Talking It Over

  When he left, he asked if he could cut something off that tree outside. For a keepsake, he said. He went off with a bit of monkey-puzzle in his hand.

  Gillian Stuart is going away. I’m sure that’s a wise decision. Sometimes I think we should do the same. Oliver’s always talking about the fresh start he’s on the point of making but we’re still both living in the same city, doing the same jobs. Maybe we should just go.

  Oliver The test was negative, of course. I knew it would be. You weren’t actually worrying on my behalf, were you? Mes excuses. I’m really touched. Had I realised I’d have told you as soon as I knew.

  Mme Wyatt You ask me what I think of them, Stuart and Oliver, whom I prefer? But I am not Gillian, and that is all that counts. She said to me, ‘I suppose I knew what it was to be loved. I didn’t know what it was like to be adored.’ I replied, ‘Then why pull such a long face?’ As you English say, if you pull a face, the wind might change.

  I suppose also, it never happens quite as you expect. I have the same prejudices as any mother. When I first met Stuart, and then afterwards when they married, I was thinking, Don’t you dare to harm my daughter. Stuart would always sit in front of me as if he was being examined by a doctor or a schoolmaster or somebody. His shoes were always very well polished, I remember, and when he thought I was not noticing he would cast an eye down on them to see that they had not got scuffed. He was so eager to please, for me to like him. I found this touching, but of course I resisted it a little. Yes, you love her now, I can see that, yes you are very polite to me and polish your shoes, but if you do not mind I will wait a few years. When ChouEn-lai was asked what he thought the effect of the French Revolution had been on world history, he replied, ‘It is too early to tell.’ Well, that is what I thought with Stuart. I saw him as an honest young man, perhaps a little dull, who earned enough money to look after Gillian, and that was a good start. But if I was examining him as he thought, then I would have come to this judgment: it is too early to tell, come back in a few years. I am waiting, I am watching. And I never once asked myself the question the other way round: what if my daughter does harm to Stuart? So I am not such a wise woman, you see. I am like those fortresses who have all their guns pointing to where they think the enemy is coming from, and are undefended when he arrives by the back door.

  And then we have Oliver instead of Stuart, and what do I think about that? Oliver who does not think that polishing his shoes is the best way to persuade me to like him. On the contrary, Oliver behaves as if it was impossible for me not to like him. He behaves as if we have always known one another. He gives me advice about which sort of English fish are best to replace in the bouillabaisse the Mediterranean fish I cannot obtain. (He does not ask me first if I like bouillabaisse.) He flirts with me, in a certain way, I think. And he does not for a moment allow himself to imagine that I could disapprove of him for having broken up my daughter’s marriage. He wants – how can I put this? – he wants me to have a part of his happiness. It is strange, and rather touching.

  You know what he said to me the other day? ‘Maman,’ he said – he has called me that instead of Mme Wyatt ever since he broke up my daughter’s marriage, which I find perhaps a little peculiar – ‘Maman, why don’t we find you a husband?’

  Gillian looked at him as if in the circumstances it was probably the worst thing he could have said, and maybe it was but I didn’t mind. He said it too in a flirting way, as if he would have suggested himself for the role had he seen me before he had seen my daughter. What a cheek? Yes, but I could hardly dislike him for it.

  ‘I do not think I will marry again,’ was all I said, though.

  ‘Un oeuf is enough?’ he replied, and started giggling at his own joke. It wasn’t even a good joke. Gillian joined in, and laughed more than I knew she could laugh. They forgot I was there, which was a good idea at the moment.

  You see, I do not think I will marry again. Oh, I do not say that I will not fall in love again, but that is another business. Everyone is vulnerable to that, whatever they say, until the day one dies. No, but marriage … I will tell you the conclusion I came to, after all those years with Gordon, years which despite what you might think were mostly happy; as happy as anybody else, I would say. And my conclusion was this: that as you go on living with someone, you slowly lose the power to make them happy, while your capacity to hurt them remains undiminished. And vice versa, of course.

  Not an optimistic view? But one only has a duty to be optimistic in the eyes of others, not for oneself. Ah, you will say – Oliver would certainly say it – that was just with Gordon, he just ground you down, it was not a fair trial, give it another go, love. Well, it is not just from living with Gordon that I decided this: I have eyes for other marriages. And I tell you this in all honesty. There are certain truths which you can live with if they have been demonstrated to you only once. That way they do not oppress you, there is room for an interrogation mark beside them. But if such a truth is demonstrated twice, it will oppress and suffocate. I could not bear for this to be true, twice true. And so I keep my distance from that truth, and from marriage. Un oeuf is enough. And what do you also say? You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs. So, no omelette for me.

  16: De Consolatione Pecuniae

  Stuart If you ask me – and I have now had time to think about this – love – or what people call love – is just a system for getting people to call you Darling after sex.

  I hit a bad time after that Business. I didn’t Go to Pieces. I didn’t Have a Breakdown. I’m not the sort of person for things like that. I know that I’m probably going to go on, with roughly the same job, and certainly the same personality, and definitely the same name (I’m the one who sticks by his name, remember?) until … well, until I give up my job, and old age starts to eat away at my personality, and death finally takes away my name. But the Business changed me. Oh, it didn’t Mature Me, it didn’t Make Me Grow Up. But it did change me.

  You remember about my parents, how I always had the feeling that I was disappointing them? I thought that was just between parents and children, and if you were lucky you didn’t even get it there. Now I think it’s general. It’s just a question of who does it to whom. For instance, when the Business happened, and we were all of us going through it – I can see that now, it wasn’t just me going through it – I used to think that I was disappointing Gillian. I thought, here we go again: I failed my parents in some way they never quite explained to me, and now I’m failing my wife in some new but equally unfathomable way. Then, a bit later, I began to realise that it wasn’t me who’d disappointed her, it was they who’d disappointed me. My wife let me down, my best friend let me down, it was only my character and my bloody tendency to feel guilt that made me not see this before. They let me down. And so I formulated a principle. I don’t know if you follow rugby, but some years ago there was a famous saying in the game: Get your retaliation in first. And now the way I live my life is according to this principle: Get your disappointment in first. Disappoint them before they disappoint you.

  Work helped a lot. At first it was just somewhere to go, something I could still respect. It had its own system, it could go on forever without me; but it let me sit at a screen and deal with it. I was grateful to work, to money, for doing that. I would get miserable, and I would get drunk, of course, and I would get angry, but as soon as I sat down in front of money I felt calmer. And I always paid it respect. I never got drunk the night before coming in to work. I always wore a clean shirt. If I binged it was only on Fridays and Saturdays. For a while it was every Friday and Saturday. But come Monday I was sitting there in a clean shirt with a clear head, talking to money.

  And since this was what I did best in my life, I got better at it. Or I got to know more. I was never going to be a high flier, but I am a medium flier. I was never going to take a punt on some high-risk offshore megabuck Saudi whatsit. I was the fellow advising against all this. I was the chap who said not so fast, have we got
everything covered, remember what happened to the Second City Bank of Cornbelt. I’m good at saying things like that. We can’t all be barrow-boys in sharp suits who coin it when times are good and get burnt out at twenty-five. So when the Bank opened more branches in the States, they sent me along to Washington as a sensible middle-ranking person. That’s where I am now.

  And money helped too. I showed respect to money, and money paid me back, money helped me. I remember the first time money helped. It wasn’t long before my ex-wife and my ex-best-friend inflicted the final, terminal disappointment on me of marrying one another. That was a bad time as you can imagine. It wasn’t a period when I could put much trust in people, not over the simplest things. How did I know someone wasn’t just waiting for me to become attached to them so that they could stab me with disappointment?

  One day, one afternoon to be precise, I decided I was bloody well going to have sex. Apart from everything else she’d done to me, Gillian had put me off sex. I didn’t want sex, you understand, when I decided to have it. The point was, I was fighting back against what they’d done to me. So I thought, how shall I go about this? And then I remembered that to the outside world I probably looked like a businessman in a suit, and so decided to behave as such people are supposed to behave. It was a Saturday afternoon, and I packed a case, took a cab to a hotel in Bayswater, checked in, went out and bought a magazine of the sort businessmen might buy, and went back to the hotel.

  I scanned the ads and eventually settled on an organisation which offered Sophisticated Girls for both Relaxing Massage or Escort Duties, at Your Hotel, Credit Cards Accepted. I paused over the credit card thing. Was this a good idea? I hadn’t anticipated it as a possibility – indeed, I’d come equipped with lots of cash. Perhaps they just wanted your credit-card number in order to blackmail you? But I must be one of the few unblackmailable people around now. I don’t have any family to hide anything from. And what if the Bank found out? They’d probably only object if I used a credit card they disapproved of, one with an interest rate that cast doubt on my professional competence.

  Then, as I made the call, I had a sudden panic. What if they sent a girl who looked like Gillian? That really would have been a kick in the guts. So when they asked if I had any particular sort of escort in mind, I asked if they had an Oriental girl. So they sent Linda. Or they sent a girl who called herself Linda. She cost £100. That was her price, that was what money bought. I’m not going to go into details because I’m not the sort of person who goes into details about that kind of thing, but it was worth every penny. She was very good at what she did. I didn’t want sex, as I said, I just decided to have it; but very soon I wanted it as well and was glad I wanted it. After she left I looked at the credit-card slip to see what she’d written in the box headed Quantity and Description. She’d put ‘Goods’. Just that. ‘Goods’.

  Sometimes they put jokey things like ‘Servicing Equipment’, and sometimes they put nothing, or whatever you ask them to; but I’ll always remember that Linda put ‘Goods’. It was a transaction, a piece of business, so why not? Since then there’ve been lots more girls like Linda, some of them also called Linda. There seems to be a certain level of name the girls assume: I’ve met a lot of Lindas and Kims and Kellys and Lorraines and Linzis. I haven’t met many Charlottes and Emmas in this line of work, I can tell you. And another plus for the profession is this: when the girls decide on their names they rarely think that the businessman in the grey suit with the eager credit card wants them to be called Gillian. At least, not Gillian in full. I don’t think I could handle that. There was a girl once – in Manchester, I think – who said her name was Gill.

  ‘How do you spell it?’ I said. I was pulling my credit card out of my wallet and just froze.

  ‘What d’you mean?’ She looked a bit miffed, as if I was giving her some sort of IQ test before engaging her.

  ‘Just how do you spell it – with a J or with a G?’

  ‘J of course.’

  Of course.

  I like it in America. It suits me being foreign in America. Foreign but English-speaking, that is. And English, too. Americans are very friendly, as we’ve all been told a million times, and the ones I know are nice to me, but if they look like getting too close and I back off, then they just put it down to my being English. They think I’m just a bit reserved, a bit tight-assed, and that’s OK by me. I back off – I get my disappointment in first.

  And the girls are good too. The professional ones, I mean. The Shelleys and the Marlenes. Not a Charlotte or an Emma on this side of the water either. Not in this business. Not a Gillian either. Not in the full form, and with a G, anyway.

  Look, you may not like me much now. Perhaps you never did. But that’s OK. I’m not in the business of being liked any more. I don’t mean I’m planning to be some ferocious mega-tycoon who’s always shitty – I’m never deliberately nasty to people, that’s not part of my make-up. It’s just that it matters far less to me whether or not people like me. I used to do quite a lot to please them, to get approval. Nowadays I find I don’t care so much one way or the other. As a small example, I’ve gone back to glasses. I only started wearing contact lenses because I thought Gillian would like me more that way.

  One of the first things people tell you about money is that it’s an illusion. It’s notional. If you give someone a dollar bill it’s not ‘worth’ a dollar – it’s ‘worth’ a small piece of paper and a small amount of printer’s ink – but everyone agrees, everyone subscribes to the illusion that it’s worth a dollar, and therefore it is. All the money in the world only means what it does because people subscribe to the same illusion about it. Why gold, why platinum? Because everyone agrees to place this value upon them. And so on.

  You can probably see where I’m leading. The other world illusion, the other thing that exists simply because everyone agrees to place a certain value on it, is love. Now you may call me a jaundiced observer, but that’s my conclusion. And I’ve just been pretty close up to it. I’ve had my nose rubbed in love, thank you very much. I’ve put my nose as close against love as I put my nose to the screen when I’m talking it over with money. And it seems to me there are parallels to be drawn. Love is only what people agree exists, what they agree to put a notional value on. Nowadays it’s prized as a commodity by almost everyone. Only not by me. If you ask me, I think love is trading artificially high. One of these days the bottom is going to fall out of love.

  Oliver used to carry around with him a book called The Consolations of Philosophy. ‘So, so consoling,’ he used to coo pretentiously, and give the cover a patronising tap. I never saw him reading it. Perhaps he just liked the title. But I’m the one with the title of today’s book, the up-to-date version. It’s called ‘The Consolations of Money’. And believe me, they work, those consolations.

  People find me more interesting now I’ve got more money. I don’t know if I am – I’m probably not – but they find me so. That’s a consolation. I like buying things and owning things and throwing them away if I don’t like them. I bought a toaster the other day and after a week I didn’t like the way it looked so I chucked it out. That’s a consolation. I like employing people to do things for me that I don’t feel like doing myself – washing the car, cleaning the apartment, doing the shopping. That’s a consolation. While I have a lot less money than some of the people I deal with, I have a lot more money than many of the people I deal with. That’s a consolation. And if I go on earning at the rate I seem to be doing at the moment and invest wisely, then I shall be able to live comfortably from the time I retire until the time I die. Money, it seems to me, is a good deal more consoling than philosophy when it comes to worrying about that stretch of one’s life.

  I’m a materialist. What else is there to be, if you’re not a Buddhist monk? The two great creeds that have ruled the world this century – capitalism and communism – are both materialist; one’s just better at it than the other, as recent events have proved. Man likes consumer g
oods, always has, always will. We may as well get used to it. And the love of money isn’t the root of all evil, it’s just the starting-point of most people’s happiness, most people’s consolation. It’s much more reliable than love.

  What you see is what you get. What you get is what you pay for. That’s the rule in the world of Kim and Kelly and Shelley and Marlene. I don’t mean that there aren’t cheats. Of course there are, just as there are girls with diseases and girls who turn out to be boys; it’s like any other business, there are frauds and bad buys. But go to the right people, pay the right price, and you get what you want. Reliably, professionally. I like the way they have their little codes when they arrive. How can I be of assistance? What do you have in mind? Is there anything special you’d like? No doubt with other customers this leads to prolonged bargaining before the metallic crunch of the credit-card machine they carry in their bag along with contraceptives. But my bargaining is always simple. When they ask me if there’s anything special I want, I never bother them with schoolgirl outfits and whips or whatever. I just say that I want them to call me Darling afterwards. Just once, that’s all. Nothing more.

  I’m not friendless. Don’t misjudge me. I go to work, and I work hard, and I earn my money. I live in a nice apartment not too far from Dupont Circle. I have friends, both male and female, with whom I spend time; I get as close to them as I want to, but no closer. Get your disappointment in first. And yes, I’ve had girlfriends over here. I’ve been to bed with some of them, and some of them have called me Darling, before, afterwards, during. I like that, of course, but I don’t trust it. The only Darling I can trust is a Darling I’ve paid for.

  You see, I don’t think of myself as jaundiced or cynical or disillusioned or whatever. I just think of myself as seeing things more clearly now than I did before. Love and money are two great holograms that glitter before us, turning and twisting like real 3-D things. Then you reach out and your hand goes straight through them. I always knew that money was an illusion, but I also knew that even so it had limited powers, and wonderful powers they are. I didn’t know love was the same. I didn’t know you could put your hand straight through it. Now I do, and I’m wiser.