Talking It Over

  So there we were, that summer. Woes were not on the agenda. At Frinton we played a one-armed bandit for two whole clattering hours and never attained three fruits in a row – but did we mope? I do, however, recall one moment of piercing sadness. We were on a beach, and someone – probably me in my cheerleader mode – suggested we engrave our names in big letters upon the sand, then one of us would mount the promenade and photograph inscription plus inscriber. A cliché in Beowulf’s time, I know, but you can’t keep coming up with new games. When it came to my turn to be recorded, Gillian went up to the promenade with Stuart. Probably he required help with the auto-focus. It was the end of the afternoon, an east wind was chivvying its self-important way across the North Sea, the sun was losing its heat, and most people had gone home. I stood alone on the beach next to the elaborate italics of Oliver (the others had done capitals, of course), and I looked up towards the camera, and Stuart shouted ‘Cheese!’ and Gillian shouted ‘Gorgonzola!’ and Stu shouted ‘Camembert!’ and Gillian shouted ‘Dolcelatte!’ and suddenly I had this crying fit. I stood there gazing up and blubbing. Then the sun got into my tears and I couldn’t see anything, just a blinding coloured rinse. I felt I might cry for ever, whereupon Stu shouted ‘Wensleydale!’ and I just howled some more, like a jackal, like a pathetic pye-dog. Then I sat in the sand and kicked at the r of Oliver until they came and rescued me.

  Shortly afterwards I was jolly again, and they were jolly too. When people fall in love they develop this sudden resilience, have you noticed? It’s not just that nothing can harm them (that old suave illusion), but that nothing can harm anyone they care about either. Frère Ollie? Crying fit on the beach? Broke down while being photographed by his friends? No, that’s nothing, call off the men in the white coats, send back the padded van, we’ve got our own first-aid kit. It’s called love. Comes in all sorts of packaging. It’s a bandage, it’s a sticking-plaster, it’s lint, it’s gauze, it’s cream. Look, it even comes as an anaesthetising spray. Let’s try some on Ollie. See, he’s fallen down and broken his crown. Spray spray, whoozh, whoozh, there, that’s better, Ollie, up you get.

  And I did. I got up and was jolly again. Jolly Ollie, we’ve mended him, that’s what love can do. Have another squirt, Ollie? One last pick-me-up?

  They took me home that night in Gillian’s rebarbatively quotidian motor-car. Definitely not a Lagonda. I got out and they got out too. I kissed Gillie briefly on the cheek, and ruffled the pelt of Stuart, who was beaming concern at me. So I Nureyeved the front steps and flowed through the door in a single motion of Yale and Chubb. Then I lay upon my understanding bed and burst into tears.

  4: Now

  Stuart It’s now. It’s today. We got married last month. I love Gillian. I’m happy, yes I’m happy. It finally worked out for me. It’s now now.

  Gillian I got married. Part of me didn’t think I ever would, part of me disapproved, part of me was a little scared, to tell the truth. But I fell in love, and Stuart is a good person, a kind person, and he loves me. I’m married now.

  Oliver Oh shit. Oh shit shit shit shit SHIT. I’m in love with Gillie, I’ve only just realised it. I am in love with Gillie. I’m amazed, I’m overawed, I’m poo-scared, I’m mega-fuckstruck. I’m also scared out of my cerebellum. What’s going to happen now?

  5: Everything Starts Here

  Stuart Everything starts here. That’s what I keep repeating to myself. Everything starts here.

  I was only average at school. I was never encouraged to think that I should aim for university. I did a correspondence course in economics and commercial law, then got accepted by the Bank as a general trainee. I work in the foreign exchange department. I’d better not mention the Bank’s name, just in case they don’t like it. But you’ll have heard of them. They’ve made it fairly clear to me that I’ll never be a high-flier, but every company needs some people who aren’t high-fliers, and that’s all right by me. My parents were the type of parents who always seemed faintly disappointed by whatever it was you did, as if you were constantly letting them down in small ways. I think that’s why my sister moved away, up north. On the other hand, I could see my parents’ point of view. I was a bit disappointing. I was a bit disappointing to myself. I tried to explain earlier about not being able to relax with people I liked, not being able to get them to see what virtues I had. Now I come to think of it, most of my life was like that. I couldn’t get other people to see the point of me. But then Gillian came along, and everything starts here.

  I expect Oliver’s given you the impression that I was a virgin when I got married. No doubt he used some rather choice language about this hypothesis of his. Well, I’d like you to know it isn’t true. I don’t tell Oliver everything. I bet you wouldn’t tell Oliver everything either. When he’s cheerful his tongue runs away with him, and when he’s depressed he can be unkind. So it’s common sense not to let him into every area of your life. We very occasionally went on double dates but they were without exception complete disasters. For a start, Oliver would always provide the girls and I would always provide the money, though naturally I had to slip him his half of it beforehand so the girls wouldn’t know who was really paying. Once he even made me hand over all the money beforehand, so that it would look as if he was paying for everyone himself. Then we would go to a restaurant and Oliver would get dictatorial.

  ‘No, you can’t have that as a main course. There’s mushrooms and cream in your starter.’ Or fennel and Pernod. Or whatever and whatever. Do you ever feel the world is getting too interested in food? I mean, it does come out at the other end very soon afterwards. You can’t store it, not for long. It’s not like money.

  ‘But I like mushrooms and cream.’

  ‘Then have this main course and the aubergine starter.’

  ‘Don’t like aubergine.’

  ‘Hear that, Stu? She cringeth at the glossy aubergine. Well, let’s try converting you tonight.’

  And so on. Then the business about wine with the waiter. Sometimes I used to go for a pee at this point. Oliver would start by addressing the table: ‘Shall we perhaps essay a Hunter River Chardonnay ce soir?’

  And having got our agreement in theory he would begin grilling the poor waiter. ‘Would you advise the Show Reserve? Would you say it had enough bottle age? I like my Chardonnays fat and buttery, but not too fat and buttery, you understand. And how oaky is this one? I do find the colonials tend to be rather over-zealous in their use of oak, don’t you?’

  Mostly the waiter would go along with this, sensing that Oliver was one of those customers who did not, for all their enquiries, actually want any advice, and it was just a question of slowly reeling him in like a fish. Eventually the order would be placed, but this was not the end of my anxieties. Oliver had to be seen to approve of the wine he had himself chosen. At one time this involved a lot of slurping and gargling and half-closed eyes and many seconds of mystical contemplation. Then he read an article somewhere which said that the point of tasting a wine before it was poured was not to see if you liked it, but to make sure that it wasn’t corked. If you didn’t like the taste, that was too bad, because you’d chosen it yourself. What you should do – if you were sophisticated – was just give the glass a swirl and sniff, which would tell you whether or not the wine was off. So this was what Ollie took to doing, reducing his performance to a series of loud inhalings followed by a curt nod. Sometimes, if he thought one of the girls didn’t know what he was doing, he’d go into a long explanation of why he hadn’t actually tasted the stuff.

  I must say Oliver ordered some pretty filthy wines those times I went out with him. I shouldn’t be surprised if some of the bottles were corked.

  But what does that matter now? The same as what does it matter whether or not I was a virgin when I met Gillian? I wasn’t, as I say, though I don’t delude myself that this area of my life which I kept hidden from Oliver was the story of one triumph after another. It was average, I suppose, whatever average means in this context. Sometime
s it was jolly nice, sometimes it was a bit fraught, and sometimes I had to remind myself not to start thinking of other things in the middle. Average, you see. But then Gillian came along, and everything starts here. Now.

  I love that word. Now. It’s now now; it’s not then any more. Then has gone away. It doesn’t matter that I disappointed my parents. It doesn’t matter that I disappointed myself. It doesn’t matter that I couldn’t ever get myself across to other people. That was then, and then’s gone. It’s now now.

  I don’t mean I’ve done a sudden transformation. I’m not a frog that’s been kissed by a princess or whatever the fairy tale is. I haven’t suddenly become incredibly witty and good-looking – you’d have noticed, wouldn’t you? – or a high-flier with a huge family that takes Gillian into its bosom. (Do those families exist? On television you’re always seeing fascinating households full of eccentric old aunts and sweet children and interestingly varied adults, who may have their ups and downs but are basically all pulling together and ‘on the side of the family’, whatever that means. Life never seems to be like that to me. Everyone I know seems to have a small, broken family: sometimes broken up by death, sometimes by divorce, usually just by disagreement or boredom. And no-one I know has any sense of ‘the family’. There’s just a mum they like and a dad they hate, or vice versa, and the eccentric old aunts that I’ve come across tend to be eccentric only because they’re secret alcoholics and smell like unwashed dogs or turn out to be suffering from Alzheimer’s disease or something.) No, what’s happened is this. I’ve stayed the same as I was before but now it’s all right to be what I was before. The princess kissed the frog and he didn’t turn into a handsome prince but that was all right because she liked him as a frog. And if I had turned into a handsome prince Gillian would probably have shown me – him – the door. She doesn’t go for princes, Gillian.

  I was a bit nervous about meeting her mother, I can tell you. I polished my shoes and no mistake that morning. A mother-in-law (that’s how I thought about her already), a French mother-in-law who’s been deserted by an Englishman now being introduced by her daughter to the Englishman she wants to marry? I suppose I thought she’d either be fantastically frosty and sit on one of those little gilt chairs with a fancy gilt mirror behind her, or else be quite fat and red-faced and come in from the stove holding a wooden spoon and give me a huge embrace smelling of garlic and stockpot. On balance I would definitely have preferred the latter, but of course I got neither (that’s families again for you). Mrs or Mme Wyatt wore patent-leather shoes and a smart brownish suit with a gold brooch. She was polite, but no friendlier than she had to be; she looked at Gillian’s jeans with disapproval but without comment. We had tea and discussed everything except the two things that interested me: the fact that I was in love with her daughter, and the fact that her husband had run off with a schoolgirl. She didn’t ask me what my prospects were, or how much I earned, or whether I was sleeping with her daughter – all of which I had thought of as possible avenues of conversation. She was – is – what people call a handsome woman, a phrase which has always struck me as a bit patronising. (What does it mean? It means something like: surprisingly fanciable if it was socially OK to fancy women of that age. But perhaps someone did – does – fancy Mme Wyatt. I’d like to think so.) That’s to say, she had firm features and smartly cut, possibly dyed hair obviously kept under regular control, and she behaved as if she had known a time when she turned every head and expected you to be aware of this too. I looked at her a lot during that tea. Not just out of polite attention, but trying to see how Gillian would turn out. It’s supposed to be a key moment, isn’t it? Meeting your wife’s mother for the first time. You’re meant either to run a mile, or else collapse back happily: oh yes, if she turns out like that, I can more than handle it. (And the prospective mothers-in-law must be aware that this is going through the young man’s mind, mustn’t they? Perhaps sometimes they deliberately make themselves look a terrible fright to scare him away.) With Mme Wyatt, I had neither of these reactions. I looked at her face, at the shape of the jaw and curve of the forehead; I looked at the mouth of the mother of the girl whose mouth I couldn’t get enough of kissing. I looked and I looked; but while I saw similarities (the forehead, the set of the eyes), while I could understand that other people might take them for mother and daughter, it didn’t work for me. I couldn’t see that Gillian was going to turn into Mme Wyatt. It was completely improbable, and for one simple reason: Gillian wasn’t going to turn into anyone else. She would change, of course. I’m not so silly and in love that I don’t know that. She would change, but she wouldn’t change into someone else, she would change into another version of herself. And I would be there to see it happen.

  ‘How did it go?’ I asked as we were driving away. ‘Did I pass?’

  ‘You weren’t being examined.’

  ‘Oh.’ I felt a little disappointed.

  ‘She doesn’t work like that.’

  ‘How does she work?’

  Gillian paused, changed gear, pursed those lips which were and yet weren’t at all like her mother’s lips, and said, ‘She waits.’

  I didn’t like the sound of that at first. But later, I thought, Fair enough. And I can wait too. I can wait until Mme Wyatt sees me for what I am, understands what Gillian sees in me. I can wait for her approval. I can wait for her to understand how I make Gillian happy.

  ‘Happy?’ I said.

  ‘Mmm.’ She kept her eyes on the traffic, took her hand off the gear-stick briefly, patted my leg, then withdrew her hand to change gear. ‘Happy.’

  We’re going to have children, you know. No, I don’t mean she’s pregnant, though I wouldn’t mind too much if she were. It’s a long-term plan. We haven’t really discussed it, to be honest; but I’ve seen her with kids once or twice and she seems to get on with them instinctively. To be on the same wavelength. What I mean is, she doesn’t seem surprised by the way they behave and how they react to things; it seems normal to her and she accepts it. I’ve always found children to be OK, but I’ve never completely worked them out. I can’t read them. Why do they go on the way they do, making a huge fuss about little things and then ignoring what ought to be much more important? They walk into the corner of the TV set and you think they’ve broken their skull, but they just bounce off; next moment they sit down very gently on their bottoms which are padded with what looks like fifteen nappies and they burst into tears. What’s it about? Why haven’t they got a sense of proportion?

  Still, I want kids with Gillian. It seems the natural thing to do. And I’m sure she’ll want them too when the time is right. That’s something women know, isn’t it – when the time is right? I’ve already made them a promise, those kids we’re going to have. I’m not going to be like my parents. I’m going to try and see the point of you, whatever that point is. I’ll back you. Whatever you want to do is OK by me.

  Gillian I suppose I do have one worry about Stuart. Sometimes I’m working away up here in my studio – the name’s a bit too grand for the room, which is only 12 by 12, but even so – and there’s music on the radio and I’m sort of on automatic pilot. Then I’ll suddenly think, I hope he doesn’t get disappointed. This may be an odd thing to say when you’ve only been married a month, but it’s true. It’s something I feel.

  I usually don’t mention the fact that I once trained as a social worker. It’s another thing people tend to make crass comments about, or crass assumptions anyway. For instance, it’s perfectly obvious that what I was trying to do for my clients was patch up their lives and their relationships in a way that I’d been unable to do for my parents. That’s perfectly obvious to anyone, isn’t it? Except to me.

  And even if I was in some way trying to do this, I certainly didn’t succeed. I lasted eighteen months before packing it in, and in that time I saw a lot of disappointed people. Most days I saw damage, people with huge problems, emotional, social, financial – sometimes self-inflicted, mostly just handed down to the
m. Things families had done to them, parents, husbands; things they’d never get over.

  Then there were the other ones, the disappointed ones. And that was real damage, irreversible. The ones who began with such high hopes of the world, then put their trust in psychopaths and fantasists, invested their faith in boozers and hitters. And they’d go on for many years with incredible perseverance, believing when they had no reason to believe, when it was crazy for them to believe. Until one day they just gave up. And what could twenty-two-year-old trainee social worker Gillian Wyatt do for them? Believe me, professionalism and cheerfulness cut very little ice with these clients.

  People get broken in spirit. That’s what I couldn’t face. And it came to me later, as I began to love Stuart, this thought: please don’t let him be disappointed. I’d never felt that before with anyone. Worrying about their long-term future, how they’d turn out. Worrying what they might think when they finally looked back.

  Listen, I’m not playing this … game. But equally there’s no point sitting in the corner with a handkerchief stuffed in your mouth. I’ll say what I have to say, what I know.

  I went out with quite a lot of men before I met Stuart. I was nearly in love, I was proposed to a couple of times; on the other hand, I once went for a year without men, without sex – both seemed too much trouble. Some of the men I went out with were ‘old enough to be my father’ as they say; on the other hand, many weren’t. So where does that leave us? One bit of information and people are immediately off into their theories. Did I marry Stuart because I thought he wouldn’t let me down the way my father had? No, I married him because I loved him. Because I love, respect and fancy him. I didn’t fancy him at first, not particularly. I don’t conclude anything from that either, except that fancying is a complicated business.