My mind did not, at that instant, have quite the solidity of Soviet monumental sculpture in the Stalin-to-Brezhnev era. I pictured Mrs Dyer mistakenly opening a brown envelope from the clinic. Except that I’d said I’d call them. Except that they didn’t have this address.
‘Who told you so?’
‘The gentleman from the Council. The one who came about the poll tax. The one who lives over the road. I’ve seen him. He’s got a nice-looking wife.’ She waved in the direction … and all fell into place.
‘It was a joke, Mrs Dyer,’ I said. ‘A sort of joke.’
‘I think he thought I didn’t know what the AIDS was.’ I looked at her as if I was a touch bouleversé myself that she did. ‘I read the leaflets,’ she said. ‘Anyway, I told him you were very clean and we had separate toilets.’
My heart was suddenly a sog of tenderness. Extend a cautious foot into my coeur and you’d go in right over the wellie. ‘Mrs Dyer,’ I said, ‘I hope you won’t think me too forward, but would you consider becoming my wife?’
She gave a quiet cackle. ‘Once is enough for any woman,’ she said. ‘And besides, young man, you’ve got the AIDS.’ She gave another skirl of amusement, and disappeared back into her kitchen.
I sat at my window behind the monkey-puzzle tree and thought of Stuart at the breakfast table shaking his packet of cereal: Sh-chug-a-chug, Sh-chug-a-chug-chug. And then – the mind is such a bluebottle, such a jumping-jack – I thought of Stuart in bed with Gillian. I bet it’s the same. I bet he goes Sh-chug-a-chug, Sh-chug-a-chug-chug. It hurts, oh it hurts.
Stuart I don’t mean everything I say at the moment, but I did mean what I said about Oliver not having a proper job. What would be the most effective cure for sexual immorality, for wife-stealing? Full employment, with every adult male working the same hours, 9.00 to 5.30. Oh, and Saturdays as well, let’s get back to the six-day week. Not popular with the unions, of course, and there’d have to be exceptions made for airline pilots and so on. Of course, airline pilots and their crews are notoriously immoral. What other professions are full of immorality and wife-stealing? University lecturers, actors and actresses, doctors and nurses … You see what I mean? None of them work regular hours.
And Oliver is a liar, of course. That helps. I’ve always thought that over the years I’d learned how much to allow for his exaggerations, but maybe I was way out all along. For instance, the story about his father beating him up. I wonder if that’s true. He’s always made a big thing about it – how his dad started beating him up after his mum died when he was six. How he took a billiard cue to him because Oliver looked like his mum and so his dad was in effect punishing her for leaving him by dying (do people really behave like this? Oliver assured me they do). How the abuse went on for years and years, until one day, when he was fifteen (though sometimes it’s sixteen, sometimes thirteen), Oliver turned round and thumped his father. After that it never happened again, and now Dad lives in some old folks’ home and Oliver every so often goes to visit hoping to find some spark of affection in these closing years, but always comes back sad and disappointed. Which is a great sympathy-winner, not least with women.
No-one’s heard his dad’s version, needless to say. I met him briefly a couple of times, when I went to call on Oliver, and he never tried to beat me up. After hearing Oliver’s stories I expected him to have vampire teeth and carry a pair of handcuffs; but he struck me as a nice enough old boy with a pipe. Oliver certainly hates him, but there may be other reasons for that, like he eats his peas off a knife or doesn’t know that Bizet wrote Carmen. Oliver is a snob, as you might have noticed.
He’s also, I can’t help pointing out, a coward. Or at least, put it this way. The big event in Oliver’s childhood is the moment when he turns on his violent dad and gives him such a whipping that the Old Bastard – as Oliver refers to him – slinks away with his tail between his legs. Now, I’m quite a bit smaller than Oliver, but when I gave him a little poke in the face with my head, how did he react? He ran away squealing and blubbing. Is this the behaviour of the famous tamer of bullies? Oh yes, and what about that billiard cue? Oliver once told me that he and his father only had one thing in common: they both hated sport.
Gillian Oliver needed five stitches in his cheek. He told the hospital he’d tripped over and gashed it on the corner of a table.
He said the expression of violence on Stuart’s face had to be seen to be believed. He said he thought Stuart wanted to kill him. He suggested I put water in the whisky bottle. He begged me to leave at once.
Stuart
And as the skies turn gloomy
Nightbirds whisper to me
I’m lonesome as I can be …
Gillian You know, in all the time Stuart and I were together he never once asked me why I was at the Charing Cross Hotel that evening. I mean, he asked about it in one sense, and I replied that I’d seen the ad in Time Out, but he never asked me why. He was always very careful in his finding-out about me. I think it was partly that he didn’t mind what had happened before: here I was, and that was all Stuart was interested in. But it was a bit more than that. Stuart had his idea of what I was like, he’d decided upon it, and he didn’t want to hear anything different.
Why I was there is easily told. A married man: he wouldn’t leave his wife, I couldn’t give him up. Yes, that old story, the one that keeps dragging on. So I took steps to stop it dragging on. You’ve got to be responsible for your own happiness – you can’t expect it to come flopping through the door like a parcel. You’ve got to be practical in these matters. People sit at home thinking Some Day My Prince Will Come. But that’s no good unless you’ve got a sign up saying Princes Welcome Here.
Oliver couldn’t be more different. For a start, he wants to know everything about me. I sometimes feel I’m letting him down by not having had a more exotic past. I’ve never been pearl-fishing in Tahiti. I didn’t sell my virginity for a sable coat. I’ve just been me. On the other hand, that me isn’t settled and decided in Oliver’s mind the way it was in Stuart’s. And that’s … nice. No, it’s more than nice. It’s sexy.
‘You know, I bet Stuart basically thinks of you as a good little shopper.’ This was a few weeks ago.
I don’t like Stuart being criticised. In fact, I won’t have it. ‘I am a good little shopper,’ I replied (though that’s not how I think of myself). At least, I’m much better than Oliver, who tends to go into a trance over a green pepper, if you know what I mean.
‘Sorry,’ he said quickly. ‘What I meant is merely that for me you are someone of well, endless possibility. I do not stake out and fence in what is taken to be your approved and registered nature.’
‘That’s very sweet of you, Oliver.’ I was teasing him a little, though he didn’t seem to notice.
‘It’s just that – not to say a word against – Stuart’s never actually seen you.’
‘And do you – see me?’
‘3-D specs. Eyes for nothing else.’
I smiled and kissed him. Later, I wondered: but if two such different people as Stuart and Oliver can both fall in love with me, what sort of me is it? And what sort of me falls in love first with Stuart and then with Oliver? The same one, a different one?
Harringay Hospital
Accident & Emergency Department
Surname RUSSELL
First Name(s) OLIVER DAVENPORT DE QUINCEY
Address 55, St Dunstan’s Road, N16
Occupation Screenwriter
Place of Accident Home
Time of Arrival 11.50
GP’s Name Dr. Cagliari (Sicily)
NOTES
says old duelling scar reopened by walking into monkey-puzzle tree
smells of alcohol + +
no L.O.C.
last tetanus > 10 years ago
O/E 3cms laceration ® cheek
X-R → no # seen
sutured c 10 × 50 Nylon
tet tox
R.O.S. here 5/7 J. Davis
16
.00
Oliver I never thought I might have the AIDS, as Mrs Dyer so arrestingly refers to the matter. But it shows my intentions are serious, doesn’t it? Tabula rasa, starting from scratch.
And I don’t have to pay the poll tax twice, because I don’t really live at number 55, and I’m not going to be there much longer anyway. I have this fantasy about asking Mrs Dyer to be a bridesmaid. Or a matron-of-honour, perhaps.
Some things get to you. I wish I hadn’t thought of Stuart going Sh-chug-a-chug. You see, I used to have this joke with myself. Some book I read when barely post-pre-pubescent contained the words: he made free with her narrow loins. I admit, almost without shame, that for years this phrase hung from a string in my skull like some Christmas decoration, gilded and talismanic. So that’s what they’re up to, dirty beasts, I’d think. Me too, soon. Then, for many years, reality effaced phraseology. Until the words came back to me with Gill. I’d sit aloft in my monkey-puzzle tree and whisper to myself (not wholly seriously, I trust you comprehend), ‘I shall make free with her narrow loins’. But I can’t do that any more, because of some cerebral hitch, some jammed ganglion. Because every time I hear the words they are followed by the sound of Stuart going Sh-chug-a-chug, Sh-chug-a-chug-chug, like a tubby tender behind a slinky locomotive.
I hope to God they’re not still doing it. I hope to God they’re not even sleeping in the same bed still. I can’t ask. What do you think?
After la lune de miel comes la lune d’absinthe. Who’d have thought that Stuart would turn violent in his liquor?
Stuart
I stop to see a weeping willow
crying on his pillow
maybe he’s crying for me …
Not very drunk.
Just drunk.
Gillian And I know there’s a question I’ve got to answer. You’ve a right to ask it, and I can’t be surprised if there’s a sceptical tone to your voice, or even a bit of a sneer. Go on, ask it.
Look, Gill, you’ve told us how you fell in love with Stuart – getting soppy when you saw his cooking timetable – so what about telling us how you fell in love with Oliver? You saw him filling in his pools coupon, doing The Times crossword?
Fair enough. I’d probably be a bit dubious in your position. But I’d just like to say this. I didn’t choose what happened. I didn’t manipulate things, suddenly decide that Oliver was a ‘better deal’ or something than Stuart. It happened to me. I married Stuart, then I fell in love with Oliver. I don’t feel complacent about that. Some of it I don’t even like. It just happened.
But ‘that moment’ – the one people I don’t even know yet are going to ask me to remember. We were in a restaurant. It’s supposed to be French but it isn’t. I think half the waiters are Spanish and half are Greek, but they look Mediterranean enough and the chef puts anchovies and olives in everything and they call the place Le Petit Provençal, which seems to fool most people, or if not fool them, at least satisfy them.
We were there because Stuart was away for the night and Oliver insisted on taking me out to dinner. First of all I didn’t want to go, then I said I’d pay, then I suggested going Dutch, but we got into the usual male pride bit, and the way that works is that it’s harder for them to accept you paying half if they’re short of money. So there I was, half-reluctant, half-bullied, in a restaurant I didn’t much like but which I’d chosen because I thought it was cheap enough for him to take me to. None of this seemed to affect Oliver. He was very relaxed, as if all the negotiations it had taken to get us there had never occurred. I suppose I was also apprehensive in case he started slagging off Stuart, but quite the opposite. He said he didn’t remember much about school any more, but all the nice things were to do with Stuart. There was some gang they defeated all by themselves, just the two of them. There was someone they called ‘Feet’ because he had big hands. There was the time the two of them went hitch-hiking to Scotland. Oliver said it took them weeks to get there because he was such a snob about cars at that time he would actually turn down lifts when someone had stopped because he didn’t like the upholstery or the hub-caps. And then it rained all the time so they sat in bus-shelters and ate oat-cakes. Oliver said he’d already started to get interested in food so Stuart gave him a blind-fold test. Oliver closed his eyes and Stuart fed him alternately little bits of damp oat-cake and little bits of damp torn-up packaging. Stuart had claimed that Oliver couldn’t tell the difference.
It was all … surprisingly easy, I suppose, and Oliver grunted approvingly at the food even though we both knew it wasn’t up to much. As we were finishing our main course, he stopped a waiter who was passing our table.
‘Le vin est fini,’ Oliver said to him. He wasn’t showing off or anything, just assuming that the waiters at somewhere called Le Petit Provençal were French.
‘Sorry?’
‘Ah,’ said Ollie. He turned his chair slightly, and tapped the wine bottle as if teaching at that awful Shakespeare School of English. ‘Le vin … est … fini,’ he repeated, articulating carefully and with a rising note at the end, indicating that there was more to come. ‘The … wine …’ he went on in a thick non-English accent, ‘… comes … from … Finland.’
‘You want another bottle?’
‘Si, signor.’
I’m afraid I just hooted, which wasn’t very fair on the waiter, who went and got us another bottle rather grumpily. As he was pouring it into my glass, Ollie murmured, ‘A rather pleasant Chateau Sibelius, I think you’ll find.’
And that set me off again. I laughed till I coughed. Then I laughed till it hurt. And the thing about Ollie is he knows how to make a joke run. I don’t want to make comparisons, but Stuart isn’t very good at jokes and if he makes one he just leaves it there, as if he’s shot a rabbit or something and that’s the business done. Whereas Oliver keeps at it, and if you aren’t in the mood it could be tiresome, but I guess that evening I was in the mood.
‘And with the coffee, Modom? A little Kalevala? A Suomi on the rocks? I know, a glass of Karelia?’ I just got incapable at that point, and the waiter didn’t know what the joke was. ‘Yes, I think a finger of Suomi for my friend,’ said Ollie. ‘What brands do you have? Do you have Helsinki Fivestar?’
I waved my hands at him to stop, which the waiter thought meant something different. ‘Nothing for the lady. And for you sir?’
‘Oh,’ said Ollie, pretending to come down and suddenly looking serious. ‘Ah. Yes. I’ll just have a small Fjord, please.’ Then we took off again, and when I came out of it my sides were aching, I was looking across at Ollie, his eyes were glistening, and I thought to myself, God this is dangerous, this is really beyond dangerous. Then Ollie went quiet, as if he’d felt it too.
You don’t find this as funny as I did? That’s all right. I’m only telling you because you asked. And we did leave a large tip in case the waiter thought we were laughing at him.
Stuart
And as the skies turn gloomy
Nightbirds whisper to me …
Gillian The first time I met Oliver I asked him if he was wearing make-up. That was a bit embarrassing – I mean, to remember this afterwards as almost the first thing you said to someone you fell in love with – but it wasn’t so far out. I mean, sometimes it is as if Oliver wears make-up with people. He likes to be dramatic, he likes to shock them a bit. Only he doesn’t with me. He can be quiet, he can be himself, he knows he doesn’t have to act up a storm to impress me. Or rather, that if he did he wouldn’t.
It’s a bit of a joke between us. He says I’m the only person who sees him without make-up. But there’s truth in that.
Oliver says it’s not surprising either. He says that’s what I’m like. I spend my days cleaning the gook off pictures, so naturally I do with him too. ‘Spit and rub,’ he says. ‘No harsh solvents necessary. Just spit and rub, and soon you’re down to the real Oliver.’
And what’s that like? Gentle, truthful, not very sure of himself, a bit lazy and very sexy. You can’t see that? Giv
e him time.
Now I’m sounding like my mother.
…(female, between 25 and 35) If you ask me, there’s a simple explanation. Maybe not simple, actually, but I’ve come across it before. The point is …
What? What did you say? You want my credentials. YOU want MY credentials? Look, if anyone’s got to provide documentation it should be you. What have you done to qualify for my opinions? What’s your authority, incidentally? Just getting this far doesn’t allow you to come on like the Old Bill.
You’d believe me more? Look, as far as I’m concerned it’s a cream bun to a twopenny fuck whether or not you believe me. I’m giving you an opinion, not an autobiography, so if you don’t like the deal, stroll on stranger. In any case I’m not hanging around, so there’s no need to come the old-fashioned stuff with me. I understand, sure I do. You want to know whether I’m Ginny the genial GP, Harriet the haughty Harley Street headshrinker, Rachael the raunchy rock star or Nathalie the nuzzling night-nurse. My credibility depends upon my professional or social position. Well, excuse me. Or rather, fuck off. And if you desperately crave an identity, I’ll give you one. Maybe I’m not really a girl after all, I just look this way. Perhaps I went to the universities of Casablanca and Copacabana. Postgraduate work in the Bois de Boulogne.
OK, I’m sorry. You just got on my wick. Also, you caught me in a bad mood. (No, that’s none of your business, either.) Christ, look, I’ll just tell you what I think and then I’ll fuck off myself. You can make up your own mind. I’m not exactly flavour of the month around here at the moment, so you won’t be seeing me after this.
And of course I’m not a transsexual. You can ask Stuart if you like, he’ll confirm it, he’s seen the evidence. Sorry, shouldn’t laugh at my own jokes, it’s just that you seem so disapproving. OK, look, I know those two boys from way back. I remember Oliver when his idea of opera was Dusty Springfield coming out of both speakers in the back of a Cortina. I remember Stuart when he wore glasses with bits of elastic wire round the ears. I remember Oliver in string vests and Hush Puppies, Stuart when he used to put dry shampoo on his hair. I’ve been to bed with Stuart (sorry: no press release) and I’ve also turned down Ollie for that matter. Those are my credentials. Plus having Stuart bend my ear about the whole story over little half-secret lunches and dinners for the past weeks and months. At first, to be honest, I thought he was after something else. Yeah, Miss Mugg all over again, I know, story of my life. I thought Stuart wanted to see me. Pretty stupid, I admit. He just wanted a fucking great ear to pour his troubles into. I sat there and he’d never once ask what I’d been up to, and then at the end of the evening he’d apologise for going on so much about his own life, and then we’d meet again and he’d do exactly the same. He’s obsessed, that guy, to put it mildly, and I don’t need it. I really don’t need it, not at this point in my life. Another reason for getting out of all this.