‘So,’ I said, as we settled our flagons back on the quiz-night beer mats, ‘no hard feelings? All blood under the bridge?’
‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he replied.
So that’s all right, then.
Mme Wyatt Stuart asks me what are soft feelings. I say I do not know what he is talking of. He replies, ‘Everyone always says no hard feelings, Mme W, so I was just wondering what are soft feelings.’ I tell him I have lived here thirty years or more—probably more—but that I certainly do not understand the crazy language. Or the crazy English for that matter.
‘Oh, I think you do, Mme W, I think you understand us only too well.’ And he gave me a wink. I thought at first it was a nervous tic that had developed, but it clearly was not. This was not the typical behaviour of the Stuart I remember from before.
But then Stuart has changed much. He looks, if it is possible to understand me, like someone who has placed all his troubles behind him in order to embrace with enthusiasm some new ones. He is thinner than he used to be and not so anxious to please. No, that is not quite true. But among men there are different ways of pleasing, at least of trying to please. Some find out what it is that pleases other people and then try to perform it, while others simply do what they propose to do in the expectation and in the confidence that what they have decided to do will in any case please. Stuart has passed from the first type to the second type. For instance, he has conceived of what he calls a Rescue Package for Gillian and Oliver. I do not think that Gillian and Oliver have asked him to rescue them. Is this not the case? So perhaps what he is doing is dangerous. To him, not to them. One is rarely forgiven for being generous.
Stuart does not even appear to be paying attention when I tell him this. He asks me instead, ‘Do you know the expression blood under the bridge?’
Why am I all of a sudden an expert on the English language? I tell him it sounds like when you punch someone on the nose.
‘Hit the nail on the head as usual, Mme W,’ he replies.
Ellie The people you meet in this job—you’d never meet them normally. Like, I’m a 23-year-old picture restorer with just enough money for rent and food, and they’re rich enough to have paintings that need restoring. They’re quite polite, but they haven’t a clue, lots of them. I know far more about pictures than they do, I appreciate them more, but they’re the ones that have them.
Take the man whose picture this is. Look, I’ll put a better light on it for you. Yes, you said it. Mid-nineteenth-century park railings. He sort of admitted it was rubbish, straight out. If I’d been Gillian I’d probably have said no it isn’t just crap it’s complete crap, but as I’m not I merely said something about never arguing with a client, and he laughed, but didn’t go on to explain. I suppose he could have been left it. By a blind auntie.
The same with how he found me—didn’t really explain that. Said he’d looked me up in the book. I pointed out I wasn’t in the yellow pages, he said someone had recommended me—who? oh, he couldn’t remember—they didn’t know the number, blah blah blah. Half the time he was Mr Mystery Man, and half the time he seemed to be really focused.
He lives in this totally bare flat in St John’s Wood. You couldn’t tell if he’d just moved in or was just about to move out. The lighting was terrible, there were horrible lace curtains, and nothing on the walls—and I mean nothing. Perhaps he’d suddenly noticed and gone out and bought this picture.
On the other hand, he was very interested in the business side of things. Asked me lots of questions about prices, rents, materials, techniques. He somehow knew the right questions to ask. Where our work came from, what we needed in the studio. Said whoever had recommended me had spoken highly of my ‘partner.’ Boss. So I talked about Gillian a bit.
‘I mean, she would probably tell you this isn’t worth the canvas it’s painted on,’ I said at one point.
‘Then it’s just as well I came to you and not her, isn’t it?’
He could have been an American who’d lost his accent.
Oliver The law of unintended effect. You see, when I fell in love with Gillian, I little thought that our coup de foudre would exile Stuart to the New Golden Land and translate him into a greengrocer. How little I knew—I didn’t even suspect there was a law covering such eventualities. And then—fast-forward a decade—we have the Poussinesque theme of the Exile’s Return. The Friendship Restored. The Happy Trio happy again. The missing jigsaw piece located. I would be pushed to compare Stuart to a Prodigal, but what the fuck, it’s somebody’s saint’s day every day of the year, so here’s to St Stuart, raise your goblet and toast this Prodigal Son of ours.
St Stuart. I’m sorry, I gave myself the giggles. Stabat Mater Dolorosa, and crammed into a predella beneath are St Brian, St Wendy and St Stuart.
Gillian You like Maman, don’t you? You probably think she’s—what?—a wise old bird, a real character. You probably flirt with her a bit. I wouldn’t be surprised. Both Oliver and Stuart used to, in their different ways. And I bet Maman’s been flirting with you, whatever your age or sex. She’s like that. She’s probably got you round her little finger by now.
It’s all right, I’m not jealous. I would have been once. Mothers and daughters—you know the story. And then, mother and daughter without a father—do you know that one too? What the teenage daughter thinks of the mother’s … suitors, let’s call them, what the mother thinks of the daughter’s boyfriends. That was a time neither of us likes to look back on. She thought I was too young for sex, and I thought she was too old for it. I went out with some really dirty-looking boys, she went out with pillars of the golf club who wondered if she’d got a few million francs stashed away. She didn’t want me pregnant, I didn’t want her humiliated. That’s what we said, anyway. What we felt was a bit different, less nice.
But that’s all over now. We’re never going to be like those puke-making mothers and daughters you see in magazines who are always going on about how they’re one another’s best friend. But I’ll tell you what I admire about Maman. She’s never felt sorry for herself—or if she has she doesn’t admit it. She has her pride. Her life hasn’t worked out like she hoped, but she just gets on with things. That doesn’t sound much of a lesson, does it? Still, it’s what she’s taught me. When I was growing up she was always giving me advice and I was never taking it, and the only real lesson I learnt she didn’t try to teach.
So I get on with things too. Like when … look, I probably shouldn’t be telling you this—Oliver would hate it—he’d think it a betrayal—but a year or two back Oliver had his—what?—episode? illness? depression? The words never seemed to cover it at the time and they still don’t. Did he tell you anything about it? No, I thought not. Oliver has his pride too. But I remember—vividly—getting home early one day, and he was still lying exactly where I’d left him, on his side, with a pillow over his head so that I could just see his nose and chin protruding, and he could feel my weight as I sat on the bed, but didn’t respond. I said—and the words seemed hopeless in my mouth as I uttered them—‘What’s the matter, Oliver?’
And he replied, not in one of his jokey voices, but straightforwardly, as if trying very hard to answer my question, ‘The inexpressible sadness of things.’
Do you think that’s partly it? Inexpressibility, I mean? If depression is the place where words run out, then its inexpressibility must make your plight, your isolation, all the more unbearable. So you bravely say, ‘Oh, I’m a bit down,’ or ‘Feeling blue,’ but the words make it worse, not better. I mean, we’ve all been there, or nearly there, at some point, haven’t we? And Oliver is good with words—as you’ll have noticed—so for him of all people to find things inexpressible …
Then he added something else, which I remember just as well. He said, ‘At least I’m not in the foetal position.’ And there wasn’t any answer to that either, because it was as if Oliver was saying, ‘I know all the clichés as well as you do.’ And whatever Oliver is or isn’
t, he’s intelligent, and someone being intelligent about their own depression is unbearable to watch. Because part of you feels their intelligence has helped get them into it but isn’t going to be any help getting them out. He wouldn’t see any doctors. He calls them the Men Who Guess. Actually, that’s what he calls all experts he disagrees with.
And because I’m frightened it might come again, I keep everything organised. I get on with things. I am Little Miss Brisk. Now Mrs Brisk. I think—I hope—that if I keep a structure to our lives, then Oliver can rattle around inside without coming to much harm. I tried to explain this to him once, and he said, ‘Oh, you mean like in a padded cell?’ Which is why I don’t explain things so much any more. I just get on with them.
Oliver I’m sorry, I had a sudden panic attack. Nothing serious. Just the idea that there really might have been a St Stuart. Let’s dream his hagiography a while. Goody-goody son of an honest soldier’s widow in provincial Asia Minor. While other lads were busy elasticating their prepuces, young Stuartus preferred threading dried beans on a piece of string. Grew up to be a prematurely grey tax-collector in the city of Smyrna, where his pedantic book-keeping uncovered an early Roman scam. The provincial governor’s ADC dipping his paw in the grain barrel. The gubernatorial cover-up sadly necessitating the execution of Stuartus of Smyrna on the trumped-up charge of spitting and defecating on idols in the Temple. The local Christian rabble-rousers opportunistically proclaiming him a martyr—whereupon, St Stuart! The law of unintended effect strikes again! Feast Day: April 1st. Patron and protector of the unmodified vegetable.
I hied me to the Dictionary of Saints. I was hyperventilating as I flicked the pages. St Simeon the Stylite, St Spiridon, St Stephen (bags of them), St … Sturm, St Sulpice, St Susan. Oof! O happy gap. That was a near one.
Call me a name-snob if you will. Call me Oliver. Best mate of Roland. The Battle of Roncesvalles. The seeing-off of the Saracen. A tragic falling out between the chums. Phrase: to give a Roland for an Oliver, id est, the exchange of mighty hammer blows in battle. Ah, the age of myth and legend. Charlemagne, knighthood, the high Pyrenean passes, the future of Europe, the future of Christendom itself at stake, the heroic rearguard, the stirring call of the battle horns, the sense of human life, however inconsequential, however much a tiddleywinks counter, being nonetheless flipped into the clash of greater forces. To be a pawn was something indeed when there were knights and bishops and kings on the board, when a pawn might dream of becoming a queen, when there was black versus white, and God above.
You see what we have lost? Nowadays there are only pawns on view, and both sides wear grey. Nowadays Oliver has a chum called Stuart, and that falling-out of theirs does not echo far. ‘He gave a Stuart for an Oliver.’ Oh dear. Handbags at ten paces.
On the other hand, do you think Hollywood might be ready for The Song of Roland? The ultimate buddy movie. Action, scenery, high stakes, and the love of fair women. Bruce Willis as the grizzled Roland, Mel Gibson as the fabled Oliver.
I’m sorry. I just gave myself the giggles again. Mel Gibson as Oliver. You’ll have to excuse me.
Gillian Oliver said, ‘Do you think Ellie would suit?’
‘Suit what?’
‘Stuart, of course.’
‘Stuart?’
‘Why not? He’s not that bad-looking.’ I just stared at him. ‘Thought we could have them both round. Lash out on a saag gosht and a king prawn balti.’
You have to understand that Oliver doesn’t really like Indian food.
‘Oliver, that’s a ridiculous idea.’
‘What about combining the two then? Have a saag prawn. Best of both worlds. No? Lamb dansak? Chicken channa? Brinjal bhaji?’
He likes the words rather than the things themselves, you see. I suppose that’s a start.
‘Aloo gobi? Tarka daal?’
‘He’s twice her age and married.’
‘No he isn’t.’
‘Ellie’s twenty-three—’
‘And he’s our age.’
‘All right, technically—’
‘And consider,’ said Oliver, ‘that with each passing year, he’d become less than twice her age.’
‘And he’s married.’
‘No.’
‘You told me—’
‘No. Was. Isn’t. Free man, not that anyone truly is or can be, as the philosophers have demonstrated with wearisome regularity if different proofs.’
‘So he hasn’t got an American wife?’
‘Not any more. So what do you think?’
‘What do I think? Oliver, I think it’s just as …’ (nowadays I find myself avoiding words like barmy, potty, mad and the rest) ‘… as impractical as I did before.’
‘Well, we’ve got to find him someone.’
‘We do? Why? Did he ask?’
Oliver pouted. ‘He’d do stuff for us. We ought to do stuff for him. Be proactive.’
‘Like serve up my assistant?’
‘Vegetable samba? Metar paneer?’
Stuart Blood under the bridge. Like when you punch someone on the nose. Good old Mme W. Or, to be exact about it, like when I head-butted Oliver.
Have you noticed something about Mme W? Her English seems to have got worse. I’m sure I’m not imagining it. She’s carried on living here for the last ten years, and instead of her English getting better or staying the same, it’s got worse. What do you put that down to? Perhaps as you get older you start losing the things you’ve learnt as an adult. Perhaps you end up with only what you had as a child. In which case, she’ll end up speaking nothing but French.
Gillian Impractical—what a … practical word. A few years ago, I was seriously tempted. I really fancied … this person. I could tell it was mutual. I imagined what I’d say if he asked me. And I knew I’d say, ‘I’m afraid it’s impractical.’ And I couldn’t bear to hear myself saying it. So I made sure I never found myself in a place where he’d ask.
Why do you think Stuart didn’t tell me he wasn’t married any more? He certainly had the opportunity.
The only reason I can think of is this: he was too ashamed. Next question: what can there be to be ashamed of in this day and age, when nobody’s judgemental, whatever sort of failure you make of things? And the only answer I could think of was this: what if Stuart’s second marriage ended in a way which reminded him of how his first marriage ended? It’s an awful thought, quite awful. I can’t ask him, can I? It’s up to him to tell me.
Terri There are these stone crabs, which I guess you don’t have in your country. What’s special about them is they grow this one big claw, just the one—I mean, the other stays the normal size. And it’s this big claw that’s the delicacy, so the crabbers just tear it off and throw the rest of the crab back in the water. And you know what the crab does? It starts growing another big claw all over again. This is what people tell you, so I suppose it must be true. You’d think the crabs would just be traumatized, just sink down in the water and die. Uh-uh. They just keep coming back for more, as if having their arm ripped off never happened.
As my friend Marcelle says: remind you of something?
9
CURRY IN A HURRY
Terri Show the photograph. Get him to show the photograph.
Mme Wyatt Naturally I am not a psychologue or a psychiatre. I am just a woman who has examined existence for more years than I hope you will be able to estimate. And one characteristic of the human race which seems to me ineradicable is its capacity to be surprised by unsurprising things. Hitler invades France—surprise! Presidents are assassinated—surprise! Marriages do not last—surprise! The snow falls in winter—surprise!
The opposite would be the surprise. Exactly as it would have been surprising if Oliver had not had some kind of collapse. There is not much solidity to Oliver. He lives on his nerves and frankly is not happy in his skin. Oh, he says he is, of course, he appears pleased with himself, very sufficient, but I have always thought of him as someone who secretly hates himself. Someone w
ho makes a lot of noise because he is terrified of the silence within. My daughter is right when she says that Oliver would be improved by success, but in my opinion that is little probable. His so-called career is a disaster. Well, perhaps not, does not disaster indicate the existence of some initial success, and one cannot accuse Oliver of that. He lives off Gillian, more or less, which is no life for a man. Oh yes, I know the modern theories about how this can be a good idea, the division of work, the flexibility, etcetera etcetera, but the modern theory is only good if the psychology of the person it is applied to is also modern, if you follow.
Is he faithful to Gillian? Don’t tell me if you know the answer. I hope he is, of course. But not for why you think—that she is my daughter and infidelity is wrong. No, I think it would be bad for Oliver. There are many husbands—and wives—who are made cheerful by adultery, made better able to bear their lives. Who was it who said that the chains of marriage are so heavy that sometimes it needs three people to carry them? But Oliver is not like that in my opinion. I am not talking of guilt; I am talking of self-hatred, which is quite another matter.
People are surprised that Oliver had a nervous collapse after the death of his father. But he so hated his father, they say. Why did not that death release him from that emotion and make him happy? Well, how many reasons would you prefer? Shall we begin with four of them? One, it is often the case that the death of the second parent revives in the child’s mind the death of the first one. Now, Oliver’s mother died when he was six, which is a painful experience to endure for a second time, and after such a distance as well. Next, the death of a parent you love is in many ways simpler than the death of a parent you hate or to who you are indifferent. Love, loss, mourning, remembering—we all know the scheme. But what is the scheme when this is not the case, when the parent is not loved? A tranquil forgetting? I think not. Imagine the situation of someone like Oliver, who realises that for all his life as an adult, and for many years before that as well, he has lived without knowing what it is like to love a parent. You will reply that this is not so extraordinary, not so uncommon, and I will reply that this does not make it more easy.