Talking It Over (15 page)

Bash, bash, bash. I’m the one who’s going to get hurt.

11: Love, & c.

Oliver
I’ve been calling her every day to tell her I love her. Now she’s stopped putting the phone down on me.

Stuart
You will have to bear with me. I do not have the flashing brain of my friend Oliver. I have to work things out step by step. But I get there in the end.

You see, the other day I came home from work earlier than usual. And as I turned into our street –
our
street – I saw Oliver in the distance, coming towards me. I waved, sort of instinctively, but he had his head down and didn’t see me. He was about forty yards away, and hurrying along, when he suddenly fished a key out of his pocket and turned into a house. A house on the other side of the road from ours, the
one with a monkey-puzzle tree in front. Some old biddy lives there. By the time I got level – it was number 55 – the door had shut. I carried on home, let myself in, gave my habitual cheery View Halloo, and started to think.

The next day was a Saturday. I know Oliver gives lessons at home on Saturdays. I put on a sports jacket, found myself a clipboard and biro, then went across to number 55. I was, you understand, from the local council, just tidying up our records for the new community charge or poll tax, and verifying the occupants of each residence. The little old lady identified herself as Mrs Dyer, freeholder.

‘And there’s a …’ – reading from my clipboard – ‘Nigel Oliver Russell living here?’

‘I didn’t know he was called Nigel. He told me he was called Oliver.’

‘And a Rosa …’ I gabbled a foreign name, trying to sound vaguely Hispanic.

‘No, there’s no-one of that name.’

‘Oh, I’m sorry, my eye must have slipped a line. So there’s just you and Mr Russell?’

She agreed. I started down the path. She called after me, ‘Don’t worry about the gate. It’ll see me out.’

Right. That was the start. Oliver was not letting himself in to Rosa’s flat the other evening.

Now we have to eliminate the next possibility. On Sunday morning Gillian went back upstairs to work, as she’s promised the museum she’ll let them have that scene of the frozen Thames back by the end of next week. (Have you seen it, by the way? It’s quite pretty, I think, just what a picture should be.) Now there is no phone jack in her studio. We deliberately didn’t have
one put in so she wouldn’t be disturbed up there. Downstairs, two storeys away, I called Oliver. He was in the middle of a conversation class, as he put it – which means having some poor student round for a cup of coffee, chatting to her about the World Cup or something, and relieving her of a tenner. No, not the World Cup, knowing Oliver. He probably asks them to translate a pictorial guide to sex.

Anyway, I got down to business straightaway, and said how it had slipped our minds, how we hadn’t been half hospitable enough, but when he was next up in our neck of the woods visiting Rosa, would he like to bring her round for a meal?

‘
Pas devant’
, came the reply, ‘
C’est un canard mort, tu comprends?’
Well, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but no doubt it was something bloody irritating like that. I did my Pedestrian Old Stuart number, and he felt obliged to translate. ‘We’re not seeing so much of one another nowadays.’

‘Oh, sorry about that. Foot in mouth time again. Well, just yourself then, sometime soon?’

‘Love to.’

And I rang off. Have you noticed the way people like Oliver always say
We’re
not seeing so much of
one another
nowadays? What a thoroughly dishonest phrase. It always sounds like such a civilised arrangement, whereas what in fact it means is: I dropped her, she stood me up, I was bored anyway, she’d rather go to bed with someone else.

So that was Stage Two complete. Stage Three followed over supper, where I made concerted enquiries about the well-being of our mutual friend Oliver, with the implication that Gillian saw a fair bit of him. Then I asked, ‘Is he sorting things out
with Rosa? I thought we might have them both round one evening?’

She didn’t answer at once. Then she said, ‘He doesn’t talk about her.’

I let it pass, and instead offered congratulations on the sweet potatoes, which Gillian had never cooked before.

‘I wondered if you’d like them,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you do.’

After dinner we took our coffee into the sitting-room and I lit up a Gauloise. It’s not a thing I do very often, and Gillian gave me an enquiring glance.

‘Shame to waste them,’ I said. ‘Now that Oliver’s given up.’

‘Well, don’t make it a habit.’

‘Did you know,’ I replied, ‘that it has been statistically proved that smokers are less vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease than non-smokers?’ I was rather pleased with this obscure item of information, which I’d picked up from somewhere.

‘That’s because smokers all die before they’re old enough to get Alzheimer’s,’ said Gill.

Well, I had to laugh at that. Thoroughly outmanoeuvred in one respect.

Often, we make love on Sunday nights. But I wasn’t feeling like it for some reason. For a particular reason: I wanted to think things over.

So. Oliver is discovered early one morning buying flowers in Stoke Newington for Rosa, with whom he has had a sexual fiasco the night before. Oliver, who is in a bad way, is encouraged to visit Gillian any time he’s up in the area calling on Rosa. He does therefore visit regularly. Except that Oliver isn’t seeing Rosa. Indeed, we have no evidence that Rosa lives up here. On the other hand, we do have evidence that Oliver
lives up here. He has hired a room from Mrs Dyer at number 55, and sees Stuart’s wife during the afternoon when Stuart is safely at work earning money to pay the mortgage.

WHERE DO THEY DO IT? AT HIS PLACE OR AT HERS? DO THEY DO IT IN THIS BED, THIS VERY BED?

Gillian
The fact is, sometimes I put the telephone down and I can still hear Oliver’s voice in my ear telling me he loves me, and … No, I’m not sure I can tell you the rest.

Stuart
I’m not going to ask. It may not be true. If it isn’t true it’s a terrible thing to say. And if it is true?

I really didn’t think there was anything wrong with our sex-life. I didn’t. I mean, I don’t.

Look, this is silly. It’s
Oliver
who says he’s got the sex problems. Why should I assume – why should I even suspect – he’s having an affair with my wife? Unless he said he had a sex problem so that I wouldn’t get suspicious. And it worked, didn’t it? What was that old play Gillian and I once went to, where some bloke pretends to be impotent and everyone believes him and all the husbands let him visit their wives? No, that’s ridiculous. Oliver isn’t like that, he isn’t calculating. Unless … how could you have an affair with your best friend’s wife without being calculating?

Ask her, ask her.

No, don’t ask her. Leave it alone. Wait.

How long has it been going on?

Shut up.

We’ve only been married a few months.

Shut up.

And I gave him a large cheque.

Shut up. Shut up.

Oliver
She’s got this comb. This comb with its tender mutilations.

When she works, she first of all puts her hair back. There’s a little comb which she keeps on the stool where the radio stands. She takes this comb, and pulls her hair back over her ears with it, first the left side then the right, always that way round, and after she’s finished pulling back each side she puts a tortoise-shell grip in her hair, just behind the ear.

Sometimes, when she’s working, a strand or two of hair will come loose, and then, without breaking concentration, she will reach instinctively for the comb, take out the grip, pull her hair back, put the grip back in, and return the comb to the stool, all without taking her gaze from the canvas.

That comb has some teeth missing. No, let’s be precise. That comb has fifteen teeth missing. I’ve counted them.

This comb, with its tender mutilations.

Stuart
Oliver has had quite a few girlfriends over the years, but if you want my opinion he’s never been in love. Oh, he’s
said
he’s in love, lots of times. He’s made corny old comparisons between himself and characters in
Grand Opera, he’s done things which people are supposed to do when they’re in love, like mope a lot, and blab to their friends, and get drunk when things are going wrong. But I’ve never believed he’s
actually
been in love.

I never told him, but he reminded me of those people who are always claiming to have the flu when all they’ve got is a heavy cold. ‘I had that nasty three-day flu,’ they’ll say. Oh no you didn’t, you had a runny nose and a bit of a headache and your hearing went funny, but that wasn’t flu, that was only a cold. Just as it was the previous time. And the time before that. Nothing more than a heavy cold.

I hope Oliver hasn’t got the flu.

Shut up. Shut up.

Oliver
‘Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.’ Who said that? Someone. Some hero of mine.

I whisper it to myself, Monday to Friday, between 6.32 and 6.38, sitting in my bottle-brush canopy, as steatopygous Stu comes trundling home. ‘Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.’

I can’t stand to see him coming home, either. How dare he come home and end my happiness? Of course I don’t want him to fall under a tube train (clutching his return half in his raincoat pocket!), I just can’t bear the gloom I feel as he turns the corner with his briefcase in his hand and a mugwump smile on his face.

I’ve taken to doing something I probably shouldn’t. It’s Stuart’s fault, he set me off, mugwumping home like that to his little tufty nest, all smug and snug, while I sit up here in my
unlighted room pretending to be Orson Fucking Welles. When he turns the corner, some time between 6.32 and 6.38, I press number 1 on my absurd matt-black leather-encrusted portable telephone which would live much more happily in that stocky briefcase of Stu’s. It has all sorts of nifty ploys, this phone, as the vendor throbbingly explained to me. One of the more basic of these – which even I was deemed able to comprehend – is called a Storage Facility. In other words, it remembers numbers. Or in my case, it remembers one number. Hers.

As Stuart turns his shining sunset face toward home, Oliver presses 1 and waits for her voice.

‘Yes?’

‘I love you.’

She puts the phone down.

Stu reaches for the handle of his gate.

My phone pops, buzzes, and offers its expectant dialling tone up to my ear.

Gillian
He touched me today. Oh God, don’t say it’s started. Has it started?

I mean, we’ve touched each other before. I’ve taken his arm, ruffled his hair, we’ve hugged, kissed cheeks, the usual between friends. And this was less, less than any of those, and yet much more.

I was at my easel. My hair came loose. I reached out my hand towards the comb I keep on my stool.

‘Don’t move,’ he said, very quietly.

I went on working. I felt him come across. He took the grip out of my hair, the hair fell loose, he combed it back
behind my ear, slid the grip into place, clicked it shut, put the comb back on the stool, went and sat down. Just that, no more.

Luckily I was working on a straightforward patch. I just continued automatically for a minute or two. Then he said, ‘I love that comb.’

It’s unfair. Comparisons are unfair, I know. I shouldn’t make them. I never gave that comb of mine a thought. I’ve always used it. One day, soon after we met, Stuart was in my studio and saw it. He said: ‘Your comb’s broken.’ A couple of days later, he gave me a new one. He’d obviously gone to some trouble because it was the same size as the old one, and tortoise-shell too. But I didn’t use it. I kept the old one. It’s as if my fingers have got used to feeling for those missing teeth and know where they are.

Now Oliver just says, ‘I love that comb,’ and I feel lost. Lost and found.

It isn’t fair on Stuart. I say to myself, ‘It isn’t fair on Stuart’, but the words don’t seem to have the slightest effect.

Oliver
When I was a boy, The Old Bastard used to take
The Times
. No doubt he still does. He vaunted his skill at the
mots croisés
. For my part, I used to look at the Obituaries and work out the average age at which Old Bastards had died that day. Then I’d work out how long there was to go statistically for the Old Bastard Crossword Solver himself.

There was also the Letters Page, which my father would scrutinise for dank prejudices dripping with the correct amount of pond-weed. Sometimes the Old Bastard would give
a deep, almost colonic grunt as some pachydermatous
déjà pensée
– Repatriate All Herbivores to Patagonia – miraculously accorded with his own, and I would think, Yes, there really are a lot of Old Bastards out there.

The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for – and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard – simply ended like this:
Yours etc
. And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it:
Yours &c
.

Yours &c
. I used to muse about that. What did it mean? Where did it come from? I imagined some bespatted captain of industry dictating his OB’s views to his secretary for transmission to the Newspaper of Record which he doubtless referred to with jocund familiarity as ‘The Thunderer’. When his oratorical belch was complete, he would say, ‘Yours etc,’ which Miss ffffffolkes would automatically transcribe into, ‘I have the honour to be, sir, one of the distinguished Old Bastards who could send you the label off a tin of pilchards and you would still print it above this my name,’ or whatever, and then it would be, ‘Despatch this instanter to The Thunderer, Miss ffffffolkes.’

But one day Miss ffffffolkes was away giving a handjob to the Archbishop of York, so they sent a temp. And the temp wrote down Yours, etc, just as she heard it and
The Times
reckoned the OB captain of industry a very gusher of wit, but decided to add their own little rococo touch by compacting it further to
&c
, wherepon other OBs followed
the bespatted lead of the captain of industry, who claimed all the credit for himself. There we have it:
Yours &c
.