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.
It was my fault, and it wasn’t my fault. You see, I wanted a church wedding. I wanted to be best man. They couldn’t understand it at the time, and nor could I. None of us has any religious sense, there weren’t any fundamentalist kinsmen to pacify: the absence of a fellow in a frilly white frock wouldn’t have led to the thrust of disinheritance. But Ollie must have been prescient. I said I wanted to be best man, I said I wanted a church wedding. I rather went on about it. I started shouting. I came the Hamlets a bit. I was drunk at the time, if you must know.
‘Oliver,’ said Stu after a while, ‘you’re way out of order. This is our wedding. We’ve already asked you to be a witness.’
I reminded them both of the force of ancient ceremony, the ley-lines of hymeneal fortune, the gilded corrugations of the sacred text. ‘Go on,’ I urged in completion, ‘get done by a vie.’
Stuart’s plump little visage tightened as far as that was a physical possibility. ‘Oliver,’ he said, lapsing almost parodically at this solemn moment into the brute vocabulary of mercantilism, ‘we’ve asked you to be a witness and that’s our final offer.’
‘You’ll regret it,’ I yelled, a captain of industry from Mitteleurop thwarted by the Monopolies Commission. ‘You’ll regret it.’
What I mean by prescient is this. If we’d had a church wedding, she’d have done the white-lace-and-trimmings bit, the full veil-and-trail number. I might have looked at her outside the church and seen just another assembly-line bride. And then it might never have happened.
It was her face that did it. I didn’t know at the time. I thought I was just a bit hyper, like everyone else. But I was gone, sunk. Unimaginable change had happened. Fallen like Lucifer; fallen (this one is for you, Stu) like the stock market in 1929. I was also gone in the sense that I was transformed, made over. You know that story of the man who wakes up and finds he’s turned into a beetle? I was the beetle who woke up and saw the possibility of being a man.
Not that the organs of perception apprehended it at the time. As we sat there at the wedding-feast I held to the pedestrian belief that the rustling jetsam at my feet was merely the accumulation of champagne foil. (I had to insist on personally opening the little non-vintage number Stuart had secured in bulk. No-one knows how to open champagne nowadays, not even waiters. Especially waiters. The idea, I have to keep telling people, is not to make the cork go jolly pop and thus provoke an ejaculatory mousse from the bottle. No, the idea is to open it without so much as a nun’s fart. Hold the cork and turn the bottle, that’s the secret. How many times do I have to repeat it? Forget the flourish of the big white napkin, forget two thumbs on the cork’s corona, forget aiming at the bulbs in the recessed ceiling-lights. Just hold the cork and turn the bottle.) No, what blew against my ankles like tumbleweed that afternoon was not the crinkle of Mumm NV but the discarded skin of my former being, my beetle carapace, my sloughed and umber appurtenances.
Panic, that was the first reaction to whatever it was that had just happened. And it got worse when I realised I didn’t know where they were going for their lune de miel. (How duncical, by the way, for both French and English to retain the same phrase. You would think that one of us might scurry around for a new word instead of accepting linguistic hand-me-downs. Or perhaps that’s the point: the phrase is the same because the experience is the same. [Honeymoon, by the way, just in case you can’t cut the etymological mustard, has only in recent times come to denote a nuptial holiday involving the purchase of duty-free goods and the taking of too many colour prints of exactly the same scene. Dr Johnson, in his intermittently droll Dictionary, was for once not attempting to stir mirth when he defined it thus: ‘The first month after marriage, when there is nothi
ng but tenderness and pleasure.’ Voltaire, an altogether more sympathetic figure, who incidentally used to serve himself the best Burgundy while giving his guests vin ordinaire, observed in one of his philosophical tales that la lune de miel is followed the next month by la lune de Vabsinthe.])
You see, I suddenly felt that I couldn’t bear it, not knowing where they were going to be for the next three and a half weeks (though in retrospect I doubt whether the location of the groom much perturbed me). So when, towards the end of lunch, Stuart lurched to his feet and informed the table – why this confessional urge that comes upon people at such times? – that he was ‘Just going to decant’ (and the awful phrases they come up with: from which beagling divisional manager did my chum filch that one?), I slipped from my own chair without a word, kicked away the detritus of my previous life which was posing as champagne foil, and followed him to the Gents.
There we stood, side by side at those hip-high porcelain scoops, each staring grimly ahead at some Mexican firing-squad in the way that Englishmen do, neither dropping his gaze for a squint at the other’s tackle. There we stood, two rivals as yet quite unaware they were rivals, each grasping his membrum virile – should I offer the groom some tips as to its deployment? – and peeing virtually unamended, rebottleable Mumm NV on to a little violet cube of toilet-freshener. (How would my life change if I had a great deal of money? I return constantly to the same two luxuries: having someone to wash my hair every morning, and peeing over crushed ice.)
We seemed to be peeing more than we could possibly have drunk. Stuart gave a little embarrassed cough, as if to say, ‘Don’t know about you, but I’m not even halfway there.’ It seemed the moment to enquire into the planned whereabouts of the hymeneal rough-and-tumble. But all I got in reply was a squinty smirk and the hiss of piss.
‘No, really,’ I insisted a minute or so later, as I laundered my fingers and Stuart needlessly scraped a fetid plastic comb over his cranium, ‘where are you going? You know, just in case I need to get in touch.’
‘State secret. Even Gillie doesn’t know. Just told her to take light clothes.’
He was still smirking, so I presumed that some juvenile guessing-game was required of me. I hazarded various Stuartesque destinations like Florida, Bali, Crete and Western Turkey, each of which was greeted by a smug nod of negativity. I essayed all the Disneylands of the world and a selection of tarmacked spice islands; I patronised him with Marbella, applauded him with Zanzibar, tried aiming straight with Santorini. I got nowhere.
‘Look, something might happen …’ I began.
‘Sealed envelope with Mme Wyatt,’ he replied, laying an uncharacteristic finger against his nose as if this was what he’d been to spy-school for.
‘Don’t be so bloody bourgeois,’ I shouted. But he wouldn’t tell me. Back at the table I was in crepuscular mood for a few minutes, then bent once more to the task of diverting the wedding guests.
The day after they left for their honeymoon I telephoned Mme Wyatt, and guess what? The old vache wouldn’t tell me. Claimed she hadn’t opened the envelope. I said I missed them, I wanted to telephone them. It was true, I did miss them. I may have cried down the telephone, but Mme Dragon wouldn’t unbend.
And by the time they came back (yes, it was Crete: I’d guessed, but he hadn’t flickered, the duplicitous bastard), I knew I was in love. I got a sun-’n’-sex postcard from Heraklion, worked out which day they’d be returning, telephoned all possible airlines and went to meet them at Gatwick. When the indicator board clacked out the information BAGGAGE IN HALL against their flight, a circle of bell-ringers in my stomach all heaved on their ropes at the same time, and the terrible clangour they set off in my skull could only be stilled by a couple of stiff ones at the bar. Then I waited at the barrier, the motley flesh around me all pulsing with welcome.
I saw them before they saw me. Stuart had typically picked a trolley with one locked wheel, and he emerged from the tender scrutiny of the douaniers in a comic curve, his uncertain course hymned by Gillian’s indulgent laughter and his trolley’s maundering squeak. I adjusted the chauffeur’s cap I’d borrowed, hoisted a rudely lettered sign reading ‘Mr & Mrs Stewart Hughes’ (the misspelling was a tad masterly, I thought), took a deep breath and prepared to face the glittering turmoil that my life would become. As I watched her before she became aware of me, I whispered to myself, Everything begins here.
6: Stave Off Alzheimer’s
Stuart It’s really rather awful you know. I keep on feeling sorry for Oliver. I don’t mean I shouldn’t – no, I’ve got lots of reasons now – it’s just that I’m uncomfortable with it. This isn’t what I should feel for him. But I do. Have you seen those cuckoo clocks which have little weathermen as part of the mechanism? The clock goes off, the cuckoo goes cuckoo, and then a little door opens and either the good-weather weatherman comes out, all grinning and dressed for the sunshine, or else another door opens and it’s the bad-weather weatherman who comes out with an umbrella and a raincoat and a grumpy expression. The point is, only one of the two can come out of his little door at any one time, not just because that would make impossible weather, but because the two little men are joined together by a metal bar: one has to stay in if the other one is out. That’s how it’s always been with Oliver and me. I’ve always been the one with the umbrella and raincoat, forced to stay indoors in the dark. But now it’s my time in the sun, and that seems to mean that Oliver’s going to have less fun for a bit.
He looked a real mess at the airport, and I don’t think we helped matters. We’d had these super three weeks in Crete – marvellous weather, nice hotel, swimming, really got on – and even though the flight was delayed we were still in a terrific mood when we got to Gatwick. I waited at the carousel, Gillie fetched a trolley, and by the time she got back the bags had already come up. I loaded them on, and when she tried to push she found out she’d got a trolley with a wonky wheel. It wouldn’t go in a straight line and kept squeaking, as if it was trying to draw the attention of the customs officers to the person pushing: ‘Hey, take a look at this chap’s bags.’ That’s what I thought the trolley sounded like as we went through the green channel. I’d joined in trying to control the thing by now as Gillian found she couldn’t manage curves on her own.
So it wasn’t really surprising that we didn’t recognise Ollie when we got into the arrivals hall. No-one knew we were on this flight, and we only had eyes for one another, frankly. So when someone emerged from the scrum of drivers meeting various flights and waved a sign in our face, I sort of pushed him away. I didn’t really look at him, though I immediately smelled alcohol on his breath, and thought, that firm isn’t going to last long if it’s sending out drunken drivers to pick up clients. But it was Oliver, dressed in a chauffeur’s cap and carrying a sign with our names on it. I pretended to be glad to see him, though my first thought was that Gill and I wouldn’t be alone on the train back to Victoria. We’d have Oliver with us. Isn’t that unkind? You see what I mean about feeling sorry for him?
And he was in a terrible state. He seemed to have lost weight, and his face was all white and drawn, and his hair, which he normally keeps quite neat, was getting straggly. He sort of stood there, and then, after we’d recognised him, he threw himself on us both, hugging and kissing us. Not typical behaviour at all, because it was more pathetic than welcoming. And he did smell of drink. What was that about? He said our flight had been delayed and he’d spent the time in the bar, and then added, rather unconvincingly, that some woman had insisted on ‘plying Phaeton with liquor’ as he put it, but there was a hollowness in the way he said it, and I don’t think either Gill or I believed him for a moment. And here’s another odd thing: he didn’t ask us about our honeymoon. Not till much later. No, the first thing he launched into was a harangue about how Gillian’s mother wouldn’t tell him where we were staying. I wondered if we should let him drive, given the state he was in.
Later, I found out what it was all about. You’ll never gues
s what’s happened. Oliver has gone and lost his job. He’s managed to get himself sacked from the Shakespeare School of English. Now that has to be a first. I don’t know how much Oliver’s told you about the Shakespeare School, but take it from me that place is tacky: how it got its registered status I shudder to think. I went there once. It’s in what was obviously quite a nice terrace at one time, early Victorian or something, with big fat columns holding up the porches and railings on the street and steps leading to the basement. But the whole area’s gone terribly downhill. The telephone boxes are all covered with prostitutes’ phone numbers, the street-sweepers probably haven’t been since 1968, and there are left-over hippies in attics playing mad music all the time. You can imagine the sort of area. And the Shakespeare School is in the basement. And the Principal looks like a serial killer. And Ollie managed to get himself sacked from the place.
He didn’t want to talk about it, and muttered that he’d resigned over a matter of principle concerning next year’s timetable. As soon as he said this, I didn’t believe him. Not that it’s impossible – indeed, it’s rather the sort of thing Oliver might do – but I’ve somehow stopped believing most of what he says. That’s rather awful, isn’t it? He is my oldest friend. And it’s not made any better by feeling sorry for him. A year or two ago I would have believed him, and maybe the truth would have come out a few months later. But now I instinctively thought, Oh no you didn’t Ollie, you didn’t resign, you got sacked. I suppose it’s something to do with me being happy, being married, knowing where I am: I can see things more clearly now than I used to.
So when I next got Oliver alone, I said to him quietly, ‘Look, you can tell me, you didn’t resign, did you?’ He went all quiet and un-Oliver-like and admitted that he’d got the sack. When I asked him what for he gave a sad sigh and then a sort of bitter grin and looked me in the eye and said, ‘Sexual harassment.’ Apparently there’d been this girl, Spanish or Portuguese I think, and Ollie had been giving her private lessons at his flat, and he thought she fancied him, and he’d had a couple of Special Brews at the time and thought she was just shy, and then he tried kissing her, and it’s the old, old, sordid story, isn’t it? Turned out the girl was not just a devout Catholic who was only interested in improving her English but also the daughter of some big-shot industrialist with lots of connections at the Embassy … The girl told her father, and one phone-call later Oliver was out in the gutter with the styrofoam burger boxes and not even any severance pay. He got quieter and quieter as the story unfolded, and I believed every word of it. He also couldn’t face me. Towards the end I realised he was crying. When he finished he looked up at me, and there were tears all down his face, and he said to me, ‘Lend us a quid, Stu.’