Talking It Over, Page 2

  So I believe in coddling my memory, just slipping it the finer morsels of experience. That lunch after the wedding, for instance. We had a perfectly frisky non-vintage champagne chosen by Stuart (brand? search me? mis en bouteille par Les Vins de l’Oubli), and ate saumon sauvage grillé avec son coulis de tomates maison. I wouldn’t have chosen it myself, but then I wasn’t consulted anyway. No, it was perfectly all right, just a little unimaginative … Mme Wyatt, with whom I was à côté, seemed to enjoy it, or at least to relish the salmon. But she pushed rather at the pinkish translucent cubelets which surrounded the fish, then turned to me and asked,

  ‘What exactly would you say this might be?’

  ‘Tomato,’ I was able to inform her. ‘Skinned, cored, depipped, cubed.’

  ‘How curious, Oliver, to identify what gives a fruit its character, and then to remove it.’

  Don’t you find that rather magnificent? I took her hand and kissed it.

  On the other hand I’m afraid I couldn’t tell you whether Stuart was wearing his medium-dark-grey suit or his dark-dark-grey suit for the ceremony.

  Do you see what I mean?

  I remember the sky that day: swirling clouds like marbled end-papers. A little too much wind, and everyone patting his hair back into place inside the door of the register office. A ten-minute wait round a low coffee table bearing three London telephone directories and three copies of the Yellow Pages. Ollie trying to amuse the company by looking up relevant professionals like Divorce Lawyers and Rubber Goods Purveyors. No spirit of fun ignited, however. Then we went in to face this perfectly oleaginous and crepuscular little registrar. A flour-bomb of dandruff on his shoulders. The show went off as well as these things do. The ring glittered on its damson pouffe like some intra-uterine device. Stuart bellowed his words as if answering a court-martial and failure to enunciate perfectly at top volume would earn him a few more years in the glasshouse. Poor Gillie could scarcely vocalise her responses. I think she was crying, but adjudged it vulgar to peer. Afterwards we went outside and took photographs. Stuart was looking particularly smug, I thought. He is my oldest friend, and it was his wedding, but he was looking mogadonic with self-satisfaction, so I purloined the camera and announced that what the wedding album needed were a few art shots. I pranced about and lay on the ground and turned the lens through 45 degrees and stepped in pore-scouringly close, but what I was really doing, what I was after, was a good shot of Stuart’s double chin. And he’s only thirty-two. Well, maybe double chin is a little unfair: let’s say a mere jowlswipe of pork tenderloin. But it can be made to bulge and glitter with a maestro behind the iris.

  Stuart … No, wait a minute. You’ve been talking to him, haven’t you? You’ve been talking to Stuart. I sensed that little hesitation when I floated the subject of his double chin. You mean you didn’t notice it? Yes, well, in the dark with the light behind him … And he was probably sticking his jaw out to compensate. In my view the jugular podge wouldn’t show up so much if he had longer hair, but he never gives that coarse mousy matting of his any Lebensraum. And with his round face and friendly little circular eyes peering at you from behind those less-than-state-of-the-art spectacles. I mean, he looks amicable enough, but he somehow needs work, wouldn’t you say?

  What’s that? He wasn’t wearing glasses? Of course he was wearing glasses. I’ve known him since he was knee-high to a schoolmaster and … well, maybe he’s secretly taken to lenses and was trying them out on you. All right. It’s possible. Anything’s possible. Maybe he seeks a more thrustful mien so that when he goes to his nasty little hutch in the City and glares at his neurotically blinking little screen and barks into his cellular telephone for another tranche of lead futures or whatever, he comes over as just a trifle more macho than we all know him to be. But he’s been keeping the opticians in business – especially the ones that stock really old-fashioned frames – ever since we were at school together.

  What are you smirking at now? We were at school … Ah. Got it. Stuart’s been bleating on about how I changed my name, hasn’t he? He’s obsessed by things like that, you know. He’s got this really boring name – Stuart Hughes, I ask you, there’s a career in soft furnishings for you, no qualifications needed except the perfect name, sir, and you’ve got it – and he’s quite complacent about answering to it for the rest of his days. But Oliver used to be called Nigel. Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Or rather, not. Or rather, Thanks, Mum. Anyway, you can’t go through the whole of your life being called Nigel, can you? You can’t even go through a whole book being called Nigel. Some names simply aren’t appropriate after a while. Say you were called Robin, for instance. Well that’s a perfectly good monicker up to the age of about nine, but pretty soon you’d have to do something about it, wouldn’t you? Change your name by deed-poll to Samson, or Goliath, or something. And with some appellations, the contrary applies. Like Walter, for instance. You can’t be Walter in a pram. You can’t be Walter until you’re about seventy-five in my view. So if they’re going to christen you Walter they’d better put a couple of names in front of it, one for your spell in the pram plus another for the long haul up to becoming Walter. So they might call you Robin Bartholomew Walter, for example. Pretty duff, in my opinion, but doubtless it somewhere pleases.

  So I swapped Nigel for Oliver, which was always my second name. Nigel Oliver Russell – there, I pronounce it without an encrimsoned cheek. I went up for my first term at York called Nigel and I came back as Oliver. What’s so surprising? It’s no stranger than joining the army and coming home on your first leave with a moustache. A mere rite of passage. But for some reason old Stuart can’t get over it.

  Gillian’s a good name. It suits her. It’ll last.

  And Oliver suits me, don’t you find? It rather goes with my dark, dark hair and kissable ivory teeth, my slim waist, my panache and my linen suit with the ineradicable stain of Pinot Noir. It goes with having an overdraft and knowing one’s way around the Prado. It goes with some people wanting to kick my head in. Like that deep trog of a bank manager I went to see at the end of my first term at university. The sort of fellow who gets an erection when he hears the bank rate’s gone up a tenth of a percent. Anyway, this trog, this … Walter had me into his panelled wankpit of an office, classified my request to change the name on my cheques from N.O. Russell to Oliver Russell as not central to the Bank’s policy for the 1980s, and reminded me that unless funds were forthcoming to camouflage my black hole of an overdraft I wouldn’t be getting a new cheque-book even if I called myself Santa Claus. Whereupon I fell about in my chair at this with an effective simulacrum of sycophancy, then matadored the old charm around in front of him for a few minutes, and before you could say fundador Walt was on his knees begging me for the coup de grâce. So I allowed him the honour of endorsing my change of name.

  I seem to have mislaid all the friends who once called me Nigel. Except for Stuart, of course. You should get Stuart to narrate our schooldays together. I certainly never insulted my memory by asking it to store all that routine junk. Stuart, just for something to say, occasionally used to go ‘Adams, Aitken, Apted, Bell, Bellamy …’ (I invent the names, you understand.)

  ‘What’s that?’ I’d say. ‘Your new mantra?’

  He would look baffled. Perhaps he thought a mantra was a make of car. The Oldsmobile Mantra. ‘No,’ he would reply. ‘Don’t you remember? That was 5A. Old Biff Vokins was our form-master.’

  But I don’t remember. I won’t remember. Memory is an act of will, and so is forgetting. I think I have sufficiently erased most of my first eighteen years, puréed them into harmless baby food. What could be worse than to be dogged by all that stuff? The first bicycle, the first tears, that old teddy with a chewed-off ear. It’s not just an aesthetic matter, it’s practical as well. If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that’s what caused me to be like this, it’s not my fault. Permit me to correct you: it probably is your fault. And kindly spare m
e the details.

  They say that as you get older, you remember your earliest years better. One of the many tank-traps that lie ahead: senility’s revenge. Have I told you my Theory of Life, by the way? Life is like invading Russia. A blitz start, massed shakos, plumes dancing like a flustered henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January, whose fingernails are very icicles. Bitter retreat. Harrying Cossacks. Eventually you fall beneath a boy-gunner’s grapeshot while crossing some Polish river not even marked on your general’s map.

  I don’t ever want to get old. Spare me that. Have you the power? No, even you don’t have the power, alas. So have another cigarette. Go on. Oh, all right, please yourself. Everyone to his own taste.

  2: Lend Us a Quid

  Stuart In a way it’s a surprise that the Edwardian has survived, but I’m rather pleased it has. It’s a surprise too that the school has survived, but when they were killing off all the grammar schools in this country and turning them into comprehensives and middle schools and sixth-form colleges, and everyone was getting shoved in with everyone else, there somehow wasn’t anyone to shove St Edward’s in with, and they sort of left us alone. So the school continued, and the old boys’ magazine continued as well. I didn’t take much notice of it in the first few years after I left school, but now I’ve been gone, what, fifteen years or so, I find quite a lot of interest in what’s happened. You see a familiar name and it sets off all sorts of memories. Old boys write in from various parts of the world and say what they’re up to. Good God, you think, I’d never have thought Bailey would be in charge of the whole South East Asia operation, you say to yourself. I remember when he was asked what the principal crop of Thailand was and he answered transistor radios.

  Oliver says he doesn’t remember anything about school. He says – what’s that phrase of his? – he says he can drop a stone into that particular well and never hear the splash. He always yawns a lot and says Who? in a bored voice when I pass on news from the Edwardian, but I suspect he’s interested. Not that he ever offers recollections of his own. Perhaps when he’s with other people he pretends he went to a posher school – Eton or something. I wouldn’t put that past him. I’ve always thought you are what you are and you shouldn’t pretend to be anyone else. But Oliver used to correct me and explain that you are whoever it is you’re pretending to be.

  We’re rather different, Oliver and me, as you might have noticed. Sometimes people are surprised that we’re friends. They don’t exactly say so, but I can feel it. They think I’m lucky to have a friend like Oliver. Oliver impresses people. He talks well, he’s travelled to distant lands, he speaks foreign languages, he’s conversant with the arts – more than conversant – and he dresses in clothes which don’t fit the contours of his body and are therefore declared to be fashionable by people in the know. All of which isn’t like me. I’m not always very good at saying what I mean, except at work, that is; I’ve been to Europe and the States but never to Nineveh and Distant Ophir; I don’t have much time – literally – for the arts, though I’m not against them in any way, you understand (sometimes there’s a nice concert on the car radio; like most people I read a book or two on holiday); and I don’t give much of a thought to my clothes beyond looking smart at work and feeling comfortable when I get home. But I think Oliver likes me for being the way I am. And it would be rather pointless if I started trying to ape him. Oh yes, there’s another difference between us: I’ve got a reasonable amount of money, and Oliver has hardly any at all. At least, not what anyone who knows about money would call money.

  ‘Lend us a quid.’

  That was the first thing he ever said to me. We were sitting next to one another in class. We were fifteen. We’d been in the same form for two terms without really speaking, because we had separate friends and in any case at St Edward’s you were seated according to your exam results at the end of the previous term, so it wasn’t likely we’d be close. But I must have done well the term before, or perhaps he was slacking, or both, because there we were together and Nigel as he then called himself was asking for a pound.

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘Such colossal impertinence. What on earth do you want to know for?’

  ‘No prudent money manager would authorise a loan without first knowing its purpose,’ I replied. This seemed to me a perfectly reasonable statement, but for some reason it set Nigel off laughing. Biff Vokins looked up from his desk – this was meant to be a private study period – and gave an enquiring glance. More than enquiring, actually. Which only set Nigel off more, and it was some time before he could attempt an explanation.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir,’ he said finally. ‘I do apologise. It’s just that Victor Hugo can be so terribly amusing sometimes.’ Then he started howling with more laughter. I felt rather responsible.

  After the lesson he told me that he wanted to buy a really good shirt he’d seen somewhere, and I enquired into the resale potential of the item with a view to recovering my outlay in case of bankruptcy, which amused him further; and then I gave him my terms. Five per cent simple interest on the principal per week, repayment within four weeks otherwise the interest rose to 10 per cent per week. He called me a usurer, which was the first time I’d heard the word, paid me back £1.20 after four weeks, paraded at weekends in his new shirt, and we were friends thereafter. Friends: we just decided and that was it. At that age you don’t discuss whether or not you’re going to be friends, you just are. It’s an irreversible process. Some people were surprised, and I remember we played up to this a bit. Nigel would pretend to patronise me, and I would pretend I wasn’t clever enough to notice; and he would be swankier than he really was, and I would be more boring; but we knew what we were doing and we were friends.

  We stayed friends even though he went to university and I didn’t, even though he went off to Nineveh and Distant Ophir and I didn’t, even though I went into the Bank and had a steady job while he flitted from one bit of temporary work to another and eventually ended up teaching English as a foreign language in a side street off the Edgware Road. It’s called the Shakespeare School of English and has a neon Union Jack outside which flashes on and off all the time. He says he only took the job because the neon sign always cheers him up; but the fact is he really needs the money.

  And then Gillian came along and there were three of us.

  Gill and I agreed we wouldn’t tell anyone how we met. We always said that someone at the office called Jenkins had taken me to the local wine bar after work and we’d run into some old girlfriend of his and Gillian who knew this girl vaguely was with her and we sort of got on immediately and made another date.

  ‘Jenkins?’ Oliver said when I told him this story rather hesitatingly, though I expect my nerves were to do with talking about Gillian. ‘Is he from Arbitrage?’ Oliver likes to pretend he knows what I do, and chucks out the odd word from time to time to sound authoritative. I tend to ignore it nowadays.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He was new. Well, he’s old now. He didn’t last long. Not up to the job.’ This was true. I’d chosen Jenkins because he’d recently got the sack and no-one was likely to run into him.

  ‘Well, at least he dealt you a tranche de bonheur while he was there.’

  ‘A wotsit?’ I asked, playing Dumb Stu. He smiled his smile, playing Sophisticated Ollie.

  The fact is, I’ve never been very good at meeting people. Some people are naturally good at it and others aren’t. I don’t come from one of these huge families where there are loads of cousins and all sorts of people keep ‘dropping in’. No-one ‘dropped in’ on our family the whole of the time I lived at home. My parents died when I was twenty, my sister moved up to Lancashire and became a nurse and got married, and that was the family gone.

  So there I was, living in a small fl
at by myself in Stoke Newington, going to work, sometimes staying late, getting lonely. I don’t have what is referred to as an outgoing personality. When I meet people I like, instead of saying more and showing I like them and asking questions, I sort of clam up, as if I don’t expect them to like me, or as if I’m not interesting enough for them. And then – fair enough – they don’t find me interesting enough for them. And the next time it happens I remember this, but instead of making me determined to do better, I freeze again. Half the world seems to have confidence and half the world doesn’t, and I don’t know how you make the jump from one half to the other. In order to have confidence you have to be confident already: it’s a vicious circle.

  The advertisement was headed YOUNG PROFESSIONAL? 25–35? WORKING TOO HARD FOR YOUR SOCIAL LIFE TO GET OFF THE GROUND? It was quite well done, the ad. It didn’t read like some pick-up place where everyone went off together for topless holidays; nor did it make it seem as if it was your fault for not having a social life. It was just one of those things that happened to even the nicest people, and the sensible thing to do about it was pay £25 and turn up at a London hotel for a glass of sherry and an implicit promise of no humiliation if things didn’t work out.

  I thought they might give us badges to wear with our names on, like at conferences; but I suppose they thought this would imply we weren’t even capable of uttering our own names. There was a sort of host who dished out the sherry and took each new arrival round the groups; though as there were quite a lot of us he couldn’t remember all our names so we were forced to say them. Or perhaps he deliberately didn’t remember some of our names.