Caroline's Bikini

by Kirsty Gunn

  The water polo game was somehow part of it, he surmised, coming up as a subject of conversation the evening before, and carrying on as a theme at the party itself that quickly gained momentum, became a spirited source for debate amongst all the guests: Why, in this ‘day and age’ as people have it, would one segregate sport in that way? ‘Boys Only’ indeed. After all this wasn’t the Olympics! It wasn’t even a schools-type match! So why shouldn’t the women and girls join in if they wanted? It was all about David, was it? the conversation ran. That he was the sort of man who wanted to control things, have a performance play out exactly as he wanted. And Caroline was leading the argument about that version of her husband from the front, Evan said, giving a range of opinions and gesturing over to David, to where he was in the pool with all the boys splashing around him. Talking about him. Imitating him. Throwing in Greek verbs and so on to agitate further. Myths about this and that, the flat in Russell Square …

  David just ignored her.

  ‘I’m fed up with the way you behave,’ said Caroline then, rising from her sun lounger and going over to stand at the side of the pool to confront her handsome husband, who was in there, in the deep end, with her sons and the other children who were male, all these men. ‘Get out of the water, boys,’ she said.

  ‘They stay where they are,’ David replied. ‘You’re drunk. Go back and lie on your thing. Go to sleep. Whatever. We’ve got a game to play.’

  OK, so I put a bit more detail in there than had been supplied in the original but Evan had given me the main shape of the afternoon, the turn of events, an unpleasant turn, that took hold at the glamorous party down the road and killed it. Caused everything to change.

  He’d told me, when he’d called me up on the phone, giving those terse instructions, to meet him at The Remarkable straight away, that something ‘conclusive’ had occurred. ‘Nin,’ he’d said, ‘I need to see you now, if you can make it, at this place just by The River Cafe between Hammersmith and Chiswick … You can’t miss it if you come along by the water. Something has happened. It happened yesterday at the Beresfords, something that happened as a result of that pool party, and I need to see you. This minute. ASAP.’

  So I was writing now, this minute, too, and ASAP and fast, and faster, reaching the end of all our pages and the things he’d said. It had been nine, ten in the morning on a Sunday when he’d called and he’d said we needed to meet straight away. So … Early opening hours, then, I’d thought, it must be. At this new place I’d had to look up on my computer. It must be some place. So quick. Go as fast as you can, then, run, the writing to match. The streets of London had been quiet when I set out, planning to go up the back streets and cut down the side by the park to the river. We would most certainly get a table outside, I was thinking as I left, even though the weather was fine … And so I’d started walking, and walking faster, enjoying the hour, the day, wondering about Evan, what was ahead, and wondering, too, not for the first time, about why I’d never got a dog. Never. I increased my pace. Why? When I love walking, always have, have I never got a dog? When, remember, when we were growing up, Evan’s family always kept dogs, spaniels – Flossie, Jo and Barney, one after the other, mother, daughter, daughter’s son – and I’d always loved those spaniels, my mother had taken the ageing Barney to live with her and my father after the Gordonstons moved to America … So thinking about all this too, while walking faster, faster, all of this, this information running through my mind as well as wondering what Evan was going to tell me when we met, coursing through my mind – like a spaniel coursing across a field you might say, though none of the Gordonstons’ dogs were working dogs – and I was running, by now, myself, I was, running, as fast as I could to get to Evan, to where I was to hear this ‘last part’, as he’d put it, when he’d called me, running towards the ‘finishing lines’ of his story, along the Riverside Promenade as it’s called, towards the glass construction that is The Remarkable, and everything, everything, looked at that point … Amazing.

  As did Evan himself.

  I’ve written that down already. That he had a shine to him. Sunny, tanned, relaxed … Content. And ‘content’ is a very nice word. A good word, a concluding sort of word, yes, alright, it is, but calm, and clear. Fixed. A nice word.

  Content.

  Why then was I to feel the need of a stomach pump just seconds later? Why to feel ‘content’ might cause me so much ill?

  ‘Hi you!’ Evan had called over to me when I’d arrived at the lawn in front of The Remarkable, had seen the sign. ‘Come over and have this fancy but disgusting drink I’ve got for us both here and I’ll tell you about what happened yesterday at the Beresfords’. What happened to me.’

  And I write again: Why sick then? So unwell? That same question? When ‘content’ was there along with ‘content’, details to be given, more ballast, for an ending in store. Why sick? When that is what I was used to? Details? Ballast? Why not ‘content’?

  When Evan was saying, ‘For it’s resolved, Nin. Between me and Caroline. The thing between us … It’s over now.’

  Why wrong?

  The glass shattering.

  The day in shards.

  Why not content, with that ‘It’s over now’?

  But instead feeling bright, like migraine, too bright, the summons of the day – and my turning away from Evan before turning back. I felt trapped, I reached for my pen.

  Only, ‘Look in your heart and write,’ says the poet.*

  So Evan talked, he started to, and talked and I started, as I’ve said, to write it down, all of it, the weather, the guests … The polo playing, the mighty row, there in front of everyone, Caroline jumping in the pool to get to David, shouting at him, ‘I hate you!’ ‘I loathe you!’ and nearly drowning because she’d had too much to drink, that’s what everyone said, those cocktails had been very strong, and that ‘poor David Beresford’ would have to take her home. As he did, he must have – or did he? Caroline didn’t know, had no idea, only that when she woke up, hours later it was, she was in her own bed, her bikini, still wet with swimming-pool water, in a soggy pile on the kitchen floor where she had left it.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked Evan. It was the second ‘How do you know?’ I’d asked him.

  ‘Because I saw it,’ he said. ‘I picked it up. I was up in my room all the time, you know, I’d been working. I’d been out for a walk but I had stuff to do, I’d figured: well the Beresfords are all out, the house will be quiet. I’ll get some emailing done, I was doing that, and then at some point, late late afternoon this was, evening, dusk, Caroline called me on my mobile and said would I go up to her room, that she needed to see me, could I help her, that she didn’t know what she was going to do.’

  Didn’t know what she was going to do.

  I underlined that line. We’d been there before, hadn’t we? Hadn’t that been the line she’d spoken in Evan’s room also, the night she went ‘up’? So this was where the story had been going, was it? That still, after all this time, there was Evan. There was Caroline, and she ‘didn’t know what she was going to do’.

  And, as I say again, there he was, there she was. And all the notes I’d already made, taken from details Evan had given me – the water polo incident and what Caroline had said, what David had said. ‘Don’t start laying down the law about gender to me,’ saying. ‘Boys and girls. Boys and girls bullshit. You don’t know the first thing about it. You’re drunk. You’ve been drunk all day …’ and Caroline nearly drowning then and crying and then someone must have taken her home but not David after all because the next thing she knew she’d woken up in her own bed, and no one there in the house, no David, no boys, only Evan there … Her bikini puddled in a pile on the kitchen floor, wet footsteps still showing on the shiny tiles, leading out the kitchen to the hallway and the stairs – these details were accumulating, happening, with only pages left in this story to go, and not even pages, no, not even more than a couple of paragraphs to go …

  ‘What then
?’ I said, I managed, I had to know. This new Evan. Resolved. Content. The story nearly over. The story done.

  ‘What then?’ I repeated.

  ‘I ate the bikini,’ Evan replied. He smiled. ‘I know …’

  He took up my hand. ‘Crazy, Nin. I know. But that’s what happened, it’s what I did. First, yes. I went to her room like she’d asked me. I sat on the bed, we talked, she talked, I listened and I brought her a cup of tea—’

  ‘You ate …’ I started.

  ‘Yes,’ he smiled again. ‘I cut it up, in little pieces, but yes, over the course of the evening that followed I ate it, finished the whole thing. It’s resolved, Nin. The story is over. Everything that happened between Caroline and me …’

  ‘Is gone,’ I finished for him.

  ‘I finished it, yes.’

  ‘And everything else, everything that had happened before …?’

  ‘Her room, my room, her there waiting for me in her room, yes, all that, too …’

  ‘Is finished.’

  ‘Gone, yes.’ Evan smiled his smile again, this new smile of his I’d never seen before, well maybe I had, but that was years ago, years and years and years ago when he and I had lived next door to each other and loved each other, spent all our time together, maybe from then, that smile, I remembered, maybe then …

  ‘The last thing she said was “Stay with me, Evan,”’ he said, ‘before she closed her eyes. But I knew she would sleep deeply. Knew that soon, David and the boys would come home.’

  ‘So that’s when …’

  ‘Yeah. I went downstairs. The bikini was there. As I’ve said, it was a simple thing to do. And then, when that was done, when it was, as it were, gone … Eaten … I started packing. I’m leaving Richmond, Nin. A removal company are on their way there now to get my things.’

  ‘I see,’ I may have said, but probably just nodded.

  ‘What I love about you, Nin. About this whole project,’ Evan said. ‘Is that I can tell you everything. As I have told you everything from the start.’

  ‘Even that,’ I said. ‘That final, final thing. That weird and strange thing that you’ve just said now.’

  ‘Even that,’ he replied. ‘Everything.’

  And a kid leapt down then and seemed to land just behind him. But it was an optical illusion, the way the swingbars were set above his head; a tiny voice cried out, ‘Yay!’

  ‘Everything,’ I finished. ‘Well …’

  My voice trailed away. I couldn’t take my eyes off him.

  ‘But even so …’ Evan said, and he leaned over, he leaned right over. ‘I couldn’t have done any of this, you know, got started, gone on, created a middle, a beginning, the end of it … Couldn’t have thought how to manage it, write it, describe it and plan it, this, the whole book, the project, the novel, essay, whatever, I couldn’t have done any of it at all …’ he said, and stood, and he pulled me up with him and we stood together, blue sky all around him, shattered glass dissolved into sun and light and water … ‘Without,’ he finished …

  ‘You.’

  * Philip Sidney wrote that, who’s not even featured in this novel, at the beginning of his own extensive literary project; it’s a small but final and lovely footnote – there will be no more.

  Some Further Material

  Caroline’s Bikini, the project undertaken by Emily Stuart and Evan Gordonston as a formal experimentation of the extended style of narrative some may call essay or reportage but that I refer to here as ‘novel’, is now finished. The words are done, arranged. The piece overall has a contents page and a cover and all the rest of it; my job here is simply to direct interested readers towards those particulars relating to the work that are to do with background, personal history, and so on – to paint a picture of London and a segment of society in that fine city as inhabited by those in this book who have always lived there; their activities, to an extent, revealed in addition to what is already shown, in the way that all stories continue beyond the pages of books and have no ending but send out further lines to be considered in echoes, reflections, ghostings, of the written originals.

  It’s like that swimming pool again, where this book started. That image of a pool that could be anywhere, in any city, country or town … In the same way, the splash and sounds of people enjoying themselves there, in that blue water, their voices, shouts and calls might be a kind of metaphor, a reminder that Caroline Beresford and her friends, and Emily Stuart and Evan Gordonston and their families … Everyone whose name has featured in this novel sits along with others we already know in our own lives, encircling each other as memories of all kinds of people we love. So our own stories are interlinking with fiction’s circular lines to make one continual, endless narrative … A slide of clear blue water endlessly interrupted by gesture and movement, turning and shining in the light, shifting, even when the pool’s watery surface is completely devoid of swimmers.

  How to use these pages that follow?

  As you will. There’s no order, in particular; just flick straight through, or find parts you might want to read in more depth. Every section reminds you where it comes from, in Evan’s story – from what conversation or scene – a reminder perhaps of earlier chapters in the novel, or hints, perhaps, in other places, of stories gone untold. The minute I started assembling these notes, I realised they could have no end. Old London? The way things used to be? Before oligarchs and giant shopping malls? The friendship that existed between the Gordonstons and the Stuarts, before the Gordonstons all moved to New York? I could write about these things forever. Then there’s the section on love, its curious emanations in the beautiful poetry of Petrarch, Dante … Again, books have been written on that subject and though I have but scant details for you here, scholars will tell you that these stories, too, are infinite.

  We want to go on and on.

  For now, I’ll leave my own desire to continue, not leave this story at an end, by way of this second introduction – and a selection of stories and ideas from my own materials that run at great length in pages and pages of handwritten and printed texts. A bikini is cut, as Evan Gordonston knows, from the smallest increment of this fabric. One may assume it, Caroline’s top and bottom, as Evan does, no mistake about that. But there is, Reader, so much more besides.

  Narrative Construction

  Overall, one needs to consider the moment of attraction. Back on p. 29, Evan Gordonston describes this as a ‘ping’; Emily Stuart on p. 25 as ‘BANG’, in capital letters, just like that. Either way it denotes an instant moment of romantic crisis – attraction, passion, ardour … All gathered together on the page when one may describe oneself as being lovestruck, as though ‘hurled’ off a bike, we read on p. 17. Or by Cupid’s arrow, as some would have it. In Caroline’s Bikini it is the appearance of Caroline Beresford at the front door of her Richmond home that sets Evan’s heart racing, is how we see it in this story. Evan refers to this moment himself as mythic, as an aspect of faith – see pp. 29, 32, 33, when he’s describing the effect of Caroline to Emily Stuart. ‘It may turn out that I don’t even have a life,’ he says to the latter on p. 89. ‘That that’s what my unrequited love for Caroline has made me see.’

  See also: ‘Literary Context’; ‘Courtly Love’.

  Literary Context

  Caroline’s Bikini has been created in a particular style and manner that Emily Stuart and Evan Gordonston arrived at together following one of their initial meetings in a West London pub. It comprises an oral account as rendered by Evan over several gin and tonics that were served with occasional bags of nuts and crisps, along with transcripts of notes and journals and various papers he also provided that were then gathered up together and fashioned into one document by Emily, in the hours when she was not talking with Evan, and later, also taking notes herself as part of those discussions.

  In this way, Stuart describes herself as ‘amanuensis’ to Evan Gordonston – meaning, literally, that she saw herself, throughout the entire process, as standing by
, at Evan’s hand, to take down details of whatever he had to tell her that day or evening and deliver this up again to him in neat, orderly sentences and paragraphs.

  The dictionary definition is precise and useful when we think of Emily Stuart’s key role in the ‘novel’, as it was later termed by Gordonston, as it describes perfectly the way such a writer is both necessary to the project in hand and yet curiously invisible. Chambers’s Twentieth Century Dictionary presents it thus:

  Amanuensis: n. one who writes to dictation: a copying secretary.

  On p. 7, when Gordonston first suggests this manner of his relationship with Stuart, in terms of the prose project underway, she, immediately, is made to think of Milton, a favourite poet of hers who, she remembers from English Literature classes at university, dictated his great epic Paradise Lost from bed, first thing in the morning, is how she sees it, after a long night of composing before he went to sleep. He had become blind and widowed in the latter stages of his life and was looked after by his daughters, who would take down as dictation great portions of the poem that he was ready to deliver to them, ‘possibly before breakfast was even served’ – she made a note of that somewhere and it has stuck. She knows there are other accounts of the poet’s life in which others were called upon by the poet to help in the same way – students, friends, even the young poet Andrew Marvell. But Stuart has it in mind that the daughters were the main amanuenses in the story she’s interested in. It seems he would have the stanza fully developed in his mind and would then simply recite it through at length, from memory. On other occasions, after breakfast had been served, perhaps, he would compose new lines of the poem and develop these as one of his daughters was making the copy, reading back portions of the text as they went along, much in the same way Emily Stuart would recount lines of Evan Gordonston’s own writing and conversation as Caroline’s Bikini proceeded.