Unfaithfully Yours (29 page)

Doh
– as your really rather nice children might have said. So if you were ‘putting up with being apart’, you must, surely, have been aware of it, and if you were aware of it, it must have manifested itself in more than the odd sigh or rolling of the eyes. Are you expecting me to believe that that was all that happened? Come off it, Barbara – who are you trying to fool? Love from afar? With Gerald????? Courtly love went out a very long time ago; it was never, ever an option for someone like you and most certainly not for Gerald Price QC. You weren’t, anyway, ‘apart’ from each other. You were constantly tripping over each other at judo practice and Speech Day and at my house and your house. I have gone back over every encounter and tried to remember exactly how you acted together. Nothing. From which, Barbara, I deduce that there was an active attempt at concealment. You have both been at it for years.

When did you two first start fucking? Tell us. Just own up to the whole horrible squalor of it. Don’t lie or, if you must lie, have the grace to come up with something a little more credible than the plot of your last novel but two.

‘
We were very careful not to touch each other. Or, if possible, even to get too close. Everyone thought we disliked each other and that suited both of us just fine
.’

I don’t think that anybody much thought you disliked each other. If that was what you were trying to convey, you made a very bad job of it. And as for ‘not getting too close’, how about that night in the swimming pool of the Villa Isadora? Or the hokey-cokey in and around the gardens of the Maison de Maître Île de Maquereaux, Bénodet, Brittany, on the night of 1 September 1984? And just how did the spoken unspoken agreement between you two sensitive flowers operate? You just ‘knew’, did you? Bollocks, Barbara. I may not be a highly regarded female novelist who earns nearly six figures a year (I just do not believe that figure by the way) but I do know bullshit when I see it and your letter is almost as near a liquid stream of bullshit as you are likely to find outside a dysentery hotspot in downtown Calcutta.

‘
Life is a stupid business, isn’t it?
’

Er . . . possibly it is. Not a particularly original thought for a leading lady novelist. It needn’t be, of course, if one tries to behave intelligently. Something that seems to be very low indeed on your list of priorities

‘
We were not, either of us, so bound by the conventions of marriage that we were struggling with feelings we knew to be wrong or anything of that sort. It is simply that this was how it was but neither of us could see it
.’

Oh, perish the thought that anyone, these days, is ‘bound by the conventions of marriage’. The conventions being, I suppose, that you try to look after, tell the truth to and generally support the person you are supposed to love. Oh, no, Barbara, you’re an artist, aren’t you? You can do exactly as you like and we – the poor benighted creatures who have not published novels that were well received by the
New Statesman
– are supposed to lie down and accept it.

The second half of that first euphoniously dishonest sentence is very revealing. You weren’t struggling with feelings you knew to be wrong. Hang on. What was it you said earlier in the letter?

‘
I have been in love with Gerry Price for the last forty-three years. I fell in love with him on the day I met him on a hot summer’s day in Oxford in the summer of 1968. Remember 1968?
’

Yes, I do, Barbara. It was not a particularly interesting year. Principally because the world was full of people like you walking around with flowers in their hair and talking mealy-mouthed rubbish about universal love and brotherhood.

But, getting back to your letter, you were in love with him and not struggling, in any sense, with that feeling. It was just . . . there. You hardly noticed it, really. You didn’t sort of get around to doing anything about this grand passion until you were in your late fifties. Why was this, I wonder? More time on your hands? Career not going so well? Or could it possibly be that it wasn’t really there at all? It seems, as far as I can tell, to be based on the fact that he ogled you, briefly, in the cloisters of an Oxford college.

‘
You never know until it is far too late, but we know it now and, even if we did not know it then, we can see that that was what made us both the people we were. It is almost too late for me and Gerry, but not quite too late.
’

Don’t want to sound like a stuffy old schoolmistress, Barbara darling, but, if you really do think we ‘never know until it is far too late’, how come you can authenticate this mysterious feeling that kept you rooted to the spot when dear old Gary Booker was singing his heart out over and over again on that afternoon in Magdalen? You seem to want us to believe that it was a dream that sustained you as you struggled with the wasteland that is SW15 for thirty-odd difficult years.

‘
I am sorry, John. I could have wished I had not fallen in love with a man you disliked so violently
.’

Well – this is a little nearer to it. Not, of course, in any way honest, but a little nearer than most of the rest of your truly awful letter. It is the only moment when you own up to the fact that your actions do have some impact on those around you and, while I do not believe for a moment that you care about what John may or may not think of your new choice of man, some of the badly expressed, half-baked ideas jostling around in that sentence do give some hint as to your real motivation.

It must be very sweet to take something from me. You have always wanted to do that. You have always wanted my approval but, like the conscientious teacher I am, I was never able to say about any book of yours, ‘Darling, it was marvellous!’ I am boringly programmed towards honesty. Towards saying what I genuinely feel and think, even if other people are going to be offended by it. Conrad always tells the story of our taking him, when he was about seven, on the Channel ferry. He asked me what the ship was made of and I said, ‘Iron. Steel.’ He said, ‘So is it heavier than water?’ I said, ‘In one sense it is!’ And he said, ‘How do we know, then, that it won’t sink?’ I said, ‘Darling, we don’t
know
– but we can reasonably assume it might not.’ Which left the poor little chap with a lifelong fear of the sea.

You have taken quite a bit off me over the years. There was that rather nice Provençal bowl in about 1981. There were no fewer than three blenders between 1979 and 1986. There was that very nice first edition of Lynd Ward’s
Madman’s Drum
– worth, I am told, four hundred dollars, these days – that you ‘borrowed’ and somehow never got around to returning and, of course, I did not ask you for it because I am not like that and you know I am not like that and that was why you kept it. There was the scarf. Oh, yes – the scarf. You must remember that because, for some reason, I did ask for it – over and over again – and you, with that famous charm of yours, said you
must
remember and you were
so
stupid and you
would
do it, you really would, and I looked at you from behind my famously lidded eyes and puffed on a fag, and said, ‘You won’t, Barbara. You know you won’t. Stop pretending. You just won’t!’ And you laughed with what some people think of as charm, and said, ‘I know! I know!’

Perhaps, though, Barbara, I have, at last, taken something from you – even if it is something you do not seem to want.

I am writing this at the desk in your study, surrounded by unsold copies of your works. Many of them, for some reason, in Japanese. What on earth the Japanese make of you I cannot imagine. The sheer volume of volumes still
chez toi
might suggest that they don’t make very much of you at all, but I am sure you improve a great deal in translation. Perhaps there is a small core of tasteless idiots in just about every country in the world who all sign up to pretending to like the same kind of rubbish.

Really, your house is a shocker. Did you know you have earwigs (at least I think they are earwigs) in your kitchen cupboards? And that the fridge door will not close? Why have you put that coffee-table in the front room? Why did you buy it in the first place? What on earth is that Monet reproduction doing in the lavatory? For how long, by the way, have you had separate bedrooms and how did you manage to snaffle the most comfortable bed?

John and I are enjoying it greatly. In spite of the rain falling on your shabby little garden. Although I think I may have painted the whole place green by the time you return to London. Oatmeal is so
passé
, don’t you think?

Oh, in case you were wondering what I’m doing in your house, John has left a letter there, which will explain it all from his point of view. I will try to give my account of what happened between John and myself without resorting to any rubbish about being in love with each other in a previous life, or swapping glances at the school gates for the last however many years without really understanding their significance until last week.

I was devastated after Gerald left me. He is not an easy person to love – or even to like for that matter – but he was the person I loved. He was the father to my children, and I was under the impression that he was in love with me. I can’t understand why else he would have shared my life for so long. If I had had the kind of problem with him that he seems to have had with me, I would have told him.

Out of the blue I got a letter from John, who had run away to France after your horribly twisted version of a Goldsmith Annual Family Round Robin Newsletter arrived on everyone’s doormat. It seems that he has, for quite a long time, been thinking that he felt something for me that was slightly more than friendship. When he said that, I realized that I had been feeling almost the same kind of thing. I hadn’t ever done anything about it because I was married and, or so I thought, in love with someone else. I suggested he look me up when he was back in London. He did. We found we liked each other very well. We want to live together. At the moment we seem to be living in your house.

I would suggest that when and if you do return to Putney you go to Heathland Avenue. John is still really very angry with Gerald and I don’t think either of us wants an undignified scene, do we? Somehow or other we will have to get this sorted. For the moment, letters seem an easier way of communicating. At one level I think all four of us are so angry with our partners that meeting in person is a very bad idea.

Your former friend

Elizabeth Price

PS You also have moths. Quite a lot of them.

PPS I have had a series of extraordinary conversations with a funny little man called Gibbons, who is a private detective. He seemed to be implying that either Gerald or you may have murdered poor Mike Larner’s wife. I think he is rather sweet on me actually.

From:

Orlando Gibbons

Detectives Are Us

12 The Alley

Putney

14 December

To:

Mike Larner and Sam Dimmock, c/o 24 Beeston Crescent

John Goldsmith and Elizabeth Price,

c/o 112 Heathland Avenue

Gerald Price and Barbara Goldsmith, c/o 101 Fellen Road

Mary Dimmock, c/o Orlando Gibbons, Flat 12,

Woodvale Mansions, Keswick Avenue

Dear All,

This letter and its contents, which, I suppose, come to think of it, are the same thing, is and are highly confidential. I hope I have got everyone’s address right! There have been some pretty major changes in the living arrangements of our ‘little group’ recently, and if I have got an address wrong, I apologize!

As many of you know, I have recently become engaged to be married to Mary Dimmock as soon as her divorce comes through. This is someone on whom I spied in my professional capacity as a ‘private dick’. She knows. She has forgiven me.

My darling, I still love you and feel intensely the great joy you have brought to me by agreeing to share your life with me, which, of course, Sam knows about. You have your ‘hands full’ elsewhere, Sam, by which I do not mean a cheap joke at the expense of your newly discovered and – to me – deeply moving awareness of your sexuality. What you have with Micky is unique and very precious in my view.

The purpose of this letter is to report on my current ‘work in progress’, which is to provide an assessment of the causes of death of Mrs Pamela Larner on 3 November 2000. Normally I would supply Mr Larner, who is my client, with an exclusive report of my conclusions, but I have already given him an early look at my ‘result’ and we both felt it would be appropriate to share my report with the group I have herein termed the ‘Puerto Banús Seven’, being a reduced number of the original ‘Puerto Banús Eight’ by one person due to the death of Mrs Pamela Larner on 3 November 2000.

It is this death on which I am now reporting. It is a story of passion and sexuality, which, in many instances, combines the two at the same time. It is full of squalor and ugliness but also beauty and nobility. And, also, regrettably, hideous violence and suppressed urges, which surfaced with tragic consequences for the people in whom they surfaced and also those near to them at the time.

I will attempt to keep my narrative ‘plain and unvarnished’ and stick to the facts as I have uncovered them. I have indicated my sources, where necessary, and checked my recordings with the respondents.
¹

Pamela Larner, born Pamela Figgis in Hertford, England, on 12 January 1948, was a petite brunette (we think) who had had a varied career in reflexology, hairdressing, secretarial work and Gestalt therapy. There is no firm evidence that she qualified at any of the institutes claiming to implement the now discredited doctrines of Fritz Perls but she had, almost certainly, ‘read a book about it’. She also maintained she was a qualified Jungian analyst but I have been able to find no justification for this at all. Michael Larner has said that her therapy work was ‘all bullshit, really’ and that she ‘just got people to roll around the floor, with their clothes off, if possible, to make it all look more intense’.