I was talking to a man with a stammer who was training to be an estate agent when Gillian was brought across by the organiser. Something about the fact that this chap stammered gave me more confidence. That’s a cruel thing to say, but it’s been done to me often enough in the past: you find yourself saying ordinary things and the person next to you is suddenly being witty. Oh yes, that’s happened to me often enough. It’s a sort of primitive law of survival – find someone worse off than yourself and beside them you will blossom.
Well, maybe ‘blossom’ is an exaggeration, but I told Gillian one or two of Oliver’s jokes, and we talked about being apprehensive over coming to the group, and then it emerged that she was half-French, and I had something to say about that, and the estate agent tried to bring in Germany but we weren’t having any of it, and before I knew where I was I had half-turned my shoulder to exclude the other chap and was saying, ‘Look, I know you’ve only more or less just arrived, but you wouldn’t like a spot of supper, would you? I mean, perhaps another evening if you’re not free.’ I was amazed at myself, I can tell you.
‘Do you think we’re allowed to go this soon?’
‘Why ever not?’
‘Aren’t we meant to meet everybody first?’
‘It’s not compulsory.’
‘All right, then.’
She smiled at me, and looked down. She was shy, and I liked that. We went out for supper in an Italian restaurant. Three weeks later Oliver came back from somewhere exotic, and there were the three of us. All that summer. The three of us. It was like that French film where they all go bicycling together.
Gillian I wasn’t shy. I was nervous, but I wasn’t shy. There’s a difference. Stuart was the shy one. That was perfectly obvious from the start. Standing there with his schooner of sherry, perspiring a little at the temples, clearly not in his element, and trying painfully hard to overcome it. Of course, nobody was in his or her element. At the time, I thought, this is a bit like shopping for people, and we aren’t trained for that, not in our society.
So Stuart began by telling a couple of jokes, which fell rather flat because he was so jumpy and I don’t think the jokes were much good in the first place. Then France was mentioned, and he said something ordinary, like you can always tell you’re there from the smell of the place, how you could tell even if you were blindfold. The point was, though, that he was trying, with himself as much as with me, and that’s touching, you know. It’s genuinely touching.
I wonder what happened to the man with the stammer who wanted to talk about Germany. I hope he’s found somebody.
I wonder what happened to Jenkins.
Oliver Don’t tell me. Let me guess. Let me zero my telepathy in on the benign, rumpled and somewhat steatopygous figure of my friend Stu. Steatopygous? Means his bum sticks out: the Hottentot derrière.
Jules et Jim? Am I right? I think I can tell. He used to mention it at one time, but only to me, never to Gillian. Jules et Jim. Oskar Werner, the short, blond and – dare one say it – quite possibly steatopygous one, Jeanne Moreau, and then the tall, dark, elegant, good-looking one who doubtless had kissable teeth (what was his name?). Well, no problem with the casting, the only problem is remembering the plot. They all go bicycling together and run across bridges and lark about, yes? I thought so. But how pudgily typical of Stuart to choose Jules et Jim – likeable enough, but not exactly central to post-war cinema – as his cultural reference point. Stuart, I’d better warn you in advance, is the sort of person who knows Mozart’s K467 as the Elvira Madigan concerto. His preferred idea of classical music is the sound of a string band imitating birds, or clocks, or a little chuffer train going up a hill. Isn’t it so sweetly unstylish?
Maybe he’d taken a course in French film as a way of learning how to pick up girls. That was never his forte, you understand. I sometimes used to help him out with double dates, but they always ended with both girls squabbling over yours truly and Stuart sulking in the corner and displaying all the charisma of a limpet. Dear me, those were saturnine occasions, and I’m afraid our Stuart did tend to point the finger afterwards.
‘You ought to help me more,’ he once complained pathetically.
‘Help you? Help you? I find the girls, I introduce you, I get the evening on an upward parabola, and you just sit there glowering away like Hagen in Götterdämmerung, if you’ll excuse the cultural allusion.’
‘I sometimes think you only invite me so that I can pay the bill.’
‘If I were coining it down in the bull market,’ I reminded him, ‘and you were my oldest friend and out of work and you came up with two corking girls like that, I’d be honoured to pay the bill.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I just don’t think you should have told them that I don’t have any confidence with women.’
‘Oh that’s what’s bugging you.’ Now I began to understand. ‘The master plan was to put everyone at his ease.’
‘I don’t think you want me to get a girlfriend,’ Stuart sulkily concluded.
Which is why I was pretty surprised when he excavated Gillian. Who’d have believed it? What’s more, who’d have believed he’d picked her up in a wine bar? Imagine the scene if you please: Gillian on a bar-stool with satin skirt slashed to the hip, Stuart nonchalantly hefting his tie-knot while working out the current bodybuilder health of the yen on his wristwatch computer, a barman who knows without asking that Mr Hughes-Sir desires the 1918 late-landed Sercial in the special glass which concentrates the nose, Stuart sliding onto the next stool and casually emitting the subtle musk of his sexuality, Gillian begging a light, Stuart slipping the tortoise-shell Dunhill from the pocket of his unstructured Armani suit …
Come on, I mean, come on. Let’s get some reality in here. I’ve heard the account in hushed and pulsing detail and frankly it was no more and no less squalid than you might expect. Some winklebrain from the bank who managed to get himself sacked the following week (and you really do have to be a winklebrain to get ejected from there) stepped out one evening with Stu for a post-Arbeit beverage at Squires Wine Bar. I made Stuart repeat the name to me several times: Squires Wine Bar.
‘Are we to understand,’ I cross-examined, ‘that this is an establishment owned by someone who deems himself a Squire; or, on the other hand, that this is a location sought out by Squires such as yourself when they desire to quaff?’
Stuart thought about this for a while. ‘I don’t follow you.’
‘Then look at it this way. Where does the apostrophe go?’
‘The apostrophe?’
‘Is it e apostrophe s or s apostrophe? It does make a measurable difference.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think it has one.’
‘It must have one, even if subliminally.’ We stared at one another for a few seconds. I don’t think Stuart at all grasped the point I was making. He looked as if he thought I was deliberately sabotaging his modern dress Paul et Virginie. ‘Sorry. Do go on.’
So there they were, Vinkelkopf and Stu, lording it at Squire’s or Squires’ Wine Bar as the case may be, when who should step in but some vieille flamme of Herr Vinkel’s, and this Fräulein had in tow none other than what turned out to be our own dear Gillian. Now the course of events for the trysting quartet from here on in would normally be predictable, except that one of the quatuor was Stuart, and Stuart on a double date is defiantly cognate with a breadstick still in its wrapper. How did he burst out of his crepuscular oubliette of unnoticeability on this occasion? I put this poser to him, though in a more tactful way, you understand. And I cherish his reply.
‘We sort of got talking. And we sort of got on.’
Ah, that’s my Stuart. Do I hear Tristan? Don Juan? Casanova? Do I hear the unspeakably naughty Marquis? No, I hear my mate and mucker Stuart Hughes. ‘We sort of got talking. And we sort of got on.’
Oh dear, you’re giving me that look again. You don’t have to say it. I know. You think I’m a patronising pudendum, don’t you? It’s not really like
that. Perhaps you’re not picking up the tone. I only go on like this because Stuart’s my friend. My oldest friend. I love him, that Stuart. And we go way back – way, way back, back to the time when you could still buy mono records, when kiwi fruit were yet to be devised, when the khaki-clad representative of the Automobile Association would salute the passing motorist, when a packet of Gold Flake cost a groat and a half and you still had change for a flagon of mead. We’re like that, Stuart and me. Old Buddies. And don’t you underestimate my friend, by the way. He comes on a bit slow, sometimes, and the old turbine up top doesn’t always chug away like a Lamborghini, but he gets there, he gets there. And sometimes sooner than I do.
‘Could I borrow a pound from you?’ We were sitting on adjacent banquettes at whatever that school of ours was called (Stuart will know – ask Stuart). I thought it only civil to break the ice with this boy of hitherto laggardly intelligence who had somehow scrambled his way to a temporary plateau of scholastic proximity. But guess what? Instead of obsequiously handing over the dosh as any self-respecting minion temporarily permitted to breathe the upper air would have done, he started reciting terms and conditions. Interest, percentages, dividends, market forces, price/earnings ratio and what-have-you. He practically had me signed up for the European Monetary System when all I wanted was to touch him for a gold moidore. Then he asked why I wanted the money! As if it was any of his business! As if I knew! I just let out a giggle of disbelief which made the old gecko who ran the class flutter his ruff at me in disapproval; I calmed him with a quip and continued the negotiations with my round and financially tenacious new chum. Some months later I paid him back, ignoring his ridiculous caveats and quibbles about interest rates because they were frankly unintelligible, and we’ve been mates and muckers ever since.
He had a girlfriend. Before Gillian, I mean. Back in the days when a groat and a half, etc. And do you know what? I’m sure he won’t mind my telling you this – he wouldn’t sleep with her. Get that. No rumpy pumpy. He declined to make free with her narrow loins. When such Stakhanovite chastity over a period of months finally coaxed some forlorn gesture of affection from the girl, he told her he wanted to get to know her better. I said that this was what she’d been proposing, dummkopf, but Stuart wasn’t having any of it. No, that’s right, he wasn’t having any of it.
Of course, he might have been lying, I suppose, but that would have been an imaginative step for him to take. And besides, I have other evidence. Boffins have definitively spotted the tie-up between sex, interest in/lack of interest in, and food, interest in/lack of interest in. (You doubt me? Then let me cosh you with this detail: one of the most important human pheromones, or sex-pongs, is called isobutyraldehyde, which in the mighty pulsing chain of carbon lies immediately next to – the odour of bean sprouts! Chew on that, amigo.) Now, Stuart, as you will discover if you have not done so already, believes that the principal raison d’être of food is to conceal from public view the hideous pattern on the plate beneath. Whereas few – not to boast – few are speedier on the draw with the old chopsticks than young Ollie.
Ergo, I’ve never had much trouble in the related department of human behaviour either. Family Hold Back has not been my motto. Perhaps my reputation as a coureur emasculates Stuart. And working at the Shakespeare School of English doesn’t exactly hinder me in that direction. After-hours individual tuition in a one-to-one personal interface situation. Stuart must have rung my boudoir and learned how the telephone is answered in about fifteen languages so far. But he’s all right now. He’s got Gillian, hasn’t he?
To tell the truth, I didn’t have a steady girlfriend at the time he swanned into the Café des Squires and exited with Gillian. I was a bit blue, and being blue always makes me satirical, so I expect the odd unfair jest might have escaped my lips. But I was happy for him. How could I not have been happy for him? And he was so puppyish that first time they came round together to my place. So tail-waggingly, bone-snafflingly puppyish that I nearly tickled him under the ears.
I’d tried not to make my apartment look too intimidating. I loosely tossed a swirl of Moroccan curtain over the sofa, slid Act 3 of Orfeo onto the revolving mat, lit an Al Akhbar joss-stick, and left it at that. Rather a bienvenue chez Ollie effect, I thought. Oh, I could have gone further, I suppose – put up a bullfight poster to make Stuart feel at home – but one mustn’t entirely submerge one’s personality, I find, otherwise one’s guests don’t know whom they’re meeting. I lit a Gauloise as the bell went and prepared to meet my doom. Or Stuart’s doom, as the case might be.
At least she didn’t ask why I kept my curtains closed in the daytime. My explanations of this foible have become increasingly baroque of late: I find myself announcing everything from a rare eye disease to undying homage to the early Auden. But perhaps Stuart had warned her.
‘How do you do,’ she said. ‘Stuart’s been telling me about you.’
I did a touch of Makarova in Romeo and Juliet at that, just to put everyone at his ease. ‘Oh God,’ I replied, launching myself at the Moroccan fabric, ‘he hasn’t blown the gaff on my war wound, has he? Really, Stuart, I know it’s not everyone who’s descended from King Zog of Albania, but there’s no need to blab the whole story.’
Stuart touched her on the arm – not a gesture I had ever seen come naturally to him before – and muttered, ‘I told you not to believe anything he said.’ She nodded, and in a strange way I suddenly felt outnumbered. It was strange because there were only two of them, and normally it takes a lot more than that to make me feel outnumbered.
Let me try and reconstruct what she looked like that day. I failed to deposit an accurate simulacrum of her visage and demeanour with the left-luggage clerk of memory; but I think she was in a shirt of a hue between sage and lovage, atop grey stone-washed 501s, green socks and a ridiculously unaesthetic pair of trainers. Marron hair pulled back and clipped over her ears, falling freely behind; lack of make-up bestowing a pallor which dramatised her generous brown eyes; petite mouth and jaunty nose, set rather low on the tapered oval of her face, thus emphasising the curved hauteur of her forehead. Ears with practically no lobes, I couldn’t help noticing, a genetic trait of increasing popularity which no doubt Darwin could explain.
Yes, I think that’s how she struck me.
Now, I’m not one of those conversationalists who maintain that the personal should only be approached after arduous circumnavigation. I do not take a lapwing diversion from the nest via such topical matters of the day as the political turmoil in Eastern Europe, the freshest African coup, the survival chances of the whale, and that surly ripple of low pressure currently pendant from Greenland’s coathook. No sooner had I equipped Gillian and her Squire with a cup of Formosa Oolong than I asked her how old she was, what she did, and whether her parents were still alive.
She took it all in good humour, though Stuart seemed as twitchy as a rabbit’s septum. She was twenty-eight, I discovered; her parents (mother French, father English) had separated some years previously when Pater had done a runner with a bimbo; and she toiled as a handmaiden of the arts, rendering fresh the faded pigments of yesteryear. What? Oh, she restores pictures.
Before they left I could not forbear to draw Gillian closer and impart to her the glittering counsel that wearing 501s with trainers was frankly un désastre and that I was amazed she had walked the streets to my apartment in broad daylight and escaped pillory.
‘Tell me,’ she replied. ‘You don’t …’
‘What?’ I urged her.
‘You don’t … You’re not wearing make-up, are you?’
3: That Summer I Was Brilliant
Stuart Please don’t take against Oliver like that. He goes on a bit but he’s basically very good-hearted and kind. Lots of people don’t like him, and some actively loathe him, but try to see the better side. He hasn’t got a girlfriend, he’s practically penniless, he’s stuck in a job he hates. A lot of that sarcasm is just bravado, and if I can put up with his teasing, can’
t you? Try and give him the benefit of the doubt. For my sake. I’m happy. Please don’t upset me.
When we were sixteen, we went youth-hostelling together. We hitch-hiked up to Scotland. I tried to get a lift from every vehicle that passed, but Oliver only stuck out his thumb at cars he really wanted to ride in, and sometimes even scowled at drivers whose cars he disapproved of. So we weren’t very successful at hitch-hiking. But we got there. It rained most of the time, and when we were kicked out of the youth hostel for the day we walked around and sat in bus shelters. We both had anoraks but Oliver would never pull up his hood because he said it made him look like a monk and he didn’t want to endorse Christianity. So he got wetter than I did.
Once we spent all day – somewhere near Pitlochry, I think – in a telephone box playing battleships. It’s that game where you make a grid on a sheet of graph paper and each player has one battleship (four squares), two cruisers (three squares), three destroyers (two squares) and so on, then you have to knock out the opponent’s fleet. We played game after game. One of us had to sit on the floor of the phone box while the other stood up and rested on the shelf where you open out the directories. I spent the morning sitting on the floor and the afternoon standing up at the shelf. For lunch we had damp oat-cakes we’d bought at the village shop. We played battleships all day, and nobody wanted to use the phone. I can’t remember who won. In the late afternoon the weather cleared and we walked back to the youth hostel. I pulled my hood down and my hair was dry; Oliver’s was still soaking wet. The sun came out and Oliver linked his arm through mine. We passed a lady in her front garden. Oliver bowed to her and said, ‘Behold, madam, the dry monk and the damp sinner.’ She looked puzzled, and we walked on keeping step with one another, arm-in-arm.