WHERE DO THEY DO IT? AT HIS PLACE OR AT HERS? DO THEY DO IT IN THIS BED, THIS VERY BED?
Gillian The fact is, sometimes I put the telephone down and I can still hear Oliver’s voice in my ear telling me he loves me, and … No, I’m not sure I can tell you the rest.
Stuart I’m not going to ask. It may not be true. If it isn’t true it’s a terrible thing to say. And if it is true?
I really didn’t think there was anything wrong with our sex-life. I didn’t. I mean, I don’t.
Look, this is silly. It’s Oliver who says he’s got the sex problems. Why should I assume – why should I even suspect – he’s having an affair with my wife? Unless he said he had a sex problem so that I wouldn’t get suspicious. And it worked, didn’t it? What was that old play Gillian and I once went to, where some bloke pretends to be impotent and everyone believes him and all the husbands let him visit their wives? No, that’s ridiculous. Oliver isn’t like that, he isn’t calculating. Unless … how could you have an affair with your best friend’s wife without being calculating?
Ask her, ask her.
No, don’t ask her. Leave it alone. Wait.
How long has it been going on?
Shut up.
We’ve only been married a few months.
Shut up.
And I gave him a large cheque.
Shut up. Shut up.
Oliver She’s got this comb. This comb with its tender mutilations.
When she works, she first of all puts her hair back. There’s a little comb which she keeps on the stool where the radio stands. She takes this comb, and pulls her hair back over her ears with it, first the left side then the right, always that way round, and after she’s finished pulling back each side she puts a tortoise-shell grip in her hair, just behind the ear.
Sometimes, when she’s working, a strand or two of hair will come loose, and then, without breaking concentration, she will reach instinctively for the comb, take out the grip, pull her hair back, put the grip back in, and return the comb to the stool, all without taking her gaze from the canvas.
That comb has some teeth missing. No, let’s be precise. That comb has fifteen teeth missing. I’ve counted them.
This comb, with its tender mutilations.
Stuart Oliver has had quite a few girlfriends over the years, but if you want my opinion he’s never been in love. Oh, he’s said he’s in love, lots of times. He’s made corny old comparisons between himself and characters in Grand Opera, he’s done things which people are supposed to do when they’re in love, like mope a lot, and blab to their friends, and get drunk when things are going wrong. But I’ve never believed he’s actually been in love.
I never told him, but he reminded me of those people who are always claiming to have the flu when all they’ve got is a heavy cold. ‘I had that nasty three-day flu,’ they’ll say. Oh no you didn’t, you had a runny nose and a bit of a headache and your hearing went funny, but that wasn’t flu, that was only a cold. Just as it was the previous time. And the time before that. Nothing more than a heavy cold.
I hope Oliver hasn’t got the flu.
Shut up. Shut up.
Oliver ‘Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.’ Who said that? Someone. Some hero of mine.
I whisper it to myself, Monday to Friday, between 6.32 and 6.38, sitting in my bottle-brush canopy, as steatopygous Stu comes trundling home. ‘Punctuality is the virtue of the bored.’
I can’t stand to see him coming home, either. How dare he come home and end my happiness? Of course I don’t want him to fall under a tube train (clutching his return half in his raincoat pocket!), I just can’t bear the gloom I feel as he turns the corner with his briefcase in his hand and a mugwump smile on his face.
I’ve taken to doing something I probably shouldn’t. It’s Stuart’s fault, he set me off, mugwumping home like that to his little tufty nest, all smug and snug, while I sit up here in my unlighted room pretending to be Orson Fucking Welles. When he turns the corner, some time between 6.32 and 6.38, I press number 1 on my absurd matt-black leather-encrusted portable telephone which would live much more happily in that stocky briefcase of Stu’s. It has all sorts of nifty ploys, this phone, as the vendor throbbingly explained to me. One of the more basic of these – which even I was deemed able to comprehend – is called a Storage Facility. In other words, it remembers numbers. Or in my case, it remembers one number. Hers.
As Stuart turns his shining sunset face toward home, Oliver presses 1 and waits for her voice.
‘Yes?’
‘I love you.’
She puts the phone down.
Stu reaches for the handle of his gate.
My phone pops, buzzes, and offers its expectant dialling tone up to my ear.
Gillian He touched me today. Oh God, don’t say it’s started. Has it started?
I mean, we’ve touched each other before. I’ve taken his arm, ruffled his hair, we’ve hugged, kissed cheeks, the usual between friends. And this was less, less than any of those, and yet much more.
I was at my easel. My hair came loose. I reached out my hand towards the comb I keep on my stool.
‘Don’t move,’ he said, very quietly.
I went on working. I felt him come across. He took the grip out of my hair, the hair fell loose, he combed it back behind my ear, slid the grip into place, clicked it shut, put the comb back on the stool, went and sat down. Just that, no more.
Luckily I was working on a straightforward patch. I just continued automatically for a minute or two. Then he said, ‘I love that comb.’
It’s unfair. Comparisons are unfair, I know. I shouldn’t make them. I never gave that comb of mine a thought. I’ve always used it. One day, soon after we met, Stuart was in my studio and saw it. He said: ‘Your comb’s broken.’ A couple of days later, he gave me a new one. He’d obviously gone to some trouble because it was the same size as the old one, and tortoise-shell too. But I didn’t use it. I kept the old one. It’s as if my fingers have got used to feeling for those missing teeth and know where they are.
Now Oliver just says, ‘I love that comb,’ and I feel lost. Lost and found.
It isn’t fair on Stuart. I say to myself, ‘It isn’t fair on Stuart’, but the words don’t seem to have the slightest effect.
Oliver When I was a boy, The Old Bastard used to take The Times. No doubt he still does. He vaunted his skill at the mots croisés. For my part, I used to look at the Obituaries and work out the average age at which Old Bastards had died that day. Then I’d work out how long there was to go statistically for the Old Bastard Crossword Solver himself.
There was also the Letters Page, which my father would scrutinise for dank prejudices dripping with the correct amount of pond-weed. Sometimes the Old Bastard would give a deep, almost colonic grunt as some pachydermatous déjà pensée – Repatriate All Herbivores to Patagonia – miraculously accorded with his own, and I would think, Yes, there really are a lot of Old Bastards out there.
The thing I remember from the Letters Page in those antique days was the way the OBs signed off. There was Yours faithfully, Yours sincerely, and I have the honour to be, sir, your obedient servant. But the ones I always looked for – and which I took to be the true sign of an Old Bastard – simply ended like this: Yours etc. And then the newspaper drew even more attention to the sign-off by printing it: Yours &c.
Yours &c. I used to muse about that. What did it mean? Where did it come from? I imagined some bespatted captain of industry dictating his OB’s views to his secretary for transmission to the Newspaper of Record which he doubtless referred to with jocund familiarity as ‘The Thunderer’. When his oratorical belch was complete, he would say, ‘Yours etc,’ which Miss ffffffolkes would automatically transcribe into, ‘I have the honour to be, sir, one of the distinguished Old Bastards who could send you the label off a tin of pilchards and you would still print it above this my name,’ or whatever, and then it would be, ‘Despatch this instanter to The Thunderer, Miss fffff
folkes.’
But one day Miss ffffffolkes was away giving a handjob to the Archbishop of York, so they sent a temp. And the temp wrote down Yours, etc, just as she heard it and The Times reckoned the OB captain of industry a very gusher of wit, but decided to add their own little rococo touch by compacting it further to &c, wherepon other OBs followed the bespatted lead of the captain of industry, who claimed all the credit for himself. There we have it: Yours &c.
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 i
s 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.