Talking It Over (5 page)

‘Tell me,’ she replied. ‘You don’t …’

‘What?’ I urged her.

‘You don’t … You’re not wearing make-up, are you?’

3: That Summer I Was Brilliant

Stuart
Please don’t take against Oliver like that. He goes on a bit but he’s basically very good-hearted and kind. Lots of people don’t like him, and some actively loathe him, but try to see the better side. He hasn’t got a girlfriend, he’s practically penniless, he’s stuck in a job he hates. A lot of that sarcasm is just bravado, and if I can put up with his teasing, can’t you? Try and give him the benefit of the doubt. For my sake. I’m happy. Please don’t upset me.

When we were sixteen, we went youth-hostelling together. We hitch-hiked up to Scotland. I tried to get a lift from every vehicle that passed, but Oliver only stuck out his thumb at cars he really wanted to ride in, and sometimes even scowled at drivers whose cars he disapproved of. So we weren’t very successful at hitch-hiking. But we got there. It rained most of
the time, and when we were kicked out of the youth hostel for the day we walked around and sat in bus shelters. We both had anoraks but Oliver would never pull up his hood because he said it made him look like a monk and he didn’t want to endorse Christianity. So he got wetter than I did.

Once we spent all day – somewhere near Pitlochry, I think – in a telephone box playing battleships. It’s that game where you make a grid on a sheet of graph paper and each player has one battleship (four squares), two cruisers (three squares), three destroyers (two squares) and so on, then you have to knock out the opponent’s fleet. We played game after game. One of us had to sit on the floor of the phone box while the other stood up and rested on the shelf where you open out the directories. I spent the morning sitting on the floor and the afternoon standing up at the shelf. For lunch we had damp oat-cakes we’d bought at the village shop. We played battleships all day, and nobody wanted to use the phone. I can’t remember who won. In the late afternoon the weather cleared and we walked back to the youth hostel. I pulled my hood down and my hair was dry; Oliver’s was still soaking wet. The sun came out and Oliver linked his arm through mine. We passed a lady in her front garden. Oliver bowed to her and said, ‘Behold, madam, the dry monk and the damp sinner.’ She looked puzzled, and we walked on keeping step with one another, arm-in-arm.

I took Gillian to see Oliver a few weeks after we met. I had to explain him a bit first, because from meeting me you wouldn’t necessarily be able to tell what my best friend was like, and Oliver can get up people’s nostrils. I said he had various slightly eccentric habits and tastes, but that if you ignored them you quickly got through to the real Oliver. I said
he’d probably have the curtains drawn and the place would smell of joss-sticks, but if she behaved as if nothing was out of the ordinary, all would be fine. Well, she did behave as if nothing was out of the ordinary, and I began to suspect that Oliver was a little displeased. When all’s said and done, Oliver does like to cause a bit of a stir. He does enjoy some come-back.

‘He wasn’t as odd as you’d made him out to be, your friend,’ Gillian said as we left.

‘Good.’

I didn’t explain that Oliver had been uncharacteristically well-behaved.

‘I like him. He’s funny. He’s rather good-looking. Does he wear make-up?’

‘Not to my knowledge.’

‘Must have been the lighting,’ she said.

Later, over a tandoori dinner, I was on my second lager, and something, I don’t know what, got into me. I felt I could ask questions, I felt she wouldn’t mind.

‘Do
you
wear make-up?’ We’d been discussing something else, and I said it out of the blue, but in my mind it was as if we’d just been talking about Oliver, and the way she answered, as if she thought we’d just been talking about Oliver too and there wasn’t any break in that conversation even though we’d been through lots of different subjects in the meantime, made me feel very cheerful.

‘No. Can’t you tell?’

‘I’m not very good at telling.’

There was a half-eaten chicken tikka in front of her and a half-drunk glass of white wine. Between us stood a fat red
candle, whose flame was beginning to drown in a pond of wax, and a purple African violet made of plastic. By the light of that candle I looked at Gillian’s face, properly, for the first time. She … well, you’ve seen her for yourself, haven’t you? Did you spot that tiny patch of freckles on her left cheek? You did? Anyway, that evening her hair was swept up over her ears at the sides and fastened back with two tortoise-shell clips, her eyes seemed dark as dark, and I just couldn’t get over her. I looked and I looked as the candle fought with the wax and cast a flickering light on her face, and I just couldn’t get over her.

‘I don’t either,’ I finally said.

‘Don’t what?’ This time she hadn’t picked up the thread automatically.

‘Wear make-up.’

‘Good. Do you mind if I wear trainers with 501s?’

‘You can wear whatever you want to as far as I’m concerned.’

‘That’s a rash statement.’

‘I’m feeling rash.’

Later, I drove her back to the flat she shared and stood leaning against some rusted railings while she looked for her keys. Then she let me kiss her. I kissed her gently, then I looked at her, then I kissed her gently again.

‘If you don’t wear make-up,’ she whispered, ‘it can’t rub off.’

I hugged her. I put my arms around her and hugged her, but I didn’t kiss her again because I thought I might cry. Then I hugged her again and pushed her through the door because I thought that if it lasted any longer I
would
cry. I stood on
the doorstep alone, pressing my lids together, breathing in, breathing out.

We traded families. My father died of a heart attack some years ago. My mother appeared to be coping well – in fact, she seemed almost exhilarated. Then she got cancer, everywhere.

Gillian’s mother was French – is French, I mean to say. Her father was a schoolmaster who went to Lyon for a year as part of his training course and came back with Mme Wyatt in tow. Gillian was thirteen when her father ran off with one of his pupils who’d left school a year earlier. He was forty-two, she was seventeen. There were rumours they’d been having an affair while he was actually teaching her, when she would have been fifteen; there were rumours the girl was pregnant. There would have been a terrific scandal if there’d been anyone present to have a scandal around. But they just took off, vanished. It must have been awful for Mme Wyatt. Like having a husband die and leave you for another woman at the same time.

‘How did it affect you?’

Gillian looked at me as if that was rather a stupid question.

‘It hurt. We survived.’

‘But thirteen’s … I don’t know, a bad time to be left.’

‘Two’s a bad time,’ she said. ‘Five’s a bad time. Ten’s a bad time. Fifteen’s a bad time.’

‘I just meant, from articles I’ve read …’

‘Forty wouldn’t be too bad,’ she said in a sort of bright, almost hard voice I hadn’t heard before. ‘If he hadn’t bunked off till I was forty I think it might have been better. Perhaps they ought to make that the rule.’

I thought, I don’t ever want anything like that to happen to you ever again. We were silent, holding hands. Only one parent out of four between us. Two dead, one missing.

‘I wish life was like banking,’ I said. ‘I don’t mean it’s straightforward. Some of it’s incredibly complicated. But you can understand it in the end, if you try hard enough. Or there’s someone, somewhere, who understands it, even if only afterwards, after it’s too late. The trouble with life, it seems to me, is that it can turn out to be too late and you still haven’t understood it.’ I noticed she was looking at me carefully. ‘Sorry to be gloomy.’

‘You’re allowed to be gloomy. As long as you’re cheerful most of the time.’

‘OK.’

We
were
cheerful that summer. Having Oliver with us helped, I’m sure it did. The Shakespeare School of English had switched off its neon light for a couple of months, and Oliver was at a loose end. He pretended he wasn’t but I could tell. We went around together. We drank in pubs, played fruit machines, went dancing, saw films, did silly things on the spur of the moment if we felt like it. Gillian and I were falling in love and you’d think we’d have wanted to be by ourselves all the time, gazing into one another’s eyes and holding hands and going to bed together. Well of course we did all that too, but we also went around with Oliver. It wasn’t how you might think – we didn’t want a witness, we didn’t want to show off that we were in love; he was just easy to be with.

We went to the seaside. We went to a beach north of Frinton and ate ice-cream and rock and hired deck-chairs and Oliver got us to write our names in big letters in the
sand and photograph one another standing next to them. Then we watched the names being washed out as the sea came in and felt sad. We all groaned a bit and snivelled like kids, and we were putting it on, but we were only putting it on because underneath we
did
feel sad seeing our names rubbed out. Then Gillian said that thing about Oliver talking like a dictionary, and he did his scene on the beach and we all laughed.

Oliver was different, too. Normally when he and I were with girls he would be all competitive, even if he wasn’t meaning to be. But now I suppose he had nothing to win, nothing to lose, and it made everything easier. Something in all three of us knew that this was a one-off, that this was a first and last summer, because there wouldn’t be another time when Gillian and I were falling in love as opposed to just being in love or whatever. It was unique, that summer; we all sensed it.

Gillian
I started training in social work after I left university. I didn’t last very long. But I remember something a counsellor said on one of the courses. She said, ‘You must remember that every situation is unique and every situation is also ordinary.’

The trouble with talking about yourself the way Stuart is doing is that it makes people jump to conclusions. For instance, when people find out that my father ran off with a schoolgirl they invariably look at me in a particular way, which means one of two things, if not both of them. The first is: if your father ran off with someone only a couple of years older than you, what this probably means is that he
really
wanted to run off with
you
. And the second is: it’s a well-known fact that girls whose fathers run off frequently try to compensate by having affairs with older men. Is that what you’re into?

To which I would answer, first, that the witness is not before the court and has not been cross-examined on the matter, and secondly that just because something’s a ‘well-known fact’ this doesn’t make it a well-known fact about
me
. Every situation is ordinary and every situation is also unique. You can put it that way round if you prefer.

I don’t know why they’re doing this, Stuart and Oliver. It must be another of their games. Like Stuart pretending he hasn’t heard of Picasso and Oliver pretending he doesn’t understand any machinery invented after the spinning-jenny. But it’s not a game I want to play, this one, thank you very much. Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.

All I’d say is that I don’t quite agree with Stuart’s description of that summer with Oliver. Yes, we spent quite a lot of time alone together, started going to bed and all that, and yes we were sensible enough to know that even when you’re falling in love you shouldn’t live entirely in one another’s pockets. But this didn’t necessarily mean, from my point of view, that we had to go around with Oliver. Of course I liked him – you can’t not like Oliver once you get to know him – but he did tend to monopolise things. Almost telling us what to do. I’m not really complaining. I’m just making a small correction.

That’s the trouble with talking it over like this. It never seems quite right to the person being talked about.

I met Stuart. I fell in love. I married. What’s the story?

Oliver
I was brilliant that summer. Why do we keep referring to it as ‘that summer’ – it was only
last
summer, after all. I guess because it was like one perfectly held note, one exact and translucent colour. That’s how it seems in memory; and we each apprehended it subcutaneously at the time,
il me semble
. On top of which, I was brilliant.

Things were just a touch grim at the Shakespeare School before it occluded its portals for the vacation. A certain crepuscularity of spirit had sauntered in, courtesy of a misunderstanding which I hadn’t bothered to trouble the prancing Squire and his Milady with; not fair, in their state of mind, I thought. But I had discovered one of the problems, one of the deep-seated wrinkles about my foreign students: they don’t speak English very well. That was the cause of it. I mean, there she was nodding away and smiling at me, and Ollie, poor old dimwit braindead Ollie, actually jumped to the conclusion that these outward behavioural tics were reliable indicators of reciprocated attraction. Which not too surprisingly in my view led to a misunderstanding which, while ultimately regrettable, was surely purged of culpability on the part of the hapless instructor. And the idea that I resisted her desire to vamoose from my apartment, that I was unmoved when she burst into tears – how could I, an aficionado of opera, fail to respond to lachrymosity? – is a ridiculous exaggeration. The Principal, a frightful piece of lava from a volcano long extinct, actually insisted that I relinquish domestic tuition, simperingly permitted the murky phrase
sexual harassment
to hover in the air between us, and indicated that in the course of the aestival recess he might be reconsidering the terms and conditions of my employment. I replied that as far as I was concerned
his terms and conditions of employment were best used as a rectal implant preferably without benefit of anaesthetic, which roused him to suggest that perhaps the whole matter would best be served by being turned over to the florid authority of Her Majesty’s Judiciary, via PC Plod, or at the very least to some banal tribunal vested with the right to dilly-dally over
contretemps
between master and servant. I replied that of course such decisions were entirely his prerogative, then I fell into a musing mood and sought to recall something Rosa had asked me the previous week about English social customs. Was it normal, she had enquired, for elderly gentlemen making termly investigations into your scholastic progress to indicate where you were to sit for interview by laying their hand on the sofa cushion, and then, when you sat down, failing to remove their hand? I acquainted the Principal with the burden of my reply to Rosa: I had explained that it was less a question of manners than of physiology, and that extreme decrepitude and senescence did often lead to withering of the bicep and tricep muscles, which in turn led to a breakdown in the chain of command from cerebral GHQ to courting finger. Only later, I told the now somewhat quivering Principal, only later, when Rosa had gone, did it come to mind that one or two of the other girls had made of me the same enquiry over the past twelve months. I could not quite remember their identities, but were those currently
in statu pupillare
to be assembled in a
décontractée
atmosphere – rather like, say, a police line-up – I felt sure that the whole matter could be discussed as an appendix to their weekly class ‘Britain in the 1980s’. The Principal had by this time become almost as fluorescent as the neon sign outside his academy, and we eyeballed one another in a
spirit entirely lacking in camaraderie. I thought I might have lost my job, but I wasn’t sure. My bishop pinned his queen; his bishop pinned my queen. Was it to be stand-off or mutual destruction?