Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  His love for her was deepening, as was my own involvement, mortgage or no mortgage. Everything was becoming more cyclical, ongoing and in a state of movement but also static, fixed. The flowers were replaced, ever fragrant. It was as if they never died. So, too, Caroline had been ‘up’ to Evan’s room ages ago by now but it might have happened yesterday, the way Evan talked about it, the way I, too, considered the scene in my mind. Or, by contrast and just as easily, taken place many many months ago indeed, years even; so it was as though an event that had only taken place in a dream. Caroline would talk, she had no trouble talking and would talk and talk and talk to Evan – despite, because of, going up – about her family, marriage, the children … Privacy wasn’t an issue for her. So one could say this thing had happened between her and the man who had come to lodge in her home, this intimate private exchange that had taken place in his room, but it was just like the flowers she replaced each week … The minute the situation had become something that had happened it was as though it could be, quite simply, overwritten by some other, fresher memory.

  Altogether it could have been as if, as I wrote down, to finish the end of the second section of this book, her sitting there on Evan’s bed – there on the bed of a man who was not really very known to her – was normal. The most natural thing in the world. Because it could be replaced, any gesture, covered over, fresh flowers given. As if anything she might do that could be forgotten about would be normal, unremarkable, not worthy of discussion even, or apology or explanation. Because all this, everything I am writing down, was – her gestures seemed to say – really all of it was simply the most natural, quotidian, unexceptional series of events that might unfold in a life, a narrative of experience, feeling … It all had novel-ish texture, and depth, in that way. A reflection of life, and so on. Is what we hoped anyhow, Evan and I. And that it might indeed even be a love story, in the end, if we kept on with it. Certainly these pages we’d written were real.

  * There are some notes on Petrarch’s story, how he came across Laura after a certain Easter service, naturally it’s in the relevant section at the back of the book.

  † i.e. that the world might become a bigger and more interesting place thanks to a good novel. See the note, later on, ‘Narrative Construction’, with its reference to Katherine Anne Porter and her idea of literary ‘increase’, if interested. No need at all if not.

  ‡ Laura and Beatrice were much younger than Caroline Beresford but she shares with them certain attributes of flowers. In ‘Courtly Love’, later, there are details of the motifs of flora and fauna in Petrarch’s work; see also the section marked ‘Evan’s Living Arrangements’.

  § For a long time I wondered about including, within ‘Alternative Narratives’, details of the working method of Caroline’s Bikini, along with a possible Questionnaire regarding efficacy of its approach, sense of its literary credentials, Evan’s writing, etc. I am always keen to hear back from Readers, I suppose, and the Questionnaire had that in mind.

  Go!

  one

  In fact, ‘natural’, that word … Really, it is at the heart of this story. For who on this earth has not known a similar love? Natural. Ordinary. Unselfconscious. The kind of love that seems so straightforward, so easy, honest and assured; other forms of romantic attachment seem artificial and highly wrought by comparison, freighted as they are by great force of expression. By contrast, how clear, how singular and constant is unrequited love, the object for whom it burns largely unaware of the intensity of heat. So the flame goes higher, burns deeper. And yes, natural, are these concepts, these ideas. That such loves might occur in most lives, in these kinds of ways – to a lesser degree perhaps, for many, that they might not have become a lodger in the way that Evan Gordonston so lodged, that they might not wish to create a document, a written story or record of their desire in order that they may make real their condition – seems something worth considering in this age of imposed feeling generated by the industries of film and entertainment with their endless replications of the same story, always the same, coinciding with shopping and the busy activities and lusts of consumption. Unspoken love, by contrast, is as natural as the air, the weather. As apt to change lives as the other sort, though rarely acknowledged, is what happens in the end when the heart has become engaged, the capacity of the mind increased. Its silence enlarges the scale of the world.

  By now it was fully summer. That conversation Evan and I had had, when he’d told me about Caroline coming up to his room and showing to him fully, in her manner and conversation, how upset she was, presenting herself to him in a way that showed all her unhappiness … That had taken place in what I still thought of as another season, late spring, it belonged to a different time. Though nothing had changed, Evan still not able to speak fully to Caroline, show her some emotion of his own, despite the width of her confession, her telling him of her sense of being at a loss in the world, as though there were nowhere else she could turn but to that little attic room, that there was no one else she could go to but the man who lived beneath her eaves … Still, it seemed that that had happened a long time ago and the story had moved on, come fully into itself with its own definitions and terms. That Evan was the man who might give Caroline solace, on that one particular night, seemed to denote it. We had our ‘novel’ somehow, word by word, it was there.

  For how things were to take a turn. How they were to change.

  Evan was tired. I had been able to see it collecting around him for some time, an air of gradual fatigue. It was there in his clothing, as seen, his posture, his appearance sitting before me, the way he felt when he hugged me goodnight. It was almost as though, as the days were getting lighter and longer and warmer, as the doors and windows of houses were being opened into the summer air, more and more of Evan Gordonston was being held back and limited in expression, more closed into himself he seemed than ever, and reserved. That wearing of the jerseys that I had seen, even when it was far too warm for wool, and the condition of those garments – stained and threadbare and fretted with holes – indicated a general malaise, a ruination of sorts, one might say, a desperation, represented by the worn-out attitude of his dress. There was a darkness about him, a wintry silence that seemed to hang about that corner of any pub in which we might meet, The Pincushion, then, more and more, Ripeness Is All. And where once we might have sat, so happily, it seems, looking back on it, in The Kilted Pig, say, or A Tulip’s Edge, talking about life and love and Caroline, the sunlit times that would be ahead, the plans that could be made and followed through with gifts and holidays and bouquets of roses … Now to think about these aspects of love, these romantic details that might be the very definition of Evan’s feelings for Caroline, seemed part of another story, another life, altogether.

  The simply named Last Stand had been the most recent place where Evan and I would meet. A pub quite near Ealing, as though Evan himself no longer had the imagination to stray far in his mind from the site of that beautiful landlady’s home to which he paid his monthly dues and could think of nowhere else, not really.

  And that we might choose the Stand! At this time of year! When the rest of the world was at the river or in the park, or sitting outside at one of the many bars and restaurants and cafes in West London, there we were, in a traditional hostelry with dim lighting and a downtrodden feel – an indication of the state of the protagonist and his amanuensis, both. Though there’d been times in this story when Evan and I had ventured outdoors – those early days of me meeting him off the tube, remember? And walking around the corner to my local, or the Elm that was just across Brook Green, or that night we loitered outside The Gin Whistle, amongst all the other people who were there, as though we might be part of that merry crowd, and take, along with them, our drinks to an outside table … They were gone now. We would not sit outside. The whole attitude of that … merriment … that had reigned then, in contrast to the present mood, back there in the winter and early spring, rattling the ice in our gin and ton
ics as we discussed this idea or that, where Caroline had gone last night, what the boys said about their mother’s serving, yet again, even though they were teenagers, of fish fingers for tea. Or talking about David’s shirts, perhaps, and how Caroline always bought them for him from traditional gentlemen’s outfitters in Jermyn Street, David’s witty comments about the quality of the checks or stripes … Now we were no longer people of that ilk. There was no more discussion of that sort to be had. There was rarely a person inside the Stand, in June, late June with the sun high in the zenith, yet there we were, nevertheless, two people, two old, old friends.

  So we sat, hunched over empty glasses, the lemon rind sucked dry and no ice to melt. There we were, wrung out as those rinds, is how it felt, with nothing left to say about it, this story, all feelings emptied into Caroline as though she contained them all. Everything that we might feel or think or respond to, every thought, every emotion … Down, down into Caroline had gone all our selves, all our dreams and hopes and will, imagination and words and sense of metaphor and simile, illustration, sound sense … Down, down and down and only Caroline was left, this figure with her blonde hair pulled back into a twist, adopting beach wear and thin summer dresses and sandals now that July was nearly here, her long tanned legs striding through Evan’s life as though she’d never used them to ascend the stairs and come, that night, to his room, late, as though her bare feet finished in toenail polish the colour of poppies were unknown to the carpet that was fitted fully through the lodger’s studio beneath the eaves.

  So Caroline. Caroline. And what was left of Evan but this shell of a man now, grey husk, with no one to be with but me? What was left of me?

  Things had been going badly at work. Evan’s preoccupation with ‘the situation at the end of the Green Line’, as he came to refer to it, had meant his standards had dropped off, his levels of expertise blunted, his acumen blurred. It seemed he had botched a major deal and then, when the client had complained, laughed in his face and sent around a general email, copied in to his CEO, headed ‘No Biggie’ with a smiley face as a full stop. I did wonder whether Evan was going a little bit ‘doolally’, his mother Helen would call it, a term that may have been lost along with a whole number of personal anachronisms and expressions of that family once they had moved to America. It happened, after all, love causing derangement of the senses, erratic behaviours, unpredictability, there was massive precedent for it.* Evan had never been that great at looking after himself – I remembered that from when we were children, how he could go hours at a time without thinking about whether he was cold or hot, hungry or thirsty, soaking wet with rain or sunburned – and though years had passed between our childhood games and this livid present tense, still, I could see remnants of that careless boy I had loved to play with more than any other. It seemed, it is completely true, as if he just didn’t want to bother with thinking about himself. As in those far-off days he could be hungry and not even consider going home for a sandwich, much less ask me for so much as a crisp from my packet – though I would have given him the entire contents of that bag and more, and asked my mother to make him a lovely lunch, to boot, with biscuits and fruit to follow – so now he waned and would not petition. In my flat I had a cupboard full of pasta, rice, enriching grains; I went shopping at the supermarket once or twice a month; there was nothing I couldn’t have cooked for him, grilled or boiled or stewed … Yet as before when he had been a boy who could be so involved in a game, some adventure or other, as though it was only ever just the two of us alive together and as though the outside world did not exist, so now he seemed to have no mind for anything else but Richmond, to be entirely within the confines of that drama, appetite gone, and was fading away before me, getting thinner and thinner, more and more pale.

  Indeed, that quality of his, of being disconnected from the world, was out and showing – a quality of forced looking deep inside his own invented world is how I might put it. Just as when he was a boy there was a concentration, focus on one thing, so it was as if any of the smaller, practical aspects of life didn’t exist, to the extent that now it was as though he barely noticed me as well. He said, ‘Hi,’ when he came into the pub, sure, or when I arrived and he was sitting there in the dark corner, still his eyes focused on me in that kind, endearing way when he smiled, but there was no energy around his greeting, no enthusiasm, no jump or bump or go. It had been a long time since he’d shouted out, like a cowboy, from the bar of Child o’ Mine: ‘Just write it down, Nin! That’s all you’ve got to do!’ The seasons had turned, life moving inexorably onwards. It had been fully six months since he’d first laid eyes on Caroline Beresford and, apart from that night when she’d come up to his room and sat on the bed, nothing had happened. Nothing had happened at all.

  For there’d been no further developments to our novel, nothing doing by way of narrative arc, since Caroline had sat on the bed in his room under the eaves, with Evan coming to sit next to her, and when she had, as it turns out she did, put her hand up to the side of Evan’s face before leaning towards him and Evan, so shocked still with desire and surprise, could not, I think, for a second, respond and by the time he went to react it was too late, the moment had passed, and Caroline was saying, ‘Oh I am so terribly sorry, Evan. It’s these crazy pills the doctor gave me. They make me do crazy things …’

  Yes, despite all that, even, a gesture of such magnitude one might think it would have appeared earlier in the story … That it would have been written down much earlier than at this late stage of proceedings … Still, nothing. No gift of further touch or look in any of this that a writer could use and adumbrate, no surprise remark or small expression of affection that would make Evan have, that simple word, ‘hope’. As in, the phrase he kept using constantly now, that old cliche, well worn and done in: ‘I’ve not a hope in hell with Caroline.’ It was as though he’d never ever believed he and Caroline could be … might be … close.

  So it could have been, so it seemed by his behaviour, I was starting to think, the writer was thinking, as though that fateful night had never happened. Had it? I found myself asking. Had anything happened there, really, in which case: What about this novel, eh? I wondered. I did.

  ‘She hasn’t referred to it,’ Evan had reported, shortly after the incident. That was back in the days when I would ‘press’ him for more information, ‘press’ him, too, to act, to ‘bring the story on’ as I put it. But as those same days went on it turned out Caroline was never to say anything significant about that night. She had reverted fully to her ebullient self, full of jokes and laughter and endless telephone calls and plans to go out, and whenever she was to talk to Evan it was only to say something funny or to ask him, ‘Will you be a darling and put the kettle on?’ Really, it was as though the events that had taken place on that dramatic night, when it was late, after Caroline had been entertaining and doing this on her own because where was David Beresford in all this? That man so caught up with his classical education and Greek translation classes at the University of London, when he was supposed to be home with her? Only in Bloomsbury. Indeed, how the contents of a particular sort of novel or TV reality series might reflect so well this situation of a certain sort of marriage, the relationship between Caroline and David Beresford, the husband all too often absent at the table which his wife had laid so nicely and furnished to the great pleasure of all her guests with the produce and effects of the Tante Marie cookery classes completed when she was a young woman. For only absent, more and more, was David from the family home. That’s a straightforward story to tell, that one, after all. How that man was gone, gone, gone while Caroline was serving, drinking. Doing all that on her own, and not for the first time, by no means; this last instance of David’s absence that had caused her to go ‘up’ only one in a long line of his calls from the office, his ‘I won’t be able to make it tonight after all,’ or ‘I’ll be back much later. Don’t wait for me,’ as I can only imagine, as Evan himself attempted to imagine, in some notes he ma
de and passed subsequently to me … And all the time Caroline herself having to manage everything, greeting the guests, entertaining them, talking with them, seeing them to the door …

  And David had never come home, those Latin and Greek conjugations of his burning in her mind as much as the knowledge of his empty, open absence. The embarrassment of that, socially, the shame. That ‘Introduction to Classical Greek’ might have him ignore his wife and family, stay away in a private flat taken solely for the purposes of study and concentration, for his workbooks and assessment papers, where he had a desk all set up for his various kinds of homework and translation, Latin into English, and English into Greek … Were it not for the fact that Evan’s and my text must be entwined for the very nature of our shared endeavour to succeed, so to be focused on Caroline and Evan alone, I mean, I would say all this kind of additional material was the stuff of novels indeed.

  ‘I’ve given all this a great deal of thought, you see,’ Evan said to me, ‘in the various ways David has made himself absent from Caroline, but at the end of the day, it’s not that relevant, Nin.’

  For at the end of the day, there was Caroline, who was, as he reminded me, the only story that really needed to be told, the object of all his feelings, alone. Last thing at night and the boys have been in their rooms for hours, the final guest farewelled and out the door, and, really, I can imagine all this, so easily, see it in my own mind’s eye, not only through Evan’s, her going into the kitchen to finish off the half bottle of French Chardonnay that was left, starting to stack plates and glasses … All this preceding, a drama in its own way, the great drama that was her going up the stairs having thrown back the best part of a bottle of that good white Burgundy, glass still in hand, to tap upon Evan’s door.