Talking It Over (19 page)

So I only say, ‘It is always the dangerous time.’

Of course I knew immediately that it was Oliver.

Gillian
He said: ‘Please don’t leave me yet. They’ll think I haven’t got a prick.’

He said: ‘I love you. I’ll always love you.’

He said: ‘If I catch Oliver inside this house, I’ll break his fucking neck.’

He said: ‘Please let me make love to you.’

He said: ‘It’s quite cheap to get someone killed nowadays. It hasn’t at all kept up with the rate of inflation. Market forces must be to blame.’

He said: ‘I’ve only felt alive since I met you. Now I’ll have to go back to being dead again.’

He said: ‘I’m taking a girl out to dinner tonight. I may fuck her afterwards, I haven’t decided yet.’

He said: ‘Why did it have to be Oliver?’

He said: ‘Can I still be your friend?’

He said: ‘I don’t ever want to see you again.’

He said: ‘If Oliver had had a proper job this would never have happened.’

He said: ‘Please don’t leave me. They’ll think I haven’t got a prick.’

Mme Wyatt
And there was one other thing my daughter said to me, which I found terribly poignant. She said, ‘Maman, I thought there were
rules
.’

She didn’t mean rules of behaviour, she meant something more than that. People often imagine that if they get married
that will ‘solve things’, as they say. My daughter of course is not so naïve as to think that, but she did, I believe, hope or perhaps just feel that she would in some way be protected – at least for a while – by something which we could call the immutable rules of marriage.

I am now more than fifty years of age, and if you ask me what are the immutable rules of marriage, I can think of only one: a man never leaves his wife for an older woman. Apart from that, anything that is possible is normal.

Stuart
I went over to number 55 yesterday evening. The little old lady who lives there, Mrs Dyer, answered the door.

‘Oh, you’re that man from the Council,’ she said.

‘That’s right, Madam,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you so late, but it is a Council responsibility to inform all landlords – and landladies – as urgently as possible if their tenants have been positively tested for AIDS.’

‘You’ve been drinking,’ she said.

‘Well, it’s a very stressful job, you know.’

‘All the more reason why you shouldn’t drink. Especially if you have to operate machinery.’

‘I don’t operate machinery,’ I said, feeling we were getting off the point.

‘Then try and have an early night.’ And she shut the door in my face.

She’s right, of course. I might have to operate machinery. For instance, I might have to run my car backwards and forwards over Oliver’s body. Bump, bump, bump. That would
be a task I would have to be sober for.

I don’t want you to get me wrong. I don’t just sit around getting drunk and listening to Patsy Cline tapes. Well, I do that a bit, it’s true. But I’m not going to spend more than a certain percentage of my time wallowing in – what did Gill call it? – yes, ‘nauseating self-pity’ was the phrase. I’m also not going to give up, do you see? I love Gill, and I’m not going to give up. I’m going to do whatever I can to stop her leaving me. And if she does leave me, I’m going to do everything I can to get her back. And if she won’t come back … well, then I’ll think of something. I’m not going to take this lying down.

I didn’t mean it about running over Mrs Dyer’s tenant with my car, of course. It’s just something you say. You don’t get any practice in these situations beforehand, do you? All of a sudden they’re on you, and you have to deal with them. So you say things you don’t mean, and things you can imagine someone else saying suddenly come out of your own mouth. Like for instance when I told Gill I was taking a girl out to dinner and I might fuck her afterwards if I felt like it. That’s just stupid, trying to hurt Gill. The person I took out to dinner was a woman, it’s true. But it was Val, who’s an old friend from way back, and the person I want to make love to is Gill. No-one else.

Oliver
I let myself in and unleashed the bison’s cough I’ve developed to let Mrs Dyer know I’m leaving the pedal imprint on her parquet. She came out of the kitchen, turning her sunflower head sideways to squint up at me.

‘I’m sorry to hear you’ve got the AIDS,’ she said.

My mind did not, at that instant, have quite the solidity of Soviet monumental sculpture in the Stalin-to-Brezhnev era. I pictured Mrs Dyer mistakenly opening a brown envelope from the clinic. Except that I’d said I’d call them. Except that they didn’t have this address.

‘Who told you so?’

‘The gentleman from the Council. The one who came about the poll tax. The one who lives over the road. I’ve seen him. He’s got a nice-looking wife.’ She waved in the direction … and all fell into place.

‘It was a joke, Mrs Dyer,’ I said. ‘A sort of joke.’

‘I think he thought I didn’t know what the AIDS was.’ I looked at her as if I was a touch
bouleversé
myself that she did. ‘I read the leaflets,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I told him you were very clean and we had separate toilets.’

My heart was suddenly a sog of tenderness. Extend a cautious foot into my
coeur
and you’d go in right over the wellie. ‘Mrs Dyer,’ I said, ‘I hope you won’t think me too forward, but would you consider becoming my wife?’

She gave a quiet cackle. ‘Once is enough for any woman,’ she said. ‘And besides, young man, you’ve got the AIDS.’ She gave another skirl of amusement, and disappeared back into her kitchen.

I sat at my window behind the monkey-puzzle tree and thought of Stuart at the breakfast table shaking his packet of cereal:
Sh-chug-a-chug, Sh-chug-a-chug-chug
. And then – the mind is such a bluebottle, such a jumping-jack – I thought of Stuart in bed with Gillian. I bet it’s the same. I bet he goes
Sh-chug-a-chug, Sh-chug-a-chug-chug
. It hurts, oh it hurts.

Stuart
I don’t mean everything I say at the moment, but I did mean what I said about Oliver not having a proper job. What would be the most effective cure for sexual immorality, for wife-stealing? Full employment, with every adult male working the same hours, 9.00 to 5.30. Oh, and Saturdays as well, let’s get back to the six-day week. Not popular with the unions, of course, and there’d have to be exceptions made for airline pilots and so on. Of course, airline pilots and their crews are notoriously immoral. What other professions are full of immorality and wife-stealing? University lecturers, actors and actresses, doctors and nurses … You see what I mean? None of them work regular hours.

And Oliver is a liar, of course. That helps. I’ve always thought that over the years I’d learned how much to allow for his exaggerations, but maybe I was way out all along. For instance, the story about his father beating him up. I wonder if that’s true. He’s always made a big thing about it – how his dad started beating him up after his mum died when he was six. How he took a billiard cue to him because Oliver looked like his mum and so his dad was in effect punishing her for leaving him by dying (do people really behave like this? Oliver assured me they do). How the abuse went on for years and years, until one day, when he was fifteen (though sometimes it’s sixteen, sometimes thirteen), Oliver turned round and thumped his father. After that it never happened again, and now Dad lives in some old folks’ home and Oliver every so often goes to visit hoping to find some spark of affection in these closing years, but always comes back sad and disappointed. Which is a great sympathy-winner, not least with women.

No-one’s heard his dad’s version, needless to say. I met
him briefly a couple of times, when I went to call on Oliver, and he never tried to beat
me
up. After hearing Oliver’s stories I expected him to have vampire teeth and carry a pair of handcuffs; but he struck me as a nice enough old boy with a pipe. Oliver certainly hates him, but there may be other reasons for that, like he eats his peas off a knife or doesn’t know that Bizet wrote
Carmen
. Oliver is a snob, as you might have noticed.

He’s also, I can’t help pointing out, a coward. Or at least, put it this way. The big event in Oliver’s childhood is the moment when he turns on his violent dad and gives him such a whipping that the Old Bastard – as Oliver refers to him – slinks away with his tail between his legs. Now, I’m quite a bit smaller than Oliver, but when I gave him a little poke in the face with my head, how did he react? He ran away squealing and blubbing. Is this the behaviour of the famous tamer of bullies? Oh yes, and what about that billiard cue? Oliver once told me that he and his father only had one thing in common: they both hated sport.

Gillian
Oliver needed five stitches in his cheek. He told the hospital he’d tripped over and gashed it on the corner of a table.

He said the expression of violence on Stuart’s face had to be seen to be believed. He said he thought Stuart wanted to kill him. He suggested I put water in the whisky bottle. He begged me to leave at once.

Stuart

And as the skies turn gloomy

Nightbirds whisper to me

I’m lonesome as I can be …

Gillian
You know, in all the time Stuart and I were together he never once asked me why I was at the Charing Cross Hotel that evening. I mean, he asked about it in one sense, and I replied that I’d seen the ad in
Time Out
, but he never asked me
why
. He was always very careful in his finding-out about me. I think it was partly that he didn’t mind what had happened before: here I was, and that was all Stuart was interested in. But it was a bit more than that. Stuart had his idea of what I was like, he’d decided upon it, and he didn’t want to hear anything different.

Why
I was there is easily told. A married man: he wouldn’t leave his wife, I couldn’t give him up. Yes, that old story, the one that keeps dragging on. So I took steps to stop it dragging on. You’ve got to be responsible for your own happiness – you can’t expect it to come flopping through the door like a parcel. You’ve got to be practical in these matters. People sit at home thinking Some Day My Prince Will Come. But that’s no good unless you’ve got a sign up saying Princes Welcome Here.

Oliver couldn’t be more different. For a start, he wants to know everything about me. I sometimes feel I’m letting him down by not having had a more exotic past. I’ve never been pearl-fishing in Tahiti. I didn’t sell my virginity for a sable coat. I’ve just been me. On the other hand, that
me
isn’t settled and
decided in Oliver’s mind the way it was in Stuart’s. And that’s … nice. No, it’s more than nice. It’s sexy.

‘You know, I bet Stuart basically thinks of you as a good little shopper.’ This was a few weeks ago.

I don’t like Stuart being criticised. In fact, I won’t have it. ‘I
am
a good little shopper,’ I replied (though that’s not how I think of myself). At least, I’m much better than Oliver, who tends to go into a trance over a green pepper, if you know what I mean.

‘Sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘What I
meant
is merely that for me you are someone of well, endless possibility. I do not stake out and fence in what is taken to be your approved and registered nature.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, Oliver.’ I was teasing him a little, though he didn’t seem to notice.

‘It’s just that – not to say a word against – Stuart’s never actually
seen
you.’

‘And do you –
see
me?’

‘3-D specs. Eyes for nothing else.’

I smiled and kissed him. Later, I wondered: but if two such different people as Stuart and Oliver can both fall in love with me, what sort of
me
is it? And what sort of
me
falls in love first with Stuart and then with Oliver? The same one, a different one?

Harringay Hospital

Accident & Emergency Department

NOTES

says old duelling scar reopened by walking into monkey-puzzle tree

smells of alcohol + +

no L.O.C.

last tetanus > 10 years ago

O/E 3cms laceration ® cheek

X-R → no # seen

sutured c 10 × 50 Nylon

tet tox

R.O.S. here 5/7
J. Davis

16.00

Oliver
I never thought I might have the AIDS, as Mrs Dyer so arrestingly refers to the matter. But it shows my intentions are serious, doesn’t it?
Tabula rasa
, starting from scratch.

And I don’t have to pay the poll tax twice, because I don’t really live at number 55, and I’m not going to be there much
longer anyway. I have this fantasy about asking Mrs Dyer to be a bridesmaid. Or a matron-of-honour, perhaps.

Some things get to you. I wish I hadn’t thought of Stuart going
Sh-chug-a-chug
. You see, I used to have this joke with myself. Some book I read when barely post-pre-pubescent contained the words:
he made free with her narrow loins
. I admit, almost without shame, that for years this phrase hung from a string in my skull like some Christmas decoration, gilded and talismanic. So that’s what they’re up to, dirty beasts, I’d think. Me too, soon. Then, for many years, reality effaced phraseology. Until the words came back to me with Gill. I’d sit aloft in my monkey-puzzle tree and whisper to myself (not
wholly
seriously, I trust you comprehend), ‘I
shall make free with her narrow loins’
. But I can’t do that any more, because of some cerebral hitch, some jammed ganglion. Because every time I hear the words they are followed by the sound of Stuart going
Sh-chug-a-chug, Sh-chug-a-chug-chug
, like a tubby tender behind a slinky locomotive.