Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  Nothing was happening at all.

  And I couldn’t figure out any of it, my own responses, thoughts. Thinking back to the Seed, the Child. Only that I was mad alright, short-tempered and cross and with trouble in mind.

  I was fed up.

  More and more it was seeming to me that what happened between Evan and Caroline, if anything indeed could be said to have ‘happened’, could never be a drama in any kind of traditional sense of the word. I may as well have never read Aristotle. Those ‘stage figures’ of his – at least action occurred around them, to them. At least they ‘moved on’, to use the popular turn of phrase suggesting trajectory in relationships, closure. Whereas here I was stuck in the ongoing feelings of Evan for Caroline that never turned into anything like drama, and yet, too, it seemed it was the very lack of any activity on the stage that kept those feelings so … full. So present in Evan’s life that there was room for nothing more, absolutely nothing more.

  Of course some elements were playing out, still – various scenes occurring in the Beresford family as a result of the increasing strains and distance between Caroline and David, the way that affected the three boys, who, after all, were growing up … Caroline’s medication, and so on. There were David’s forthcoming end-of-year exams in ‘Introduction to Classical Studies’, the fact that the boys and Caroline had never once been able to visit the one-bedroom flat he’d taken off Russell Square, they didn’t even know the address – but all of these things, these domestic details did not come close to the central issue of Evan’s and my ‘story’. And as for that ‘story’, well … Evan was – surely, surely, and soon – going to have to resolve it: hamartia, hubris, catharsis, all that. Those ideas of Aristotle, that he came up with first. Otherwise how else could we ever gain relief, another classical idea, that rhetoric might force a response from us to a story that would eventually give us calm, and satisfaction, create ‘relief’, if the story of Caroline was left forever hanging in mid-air?

  So, yes. Evan was going to have to act. To DO something. Not just sit there in his room while she fell back on his bed in an evening dress that was – as Evan had described it, ‘quite cut away’ – and … wait, silently for a ‘registered time’ before he could tell her how he felt and move to hold her in an embrace.

  And mad?

  Yes, fuming.

  Hopping.

  That was where this ‘novelist’ was at.

  She ordered another round of drinks for herself and her companion.

  Her friend.

  Her dearest and oldest friend.

  ‘Oh, Evan,’ I said then, only able to write it down now, while in my mind Caroline had come to his room and confessed how unhappy she was and how much she had come to rely upon Evan, the knowledge of his steady presence in the home, his effect in the house, ongoing, as he lodged at the top of the topmost stair.

  ‘Oh …’ I started again, but didn’t finish, because there was Caroline instead, I could see her, there in the room with him, telling him all that she was telling him, his own response of quiet and of calm and … yes, I could see, as though I had been there myself, how she had that word about her, Caroline had, of ‘strength’. And so all these remarks of hers had been made – albeit in a state of inebriation and in a kind of medicated high that was also quite depressed, albeit, yes, albeit – and yet … And yet. With all her … presence. In the room. Her strength … Evan had just sat there. On the bed. Waiting. Doing nothing. Nothing. Then standing up. Just standing up in the room but not doing anything even then. Just standing. Like a tree. Or a telegraph pole. Is how I see him. Unmoving in his jersey. Standing there while Caroline, in a tiny silk slip of a dress, fell back upon his bed and said, ‘I love you, Evan.’

  ‘I’m fed up with it here,’ I finally said, as I’d said, too, in the Child. And in the Edge, and before it in the Elm and the Seed and the Stand and all these places in this book. ‘For goodness’ sake,’ I said, ‘can’t we find somewhere new?’

  * In terms of footnotes, by now all is reprise, reprise … Themes of love and literary background, ‘Courtly Love’ and ‘Narrative Construction’ … There’s no end to it, really, the history of unrequited love in literature …

  † The Beresford grandmother has been mentioned before, and ‘Personal History’ at the back of the book has further detail that might be of interest.

  four

  ‘She actually tried to kiss you and you just stood there. You took her hands instead and shook them.’

  This was a few days after that acknowledgement of my grumpy mood. But it may as well have been months ago. As it turned out, it made no difference to Evan and me, whatever he said, or I said. By now the story was nearly done, and we’d never left the Barrel actually, as I’d thought we might. The Barrel had become like home. Evan was right. There was nothing welcoming about the place whatsoever but we had come to love it even so. Its dark corridor-like interior, vaguely vibrating with traffic off the Talgarth Road, suited our deepening, unhappy mood and the gin was triple strength, barely legal.

  ‘I wanted to calm her down,’ Evan was telling me. ‘That time … Nin, I told you. It was not the right—’

  ‘She tried to kiss you and you turned away,’ I repeated.

  ‘I say again, it was not the right time.’ Evan had a desperate and boyish expression on his face that I recognised from when he’d been five years old, something highly wrought and feverish going on in his mind but that was also the result of the rogue element of the gin.

  ‘I know you were cross, Nin,’ he said, ‘a bit. About the … You know … But the time … for calm … That time …’ He was not making a great deal of sense.

  As I say, the gin was strong enough. The bottle didn’t even have a label. I was thinking, as we sat there, me looking at him, a bit hectic and flushed his dear old familiar face, about all the time we used to spend together when we were children, all the time over at his house, he at my house. The way our two mothers would say to both of us, ‘You may as well move in,’ depending on who was at whose. Helen Gordonston had always seemed like the quintessential artist figure to me, in her smock, with her potter’s wheel set up at the end of the kitchen in a little conservatory the Gordonstons had built on after Evan had started school, my mother had told me, ‘with room for a kiln as well and those lovely silk-screen processes of hers’. And then, as far as my own family was concerned, Evan always saying that my mother was like a mother in an Enid Blyton book, terrific at baking and careless, both. Oh yes, I was feeling a bit incoherent, too, but still … We could always get on and do exactly what we wanted, I remember, without Evan’s mother noticing or telling us to come inside and have lunch. That, it seemed to us then, it still does, is an ideal circumstance of care. I took another sip of the strange potent cocktail served up in the Barrel and said, randomly, to Evan, ‘Hmmm.’

  I was also thinking about how he was going to have to do something here, in the third section of the book – and do it smartish. Put his hand to Caroline’s cheek – as she had put hers to his – gestured back to her cheek, somehow? For hadn’t she, at some point, done that, put her hand to his face that way? Or he should gather her to him, or simply lean in towards her, as I’ve written before – and as I was thinking all these things, or trying to, and looking at him, thinking, too, about the years we’d known each other, I was also thinking how he might do any of these things and how it would seem, to be the woman who received such gesture, such abundance of gesture. Of love and care. Of care and love.

  I was thinking a great deal, scrambled, uncertain thoughts, as he sat there, familiar. But thinking, nevertheless.

  Months had passed since our story had begun. This essay of ours, these pages of words. A long time, the changes of season charted in sections or chapters, I hadn’t decided yet how they would be arranged, yet now here we were stuck, is how it felt, like a machine gets stuck, mid-action, and can’t sort itself, can’t click into gear to start up its whirring and turning again but only spins, over and o
ver, brokenly and pathetically in the same place.

  Me and Evan.

  Doesn’t sound too grammatical.

  Evan and me.

  And I myself was not exactly doing much either. I had to ‘register’ that myself in the dark shadows as the traffic passed by. Oh, I received. Even at this late stage, I continued to. Evan’s ideas, dreams … But that was all I did. He may have been gloomy and thin, sad, pale and wan, but he was still passing over to me papers he’d compiled, journal entries he’d written, diaries, lists he’d made. He had started a thorough reading of the Canzoniere* and The Divine Comedy, and was involved in tracking down major scholarly work on Petrarch and Dante – he was, despite his melancholy and desperate mien, ordering books online and these were stacking up in a neat pile in his rooftop lodging beside the bed. He was able to tell me, too, in his more optimistic moments, about the fruits of all this research, the early Renaissance thinking behind the sheer energy of emotion – the art, the music, the sculpture and literature – all generated by the great engine of unrequited love that had hummed and sung its way through the culture of western Europe from the medieval period on. And he was writing about that, too, in his lonely lodger’s quarters, about that engine. What it might mean. Where it might take a person and whether it might change them.

  In many ways then, you could say, Evan was more fully active in this project of ours than I was ever going to be. Because he had gone ‘right inside it’, as he put it, into the writing, our content. He was busy enough. While I, all I could do was worry endlessly at the fabric of the thing we’d sewn together, this great cloth of words, picking at the hem, troubling and worrying at a stitch here, there. Might these pages ever ‘find a readership’? That sort of thing. As I used to think a little about back in the days of trying out the odd short story or whatever, amongst all my copywriting work and the catalogue entries I put together for the gallery … Though all that activity now seemed like a long time ago and in another life.

  Yet I still had hopes it would all work out in the end. Marjorie had just started calling me again about a new campaign for cat litter that promised to pay fabulously well and asked, super-casually, as though she hadn’t been talking to Christopher, if I might be interested.

  ‘You can’t be still working on that idea for Evan Gordonston?’ she said, when I called back and told her I was interested if I could have until the end of July before I had to start. ‘That’s crazy, Emily. You can’t afford to go without proper work for so long. What about your mortgage? Christopher did tell me he thinks you’re being irresponsible on this. That he’s been telling you that for some time. Promise you’ll bring matters to a close with this thing between you and Evan.’

  ‘It’s not a “thing” between me and Evan,’ I said. ‘It’s a book.’

  ‘It’s a “thing”, Emily,’ said Marjorie. ‘And well you know it.’

  ‘It’s nearly finished,’ I said. ‘I hope. Just give me these few days in July.’

  For really I did have a feeling that we were approaching the finishing line. In fact, I could see those words appearing on a page: ‘Finishing Lines’. I was clear enough about it that I knew now was not the time to pick up extra income by way of Marjorie Clarke’s advertising work overflow. Time enough for cat litter and the pet food and provisions giants, I thought. The ending was, it had to be, in sight. Otherwise there’d be nothing of Evan and me left.

  That’s what it felt like, for the two of us, despite, or perhaps because of, all this ‘work’, all his thinking and reading, and my ‘laying down’ of the sentences … It felt like we ourselves were fading away. Into words, only words, words … They were consuming us. There we were, still, returning, day after day for that last week in July before the pool party, coming back each time to a dark pub set under a busy flyover, to a little table, unmarked gin … While the rest of London sat outside in cafes and restaurant and bars … In the sun … We were inside. That thickened set-painting so necessary to a good stage play and dramatic performance? That was our world. The Empty Barrel, it was empty alright. Evan and I the only customers, and both as shadowy and cast off as the place itself.

  But yes, we were there, even so, using that little table at the Barrel, to get finished with everything and reach a conclusion, the end. I was still going through more of those details I mentioned earlier. Evan had supplied me with a list comprising all the items, exactly, furnishings, accessories, of his ‘lodger’s quarters’, all better to provide ‘context’, as he maintained, for that key ‘scene’, and I was to use the list in any way I saw fit. One might have thought I would, too – certainly I’d intended to – were it not for another event altogether that, as it transpired, was to move the story on in a way neither of us would have ever anticipated, that Evan had nevertheless intuited, I suppose, when he’d first become aware of, and excited by, the arrival of a certain invitation at No. 47.

  For now, though, the contents of his latest list continued to involve us.

  The accommodation itself, for Evan, up there under the eaves in Richmond, was modest. I write that never having been there, not near, not really, that time long ago at the cafe on the outskirts was nowhere close, neither to the road, nor the house – let alone the studio flat that was situated at the end of the topmost stair. But Evan had given me enough of that ‘ballast’, detail, description, that I could write in that much at least: ‘Modest.’ ‘Under the eaves’. ‘Topmost stair’. As though using these descriptions as a way of establishing circumstance, situation, might be a metaphor if you like, Evan’s room and its position in the home, for his relations as a whole to the Beresfords and their social set. He was never, never going to be going to that pool party. Not that he’d wanted to, hoped to, wished to. He had chosen this outsider status for himself as surely as he had chosen his attire, that broken woolly jumper and the terrible ‘sweat pants’ and the ancient jeans and pensioner corduroy trews. He was no more inclined to don swim trunks and walk down the road with Caroline and David and the boys to No. 23 than dive straight into the lozenge- – or did I say ‘kidney-’ – shaped pool of the garden there, greet the Caxton Taylors on a certain Saturday afternoon and settle right in. No. He was a lodger, Evan. In Richmond, temporarily. To ‘find his feet’. A lodger. That was all he was.

  Yet I had to remind myself as I wrote these words, really, remind myself, with the story so far along by now, too, that Evan had had no need, never had, to be a lodger. Since coming back to London, after the years away, he had taken up a most senior position in his firm, and it was as though I kept forgetting about all this, that he had this side to his nature, elegantly slipping back into a position in corporate and legal life in the City as though he had always lived in London. For Evan, as long as I have known him, has always been like that. A man, and before that a boy, who, even when we were over at each other’s house every day, was always capable and organised and with a quiet animal’s ability to fit in, and alter quickly, adapt immediately, it would seem, to the new situation he found himself in. So he lost a shoe at mine? He just borrowed my brother’s gumboots. So he didn’t have any change for sweets because he’d forgotten to ask for his pocket money? Well, he could use mine and we could choose together because he didn’t like gobstoppers. So in the same way, now, in London, he’d come straight back into a smart high-powered position with his firm and could have lived in pretty much any flat anywhere he’d chosen, still here he was, a lodger, and I could so easily forget that it might be otherwise. As though one might say to him now, ‘Why not move in with me and here are the gumboots, the pound coins for as many sweets as we need,’ and he might reply, ‘I’d love that,’ and arrive the same night with a small bag of clothes, and that would be all it would take. Instead of a preoccupation with an invitation, a host family’s social plans for a Saturday in July, there’d be a knock on the door, a greeting. I’d say, ‘Hello there. What took you so long?’ and he would just come inside.

  * There’s that really lovely little edition available to
the general reader, Canzoniere: Selected Poems, translated by Professor Anthony Mortimer (Penguin Classics, 2002), and by now enough information has been given throughout this entire ‘story’ with regards to the Further Material that appears in the back of this book, including a selection of Petrarch’s sonnets to which some readers will refer and others can happily ignore. There’s no need to add anything further there. It’s done, that part of things nearly over too.

  five

  So yes, Evan, during all this time, could have been somewhere else. He could have had his company put him up in rooms or in a hotel, even, while he was getting settled back in London, and he could have moved into a really central flat in an easily accessible part of town. He would have had people at his firm sort all that out for him. He wouldn’t have had to lift a finger, just say, ‘Yes, I like it there,’ and they would have organised the movers, decorators. It’s the kind of thing high-powered firms sort out for their topend employees who are relocating. And Evan, though I found it hard to believe it, was one of these. The sort who might point to some piece of furniture and a corner of a grand room and say to the removal guys, ‘Put that there, will you?’ indicating a space over by the French windows that looked over a garden square. I said that to Evan at some point, ‘I can see you somewhere really lovely,’ I said. ‘Somewhere that’s close to work and I could walk to meet you.’ And then going on to describe the kind of place to him, a flat of his own, not lodgings. ‘You don’t have to be in Richmond, you know,’ I said.