Talking It Over

  Just like at school. Poor old Oliver. This time I simply wrote him a decent-sized cheque and told him not to worry about repaying it.

  ‘Oh, but I will. I’ve got to.’

  ‘Well, let’s talk about that another time.’

  He wiped his face, then he picked up the cheque again, and his wet thumb smudged my signature. God, I felt sorry for him.

  You see, it’s now my job to look after him. It’s as if I’m repaying him for looking after me at school. All those years ago after we’d been friends for a couple of months or so (and he’d borrowed quite a bit more money off me), I confessed to him that I was being persecuted by a thug called Dudley. Jeff Dudley. The Edwardian informed me recently that he’d been appointed trade attaché in one of our Central American embassies. Perhaps that means he’s a spy nowadays. Why not? At school his best subjects were lying, stealing, extortion, blackmail, and gang-leadership. It was a fairly civilised school, so Dudley’s gang consisted of only two: himself and ‘Feet’ Schofield.

  I would have been safer if I’d been better at games or cleverer. I didn’t have a protective big brother: all I had was a small sister. Also, I wore glasses and didn’t look capable of jujitsu. So Dudley picked on me. The usual things – money, services, pointless humiliations. I didn’t tell Oliver at first because I thought he’d despise me. He didn’t; instead, he sorted them out in two weeks flat. First he told them to lay off me, and when they sneered and said what would happen if they didn’t, he merely replied, ‘A series of inexplicable misfortunes.’ Well, that’s not how schoolboys talk, so they sneered some more and waited for Oliver to challenge them to a formal fight. But Oliver never played things by the rules. A series of indeed inexplicable misfortunes, none of them obviously traceable to Oliver, then occurred. A master found five packs of cigarettes in Dudley’s desk (one was a beating offence at that time). Schofield’s sports kit was discovered half burnt in the school incinerator. Both the saddles off my persecutors’ bikes disappeared one lunchtime, and they had to ride home, as Oliver put it, in ‘discomfort bordering on danger’. Shortly afterwards Dudley tried to waylay Oliver after school, and was probably about to suggest meeting behind the bike sheds with knuckledusters at noon when Oliver punched him in the throat. ‘Another inexplicable misfortune,’ he said, as Dudley lay on the ground choking. After that, the two of them left me alone. I offered my thanks to Oliver, and even suggested some debt restructuring by way of gratitude, but he just shrugged it off. That’s the sort of thing Oliver does.

  What ever became of ‘Feet’ Schofield? And where did he get his nickname? All I can remember is that it had nothing to do with his feet.

  Gillian You don’t know exactly when you fall in love with someone, do you? There isn’t that sudden moment when the music stops and you look into one another’s eyes for the first time, or whatever. Well, maybe it’s like that for some people, but not me. I had a friend who told me she fell for a boy when she woke up in the morning and realised he didn’t snore. It doesn’t sound much, does it? Except it sounds true.

  I suppose you look back and select one particular moment out of several and then stick to it. Maman always said she fell for Daddy when she saw how precise and gentle he was with his fingers while filling his pipe. I only ever half-believed her, but she always told it with conviction. And everyone has to have an answer, don’t they? I fell in love with him then, I fell in love with him because. It’s a sort of social necessity. You can’t very well say, Oh, I forget. Or, it wasn’t obvious. You can’t say that, can you?

  Stuart and I went out together a few times. I liked him, and he was different from other boys, not at all pushy, except pushy to please I suppose, but even that was sweet in a way – it made me want to say, it’s all right, don’t fret so much, I’m having a perfectly nice time, slow down. Not that it was slow down in the sense of Don’t go too fast physically. If anything, the opposite was the case. He tended to stop kissing me first.

  What I’m trying to tell you about is this. He offered to cook me dinner one evening. I said I’d like that. I went round to his flat at about 8.30, and there was a nice smell of roasting meat and candles on the table which were lit even though it wasn’t yet dark, and a bowl of those Indian bits and pieces for beforehand, and flowers on the coffee table. Stuart was wearing the trousers of his work suit, but he’d changed his shirt, and he had an apron over the top. His face seemed to be divided into two: the bottom half was all smiling and pleased to see me, the top half was frowning with anxiety about the dinner.

  ‘I don’t cook much,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to cook for you.’

  We had shoulder of lamb, frozen peas, and potatoes roasted round the meat. I said I liked the potatoes.

  ‘You par-boil them,’ he said solemnly, ‘then you scrape them with a fork and that puts ridges on them and then you get more crispy bits.’ It must have been something he’d seen his mother do. We had a nice bottle of wine, and whenever he poured it he put his hand over the price-tag which he’d forgotten to remove. I could see he was doing that deliberately, out of embarrassment. He thought he should have taken the price off. Do you see what I mean, he was trying?

  Then he wouldn’t let me help clear away. He went off into the kitchen and came back with an apple pie. It was a warm spring evening and the food was winter food, but that didn’t matter. So I had a slice of pie and then he put the kettle on for coffee and went to the loo. I got up and took the pudding plates into the kitchen. As I was putting them down I saw a piece of paper leaning against the spice-rack. Do you know what it was? It was a timetable:

  6.00 Peel spuds

  6.10 Roll pastry

  6.20 Switch oven on

  6.20 Bath

  and it went on like that …

  8.00 Open wine

  8.15 Check potatoes browning

  8.20 Put on water for peas

  8.25 Light candles

  8.30 G arrives!!

  I hurried back to the table and sat down. I was trembling. I also felt bad about reading it because I’m sure Stuart would have thought I was spying. But it just got to me, each item more than the last. 8.25 Light candles. It’s all right, Stuart, I thought, I wouldn’t have minded if you’d left that till after I arrived. And then 8.30 G arrives!! Those two exclamation marks really did for me.

  He came back from the loo and I had to stop myself telling him what I’d found out and that it didn’t seem silly or neurotic or hopeless or anything, but just very thoughtful and touching. Of course I didn’t say anything, but I must have reacted in some way and it got through to him, because he seemed more relaxed from that point on. We spent a long time on the sofa that evening, and I would have stayed the night if he’d asked me but he didn’t. And that was all right too.

  He worries a lot, Stuart. He really wants to get things right. Not just for himself, and for us. He’s terribly bothered about Oliver at the moment. I don’t know what’s happened to him. Or rather, I do. He tried to molest some poor girl at the Shakespeare School and got thrown out. Well, that’s reading between the lines of what Stuart told me. Stuart was leaning over backwards to see Oliver’s point of view. Leaning so far, in fact, that we had this ridiculous disagreement. Stuart said the girl must have been leading Oliver on and being provocative, I said she was probably shy and terrified by these advances from her teacher, until we both realised neither of us had set eyes on the girl or knew what had happened. We were just guessing. But even just guessing has rather put me off Oliver at the moment. I don’t exactly approve of teacher-pupil relationships, for reasons that don’t need filling in. Stuart said he’d given Oliver some money, which I thought was quite unnecessary, not that I said so. After all, Oliver’s a healthy young man with a university degree. He can find another job. Why should he get some of our money?

  Still, it’s true he’s a mess at the moment. It was awful at the airport. Just the two of us. I remember thinking as we stood in the baggage hall, this is a bit like the rest of life. Two of us in a great mas
s of strangers, and various things to do that you’ve got to get right, like follow signs and collect your luggage; then you get looked over by the customs, and no-one particularly cares who you are or what you’re doing there so the two of you have to keep one another cheerful … I know, it probably sounds sentimental but that’s what it felt like to me at the time. And then we get through customs, and the two of us are having a laugh because we’re safely back, and suddenly this drunk in a chauffeur’s cap throws himself at us and nearly puts out my eye with a cardboard sign and treads on my foot into the bargain. And guess what? It’s Oliver. Looking like death. He obviously thought it was funny, what he was doing, but it wasn’t at all. It was pathetic. That’s the trouble with people like Ollie, I think: when they come off they’re really good company, and when they don’t they miss by a mile. Nothing in the middle.

  Anyway, we pulled ourselves together and pretended to be pleased to see him, and then he drove us back to London like a maniac, keeping up a stream of gibberish which after a while I stopped listening to. Just put my head back on the seat and closed my eyes. The next thing I remember was being jerked to a stop outside the house and Oliver saying in a rather odd voice, ‘A propos de bottes, how was the lune de miel?’

  Oliver Have a cigarette? You don’t? I know you don’t – you’ve told me that before. Your disapproval still flashes in neon. Your frown is worthy of the mother-in-law from Katya Kabanova. But I have puckish news for you. I read in the paper this morning that if you smoke you’re less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease than if you don’t. A hit, a veritable hit? Go on, have one, kipper your lungs and keep your brain intact. Isn’t life bedizened with jaunty contradictions? Just when you think you’ve got it straight, along comes the Fool with his pig’s bladder and whops you on the nose.

  By the way, I’m no idiot. I could tell Gillian and Stuart weren’t thrilled to see me at the airport. I can sense a piccolo faux pas when I make one. Ollie, old son, I said to myself, your puppyish fraternising is misplaced. Put that couple down at once, stop licking their faces. Except, of course, it wasn’t really puppyish, or particularly fraternal. I met them because I’m in love with Gillian. All the rest was just an act.

  It was odd, that drive back to London. Odd? Rather, spectacularly sui generis. Gillian sat in the back and soon dropped off to sleep. Every time I looked in the mirror – and I can be a very careful driver if I want to be – I saw the languid bride with shuttered eyes and hair adrift. Her neck rested on the top curve of the seat and this lifted her mouth as if for kissing. I kept looking in the mirror but not, you understand, for traffic. I roamed her face, her sleeping face.

  And there was plump, placid, erotically drained Stuart beside me, looking so fucking … blithe, pretending it was nice to be met at the airport, and probably thinking about how he was going to claim back some Danegeld on the unused half of their return billets from Gatwick to Victoria. Stuart, I warn you, can be a major nickelfucker. When he goes abroad, he always buys a return ticket to the airport a) because he thinks this will save three milliseconds in a fortnight’s time; b) because he knows he’s coming back; and c) in case fares go up in the interval. Oliver always buys a single. Who can predict what Brazilian carnival queen might not cross his path? Who cares about the possible queue a week next putative Saturday at the Gatwick guichet? I once read a case in the newspaper about a man who jumped in front of an Underground train. At the inquest they said he probably hadn’t intended to kill himself because he had a return ticket in his pocket. Well, excuse me, M’Lud, there are other explanations. He could have bought a return ticket because he knew that inserting a scintilla of doubt would spare the feelings of those close to him. Another possibility is that he could have been Stuart. If Stuart decided to give a train driver six weeks compassionate leave or whatever the allowance is, he’d buy a return ticket. Because he’d be thinking, what if I don’t kill myself after all? What if I decide against it at the last minute? Think of those awful queues before the ticket machines at Tottenham Court Road. Yes, I’ll take a return just in case.

  You think me unfair? Listen, too much has been going on in my head of late. I am in stark need of a febrifuge. The cerebellum is positively bursting with over-activity. Imagine: I was a bit pissed for a start, the object of my complete love was nesting in my rear-view mirror, the corpulent groom – my best friend – who had spent three weeks pleasuring her in the Hellenic sunshine was sitting beside me with a clank of duty-free between his calves, I’d lost my job, and the other drivers on the road were all tuning up for Formula One. I’m meant to be calm? I’m meant to be fair?

  What I did in the circumstances was go off into an Ollieish riff about je ne sais quoi, keeping Stu achortle without waking the fair Gillian. Every so often I’d have to grip the wheel tightly because what I really wanted to do was interrupt my drollery, pull over on to the hard shoulder, turn to my passenger and say, ‘By the way, Stuart, I’m in love with your wife.’

  Is that what I’ll say? I’m terrified, I’m awed, I’m mega-fuckstruck. I’ll have to say something like that before long. How will I tell him? How will I tell her?

  You think you know people, don’t you? OK, you’ve got a best friend, he gets married, and the day he gets married you fall in love with his wife. How will your best friend react? There aren’t many benign possibilities, I’d guess. ‘Oh I can quite see your point of view’ is not a reaction that is on the agenda, quite frankly. Out with the Kalashnikov more likely. Banishment the minimum sentence of the law. Gulag Ollie, they’ll call me. But I won’t be banished. You see? I won’t be banished.

  What has to happen is this. Gillian has to realise she loves me. Stuart has to realise she loves me. Stuart has to step down. Oliver has to step up. Nobody must get hurt. Gillian and Oliver must live happily ever after. Stuart must be their best friend. That’s what has to happen. How high do you rate my chances? As high as an elephant’s eye? (That cultural allusion is for you, Stu.)

  Oh, please take that disapproving look off your face. Don’t you think I’ll have enough of that coming my way in the weeks and months and years ahead? Give us a break. Put yourself in my pantoufles. Would you renounce your love, slip gracefully from the scene, become a goatherd and play mournfully consoling music on your Panpipes all day while your heedless flock chomp the succulent tufts? People don’t do that. People never did. Listen, if you go off and become a goatherd you never loved her in the first place. Or you loved the melodramatic gesture more. Or the goats. Perhaps pretending to fall in love was merely a smart career move allowing you to diversify into pasturing. But you didn’t love her.

  We’re stuck with it. That’s the long and short of the matter. We’re stuck in this car on this motorway, the three of us, and someone (the driver! – me!) has leant an elbow on the button of the central locking system. So the three of us are in here till it’s resolved. You’re in here too. Sorry, I’ve clunked the doors, you can’t get out, we’re all in this together. Now what about that cigarette? I’m smoking, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Stuart took it up quite soon. Go on, have one. Stave off Alzheimer’s.

  7: Now Here’s a Funny Thing

  Stuart Now here’s a funny thing. I was on my way to work this morning. I probably haven’t explained that there are two ways of walking to the station. One takes me along St Mary’s Villas and Barrowclough Road, past the old municipal baths and the new DIY and wholesale paint centre; while the other means cutting down Lennox Gardens, taking that street whose name I always forget into Rumsey Road, then past the row of shops and back into the High Street. I’ve timed both ways and there isn’t any more than twenty seconds in it. So some mornings I go one way, and some mornings the other. I sort of toss up as I leave the house over which direction to take. I tell you this as background information.

  So, this morning I set off down Lennox Gardens, the Street with No Name, and then into Rumsey Road. I was looking about a lot. You know, that’s one of the many differences since Gill and I have been toge
ther: I start seeing things I never would have noticed before. You know how you can walk along a street in London and never raise your eyes above the top of a bus? You go along, and you look at the other people, and the shops, and the traffic, and you never look up, not really up. I know what you’re going to say, if you did look up you’d probably step in a pile of dog turds or walk into a lamp-post, but I’m serious. I’m serious. Raise your eyes just that little bit more and you’ll spot something, an odd roof, some fancy bit of Victorian decoration. Or lower them, for that matter. The other day, one lunchtime in fact, I was walking up the Farringdon Road. All of a sudden I noticed something I must have walked past dozens of times. A plaque set in the wall at shin height, painted cream with the lettering picked out in black. It says:

  These Premises

  Were Totally Destroyed

  by a