Caroline's Bikini by Kirsty Gunn

Author:Kirsty Gunn [Kirsty Gunn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571339358
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2018-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

Go!

one

In fact, ‘natural’, that word … Really, it is at the heart of this story. For who on this earth has not known a similar love? Natural. Ordinary. Unselfconscious. The kind of love that seems so straightforward, so easy, honest and assured; other forms of romantic attachment seem artificial and highly wrought by comparison, freighted as they are by great force of expression. By contrast, how clear, how singular and constant is unrequited love, the object for whom it burns largely unaware of the intensity of heat. So the flame goes higher, burns deeper. And yes, natural, are these concepts, these ideas. That such loves might occur in most lives, in these kinds of ways – to a lesser degree perhaps, for many, that they might not have become a lodger in the way that Evan Gordonston so lodged, that they might not wish to create a document, a written story or record of their desire in order that they may make real their condition – seems something worth considering in this age of imposed feeling generated by the industries of film and entertainment with their endless replications of the same story, always the same, coinciding with shopping and the busy activities and lusts of consumption. Unspoken love, by contrast, is as natural as the air, the weather. As apt to change lives as the other sort, though rarely acknowledged, is what happens in the end when the heart has become engaged, the capacity of the mind increased. Its silence enlarges the scale of the world.

By now it was fully summer. That conversation Evan and I had had, when he’d told me about Caroline coming up to his room and showing to him fully, in her manner and conversation, how upset she was, presenting herself to him in a way that showed all her unhappiness … That had taken place in what I still thought of as another season, late spring, it belonged to a different time. Though nothing had changed, Evan still not able to speak fully to Caroline, show her some emotion of his own, despite the width of her confession, her telling him of her sense of being at a loss in the world, as though there were nowhere else she could turn but to that little attic room, that there was no one else she could go to but the man who lived beneath her eaves … Still, it seemed that that had happened a long time ago and the story had moved on, come fully into itself with its own definitions and terms. That Evan was the man who might give Caroline solace, on that one particular night, seemed to denote it. We had our ‘novel’ somehow, word by word, it was there.

For how things were to take a turn. How they were to change.

Evan was tired. I had been able to see it collecting around him for some time, an air of gradual fatigue. It was there in his clothing, as seen, his posture, his appearance sitting before me, the way he felt when he hugged me goodnight.

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