Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

It was strange, it was, for me to hear Evan talking so much about Caroline’s husband all of a sudden. There’d been little enough of him in our story, and it was rather too late now, I felt, to bring him in. ‘Poor David’, as I’d referred to him as, after all. Because, I suppose, of that love of his for antiquities and so on, because of being a bit out of kilter in terms of his work ambitions and his true desires. And yet now here was that same husband being ridiculed, in the same text, for his language, expressions used. For his coolness towards his wife, the various kinds of domestic treachery carried out by David Beresford in the name of his wanting to ‘do his own thing’ … It was all very well Evan giving me this now, at this junction, but too late, by now, to bring it in.

  Besides, my mind was with that pool down the road. That large cool blue shape laid out in a back garden in Richmond, tiled around the edges in an expanse of smooth dark grey slate, with a large square patio giving on to grass. In my mind’s eye I could see Caroline and her friends arranged around that bright, watery lozenge, at the bottom of the garden, sunglasses on, stretched back on one of the many bright sun loungers the Caxton Taylors had placed at the pool edge. Calling out, ‘Don’t splash, Robbie,’ or ‘Careful,’ but somewhat carelessly, as if they didn’t really mind if they were splashed at all. ‘No dive bombs, please.’ When really, they weren’t even thinking about their children and what their children were doing; they were thinking about their husbands and themselves.

  So yes, ‘Don’t splash’ and ‘No diving’. These phrases, sentences, images, were coming to me, floating about in my mind rather like the sort of large, brightly coloured plastic toys you see floating on the surface of swimming pools around the world, gently bumping and colliding in the bright sunshine as Evan rattled at his empty glass in the gloom and darkness of the Barrel. All working together, all these various ideas, descriptions, to build up a picture of the actual party, the day itself, that particular Saturday afternoon when the neighbours were all arriving and, one by one, picking up a cocktail from one of the many young Eastern European women on hire from a catering company Pamela Caxton Taylor had found that specialised in ‘London Pool Parties’ – the company was called that, Caroline had explained to Evan – all dressed in fake grass skirts as though they lived in Hawaii. ‘Those cocktails were a knockout,’ Evan said.

  But that was later.

  Now I had Evan talking, and framing judgements. Wanting to add this, add another thing. So that I had, at the last minute it seemed, all these extra pages to put in, all these extra details. And it seemed also as though it took a very long time, too, for me to get there, to that ‘later’ – for me to hear anything about the party at all. It seemed, at one point, that it would take a whole new section of this book.

  For after seeing him at the Barrel on the Friday night, all that seemed to occur for me, for my writing, was only … silence. Almost as dramatic and obvious as the time back in late spring when there’d been the terrible silence after him confiding in me late at night. Now, as then, I heard nothing from Evan. Nothing. After the opinions, the ideas … The hours passed by as long as they had seemed to pass back in the spring, with no call from him, no text. I saw him on the Friday and then … Not a word. All day Saturday, then Saturday evening, and nothing. Saturday night then came and went, and still … Not a sentence. Not a thing to write down. About the weekend. The Beresfords. Caroline. The party. Nothing. Until finally, finally Evan had called me on Sunday morning and said he was ready to meet. The end of the story was nigh, he’d told me, over the phone, in a strange, elated voice that was also calm. ‘Let’s meet at The Remarkable – you’ll have to look it up on your computer – and I’ll tell you everything,’ he’d said.

  ‘How do you know?’ I would say to him there, in that extraordinary venue, in a couple of hours’ time, after he mentioned those ‘knockout’ cocktails again and he and I were meeting for what would be our last get-together of the sort we’d been having in a London pub. ‘You weren’t there …’

  ‘I’ll tell you everything,’ he would say again.

  The Remarkable was a brand new pub, in both senses of the word – because it was newly built, recently opened it seemed, as well as it being the first, of all the pubs we’d ever visited, that we hadn’t seen, somehow, in advance, while being at another. How ‘remarkable’ could it be, The Remarkable? Well, it just was. It was along from The River Cafe, and very, very fancy. I’d had to look it up on my computer to find out where it was, just as Evan had said. Gin came in tiny shot glasses carved from ice that you had to pour yourself, in one action down the side of your regular though highly frosted tumbler, tipping in the ‘tonic and lime medley’, as it was called, in a deft way, then stirring the whole with a crystal swizzle stick as fine as a darning needle that had also been provided, along with a bowl in which the ice shot glass could melt. Whew. The whole thing, as well, the place itself, seemed made of glass, glass windows, a glass roof. Glass doors that were open on to a green, glass tables on the grass, glassy-looking chairs and benches … The whole place looked like a set out of a film and nothing, nothing like any of the sorts of pubs Evan and I had got used to.

  What was going on? What was going on here?

  Despite its slick appearance, and perhaps because it was right next to the river and had a fountain and it was summer and the sky was bright blue, The Remarkable was the kind of place that attracted families, families with young children. The place rang with happy shouts and cries. I couldn’t work out why Evan had chosen it; he’d seen it on a website one night after getting back to Richmond after one of our nights together, he said, long ago, after he’d left me, and ‘had to walk it off’ – his phrase for the feeling of having talked too much about Caroline and it making him feel sick, or sickened, rather, by the fullness of his feeling, to use a rather more archaic expression that might be rather more suited to the Romantic period than to that in which Petrarch and Dante were writing. He’d had a kind of indigestion, he said. It had been one of our meetings at The Kilted Pig he had left behind him, he said, me still there within its dark interior, not ordering another drink, but not able to leave either, just sitting, with an equally dark and knowing feeling within me that these nights together were, despite the increasing loveliness of the evening outside, closing us up, somehow, drawing us in.

  I thought how The Kilted Pig had been a favourite for a time, of course, and typical, too, of the kind of pub Evan and I often found ourselves in in those days: a bit on the small side, perhaps, but with comfortable chairs and good-sized tables as I’ve written about already, in earlier pages, of course. That kind of place had suited me, I thought, had suited us, at the time, just fine. I should have known, and I kind of did, that when at last Evan called me on the Sunday morning following the pool party, suggesting a very different kind of establishment, the sort that I would need to ‘look up’ on my computer, that would sit next to a restaurant like The River Cafe, as it were, on that part of the river where the world goes, as it were again, to promenade … A place out in the open … In the bright air and the sun … A place to go to see and be seen … Well I did, I did know, that something was up. Something had changed. That this story was drawing to an end.

  Not that any of this is to sound sorry for myself, harking back to lost pubs, for that was surely the last thing on my mind, but only to indicate that when I received that call it was like a little bell rang, ‘Finishing Lines!’ A high jangled note that might seem to echo and resound off the sheer glass walls of the unlikely establishment Evan had selected for our meeting.

  After I hung up, I pulled on some clothes and headed straight there. I knew exactly where it was, The Remarkable, and he’d told me to get there ‘ASAP’ – about an hour’s walk from where I live, maybe forty-five minutes, going fast, wiggling down those back roads from the end of my street that eventually lead into the side streets of Chiswick … So how Evan got there before me, leaving Richmond, after all – did he take a cab instead of his usual walking or the tube? – w
as anybody’s guess.

  Chiswick is nowhere near Richmond, I’d had it in mind to say. Or the Barrel. Or anywhere. ‘Why do you want to meet there?’ I’d said, when we were still on the phone.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ Evan said. ‘I am leaving Richmond, Nin. I’ll tell you about it. And,’ he added, ‘The Remarkable is by the river and has cool breezes. It’s a great place. You’ll love it, I promise.’

  When we met, minutes later, it seemed, with my clever route and his unbelievable speed – he must have taken a cab – he repeated, I noticed, the same strange sort of sentence, about the airiness of the place and how I would appreciate it, only ominously this time, is how it sounded, with him leaning towards me. ‘It’s lovely here, don’t you think? With the cool breezes?’ he said. Then, ‘How, Nin, with everything I have to tell you, I need those breezes now.’

  I remember feeling strange then. How I put down my glass. And as I say it was a very fancy glass – but all of a sudden it was as if that fancy place was dull, dull, dull. Nothing fancy about the table we were sitting at, about that needle of a swizzle stick, or the melting hand-carved gin-pourer made of ice. It was suddenly as though there was nothing fancy at all about any of it, or about the whole wide world. Behind Evan, his face framed by it, was a complicated arrangement of poles and ropes and ladders – a children’s climbing frame. Little children, really little children, were moving all over it, fast as spiders. The climbing frame was crawling with tiny legs and arms and dotted with brightly coloured T-shirts and little pairs of shorts. I felt sick.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said to Evan then. I felt ill. Everything was crawling. Twinkling around me, like the beginnings of a sort of migraine, was all the glass, the shining day, the ropes and silver frames, the tiny legs and little miniature pairs of shorts.

  ‘What do you mean?’ I said again. It was as though all the meetings, all the tables, all the talks, all the gin and tonics in the world, all the nuts and crisps … Had piled up together into one twinkling, glassy, terrible experience, as though all we’d been doing, Evan and I, all we’d been spending all these months together doing, was not speaking, exchanging, learning, thinking, imagining … Not writing a book at all. But only drinking the most monstrous kind of cocktail, some unholy kind of spirit, that had come to lodge, with a piece of the glass it was poured into, right in the centre of my brain. Here I was, here we were, in this terrible, terrible place, beneath the blue sky in a glassy pyramid of a building set upon the grass, moving inexorably towards some kind of conclusion, an ending, and Evan there before me, dressed as badly as he’d ever been, although, and I could see this, too, as though for the first time, there was a new loveliness in his face, a softness, a brightness, to his features. He was shining.

  Yes. There he was.

  ‘There you are,’ I managed.

  He looked tanned, actually. How can that have happened? He was relaxed. His thick shirt, wintry as ever, and still stubbornly worn at this time of year, was loose and groovy-looking – I saw even through my sickish, migrainey-affected eyes how fabulous the old flannel suddenly looked on him – the sleeves rolled up like he was a cowboy from a seventies TV show and his arms brown and strong, his hands strong, his fingernails clean and fine. He still looked intense, there was that issue of him having ‘something to tell me’, but for now he leaned over to take my hand.

  ‘You’ve been amazing, Nin,’ he said.

  Past tense. Past tense.

  A wave of nausea came over me like they say it does in all the novels.

  Cliche, too. A cliche. ‘A wave of nausea.’ The migrainey thing doing its migrainey thing.

  I thought I was going to be sick.

  ‘All these months,’ Evan said. ‘Hearing me go on and on about Caroline … Caroline this, Caroline that … my love for Caroline, how I can’t live without Caroline, all the things I say to Caroline, all the things she says to me …’

  ‘I’ve tried to get it all down—’ I felt so queasy I could barely speak.

  ‘And now,’ he carried on, as though I hadn’t responded, the story whirling, whirling towards conclusion – that past tense! That use of the past tense! – and my sick dead feeling passing through me in waves, like sea sickness, tossed upon a glassy, gin-soaked sea …

  ‘And now,’ he repeated, ‘we’re here, you and I, things coming to an end. And you … You’ve been with me from the start.’

  I turned from the table, from Evan. I was like a person on a boat. Exactly. I was exactly like that person, as though I had turned because I was about to throw up over the side. This speech coming from him, from Evan, this strange sickening-making speech and coming from him, from him of all people, my dearest, oldest friend, the person I have known since childhood when his parents moved next door and he came over and knocked on the door the first day and said, ‘Hello, my name is Evan Gordonston and we live next door. Do you want to come out and play?’ and my mother had said, ‘Yes, go, Emily. You’ll have fun,’ because she’d already said hello to Helen Gordonston and had liked her immediately. Since all of that, all of this. All our past and present and future in jeopardy for here was Evan now with his strange way of speaking. I couldn’t understand. I couldn’t properly see. After all the conversations that had gone on since he’d come back from America, since he’d first put up at the ‘fun scene’ that was Richmond, all the conversations, talking, that had gone on, all those meetings of ours, all the notes and journals and … chat … Only to end in this strange new way of communicating I didn’t recognise at all …. This way of talking that bore no resemblance to the phone calls, the texts, the emails, the journal entries, my writing … This new Evan with his thick shirt sleeves all rolled up and his brown hands taking mine, talking now.

  There I was, turned away. Faced overboard, so to speak. The world tipping around me. No ‘How are things?’ or ‘Fine, thanks.’ No ‘Meet later?’ Or ‘Sure.’ Or even ‘Was thinking of you’ and ‘Same’ – no. This kind of interaction we were having now was no interaction I know, was something different altogether. Though there were all those texts that finished with an xxx – still xxx-ing each other ourselves was something we would never do, never when we were five years old would we kiss so why kiss now? What reason? Why? ‘Is this even happening?’ I was thinking to myself as I was turned away, head down over the side of my metaphorical boat, getting ready to be sick.

  ‘What?’ I said from that position, not looking. ‘What on earth do you mean?’

  ‘Only that—’ Evan replied, in the kind of way that indicated a new paragraph, but then saying instead of finishing that sentence, ‘Eugh!’ and slamming down his glass. ‘This gin and tonic tastes like kids’ lemonade,’ he said, and I turned back then, to face him. The relief! He poked in his glass with the swizzle stick. ‘It’s disgusting …’ He made a face, and pushed his glass to one side. ‘Only,’ he continued, ‘there is something I need to tell you about me and Caroline.’

  I felt another cliche then, another ‘wave’, only this time, of strange disappointment, that sort of peculiar relief. This new sentence, mood … I’d thought he’d said the story was nearly done? Only now, maybe not after all. For now there was this. Him taking up the glass again and fiddling with it. I’d been wrong. I drew breath. I straightened myself in my chair. Got ready for the next sentence, got myself prepared.

  ‘After the party,’ Evan began, ‘the pool party at the Caxton Taylors’ … Well, because of …’

  ‘What?’ I said now, and the sickness was gone, we were back on that old familiar territory. I could almost have reached in my bag and taken out my pad, my pen. Everything about that pool party had been like drawing teeth, as far as getting details out of Evan was concerned. Not to call me after it, or any time before or during, as he’d said he would. All through Saturday, Saturday night. To get no information out of him whatsoever … Only that silence of his. The empty line at the end of a mobile phone. But now, here he was, and it looked as though I were to be getting some information af
ter all. ‘Yes?’ I said, expectantly. For I was ready for him. Up until this point, after all, I’d had to imagine everything for myself, from the colour of Caroline’s bikini – ‘Hawaiian print, cotton, pink’, to match the Hawaiian theme of the invitation and the day – to the pool – ‘turquoise, lozenge-shaped, edged with charcoal-coloured slate’ – to, well, everything. The Beresfords, David Beresford team-leading water polo for the neighbourhood boys, young and old, ‘Boys Only’ as it turned out David Beresford had ordered, causing a great deal of talk at the party, that there were no girls allowed … I’d put all that in, I was planning how it would go. The fact that the day was hot, the guests many and those drinks, the cocktails, circulating freely as I knew they would, from the details on the invitation Evan had told me about weeks earlier, were indeed ‘knockout’ … Everything. Everything was in my mind, ready to be turned into words and sentences and substance for this book. The fact that those cocktails circulating on the fluorescent green and yellow and fuchsia-coloured plastic trays were really strong, included three kinds of alcohol, vodka, cachaça and rum, plus a mixer, and Caroline drinking more than one or two or three of them … Everything. I had put it all in.

  Now Evan was speaking, and there it was, the details, the colours, but he was speaking now so this part was real.

  ‘Something had happened the night before the pool party,’ he said. ‘I don’t know what, exactly, but there was an atmosphere in the house on the Saturday morning and David and Caroline were barely speaking.’ I nodded, I did quietly, actually, reach for my pen and the usual lined paper that I’d used for all of my amanuensis work. ‘It was unpleasant, alright,’ said Evan, and he went on to describe a sort of mounting tension so that, by the time the family went down the road together to No. 23, though all dressed in swimwear as requested, the clothes they wore on top of those garments seemed dark, funereal even, Evan had thought, watching them leave from the window of his high lodging rooms.