Talking It Over Read Online Free PDF Page B

launching myself at the Moroccan fabric, ‘he hasn’t blown the gaff on my war wound, has he? Really, Stuart, I know it’s not everyone who’s descended from King Zog of Albania, but there’s no need to blab the whole story.’
    Stuart touched her on the arm – not a gesture I had ever seen come naturally to him before – and muttered, ‘I told you not to believe anything he said.’ She nodded, and in a strange way I suddenly felt outnumbered. It was strange because there were only two of them, and normally it takes a lot more than that to make me feel outnumbered.
    Let me try and reconstruct what she looked like that day. I failed to deposit an accurate simulacrum of her visage and demeanour with the left-luggage clerk of memory; but I think she was in a shirt of a hue between sage and lovage, atop grey stone-washed 501s, green socks and a ridiculously unaesthetic pair of trainers. Marron hair pulled back and clipped over her ears, falling freely behind; lack of make-up bestowing a pallor which dramatised her generous brown eyes; petite mouth and jaunty nose, set rather low on the tapered oval of her face, thus emphasising the curved hauteur of her forehead. Ears with practically no lobes, I couldn’t help noticing, a genetic trait of increasing popularity which no doubt Darwin could explain.
    Yes, I think that’s how she struck me.
    Now, I’m not one of those conversationalists who maintain that the personal should only be approached after arduous circumnavigation. I do not take a lapwing diversion from the nest via such topical matters of the day as the political turmoil in Eastern Europe, the freshest African coup , the survival chances of the whale, and that surly ripple of low pressure currently pendant from Greenland’s coathook. No sooner had I equipped Gillian and her Squire with a cup of Formosa Oolong than I asked her how old she was, what she did, and whether her parents were still alive.
    She took it all in good humour, though Stuart seemed as twitchy as a rabbit’s septum. She was twenty-eight, I discovered; her parents (mother French, father English) had separated some years previously when Pater had done a runner with a bimbo; and she toiled as a handmaiden of the arts, rendering fresh the faded pigments of yesteryear. What? Oh, she restores pictures.
    Before they left I could not forbear to draw Gillian closer and impart to her the glittering counsel that wearing 501s with trainers was frankly un désastre and that I was amazed she had walked the streets to my apartment in broad daylight and escaped pillory.
    ‘Tell me,’ she replied. ‘You don’t …’
    ‘What?’ I urged her.
    ‘You don’t … You’re not wearing make-up, are you?’

3: That Summer I Was Brilliant
    Stuart Please don’t take against Oliver like that. He goes on a bit but he’s basically very good-hearted and kind. Lots of people don’t like him, and some actively loathe him, but try to see the better side. He hasn’t got a girlfriend, he’s practically penniless, he’s stuck in a job he hates. A lot of that sarcasm is just bravado, and if I can put up with his teasing, can’t you? Try and give him the benefit of the doubt. For my sake. I’m happy. Please don’t upset me.
    When we were sixteen, we went youth-hostelling together. We hitch-hiked up to Scotland. I tried to get a lift from every vehicle that passed, but Oliver only stuck out his thumb at cars he really wanted to ride in, and sometimes even scowled at drivers whose cars he disapproved of. So we weren’t very successful at hitch-hiking. But we got there. It rained most ofthe time, and when we were kicked out of the youth hostel for the day we walked around and sat in bus shelters. We both had anoraks but Oliver would never pull up his hood because he said it made him look like a monk and he didn’t want to endorse Christianity. So he got wetter than I did.
    Once we spent all day – somewhere near Pitlochry, I think – in a telephone box playing