Our Evenings

After an unannounced time jump forward of three years, this section introduces Dave’s new milieu: His acting career is beginning to take off, allowing him to tour the country and encounter a wider variety of people from different social classes and backgrounds.

The novel juxtaposes Dave’s first father figure, Mark Hadlow, with a new paternal mentor—Raymond, the artistic director of the experimental theater company Terra—in terms of their power and influence over Dave’s professional life. Raymond, although somewhat rough tongued, allows Dave to perform Shakespeare roles not typically cast with people of color: Mercutio, the wise moral center of Romeo and Juliet, and Edgar, the innocent and upright heir of King Lear. Raymond’s approach is also visible in the ambitious Hector, who, in Terra, is somewhat protected from the fact that “no one in the big world that he dream[s] of [i]s going to offer him more than the mauvais rôles” (341). However, the radical approach of Terra, while admirable, is not sustainable without the continued support of traditional institutions and systems of power. Although Raymond has the power to cast Dave and Hector, it is just as important that the Guardian newspaper reviews the play favorably. Similarly, while Raymond is unable to fully meet the financial pressures of running a small theater company, Mark continues to be a key source of financial backing for Dave’s prospects, happy to invite the young man to parties of the wealthy elite and fund Terra.

When Dave attends the Upshaws’ party with Mark and Cora, the upper-class guests remind him of his outsider status and of the now somewhat less overt Racism and Prejudice that persist in British society. People sometimes stare at him as if he should not be there, and they quickly look away when he catches them—a gesture that Dave is used to it now. Several glimpses of casual indifference and ignorance show how white people often misidentify people of different racial backgrounds because they do not take the trouble to tell them apart. Jasmine Upshaw compliments Dave on his role in a production titled The Yellow Flower, although this role was actually played by a Chinese actor, who is much shorter than Dave and five years older. Similarly, a man named Martin Causley mistakenly thinks that he met Dave at a political conference that Dave never attended. Dave continues feeling as though he doesn’t belong. Even when he walks around his hometown with Chris, a number of people recognize him from childhood and offer a half smile, while others, he supposes, see in him “an unexpected foreigner, being shown around the town by his English host” (306-07).

Giles’s reappearance here—he keeps popping up throughout the novel—serves to remind the reader that Giles and Dave are not only from different social classes but also complete opposites. Giles is everything that Dave is not, and vice versa. Giles is ambitious, ruthless, and successful, but he lacks absolutely Dave’s warmth, sensitivity, and self-reflective ability. Dave has a quiet contempt for the man who bullied him when they were children, and Giles has no interest at all in Dave.

Dave’s relationships with Chris, Derry, and Hector feature Dave’s particular experience of The Ease of Falling in Love. Dave’s first sexual connections are marked by rushes of being enamored and being unabashed about cheating on his partners. His brief encounter with Derry recasts Dave’s earlier bond with Mr. Hudson—both are older men to whom Dave is attracted, and both represent potential futures. Derry’s career in the theater and in opera marries Mr. Hudson’s interest in music with Dave’s acting ambitions; his photograph of a former lover from Burma both forms a meaningful link to Dave’s heritage and raises the problematic issue of the power dynamics between white British men and men under British colonial rule. Dave’s at first heady relationship with Chris cannot survive the challenge of Dave’s almost overwhelming attraction to Hector, which Dave perceives as love that happens again almost instantly after they act in a scene together. Dave’s affinity with Hector is increased when he discovers that his Black paramour has white parents, meaning that they have a complex racial heritage in common. His relationship with Hector is the most intense relationship that Dave has had yet with a man.