I’ll tell you something you haven’t heard before. Pravda is Russian for truth. No, I guessed you knew that. What I’m going to tell you is this: there is no rhyme for pravda in Russian. Ponder and weigh this insufficiency. Doesn’t that just echo down the canyons of your mind?
Gillian We came here because Oliver got a job at the school in Toulouse.
We came here because I heard there was a chance of work from the Musée des Augustins. There are also some private clients, and I was given a couple of introductions.
We came here because London is no longer a place to bring up children, and we want Sophie to be bilingual like Maman.
We came here because of the weather and the quality of life.
We came here because Stuart started sending me flowers. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine?
We talked it over beforehand. We talked about all these things except for the last one. How could Stuart do that? I couldn’t work out whether it was genuine – saying he was sorry – or some kind of sick revenge. Either way I couldn’t handle it.
Oliver It was Gill’s decision. Well, of course we brown-nosed democracy, went through the hallowed process of consultation, but when les frites are down a marriage always consists of one moderate and one militant, don’t you find? From which statement you are not to truffle out some routine whine of the orchidectomised male. Rather, let us agree upon the following generality: that those who have inflicted marriage upon themselves assume such rival guises alternately. When I wooed her I was the single-issue hard-liner, she the quailing middle-of-the-roader. But when it came to exchanging the hot pong of stagnant London bus for the genteel waft of herbes de Provence, then it was Gillian’s migratory pulse which resounded like the mighty dented gong of J. Arthur Rank. My own heart-flutter of expatriation could only be detected with auscultatory assistance.
Look, she found me the job. Discovered the mildewed quarterly in which might be discovered the whereabouts of honest employ à l’étranger. I was feasting upon London, given that the steatopygous one had taken his chubbiness off to another continent. But I could catch the anticipatory rustle of Gill’s wings; I could sense her sitting on the telephone wire at dusk, dreaming of the south. And if, as I once ventured to Stu-baby, money may be compared to love, then marriage is the bill. I jest. I half-jest, anyway.
Gillian Of course Oliver, like most men, is fundamentally lazy. They make one big decision and think they they can spend the next few years sunning themselves like a lion on a hilltop. My father ran off with his schoolgirl and that was probably the last decision he took in the whole of his life. Now Oliver’s a bit the same. He makes a lot of noise but he doesn’t get much done. Don’t misunderstand me: I love Oliver. But I do know him.
It simply wasn’t realistic for us to go on in the same old way, except with Oliver slotted into my life in the exact position that Stuart had occupied. Even when I got pregnant it didn’t seem to concentrate Oliver’s thoughts. I tried to explain these things to him, and he just said, in a rather pained way, ‘But I’m happy, Gill, I’m so happy.’ I loved him of course, for that, and we kissed, and he stroked my tummy which was still as flat as a pancake, and made some silly joke about the tadpole, and everything was fine for the rest of the evening. That’s the thing about Oliver: he’s very good at making things fine for the rest of the evening. But there is always the next morning. And on that next morning, I thought, I’m very glad he’s happy, I’m happy too, and this ought to be enough, but it isn’t, is it? You have to be happy and practical, that’s the truth.
Now, I don’t want my husband to rule the world – if I’d wanted that, I wouldn’t have married the two I did – but equally I don’t want him to bumble along without thought of the future. In all the time I’d known him, Oliver’s career, if that isn’t too grand a word for it, had made only a single movement, and that was downwards. He was sacked by the Shakespeare School and moved to Mr Tim’s. And anyone could see he was better than that. He needed pointing in the right direction, especially with me being pregnant. I didn’t want … Look, I know I’ve said this before, I said it about Stuart, but it’s true, and I’m not ashamed of it. I didn’t want Oliver to be disappointed.
I expect he’s mentioned Monsieur Lagisquet’s dog. There are two things he tells everyone about, the castle in the village, which with every retelling becomes a more and more important Crusader fortress or Cathar stronghold, and the dog. He’s a very friendly, russet-brown, shiny-coated dog called Poulidor, but he’s now got so old that he’s gone stone deaf. Both Oliver and I find this terribly sad, but not for the same reason. Oliver finds it sad because Poulidor can no longer hear his master’s friendly whistle as they walk across the fields, and he’s cut off in a world of silence. Whereas I find it sad because I know he’s going to be run over one day. He just comes bursting out of Monsieur Lagisquet’s house all panting and hopeful, as if once he gets outside he’ll rediscover his hearing. Drivers don’t imagine dogs being deaf when they see them. I keep thinking about some young man, going a bit too fast through the village, seeing Poulidor lolloping along, and this impatient driver hooting, hooting again at the stupid dog, then swerving just too late. I see it all. And I told Monsieur Lagisquet he ought to tie the dog up, or put him on a long rope. He said he’d tried once and Poulidor had just moped all the time and wouldn’t eat, so he untied him. He said he wanted the dog to be happy. I said you can be happy but you have to be practical as well. And now the dog is going to get run over some time. I just know it.
Do you see what I mean?
Stuart I had a lot of plans. One of the first ones was to pay a girl at that tacky school Oliver was reduced to teaching at to denounce him. Say he’d made advances to her. It would probably have been true anyway – if not that girl, it would have been true of another. Perhaps he’d have got the sack. Perhaps the police would have come in this time. But in any event Gill would have known the sort of man she’d left me for. It would always rankle, and she’d never have felt safe again. That was a good plan.
When I got to the States I had another plan. I was going to pretend to have killed myself. I wanted to hurt them a lot, you see. I wasn’t sure how I was going to do it. One idea was to write under another name to the old boys’ magazine, the Edwardian, and have them put in an obituary notice, and then make sure it got sent on to Oliver. I also thought about getting some intermediary to pass on the news on a visit to London, casually somehow. ‘Sad about Stuart topping himself, wasn’t it? No, he never got over the break-up. Oh, you didn’t know …?’ Who would do it? Someone. Someone I’d pay.
I thought about that idea rather too much. It made me gloomy. It got a bit tempting, if you know what I mean. To do it really. To make it all true, and punish them. So I stopped.
But it’s not over. Oh, my marriage is over, I know that. But it’s not over, not until I feel it is. It’s not over till it stops hurting. There’s a long way to go. And I can’t get over the feeling that it wasn’t fair, what happened. I ought to be able to get over that, oughtn’t I?
Mme Wyatt and I write to one another. Guess what? She’s having an affair. Good for you, Mme Wyatt.
Oliver This is probably not the right thing to say, but then I never made a career out of saying the right thing. There are times when I miss Stuart. Yeah, yeah, you don’t have to tell me. I know what I did. I have chewed guilt like an old Boer trekker with biltong between his teeth. And what makes it worse is that sometimes I think Stuart was the person who understood me best. I hope he’s all right. I hope he’s got a nice cuddly inamorata. I see them barbecuing over mesquite wood while the cardinal birds swoop low over the lawn and the cicadas thrum like the assembled strings of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. I wish him everything, that Stuart: health, hearth, happiness and herpes. I would wish him a hot tub if I didn’t think he’d keep tropical fish in it. Oh Lordie, just the thought of him makes me chuckle.
Do you know if he’s got a girl? I wonder if he’s got some crepuscular secret, some sexua
l hidey-hole. What could it be? Porn? Flashing? Erotic phone calls? Filthy faxes? No, I hope he’s making out. I hope life isn’t making him poo-scared. I wish him … reversibility.
Stuart I’d like to put the record straight in one respect. You’ve probably forgotten, but Oliver used to have this joke with me. Well, not so much with me as at my expense. About how I thought a Mantra was a make of car. I let him get away with it at the time, but what I wanted to say was, ‘Actually, it’s a Manta, Oliver, not a Mantra.’ The Manta Ray, to be exact. Very powerful job, made by General Motors, based on the Corvette. I even toyed with buying one when I got over here. But it’s hardly my image. And it would have been giving in to the past a bit too much, don’t you agree?
Trust Oliver to get it wrong.
Mme Wyatt Stuart writes. I send him news, what news there is. He can’t let go. He says he is making a new life for himself, but I feel that he is unable to let go.
The one thing that might help him let go I cannot bring myself to tell him. About the baby. He does not know they have a child. It is terrible to be in possession of a piece of information which you think can hurt somebody. And because I did not tell him at once this made it harder to tell him later.
You see, there was an afternoon they came to see me, and my daughter was out of the room, and Stuart was sitting there waiting to be examined, with his shoes all shiny and his hair brushed back, and he said to me, ‘We are going to have children, you know.’ And then he suddenly looked embarrassed, and said, ‘I mean, I do not mean now … I do not mean she is …’ And then there was a noise from the kitchen and he looked even more embarrassed, and said, ‘Gill does not know yet. I mean, we have not talked about it, but I am sure, I mean, oh dear …’ And he just ran out of words. I said, ‘It is all right, it is our secret,’ and he looked suddenly very relieved, and then I could see from his face that he could not wait for Gillian to come back into the room.
I kept remembering this when Oliver told me that Gillian was pregnant.
Sophie Anne Louise. It is a bit pretentious, do you not find? Maybe it is better in English. Sophie Anne Louise. No, it still sounds like one of Queen Victoria’s grandchildren.
Gillian Oliver is a good teacher, I wouldn’t want you to think otherwise. There was a little vin d’honneur at the end of last term and the director made a point of telling me how good he was with the pupils and how they all appreciated him. Oliver pooh-poohed this afterwards. The line he takes is that teaching English ‘Conversation et Civilisation’ is a push-over, as you can say any weird thing that comes into your head and the pupils treat it as a priceless example of le British sense of humour. But he would say that. He’s got a lot of bravado, Oliver, but he hasn’t really got any self-confidence.
Sending your ex-wife flowers two years after you’ve broken up. What’s that about?
When I was growing up, which seems to me a long time ago now, I had all the usual conversations. What did we want from a man, what were we looking for? Usually, with other girls, I’d just name film stars. But to myself I’d say that what I wanted was someone I could love, respect and fancy. I thought that was what one should be aiming for, if the thing were to last. And when I started with men it always seemed as difficult as getting three strawberries in a row on a fruit machine. You’d get one, and then you might get another, but by that time the first one had spun away. There was a button marked HOLD but it didn’t seem to work properly.
Love, respect, fancy. I thought I’d got all three with Stuart. I thought I’d got all three with Oliver. But maybe three’s not possible. Maybe the best you can get is two, and the HOLD button is always on the blink.
Mme Rives He says he’s Canadian. Québécois he isn’t. He wanted a room at the front. He didn’t know how long he’d be staying. He told me again he was Canadian. So what? Money has no colour.
Gillian There had to be rules. There had to be very firm rules, that’s obvious, isn’t it? You can’t just ‘be happy’; you have to manage happiness. That’s one of the things I know now. We came here, we were starting again, and properly this time. A new country, new jobs, the baby. Oliver would make Speeches about the New Found Golden Land, and so forth. One day when Sophie had taken more out of me than usual, I interrupted him.
‘Look, Oliver, one of the rules is, no affairs.’
‘Che?’
‘No affairs, Oliver.’
Perhaps I said it the wrong way, I don’t know, but he really flew off the handle. You can imagine the rhetoric. I don’t remember it all, because I’m afraid that when I’m tired I have a sort of filtering system for Ollie. I just take out what I need to keep the conversation going.
‘Oliver, all I’m saying … Given the circumstances in which we met … given that everyone thought we were having an affair and that’s why Stuart and I broke up … I just think, for our own sakes, we have to be careful.’
Now Oliver can be extremely sarcastic, as you may have noticed. He denies it, he says sarcasm is vulgar. ‘Playful irony au maximum,’ he claims. So maybe he was merely being playful and ironic when he pointed out to me that if he remembered correctly, the reason we didn’t have an affair while I was married to Stuart was because he’d declined my very pressing offer (various anatomical references at this point, which I’ll leave out), and so if anyone was to be suspected of having affairs it was me, etc. etc. Which I suppose was a fair point to make, except that mothers with small babies who also work don’t on the whole have the energy to jump into bed with other people, and so on.
It was awful. It was a shouting match. I was just trying to be practical, trying to express something that I thought came out of my love for Oliver, and he got all jumpy and hostile.
These things don’t immediately go away, either. And the heat down here makes it worse. We were scratchy with one another all the following week. And guess what? That stupid old tank he drives because he thinks it’s stylish broke down three times. Three times! And the third time he mentioned the carburettor I must have looked a bit sceptical, because he turned on me.
‘Say it, then.’
‘What?’
‘Go on, say it.’
‘All right,’ I said, knowing that I shouldn’t. ‘What’s she called?’
He gave a sort of roar, as if he’d won by making me say it, and as I looked at him standing over me I knew – we both knew, I think – that he could easily hit me. If I’d gone on, he would have hit me.
He’d won, and we’d both lost. It hadn’t even been a real quarrel either, not about something, it was just made out of some senseless need to quarrel. I hadn’t succeeded in managing happiness.
Later I cried. And I thought: SWEDE’S TURNIP’S SWEET POTATO’S CAULI’S COX’S SPROUT’S. No-one ever told that chap, no-one corrected him. Or they did, and he never listened.
No, this isn’t England. This is France, so I’ll give you a different comparison. I was talking to Monsieur Lagisquet the other day. He’s got a few hectares of vines outside the village, and he told me that in the old days they used to plant a rosebush at the end of each row of vines. Apparently a rose shows signs of disease first, so the bushes act as an early-warning system. He said that locally this tradition had now died out, but they still do it in other parts of France.
I think people should plant rose-bushes in real life. We need some sort of early-warning system.
Oliver’s different out here. Actually, I mean the opposite of that. Oliver’s exactly the same as he’s always been and always will be, it’s just that he comes across differently. The French don’t really read him. It never struck me before we moved down here, but Oliver is one of those people who makes more sense in a context. He seemed terribly exotic when I first met him; now he seems less colourful. It’s not just the effect of time and familiarity, either. It’s that here the only English person he’s got to set him off is me, and that’s not really enough. He needed someone like Stuart around. It’s the same as colour theory. When you put two colours side by side, that affec
ts the way you see each of them. It’s exactly the same principle.
Stuart I took three weeks’ leave. I went to London. I thought I’d be able to handle it better than I did. I wasn’t stupid, I didn’t try going back to places I’d been with Gill. I just felt angry and sad at the same time. People say angry-sad is an improvement on sad-sad, but I’m not so sure. If you’re sad-sad people are nice to you. But if you’re angry-sad you just want to go to the middle of Trafalgar Square and scream at people. IT’S NOT MY FAULT. LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO ME. WHY DID THIS HAPPEN? IT ISN’T FAIR. People who are angry-sad aren’t really working it through; they’re the ones who go mad. I’m that person you see on the Underground talking to himself just a bit too loudly, the sort of person you keep out of the way of. Don’t go too near him, he might be a jumper or a pusher. He might suddenly leap in front of the train – or he might knock you under it.
So I went to see Mme Wyatt. She gave me their address. I said I wanted to write because the last time we’d met they’d tried to be friends and I’d shoved them away. I’m not sure Mme Wyatt believed me. She’s a good reader of people. So I changed the subject and asked her about her new lover.
‘My old lover,’ she replied.
‘Oh,’ I said, imagining some elderly gentleman with a rug over his lap. ‘You didn’t tell me how old he was.’
‘No, I mean to say, my former lover.’
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Don’t be. It was just … a passage. Faut bien que le corps exulte.’
‘Yes.’ You know, that’s not a word I’d have thought of using. Does the body exult in English? The body has a jolly good time, I think, but I don’t know if it exactly exults. Or perhaps that’s just me.