Talking It Over

  I had imagined the cleaning to be a routine trundle and the retouching a source of joy, but apparently it’s vice versa and tête-bêche. I probed Gillian further as to the wellsprings of her professional satisfaction.

  ‘Finding something you didn’t know was there, when you take off overpaint, that’s the best. Watching something two-dimensional gradually turn into something three-dimensional. Like when the modelling in a face begins to emerge. For instance, I’m looking forward to doing this bit.’ With the tip of her swab she indicated the figure of an infant sliding on the ice with hands trepidatiously grasping a chair.

  ‘Do it, then. Aux armes, citoyenne.’

  ‘I haven’t earned it yet.’

  You see how everything makes sense nowadays, how everything resounds in this world? It’s the story of my life. You discover what you didn’t know was there. Two dimensions give way to three. You appreciate the modelling in faces. But you have to have earned it all. Very well, I shall earn it.

  I asked her how she would know when all her dabbing and rolling with Economy Pleat from Pretty would have fulfilled its purging task.

  ‘Oh, this should take me about another fortnight.’

  ‘No, I mean how can you tell when you’ve finished?’

  ‘You can sort of tell.’

  ‘But there must be a point … when you’ve hosed off all the muck and the glaze and the bits of overpainting and your musks of Araby have done their work and you get to the point when you know that what you see before you is what the chap would have seen before him when he stopped painting all those centuries ago. The colours just as he left them.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. You’re bound to go a little bit too far or not quite far enough. There’s no way of knowing exactly.’

  ‘You mean, if you cut that picture up into four – which would be a distinctly pro-life act if you want my opinion – and gave it to four different restorers, they’d each stop at a different point?’

  ‘Yes. I mean, obviously they’d all get it roughly back to the same level. But it’s an artistic rather than a scientific decision, when to stop. It’s something you feel. There’s no “real” picture under there waiting to be revealed, if that’s what you mean.’

  It is, oh it is. Isn’t that wonderful? Oh effulgent relativity! There is no ‘real’ picture under there waiting to be revealed. What I’ve always said about life itself. We may scrape and spit and dab and rub, until the point when we declare that the truth stands plain before us, thanks to xylene and propanol and acetone. Look, no fly-shit! But it isn’t so! It’s just my word against everybody else’s!

  Mrs Dyer And another thing he does. He talks to himself in his room. I’ve heard him. They say these creative people can be a bit potty. But he’s got bags of charm. I said to him, if I was fifty years younger. And he gave me a smacker on the forehead, said he’d keep me up his sleeve if he never made it to the altar.

  Oliver I told you, I’m sorting out my life. That stuff about exercise was a bit of a fibette, I admit – I’m sure I’d collapse from jogger’s nipple climbing into my Nikes. But in other respects … Look, I have to do two things. One, make sure I have every afternoon, Monday to Friday, free in case she will let me be with her. Two, earn enough money to support both my Babylonian apartment in the West and my Spartan hiring in the North. And the answer – sapristi! – is: I work at weekends. Apart from anything else, that takes my mind off the wombat of Stoke Newington and his tufty little dormitory.

  I’ve changed my job. I now work at Mr Tim’s College of English. Something about the title unleashes upon one the suspicion that Mr Tim is not, himself, as it were, English. But I take the humanitarian line that this permits Mr Tim to engage in full imaginative sympathy with those tongues of Babel who throw themselves on his mercy. As yet, the College is not an officially recognised English Language School – Mr Tim is so o’erburdened with pastoral responsibilities that he keeps failing to apply for a thumbs-up from the British Council (even the base Shakespeare School had achieved recognition). As a result, our classes are not overrun with Saudi princelings. Do you know how some of the kids afford the fees? They walk up and down the teeming thoroughfares of Central London distributing to lookalikes and doppelgangers a leaflet advertising Mr Tim’s College of English. The fish feeds upon its own tail. Mr Tim, by the way, does not acknowledge the modern concept of the language laboratory; nor does he cleave to the antique idea of the library of books; still less does he believe in separating students of different ability. Do you detect a touch of moral fervour rippling its unsightly way across the normally limpid Weltanschauung of Oliver Russell? Perhaps you do. Perhaps I’m changing more than my job. EFL, by the way. Nobody sees the joke. English as a Foreign Language. No? Let me put it into a sentence: ‘I’m teaching English as a Foreign Language.’ Look, the point is, if that’s how it’s being taught, it’s not surprising that most of our alumni can’t buy a bus-ticket to Bayswater. Why don’t they teach English as English, that’s what I want to know.

  Sorry. Didn’t mean to blow off like that. Anyway, I merely had to dangle my aromatically forged reference from the Hamlet Academy before Mr Tim and there I was, unleashed upon the cosmopolitan virginibus puerisque couchant before their desks. The gold moidore factor is not quite what it was, since Mr Tim is a major nickelfucker. £5.50 an hour oozed reluctantly from his wallet, as against the munificent £8 of the Shakespeare School. At this rate poor Ollie will end up a Mr Mopp.

  Why, Mr Tim enquired, his accent a silky simulacrum of an Inuit chewing a Berlitz tape, did I want the afternoons off? So poor old Pater rode to the rescue once again. Close as Achilles and Patroclus, the two of us (knowing that the raunch of the reference would evade Mr Tim). Have to find him yon old folkery with the picture-window looking on to the stand of immemorial beeches, the dingle dell, the plashing brook, the wishing-well, the verdant sward … May the Old Bastard discover that Bosch was not exaggerating, that his Triumph of Death was a pastel cartoon compared to the real thing. But don’t let me get started on that, please.

  And in the afternoons, when she lets me, I go and sit with her. The swab of the rag, the tickle of the brush, the buzz of the fire (I’m so sentimental about that electric bar already), the serendipity of Radio 3, and her quarter-profile as she sits turned away from me, hair hooked back behind one lobeless ear.

  ‘It’s not true about Rosa, is it?’ she asked yesterday.

  ‘What isn’t?’

  ‘That she lives somewhere round here and you go and see her?’

  ‘No, it’s not true. I haven’t seen her since … since then …’ I couldn’t say any more. I was embarrassed – a state of mind which, you might have observed, transpires in the psyche of Oliver Russell about as frequently as the passage of Halley’s Comet. I didn’t like to recall that squalid gavotte of erotic incomprehension I had once danced, didn’t like to compare – to imagine Gill comparing – my being in a room with her here and my being in a room with another there. I was … embarrassed. What more can I say? Except that this condition clodhopped into view only because I intend to tell the unlipsticked truth to Gill. Look, no make-up! Ollie’s Honour, cross my heart and hope to become a Girl Guide.

  It’s infectious. I go there, and I sit in her room, and we are very quiet, I don’t fucking camp around, I never smoke, and we tell one another the truth. Nn-nn-nnn. Do I hear violins? The lilting scrape of the zigeuner tune, the conveniently passing flower-seller, the sad candle-lit smile of the softly envious match-girl? Go on, embarrass me some more, Ollie can take it, he’s getting used to it.

  Look, I know I have a reputation for serving up the truth with more than the traditional British accompaniments. Two veg and Oxo gravy is not my style. But with Gillian, things are different.

  And I’ve discovered this really tasty metaphor. Fashions in the universe of picture restoration – I speak from recent but devoted authority – tend to change. One moment it’s out with the Brillo pad and
scour, scour, scour. Another moment it’s retouch with a decorator’s brush, load every rift with pigment, and so on. The current talismanic concept is reversibility. This means (you don’t mind if I simplify matters a tad?) that the restorer should at all times do only what she knows may be undoable later by others. She must appreciate that her certainties are only temporary, her finalities provisional. So: your Uccello has been skewered by an assegai-wielding sociopath convinced that some noxious item of legislation will be reversed once he Goths a valuable masterpiece. Here in the art hospital the slash is mended, the pits and ruts are Polyfilled, and the retouching is about to begin. What does the restorer do first? She uses an isolating varnish to ensure that the paint she applies can be removed without trouble at some later date – when, for example, the fashion might be to display the historical vicissitudes of the painting as well as its aesthetic freight. This is what we understand by reversibility.

  Don’t you see how it all applies? Isn’t it tasty? You will help spread the word, won’t you? Text for today: We shall undo those things which we ought not to have done, and there is health in us. Reversibility. Already I am organising supplies of isolating varnish to all churches and register offices.

  When she said it was time to go, I told her I loved her.

  Gillian This has got to stop. It’s not what I thought would happen. He was meant to come round and tell me his troubles. But it turns out that I’m doing most of the talking. He just sits there, very quietly, and watches me work and waits for me to talk.

  Usually I have the radio on in the background. You can ignore it if you need to concentrate. I never thought I could work with someone like Oliver there, but I can.

  Sometimes I wish he’d just pounce. Right, Oliver, out you go, Stuart’s best friend, right that’s it, out. But he doesn’t, and I’m less and less convinced I’d react like that if he did.

  As he was saying goodbye today, I saw him open his mouth and look at me in that way.

  ‘No, Oliver,’ I said, Little Miss Brisk. ‘No.’

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t love you.’ His expression didn’t change, though. ‘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.’

  ‘Out.’

  ‘I don’t love you. It’s all right.’ He began to close the door. ‘I don’t love you.’

  Oliver The monkey-puzzle tree brandishes its knobbly fingers at the evening sky. Rain falls. Cars swish by. I stand at the window. I watch and wait. I watch and wait.

  10: I’m Not Sure I Can Believe This

  Stuart I’m not sure I can believe this. I’m not exactly sure what ‘this’ is, to begin with.

  Is it ‘nothing’ (as Gill assures me), or is it ‘everything’?

  What do they say, those bloody know-alls whose wisdom is handed down from generation to generation? The husband is always the first to suspect and the last to know.

  Whatever happens … whatever happens, I’m the one that’s going to get hurt.

  By the way, would you like a cigarette?

  Gillian The other two, they each want one thing, for me to be with them. I want two things. Or rather, I want different things at different times.

  God, yesterday I looked at Oliver and I had this strange thought. I want to wash your hair. Just like that. I suddenly got embarrassed. His hair wasn’t dirty – it was all clean and flyaway in fact. It’s wonderfully black, Oliver’s hair. And I just saw myself washing it while he sat in the bath. I’ve never thought of doing that to Stuart.

  I’m the one in the middle, the one that’s being squeezed every day. I’m the one that’s going to get hurt.

  Oliver Why do I always get the blame? Ollie the heart-breaker, Ollie the marriage-breaker. Wild dog, bloodsucker, snake in the grass, parasite, predator, vulture, dingo. It isn’t like that. I’ll tell you what I feel like. Don’t laugh. I’m a fucking moth bashing its head against a fucking window. Bash, bash, bash. The soft yellow light which looks so gentle to you but which sears my guts.

  Bash, bash, bash. I’m the one who’s going to get hurt.

  11: Love, & c.

  Oliver I’ve been calling her every day to tell her I love her. Now she’s stopped putting the phone down on me.

  Stuart You will have to bear with me. I do not have the flashing brain of my friend Oliver. I have to work things out step by step. But I get there in the end.

  You see, the other day I came home from work earlier than usual. And as I turned into our street – our street – I saw Oliver in the distance, coming towards me. I waved, sort of instinctively, but he had his head down and didn’t see me. He was about forty yards away, and hurrying along, when he suddenly fished a key out of his pocket and turned into a house. A house on the other side of the road from ours, the one with a monkey-puzzle tree in front. Some old biddy lives there. By the time I got level – it was number 55 – the door had shut. I carried on home, let myself in, gave my habitual cheery View Halloo, and started to think.

  The next day was a Saturday. I know Oliver gives lessons at home on Saturdays. I put on a sports jacket, found myself a clipboard and biro, then went across to number 55. I was, you understand, from the local council, just tidying up our records for the new community charge or poll tax, and verifying the occupants of each residence. The little old lady identified herself as Mrs Dyer, freeholder.

  ‘And there’s a …’ – reading from my clipboard – ‘Nigel Oliver Russell living here?’

  ‘I didn’t know he was called Nigel. He told me he was called Oliver.’

  ‘And a Rosa …’ I gabbled a foreign name, trying to sound vaguely Hispanic.

  ‘No, there’s no-one of that name.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry, my eye must have slipped a line. So there’s just you and Mr Russell?’

  She agreed. I started down the path. She called after me, ‘Don’t worry about the gate. It’ll see me out.’

  Right. That was the start. Oliver was not letting himself in to Rosa’s flat the other evening.

  Now we have to eliminate the next possibility. On Sunday morning Gillian went back upstairs to work, as she’s promised the museum she’ll let them have that scene of the frozen Thames back by the end of next week. (Have you seen it, by the way? It’s quite pretty, I think, just what a picture should be.) Now there is no phone jack in her studio. We deliberately didn’t have one put in so she wouldn’t be disturbed up there. Downstairs, two storeys away, I called Oliver. He was in the middle of a conversation class, as he put it – which means having some poor student round for a cup of coffee, chatting to her about the World Cup or something, and relieving her of a tenner. No, not the World Cup, knowing Oliver. He probably asks them to translate a pictorial guide to sex.

  Anyway, I got down to business straightaway, and said how it had slipped our minds, how we hadn’t been half hospitable enough, but when he was next up in our neck of the woods visiting Rosa, would he like to bring her round for a meal?

  ‘Pas devant’, came the reply, ‘C’est un canard mort, tu comprends?’ Well, I can’t remember exactly what he said, but no doubt it was something bloody irritating like that. I did my Pedestrian Old Stuart number, and he felt obliged to translate. ‘We’re not seeing so much of one another nowadays.’

  ‘Oh, sorry about that. Foot in mouth time again. Well, just yourself then, sometime soon?’

  ‘Love to.’

  And I rang off. Have you noticed the way people like Oliver always say We’re not seeing so much of one another nowadays? What a thoroughly dishonest phrase. It always sounds like such a civilised arrangement, whereas what in fact it means is: I dropped her, she stood me up, I was bored anyway, she’d rather go to bed with someone else.

  So that was Stage Two complete. Stage Three followed over supper, where I made concerted enquiries about the well-being of our mutual friend Oliver, with the implication that Gillian saw a fair bit of him. T
hen I asked, ‘Is he sorting things out with Rosa? I thought we might have them both round one evening?’

  She didn’t answer at once. Then she said, ‘He doesn’t talk about her.’

  I let it pass, and instead offered congratulations on the sweet potatoes, which Gillian had never cooked before.

  ‘I wondered if you’d like them,’ she said. ‘I’m glad you do.’

  After dinner we took our coffee into the sitting-room and I lit up a Gauloise. It’s not a thing I do very often, and Gillian gave me an enquiring glance.

  ‘Shame to waste them,’ I said. ‘Now that Oliver’s given up.’

  ‘Well, don’t make it a habit.’

  ‘Did you know,’ I replied, ‘that it has been statistically proved that smokers are less vulnerable to Alzheimer’s disease than non-smokers?’ I was rather pleased with this obscure item of information, which I’d picked up from somewhere.

  ‘That’s because smokers all die before they’re old enough to get Alzheimer’s,’ said Gill.

  Well, I had to laugh at that. Thoroughly outmanoeuvred in one respect.

  Often, we make love on Sunday nights. But I wasn’t feeling like it for some reason. For a particular reason: I wanted to think things over.

  So. Oliver is discovered early one morning buying flowers in Stoke Newington for Rosa, with whom he has had a sexual fiasco the night before. Oliver, who is in a bad way, is encouraged to visit Gillian any time he’s up in the area calling on Rosa. He does therefore visit regularly. Except that Oliver isn’t seeing Rosa. Indeed, we have no evidence that Rosa lives up here. On the other hand, we do have evidence that Oliver lives up here. He has hired a room from Mrs Dyer at number 55, and sees Stuart’s wife during the afternoon when Stuart is safely at work earning money to pay the mortgage.