Talking It Over

  I was advised to ignore him. Occupants of other tables began to leave, but this only made my wife’s first husband more prominent. A twister of cigarette effluent rose above his table. Smoke-signals from a discarded brave signalling to his lost squaw. I’ve given up the weed myself. It’s a stupid habit, encouraging self-indulgence. But that’s just what Stuart needs and wants nowadays – self-indulgence. Eventually there remained in the restaurant only the ten of us (each seated before a flamboyant dolce), a late-lingering couple in the window doubtless plotting some itchy passage of banlieusard adultery, and Stu. As I got up I noticed him glance nervously at our table and light another cigarette.

  I made him sweat a bit by taking a voluminous pee in the crepuscular gabinetto, then sauntered back past his table. I had intended merely to glance condescendingly at him, but as I approached he took a pulmon-shuddering drag on his cigarette, looked up quaveringly at me, gazed down at the ashtray, started to lay his fag in one of the notches, eyed me afresh and burst into tears. He just sat there gushing and hissing like a punctured radiator.

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Stu,’ I said, trying not to let my irritation show. Then he started mumbling something about cigarettes. Cigarettes this, cigarettes that. I looked down at his ashtray and saw that the hopeless bugger had got two burning at the same time. That showed how pissed he was, and also what a desperately unstylish smoker he was turning out to be. I mean, a basic element of nicotine panache is available to even the hickest addict if he so seeks.

  I reached down and stubbed out one of these two cigarettes he’d got burning – just for something to do, I suppose. Whereupon he looked up wildly and burst into giggles. Then he stopped just as suddenly and started blubbing. A lachrymose Stuart is not a sight I would wish to impose on you. Next he began bawling like a kid that’s lost a whole muff of teddies. So I summoned Dino and said What about it now? But Dino appeared to have stiffened against my cause, and came on all dismayingly Latin, as if public despair was part of the attraction of his trattoria and customers actually came there to witness it, as if Stuart was his star turn. He actually began comforting the tormented banker, whereupon I merely dropped an order for twelve double grappas if he’d got time to break off from his voluntary nursing work, and glided back to our table. And guess what? I was met by a complete frost. Anyone would have thought that I’d made him cry. Anyone would have thought that I was the one who was wrecking the whole wedding party.

  ‘Bring those bloody grappas, Dino,’ I shouted, whereupon half the party including the wretched bride and my bloody mother-in-law informed me that they didn’t like grappa. ‘What’s that got to do with it?’ I shouted.

  By now things were getting right out of hand. The restaurant staff were clustered round Stuart as if he’d first discovered the place rather than me, the nuptial party was throttling back on celebration, the adultery table was candidly staring, the grappas were being costively withheld, and old Ollie was frankly feeling that he was being treated like a three-day-old fish-head. Still, the ingenuity was not yet defunct, and I bullied a waiter into bringing me their largest tablecloth. Two hatstands, resited under protest, a few used carafes as weights, a couple of neat knife-wounds in the cloth, and there we had it: an improvised screen. Gone were the intrusive lovers, gone was the burbling Stuart, and here came the grappas! A tactical triumph for Ollie, who then turned up the anecdotal charm in an attempt to bump-start the party again.

  It almost worked. Some of the frost began to melt. Everyone decided they’d better have a final push towards enjoying themselves. I was in the middle of one of my lengthier and droller oral tales when there was a distant sound of a scraping chair. Oh good, I thought, he’s finally buggering off. But a mere few seconds later, as I was building to one of my anecdotal crescendi, Gillian screamed. She screamed, then she burst into tears. She looked as if she’d seen a ghost. She was staring at the top of the screen I’d rigged up. What was she looking at? There was only the stippled ceiling beyond. Her tears seemed unstoppable, her ducts pulsed like a severed artery.

  No-one wanted to hear the end of my story.

  Gillian A clown. A turnip head. A Hallowe’en mask …

  15: Tidying Up

  Stuart I’m leaving. That’s my lot. There’s nothing for me here.

  I can’t bear three things.

  I can’t bear that my marriage failed. No, let’s get it straight. I can’t bear that I failed. I suddenly started noticing the way people talk about these things. They say, ‘The marriage failed,’ they say, ‘The marriage broke down.’ Oh, it was the marriage’s fault, was it? Listen, there’s no such thing as ‘the marriage’, I’ve decided. There’s only you and her. So it’s either her fault or your fault. And while at the time I thought it was her fault, now I feel it’s mine. I failed her. I failed me. I didn’t make her so happy that it was impossible for her to leave. That’s what I didn’t do. So I failed, and I feel shame about it. Compared to this I don’t give a stuff whether or not anyone thinks my prick doesn’t work.

  I can’t bear what happened at the wedding. Her scream still echoes in my brain. I didn’t want to spoil things. I just wanted to be there, to watch unseen. It all went wrong. How can I apologise? Only by going away.

  I can’t bear that they say they want to be my friends. If they don’t mean it, it’s hypocritical. If they do mean it, it’s worse. How can they say a thing like that after all that’s happened? I am pardoned for my sins, the colossal impertinence of having for a brief period come between Romeo and Juliet has been forgiven. Well, piss off to both of you. I’m not going to be forgiven like that, and neither are you, do you hear? Even if I can’t bear it.

  So I’m going away.

  The only person I’ll miss, funnily enough, is Mme Wyatt. She’s always been very straight with me from the beginning. I rang her last night to say I was going away and to apologise for how I had behaved at the wedding.

  ‘Don’t think about it, Stuart,’ she said. ‘You may even have helped.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Maybe if you start off with a disaster, you aren’t tempted to look back and pretend that things were once perfect.’

  ‘You’re a philosopher, Mme Wyatt, you know that?’

  She laughed in a way I hadn’t ever heard her laugh before.

  ‘No, really,’ I said, ‘you’re a wise woman.’

  And that, for some reason, made her laugh even more. I suddenly realised she must have been quite a flirt in her younger days.

  ‘Keep in touch, Stuart,’ she said.

  That was very nice of her, wasn’t it? I might just do that.

  Oliver Impossible not to clock, de temps en temps, the fact that life has its ironic side, isn’t it? Here is Stuart the joyful banker (I Banchieri Giocosi – why are there so few operas about the trade, I wonder, I wonder), the diminutive yet dogged bulwark of capitalism, the scurrying caresser of market forces, the Mountjoy of the take-over, the legman of buy-in and sell-off. And here am I, credulous liberal who votes with pin and blindfold, tender ringmaster of the arts of peace, one who instinctively supports the weak against the strong, the whale against the all-Nippon fishing fleet, the dank seal-cub against the culling brute in the lumberjack shirt, the rain forest against the under-arm deodorant. And yet, when the purveyors of these rival philosophies direct their attention to matters of love, one of them suddenly believes in protectionism and the Monopolies Commission, while the other asserts the natural wisdom of the free market. Guess which turns out to be which?

  And it’s also about bonking, too, about rumpy pumpy, about that little prod of extendable tissue which causes so much anxiety. The heart’s afflatus, as hymned by minstrels high and low, also leads to fucking, we shouldn’t forget that. I must resist the triumphalist tone here (a little anyway), but we shall not fail cautiously to note that when the free marketeer becomes protectionist, perhaps it’s because he realises that his goods don’t measure up. That sometimes merely going Sh-chug-a-chug like a shaken b
ox of breakfast cereal does not make the inamorata thrum until the sun goes down. That there are times when what is called for is summer lightning across a sub-Saharan sky. Who would opt for the model aeroplane with plastic propellor and wind-up rubber band when there are still shooting stars up there in the heavens? Is not the human race marked out from the lower beasts by the fact that it knows how to aspire?

  But if one of necessity wields a touch of the seal-clubber when it comes to love, if the Japanese whaler within one must be sent forth across the Southern waters to do his business, this does not entail a continuing brutishness when one returns to port. Poor Stuart – I offer him still the palm of friendship. In fact, I telephoned him. There I was, with the scar from our little contretemps still upon my cheek (but that was fine: I was Ollie the Jaunty Duellist rather than Oliver Russell the Semi-Employed Crime Victim), attempting to wheedle him back towards normality.

  ‘Hi, it’s Oliver.’

  There was a pause whose medium length made it difficult to interpret, followed by a less ambiguous utterance. ‘Fuck off, Oliver.’

  ‘Look …’

  ‘Fuck off.’

  ‘I can imagine …’

  ‘FUCK OFF FUCK OFF FUCK OFF.’

  Anyone would have thought that I was ringing to apologise to him, that I was the one who’d come pestering his nuptials. The Ancient Mariner had nothing on Stu, turning up at the church then dogging us to the restaurant. I really should have had him arrested, you know. Officer, bespy thou that antique salt yonder? He’s been whingeing on to one and all about downing a seagull. Move him on, would you please, or preferably fix him up with a night in Newgate at Her Majesty’s Pleasure.

  But I didn’t, I was reasonable, and this is the thanks I get. A drip-drip of Fuckoffs like a dosage of Earex. It seemed especially coarse, given that the instrument through which these repeated incitements to departure were conveyed was none other than the matt-black leather-encrusted portable through which I had declared myself to his wife. Had my friend stayed on the line long enough I might have shared this deft irony with him.

  Of course, I did not compose Stuart’s number – her number! all I did was press that sacred ever-remembering 1 upon the dial! – entirely on my own initiative. Sometimes magnanimity requires an accoucheuse. Gillian suggested I call.

  Don’t get the wrong idea about Gillian, by the way. Not that I’ve any notion of the colour transparency you hold up to the light when dreaming of her. It’s just that she’s stronger than me. I’ve always known it.

  And I like it. Bind me with silken cords, please.

  Gillian Oliver said that Stuart didn’t want to talk to him. I tried calling him too. He answered the phone. I said, ‘It’s Gillian.’ There was a sigh, and he put the phone down on me. I can’t blame him, can I?

  Stuart bought out my share of the house. The division of money and possessions was fair. Do you know what he did, Stuart? It was one of those really surprising things. When we agreed to divorce – when he agreed to let me divorce, to be more accurate – I said something about the way I hated the idea of having lawyers come in and decide who gets what, how it had been painful enough already, but then the lawyers supposedly made it worse by insisting that you fight for every penny. And do you know what Stuart’s reaction was? He said, ‘Why don’t we ask Mme Wyatt to decide?’

  ‘Maman?’

  ‘I’d trust her to be fairer than any lawyer I’ve met.’

  Isn’t that rather extraordinary? So she did, and the lawyers were told what we’d agreed. Then the court approved.

  Another thing. It wasn’t anything to do with sex, the break-up. Whatever anyone might imagine. I’m not going into detail, so I’ll just say this. If someone thinks he or she hasn’t got love-making completely mastered, then he or she is likely to try harder, isn’t he or she? And if on the other hand he or she believes he or she has got the whole thing taped, then he or she might become lazy, even complacent. And so to the person with them, the difference might not seem very great. Especially if what’s really important is who they are.

  After I moved out, Stuart let me keep on the studio. He wouldn’t accept rent either. Oliver didn’t like it. He said Stuart might attack me. Well, of course he didn’t.

  When we were dividing the spoils, Stuart insisted that I keep the glasses Maman gave us. Or what remained of them. There used to be six, now there are only three. It’s funny, I don’t remember breaking any of them.

  Mme Wyatt I regret the incident with the wedding dress. I had no intention to upset Gillian, but really her idea was absurd. More than absurd, the idea of an imbecile. To marry twice in the same dress – who heard of it? So sometimes it is necessary for a mother to behave like a mother.

  The wedding was a disaster. It is impossible to exaggerate how much everything went wrong. I could not avoid noticing that the champagne did not come from Champagne. We began with some black food that would have been more appropriate for a funeral. There was that difficulty with Stuart. All a disaster. And finally Oliver insists on ordering for us some Italian digestif of the sort which you would perhaps rub on the chest of a sick child. But put it inside oneself? Never. All a disaster, as I say.

  Val I give it a year. No, seriously. I’ll put money on it. What d’you fancy? A tenner, fifty, a hundred? I give it a year.

  Listen, if Stuart, who’s all cut out to be a husband, lasts as short a time as he did with that prim ballcrusher, what chance for Oliver, who’s got no money, no prospects and is basically queer? How long will the marriage last once he starts calling her Stuart in bed?

  And another thing …

  Oliver & Stuart Out.

  Get that bitch out of here.

  Go on.

  Out.

  Out.

  OUT.

  Val They can’t do this to me. You can’t let them do this to me. I’ve got just as much right …

  Oliver & Stuart OUT. It’s her or us. Out, you bitch. OUT. Her or us.

  Val You know this is against all the rules?

  I mean, you realise what you’re doing here? You know what the consequences of this are likely to be? Have you thought about them? This is player power. Hey you – aren’t you meant to be the manager, aren’t you meant to own the whole fucking team?

  Oliver Have you got a scarf, Stu?

  Val Can’t you see what’s going on? This is a direct challenge to your authority. Help me. Please. If you help me, I’ll tell you about their cocks.

  Oliver I’ll hold her, you gag her.

  Stuart Right.

  Val You’re pathetic, you know that? You two.

  Pa the tic.

  Stuart …

  Ol …………

  Oliver Woof. That was sport. Valda the Vanquished. Woof, woof.

  Stuart, look …

  Stuart NO.

  Oliver It was just like old times, wasn’t it, that?

  Just like old times. Remember? Jules et Jim?

  Stuart Fuck off, Oliver.

  Oliver When I get your scarf back, shall I send it on?

  Stuart Fuck off, Oliver.

  If you open your mouth again, I’ll …

  Go on, fuck off.

  Oliver I’ve been reading Shostakovich’s memoirs. The foregoing histrionics of Valda reminded me of its opening page, on which the composer promises that he will try to tell only the truth. He has lived through many important events and known many outstanding people. He will try to give an honest account of them and not falsify or colour anything: his will be the testimony of an eye-witness. Good. Fair enough. Whereupon this underrated ironist continues, and I quote: ‘Of course, we do have the saying, “He lies like an eye-witness.” ’

  That just about sums up Val. She lies like an eye-witness.

  Another footnote. Or rather, something Stuart might have wished to discuss had he been in a mood to spare me the time of day. Shostakovich on his opera Lady Macbeth: ‘It’s also about how love could have been if the world weren’t full of vile things. It’s the vileness
that ruins love. And the laws, and properties, and financial worries, and the police state. If conditions had been different, love would have been different.’ Of course. Circumstances alter love. And what about extreme circumstances, those of the Stalinist Terror? Shostakovich goes on: ‘Everyone seemed worried about what would happen to love. I suppose it will always be like that, it always seems that love’s last days are here.’

  Imagine that: the death of love. It could happen. I wanted to say to Stuart, you know that PhD I gave you about market forces and love, well I wasn’t sure how much I meant it, just a riff, really. Now I realise I was on to something. ‘If conditions had been different, love would have beep different.’ It’s true, so true. And how little we reflect upon it. The death of love: it’s possible, it’s thinkable, I can’t bear it. ‘Officer Cadet Russell, why do you wish to join the Regiment?’ ‘I want to make the world safe for love. And I mean it, sir, I mean it!’

  Mrs Dyer I enjoyed having that young man here. Of course, he told terrible fibs, and I still haven’t had the last two weeks’ rent he promised to send on.

  He was probably a bit round the bend, if you ask me. I used to hear him talking to himself in his room. And he did tell these fibs. I don’t think he was really writing for the films, and he never parked his car in the street. Do you think he had the AIDS after all? They say it makes people go round the bend. That could be the explanation. Still, he was a nice young man.