Talking It Over (7 page)

I love that word. Now. It’s
now
now; it’s not
then
any more.
Then
has gone away. It doesn’t matter that I disappointed my parents. It doesn’t matter that I disappointed myself. It doesn’t matter that I couldn’t ever get myself across to other people. That was then, and then’s gone. It’s
now
now.

I don’t mean I’ve done a sudden transformation. I’m not a frog that’s been kissed by a princess or whatever the fairy tale is. I haven’t suddenly become incredibly witty and good-looking – you’d have noticed, wouldn’t you? – or a high-flier with a huge family that takes Gillian into its bosom. (Do those families exist? On television you’re always seeing fascinating households full of eccentric old aunts and sweet children and interestingly varied adults, who may have their ups and downs but are basically all pulling together and ‘on the side of the family’, whatever that means. Life never seems to be like that
to me. Everyone I know seems to have a small, broken family: sometimes broken up by death, sometimes by divorce, usually just by disagreement or boredom. And
no-one
I know has any sense of ‘the family’. There’s just a mum they like and a dad they hate, or vice versa, and the eccentric old aunts that I’ve come across tend to be eccentric only because they’re secret alcoholics and smell like unwashed dogs or turn out to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or something.) No, what’s happened is this. I’ve stayed the same as I was before but now it’s all right to be what I was before. The princess kissed the frog and he didn’t turn into a handsome prince but that was all right because she liked him as a frog. And if I
had
turned into a handsome prince Gillian would probably have shown me – him – the door. She doesn’t go for princes, Gillian.

I was a bit nervous about meeting her mother, I can tell you. I polished my shoes and no mistake that morning. A mother-in-law (that’s how I thought about her already), a
French
mother-in-law who’s been deserted by an Englishman now being introduced by her daughter to the Englishman she wants to marry? I suppose I thought she’d either be fantastically frosty and sit on one of those little gilt chairs with a fancy gilt mirror behind her, or else be quite fat and red-faced and come in from the stove holding a wooden spoon and give me a huge embrace smelling of garlic and stockpot. On balance I would definitely have preferred the latter, but of course I got neither (that’s families again for you). Mrs or Mme Wyatt wore patent-leather shoes and a smart brownish suit with a gold brooch. She was polite, but no friendlier than she had to be; she looked at Gillian’s jeans with disapproval but without comment. We had tea and discussed everything except the two
things that interested me: the fact that I was in love with her daughter, and the fact that her husband had run off with a schoolgirl. She didn’t ask me what my prospects were, or how much I earned, or whether I was sleeping with her daughter – all of which I had thought of as possible avenues of conversation. She was – is – what people call a handsome woman, a phrase which has always struck me as a bit patronising. (What does it mean? It means something like: surprisingly fanciable if it was socially OK to fancy women of that age. But perhaps someone did – does – fancy Mme Wyatt. I’d like to think so.) That’s to say, she had firm features and smartly cut, possibly dyed hair obviously kept under regular control, and she behaved as if she had known a time when she turned every head and expected you to be aware of this too. I looked at her a lot during that tea. Not just out of polite attention, but trying to see how Gillian would turn out. It’s supposed to be a key moment, isn’t it? Meeting your wife’s mother for the first time. You’re meant either to run a mile, or else collapse back happily: oh yes, if she turns out like
that
, I can more than handle it. (And the prospective mothers-in-law must be aware that this is going through the young man’s mind, mustn’t they? Perhaps sometimes they deliberately make themselves look a terrible fright to scare him away.) With Mme Wyatt, I had neither of these reactions. I looked at her face, at the shape of the jaw and curve of the forehead; I looked at the mouth of the mother of the girl whose mouth I couldn’t get enough of kissing. I looked and I looked; but while I saw similarities (the forehead, the set of the eyes), while I could understand that other people might take them for mother and daughter, it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t see that Gillian was going to turn
into Mme Wyatt. It was completely improbable, and for one simple reason: Gillian wasn’t going to turn into
anyone
else. She would change, of course. I’m not so silly and in love that I don’t know that. She would change, but she wouldn’t change into someone else, she would change into another version of herself. And I would be there to see it happen.

‘How did it go?’ I asked as we were driving away. ‘Did I pass?’

‘You weren’t being examined.’

‘Oh.’ I felt a little disappointed.

‘She doesn’t work like that.’

‘How does she work?’

Gillian paused, changed gear, pursed those lips which were and yet weren’t at all like her mother’s lips, and said, ‘She waits.’

I didn’t like the sound of that at first. But later, I thought, Fair enough. And I can wait too. I can wait until Mme Wyatt sees me for what I am, understands what Gillian sees in me. I can wait for her approval. I can wait for her to understand how I make Gillian happy.

‘Happy?’ I said.

‘Mmm.’ She kept her eyes on the traffic, took her hand off the gear-stick briefly, patted my leg, then withdrew her hand to change gear. ‘Happy.’

We’re going to have children, you know. No, I don’t mean she’s pregnant, though I wouldn’t mind too much if she were. It’s a long-term plan. We haven’t really discussed it, to be honest; but I’ve seen her with kids once or twice and she seems to get on with them instinctively. To be on the same wavelength. What I mean is, she doesn’t seem surprised
by the way they behave and how they react to things; it seems normal to her and she accepts it. I’ve always found children to be OK, but I’ve never completely worked them out. I can’t read them. Why do they go on the way they do, making a huge fuss about little things and then ignoring what ought to be much more important? They walk into the corner of the TV set and you think they’ve broken their skull, but they just bounce off; next moment they sit down very gently on their bottoms which are padded with what looks like fifteen nappies and they burst into tears. What’s it about? Why haven’t they got a sense of proportion?

Still, I want kids with Gillian. It seems the natural thing to do. And I’m sure she’ll want them too when the time is right. That’s something women know, isn’t it – when the time is right? I’ve already made them a promise, those kids we’re going to have. I’m not going to be like my parents. I’m going to try and see the point of you, whatever that point is. I’ll back you. Whatever you want to do is OK by me.

Gillian
I suppose I do have one worry about Stuart. Sometimes I’m working away up here in my studio – the name’s a bit too grand for the room, which is only 12 by 12, but even so – and there’s music on the radio and I’m sort of on automatic pilot. Then I’ll suddenly think, I hope he doesn’t get disappointed. This may be an odd thing to say when you’ve only been married a month, but it’s true. It’s something I feel.

I usually don’t mention the fact that I once trained as a social worker. It’s another thing people tend to make crass comments about, or crass assumptions anyway. For instance,
it’s perfectly obvious that what I was trying to do for my clients was patch up their lives and their relationships in a way that I’d been unable to do for my parents. That’s perfectly obvious to anyone, isn’t it? Except to me.

And even if I was in some way trying to do this, I certainly didn’t succeed. I lasted eighteen months before packing it in, and in that time I saw a lot of disappointed people. Most days I saw damage, people with huge problems, emotional, social, financial – sometimes self-inflicted, mostly just handed down to them. Things families had done to them, parents, husbands; things they’d never get over.

Then there were the other ones, the disappointed ones. And that was real damage, irreversible. The ones who began with such high hopes of the world, then put their trust in psychopaths and fantasists, invested their faith in boozers and hitters. And they’d go on for many years with incredible perseverance, believing when they had no reason to believe, when it was crazy for them to believe. Until one day they just gave up. And what could twenty-two-year-old trainee social worker Gillian Wyatt do for them? Believe me, professionalism and cheerfulness cut very little ice with these clients.

People get broken in spirit. That’s what I couldn’t face. And it came to me later, as I began to love Stuart, this thought: please don’t let him be disappointed. I’d never felt that before with anyone. Worrying about their long-term future, how they’d turn out. Worrying what they might think when they finally looked back.

Listen, I’m not playing this … game. But equally there’s no point sitting in the corner with a handkerchief stuffed in your mouth. I’ll say what I have to say, what I know.

I went out with quite a lot of men before I met Stuart. I was nearly in love, I was proposed to a couple of times; on the other hand, I once went for a year without men, without sex – both seemed too much trouble. Some of the men I went out with were ‘old enough to be my father’ as they say; on the other hand, many weren’t. So where does that leave us? One bit of information and people are immediately off into their theories. Did I marry Stuart because I thought he wouldn’t let me down the way my father had? No, I married him because I loved him. Because I love, respect and fancy him. I didn’t fancy him at first, not particularly. I don’t conclude anything from that either, except that fancying is a complicated business.

We were in that hotel with schooners of sherry in our hands. Was it a cattle market? No, it was a sensible group of people taking a sensible step about their lives. It happened to work for the two of us, we were lucky. But we weren’t ‘just’ lucky. Sitting alone with self-pity isn’t a good way of meeting people.

I think that in life you have to discover what you’re good at, recognise what you can’t do, decide what you want, aim for it, and try not to regret things afterwards. God, that must sound pious. Words don’t always hit the mark, do they?

Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I love my work. There aren’t any words involved. I sit in my room at the top of the house with my swabs and solvents, my brushes and pigments. There’s me and a picture in front of me, and music from the radio if I need it, and no telephone. I don’t really like Stuart coming up here much. It breaks the spell.

Sometimes the picture you’re working on answers back. That’s the most exciting part, when you take off overpaint
and discover something underneath. It doesn’t happen very often, of course, which makes it all the more satisfying when it does. For instance, an awful lot of breasts got painted out in the nineteenth century. So you might be cleaning a portrait of what’s meant to be an Italian noblewoman, and gradually uncover a suckling baby. The woman turns into a Madonna beneath your eyes. It’s as if you’re the first person she’s told her secret to in years.

The other month I was doing a forest scene and found a wild boar someone had painted out. This completely changed the picture. It seemed to be of horsemen having a nice peaceful ride in the wood – picnickers, almost – until I discovered the animal, when it became perfectly clear that it had been a hunting scene all along. The wild boar had been hiding behind a large and actually rather unconvincing bush for a hundred years or so. Then up here in my studio, without a word being spoken, everything came back plainly into view, as it was meant to be. All by taking off a little overpaint.

Oliver
Oh
shit
.

It was her face that did it. Her face as she stood outside the register office, with that big municipal clock behind her, ticking off those first glistening moments of nuptial bliss. She was wearing a linen suit the colour of pale watercress soup, with the skirt cut just above the knee. Linen, we all know, crushes as easily as timid love; she looked uncrushable. Her hair was taken back just on one side, and she smiled in the general direction of the entire human race. She wasn’t clinging to the steatopygous Stu, though she held his arm, it’s true. She
just exuded, she glowed, she was fully there yet tantalisingly absent, withdrawn at this most public moment into some private dominion. Only I appeared to notice this, the rest thought she just looked happy. But I could tell. I went up and gave her a kiss and murmured felicitations in her one visible and lobeless ear. She responded, but almost as if I wasn’t there, so I did a few gestures in front of her face – Signalman Flagging Down Runaway Express, sort of thing – and she briefly focused on me and laughed and then went back into her secret nuptial sett.

‘You look like a jewel,’ I said, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps if she had, things would have been different, I don’t know. But because she didn’t respond, I looked at her more. She was all pale green and chestnut, with an emerald blaze at her throat; I roamed her face, from the bursting curve of her forehead to the plum-dent of her chin; her cheeks, so often pallid, were brushed with the pink of a Tiepolo dawn, though whether the brush was external and garaged in her handbag or internal and wielded by ecstasy, I was unable or unwilling to guess; her mouth was besieged by a half-smile which seemed to last and last; her eyes were her lustrous dowry. I
roamed
her face, do you hear?

And I couldn’t bear the way she was there and not there, the way I was present to her and yet not present. Remember those philosophers’ schemes according to which we only exist if we are perceived as existing by something or somebody other than ourselves? Old Ollie, before the bride’s oscillating acknowledgment of him, felt all wobbly with existential peril. If she blinked I might vanish. Perhaps this was why I turned myself into some happy-snap Diane Arbus, seizing the camera
and cavorting mirthfully in search of an angle which would set off Stuart’s embryonically goitrous condition to a satirical T. Displacement activity. Pure despair, as you can see, fear of oblivion. Of course they never guessed.