Talking It Over (16 page)

Whereupon, as an ardent damp-ear of sixteen, I took to the parodic sign-off:
Love, &c
. Not all my correspondents unfailingly seized the reference, I regret to say. One
demoiselle
hastened her own de-accessioning from the museum of my heart by informing me with
hauteur
that use of the word
etc.
, whether in oral communication or in carven prose, was common and vulgar. To which I replied, first, that ‘the word’
et cetera
was not one but two words, and that the only common and vulgar thing about my letter – given the identity of its recipient – was affixing to it the word that preceded
etc
. Alack, she didn’t respond to this observation with the Buddhistic serenity one might have hoped.

Love, etc
. The proposition is simple. The world divides into two categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the bass pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that everything else –
everything
else – is merely an
etc.;
and those, those unhappy many, who believe primarily in the
etc
. of life, for whom love, however agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth, the pattering prelude to nappy-duty, but not something as solid, steadfast and reliable as, say, home decoration. This is the only division between people that counts.

Stuart
Oliver. My old friend Oliver. The power of words, the power of bullshit. No wonder he’s ended up giving conversation lessons.

Oliver
I don’t think I’ve made myself clear. When I closed the door the other day and sought to evade the delicious tickle of Gillian’s mock-severity, I said to her (oh, I remember, I remember – there is a black box in my skull and I keep all the tapes): ‘I don’t love you. I don’t adore you. I don’t want to be with you all the time. I don’t want to have an affair with you. I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to listen to you for ever.’

Did you spot the odd one out?

Stuart
Cigarette?

Oliver
And I’m having an AIDS test.

That surprises you/that doesn’t surprise you? Delete one only.

But don’t jump to conclusions. Or at any rate, not to those conclusions: contaminated needles, Hunnish practices, the bathhouse factor. My past may in some respects be more lurid than the next man’s (and since the next man is likely to be Stuart Hughes, squire, banker and mortgagee, then it’s certain to be more lurid), but this isn’t confession time. ‘Listen With Mother’ plus ‘Police Five’ this is not.

I want to lay my life before her, don’t you see? I’m starting over, I’m clean, I’m
tabula rasa
, I’m not fucking camping around, I’m not even smoking any more. Isn’t that the dream? Or at least, one of the two dreams. The first goes: here I am complete, full, capacious, ripe, find what you will in me, use all that is there. The other goes: I am empty, open,
nothing but potentiality, make of me what you will, fill me with what you want. Most of my life has been spent pouring dubious substances into the tanks. Now I’m draining them, hosing them down, sluicing them out.

And so I’m taking an AIDS test. But I may not even tell her.

Stuart
Cigarette?

Go on, take one.

Look at it this way. If you help me out with this pack, then I’ll smoke fewer and be less likely to die of lung cancer and may even, as my wife pointed out, survive long enough to succumb to Alzheimer’s. So take one, it’s a sign that you’re on my side. Put it behind your ear and keep it for later if you like. On the other hand, if you don’t take one …

Of course I’m drunk. Wouldn’t you be?

Not very drunk.

Just drunk.

Gillian
I don’t want anyone to think that I married Stuart out of pity.

It happens. I know, I’ve seen it. I remember a girl at college, a sort of quiet, determined girl called Rosemary. She was half going out with Simon, a huge, lanky boy whose clothes always seemed a bit odd because he had to go to a special shop for them. High and Mighty, I think it was called. He’d made the mistake of telling someone this, and the girls used to laugh at him behind his back. Nothing much at first. ‘How’s Mr High and Mighty then, Rosemary?’ But sometimes it got a bit worse.
There was a small sharp-faced girl with an evil tongue who said
she’d
never go out with him because she’d never know what her nose would be bumping into next. Mostly, Rosemary seemed to go along with this, as if she was being teased as well. Then one day – it wasn’t any worse than usual either – the girl with the tongue said very slowly and slyly I remember, ‘I wonder if everything’s in proportion?’ Lots of girls had a good laugh, and Rosemary sort of joined in, but she told me later it was at that very moment she’d decided to marry Simon. She hadn’t even been particularly in love with him up till then. She just thought, ‘He’s got that coming to him all his life, and I’m bloody well going to be on his side.’ And she was. She went out and married him.

But I didn’t do that. If you marry someone out of pity, then you probably stay with him or her out of pity, too. That’s my guess.

I’ve always been able to explain things. Now none of the explanations seem to fit. For instance, I’m not one of those people who’s automatically dissatisfied with what I get; nor am I the sort who only wants what she can’t have. I’m not a snob about looks; if anything, it’s the other way round – I distrust good-looking men. I’ve never run away from relationships; generally I’ve stuck in too long. And Stuart is the same, Stuart I fell in love with last year – there haven’t been any of those nasty discoveries some women make.
And
(just in case you’re wondering) there’s absolutely nothing wrong with our sex-life.

So what I have to understand is this: despite the fact that I love Stuart, I seem to be falling in love with Oliver.

It’s every day now, every evening. I wish it would stop.
No I don’t. I can’t, otherwise I wouldn’t answer the phone. Just about half-past six. I’m waiting for Stuart to come home. Sometimes I’m in the kitchen, sometimes I’m finishing up in the studio and have to run downstairs. The phone goes, I know who it is, I know Stuart will be back soon, but I rush and answer it.

I say, ‘Yes?’ I don’t even give the number. It’s as if I can’t wait.

He says, ‘I love you.’

And do you know what’s started happening? As I put the phone down I feel wet. Can you imagine it? God, it’s like phone pornography or something. Stuart puts his key in the door and I’m feeling wet from the voice of another man. Shall I pick up the phone tomorrow? Can you imagine it?

Mme Wyatt
L’Amour plaît plus que le mariage, pour la raison que les romans sont plus amusants que l’histoire
. How would one translate that? Love pleases more than marriage, in the same way as novels are more amusing than history. Something like that. You English do not know Chamfort enough. You like La Rochefoucauld, you find him ‘very French’. You have some idea of the polished epigram being a culminating point of the ‘logical mind’ of the French. Well, I am French, and I do not so much like La Rochefoucauld. Too much cynicism, and also too much … polish if you like. He wants you to see how much work he has put into appearing to be wise. But wisdom is not like that. Wisdom has more life in it, wisdom has humour rather than wit. I prefer Chamfort. He said this as well:
Uhymen vient après l’amour, comme la
fumée après la flamme
. Marriage comes after love as smoke comes after fire. Not as obvious as it first seems.

I am called Mme Wyatt and I am supposed to be wise. It comes from this, my little reputation. From being a woman of a certain age, who after being left by her husband some years ago and having never remarried still retains her sanity and her health, who listens more than she talks, and offers advice only when it is solicited. ‘Oh, how right you are, Mme Wyatt, you are so wise’, people have said to me, but the prelude to this is usually an extended display of their own stupidity or error. And therefore I do not feel so wise. Or at least, I know that wisdom is a comparative matter, and that in any case you should never offer all you have, all you know. If you show everything, you interfere, you cannot be of help. Although sometimes it is very difficult not to show everything.

My child, my daughter Gillian, comes to see me. She is miserable. She is afraid she is falling out of love with her husband. Someone else says he is in love with her and she is afraid she may be falling in love with him. She does not say who it is, but naturally I have my ideas.

What do I think of that? Well, I don’t think very much – I mean, I have no opinion of such a situation in general, I only think that such things happen. Of course, in the actual case of my own child, I have opinions, but they are not opinions except for her.

She was miserable, I was miserable for her. It is not like changing cars, this business, after all. She cried, and I tried to comfort her, by which I mean I tried to help her to understand her own heart. That is all you can do. Unless there is something terrible in the marriage to Stuart, which she assures me
there is not.

I was sitting with my arms around her and listening to her tears. I remember how grown-up she was as a child. When Gordon abandoned us, it was Gillian who was the one who comforted me. She used to embrace me and say, ‘I’ll look after you, Maman.’ There is something heartbreaking about being comforted by a child of thirteen, you know. This memory almost made me cry myself.

Gillian was trying to explain how she felt frightened by the idea that she could stop loving Stuart so soon after starting to love him, as if she was defective. ‘I thought it was later, the dangerous time, Maman. I thought I was safe for a few years.’ She had half-turned in my arms and was looking up into my face.

‘It is always the dangerous time,’ I said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘It is always the dangerous time.’

She looked away and nodded. I knew what she was thinking. I had better explain that my husband Gordon at the age of forty-two, when we had been married – oh, it does not matter how long – ran off with a schoolgirl of seventeen years. Gillian was thinking that she had heard of the seven-year itch, as you call it, and had seen in her father the fifteen-year itch, and was now discovering for herself that there was even another before the seven-year one. She was also thinking that I too must be remembering Gordon, and I must be reflecting on the similarity between father and daughter, and how this must be painful for me. But I was not thinking that, and I could not say what I was thinking.

Oliver
Do you want to know something funny? G and S didn’t meet in that wine bar as they always pretended. They met in the Charing Cross Hotel at one of those stand-up
partouzes
for Young Professionals.

Some moment of svelte intuition made me bring up with Gillian the supposed encounter at Squires Wine Bar with or without the apostrophe before the s. At first she didn’t reply. She sputumed her swab and rolled it across her picture some more. Then she told me. Observe that I didn’t have to ask. So it must be working the other way round as well: she’s decided not to have any secrets from me either.

Apparently there are these locations for the amatoriously parched to which you can repair four times on successive Fridays, all for the sum of £25.1 was shocked – that was my first reaction. Then I thought, well, don’t ever underestimate furry little Stu. Trust him to go about the business of L’Amour like a market researcher.

‘How many times did you have to go before you met Stuart?’

‘That was my first time.’

‘So you got him for £6.25?’

She laughed. ‘No, I got him for £25. They didn’t give refunds.’

What a dulcet swoop of wit. ‘They didn’t give refunds,’ I repeated, and the giggles hit me like swamp-fever.

‘I didn’t tell you that. I shouldn’t have told you any of that.’

‘You didn’t. I’ve forgotten already.’ And I duly reined in my jocosity.

But I bet Stuart went back for his refund, major nickelfucker that he is apt to be at times. Like claiming the return half of his ticket when I met them at Gatwick. And I bet he succeeded. So
he cost her £25 and she cost him £6.25. What would he take for her now? What’s his mark-up?

And speaking of the gold moidores: Mrs Dyer, with whom I might be inclined to elope were not my heart bidden elsewhere, informed me yesterday that I was on the poll tax register. They don’t hang about, those guys, do they? Hoovering up every groat and drachma. Do you think there are humanitarian exceptions? Surely Oliver must be a special case under some grim subsection?

Gillian
He does it every time now. My hair doesn’t even have to come loose, he just takes the comb and undoes the clip and pulls the hair back and smoothes it down and puts the grip back in. And I’m burning.

I got up and kissed him. I opened my mouth straight into his, and stroked his neck and pushed down into the flesh of his shoulders and held my body so that he could touch me anywhere he wanted. I stood there kissing him, my hands up on his neck, my body waiting for his hands, even my legs apart. I kissed and I waited.

I waited.

He kissed me back, in my open mouth, and still I waited.

He stopped. My eyes were on him. He put his hands on my shoulders, turned me, and led me back to my easel.

‘Let’s go to bed, Oliver.’

Do you know what he did? He pushed me down on my chair and actually put a swab back in my hand.

‘I can’t work. I can’t work
now
.’

The thing about Oliver is, he’s different when he’s alone
with me. You wouldn’t recognise him. He’s much quieter, and he listens, and doesn’t talk in that show-off way. And he doesn’t seem at all as confident as he probably appears to others. I know what you’re expecting me to say next. ‘Oliver’s really quite vulnerable.’ So I’m not going to say it.

‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I adore you. I want to be with you all the time. I want to marry you. I want to listen to your voice for ever.’ We were on the sofa now.