Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  In his room, when she came ‘up’ she’d wanted to talk about all these individual moments, tell him about her life, what it was like, the person she thought she was and also couldn’t be. The tablets she’d told Evan about, that the doctor had prescribed, were having an effect ‘but the effect is not happy,’ she said to him, this right back in March, and before she came up, long before, too, the events that followed the issue of the invitation that sat on the Beresfords’ kitchen mantelpiece in June. ‘Resignation,’ she’d said to Evan in March, as he met her coming out of the laundry room with her arms full of clean dry sheets but her eyes red from crying. The children were growing up and ‘What next?’ she asked him one morning, making toast for seven and eating the burnt ends herself. ‘What next when all this –’ she waved her arms around at the three boys and their friends who were lying around on the sofa and floor playing some wi-fi game and jeering at each other on the screen. ‘When all this is over?’ she asked. ‘What?’

  And all he’d wanted to do, Evan, hadn’t he, on all these occasions, was to gather her up and say, ‘Don’t worry, I’m here. I can help you,’ and change everything for her in that second. Wasn’t that always foremost in his mind? When in reality he did nothing, only continued to write his pages and give them to me, phoning me up to say, ‘Can we meet? I feel like there’s a lot here to say.’

  And Caroline, through all this – and I had this down, too, in pages, in print-outs, in xeroxes, in black and white – also showed great will. She would not let herself stay mired in her sadness. She would do everything in her power to be as lovely, as laughing and funny as ever. Her remarks, I noted, stayed between them, her and Evan, in the kitchen, in the garden, on the grass, at the doorway of the laundry room as I’ve just written. They didn’t stray off the page, as it were, into conversations with others. She was discreet. And, as I’ve reported, any confessions to him alone only caused Evan to feel even more deeply in love. Why wouldn’t it? Such bravery? Valour? The way she kept the atmosphere light, that ‘fun scene’ continuing in the constant round of entertaining and socialising that was the trademark atmosphere of Richmond. So it was only when he came in some night late from work, or stepped downstairs from his quarters unexpectedly – it was the weekend, and he’d decided to go out for a walk, say, to come and meet me and have the latest discussion, he had some pages to hand over, perhaps – that he might come upon, fully, some of the unhappiness of the Beresfords.

  Though David, Evan said, was always ‘completely charming’, with beautiful manners and ‘always good fun’. Evan wanted to make that clear to me, too. ‘It’s important, Nin. In the essay or story, or whatever it is that we are finishing together. David is no villain in all this. Like Caroline, he is just being himself.’ For the pool party, he said, David was planning to team-lead some kind of fabulous watersports activity for the boys and all the children in the road. ‘He’s already spoken to the other fathers about it,’ Evan said. He was that kind of a ‘team player’, David, despite his disinterest in a City career and his love of the contemplative life; he was also someone adept at arranging a complicated game of water polo that involved sticks and several small balls, as well as organising the aqua-net and waterproof scoresheet and all the rest of it. He was quick-witted, too, full of good stories and the kinds of jaunty remarks that you might think would put the whole family at ease … His list of pleasant attributes went on and on. Though to Caroline herself he barely said a word. He was ‘cold with her’, Evan told me, this early on. It was still spring, leaves on the trees but the light only half-hearted. I was wearing a scarf back then. I remember Evan arranged it around my face as he said goodbye, making it into a sort of hat – we’d been at the pub that day for some time. He’d looked deep in my eyes and said then that David to Caroline ‘was cold’, ‘was cold with her’.

  Thereafter, Evan told me – after a chill evening when he’d drawn the soft folds of a scarf around my face, tucking the ends in neatly to form the shape of an old-fashioned bonnet – thereafter he had been able often to detect tears in Caroline’s eyes. ‘When no one else can see them,’ he said. ‘I know the tears are there. When they’re present,’ he’d added, though dashed away when Evan had come into the room, by dint of something David had said to her seconds before – so developed, Evan’s growing awareness of how the Beresford family were, the relations between them, husband and wife, father and sons. So it was becoming more and more clear to him, the fissures that were splitting the domestic unit wide open. It was there in Evan’s journals. It was in his talk.

  Sometimes, he said, Caroline would talk ‘funnily’ of how little she knew David cared for her, and how he would demean her, mostly without meaning to, some might even think what he was doing to be part of his charm. ‘Well,’ he might say of Caroline, she told Evan, over drinks with friends at some smart bar, ‘it would be nice if she were to do something with her life’ – not looking at her but at everyone else as he spoke, as though he were about to tell a joke. ‘Just look at her,’ he would say. ‘This pretty wife of mine. Hopeless.’ And ‘Don’t look,’ she would answer, but speaking to the rest of the party, too, and seeming to ignore him. ‘Please don’t.’ Such were the complicated relations played out between the two of them, that Evan might tell me, that I might try and get down on the page to be as real as I could.

  Did they ever really communicate with each other, I wondered, those two, when they were on their own? I asked Evan the same. About David’s degree, the Greek stories he was reading aloud to the boys? Did he tell his wife about his hopes, how he so longed to leave the City, get out from under his father’s shadow, his father’s career? Did she tell him that perhaps they might sell the house? Travel? Do something else with their lives? Caroline would have liked that, wouldn’t she? To feel there were options, choices? That desire to turn into someone different, to be free?

  ‘Who knows?’ Evan replied. ‘How’s anyone to know anything if it’s not written down, Nin? In permanent record? How can any of us otherwise be certain about a thing?’

  It seemed to me that even without proof – not being there to see for myself, only put an idea together based on the bits and pieces Evan told me – the way they mostly communicated, Caroline and David, was silence. Occasionally, as I’ve written, he reported voices raised, the sound of something banging … This from far away, deep in the Beresford bedroom amidst the carpets and the quilts and the cushions, something breaking, something sharp. Always late at night, with the boys long asleep, but Evan might find himself wakened out of a dream by a word, a harsh, harsh word. And that door again, opening, closing. Someone arriving? Someone in a hurry? Being called? Who knows.

  ‘The next morning,’ Evan said, ‘David would have already left for the office and it was as though nothing had happened. I wondered,’ he said, ‘was it even true?’ That he’d heard anything? Because Caroline would have the TV turned on the next morning, super-engaged and smiling, as if this was a holiday they were all enjoying together, not a Monday morning or a Thursday and the clock was ticking. Still there she was, dressed in jeans and a white T-shirt, her hair down like a girl, laughing at something one of the boys had said, giving them a hug. And there she was again, on a Saturday, chopping a vegetable up at the bench while she watched the news, frying bacon and pouring juice. Or on the phone, or arranging flowers in a complicated vase, mouthing to Evan, ‘Coffee?’ when he came in, while the person on the line continued to talk, pointing at the cafetiere and then at Evan, raising her eyebrows in question, while going ‘mmmm’ on the phone and sticking another long green stalk deep into the complications of her floral arrangement.

  These were her mornings, Caroline’s mornings. Lovely, lovely. As she herself was.

  Her jeans slouchy and faded and her long legs and the sheer length of her, the sheer tanned elegant length of Caroline, ranging about in her kitchen at the beginning of all her days …

  And of course Evan could have lived anywhere. In one of those enormous flats in Notting Hi
ll or Chelsea. Or he could have gone for something more modest, bachelor chambers in Mayfair, maybe, or a terraced house in Barnes. He could have moved here, even, to where I live, with a nearby park and the sort of trees that when you look up into them, make you think you could be anywhere, that life could have all kinds of possibilities, outcomes … That we might have lived in the countryside together, Evan and I, with these same trees around us and over our heads, and all the hills at our back. As that first pub we’d met in to begin this book might have been in the countryside and we part of it. Deep in. As though we ourselves might have come in from off a remote shoot somewhere with a pair of black Labradors at our heels and a brace of pheasant in our hands and mud on our boots … Arm in arm, two people who’ve known each other for such a long, long time …

  But in that pub we had something else we had to do. My papers, my pens and pencils and files … They were all laid out.

  And nothing could compete with that, so it seemed. Our task in hand, this book. Nothing.

  So my—

  ‘Coffee?’ Caroline mouthed at Evan, pointing to an empty mug before her and the jug there on the counter, and then to him. ‘You and me?’

  ‘And then that smile of hers,’ I transcribed from Evan’s volatile and deeply unreliable folk-music style of poetry: ‘that smile of hers that made my life begin.’

  Finishing Lines

  The day came for the Caxton Taylors’ summer get-together, as already featured in the attractive invitation that sat up on the mantelpiece in the Beresfords’ bright and rangy kitchen.

  The whole month before had been warm – as June often is – promising a long and lovely season ahead, of endless days and blue skies. And now here we were in July and the mood at the end of the District Line ‘said summer’. That was Evan’s phrase – I’ve taken it straight out of a journal – ‘and some’, he added, speaking to me directly, after he’d passed over that particular group of pages bound together in a file and was describing them to me. He had these American phrases that still came out every now and then, sentences and words that had been generated by years living in New York and Chicago and Boston, all those years of his he’d had away that I couldn’t imagine, not really, not think about, nor believe in. To my mind Evan had always been near to where I was, living close by. He’d never gone away. ‘Those Gordonstons,’ my mother used to say, ‘how I do love them.’

  So there we had it, on the basis of Evan’s American turn of phrase, the mood in Richmond ‘said summer’. It was hot enough. People were outdoors and on the streets, voices were raised. Clothing worn was light and thin and careless. The mood did indeed, all over London, say summer.

  Evan himself was still wearing thick cotton shirts, though, but the jerseys – thank goodness – were now gone. He had confessed that with the atmosphere in Chestnut Way turning towards the entertainments at No. 23 the coming weekend, he had decided he had had enough of winter clothes. It was all part of that ‘change of mood’ he’d detected at the Beresfords’, that he’d told me about the first night we met at The Empty Barrel. How there was something hopeful in the atmosphere, in the house, with the day of the pool party approaching; so something light and summery and entertaining was in the air.

  As I say, this pleasant climate wasn’t limited to Richmond. In the street where I live, geraniums were blooming in pots, pink and white and red, and how pretty they were, how I noticed them even more clearly emerging from the dark gloom of The Empty Barrel. There was the sweet, green smell of cut grass, too, coming from the parks; the scent of water from sprinklers casting the suburban gardens of West London with cool, all there to greet Evan, too, when he arrived ‘home’ at the Beresfords’ after a long, hot day at work.

  Everyone, it seemed, at No. 47 was excited about the party at No. 23. Caroline was, and the three boys, who were great friends with the Caxton Taylors’ children; David had mentioned the watersports more than once and was definitely planning to be there, ‘Most definitely,’ he’d said. That there was no travel planned for work, no more exams at UCL … That there was a whole summer ahead before the autumn started and a new and equally demanding course on the Peloponnesian wars, the conditional conjugations in both Latin and Greek, and The Complete Greek Myths, seven of which were to be fully translated, from English back into the original, before the end of the first term, but not now, not now …. Meant that all this time was available, for him, so that there was nothing else he had to ‘do’, any place he needed to ‘be’ – other than at home with his wife and family. Was all part of the lift in mood, the lightness of the air, in Richmond. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he was ‘very much around’, he’d told Evan when they’d bumped into each other on the stair, and Caroline, for her part, seemed relieved about that, that they could all attend the neighbours’ party together, that they could all be together as a family as they used to be.

  ‘Well,’ muttered Evan somewhat grimly when I questioned him about this, about David Beresford and his attitude to home life, to parties, this one in particular, ‘it’s a case of – “Whatever”,’ he said, referring, in a protective and loving way to the many means David Beresford had at his disposal, as far as Evan was concerned, to break his wife’s heart. ‘He might say that now,’ Evan said, that he was going, but who knew for sure? All those times, Evan reminded me, when David had promised he’d be home at a certain time and then wasn’t, that he’d be there with Caroline, then wasn’t there, saying he would host a dinner with her and then staying on ‘to catch up on work’, said Evan, again ‘grimly’ – the adverb rather suiting his expression as he spoke, suiting the sarcasm with which he uttered the phrase – because, he was all too aware, Caroline had mentioned all this to him, that David would say things like that, ‘Oh sure, I’ll be home tonight in good time, I’ll bring the champagne,’ only to arrive back at the house late and loaded, and the evening just about over and the guests starting to go home. Imploring, ‘Please don’t leave,’ by way of compensation, but of course by then it was too late, as everyone was aware of the hour. Except David, Evan said. He was blissfully unaware. For his part, seeming happier than ever, according to Evan, even more handsome and charming. ‘I must say, despite knowing Caroline as I do,’ Evan had said once, ‘I can’t not like David Beresford.’ I think I know what Evan means. After all, he was just doing what he wanted, wasn’t he, David? Exactly. The classes at UCL were a sort of dream come true for him. He could chuck in his job any second as far as he was concerned, and just move to the flat off Russell Square and in time, after his DPhil and when he’d published a few papers, take up an academic position, there or in any British university where there was a good Classics department. He’d never wanted to be in the City. And he’d say that, too, to Evan, to anyone, in his charming way, with his charming smile, in front of Caroline. All the time. ‘I never wanted any of this …’ indicating the gracious home, the large green garden with its oaks and planes. ‘Any of it.’

  In the same way then, Evan was moved to add, the man could not ever really be relied upon. Watersports plan or not. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ he said of David’s plan to be part of things down the road the coming Saturday. Him letting Caroline down so much a part of things for Evan by now, their marital relationship, the way they lived their life … Evan was moved to give me all kinds of opinions on that front. For goodness’ sake, he told me, Caroline might plan a holiday, book the whole thing, pack, and then David, at the last minute, would pull out of it. There was that kind of thing happening all the time. The numberless small let-downs. Those, as well as all the complex and dark, dark secrets that can exist between a husband and wife, even if that husband and wife, like the Beresfords, seem beautifully suited and happy, with the three boys at expensive West London day schools and on track for Cambridge, with the house elegantly furnished and appointed with pleasing lodger’s quarters and a domestic situation generally that was described by many as being ‘a fun scene’.

  As Evan said ‘grimly’ into his gin and tonic on more tha
n one occasion, ‘fun scene’ or not, David Beresford, as already noted, knew well, was fully articulate and practised in, the many ways ‘to break his wife’s heart’.

  Even so, there seemed none of that intention now or rancour about the place in the days leading up to the Caxton Taylors’ ‘Pool Party’. None of it. Evan just wanted to be sure I included it, anyhow, the ‘shadow cast through the marriage’, as he put it, ‘to set the record straight’ in the book we were putting together. Though I wasn’t much interested in that sort of backstory, Evan wanting to underline all that about David’s ‘manners’, the ferocious order of them, their application in all things to achieve precisely what David Beresford wanted from life. Adding, Evan said, and ‘get it down, Nin,’ he’d told me, as usual, ‘that staying married to Caroline was the most complicated and cruel thing David Beresford could have done of all’.

  Still, the same David Beresford had definitely said he would be there, at No. 23, that Saturday in early July, from 2 pm onwards as the invitation stipulated, in ‘swimwear’ also detailed, on the bottom right-hand corner, printed but as though it had been scrawled, in bright pink script with acid green embellishment, and I, for my part believed him.

  He said he would help Charlie Caxton Taylor ‘man the barbecue’, Evan told me, ‘that old trope’ – the husbands holed up together fanning the flames while the women lounged around the pool in bikinis, keeping an eye on the children splashing, and talking amongst themselves. ‘“Man” the barbecue,’ said Evan, poking into the discarded lemon rind that was left in his glass in the Barrel on the Friday night before the big day. ‘“Man” it,’ he said. ‘Those expressions are left over from the ark, Nin. Not even our fathers would do that, say, “man the barbecue” …’ What century was David Beresford living in, anyhow? he said.