Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  That was back around early spring sometime, when Evan was feeling that things were never going to ‘take off’ with Caroline, a phrase he was using a lot at that time, static as the situation was, this weeks before Caroline coming up to his room and falling down on the bed. I was reminding him then that it would be possible to make a fresh start – somewhere like Notting Hill or Chelsea or Primrose Hill … Somewhere he could swing around the place and act a bit special if he wanted to. But no, he was to stay put as a lodger, he said, and hope that some kind of ‘take off’ might occur, as in a way it did, I suppose, in the sense that Caroline had been able to come ‘up’ as easily as she had done by the simple fact of him being a mere staircase away. At least, as Evan had figured, all through this period, and after it, he was still figuring it, he could see Caroline every day by maintaining his position within the Beresford home. He could help out with the boys sometimes, ‘be present’ is how he put it. The Beresfords could rely on him on a sort of informal teenagers-overseeing basis if ever Caroline was called away to an evening event at the last minute, as she often was so called, and with David not being there, but in the flat in Bloomsbury. ‘It’s easy for me to be present here’ is what Evan would say to me, when I questioned this kind of arrangement and asked if it was the best use of his professional status and time. Though also, I had to remind myself, I was in no position to give Evan advice in terms of his career about what he should and shouldn’t do. With my small pieces of copywriting now hanging in the balance, and poor financial management skills, I am the last person who should give anyone advice about anything, petition for anything, and besides, we’ve never been like that with each other, Evan and I. Even when the Gordonstons left, all those years ago, for America, I never said then, ‘Oh, no, please don’t go. Tell your parents, please, do tell them, to stay.’ I never would.

  Therefore, ‘I can see you somewhere like Chelsea,’ maybe, I might have said that, but nothing more. Certainly never anything like that ‘Why not move in with me?’ as at the end of the last section. Though no doubt him being somewhere more accessible, easy to get to, get from … His offices, and so on … Social destinations … Might have changed the texture of our meetings – especially as time went on and we’d found ourselves inching into the outskirts of Chiswick and Acton, as this account has indicated, most recently ending up in that Empty Barrel off the Talgarth Road. Yes, it might have changed things. Being somewhere central to begin with, that did not require him coming in from Richmond and us orienting things from there, that every night he would have to get back at some kind of decent time … Yes. It might have altered matters somewhat.

  The area I live in myself is pleasant, and always calming to return to. Coming home, often late, from a long walk back after, sometimes, fraught discussions because things weren’t moving along on the story front, or there’d been rows downstairs in Richmond, Evan had heard them from under the eaves, with the Beresfords in the grip of some unhappiness that was never quite named, David Beresford staying up all night with a Greek grammar, or not answering his mobile in the flat off Russell Square, a flat that was only supposed to be a temporary arrangement while he went through his intensive first-year immersion course – ‘immersion alright,’ muttered Evan grimly, there’s nothing ‘temporary’ about anything involving ‘immersion’ – or something else was amiss, the boys were behaving badly at school, or there’d been an incident with the in-laws, everyone supposed to have been at a lunch with one set of parents or the other, but there’d been some mistake about the dates, Caroline had muddled them because she was feeling muddled, and there was embarrassment, too many apologies … Well, there were times I valued the relatively central location of my flat. A first-floor one-bedroom in a quiet street … I could breathe, after the exertions of the situation in Richmond, take in the deepening summer air.

  For there was no doubt about it, whatever way you looked at it, the discussions between Evan and me, involving always my note taking and sometimes the handing over of Evan’s own writings about proceedings … All of those chats and interviews, may I call them, could have been made so much more pleasant if Evan could have just popped in to mine, where it was peaceful, for a bowl of soup on the way home, or swung by on a Saturday morning and we could have had a walk in the park that’s at the end of my road. Maybe the contents of our discussions would not have had quite so much of the end-of-the-District-Line about them if we had been wandering somewhere in my neighbourhood and stopping off for a tea in the sun, admiring some pretty young black Labrador who was being walked, quite nicely, on a red lead beneath the plane trees in full leaf. Just … Having a conversation, only talking, then. Not interviewing. Not asking. Or answering. Or filing for later some fresh bit of news or detail about Caroline’s dress or social life, or discussing the quality of the notes Evan had been working on … We could have simply been in light and easy banter, ourselves making the subject for a change, and what we wanted, or might need.

  ‘So I moved in one bright sunny day in January,’ Evan had written, at the beginning of one such volume of papers that were handed over to me in the spirit of the usual meeting, somewhere between the two of us, increasingly oriented towards the western outskirts of the more central area, with not a light-hearted conversation about me or him in sight.

  ‘It was early in the new year, before the schools went back and the family had gone off for a few days to their place in France.’

  ‘I may as well give you all of this,’ Evan had said, turning over the pages, as I say, still giving me all this material right up to the end. ‘Make of this stuff what you will,’ and he handed me about twenty sheets of A4, all in a bunch, tied up with little pieces of legal string. I sorted them out into some kind of order which I’ll reproduce here, to an extent, space permitting:

  ‘So I moved in—’ he wrote.

  And: Really? I thought. I said ‘Are we to go through all this kind of thing again?’

  ‘May as well, Nin,’ he replied, and I read again: ‘So I moved in’ as he’d written down. I read and I read.

  His handwriting, as I’ve said before, was extremely poor, but a sense of panache hung around the words written down, this because he’d used old-fashioned fountain pen with blue-black ink, on very expensive letter paper. This was engaging enough, I suppose, this imagining of Evan sitting down to write, create a stack of manuscript in the style of a nineteenth-century poet – that blue-black ink! – that I could go through and use … But none of it was the easy, mindless talking I dreamed of. None of it was just the two of us beneath those plane trees in leaf. It was all more story, all this, all that, more of the ‘ballast’ again, and all to do with Caroline, nothing to do with us, him and me, the fact that we’d known each other for such a long time and could be happy just sitting, watching that dog with a red lead I wrote about way back in the beginning of this narrative, back around the time of us going to the Elm, I think it was, in reference to those Labradors that sat under the pub tables, perhaps … No, it was just story, this, these fresh pages I was being given. All for the story as it always was.

  ‘So I moved in …’ I started again. And tried to focus. Where was I? Only here:

  ‘One bright sunny day in early January, just before the family returned from their house in France,’ I read. ‘Caroline had told me I was welcome to join them down there, it was a bit of an open-door policy, she said, and I could come and go as I pleased, but I had items I needed to move in, various tasks needing my attention.’ Yes, I remembered all that from before. ‘My boxes were being shipped over from the US later that month and would be in storage and I needed some time to go through some of them and decide what I’d be using for these next few months while I was in transit, as it were, before deciding properly where I was going to live. Long-term, I mean.’

  I’d written there, in red pencil: ‘in transit’ next to the words ‘in transit’ for ironic emphasis. Because of course by now there was nothing ‘in transit’ in Richmond about Evan. That ‘long-t
erm’. That ‘going to live’. These phrases applied to a certain suburb on the outskirts of West London only as far as I – or any reader, for that matter – was concerned; he may as well have intended to stay there from the beginning for his entire life. ‘What!!!’ I’d written again, towards the bottom of the page – to remind myself that I needed to quiz him on this, circling that word ‘properly’. Then there was, I’d also seen, the way he wrote the word ‘Caroline’, too. ‘Properly’, you might say. For the way he’d written that word was nothing like the rest of his handwriting; it was neat and clear and even. The characters were perfectly, in that particular instance, formed. Caroline. It was obvious to me that just writing that word was a sort of meditation for Evan, upon her, I mean. Caroline. Caroline. Caroline. I could see at once, upon meeting the word of her, as it were, how he slowed down and made of her name a formal and ‘properly’ finished little piece of art.

  In all, the pages gave a great deal of insight into Evan’s orderly mind. That fancy paper was from Fortnum’s. I used to have some myself, though they don’t do it any more. I knew well too the fountain pen that he also used. With it he’d made a big list of the clothes that he’d decided to leave in storage, though none of the ghastly jerseys, I’d observed, had been included, or the ancient period jeans that gave him such a quirky, peculiar appearance; the clothing being kept was all dinner suits and sports jackets, smart shirts, loafers, ‘American stuff’ as he put it. Then there was an entry for books and CDs, DVDs and paintings, too, and some smaller pieces of furniture. He’d gathered a fair amount of ‘baggage’, as they say, in those years in the States. Still, I read on:

  ‘So yes,’ I read. ‘I had things I needed to do. And seeing Caroline, meeting her for the first time, and then again to discuss the moving-in arrangements … In many ways it had been too much for me. I felt I needed some time alone in the house to settle in, orient myself, without the massive sense of Caroline Beresford’s presence around me. I needed to normalise myself in Richmond’ – ‘normalise’ was underlined and the reason I’d written the word ‘what???’ at the bottom of the page. ‘I needed to spend time in the house alone and become used to myself in it.’

  I stopped. That was nice. That was nicely written.

  ‘Before Caroline came home,’ he went on. ‘Before she was to be in the house with me. Yes, I needed time on my own.’

  I turned over. There was another half a page or so, barely legible, then this:

  ‘I wondered, as I spent time in my attic quarters in early January, what change would be seen on her face, that beautiful face, when I looked again upon it. For she would have changed, would she not? Even a few days or so would do it. In France. With her family all around her. French food and wine. A few days can make a difference. I myself had become only too aware in the mere week since meeting Caroline of how change is vast, the way it works upon us, though time, as such, may not have passed in any great increment, though circumstances may bear—’

  ‘No,’ I said then aloud. The tone, the writing style … It was all wrong. Little wonder, I thought, a bit crossly, Evan had passed on the job to me in the beginning, of writing all his story down! No wonder he’d wanted me on board, to shift everything into the third person and get a bit of objective correlative, a bit of distance, going, here. This Edwardian-style outpouring on Fortnum’s paper … It would have to be staunched. Honed as I’d been on pet food and insurance and cutting-edge gallery catalogue work, there was nothing I couldn’t help him with on that front, would have been his thinking, the reason behind his appeal right at the start when he’d made a case from my involvement and I’d said, ‘Alright, then, I’ll try.’

  Because without … narrative shaping …. Without that … Then what? My red pen question marks and underlinings said it all.

  ‘Her messy blonde hair’, he’d written, for example. ‘How it takes up my vision’ – and I’d managed to turn that into: ‘As she walked away from him, after that first moment of meeting, he noticed the way her blonde hair was piled up quickly into a careless sort of ponytail that was actually, breathtakingly glamorous.’ Those few lines were only a draft, but still, an improvement nevertheless, they had to be, upon the original.

  Or:

  ‘I hear her yelling at the children, three boys, and she has her hands full when friends come over and they’re all partying together, with the television on some games channel, the CD player turned way up loud, but her voice is always music to my ears’ – ‘cliche!’ I’d scrawled, and I turned it into: ‘Evan found himself more and more appreciating the texture of the Beresfords’ domestic life. Three boys between twelve and fifteen and with friends over all the time, Caroline dishing out juice and biscuits and making them chips and hamburgers if they stayed over for tea, she was busy for sure. Evan would sit there sometimes at the breakfast bar while she chatted to him about this and that; normally she was on her way out the door, waiting for the babysitter to arrive so she could go upstairs and change.’

  ‘Three boys,’ she would say to Evan then, as they sipped white wine together, late in the afternoon or early evening, or in the weekends over a pot of tea. ‘Can you believe I have borne and whelped three boys and now have them to deal with for the rest of their lives? Can you? How many brothers and sisters do you have, Evan? You seem like someone who’s come from a large family?’

  And Evan would answer ‘yes’ or ‘three’ or ‘maybe’ … Not really able to respond properly or in full, or answer anything making any kind of sense because all he could do, all the time, was be thinking, it seemed: Caroline, Caroline, Caroline.

  six

  ‘I would hear her calling for her boys, up the stairs, along the hallway, calling from the kitchen, in the garden … Her hands held up towards me, fingers splayed, showing, glittering in the light of day, that large engagement ring of hers, beside it, the gold wedding band: “I mean, what can I DO, Evan? I have these three growing monsters! I am mother – can you believe it – to three teenage, three adolescent BOYS!”’

  Evan had signed his name under all this, and put the date. The pages, journal, papers, his Fortnum’s letters, as I think of them … As well as the bundle of stationery that were notebooks, spiral-bound pads, and all filled with Evan’s awful handwriting and these metaphors and similes of his. There were some really fancy turns of phrase that were hard to cope with at times – that ‘music to my ears’ and so on. Certainly, I don’t know where the influence for this kind of writing had come from but it had been beneficial, throughout the long months of working together, that I had been able to nip it in the bud.

  And at home I was still editing in that way, writing, I persisted. While Evan and I had continued to meet, and our conversation expanded, expanded, I mean, while staying curiously in one place, as time went on, this project developing, in its own way, even so I continued to write it down.

  ‘Those green eyes of hers’ and so on.

  ‘Her face softer, more girlish, in repose.’

  I could change it for something like: ‘She has this thing she would do for emphasis, raising her eyebrows as she asked Evan a question like “Shall we have a fish finger with the boys, you and I, and to hell with it?” or “If you’re not going out tonight, do you want to have a glass of wine with me?” and putting her hands on his shoulders. “Tell me that’s exactly what you want to do,” saying. “Hang out in the kitchen with an old housewife eating a leftover nursery tea.” And Evan wouldn’t be able to speak for long minutes with the loveliness of it all.’

  For this was my role. To make. To shape. Evan and Caroline sitting together at the breakfast bar in the kitchen at Richmond, and yes, her looking at him with those beautiful blue-green eyes of hers and telling him every single thing about her life, is how it seemed to him. And yes, too, putting in Evan there, listening and saying, ‘I suppose’ and ‘I see …’ So my role was to write all that down for him to look at. I’d show him periodically where I was at and he would read through to get a sense of the thing, where w
e were headed, read back to himself his own reactions and feelings. And all of the pages gaining momentum, if you like, bit by bit, one after another, reaching what could have been a turning point when Caroline ascended the stair that night, late, when her dinner party was over and David still not home.

  ‘You must think I’m such a sad case,’ she’d said to him that night she came up, when she’d told him all about the latest type of medication, and her sleeping badly, and all the other details she’d wanted to relay, and Evan had said, ‘Oh, no. I don’t think that at all …’ but hadn’t managed to take her in his arms, hold her, but had just stood there in the centre of his room, shocked into immobility is how it had felt, he’d told me later when he’d only then come to realise what effort Caroline must have put in, what energy, to be so present and alive-seeming and vibrant, how many pills it took to buoy up the lovely will and cleverness and sense of life credited to her as maintaining a ‘fun scene’.

  ‘God, Evan, if I could only tell you the half of it,’ Caroline had said, ‘being married … Two people who are so different … The loneliness of it …’

  Scattered phrases such as this, confessions …

  ‘Sometimes I truly don’t know how I can go on.’

  Writing down about that night that became the accumulation of so many moments, impressions, that now he could see …

  Those separate scenes all building up, accruing …

  At the breakfast bar once, when he’d come in on her very early in the morning, before dawn, she’d just turned down the corners of her mouth and gone, ‘Blah.’

  That I could add in now.

  Or putting in that at supper, sometimes, he’d see the boys with their eyes on the television as they ate, and Caroline just looking into space.

  And how …

  Often, Evan heard her crying on the phone.

  Heard, too, the front door opening, closing, at strange times in the night.