Julian Barnes - Pulse

‘They all looked so solemn ,’ my mother said.

‘And most of them had earphones and were listening to music. Or watching TV screens. As if the only way to concentrate on getting fit was not to concentrate on it.’

‘They were ruled by those machines, ruled.’

I knew better than to try and convince my parents of the pleasures and rewards of exercise, from increased mental alertness to heightened sexual capacity. I’m not boasting, I promise. It’s true, it’s well documented. Jake, who goes on hiking holidays with a succession of girlfriends, told me about a paradox he’d discovered. He said that if you walk for, say, three or four hours, you build up a good appetite, enjoy a nice dinner, and as often as not fall asleep as soon as you get into bed. Whereas if you walk for seven or eight hours, you find yourself less hungry, but when you get to bed you’re unexpectedly more up for it – both of you. Perhaps there’s a scientific reason for this. Or else the act of reducing expectation to near zero frees up the libido.

I’m not going to speculate on my parents’ sex life. I’ve no reason to think it was anything other than what they wanted it to be – which I realise is a contorted way of putting things. Nor do I know if they were still happily active, in contented decline, or if sex for them was an unmourned memory. As I say, my parents held hands whenever they felt like it. They danced together with a kind of concentrated grace, deliberately old-fashioned. And I didn’t really need an answer to a question I didn’t anyway want to put. Because I’d seen the look in my father’s eye when he talked about not being able to smell his wife. It didn’t matter one way or the other if they were actually having sex. Because their intimacy was still alive.

When Janice and I first got together, we used to head straight back to her place after we’d finished running. She’d tell me to take off my trainers and socks and lie down on the bed while she took a quick shower. Knowing what was coming, I’d usually have a bulge in my shorts by the time she reappeared with a towel wrapped round her. You know how most women have that trick of tucking the towel in just above their breasts with some kind of fold which keeps it all in place? Janice had a different trick: she tucked the towel in just below her breasts.

‘Look what’s on my bed,’ she’d say with a twitch of a smile. ‘What big beast is this on my bed?’

No one had ever called me that before, and I’m just as susceptible to flattery as the next man.

Then she’d kneel on the bed and pretend to inspect me. ‘What a big sweaty beast we’ve got here.’ She’d hold my cock through my shorts and start sniffing at me, at my forehead, then my neck, then my armpits, then she’d pull up my singlet and begin licking my chest and breathing me in, all the while tugging on my cock. The first time it happened, I just came on the spot. Later, I learnt to hold myself back.

And the thing was, she didn’t just smell of the shower. She used to put scent on her breasts and hold them above my face.

‘Here are your free samples,’ she’d say.

Then she’d lower a nipple until it was tickling the end of my nose, and tease me by making me guess the name of the perfume. I never knew the answer, but I was in heaven anyway, so I’d usually make up some silly brand instead. You know, Chanel No. 69, that sort of thing.

Speaking of which. Sometimes, after she’d teased my nose, she’d swivel round above me, and the towel would be gone, and she’d lower herself on to my face, and pull down the top of my shorts. ‘What’ve we got here?’ she’d say in a carrying whisper. ‘We’ve got a big sweaty stinky beast, that’s what we’ve got.’ And then she’d take my cock in her mouth.

The GP looked up my father’s nostrils, and said these things often righted themselves over time. It might just be the aftereffect of a virus Dad didn’t even know he’d picked up. Give it another six weeks or so. Dad gave it another six weeks, went back, and was given a prescription for some nasal spray. Two squirts up each nostril night and morning. By the end of the course nothing had changed. The doctor offered to refer him to a specialist; naturally, Dad didn’t want to bother one.

‘It’s quite interesting, you know.’

‘Is it?’ I was round at my parents’ place, smelling midmorning Nescafé. I didn’t believe it could be ‘interesting’ when something went wrong with the body. Painful, irritating, frightening, time-consuming, but not ‘interesting’. That’s why I took such care of my own body.

‘People think of the obvious things – roses, gravy, beer. But I was never much of a one for smelling roses.’

‘But if you can’t smell, you can’t taste, right?’

‘That’s what they say – that all taste is really smell. But it doesn’t seem to apply in my case. I can still taste food and wine the same.’ He paused. ‘No, that’s not quite right. Some white wines seem more acidic than they used to. I wonder why.’

‘Is that what’s interesting?’

‘No. It’s the other way round. It’s not what you miss, it’s what you don’t miss. It’s a relief not to smell traffic, for instance. You walk past a bus in the market square just sitting there with its engine running, spewing out oily fumes. You’d hold your breath before.’

‘I’d carry on holding it, Dad.’ Breathing in noxious fumes without even noticing? The nose was there for a purpose, after all.

‘You don’t notice the smell of cigarettes, that’s another plus. Or the smell of them on someone – I’ve always hated that. BO, burger vans, Saturday-night vomit on the pavement…’

‘Dogshit,’ I suggested.

‘Funny you should mention that. It’s always made me heave. But I stepped in some the other day and cleaning it off didn’t really bother me at all. In the old days I’d have put the shoe outside the back door and left it there for a few days. Oh, and now I cut up onions for Mum. They don’t have any effect on me. No tears, nothing. That’s a plus.’

‘That is interesting,’ I said, half meaning it. Actually, I found it typical of my father’s ability to put a positive spin on almost anything. He would have said that examining matters from every point of view was part of his legal habit. I thought him an incorrigible optimist.

‘But you know… It’s things like stepping outside in the morning and sniffing the air. Now I just register whether it’s warm or nippy. And furniture polish, I miss that. Shoe polish too. I hadn’t thought of it until now. Doing your shoes without being able to smell anything – just imagine it.’

I didn’t need to, or want to. Coming over all elegiac about tins of Kiwi polish – I hoped I’d never end up like that.

‘And, of course, there’s your mum.’

Yes, my mum.

Both my parents wore glasses, and I sometimes used to imagine them sitting up in bed reading, then putting their book or magazine down, and turning off the bedside light. When did they say goodnight to one another? Before taking off their glasses or after? Before turning out the light or after? But now I suddenly thought: isn’t smell meant to be a central factor in sexual arousal? Pheromones, those primitive things that order us about at the very moment we think we’re really in charge. My father complained that he couldn’t smell my mother. Perhaps he meant – had always meant – something more than that.

Jake used to say I had a nose for trouble. With women, he meant. That’s why I was still unmarried at thirty. So are you, I replied. Yes, but I like it that way, he said. Jake is a big, rangy, curly-haired fellow who comes on to women in a gentle, unthreatening manner. It’s as if he’s saying, Look, I’m here, I’m fun, I’m not long-term, but you’ll probably enjoy me and afterwards we can still be friends. Quite how he manages to convey such a complicated message with little more than a grin and a lifted eyebrow is beyond me. Perhaps it’s those pheromones.