Julian Barnes: Pulse

She looked at me. ‘I think that what happens with most couples over time is that they find a way of being with one another that is basically untruthful. It’s like the relationship depends on mutually assured self-deception. That’s its default setting.’

‘Well I still don’t agree.’ What I thought was: crap. Mutually assured self-deception – that doesn’t sound like you. It’s some phrase you picked up from that magazine you work for. Or from some bloke you wouldn’t mind fucking. But all I said was,

‘Are you calling my parents hypocrites?’

‘I’m talking generally. Why do you always take things personally?’

‘Then I don’t understand what you’re saying. And if I do, then I can’t think why you want to be married to me, or anybody else.’

‘So be it.’

That was another thing. I was beginning to dislike her use of that phrase.

Dad admitted that he hadn’t expected acupuncture to hurt as much as it did.

‘Do you tell her?’

‘Certainly. I say, “ Ow .”’

If Mrs Rose stuck a needle in and didn’t get the reaction she expected, she’d do it again, near the original spot, until she got what she was looking for.

‘And what’s that?’

‘It’s a sort of magnetic pull, an energy surge. And you can always tell because that’s when it hurts most.’

‘And then?’

‘And then she does it in other places. The backs of the hands, the ankles. That’s even more painful – where there isn’t much flesh.’

‘Right.’

‘But in between she needs to see how your energy levels are coming along, so she’s always checking your pulses.’

At which point I lost it. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad. There’s only one pulse, you know that. By definition. It’s the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood.’

My father didn’t reply, just cleared his throat slightly and looked at my mother. We don’t do rows in our family. We don’t want to do them, and we don’t know how to, anyway. So there was a silence, and then Mum started on another topic.

Twenty minutes after his fourth treatment, my father walked into Starbucks and smelt coffee for the first time in months. Then he went to the Body Shop to get some shampoo for Mum, and said it was like being hit over the head by a rhododendron bush. He was almost nauseous. The smells were so rich, he said, that it was as if they had bright colours attached to them as well.

‘So what do you say about that?’

‘I don’t know what to say, Dad, except congratulations.’ I thought it was probably coincidence or auto-suggestion.

‘You’re not going to pretend it’s a coincidence?’

‘No, Dad, I’m not.’

Mrs Rose, to his surprise, greeted his account neutrally, with a little head-nodding and some scribbling in a notebook. She then explained her proposed course of action. There would, if he agreed, be fortnightly appointments building towards the summer – by which she meant the Chinese, not the British, summer, because that, based on my father’s date of birth, would be his time of maximum responsiveness. She added that his energy levels were rising every time she checked his pulses.

‘Do you feel more energetic, Dad?’

‘That’s not what it’s about.’

‘And have you smelt anything since your last appointment?’

‘No.’

Right, so ‘energy levels’ had nothing to do with ‘levels of energy’, and having higher ones didn’t increase his smelling power. Fine.

Sometimes I wondered why I was being so hard on my father. Over the next three months he reported his findings matter-of-factly. From time to time he smelt things, but they had to be strong to get through: soap, coffee, burnt toast, toilet cleaner; twice, a glass of red wine; once, to his joy, the smell of rain. The Chinese summer came and went; Mrs Rose said that acupuncture had done all it could. My father, typically, blamed his own scepticism, but Mrs Rose repeated that attitude of mind was irrelevant. Since she was the one who proposed ending the treatment, I decided that she wasn’t a charlatan. But perhaps it was more that I didn’t want to think of Dad as the sort of person who could be taken in by a charlatan.

‘Actually, it’s your mother I’m more worried about.’

‘Why’s that?’

‘She seems, I don’t know, a bit off the pace nowadays. Maybe it’s just tiredness. She’s slower, somehow.’

‘What does she say?’

‘Oh, she says there’s nothing wrong. Or if there is, it’s just hormonal.’

‘What does she mean?’

‘I was rather hoping you could tell me.’

That was another nice thing about my parents. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.

‘I probably don’t know any better than you, Dad. But in my experience, “hormones” is a catch-all word for when women don’t want to tell you something. I always think: hang on, haven’t men got hormones as well? Why don’t we use them as an excuse?’

My father chuckled, but I could see his anxiety wasn’t allayed. So on his next bridge night, I dropped in on Mum. As we sat in the kitchen, I could tell immediately that she hadn’t bought my excuse of ‘just being in the neighbourhood’.

‘Tea or coffee?’

‘Decaf or herbal tea, whatever you’re having.’

‘Well, I need a good dose of caffeine.’

Somehow, it didn’t take more than that to bring me to the point.

‘Dad’s worried about you. So am I.’

‘Dad’s a worrier.’

‘Dad loves you. That’s why he notices things about you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t.’

‘No, I suppose that’s right.’ I looked at her, but her gaze was elsewhere. It was perfectly clear to me that she was thinking about being loved. It could have made me feel envious, but it didn’t.

‘So tell me what’s wrong, and don’t mention hormones.’

She smiled. ‘A bit tired. A bit clumsy. That’s all.’

About eighteen months into the marriage, Janice accused me of not being straightforward. Of course, being Janice, she didn’t put it as straightforwardly as that. She asked why I always preferred discussing unimportant problems rather than important ones. I said I didn’t think this was so, but in any case, big things are sometimes so big that there’s little to say about them, whereas small things are easier to discuss. And sometimes we think this is the problem, whereas it’s actually that , which makes this seem trivial. She looked at me like one of my stroppier pupils, and said that was typical – a typical justification of my natural evasiveness, my refusal to face facts and deal with issues. She said she could always smell a lie on me. She actually put it like that.

‘Very well, then,’ I replied. ‘Let’s be straightforward. Let’s deal with issues. You’re having an affair and I’m having an affair. Is that facing facts or not?’

‘That’s what you think it is. You make it sound like a one-all draw.’ And then she explained the falseness of my apparent candour, and the difference between our infidelities – hers born of despair, mine of revenge – and how it was symptomatic that I thought the affairs were the significant thing, rather than the circumstances which gave rise to them. And so we came full circle to the original charges.

What do we look for in a partner? Someone like us, someone different? Someone like us but different, different but like us? Someone to complete us? Oh, I know you can’t generalise, but even so. The point is: if we’re looking for someone who matches us, we only ever think of their good matching bits. What about their bad matching bits? Do you think we’re sometimes driven towards people with the same faults as we have?