by Kirsty Gunn
‘Just yourself and your bikini,’ Pamela had replied. ‘Absolutely no one – and I mean no one – is allowed to come unless they are suitably attired. It’s right there on the invitation, Caroline—’ she’d said.
Dress: Swimwear.
And so, in the American way of expressing things, it sure was.
Evan had told me about that invitation in such detail it was as though I could see it myself: the big, expensive, brightly printed card stuck up there on the mantelpiece beside the Daily Planner, ‘Swimwear’ in bright pink script, below the address and time. The entire thing on thick white stock edged with the same fluorescent pink and with ‘a bright pink tissue-lined envelope to match’, Evan had reported, girlishly, adding, as he’d mentioned before: ‘I mean, Caroline has always said the Caxton Taylors are absolutely loaded.’
I am now trying to fix times and narrative order as clearly as I can. There, first of all, are the fingers entwined in the darkish Stand on a Monday afternoon in early July, then, some days later, there we are, under the Hammersmith Flyover off the Talgarth Road, in a deserted, dank corridor of a place, several discussions later, with a party in mind. The two pubs weren’t connected, but I was starting to think Evan had chosen the particularly desperate character of the latter with a purpose: A new pub for a new chapter, perhaps? A development, kind of? A conclusion, of sorts? Or an ending? Either way I am highlighting the time of year here, the part of the season where everything can be seen, and for what it is: good or bad, lovely or terrible, attractive or grim. Just as despite the hot and summery month of July, here we were, nevertheless, in the darkest pub I have ever known, in deep, deep shadow, Evan looking as low as I have ever seen him in an old grubby pullover and loser jeans.
So much for Monday. At the Stand. Then there was the Tuesday and the Wednesday and the Thursday to follow, and Friday, all meetings set in the dank Empty Barrel … A whole week of dark, dark days that led right up to the night before the party, sitting there, set fast, unspeaking in the gloom.
Then. The Saturday of the party arrived. It came and went.
A Saturday, a Saturday night, passed by. ‘From morn/To noon … from noon to dewy eve’, as John Milton’s faithful amanuenses inscribed in that great poem of his so many of us love that is about something else entirely. And the ‘dewy eve’ in turn went on to become full night, for night fell, it deepened, it turned light again … And then finally, finally a phone call came through to me the following morning.
‘I have much to tell you,’ Evan said then. ‘I think we might be getting ready to finish our book.’
three
At this point I feel I need to recap. I’ve written – of course I have, I have written so much! To the extent that I feel like Evan, with that exclamation mark of his! – but somehow there seem to be missing pieces in what I’ve put together, information not given, parts not listed or left out. Any project of this sort does need … ‘ballast’ is a word I’ve used before. Though it’s a bit robust, maybe. So … Underpinning, then. A kind of cross-stitching under the pattern of the whole. Think of Petrarch in the details of those poems of his, the amount of fine, fine embroidery that went into the figured, satiny whole of his poetry sequence that came to be known as the Canzoniere, the production of which, in each and every section, was sewn and fastened and stitched to make up the length of figured silk that was that finished work; and Dante, too, no shortage of trammelling in The Divine Comedy, in line after line of carefully worked tapestry and nothing but an underthreading there, in brightly coloured wools. No Beatrice without her rooms and streets and tables also woven in, no Laura, no love at all without the knotting and threading and work of words.
So for this reason, I can see now, more in the way of a backstory might be in order. To ‘recap’ the situation, as I say, of the circumstances of a lodger of some six months who had returned to London two weeks prior to relocation to make contact with an old friend from childhood who subsequently knew someone who knew of a house in West London that was a bit of a ‘fun scene’, as she put it, way back then, the owners of which had always been keen to rent out in part, the top-floor studio, to interested parties.
There was, by now we have it clear, the opening ‘vision’ of the project, as Evan defined it in his notes, his first sighting of the woman who was to become the object of this book, the point to which all narrative strains: Caroline in that wrap skirt, her blonde hair twisted into a sort of pony tail, and the way he felt ‘something begin’, also found in his notes, from the moment he first saw her and how that feeling, that ‘something’ – that ‘ping’ of his, remember? – grew.
And yes, there were details, present from the start, that may have gone unaccounted in these pages – details of conversations had, looks exchanged, confessions made, that together comprise a good deal of what became a flowering, a blossoming, as the seasons turned from winter to spring to summer’s languorous days … The spread, the budding and the flowering, fruiting, of a long and heartfelt, all-consuming love. The kind of deep emotion expressed in prose that’s the stuff of books and poems, both past and present, poetic and factual, entertaining and literary – in this case is reflected in a sort of ‘essay’, I was now calling it, ‘intervention’, also, or a set of thoughts and ideas laid down by an amanuensis on her page.* For, how, in the weeks that followed the beginning of this book, we see its protagonist, in the tradition of those established texts, seeking to describe his feelings and dreams, circumstances, to a friend who would ‘get it all down’, as well as writing a journal himself that at first he’d planned to publish as his own work but soon passed over to his amanuensis as contributing towards the ‘project’ we would develop together, as we called it first, then later ‘novel’, or ‘story’, now agreeing that the thing had a different shape again.
‘Why don’t you just take all these pages,’ Evan had said, way back in the winter, when this whole idea was just beginning, passing me over a bundle of notes. ‘And do with them what you can, Nin,’ he’d said. And remember, too? How back there towards the start of all this I actually enclosed some sections of his writing to show intent, somehow, give a flavour of my friend’s own writing and unique take on things? So my plan was to adopt a range of approaches in order to give variety to the whole, that no one might get bored.
Yes, then, with that in mind there are certainly more details that I could be adding. And I might add them. Evan’s writing, verbatim. His unsent letters. His records of clothing and personal effects that were moved over in crates and packing boxes from the States. His music and books. Clothing. Cufflinks. I could put this kind of thing in, in the manner of the old masters, filling the canvas up with the rich accompaniments of domestic and civic life, by way of a shopping list or two, the transcripts of some of the messages he left on my mobile, emails, texts. As Petrarch had it: ‘see how art decks with scarlet, pearls and gold/the chosen habit never seen elsewhere,/giving the feet and eyes their motion rare/through this dim cloister which the hills enfold’.
But there are other kinds of detail, too, that I feel I have been a little thin in providing. As though painting on a kind of dilution to the backdrop, as it were, of that ‘context’ Evan was so keen on, as though the colours on the set at the back of the stage have not been applied thickly enough and under the bright lights of the theatre show the world that is being represented as looking only wan and false. For yes, we have the house in Richmond, that much is established, those pigments set which look real enough. That wide front hall at No. 47 Chestnut Way, with the eighteenth-century chiffonier inherited from David Beresford’s grandmother,† a massively valuable piece of furniture because David had always been old Annabel Beresford’s favourite – perhaps it was from her that he first learned the pleasures of the Greek alphabet, the seductions of classical literature? – but treated by all the Beresfords as though it was some build-it-yourself affair from Ikea, covered as it was in water and drinks stains – several – cigarette burns – two – and an overflowing bowl f
illed with keys and receipts and papers. Yes, there is that table, firmly in place. A point of reference indeed for the many people exiting from a house, from a ‘fun scene’, in a haze of cigarette smoke and liquor and champagne, late at night after a party or a dinner when goodnights were protracted and unwanted, gangs of friends holed up at the front door as though they might never leave …
So there’s one detail right there, of that hall, that front door, that table. But what about other ‘context’, like Evan’s room? That actual lodging place of his to which Caroline ‘came up’? Has the paint not been a little thin there that I might thicken it up a bit with fresh colour? Add varnish to the whole that we might know exactly the nature of the room wherein Caroline eventually threw her arms around Evan and told him that she needed him, had to talk to him, and that he, only he, would understand?
It’s a scene as though from a play, after all, and so needs to be conveyed with no sense of artifice or formality but as though all of it were real. All that is work to be done. As was begun, in earnest in certain country-style and more urbanely decorated pubs in the West London area, those hostelries with their various interiors and decorative flourishes from roaring fire to a long chrome bar, continued in spacious interiors with large windows to dark and spavined rooms that never saw the light of day … All of it, written down, to be written down still. Those big relaxed-looking sofas that had been arranged in the Italian style – remember them? – a configuration in which people can sit comfortably and be intimate with each other and talk, but in a formal way. That word ‘configuration’ just about sums it up.
Not that Evan and I were in any kind of configuration. We were always only ever working. Or ‘Not Working’, as Christopher had been saying, for months now, as though he’d committed some terrible Conservative Party manifesto from the eighties to memory and was now doomed to deliver it up in flat monologues left on my voicemail and answer machine. ‘There’s nothing about what you’re doing that constitutes proper, constructive work,’ he intoned, on both my mobile and landline, and I could hear him rattling something in the background. A bucket full of change for some collection or other? A morris-dancing pole with all those little shaking cymbals for one of his summer fundraisers? ‘You need to get out a bit, Emily. Do something proper,’ he’d rat-a-tat down the line. ‘Useful, gainful employment … It gives all of us a sense of purpose, of accomplishment, even.’ Still ‘work’ it was to me, I could have told him, what Evan and I were doing: we were working hard. There at the largest table we could find, in whatever pub we were in, going through our various papers and ideas – the coming to Evan’s room of Caroline: her gestures made there, speech given. Caroline’s attempted kiss of Evan that had been – well, there is no other way to say it – rebuffed by Evan because, as he put it, ‘I could not kiss her in my room in that way when she was feeling as she did … It would have been unfair.’
‘Working, eh?’ That was Christopher. And, somewhat brutally, with a rattle, ‘Huh!’
‘I know you’re tied up but please do give me a call when you can,’ said Marjorie, in more gentle tones, in a message of hers I’d kept from back when the days were just starting to get really warm. ‘I’m concerned about you. And Rosie is … Please. Let us take you out for a picnic in the country so you can get some sun …’
But I was working! I was engaged and involved! There was that: ‘I could not kiss her in my room in that way when she was feeling as she did … It would have been unfair’ of Evan’s. Written down, inked heavily, in fact, on the page. What was that, to think about transcribing, effecting fully on the page, if not hard labour? It was work alright.
I’d had to have a quick intake of breath at that point, when Evan spoke the words he’d just spoken. I remember that, as a reaction.
‘Unfair?’ I managed.
‘Taking advantage, you know,’ he’d continued. ‘It was late, she’d been drinking. She told me herself she was on medication and that it reacted with alcohol, with the wine … And she’d been entertaining, remember? The ongoing “fun scene” …?’
‘Of course,’ I muttered. ‘I was the one who told you that. When Rosie told me. The house there has always been a “fun scene”. I already knew that, Evan. I knew it myself.’
For some reason I couldn’t put my finger on I had become very grumpy. Those late spring into summer days. It’s a detail I realise has been absent from this narrative so far: Grumpy. Why? Because I’d been under the impression that the whole scene in Evan’s bedroom had rested on verbal communication only? Caroline’s use of the phrase ‘lodger’s room’ appearing at a key moment in the text, a remark that had made Evan feel stoppered in the past, unable to express his feelings for Caroline, and prevented him, too, on the one dramatic occasion we had in the book from acting – that, and not anything else? Certainly, I’d had to admit, finding out later that my friend had not done anything at all or reacted to Caroline when she came to his room, not as a result of some use of word but for some old-fashioned notion of manners that didn’t deny his physical desire, put a change about things, I reckon. Made me a bit cross. But was I also annoyed because this latest insertion only proved once again how we barely had a story here? How Evan seemed intent on undoing every chance of action or plot, responding to a gesture not with a gesture of his own, but only with words? Only more words? Indeed, was it my sense of myself as a narrator, a writer, after all, with a job to do to create a completed manuscript that might have the chance of being published, which so rebelled against Evan’s inaction at this late junction? As though his articulacy were somehow his failure, as it were, to bring about some kind of event, as Aristotle would have it in his important treatise on drama, the elements drama needs to survive? So that then I was simply hopping mad from an artist’s point of view? Or was it something else altogether? A feeling that I would never get to Evan, not really, in the way we’d been close once, now that Caroline had become something more than the woman he was in love with but stood, so it seemed, for all women everywhere, all chances, all hopes …
I was hounded, still, too, by the memory of that scrap of paper that had become mixed in with the rest, that I’d read back in the spring and that he surely never intended for me to see: ‘You can’t be real with me Evan, can you? …’ Someone he’d thought he loved from years and years ago only showing Evan’s withholding of emotion even then …
So yes, was it that? At the end of the day? A tiny thing, a scrap, that meant so much more? To do with Evan revealing the impossibility of ever seeing life for what it is so that of course he would opt to hold on to some unfulfilled ideal always, rather than be part of life as it’s being lived? Along with the knowledge that came with it that we are not able, any of us, not just him, we are all unequipped, to make the most of opportunities and chances for happiness and love as they rise up before us. That so fixated are we upon ourselves, our little point of view, our wretched opinions and ideas, in this case ‘of how things should be done’, ‘taking advantage’, and all the rest of it, that we let fixation kill all our animal feeling and our passion and our lust?
I didn’t know. I didn’t have the beginning of an answer but for sure all these thoughts and more had been swirling around in my head in Child o’ Mine and the Seed, long ago it seemed now, when I was getting more ‘pigment’ than usual from Evan than perhaps I would have liked. Not an easy thing for me to be receiving, Evan, I remember acknowledging, back then. His: ‘It wouldn’t have been fair.’ His: ‘I could not kiss her in my room.’ Not easy.
For: ‘It’s just not how things should be done,’ he’d said next. ‘When I come to Caroline, with my thoughts, my feelings for her, I want it to be clear, calm … A “registered” place, Nin, is what I mean somehow. That she would remember and hold on to whatever I might say, so that whatever goes on between us … Is serious, has consequence, resultant action …’
‘Like a scene in bloody Middlemarch,’ I remember I muttered – and there. That word ‘muttered’. I was grumpy alright.<
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‘Well, I haven’t read Middlemarch,’ said Evan. ‘Only Daniel Deronda …’
‘Same thing,’ I said shortly. ‘Shortly.’ By now fully aware of how these unpleasant adverbs of mine were kicking in, spoiling Evan’s hopeful tone. ‘Shortly’. ‘Muttered’. Something was going on, it was obvious. The story was building, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. Ballast alright. But I hadn’t wanted to write any of it in back then, only daring to include it now.
How I drained my glass! The gin had always been inferior in the Child. Their so-called ‘terroir’. The tonic was. Yet still we’d chosen to return there and to The Swan and Seed all through the spring.
And all Marjorie had wanted was to pick me up in her car, even then, and drive me out to Rosie’s for the day. We could have looked at the paintings she was making, abstractions of spring blossom and lilac, as well as commissions of people’s dogs, and then take sandwiches and a thermos and spread a rug out beneath some trees.
‘I’m fed up with this place,’ I said now, looking around me at the dark confines of The Empty Barrel. ‘Can’t we find somewhere else to go?’
For how the early summer light was fading from the windows; we’d been there for hours. And how I was thinking then: What was this thing I was writing anyway? To what end was I making notes in an establishment that spoke only of dearth and absence? ‘Novel’ I may have been calling our project together at some point, still hoped to. Perhaps one day. But, as my bitter reference to Middlemarch had highlighted, I knew deep down this might manage the status of essay or intervention but that there was no more chance of a novel happening here than a £50 million blockbusting Christmas feature running through its paces as though in a multiplex cinema on my pages.