Talking It Over (11 page)

Like this morning. If only he hadn’t opened his mouth. When he walked in I thought, You can take me dirty dancing any day of the week. Really tasty, long black hair, brilliant, the suit was brilliant as well. Bit like Jimmy White if you know what I mean. He doesn’t come up to the desk straightaway, but gives me a nod and starts looking at the flowers, really closely, like he really knew about them. I have this game with myself, me and Linzi both play it, you decide how fanciable someone is. If they’re not very fanciable, you say, ‘He’s only a Tuesday,’ meaning if he asked you out you’d only keep one night of the week free for him. The best is to call someone ‘Seven Days of the Week’, which means you’d keep every day free if he asked. So this boy is looking at the irises and I’m doing the VAT on a multiple despatch but I’m also looking out of the corner of my eye and thinking, ‘You’re a Monday to Friday.’

Then he makes me go round the shop with him and pick out flowers that are blue or white, nothing else. I point out some nice pink stocks and he does this huge shudder and goes ‘Uuuuuugggh.’ Who does he think he’s impressing? Like those boys that come in for a single rose as if nobody’s ever
done that before. Some boy give me a single red rose and I’d say, What you done with the other four, given them to your other girls?

Then we’re at the desk and he leans over all cocky like and actually gets hold of my chin and says, ‘Why so glum, my fair one?’ I pick up the scissors because I’m alone in the shop and if he touches me again he’ll leave without something he came in with, when the bell goes on the door and this other boy in a city suit comes in, boring yuppie sort. And the poser’s dead embarrassed because this other boy knows him and he’s just spotted him trying to get off with a girl in a shop, not his sort of style at all, and he blushes all over, scarlet, even his ears, I noticed the ears.

Then he goes all quiet and throws some money at me and tells me to hurry up and can’t wait to get the other boy out of the shop. So I take my time, not asking if he wants Cellophane gift-wrapping but just doing it really slowly and then I say I done the VAT wrong. And all the time I’m thinking, What did you open your mouth for? You were a Monday to Friday till then. Now you’re just a tosser.

I like flowers. But I won’t stay here long. Linzi won’t neither. We can’t stand the people that buy them.

Gillian
Something strange happened today. Something very strange. And it didn’t stop after it had happened, if you see what I mean. It went on being strange in the afternoon, and then in the evening too.

I was sitting in front of my easel at about quarter to nine, doing preliminary tests on a little panel-picture of a City
church; Radio 3 in the background was churning out something by one of those Bachs who weren’t Bach. Then the bell went. As I was putting down my swab, it went again, straightaway. Probably kids, I thought, they’re the only ones to ring like that. Wanting to clean the car. Either that or they’re finding out if someone’s home before going round the back and breaking in.

So I went all the way down to the door slightly irritated, and what did I see? A huge bunch of flowers, all blue and white in a Cellophane wrapping. ‘Stuart!’ I thought – I mean, I thought they had come from Stuart. And when I saw Oliver holding them I still believed that was the most probable explanation – Stuart had sent Oliver round with the flowers.

‘Oliver!’ I said. ‘What a surprise. Come in.’

But he just stood there, trying to say something. White as a sheet, and holding his arms out as rigid as a shelf. His lips moved, and some noises came out but I couldn’t make sense of them. It was like in films when people have a heart attack – they mumble something which seems very important to them but which no-one can understand. I looked at Oliver and he seemed to be in genuine distress. The flowers had dripped all down his trousers, his face was frighteningly lacking in colour, he was trembling, and his lips seemed to be sticking together as he tried to speak.

I thought it might help if I took the flowers off him, so I reached out and lifted them carefully, holding the stem ends away from me. Just instinct, because I had my painting clothes on and a bit of water wouldn’t have done any harm.

‘Oliver,’ I said. ‘What is it? Do you want to come in?’

He still stood there with his arms sticking out, like a robot
butler without a tray to carry. Suddenly, and very loudly, he said,

‘I love you.’

Just like that. Well, I laughed, of course. It was quarter to nine in the morning and it was Oliver speaking. I laughed – not scornfully or anything, but just as if it was a joke which I’d only half got.

I was waiting for the other half when Oliver fled. He just turned on his heel and fled. I mean it. He ran, and I was left there on the step with this huge bunch of flowers. There didn’t seem anything else to do except take them inside and put them in water. There were huge quantities of them, and I ended up filling three vases and a couple of Stuart’s beer-mugs. Then I went back to work.

I finished the testing and started cleaning the sky, which is where I always begin. It didn’t need much concentration, and all through the morning I kept getting interrupted by the thought of Oliver standing there not being able to say anything, and then practically shouting what he did. He’s definitely in an extremely jumpy mood at the moment.

I suppose it was because we know he’s been highly strung lately – his peculiar behaviour at the airport, for a start – that it took longer than it should have done for me to think over properly what had happened. And when I did I found I couldn’t concentrate on my work at all. I kept imagining conversations that evening with Stuart.

‘I say, what a lot of flowers.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Got a secret admirer, have we? I say, there
are
a lot.’

‘Oliver brought them.’

‘Oliver? When was that?’

‘About ten minutes after you left for work. You must have just missed him.’

‘But why? I mean, why did he give us all these flowers?’

‘They’re not for us, they’re for me. He says he’s in love with me.’

No, I couldn’t have this conversation. I couldn’t have anything approaching this conversation. In which case, I would have to get rid of the flowers. My first thought was to put them in the dustbin. Except what if Stuart took something out there? What would you think if you found your own dustbin stuffed full of completely fresh flowers? Then I thought of going across the road and throwing them in a skip – except that this would look very peculiar. We don’t as yet have any friends in the street, but we’re on Hello terms with a few neighbours, and frankly I wouldn’t want them to see me putting all these flowers on a skip.

So I stuffed them down the waste-disposal unit. I took Oliver’s flowers, and fed them petal-first into the grinder, and in just a few minutes I had reduced his gift to a sludge which the cold water was washing away down the waste-pipe. A strong scent came from the unit for a while, but then gradually died away. I scrumpled up the Cellophane, went to the dustbin and pushed it into a cereal box we’d thrown out. Then I washed and dried the two beer-mugs and the three vases, and put them back in their normal places, as if nothing had ever happened.

I felt I had done what was necessary. Oliver might well be having some sort of breakdown, in which case he’d need us both to be right on his side. One day I’ll tell Stuart about the flowers and what I did with them and I expect we’ll have
a good laugh with Oliver as well.

Then I went back to my panel-picture and worked until it was time to start the supper. Something made me pour myself a glass of wine before Stuart returned at his usual hour of 6.30. I’m very glad I did. He said he’d been wanting to ring me all day but didn’t want to interrupt my work. He said he’d met Oliver in the florist’s round the corner on his way to the station. He said Oliver was extremely embarrassed, as well he might have been, because he was buying flowers to make his peace with a girl he’d gone to bed with the night before and been impotent with. What’s more, the girl in question was the Spanish girl who’d been the cause of his being sacked by the Shakespeare School. It seems she’s been thrown out by her father and is living not far from us. She’d invited him round the previous evening and things hadn’t gone at all as he’d hoped. That’s what Stuart said that Oliver said.

I don’t think I reacted to this story in the way Stuart expected. I probably didn’t appear to be concentrating. I took sips of my wine and carried on with the supper, and at one point I went across to the bookcase and idly picked up a petal that was lying there. A blue petal. I put it in my mouth and swallowed it.

I’m thoroughly confused. And that’s putting it mildly.

8: OK, Boulogne It Is

Oliver
I have a dream. I heeeeeeevw aaa dreeeeeaa-aaammm. No I don’t. I have a plan. The transfiguration of Oliver. The prodigal son will feast with harlots no more. I’m buying a rowing machine, an exercise bicycle, a Langlauf podium, a Bullworker. No, I’m not, but I’m doing the equivalent. I’m planning a mega-turnaround as per the advertisement. No Pension at 45? Which Is Your Type of Baldness? Shamed By Your English? I’m getting that pension, having that crown-weave. And I’m not shamed by my English, so that’s one fewer fomenter of
cafard
. But in all other respects – it’s the 30-day life-transformation plan. Just you try and stop me.

I’ve farted around too much, that’s the
triste
truth. You’re allowed to do that for a bit, as long as you finally discern that petomania is not a profession. Put a plug in it, Ollie. Shape up.
Decision time.

First, I’m giving up smoking. Correction: I have given up smoking. You see how
serious
I am? For how many years have I not defined, or at least decorated, myself by means of the fronded fragrances of the tobacco leaf? From the first cravenly petit-bourgeois Embassy all those years ago, to the predictable monogrammed-slippers appeal of Balkan Sobranie, via the posturings of menthol and the hideous austerity of low-tar, through the Rive Gauche authenticity of fat-thumbed hand-rolling (with or without aromatic additions) and its brusque mechanical equivalent (those Stakhanovite mangles, that floppy deck-chair of rubber I could never quite subdue), all leading to the current confident plateau, the
équilibré
intake of Gauloise and Winston, alloyed occasionally by the fierce kick-start of a little Swedish number named after
hoi polloi’s
Alsatian, Prince. Woof, woof! And I’m giving all this up. No, I have given all this up. Just now, a moment ago. I didn’t even ask her. I just suspect she’d want me to.

Second, I’m going to get myself a job. I can do it. I did not flee the toxic Shakespeare School of English without abstracting a certain amount of their blushlessly chauvinistic writing-paper, and now have a series of pretty testimonials to my ability, each weighted to tickle the gonads of a different prospective employer. Why did I resign? Alas, my mother died, and I had to mastermind the discovery of an old folkery for my father. And if anyone is callous enough to check on that story then I wouldn’t want to work for them anyway. My mother’s always dying, it’s been such a help over the years, and poor Papa frequently demands a change of geriatric vista. How he longs to gaze wistfully out at a breaking wave of woodland.
How he loves to recall the far-off days before the Netherlandish beetle savaged the English elm, before the uplands were girdled with Christmas trees. Through his picture-window my Pater peers into the past.
Tap-tap-tap
goes the ancient forester with his trusty axe, runically carving a cleft in a knotted trunk to warn his fellow-woodsmen of a noxious toadstool which groweth hereabouts. And lo! how doth the brown bear frolic upon a bank of sempiternal moss! It was never like this, and my father was an Old Bastard if you must know. Remind me to tell you about him one day.

Third, I’m going to pay back Stuart. Guglielmo the Betrayer I am not. Simplicity and probity shall be my offerings. My clownish mask no longer cloaks a breaking heart, so away with it. I shall doff my slippered pantaloon, if that’s what one doffs. In other words, I’m going to stop fucking well camping around.

Stuart
I’ve been thinking. We’ve got to try and help Oliver in some way. It’s our duty. He’d do the same for us if we were in trouble. It was really pathetic, meeting him like that in the flower shop. He’s got no job. He’s got no confidence – and Oliver, even from the earliest days, was always someone who had confidence. He would take on anyone – even that father of his. I suppose that’s where it started. If you’re a kid of fifteen with a father like that and you take him on, then why should the world scare you? But it does scare Oliver now. This terrible business with the Spanish girl. The old Oliver wouldn’t have had any … trouble like that, and if he did he’d just have danced away from it. He’d have
thought up some joke, or turned it to his advantage. What he wouldn’t have done is gone out and bought the girl loads of flowers the next morning and then get caught by me doing it. It’s like saying, please don’t tell, please don’t broadcast it to the world, I can get hurt. He’d never have been like that in the old days. And the pathetic way he expressed himself. ‘I made a terrible bosh of it last night.’ That’s schoolkids’ talk. The wheels are coming off, if you ask me. We’ve got to try and help him.

Gillian
I’m not sure about any of this. I feel deeply apprehensive. Stuart came home last night in his usual cheerful mood, gave me a kiss, put his arm round me and made me sit down as if he had something important to say.

‘What about a holiday?’ he asked.

I smiled. ‘That’s nice. Of course, we
have
only just got back from our honeymoon.’

‘That was years ago. Four weeks at least. Five. Holiday?’

‘Mmm.’

‘Thought we might take Oliver along with us. Cheer him up.’

I didn’t reply, not at first. Let me tell you why. I had a friend – well, I still do, it’s just that we’re temporarily out of touch – called Alison. She was at Bristol with me. Her family were nice, lived somewhere down in Sussex, a normal middle-class country family. They loved one another;
her
father never ran off. Alison got married right out of university. She was only twenty-one. And do you know what her mother said to her the night before her wedding? Her mother said to her, quite
seriously, as if this was advice handed down in the family from mother to daughter since time immemorial, her mother said: ‘It’s always a good idea to keep them on the hop.’