottom right-hand corner. Either way, he couldn’t stop referring to the exact nature of the event – ‘Pool Party’ – that he’d seen advertised so gaily on the kitchen mantelpiece, next to the Beresfords’ ‘Daily Planner Noticeboard’ that had the date for the same circled in Caroline’s own hand.
When I questioned him about his interest, his answer was that the party was indeed ‘relevant’. As far as he was concerned, the night when Caroline ‘came up’, as Evan handily described things – a sort of summary for her arriving in his room that way, that night, dishevelled but still as lovely as ever – had been ‘the start of something’. The pool party, to his mind, seemed to continue that ‘something’, would be part of it and was therefore ‘relevant’, he said, he was sure. Conversations, he believed, following the arrival of the invitation, that took place at the Beresfords’ were more open, honest, than they had been before, Evan was sure of this. Even David had said that the idea of a pool party was fun and that he would definitely go along with the boys, would organise some kind of watersports activity they could all be part of. Caroline had told Evan this, along with other details about her marriage – his disinterest in their domestic life on the whole, in their social life, his time increasingly being spent at the office, or in the flat he rented near UCL where he was now coming to the end of his first undergraduate degree and ‘looking at getting a distinction grade’ in Greek, as he’d told her, but using the time in general, to be away, in some classics library or other, some don’s room or research facility, meeting place, from her.
These details, as Caroline put it to Evan, were ‘the facts’.
So it was that when she ‘came up’ that night there had been a confrontation, of sorts, between her and David some days before, Caroline raising the issue of some of the same ‘facts’, conveyed by a mutual friend, the details of which she need not concern herself but thought David should be aware of by now, that his absences, time away, hours spent on those courses of his delivered on and around the Bloomsbury campus of the University of London … were having an effect. On their family life. Social life. On the boys. His lack of presence a growing issue in their marriage by now, whether he was away or at home, because even when at home he would only be in his study, a book on his lap and those long legs of his stretched out in front of him, all the time in the world, reading, making notes, practising the Greek alphabet in a little Moleskine notebook he kept now, always, in his pocket.
These ‘facts’ were of the essence, according to Evan, that ‘context’ of his. Not that Caroline drank three more pre-dinner cocktails than was usual when David told her he would be late for the dinner party she’d organised at their home, that she’d shopped and cooked for, planned for weeks, that something was demanding his attention at work. Nor that she had had half a bottle of wine on her own after talking with him later on the phone, when the guests had gone, and that on top of the two Ativan she had taken before their arrival, no. That she ‘came up’ in relation to the former facts of David’s life, to put the event in that wider ‘context’, was of the essence here. After holding so much to herself, keeping so much in … According to Evan, again, that is. That she ‘came up’ in the light of a large, large sorrow and from that so much could be confected … That was the vital substance here.
For until that evening, as he reminded me in his notes, Caroline never ‘came up’ to see Evan. Oh, she ‘came up’ in general, as it were. The lodgings were always scrupulously tidy because Caroline would go up there herself
and ‘finish off’, as she put it, once her lovely cleaner, Esme, who only came once a week, had completed going through the whole house, top to bottom, including the lodger’s quarters. Caroline would put out fresh flowers and towels, then, new soaps – there were always dear little soaps in the dishes, I am imagining, in that compact but nicely designed bathroom of his underneath the eaves – soaps rather in the style of the small cakes of good soap available in nice hotels.
‘Yes, Nin,’ Evan confirmed. ‘There are always fresh flowers after she’s been in,’ he said, confirming, too, Caroline’s status in this whole story as a kind of Laura or Beatrice.‡ Or as one of the later incarnations of those same women who appeared in the so-called Cavalier Lyrics of Herrick and Carew, those objects of desire and affection for whom were strewed flowers in their wake, as it were, as ‘To gather flowers, Sappha went/And homeward she did bring … The treasure of the Spring’, Herrick has it, in ‘The Apron of Flowers’, also underlining things somewhat with his ‘Fresh strewings allow … To make my lodging the sweeter’ in another poem. Yes, there was a precedent exactly for establishing the role of the kind of woman who could be thought of in terms of fresh flowers in the history of romance writing and courtly love. There was backstory there, built in.
‘Caroline fits that bill,’ I’d said, many, many weeks earlier in The Kilted Pig, over a Gordon’s silver with lime tonic and crushed ice. ‘Flowers …’ I’d said then, all that time ago. ‘Yes. I get it. I do.’
So, in this way, from right back then, would Evan become increasingly used to the presence of Caroline in his ‘quarters’ – though he himself were not there, still he would be aware of her presence in his room, and it would add to things, I could see that, week by week, the intensity of his mood. The fact that she had been in, had ‘come up’, and this long before the actual night when she knocked on the door. Increasingly, altogether, in our story was a sense of Caroline and her various habits – I had already written at some length about this in an earlier appendix to the earlier part of this second section – of the extent and depth of her presence in Evan’s life, quoting him verbatim, from something that had come up back in the late winter in the Edge:
‘She constantly replaces flowers in my room.’
If that’s not the lyrics for a Leonard Cohen song, I might have replied to Evan then, but didn’t, wouldn’t, ‘Then I don’t know what is,’ I said out loud now, in the muffled confines of the ‘Pin’.
‘What?’ said Evan.
‘Oh, nothing,’ I replied. ‘I was thinking out loud …’
And what flowers, I continued to ponder. Over the months that our story had passed through they would have bloomed continually, in all manner of simile and metaphor. There would have been early spring bulbs at first, all that would have been available back in the dark midwinter when the narrative began, then blossom, just a sprig or two, daffodils – there’d been an announcement of a single daffodil so long ago! – then roses. More roses, then, from Caroline’s garden, standard, dwarf and patio, climbing and scented, taking us through May and into June; and onwards to a time of the year when it was warm and the leaves by now were full and dense and a thick, bright green in all the trees, and summer cushions were to be seen on the outdoor furniture of the Beresfords’ garden, tubes of suncream were dotted around the terrace as though Richmond had become the South of France, or Italy … Not London at all, but somewhere else far away and dreaming.
No wonder the mind turned to a ‘pool party’ then, under circumstances such as these. No wonder my own mind, with Evan’s level of interest in the event and the season warming up, so turned. There were the three Beresford boys running around the garden with their shirts off when they got home from the last days of summer term, just before the schools broke up. Caroline herself sunbathing on the grass, a bright summer cushion beneath her head … Richmond at this time of year was like a glamorous faraway place indeed but right here in London – the large houses with their three cars parked out on the gravel in the driveways, and, yes, there were swimming pools, in some gardens, yes, there were and one of which, down the road at No. 23, being celebrated by a party.
‘Even David is going,’ Evan said; he couldn’t leave the subject alone. We were hunched and overdressed in our grey woollen jerseys in the snug of the Pin, nursing the same warm gins as we’d ordered when we met there. ‘He’s normally busy in the weekends, with Classics revision and so on,’ he continued, ‘but in this case …’ His voice trailed off. He’d already told me about how excited the whole street seemed to be over the plans for down the road. It was to be a big party with most of the neighbours coming and a great group of the Caxton Taylors’ friends. They were, as Caroline had told Evan, ‘super-social’, the Caxton Taylors, and the party was going to be quite something. Might Evan even go himself?
‘Might you?’ I asked him now, but he shook his head.
‘Not our kind of thing, Nin,’ he said. ‘We’ve agreed that already.’
And I had to nod along with him, like the old married couple we seemed to be imitating.
‘You know perfectly well that a “pool party” is not the sort of event you and I can imagine,’ he went on, ‘and besides, as I’ve told you, it’s not for lodgers.’ He drained his ice-less glass. ‘Fancy another?’ he said, indicating our empties. ‘Let’s get back to the story in hand.’
Well, alright, so there were flowers in his room.
That was where the story was. I had written that down.
That there were wild flowers by his bed the night she ‘came up’. Well, what else, Evan? Eh? What else?
Well, by now, of course, I can say, I easily can, that Evan was more in love with Caroline than ever, more deeply caring, attentive. I can say that. By now I was fully trained in my role, was no more than the writer, after all, and so could write up something like that – ‘Evan was more in love with her than ever’ – just as easy as whistle. Though he hadn’t said a word to her about it afterwards, her coming up, and though she herself had only uttered those few casual sentences on her way out the door in high gold sandals, still those few words had been as nourishment, encouragement; his own silence giving him a kind of energy, fuel.
We’d decided to try somewhere new. Something about The Pincushion (and Thistle) … We liked it, but we wanted a change. Summer in the air, perhaps? Something.
‘And all those conversations between the two of you after that night,’ I said. ‘There wasn’t a moment when you –?’
‘Listen, Nin,’ he interrupted me. The new pub was called Ripeness Is All, not that far from the Pin but more Chiswick than Acton, altogether closer to the river, which seemed like a nice kind of idea, at this time of year when the world was wanting to be out on or near the water, here we were, near water at least, in another reproduction tavern that was like something out of The Sweeney, with not a hint of the Shakespearean mood as suggested by its name about it, only an old seventies air and not fancy at all – they probably even served a full ‘Ploughman’s Lunch’ if Evan and I were ever to want to eat, which it seemed we did not.
‘Listen,’ he said again. ‘Everything about this love story defies contemporary convention. You should know that by now. You’re writing it down. So you should know perfectly well that the convention we are serving is not the contemporary one, but much older, it’s graver somehow. God,’ he said. ‘If you were a poet, we would be creating an epic here, in sonnets, rhyming or in blank verse. But in prose, Nin. Prose. It may be we’re doing something no one else has done in modern life. Not that I’m aware of anyway.’§
I looked blank myself, probably, talking of verse, but it was only because I was tired. Since talking with Christopher recently I’d become aware of how behind I was getting in my knowledge of current affairs, politics. It was like the world was passing me by. Christopher had called to invite me on one of his scary, quite martially inclined marches to do with cycle lanes and the proliferation of disabled parking bays in Central London and I’d just had to say ‘No
,’ but was aware, as I was responding, how long it had been since I’d seen any of my friends. ‘Rosie will be in town,’ Christopher had said. ‘She would love to see you as well, you know. We all would. What is this thing you are writing after all? A telephone book? It seems to have been going on for ages and Marjorie said you won’t be able to get any more work from the agency if you don’t start taking up some of the campaign slack, Emily. She’s been giving you lots of chances. So how are you managing, anyhow? You need to work, don’t you? We all do!’
The fact is, Christopher had hit a nerve. People with right-wing tendencies often do, I’ve found, when it comes down to the advice they give to their financially challenged lefty friends. It’s because they themselves are working all the time and know how easy it is to lose money – in their case, significant amounts of it – as well as make it, of course, and keep on making it, by doing nothing but thinking about it all the time, money. And, it’s true, things hadn’t been going very well on the work front. And I did have bills that needed to be paid. So Christopher was right, in his Tory way. Maybe I would miss a payment on my mortgage if I carried on as I was, this book taking me away from the world, yet I seemed to have no choice.
For as Evan’s need to meet me had increased, so had I felt that I must meet that need; so as the amount he had to say about his situation with Caroline mounted, I too felt I had a lot to say. My papers, chapter headings, sections … They were mounting. By now I knew the colour of the carpet on the stairs up to the second floor where Evan’s room was situated, the sort of jeans Caroline wore when she went to her one and only Pilates class first thing on a Monday morning and sometimes she and Evan met by the front door.
‘Gorgeous to see you as ever,’ she would say to Evan then, fishing for car keys in the bag where she kept her exercise clothes. Calling out from the car, through the open window, as she reversed down the drive, ‘I can’t wait to see you when you get home later! Can you and I have a drink together and one of our special talks?’ And the look of her, reversing down that drive, waving once, and then she’d be gone. Caroline. Leaving Evan to walk out the gate and turn down the road where she’d just driven. Having to stop and calm himself, stem the roiling waves of nausea and anxiety that had set up such a reaction in him due to Caroline’s words, her proximity, her tone, her touch.