by Kirsty Gunn
‘She didn’t refer to it,’ Evan would come to say, over and over, in the darkening days of mood that followed the event, long after, despite the onset of summer, summer’s light. ‘Not as such,’ he would say. ‘Not as a thing she had done, or felt. It was as though it had never happened …’
And his voice trailed away then and the shadows seemed to deepen around him even as the days were light and warm and filled with promise and I looked at him with equal deepening of concern and attention.
‘Never,’ he said, his eyes cast down, and as dark, it seemed to me, as the shadows that coursed around his feet and cast a dark spread upon his gaunt cheekbones, sent ribbons of dark down the length of his body, his pensioner-style corduroy-clad legs and second-hand lambswool-bound arms … All dark, dark. Oh Evan. What were you doing dressed for winter walks when it was June? As though we were still in January and now it was nearly July?
For it was. By now. Full summer outdoors, and hot. June gone into July – the month of holidays and heat and suntan lotion and beach towels. The days would be long and dreamy and in Richmond there was the matter of that invitation that had arrived at No. 47 Chestnut Way:
POOL PARTY
It had been dispatched, as we know, some weeks before, delivered confidently by hand in a large thick white envelope, pink tissue-lined, with a tiny beach ball printed on the back flap. The Caxton Taylors had made a statement.
‘They have money,’ Evan reported, when he’d first told me about it, back when the invitation had arrived. ‘The whole thing, the invite, and so on … It’s been printed especially for the party, Nin,’ he said, and went on to describe how the beach ball motif played out on the card inside the envelope, which was printed in pink and yellow and green. All letterpress printing, too, he added. ‘Caroline says they’re loaded.’ So the message had been handdelivered to the Beresfords in the manner of neighbours, with all the details they might need. Below the words ‘Pool Party’ figured in smaller font: a barbecue and cocktails, special picnic food for the children. ‘Dress: Swimwear’, it said, on the bottom right-hand corner. Evan made a point of telling me. ‘Time: 2 pm ’til Late.’
How could Evan and I know, I thought, when he’d first told me about the invitation landing on the Beresfords’ mat at No. 47, sitting as we had been back then in The Swan and Seed, that such tidings of blue chlorinated water and sunshine could so flood a story that until now had seemed set in its ways, somehow, well ‘set’, a tale of desire and feeling and unrequited love that operated within its own boundaries and constraints? A story of enclosed pubs and sequestered meetings? Who would have guessed, the story’s narrator, amanuensis, could surely not have, that a card sitting on a mantelpiece beside the Beresfords’ ‘Daily Planner’ might come to play such a large part in the proceedings of a prose work she was attempting; that a simple invitation might come to direct so much of a text’s future actions and outcome that it may force the whole notion of ‘novel’ from one’s consciousness, only to make of its writing something else, instead?
That it could do that? Change everything?
For these days all poor Evan could say to me was, over and over, ‘It was as if the events of that night had never happened.’ As though Caroline coming up to his room and his failure to act were the only things that would ever take place in this story. As though the meaning of an invitation, its strange otherness and bright fluorescent printed call to a swimming pool in a garden in Richmond, would remain unknown and hidden; as though swimwear itself, the fact of it, imagined now soaked by the same chlorinated water as was advertised on a beach-ball-printed card and left puddled on the floor in the kitchen, in this story, would have no part to play at all.
* By now, of course, we are well aware of this. But readers having missed earlier references might want to look later at the section marked ‘Courtly Love’.
two
It was starting to seem, too, in general, as though to match this fresh sense of stasis, that the writing was changing.
‘Novel? Hah!’ I managed one night in the gloom of the Stand. ‘Let’s return to the idea of … Report. Or essay, maybe, Evan,’ I said. ‘Or a hybrid piece, part essay, part … Intervention. Reflection. I don’t know how to describe it. But with the pool party, all that … We’re moving into new territory, it seems …’
For certainly it was the case that our single piece of dramatic plot, our hope of a ‘novel’, so to speak, that scene of Caroline’s going ‘up’, and all its implications and backstory and projections … Well, ‘it may as well have never happened,’ as Evan put it. It seemed by now that the activity that had occurred in the narrow confines of his lodger’s quarters had been a dream Evan had had one night and from which he had woken, confused, still wrapped up by the dream, maybe, and with it the memory of an attempted kiss, the touch preceding it, all that there in his mind, but in full knowledge, too, that none of the things that had taken place had really happened. In the same way as we might kiss people in dreams, or try to, and when we see them in the flesh can look them full in the eye and know that we have never kissed them, so it was between Evan and Caroline. They look back at us, those with whom we have been intimate in our minds, and there is nothing in their look that would suggest they know anything about it. ‘I am a friend only,’ their look says. ‘A dear, close friend you have known for a long, long time, but I could never be in love with you.’
And with Evan now, going back to the narrative in hand, it was as though the drama of Caroline’s attempted kiss was no more than a figment. A dream of a kiss. A story he had conjured from his unconsciousness but nothing substantial there that he could use to build hopes on, make plans. It had simply been this rogue, wayward thing, a gesture, a moment, with the growing silences of Evan, when we met, in the gloomy rooms of the Stand, suggesting that he was pushing to the very furthest recesses of his mind the touch of Caroline that had come upon him that night, late, after her sad and unsuccessful dinner party.
‘Did she even talk about her illness again?’ I asked him – for that would have been a subject, one might have thought, that would bring our protagonist squarely back into a conversation about Caroline, that he could have then speculated: Was she indeed depressed? Clinically so that she needed the medication she was taking? Had she been for a long time, despite the sunny, merry exterior, someone after all who lived in the dark? That might lead to a further idea for a plot, I was thinking, were it the case. That Evan might then be someone who could help her, being outside the family as he was, not trapped by its dynamics? That he might advise her, save her, even? Help her navigate the path between the love of her three sons, the alternative intellectual life of her husband and her own happiness? He might try, Evan, to assist her in the delicate balancing act of creating and managing the ‘fun scene’ that was her domestic, family and social life … But no, Evan just sat, nursing his drink and looking down, down into the bottom of his empty glass. It was my round.
‘Are you completely sure she doesn’t want to talk about it?’ I tried again, certain, despite his silence, that a woman who had once opened up to him in the manner of a general confession would want to do so again, but Evan just slowly shook his head: Either ‘no’ or ‘I haven’t the faintest clue’, only indicating by his gesture that he had absented himself somehow, if not from Caroline, from me.
And as for me … Well, I was already fully aware that this essay of ours, report, genre-blending prose, whatever … was veering wildly off track with every paragraph. Earlier ideas of a novel – forget it. Essays might be becoming more and more popular – we might have a hope there – but this wasn’t really one of those, I knew that at heart. So what chance for a general readership now? Indeed, the only thing drawing Evan and me together was the knowledge of absence in the centre of our narrative; that, at least, like a plot-shaped space, was present in this tale. For this reason, there in the Stand, a pub chosen by both of us for no sensible justification we could figure, though it made me seem such a tough, haranguing desp
erado of a friend, I tried one more time to fill in that odd-shaped vacuity: ‘Have you thought about asking Caroline if everything is OK?’ I suggested. ‘If there is anything you can do to help? After all, it is quite a big deal for a woman to—’
‘Stop it,’ Evan said then. ‘Can’t you see, Nin? It’s upsetting for me to imagine? To think, I mean, that there might have been more I could have done to help? That I might believe I could do something now?’ His head was still down, stirring around with his fingers the three cubes of ice that were in the bottom of his glass. He was like someone meditating, working with the ice, in a far-off contemplation of a world of his own and not someone sitting in a pub with an old friend. So he sat, introspecting. So I sat, waiting. Time seemed to pass, aeons, in the silence that ensued. Then he said, from out of the depths of that other, mysterious thinking of his, ‘Sometimes I wonder, Nin, if I haven’t just, you know, made the whole thing up. Start to finish. From Caroline opening the door to me that sunny morning in January to last night when I helped her put the dishes away after the boys’ tea and we worked together in such companionable silence it was as if I had known her for as long as I’ve known you …’
I reached out then, to Evan, I put my hand on his hand, tapped with my forefinger his two fingers that were still in the glass, cold from stirring the ice, as though to say, come on now, it’s not as bad as all that. Then, quite carefully, in a similar comradely spirit, I put my index finger below his middle finger, and my middle finger on top of his. We were still in the midst of that other, ancient kind of time. Nothing moved around us, in these seconds, or breathed. It seemed that I kept our fingers so entwined for a lifetime, an exaggeration, I know, but long enough, long enough, that we both sat there that way, the two of us, looking upon our connected, finger-knit, cold and warm woven, so to speak, hands.
‘Listen,’ I said then, and I barely recognised my own voice, it was so low and quiet. ‘I don’t think you are imagining things,’ I said. ‘About you and Caroline. What you felt for her, I’m sorry, feel … is real. Those things she said to you,’ I continued, ‘when she came up to your room … That gives you something, Evan, that “companionable silence” you mentioned just now. She did not make up those things she said. Her confession. Her speaking out. Those words made way for a space that you could inhabit in her life, inhabit still. She needed you then like she needs you now. You, Evan’ – at that point I tapped his middle finger with my middle finger, my middle finger that was warm, that had not been stirring desperately around in some glass of ice still bearing the traces of an undefined but nevertheless class–A gin. ‘It was you she came to,’ I reminded him. ‘You she could confide in.’ I looked up, away from our fingers and the dear little woven shape they had made because by now Evan had brought up his third finger to lay upon my fourth and we had something of a small square design there, between the two of us. Still, I looked away from all that. ‘It’s you,’ I said. ‘All you. Being able to do that, be someone Caroline felt she could rely on, that she could think of you in that way, that you might be someone she could go to when feeling desperate … It’s all because of you.’ I was looking away, towards the open door of the deserted Stand. ‘You are that person, Evan,’ I said, I felt desperate and sad and lost but the truth of my words was there, had been spoken in the hushed and darkened air. After all, I had everything written down. And, ‘You and Caroline,’ I finished with. ‘You’re real, alright.’
I smiled then. Something had been achieved and I knew it. Though I felt myself to be sadder than I had ever been in my life, though Evan’s hand by now was warm … Still I smiled at my old writerly words, smiled at my dear old friend, to encourage him, to cheer him, to keep him going on. If I were a different kind of writer I might even say that ‘I smiled brightly’ or ‘gave him a bright smile’ by way of showing how different was my expression from the feelings behind it: ‘She smiled brightly, despite the fact that her heart was breaking,’ etc. I could write that, I suppose. Or, ‘She put on a brave face though she felt tears weren’t far away,’ etc. It’s a cliche, yes, but no doubt would do the job. Still … It would be a strange way of describing what was happening right now in a very ordinary pub at the edge of Chiswick. A strange way to sum up something that there didn’t seem to be any words for, actually, as though I’d found myself to be someone who’d never used words to express anything before.
Evan let out a huge sigh of relief.
‘I love you, Nin,’ he said.
OK.
Well stop right there.
…
‘I love you, Nin,’ he said.
Because that can’t be right.
…
And putting that sentence of his in a paragraph of its own as I have done and the ellipses and so on, making it into something of a big deal …
I’m going to stop right there.
Just stop.
Because making something of a conclusion, at this point, doing that now, at this stage of the project, as though that sentence was an achievement gained … Would be … Madness. It would make no sense in any of this story at all. After all, the second after Evan said: ‘I love you, Nin,’ he then said, ‘I knew you would comfort me. I knew you would say the right thing.’
So, there.
I have done the right thing, you see? Stopped in the ‘nick of time’ as people say, about just this kind of situation exactly. Stopped absolutely at the right time, just when I should have.
Nick of time.
I’ll say so.
‘That’s fine,’ I responded promptly, noting to myself that ‘promptly’, that particular smart and businesslike word. Then, ‘Absolutely.’ Followed by, ‘You can tell me everything,’ and adding, ‘It’s what this book is all about.’
‘Hmmm …’ Evan waggled his finger, still knit up with mine, in a companionable way. He gave me a long and detailed, some would say ‘searching’ look. ‘It’s true,’ he said then. ‘That everything I say to you, everything that happens here, that we talk about … You make it seem concrete, Nin. You do. You make it that all this has happened.’
‘Is happening,’ I corrected him.
‘Is happening,’ he said. ‘I stand corrected. You’re right. It is, it’s now. This story, it’s present tense. So this relationship between me and Caroline—’
‘Is – you see? – happening,’ I finished for him. ‘We’re talking about it now.’
‘Yes,’ said Evan, and he unlaced his fingers from mine then, and picked up his drink, that empty glass. ‘Yes,’ he said again, this time as though to himself.
I need to state here that all this … context … with which Evan was so preoccupied, this content, factual detail, thinking … It had been building up over that particular sort of party, a ‘pool party’ as it was referred to, in a new world sort of way, that was being organised at No. 23 on the first Saturday of July. An event that had begun with the invitation arriving from the Caxton Taylors, that had sat up on the mantelpiece in the airy and sunny kitchen of the Beresford home at No. 47, and events developing from there. Now that phrase ‘Pool Party’, on the invitation, was finally to be put to use, the dress code observed, water to be entered. There were those attractive printed pink words on a white background with a beach ball trim, the little blue splashes around ‘Pool’ and ‘Party’ and another beach ball in one corner striped fuchsia, lime green and yellow.
‘Pool party indeed,’ I’d said to Evan, when he had first told me about it, and it was clear it was an idea that had taken hold of his imagination. ‘We don’t have “pool parties” in London, do we? Yet here one is. In black and white. Or rather, in shades of fluorescent pink and blue. I can hardly believe it.’
We had decided to meet somewhere else, for some reason, in the days that followed. I don’t know why. Something to do with those interlacing fingers, perhaps? Certain words spoken? Or simply the sheer imminence, and indeed immanence, of the party itself, mere days away now, that might indicate a shift? Something, too, about the inevit
ability of the summer, the approach of holidays? About a feeling that the story itself, that we were involved with, was set to move on, to conclude, as surely as, all over London, families would shortly leave town to go away? Whatever the reason, or reasons, we’d come to sit ourselves down somewhere new on the bright, hot afternoons that led up to the party on the Saturday. A place no closer to Richmond or mine or any of the other pubs that we’d been frequenting during the course of this story that it might have been selected for convenience or continuity, or, most recently, to break from that continuity, a place we had chosen for no reason except that it was there and had no feeling at all of the season about it. The Empty Barrel it was called, a dark, windowless corridor of a pub, it seemed to me, right off the Talgarth Road.
‘I guess people do have swimming pools in Richmond,’ I said, when Evan and I sat down together. ‘I knew someone whose father had a swimming pool at his house in Wimbledon and when you think of it, Richmond and Wimbledon … They are similar, kind of. That large garden of the Beresfords …’
‘Could easily accommodate a pool,’ said Evan. ‘I’ve often thought that. From the moment it was obvious that summer was on its way, I’ve wondered more than once whether Caroline would like a pool at the bottom of their garden.’
It’s one thing to imagine a pool, though, dream about one … Here were neighbours now, just a few doors down from the Beresfords, actually possessed of the same. A kidney-shaped, blue-tiled construction sunk into their garden, filled to the brim and sparkling with clear chlorinated water and all ready to host a party around its cool matt slate patio area. A pool party, with swimming and a barbecue and cocktails, that was set to start at two in the afternoon and run to ‘whenever’, Pamela Caxton Taylor had told Caroline when she’d called her up to say they’d love to come and was there anything she could bring?