Read Talking It Over for Free Online Page B

feel sad seeing our names rubbed out. Then Gillian said that thing about Oliver talking like a dictionary, and he did his scene on the beach and we all laughed.
    Oliver was different, too. Normally when he and I were with girls he would be all competitive, even if he wasn’t meaning to be. But now I suppose he had nothing to win, nothing to lose, and it made everything easier. Something in all three of us knew that this was a one-off, that this was a first and last summer, because there wouldn’t be another time when Gillian and I were falling in love as opposed to just being in love or whatever. It was unique, that summer; we all sensed it.
    Gillian I started training in social work after I left university. I didn’t last very long. But I remember something a counsellor said on one of the courses. She said, ‘You must remember that every situation is unique and every situation is also ordinary.’
    The trouble with talking about yourself the way Stuart is doing is that it makes people jump to conclusions. For instance, when people find out that my father ran off with a schoolgirl they invariably look at me in a particular way, which means one of two things, if not both of them. The first is: if your father ran off with someone only a couple of years older than you, what this probably means is that he really wanted to run off with you . And the second is: it’s a well-known fact that girls whose fathers run off frequently try to compensate by having affairs with older men. Is that what you’re into?
    To which I would answer, first, that the witness is not before the court and has not been cross-examined on the matter, and secondly that just because something’s a ‘well-known fact’ this doesn’t make it a well-known fact about me . Every situation is ordinary and every situation is also unique. You can put it that way round if you prefer.
    I don’t know why they’re doing this, Stuart and Oliver. It must be another of their games. Like Stuart pretending he hasn’t heard of Picasso and Oliver pretending he doesn’t understand any machinery invented after the spinning-jenny. But it’s not a game I want to play, this one, thank you very much. Games are for childhood, and sometimes I think I lost my childhood young.
    All I’d say is that I don’t quite agree with Stuart’s description of that summer with Oliver. Yes, we spent quite a lot of time alone together, started going to bed and all that, and yes we were sensible enough to know that even when you’re falling in love you shouldn’t live entirely in one another’s pockets. But this didn’t necessarily mean, from my point of view, that we had to go around with Oliver. Of course I liked him – you can’t not like Oliver once you get to know him – but he did tend to monopolise things. Almost telling us what to do. I’m not really complaining. I’m just making a small correction.
    That’s the trouble with talking it over like this. It never seems quite right to the person being talked about.
    I met Stuart. I fell in love. I married. What’s the story?
    Oliver I was brilliant that summer. Why do we keep referring to it as ‘that summer’ – it was only last summer, after all. I guess because it was like one perfectly held note, one exact and translucent colour. That’s how it seems in memory; and we each apprehended it subcutaneously at the time, il me semble . On top of which, I was brilliant.
    Things were just a touch grim at the Shakespeare School before it occluded its portals for the vacation. A certain crepuscularity of spirit had sauntered in, courtesy of a misunderstanding which I hadn’t bothered to trouble the prancing Squire and his Milady with; not fair, in their state of mind, I thought. But I had discovered one of the problems, one of the deep-seated wrinkles about my foreign students: they don’t speak English very well. That was the cause of it. I mean, there she was nodding away and smiling at me, and Ollie, poor old dimwit