Gunn - Carolines Bikini

Alright, I said. Ill try But Ive never done this sort of thing before, is what I would have said next, Im sure, as it still seems a strange kind of thing to do, be involved in this kind of writing, the sort of project that was being suggested to me by Evan now.

I really need you to write this story down for me, Nin, he was saying, in no uncertain terms, if I think about it fully. Really, I do and yes, it did feel like a new kind of idea for me, this, a different sort of way to spend my time. It did. It felt new.

Because though, its true, I have published various pieces before short stories, bits in books and essays and so on Ive never taken on someone elses narrative, had that kind of a role. Amanuensis they would have called it in the old days, and Ive always loved that image of Milton with his daughters; the scene by the bed: the poet and those steady scribes of his, waiting for them to come in after a night of composition with his chunks of iambic pentameter at the ready and them being there to write it all down. Ghostwriter, some people might say now. Biographer, maybe. Though neither of those terms are quite right, theyre not, for the kind of thing Evan Gordonston was asking me to do.

Ive known Evan a long time. Ive known all the Gordonstons actually, practically forever, well, for most of my life. My mother was great friends with Helen Gordonston, and I went to school with Felicity, Evans younger sister; his older sister, Elisabeth, went out briefly with my brother when they were in sixth form.

So forever, yes, seems a pretty realistic description, in terms of giving the feeling of how long Ive known Evan. There was a massive time lapse, of course, between back then and now, when this story happens, because they all went off to live in America, the Gordonstons, when Tom, Evans handsome father, got transferred there for his job. Not that any of this is particularly relevant, but to provide some kind of context here is what Im doing, I suppose. That Evan was not unknown to me, I mean, as one might think a person might be unknown to a ghost-writer, say, who was going to create a narrative from that persons life, until they started work on the writing and got to find things out so that the person felt like a familiar I already knew Evan.

So yes, amanuensis could be a good word. I was closer to the subject than is usual in these things. Like one of Miltons daughters, kind of, though the words Evan wanted me to write down, all about his unrequited love for the woman who would change my life forever, is how he first put it to me, from the moment he moved in as a lodger to her house in Richmond, were hardly the stuff of Paradise Lost.

Despite our close friendship, though, Evan himself was someone Id lost touch with over the years. I had, I had lost touch, even though the family were still counted as friends by my own, with Christmas cards and calls and all of that. My mother, for example, had a summer with Helen on Cape Cod one year; my brother, when he was a postgraduate student in San Francisco, looked up Elisabeth; my father continued to send difficult crossword puzzles and books about highly evolved and researched kinds of modern history to Tom because thats what they had always talked about I am fond of Tom, my father would say, even though Helen and Margaret are the real friends so we kept abreast of the Gordonstons. We did. Yet, the fact is that I personally hadnt seen Evan through all that time hed been away, or talked with him, or even emailed, not really, until he decided to come back to London to live, many, many years later. And, yes. He was like a different person, then, in a way, because I hadnt seen him since he was a boy, might not come back so there was some correspondence that ensued from that remark, from that period in Evans life, between me and Felicity and what Felicity said about it Even so, now, here we both were, the two of us grown up and old, and yes, of course, so different, in a way, but actually also completely the same. Because of the way our two families had always been, I suppose. All the keeping abreast.

So there he was, back in London the first time, before he came back, proper, I mean this when he was still at the point of deciding whether he was going to make that very move, back home, as he put it to me in his new rather American way of saying things, though his voice in general sounded to me just the same when we were having that first gin and tonic, a drink we were going to find would serve as a sort of leitmotif set against the events and decisions that would unfold over the following months and it was as though hed never been gone. At that stage, he was only in town for a day or two; he was putting out feelers, was how he described it; the business of working out whether he could do the sort of things for some banking headhunting outfit he was working for that they wanted him to do. Though I shant even get started there and cant make any kind of that sort of background detail a part of all this.