Talking It Over

  ‘It is always the dangerous time,’ I said.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It is always the dangerous time.’

  She looked away and nodded. I knew what she was thinking. I had better explain that my husband Gordon at the age of forty-two, when we had been married – oh, it does not matter how long – ran off with a schoolgirl of seventeen years. Gillian was thinking that she had heard of the seven-year itch, as you call it, and had seen in her father the fifteen-year itch, and was now discovering for herself that there was even another before the seven-year one. She was also thinking that I too must be remembering Gordon, and I must be reflecting on the similarity between father and daughter, and how this must be painful for me. But I was not thinking that, and I could not say what I was thinking.

  Oliver Do you want to know something funny? G and S didn’t meet in that wine bar as they always pretended. They met in the Charing Cross Hotel at one of those stand-up partouzes for Young Professionals.

  Some moment of svelte intuition made me bring up with Gillian the supposed encounter at Squires Wine Bar with or without the apostrophe before the s. At first she didn’t reply. She sputumed her swab and rolled it across her picture some more. Then she told me. Observe that I didn’t have to ask. So it must be working the other way round as well: she’s decided not to have any secrets from me either.

  Apparently there are these locations for the amatoriously parched to which you can repair four times on successive Fridays, all for the sum of £25.1 was shocked – that was my first reaction. Then I thought, well, don’t ever underestimate furry little Stu. Trust him to go about the business of L’Amour like a market researcher.

  ‘How many times did you have to go before you met Stuart?’

  ‘That was my first time.’

  ‘So you got him for £6.25?’

  She laughed. ‘No, I got him for £25. They didn’t give refunds.’

  What a dulcet swoop of wit. ‘They didn’t give refunds,’ I repeated, and the giggles hit me like swamp-fever.

  ‘I didn’t tell you that. I shouldn’t have told you any of that.’

  ‘You didn’t. I’ve forgotten already.’ And I duly reined in my jocosity.

  But I bet Stuart went back for his refund, major nickelfucker that he is apt to be at times. Like claiming the return half of his ticket when I met them at Gatwick. And I bet he succeeded. So he cost her £25 and she cost him £6.25. What would he take for her now? What’s his mark-up?

  And speaking of the gold moidores: Mrs Dyer, with whom I might be inclined to elope were not my heart bidden elsewhere, informed me yesterday that I was on the poll tax register. They don’t hang about, those guys, do they? Hoovering up every groat and drachma. Do you think there are humanitarian exceptions? Surely Oliver must be a special case under some grim subsection?

  Gillian He does it every time now. My hair doesn’t even have to come loose, he just takes the comb and undoes the clip and pulls the hair back and smoothes it down and puts the grip back in. And I’m burning.

  I got up and kissed him. I opened my mouth straight into his, and stroked his neck and pushed down into the flesh of his shoulders and held my body so that he could touch me anywhere he wanted. I stood there kissing him, my hands up on his neck, my body waiting for his hands, even my legs apart. I kissed and I waited.

  I waited.

  He kissed me back, in my open mouth, and still I waited.

  He stopped. My eyes were on him. He put his hands on my shoulders, turned me, and led me back to my easel.

  ‘Let’s go to bed, Oliver.’

  Do you know what he did? He pushed me down on my chair and actually put a swab back in my hand.

  ‘I can’t work. I can’t work now.’

  The thing about Oliver is, he’s different when he’s alone with me. You wouldn’t recognise him. He’s much quieter, and he listens, and doesn’t talk in that show-off way. And he doesn’t seem at all as confident as he probably appears to others. I know what you’re expecting me to say next. ‘Oliver’s really quite vulnerable.’ So I’m not going to say it.

  ‘I love you,’ he said. ‘I adore you. I want to be with you all the time. I want to marry you. I want to listen to your voice for ever.’ We were on the sofa now.

  ‘Oliver, you’d better make love to me. You really had.’

  He got up. I thought he was getting up to take me to bed, but he just started walking around. Up and down my studio.

  ‘Oliver, it’s all right. It’s all right if …’

  ‘I want all of you,’ he said. ‘I don’t want part of you. I want the lot.’

  ‘I’m not up for sale.’

  ‘I don’t mean that. I mean, I don’t want to just have an affair with you. Affairs – affairs are – I don’t know – like buying a time-share apartment in Marbella or something.’ Then he froze in mid-stride and glanced wildly over as if expecting me to be cross at the comparison. He looked almost desperate. ‘It’s very nice, actually, Marbella. Much nicer than you’d think. There’s a little square, I remember, with orange trees in it. There were workmen picking the oranges when I was there. It was February I think. Of course you have to go off-season.’

  He was panicking, you know. When it comes down to it, Oliver’s probably got less self-confidence than Stuart. Not so deep down, either.

  ‘Oliver,’ I said. ‘We’re agreed I’m not a time-share apartment in Marbella. And stop walking about like that. Come and sit here.’

  He came and sat down very quietly. ‘My father used to beat me up, you know.’

  ‘Oliver …’

  ‘It’s true. I don’t mean he used to spank me as a child. He did that, of course he did that. What he really liked doing was hitting me across the back of the legs with a billiard cue. That was my punishment. It’s quite painful, actually. “Thighs or calves?” he used to ask. And I’d have to choose. There’s not much difference, actually, in the pain.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I put my hand on his neck. He began to cry.

  ‘It was worse after my mother died. He sort of took it out on me. Perhaps I reminded him of her too much, I don’t know. Then, one day, I suppose I was about thirteen or fourteen, I decided to stand up to the Old Bastard. “Thighs or calves?” he asked as usual. I don’t know what I’d done. I mean, I was always doing things, things he thought deserved punishing. This time I said, “You’re stronger than me now. But you aren’t always going to be, and if you ever hit me again, I promise you that when I’m strong enough I’ll beat you to a pulp.” ’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I didn’t think it would work. I mean, I was trembling, and smaller than him, and as I said it I thought beat you to a pulp was a really stupid way of putting it, and he’d just laugh at me. But he didn’t. He stopped. He stopped for ever.’

  ‘Oliver, I’m sorry.’

  ‘I hate him. He’s old now and I still hate him. I hate him for being here, in this room with us. What’s he doing here?’

  ‘He isn’t. He’s gone. He’s got a time-share apartment in Marbella.’

  ‘Christ, why can’t I do it? Why can’t I say the right things, I mean, now of all times?’ He got up again. ‘I’m not saying any of this very well.’ He put his head down and wouldn’t look at me. ‘I love you. I’ll always love you. It won’t ever stop. I’d better go now.’

  About three hours later he called me.

  ‘Yes?’ I said.

  ‘I love you.’

  I put the phone down. Almost at once Stuart’s key scraped at the lock. I was burning. The front door closed. ‘Anyone ho-ome?’ Stuart shouted, with a sort of yodel he puts in his voice so that it will carry all the way up the house. ‘Anyone ho-ome?’

  What should I do?

  Oliver Argumentation against affairs, written down by one who has had more than his share of them:

  1) Vulgarity. Everyone’s doing it. I mean, everyone. Priests do it, the Royal Family does it, even hermits find a way of doing it. Why aren’t they constantly
bumping into one another on their damp passage from bedroom to bedroom? Bonk, bonk – who’s there?

  2) Predictability. Courtship, Conquest, Cooling, Crack-up. The same dreary little plot-line. Dreary, but no less horribly addictive. After each failure, the quest for another failure. Make the world fresh again!

  3) Time-sharing. I thought I put that rather well to Gillian. How can you enjoy your holiday when you know the owners are waiting to move back in? And fucking against the clock is not my style; though in certain circumstances it can have its wily addictions.

  4) Lying. A direct result of 3) above. Affairs corrupt – and I speak as One Who, etc. It’s inevitable. First you lie to one partner and then, very soon afterwards, you lie to the second. Oh, you say you won’t, but you will. You scoop out a little duck-pond of emotional integrity with a great bulldozer of mensonges. Watch the track-suited husband go off jogging with a pocketful of change for the telephone. Jingle, jingle. ‘Might need a soft drink on the way, darling!’ Jingle, jingle, the sound of lies tinkling.

  5) Betrayal. How satisfied everyone is with small betrayals. What juice they provide. Roger the Dodger gets away with it again, part 27 – when getting away with it is really not very difficult. Stuart is my friend – yes he is – and he is going to lose his wife to me. That’s a Big Betrayal, but then I think people can handle Big Betrayals better than small ones. An affair would be a small betrayal, and I don’t think Stuart could handle that as well as the Big Betrayal. You see, I do think about him as well.

  6) I haven’t yet had the result of my AIDS test.

  Now, I didn’t put it like this to Gillian, not exactly, no. In fact, to tell the truth, I think I made a terrible bosh of it.

  Gillian On the way to the station, just on the corner at the other end of Barrowclough Road, there’s a greengrocer’s shop. It’s where I bought the sweet potatoes. Or rather, I bought the SWEET POTATO’S. The man who runs it does these price labels which he hand-letters in sort of italic capitals. And very carefully, without ever missing, he puts an apostrophe into everything he sells. APPLE’S PEAR’S CARROTS LEEK’S – you can buy them all there – SWEDE’S TURNIP’S and SWEET POTATO’S. Stuart and I used to find this funny and a bit touching, this chap doggedly getting it wrong all the time, every single time. I walked past the shop today and suddenly I didn’t find it at all funny any more. CAULI’S COX’S SPROUTS. I just found it so sad it went right through me. Not sad because he couldn’t spell, not that. Sad because he got it wrong, and then he went on to the next label and got that wrong, and then he went on to the next one and got that wrong too. Either someone’s told him and he didn’t believe it, or else in all the years he’s been a greengrocer, nobody’s told him. I don’t know which is sadder, do you?

  I think about Oliver all the time. Even when I’m with Stuart. Sometimes I can’t bear it that Stuart seems cheerful. Why can’t he see what I’m thinking about, who I’m thinking about? Why can’t he read my mind?

  Stuart Sit down. Do you like Patsy Cline?

  Two cigarettes in an ashtray

  My love and I in a small café

  Then a stranger came along

  And everything went wrong

  Now there’s three cigarettes in the ashtray

  Poor Patsy, she’s dead. And you’ve still got that ciggy behind your ear, by the way. Why don’t you smoke it?

  I watched her take him from me

  And his love is no longer my own

  Now they are gone

  And I sit alone

  And watch one cigarette burn away

  Good old Stuart, he’s so reliable. You know where you are with Stuart. He puts up with things. He trundles along. He turns a blind eye. We can take him for granted. He’ll always be the same.

  Ask no questions and they’ll tell you no lies. But that only takes you so far. Oliver’s coming over in a few minutes. He thinks we’re all three off to the cinema together like best old friends. But Gillian has gone to see her mother, so Oliver will have to make do with me. I’ll ask him some questions and he’ll tell me some lies.

  Just before she left, I was sitting here with my headphones on listening to a tape of Patsy. Gillian came in to say goodbye, so I pressed the pause button and lifted one ear-piece away from the side of my head.

  ‘How’s Oliver?’ I asked.

  ‘Oliver? Oh, he’s fine, I think.’

  ‘You’re not having an affair with him by any chance?’ I said it in a light-hearted way, of course. What, me, worry?

  ‘Christ. Christ, no.’

  ‘Oh, well, that’s all right, then.’ I pulled the ear-piece down again, closed my eyes to avoid Gill’s face, and moved my lips along to Patsy’s. I felt Gillian give me a kiss on the forehead and nodded in response.

  Now we’ll see what he’s got to say for himself.

  Oliver It will not have escaped you that my friend Stuart is not a man of broad culture. If you were to ask him the name of Proust’s girlfriend, he’d brood for a quinquennium, then start to glower at you like a samurai, decide it’s a trick question, and finally answer, with a petite pout of aggression, ‘Madeleine. Everyone knows that.’

  So I wasn’t anticipating, oh, Schreker’s Die Gezeichneten when he answered the door, beckoned me inside with fervent child-molester eyes, and scrabbled a questing paw at his tape-deck. Mayhap he had just discovered the 1812 Overture and enjoyed singing along to the cannon and fireworks. Or were we in for the Enigma Variations, accompanied by much toilsome reading of the sleeve-note about one of music’s least vital mysteries, namely the identity of the Friends Portrayed Therein? Oh, and did you know Dorabella apparently had a little speech impediment, which is why the music seems to hesitate, to go hip-hip-hop, in her Variation? Have a choc-ice, Maestro. But hie me to the vomitorium, pronto.

  He played me this song. It seemed to last about 3 hours 47 minutes, though he assured me it was less. So that’s what they call ‘country music’, is it? Then I’m so glad I live in the town. It has at least this rarity, this sophistication: that of being unparodiable – for the simple reason that it parodies itself as it goes along, like a lawn-mower picking up its own clippings. There’s no room for an old man with a rake, and equally no room for a young man with a mock. Hiddly-up, please Daddy, I’m lonesome again, Hiddly-up … No point in trying. And the singers, they wear rhinestones – and rhinestones, you see, are already parodies of diamonds, so you can’t parody rhinestones. Ah, and here comes wizened Walter coaxing a gout of cadenza from his wizened violin. You still sho’ can show’em all Walt, whine, chug-a-chug, Hiddly-up, please Daddy …

  ‘What did you think?’

  What did I think? For some reason he was positively scowling at me. He couldn’t, surely, be asking me for a musical analysis of the piece?

  As I scrabbled in the loose scree of my cortex for something that didn’t inevitably include Stuart within the dragnet of my contempt, he got up and chubbily poured us both a drink.

  ‘So what did you think, then, Oliver?’

  At the last moment the Muse of Tact scooped me up. ‘I don’t think ashtray,’ I said, ‘is a wholly satisfying rhyme for ashtray.’

  That seemed to placate him.

  My rather brutal viva voce had briefly expelled from my head what I had planned to do on my arrival. I handed Stuart an envelope. How much English I had taught as a Foreign Language to recuperate one quarter of the loan Stuart had advanced me!

  Whereupon he became unexpectedly bellicose, and cast the dosh back at me like Alfredo in Traviata.

  ‘You’ll need that for your poll tax,’ he said. I just looked at him. Why is everyone suddenly going on at me as if I had some spectroscopic interest in the digestive processes of local government finance? ‘The poll tax you’ll have to pay on your second home’ – he pronounced those unlovely words with what thousands would call a sneer – ‘over the road at number 55.’

  As I find myself repeating nowadays until it becomes a catch-phrase, don’t underestimate our furry friend. And
from that point on the evening, I have to admit, did not unravel as I had been led to believe it would. We did not patronise the kinematograph. Gillian was ‘Away Visiting Her Mother’. Stuart’s atonement for this absence of lustre consisted in a bottle of duty-free whisky, and there seemed no point in not Being Manly with him. For it was a starless night when the virtuoso of vault and till had upon him the mildness of Titus Andronicus.

  ‘Are you and Gill having an affair?’

  You see what I mean? What lorry-like directness. And how uncharacteristic. One who habitually clung to the outré back streets when crossing London was now sailing down Haymarket.

  I was taken aback, I admit. Many a time and oft have I been called upon to deny that I was having an affair when I was. But to deny that I was having an affair when I wasn’t – this seemed to demand a new skill. I swore I wasn’t. I looked around for something to swear on, but objects of shared veneration are quaintly unobtainable nowadays. I could only think of Gillian’s heart, her life, the hair on her head, none of which seemed wholly appropriate to the case, nor liable to milk some of the bullishness from Stuart’s deportment.

  We drank quite a lot of the whisky, and as we did so the possibility that the two of us might philosophically exchange rival accounts of our perception of the external world rather came and went; indeed there were moments of distinctly Neanderthal backsliding from Stu. At one point he cut into my admittedly sinuous line of argument with nothing less than a shout.

  ‘Lend us a quid, Give us your wife.’

  This observation did not seem germane to what I was seeking to establish. I looked at Stu.

  ‘Lend us a quid, Give us your wife. Lend us a quid, Give us your wife.’

  This rhetorical device is, I believe, known as repetition.

  ‘What I tell you three times is true,’ I murmured, not expecting the allusion to be fly-fished from the waters of my discourse.