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?
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 whi
ch 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.