Talking It Over (6 page)

All of which needs to be taken into account when assessing my brilliance that summer. As I say, I didn’t trouble Stu and Gillie about my career hiccup: a trouble shared is not, in my experience, a trouble halved, but rather a trouble broadcast on the mighty tannoy of gossip. Ahoy there, anyone wish to evacuate from a great height upon the doleful Ollie?

Looking back, it might actually have helped that I was a bit blue. The fact that they reserved me a front row seat in the Big Top of their felicity did assist in throttling back the glooms. And what more practical way of repaying them than to ensure that their own little seedling of
bonheur
had time to sprout and shoot, to root and burgeon? By my dancing presence I kept the pests away. I was their aphid spray, their cat-dust, their slug-pellet.

Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn’t just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It’s to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent. Don’t ever tell me that Love’s dimpled pander doesn’t earn his pesetas.

I’ll let you in on a little theory of mine. You know that Gillian’s father decamped with a nereid when his daughter was as yet but ten, or twelve, or fifteen or something – at what is falsely termed ‘an impressionable age’, as if all ages were not
so characterisable. Now, I have heard tell in the sultry dens of Freudianism that the psychological scar inflicted by this act of parental desertion frequently induces the daughter, when she is of an age to start questing for a swain, to seek a substitute for the departed archetype. In other words, they fuck older men. This has, in point of fact, always struck me as behaviour verging on the pathological. For a start, have you ever looked at old men, the sort of old men who seduce young women? The roguish high-bummed stride, the fuck-me tan, the effulgent cuff-links, the reek of dry-cleaning. They snap their fingers as if the world is their wine-waiter. They demand, they expect … It’s disgusting. I’m sorry, I’ve got a thing about it. The thought of liver-spotted hands clamped on tense juve breasts – well, …hie me to the vomitorium
prontol
And the other point which lies beyond the reef of my comprehension: if you have been deserted by Daddy, then why react by going to bed with Daddy-substitutes, by donating
la fleur de I’âge
to a line-up of old gropers? Aha, the textbooks reply, you’re missing the point: what the girl is doing is seeking a replacement for the security that was roughly torn from her; she is looking for a father who
won’t
desert her. Fair enough, but
my
point is this: if you’re bitten by a pye-dog and the wound becomes infected, is it sensible behaviour to carry on hanging out with pye-dogs? I would say, on balance, not. Buy a cat, own a budgie, but don’t hang out with pye-dogs. So what does the girl do? She hangs out with pye-dogs. This is, I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason. And besides which, I find it disgusting.

How, you might ask, does this theory of mine apply
to the case in point? Granted, my steatopygous chum is not of an age with the aforementioned silver-haired Lothario who rode off into the sunset with a nifty piece of under-age crumpet strapped to his roofrack, i.e., Gill’s dad. But one is forced, upon contemplating Stuart, to conclude that if he is not currently
d’un certain âge
, he nevertheless might as well be. Let us consider the facts of the matter. He is the owner of two medium-dark-grey suits and two dark-dark-grey suits. He is employed doing whatever it is he does by a bank whose caring
dirigeants
wear pin-striped underpants and will look after him until he retires. He contributes to the pension fund and has taken out life insurance. He has a half-share in a 25-year mortgage plus top-up loan. He is modest in his appetites and (sparing your blushes) somewhat attenuated in his sexuality. All that’s stopping him being welcomed into the great freemasonry of the over-fifties is that he happens to be thirty-two. And this is what Gillian senses, this is what she knows she wants. Bohemian pyrotechnics are not what marriage to Stu promises. Gillian has landed herself nothing other than the youngest older man she could find.

But would it have been fair to point all this out as they nuzzled one another on some Anglian
plage
and assumed I wasn’t noticing? That’s not what friends are for. And besides, I was pleased for Stuart, whose
derrière
, voluminous and pensile as it was, had not spent much of its existence in the
beurre
. He clutched onto Gillian’s hand with alarming gratitude, as if previously girls had always insisted on his wearing oven-gloves. He seemed to lose a little of his clumsiness when he was beside her. He even danced better. I mean, Stu would never attain anything more than a kind of addled bopping,
but that summer he brought a certain careless vivacity to the matter of heel-and-toe. For myself, on those occasions that Gillian embellished my dance-card, I reined myself in, generously not seeking to provoke dismaying comparison. Was I even, at times, uncharacteristically gauche as I jig-a-jigged the parquet? Perhaps. Everyone must decide for himself.

So there we were, that summer. Woes were not on the agenda. At Frinton we played a one-armed bandit for two whole clattering hours and never attained three fruits in a row – but did we mope? I do, however, recall one moment of piercing sadness. We were on a beach, and someone – probably me in my cheerleader mode – suggested we engrave our names in big letters upon the sand, then one of us would mount the promenade and photograph inscription plus inscriber. A cliché in Beowulf’s time, I know, but you can’t keep coming up with new games. When it came to my turn to be recorded, Gillian went up to the promenade with Stuart. Probably he required help with the auto-focus. It was the end of the afternoon, an east wind was chivvying its self-important way across the North Sea, the sun was losing its heat, and most people had gone home. I stood alone on the beach next to the elaborate italics of
Oliver
(the others had done capitals, of course), and I looked up towards the camera, and Stuart shouted ‘Cheese!’ and Gillian shouted ‘Gorgonzola!’ and Stu shouted ‘Camembert!’ and Gillian shouted ‘Dolcelatte!’ and suddenly I had this crying fit. I stood there gazing up and blubbing. Then the sun got into my tears and I couldn’t see anything, just a blinding coloured rinse. I felt I might cry for ever, whereupon Stu shouted ‘Wensleydale!’ and I just howled some more, like a jackal, like a pathetic pye-dog. Then I sat in
the sand and kicked at the
r
of
Oliver
until they came and rescued me.

Shortly afterwards I was jolly again, and they were jolly too. When people fall in love they develop this sudden resilience, have you noticed? It’s not just that nothing can harm them (
that
old suave illusion), but that nothing can harm anyone they care about either.
Frère
Ollie? Crying fit on the beach? Broke down while being photographed by his friends? No, that’s nothing, call off the men in the white coats, send back the padded van, we’ve got our own first-aid kit. It’s called love. Comes in all sorts of packaging. It’s a bandage, it’s a sticking-plaster, it’s lint, it’s gauze, it’s cream. Look, it even comes as an anaesthetising spray. Let’s try some on Ollie. See, he’s fallen down and broken his crown. Spray spray, whoozh, whoozh, there, that’s better, Ollie, up you get.

And I did. I got up and was jolly again. Jolly Ollie, we’ve mended him, that’s what love can do. Have another squirt, Ollie? One last pick-me-up?

They took me home that night in Gillian’s rebarbatively quotidian motor-car. Definitely not a Lagonda. I got out and they got out too. I kissed Gillie briefly on the cheek, and ruffled the pelt of Stuart, who was beaming concern at me. So I Nureyeved the front steps and flowed through the door in a single motion of Yale and Chubb. Then I lay upon my understanding bed and burst into tears.

4: Now

Stuart
It’s now. It’s today. We got married last month. I love Gillian. I’m happy, yes I’m happy. It finally worked out for me. It’s
now
now.

Gillian
I got married. Part of me didn’t think I ever would, part of me disapproved, part of me was a little scared, to tell the truth. But I fell in love, and Stuart is a good person, a kind person, and he loves me. I’m married now.

Oliver
Oh shit. Oh shit shit shit shit SHIT. I’m in love with Gillie, I’ve only just realised it. I am in love with Gillie. I’m amazed, I’m overawed, I’m poo-scared, I’m mega-fuckstruck.
I’m also scared out of my cerebellum. What’s going to happen now?

5: Everything Starts Here

Stuart
Everything starts here. That’s what I keep repeating to myself. Everything starts here.

I was only average at school. I was never encouraged to think that I should aim for university. I did a correspondence course in economics and commercial law, then got accepted by the Bank as a general trainee. I work in the foreign exchange department. I’d better not mention the Bank’s name, just in case they don’t like it. But you’ll have heard of them. They’ve made it fairly clear to me that I’ll never be a high-flier, but every company needs some people who aren’t high-fliers, and that’s all right by me. My parents were the type of parents who always seemed faintly disappointed by whatever it was you did, as if you were constantly letting them down in small ways. I think that’s why my sister moved away, up north. On
the other hand, I could see my parents’ point of view. I
was
a bit disappointing. I was a bit disappointing to myself. I tried to explain earlier about not being able to relax with people I liked, not being able to get them to see what virtues I had. Now I come to think of it, most of my life was like that. I couldn’t get other people to see the point of me. But then Gillian came along, and everything starts here.

I expect Oliver’s given you the impression that I was a virgin when I got married. No doubt he used some rather choice language about this hypothesis of his. Well, I’d like you to know it isn’t true. I don’t tell Oliver everything. I bet you wouldn’t tell Oliver everything either. When he’s cheerful his tongue runs away with him, and when he’s depressed he can be unkind. So it’s common sense not to let him into every area of your life. We very occasionally went on double dates but they were without exception complete disasters. For a start, Oliver would always provide the girls and I would always provide the money, though naturally I had to slip him his half of it beforehand so the girls wouldn’t know who was really paying. Once he even made me hand over
all
the money beforehand, so that it would look as if he was paying for everyone himself. Then we would go to a restaurant and Oliver would get dictatorial.

‘No, you can’t have
that
as a main course. There’s mushrooms and cream in your starter.’ Or fennel and Pernod. Or whatever and whatever. Do you ever feel the world is getting
too
interested in food? I mean, it does come out at the other end very soon afterwards. You can’t store it, not for long. It’s not like money.

‘But I
like
mushrooms and cream.’

‘Then have this main course and the aubergine starter.’

‘Don’t like aubergine.’

‘Hear that, Stu? She cringeth at the glossy aubergine. Well, let’s try converting you tonight.’

And so on. Then the business about wine with the waiter. Sometimes I used to go for a pee at this point. Oliver would start by addressing the table: ‘Shall we perhaps essay a Hunter River Chardonnay
ce soir
?’

And having got our agreement in theory he would begin grilling the poor waiter. ‘Would you advise the Show Reserve? Would you say it had enough bottle age? I like my Chardonnays fat and buttery, but not
too
fat and buttery, you understand. And how oaky is this one? I do find the colonials tend to be rather over-zealous in their use of oak, don’t you?’

Mostly the waiter would go along with this, sensing that Oliver was one of those customers who did not, for all their enquiries, actually want any advice, and it was just a question of slowly reeling him in like a fish. Eventually the order would be placed, but this was not the end of my anxieties. Oliver had to be seen to approve of the wine he had himself chosen. At one time this involved a lot of slurping and gargling and half-closed eyes and many seconds of mystical contemplation. Then he read an article somewhere which said that the point of tasting a wine before it was poured was not to see if you liked it, but to make sure that it wasn’t corked. If you didn’t like the taste, that was too bad, because you’d chosen it yourself. What you should do – if you were sophisticated – was just give the glass a swirl and sniff, which would tell you whether or not the wine was off. So this was what Ollie took to doing, reducing his performance to a series of loud inhalings followed by a curt nod. Sometimes, if he thought one of the girls didn’t
know what he was doing, he’d go into a long explanation of why he hadn’t actually tasted the stuff.

I must say Oliver ordered some pretty filthy wines those times I went out with him. I shouldn’t be surprised if some of the bottles
were
corked.

But what does that matter now? The same as what does it matter whether or not I was a virgin when I met Gillian? I wasn’t, as I say, though I don’t delude myself that this area of my life which I kept hidden from Oliver was the story of one triumph after another. It was average, I suppose, whatever average means in this context. Sometimes it was jolly nice, sometimes it was a bit fraught, and sometimes I had to remind myself not to start thinking of other things in the middle. Average, you see. But then Gillian came along, and everything starts here. Now.