by Kirsty Gunn
Final note: American and British idiolect and tone are interesting to consider in light of each other. The American reader is more likely to read a British voice as, unless dramatically indicated by spellings, variation in syntax, use of doggerel, idiom and so on, a generally British one, and is challenged to hear and see minute regional variations, indications of education, etc.; the same remark pertains to the British reader of American texts where subtleties outside those obvious demarcations of, say, the South, or the remote hill communities of Kentucky and Tennessee, cannot be picked up easily. Is this Wall Street banker from Connecticut or Boston? Is that young woman from Manhattan or Syracuse? Hard to tell.
Personal Social History
Here follow details of the somewhat complicated social network – including notes on the past lives and habits of certain members of that group – that comprise a key aspect of Caroline’s Bikini, i.e. that theme of the story devoted to explaining and adumbrating the various relationships and connections that exist between all who inhabit the world of the text.
From the beginning of the story – ‘novel’ or ‘book’ or ‘report’, as it is variously referred to throughout – it is clear that the various individuals in Caroline’s Bikini are well known to each other, to different degrees, either through direct contact and a history of a past relationship, or at one or two removes from each other.
We might say that in a story where Evan Gordonston and Caroline Beresford are the ‘key players’, as a particular kind of critic or writer may think of them, this network emanates from the two – that they may be, if you like, suns around which the various planets of the story revolve. Without Caroline there would be no Rosie Howard, for example, no Marjorie Clarke, and so on, let alone a David Beresford or the couple’s three teenage boys. Without Evan, there would be no Nin, so to speak, no ‘amanuensis’, no need at all to get ‘all of this down’.
However, that same fact constitutes another layer of meaning and social density in the plot line: The contents of the book are further complicated by the narrative position of Emily Stuart, who, herself, in addition to writing about knowing Evan Gordonston so well and for so long within the context of this friendship group, also interacts with and responds to other characters directly herself, which in turn adds further gradation to her understanding and subsequent rendering of Gordonston himself on the page.
To further trouble this narrative position is the fact that Stuart herself has never met Caroline Beresford. She remains at a distance, as attractive and unattainable as she is to Evan Gordonston himself, through the sheer fact of never having seen her or talked with her face to face. She feels she ‘knows’ Caroline, she uses expressions such as that one all the way through the story, but this is only because of the detail with which Gordonston has described her, as well as from the various notes and papers with which he is at pains to furnish Stuart – to ‘build a complete picture’, as he puts it.
Thus, overall, there is a sense running throughout the entire project of the prose, that all who inhabit the world of Caroline’s Bikini are familiar with each other’s presence in the story – whether they meet directly in the text or not.
Rosie Howard, for example, an old friend of Stuart’s, knows a great friend of the Beresfords without ever having met Caroline. Her knowledge of that ‘fun scene’ in Richmond comes to her through this friend’s contact on p. 13: ‘A friend of a friend of mine has a big and rather stunning, so I understand, house in Richmond. I don’t know her – the friend, I mean, Rosie’s friend – but Rosie told me she has lodgers …’ etc. Stuart, in turn, might know something of the social milieu, it is is suggested in the text, simply by knowing Rosie so well; and though Rosie herself knows David Beresford through a friend of hers who went out with his brother, and the Beresfords senior, Jonathan and Diana, she hasn’t seen David for some years, though at a party recently in Gloucestershire she did bump into Robert Beresford who talked with her about the family, his parents and his brother, as though Rosie saw them regularly and was in close touch.
The relationships are summarised below. See also pp. 24, 40.
Emily ‘Nin’ Stuart – best friend of Evan Gordonston; long-time friend of the Gordonston family; schoolfriend of Felicity Gordonston; part of a wider social group comprising family friends, some of whose parents also knew the Gordonstons through the Stuarts, including Christopher Lowden and Rosie Howard.
Evan Gordonston – best friend of Emily Stuart; brother of Elisabeth Gordonston, who went out with Felix Stuart; connected through mutual friends with, among others, Rosie Howard and Christopher Lowden.
Rosie Howard – close friend of Emily Stuart and Ros Greenford, who does not appear in this story but is a good friend of Caroline Beresford, and of Amanda Parker who went out with Robert Beresford, David’s younger brother; a good friends of the Beresfords, in general, both sons and their parents, Jonathan and Diana.
Caroline Beresford – married to David Beresford, mother of three teenage boys, Andrew, William and Jamie; good friends with a large and vibrant London social set, including Ros Greenford and Amanda Parker.
David Beresford – married to Caroline Beresford, father of three teenage boys, as above; brother to Robert Beresford who went out with Amanda Parker; a good friend of Charlie Caxton Taylor who lives down the road at No. 47; friends too with some banking associates and colleagues, though their social contact is minimal; growing friendship with Professor James Ashford Anderson in the Classics department at the University of London.
Marjorie Clarke – has a successful career in advertising and can often offer Emily Stuart ‘spillover’ work from various briefs and commissions; is an old university friend of both Stuart and Christopher Lowden; also good friend of Rosie Howard; close friends with Samantha Prinn who, along with Betsy Forman runs the Prinn Gallery over in Hoxton which also gives Emily occasional catalogue copywriting work, and used to go out with Martin Howard, Rosie’s older brother.
Christopher Lowden – close friend of Emily Stuart and Marjorie Clarke; has professional friendships with a wide range of low-level self-styled ‘activists’ in the West London area, one of whom counts Robert Beresford as a close friend.
In addition there are the parents:
Tom and Helen Gordonston – best friends with the Stuarts, Margaret and Alastair; Helen alone is good friends with a large group of neighbours in Connecticut, and artists working in upstate New York, also her gallerist Hilary Goldstein. Tom is somewhat out of touch with old colleagues and friends from Yale; he still enjoys exchanging sophisticated crossword puzzles and historical word games with Alastair Stuart in London.
Margaret and Alastair Stuart – best friends with the Gordonstons. Both also have a small but dependable friendship group based around their profession.
Jonathan and Diana Beresford – possessed of a wide and varied social group, including old family friends the Howards and the Lowdens.
Old London
There is a London that still exists below the surface of what I might call ‘New London’ – a city that is quieter, less oriented towards consumerism and what might be described as ‘billboard living’, less prone to the signs of conspicuous consumption that are so in evidence all around the capital today, from Hoxton to Knightsbridge. Endless building work being carried out on perfectly nice houses – to fit them with basement swimming pools, loft-style kitchens, formal gardens and the like – is one of the many examples of a new populace eager to spend lots and lots of money and to show that they are doing so. Once, a perfectly stylish woman would have a good handbag that she would use for years; now those handbags go out in the rubbish and instead tiny stylish clutches and purses thickened with gilt dominate the pages of Vogue and Tatler.
These are but small examples of the changes. Dogs are now made to be walked on leads, in most of the parks, as new International London is not as dog-friendly as the old place used to be; lovely department stores like Harvey Nichols are no longer lovely – where once many were able to
buy a pretty party dress there, now they would be turned away from even looking for such an item by the racks of leather trousers with rhinestones priced at £3,000 or more, and skin creams with the bones and eyes and semen of small animals, along with bits of gold, in them.
The London that exists below all this, however, and it does exist – beautiful old drawing rooms with good furniture, gardens with fruit trees and some weeds, along with clusters of ravishing old-fashioned roses, tweed coats that Granny used to wear still hanging in the wardrobe, not one scrap of Lycra folded in a drawer – is as vibrant and interesting as ever, with a great number of people happy to potter in their gardens and have friends around for drinks on a Thursday evening,
Such is the city inhabited by many in Caroline’s Bikini. Indeed, it may well be due to the unflagging work of the likes of Christopher Lowden and his ‘team of mates’, as he calls them, those active in the mission of cleaning up London and restoring it to ‘past splendour’, as he puts it, tirelessly working on every campaign he can identify, from petitioning the council against ‘meretricious building extensions that threaten to “vulgarise” the postcode’ to forming ‘street armies’ that deal with the growing litter, as he has identified it, now present in the streets due to, in his words, ‘the unprecedented consumption of convenience foods’.
A postnote: Emily’s parents, Margaret and Alastair Stuart, still live in the family home in Twickenham and have no plans to sell. Margaret finds the garden a bit much in the early spring, but has a friend, Fiona Laidlaw, who lives three doors down, and they ‘garden share’, as they call it, helping each other out to stay on top of things with pruning and weeding. Margaret is terribly fond of Fiona, but she is nothing like Helen Gordonston, who Margaret is in close contact with through email, and, now that Felix has showed her how to work it, Skype. ‘I still miss Helen,’ Margaret says.
Additional Notes
The friendship between Tom Gordonston and Emily Stuart’s father, Alastair, was formed from the start, the moment the Gordonstons moved into No. 17 Berkshire Way and Alastair came over and introduced himself and asked if he could help with anything – books, he said, were his speciality: he was excellent at arranging them on the shelves, in alphabetical order, subject area and so on.
The two men saw each other most weeks. Though Tom Gordonston was in finance and Alastair Stuart an academic and writer the two appeared to have a great deal in common: Tom had always had an interest in modern history, and though that wasn’t Alastair’s field, his reading was wide-ranging. In addition, Tom Gordonston came to be most interested in Alastair’s research in Scottish history – post-Enlightenment – and had an uncle in Inverness, with whom he used to spend a great deal of time as a boy, who wrote books on the Clearances, and so on, pre-empting a fashion for depicting that time as being more complex and nuanced than the ‘genocide’ it used to be described as back in the seventies, as the subject of material history takes over the broad sweep of earlier approaches.
Tom Gordonston still looks back fondly to ‘The Saturdays’ as he and Alastair used to call them – informal get-togethers when the two would sit with a whisky chatting about some historical finding or other, the latest books they’d been reading, a sophisticated acrostic they might be ‘nutting out’, as Alastair put it, together. As he went out of the door, Alastair would fish for something in his pocket – Where was it? went the charade, that he may not have the item he was after at all. Ah! But there it was. Another devilish historical crossword puzzle that Tom would be charged to think about over the next week, when they’d plan to meet again and discuss the outcome of the fiendishly difficult exercise in another one of their ‘Saturdays’.
Now that he is retired, Tom Gordonston, sitting in his big house in Connecticut, looks forward to the post arriving. ‘Where was the thing? … Ah! Here it is, arriving in the “mailbox”,’ as they call them over there: There’s Alastair’s familiar manilla envelope, his writing addressing Tom by his full name, giving his own return address also in full. Tom waits until Saturday afternoon to sit alone with a whisky and go through the contents, a note from Alastair about the challenge he has posed in this ‘Saturday’s’ puzzle, the great difficulty and fun of the thing itself, a combination of a crossword he has found and added to with his own clues and boxes, inserting some particular General or Brigadier or other who, if you don’t name him in full, will turn the whole game over into nothing but a pile of words. What a pleasure this is for Tom. What a great, great treat.
Felix Stuart, as is noted on p. 8, used to go out with Elisabeth Gordonston from when they were both seventeen and the Gordonstons were still in London. The relationship only lasted for a year – the Gordonstons were to move to America just three weeks after Felix’s eighteenth birthday – but in the manner of adolescent relationships, their feelings for each other were intense.
Emily Stuart is a great deal younger than her brother and so was largely unaware of the depression Felix fell into after the departure of the Gordonstons. She herself was far too taken up with missing her best friend Evan to notice how low her brother was. As a result of his broken heart, Felix Stuart turned to work, achieving in his last year at school the results that would put him straight into rooms at St John’s College, on an Oxford and College bursary. He went on to study for a PhD at Edinburgh, and is now Associate Professor of Modern History at Oxford, and Monash Professor of History at the University of New South Wales, and was previously Visiting Professor at Stanford, where, some years ago, he reignited his relationship with Elisabeth Gordonston, who lives in Palo Alto and works for Google. He says little about that time, his four years in California back when Visiting Professorships were easy enough to juggle with a full-time academic post and punishing round of book publicity tours and television appearances, but he is still single. Elisabeth, he has heard through the grapevine, married, but is now divorced. Recently an envelope arrived in his pigeonhole at Merton, postmarked California. When he is home from Sydney in a couple of weeks’ time he will open that letter.
The Kinds of People One May Meet When One Lives Alone
‘The other friends from all those years ago had pretty much faded away, married, had families and moved to the country, or even further …’ (p. 20).
As we see in Caroline’s Bikini, society in itself can be volatile and, in addition, the life of a freelance writer perilous, arduous, and, at times, socially inhibiting. Not only Emily Stuart, but Marjorie Clarke, too, feels the isolation from her peers, living, alone as she does, in that pretty flat of hers in Chelsea.
It’s a simple case of ‘having to get out there’, as their mutual friend Christopher Lowden is always reminding them: there are all kinds of ways one can ‘lock oneself in’ to some social group or other, all protest work aside. But with their heavy work schedules and close deadlines – none of which they can afford to miss, both in terms of taking on the work in the first place and making sure it is delivered on time – both women can feel the loneliness that may kick in on a Saturday morning, say, when married friends are out with their families, dropping off gangs of boys at rugby or cricket, or arranging to meet with their children’s friends’ families for a big rowdy lunch somewhere after shopping.
Sometimes Emily has wondered if she should get a dog. It might take her ‘out of things’, a bit, and she has always loved dogs, as noted in the final pages of this novel. Marjorie has a cat, but as she herself says, ‘It is not quite the same.’
As a result of all the living alone, and without a dog, the kinds of people Emily Stuart is likely to meet are mostly postmen and women, and the people in the corner shops. She goes to supermarkets, but of course, nobody talks or meets anyone in a supermarket – though she always has a nice chat with whoever is at the till and dreads, ‘dreads’ she says, the day that it will all go self-service.
As far as work colleagues are concerned, well, they are not ‘colleagues’. They are names on the end of a phone and at the bottom of an email brief. There are the very nice
people who run the Prinn Gallery over in Hoxton but they are intensely fashionable and ‘theorised’, as Samantha Prinn and Betsy Forman themselves describe themselves, and can be intimidating.
Having said that, they have always been delighted with the quality of the catalogue copy Emily writes, and, after all Emily is a great friend of Marjorie who is an old, old friend of Betsy – so she and Samantha can’t be all that theorised, can they?
Literary Background and Context
Caroline’s Bikini is a novel about unrequited love that seeks to establish itself in the tradition of extended imaginative pieces of text – poetry or prose – that in themselves are an attempt to create an artefact or ‘thing’ that may stand in for the love object. If the love may not be possessed, then, says the tradition, we have this piece of work to stand for it. The piece of work is real – we can touch it, read it, respond to it – and it has a physicality that the missing object of desire does not. The beloved may not be possessed, but her story can be, and a text created from it, that can be held and kept and returned to.
Petrarch’s Canzoniere is a perfect example of this impulse: the poet sees the young girl Laura coming out of church on Easter morning and falls in love with her, though never to meet her nor know her. In her absence he creates a sonnet sequence that he perfects and edits and writes for the rest of his life, over a period of about forty years, alternately hoping for, cherishing, fearing and giving up on feelings of love. In this he harks back to an earlier tradition where art and art’s practice may have stood in for the declaration and consummation of passion, an approach that carries with it a wealth of literature from around the world.