Talking It Over (23 page)

But that time ended. Reversibility – lustrous watchword of my wife’s profession – was effected in the domestic sphere. Gillian and Oliver became a single taxable unit and the spectre of time-share in Marbella was finally, utterly banished. The hawthorn tree beside the lych-gate was chivvied by the wind into casting its gentle confetti – none of that stuff from a box,
please
– and
la belle-mère
did the full Cartier-Bresson once I’d persuaded her that according to the photographic pioneers the instrument did on the whole work better with the lens-cap removed. Then we decamped in high humour to Al Giardinetto, and I promised Gillian not to call the manager Al, because frankly nowadays that joke was beginning to amuse only me.

The
prosecco
was lolling in the ice-buckets. This was to be a memorable meal, you understand, not a credit-card piss-up – would you order French champagne in an Italian restaurant? We loitered conversationally over the pastor’s eccentricities and the vagaries –
vagari
, Latin, to wander – of the one-way system leading to Al’s. Then the first course of
spaghetti neri alle vongole
arrived, and we hurdled with a
mere jest the objection that Ollie’s choice had a more funereal than nuptial aspect to it – ‘Maman,’ I said (for I had decreed this solution to the vocative problem), ‘Maman, do not forget that at Breton weddings they used to drape the church in black.’ In any case, as soon as the fork transported this
primo piatto
to the mouth all discord faded. I began to suck in happiness like a long, flexible, infrangible strand of pasta. And then I spotted the little bastard.

Let me set the scene. There were ten of us (who? oh, just a few hand-picked
amici
and
cognoscenti
) at the back of the restaurant, at a long table in a slight alcove – a touch Last Supper after Veronese – while below the salt a raggle-taggle of lunchers did their best to feign polite lack of interest in the jocund wedding party. (Oh, how English.
Don’t
intrude on someone else’s joy, don’t toast them across the restaurant, just pretend
nobody’s
got married unless they make too much noise and then you can
complain
.…) So I glanced around the discreetly downcast faces and what, brazenly opposite us, did I spy? The tactful First Husband, sitting all alone, pretending to read a book. A droll gambit for a start. Stuart reading a
book?
He’d have been much better camouflaged standing on his chair and waving at us.

I rose lightly from my place, despite a restraining bridal hand, went across to my new wife’s ex, and amiably instructed him to hop it. He wouldn’t look me in the face. He kept his eyes on his predictable lasagne which he’d been ineffectually torturing with a fork.

‘It’s a public place,’ he replied feebly.

‘That’s why I’m asking you to vacate it,’ I replied. ‘If it were a private place I wouldn’t do you the courtesy of
language. You’d be on the pavement in several portions by now. You’d be on a skip with the trash.’

Perhaps I was being a trifle noisy, because Dino the manager came across at this point. ‘Al,’ I said, slipping back into my old joshing ways, ‘we have an eyesore here. There is an Accident Black Spot in your trattoria. Kindly remove.’

Do you know, he wouldn’t? He refused to kick Stuart out. Even began defending him at one point. Well, rather than disturb the peace any further I returned to my table where the sombre spaghetti tasted like ash in my mouth. I explained the technicality of British restaurant law whereby a dozen happy high-rolling customers are unable to enjoy themselves in peace (talk about siding with the underdog!) and we all resolved to concentrate on the immediate felicity.

‘Ah,’ I said, turning to Gill, ‘I didn’t know your second name was Felicity,’ and everyone laughed, though it felt to Ollie as if he was labouring uphill in the wrong gear. And despite the resplendent
pesce spada al salmoriglio
, one’s attention did keep on returning to the wretched Stuart twitching a podgy finger across the page (definitely not Kafka!) and trying to stop his lasagne-flecked lips from moving as he read. Why is the tongue inescapably drawn to any dental pothole, why does it evade command as it seeks out that patch of roughness and rubs against it like a cow on a post? Stuart was our patch of roughness, our sudden cavity. How could one be truly blithe for all one’s surface glee?

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 box 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.’