Talking It Over

  I’m sorry, I truly am. How can I apologise?

  I’ll have to think of a way.

  Gillian It’s Stuart’s face I’ll never forget. He looked like a clown, a turnip head, a Hallowe’en mask. Yes, that’s right, one of those pumpkins you get at Hallowe’en with an artificial smile cut into it, and some false, flickering, ghostly light beaming out through the eyes. That’s what Stuart looked like. I was the only person to see him, I think, and the sight will be with me forever. I screamed, Stuart disappeared, everyone looked round, there was nothing but an empty stage.

  I stayed with Maman the night before the wedding. It was Oliver’s idea. When he made the suggestion I assumed he thought I might need a bit of help getting through. But it wasn’t really that at all. It was something about doing the whole thing properly. He’s quite old-fashioned in some ways, Oliver. I was to be the child leaving the parents’ house for that holy trip to the church. Except that I was scarcely the virgin bride in white clutching the arm of her father.

  I got to Maman at 7.00 in the evening the night before my second wedding day. We were both being consciously careful. She settled me down with a cup of coffee and made me put my feet up as if I were already pregnant. Then she picked up my case and went off to unpack it, which made me feel even more as if I’d just come into hospital. I sat there thinking, I hope she doesn’t give me any advice, I don’t think I could stand it. What’s done is done, and what’s about to be done can’t be changed now. So, let’s just be quiet, and watch some rubbish on television, and not talk about anything important.

  But – mothers and daughters, mothers and daughters. Approximately ninety seconds later she was back in the room holding up my suit. There was a smile on her face as if I’d suddenly gone senile and needed treating with pitying affection.

  ‘Darling, you packed the wrong clothes.’

  I looked up. ‘No, Maman.’

  ‘But darling, this is the suit I bought you?’

  ‘Yes.’ Yes, you know it is. Why do parents go on like prosecuting lawyers, checking the most obvious facts?

  ‘You are proposing to wear this tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, Maman.’

  Whereupon the deluge. She started off in French, which is what she does when she’s built up a head of steam and needs to let it off. Then she calmed down a little and switched back to English. Her basic line was that I’d clearly taken leave of my senses. Only a seriously disturbed person would dream of getting married twice in the same dress. It offended against good taste, good manners, good dress sense, the Church, everyone present at both ceremonies (though mainly her), fate, luck, world history, and a few other things and people.

  ‘Oliver wanted me to wear it.’

  ‘May I ask why?’

  ‘He said he fell in love with me when I was wearing it.’

  Outburst number two. Scandalous, ought to be ashamed, etc. Asking for trouble, etc. Can get married without your mother if that’s what you’re planning to get married in, etc. It lasted an hour or so, and I ended up handing over the key to my flat. She went off with the suit over her outstretched arm as if it had a dose of radiation.

  She returned with a couple of substitutes, which I looked at with indifference.

  ‘You choose, Maman.’ I didn’t want to fight. Tomorrow wasn’t going to be easy, I just hoped one person would be satisfied. But no, it wasn’t as simple as that. She wanted me to try on both alternatives. In order to be forgiven my enormous faux pas, I was expected to behave like a model. It was ridiculous. I tried them both on.

  ‘Now you choose, Maman.’ But that still wasn’t good enough. I must choose, I must have opinions. I didn’t have an opinion. I didn’t have a second choice, I really didn’t. It’s like saying, Look, Gill, I’m afraid you can’t marry Oliver tomorrow, that’s out, so who would you like to marry instead? This one or that one?

  When I told her this she didn’t appreciate the comparison. She thought it in bad taste. Oh well. When I married Stuart I was encouraged only to think of myself. This is your day, Gillian, people said. It’s your big day. Now I’m marrying Oliver and suddenly it’s everyone else’s day. Oliver insists on a church wedding which I don’t want. Maman insists on a dress which I don’t want.

  I woke up still being niggled at by dreams. I was writing my name in the sand except it wasn’t my name; Oliver started rubbing it out with his foot and Stuart burst into tears. Maman was standing there on the beach, wearing my green wedding suit, looking neither approving nor disapproving. Just waiting. Waiting. If we wait long enough anything and everything will go wrong and you’ll be proved right, Maman. But where’s the virtue in that?

  When we got to the church Oliver was very jumpy. At least we didn’t have to process down the aisle: there were only ten of us, and the vicar decided just to gather us at the altar. But the moment we started assembling I could see there was something up.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said to Oliver. ‘She just wouldn’t listen to reason.’

  He didn’t seem to understand. He kept looking over my shoulder towards the church door.

  ‘The dress,’ I said, ‘I’m sorry about the dress.’ It was bright yellow, an optimistic colour as Maman put it, and you would hardly have expected Oliver not to notice the change.

  ‘You look like a jewel,’ he said, though his eyes weren’t on me.

  I wore the wrong colours to both my weddings. I should have been wearing silly optimistic yellow at my first wedding, and cautious pale green at my second.

  ‘And all my worldly goods I with thee share.’ That’s what I promised. We’d argued about it beforehand. The usual argument. Oliver wanted to have ‘With all my worldly goods I thee endow.’ He said it was what he felt, that everything he had was mine, that the language embodied a state of soul, that share was mean-spirited and endow poetic. I said this was the trouble. If you’re making a vow it ought to mean something precise. If he endowed me with his worldly goods and I endowed him with mine, then what it meant was that we swapped what we owned, and swapping my mortgaged flat for his rented room didn’t seem to me to be what marriage vows were about and besides, to be frank, if we swapped goods, I’d be the loser. He said that was ungenerous as well as literal minded, and of course we were going to share everything with each other anyway, but couldn’t we still say endow. What, he argued, could more accurately define the difference between my two husbands than the words share and endow. Stuart would want to do a deal, whereas he, Oliver, wanted entire surrender. I said if he remembered Stuart and I had got married in a register office and didn’t say either endow or share.

  So Oliver went to the vicar and asked if a compromise were possible: if he could say endow and I could say share. The vicar said that wasn’t on.

  ‘And all my worldly goods I with thee share.’ Oliver emphasised the verb, wanting people to know he didn’t approve of the wording. The trouble was, it sounded as if he was complaining about having to give me anything. I told him this as we stood outside the church while Maman took photographs.

  ‘All my worldly goods I thee do rent,’ he replied. He seemed more relaxed now. ‘All my worldly goods I thee do lend. All my worldly goods except for those I really want. All my worldly goods but I need a receipt …’ and so on. Once Oliver gets going like this it’s best just to let him run on and on. Have you seen those new dog leads? The ones on a big reel which simply unwind for hundreds of feet if the dog suddenly takes off, and then wind back when the dog waits for you? That’s what I think of when Ollie goes off on a riff like that. He’s like a big dog. But he’ll wait at the corner for you to catch up and give him a pat.

  ‘And all my restaurant bills I with thee share.’ We drove a couple of miles to a nice place which Ollie had chosen. We had a long table at the back. The manager had put lots of red roses in front of my place which I thought was very kind of him even if Ollie declared in a stage whisper that red roses were a bit naff. We sat down and had a glass of champagne and got through all that giggly talk about who
’d been stuck in a traffic jam on the way, and how the vicar had seemed really interested even though he’d scarcely met me or Oliver before, and how we hadn’t fluffed our lines, and how happy I looked. ‘Any advance on happy?’ said Ollie and he was off again. ‘Do I hear radiant? Yes, I have radiant here on my left. Now, any advance on radiant? Beautiful? Do I have beautiful? thank you, sir. Now do I hear magnificent anywhere? Spectacular? Sensational? It’s with beautiful on my right at the moment … Beautiful … beautiful … I have spectacular in front of me. Spectacular with me … are you all done at spectacular? Sold to the auctioneer, bought in by Ollie …’ then he banged down a pepper-grinder like a gavel and kissed me to applause.

  The first course came, and I felt Oliver wasn’t hearing something I was saying, so I followed his glance, and there, sitting at a table by himself, not even looking at us, quietly reading a book, was Stuart.

  Then it all started to go wrong, and I’ve just tried to wipe the rest from my memory, what we ate and what was said and how we all pretended nothing was really happening. But I can’t wipe out the end of it, Stuart’s face suddenly appearing like that over the top of the tablecloth and staring at me with a horrible grin and a ghostly light in his eyes. A Hallowe’en pumpkin come to life. I screamed. Not that it was frightening, really. It was just so truly sad I couldn’t bear it.

  Oliver Bastard. You fat little bank-wank turd-eating bastard. After all I’ve done for you over years and years. Who made you into a vaguely acceptable human being in the first place? Who got arm-ache sandpapering your rough patches? Who introduced you to girls, taught you how to hold a knife and fork, was your bloody friend? And what do I get in return? You fuck up my wedding, you fuck up the best day of my life. Cheap, vulgar, selfish revenge, that’s all it was, though no doubt in your earth-closet of a soul you transmuted the motive into something vaguely noble, even judicial. Well, let me just tell you this, my steatopygous ex-mucker: if you come nosing around again you will be my ex-mucker in more than one sense. I’ll have you eating broken glass for a week, don’t let there be any ambiguity about that. Don’t you misread Oliver for a moment. There is violence in this supposedly tender heart of mine.

  I should have had you arrested the moment I spotted you. Got you locked up on some holding charge, like loitering with intent or despoiling the landscape or being a whining bore. Take this man into custody, officer, he’s just not entertaining any more, he’s simply stopped being fun. God I jest, it’s always been my weakness, but if I didn’t jest I’d have to come round and cut off your tufted ears and shove them down your throat and make you eat your antique spectacles for pudding.

  The day had all been going so well until I saw you across the road trying to appear inconspicuous by stamping the pathway metronomically as if on sentry duty, smoking like some Arnold Bennett chimney and casting fetid glances at the church. It was apparent that some item of duncical knavery was afoot, so adjusting my white carnation with its faint blush of green I cut across the carcinogenic thoroughfare and accosted you.

  ‘I’m coming to the wedding,’ you said. I corrected this unlikely intention.

  ‘You came to mine,’ continued the whinge, ‘so I’m coming to yours.’

  I explained the divergence of etiquette that such a plan entailed, namely that in the moderately evolved society known as the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland one did not, on the whole, permit oneself to attend formal ceremonies to which one had not been invited. When you queried this arcane piece of protocol I urged you, in the nicest possible way, to bugger off instanter and preferably throw yourself beneath a double-decker in the process.

  I can’t say I put entire confidence in your apparent departure, and kept a weather eye on the church door as we stood there waiting for curtain-up from the vie. At any moment I thought the oaken portal might be thrust aside to reveal your unwelcome visage. Even once the conjoining was under way, I half expected that when we came to the bit about anyone present giving a shout if there was any let or hindrance or just impediment to my being allowed to unleash corporeal fury upon the fair Gill, you might pop up from some umbrageous segment of the kirk and register a quailing objection. But you didn’t, and we romped playfully through the vows. I even had time to give an ironic accent to that crappy bit of the service in which you promise to ‘share’ your worldly goods with your partner. For centuries everyone has always ‘endowed’ his partner with his worldly goods – here, have the lot, what’s mine is yours – and that, it seems to me, conveys the wholeheartedness central to the spirit of matrimony, encapsulates the quiddity of the biz. But not any more. The lawyers and the accountants have got at everything. I was a touch bouleversé when Gillian insisted upon share, and found our discussion of it all a trifle demeaning, as if I were planning to hot-foot it from the temple and immediately put my half of Gillian’s flat on the market. Graciously I acceded to her whim in the matter. There is a zephyr of Mme Dragon about my bride, as you may have remarked.

  In truth, it was part of a mildly grubby trade-off. I wanted a church wedding, whereas Gill saw even less point this time round than before. So I got to choose the theatre, and she was allowed to launder the script. She also, I can avow, squared the padre. Not every house of worship, desperate for custom though you might expect them to be nowadays, welcomes the nuptials of a fallen woman like Gillian. I myself did the rounds of a couple of likely basilicas and received a distinctly dusty answer. So Gillian went off and talked one of the recalcitrant sky-pilots down. Such an internuncio, that girl. Compare the way she persuaded Stuart to act the officer and gentleman despite historic evidence to the contrary. At first he behaved like a proper little caveperson whenever the D-word was mentioned; but Gillian coaxed him into concord. This is not a passage of world history I care to recall in much detail, incidentally. Gillian still seeing her First Husband overmuch. Gillian retaining her studio in FH’s house even after she had left FH. Oliver banned from visiting the studio. Oliver, in fact, obliged pro tern to opt for quietism. Not so much a back seat as stuffed in the boot with only the spare tyre and an outdated road atlas for company.

  But that time ended. Reversibility – lustrous watchword of my wife’s profession – was effected in the domestic sphere. Gillian and Oliver became a single taxable unit and the spectre of time-share in Marbella was finally, utterly banished. The hawthorn tree beside the lych-gate was chivvied by the wind into casting its gentle confetti – none of that stuff from a box, please – and la belle-mère did the full Cartier-Bresson once I’d persuaded her that according to the photographic pioneers the instrument did on the whole work better with the lens-cap removed. Then we decamped in high humour to Al Giardinetto, and I promised Gillian not to call the manager Al, because frankly nowadays that joke was beginning to amuse only me.

  The prosecco was lolling in the ice-buckets. This was to be a memorable meal, you understand, not a credit-card piss-up – would you order French champagne in an Italian restaurant? We loitered conversationally over the pastor’s eccentricities and the vagaries – vagari, Latin, to wander – of the one-way system leading to Al’s. Then the first course of spaghetti neri alle vongole arrived, and we hurdled with a mere jest the objection that Ollie’s choice had a more funereal than nuptial aspect to it – ‘Maman,’ I said (for I had decreed this solution to the vocative problem), ‘Maman, do not forget that at Breton weddings they used to drape the church in black.’ In any case, as soon as the fork transported this primo piatto to the mouth all discord faded. I began to suck in happiness like a long, flexible, infrangible strand of pasta. And then I spotted the little bastard.

  Let me set the scene. There were ten of us (who? oh, just a few hand-picked amici and cognoscenti) at the back of the restaurant, at a long table in a slight alcove – a touch Last Supper after Veronese – while below the salt a raggle-taggle of lunchers did their best to feign polite lack of interest in the jocund wedding party. (Oh, how English. Don’t intrude on someone else’s joy, don’t toast them acr
oss the restaurant, just pretend nobody’s got married unless they make too much noise and then you can complain.…) So I glanced around the discreetly downcast faces and what, brazenly opposite us, did I spy? The tactful First Husband, sitting all alone, pretending to read a book. A droll gambit for a start. Stuart reading a book? He’d have been much better camouflaged standing on his chair and waving at us.

  I rose lightly from my place, despite a restraining bridal hand, went across to my new wife’s ex, and amiably instructed him to hop it. He wouldn’t look me in the face. He kept his eyes on his predictable lasagne which he’d been ineffectually torturing with a fork.

  ‘It’s a public place,’ he replied feebly.

  ‘That’s why I’m asking you to vacate it,’ I replied. ‘If it were a private place I wouldn’t do you the courtesy of language. You’d be on the pavement in several portions by now. You’d be on a skip with the trash.’

  Perhaps I was being a trifle noisy, because Dino the manager came across at this point. ‘Al,’ I said, slipping back into my old joshing ways, ‘we have an eyesore here. There is an Accident Black Spot in your trattoria. Kindly remove.’

  Do you know, he wouldn’t? He refused to kick Stuart out. Even began defending him at one point. Well, rather than disturb the peace any further I returned to my table where the sombre spaghetti tasted like ash in my mouth. I explained the technicality of British restaurant law whereby a dozen happy high-rolling customers are unable to enjoy themselves in peace (talk about siding with the underdog!) and we all resolved to concentrate on the immediate felicity.

  ‘Ah,’ I said, turning to Gill, ‘I didn’t know your second name was Felicity,’ and everyone laughed, though it felt to Ollie as if he was labouring uphill in the wrong gear. And despite the resplendent pesce spada al salmoriglio, one’s attention did keep on returning to the wretched Stuart twitching a podgy finger across the page (definitely not Kafka!) and trying to stop his lasagne-flecked lips from moving as he read. Why is the tongue inescapably drawn to any dental pothole, why does it evade command as it seeks out that patch of roughness and rubs against it like a cow on a post? Stuart was our patch of roughness, our sudden cavity. How could one be truly blithe for all one’s surface glee?