Julian Barnes - Pulse

My mother. When I think of her now, there’s a phrase that comes to mind – one I used when Dad was rabbiting on about his six Chinese pulses. Dad, I said to him, there’s only one pulse – the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood. The photographs of my parents that I’m most attached to are those taken before I was born. And – thank you, Janice – I do actually think I know what they were like back then.

My parents sitting on a pebble beach somewhere, his arm around her shoulders; he has a sports jacket with leather elbow patches, she’s in a polka-dot dress, looking out at the camera with passionate hopefulness. My parents on their honeymoon in Spain, with mountains behind them, both wearing sunglasses, so you have to work out how they’re feeling from their stance, their obvious relaxation with one another, and the sly fact that my mother has her hand slipped into my father’s trouser pocket. And then a picture which must have meant a lot to them despite its shortcomings: the two of them at a party, clearly more than a bit drunk, with the camera flash giving them the pink eyes of white mice. My father has absurd muttonchop whiskers, Mum frizzy hair, big hoop earrings and a kaftan. Neither looks as if they could possibly grow up enough to be a parent. I suspect this is the first picture ever taken of them together, the first time they are officially recorded as sharing the same space, breathing the same air.

There’s also a photo on the sideboard of me with my parents. I’m about four or five, standing between them with the expression of a child who’s been told to watch the birdie, or however they might have put it: concentrating, but at the same time not quite certain of what’s going on. I’m holding a junior watering can, though I have no memory of being given a junior gardener’s kit, or indeed of having any interest, real or suggested, in gardening.

Nowadays, when I examine this photo – my mother looking down at me protectively, my father smiling at the camera, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – I can’t help remembering Janice’s words. About how parents decide who they are before the child has any awareness of it, how they develop a front which the child will never be able to penetrate. Whether intentional or not, there was something poisonous in her remarks. ‘You want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum.’ And then: ‘There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’ What am I to do with that thought? Even if I were to pursue it and find it led nowhere?

There’s nothing mimsy or flaky about my mum and nothing – note this, please, Janice – nothing neurotically self-dramatising. She’s a solid presence in a room, whether talking or not. And she’s the person you would turn to if anything went wrong. Once, when I was little, she managed to gash herself in the thigh. There was no one else in the house. Most people would have called an ambulance, or at least disturbed Dad at his work. But Mum just got a needle and some surgical thread, pulled the wound together and sewed it up. And she’d do the same for you without turning a hair. That’s what she’s like. If there is a secret in her life, it’s probably that she helped someone and never told anybody about it. So fuck Janice, is what I say.

My parents met when Dad had just qualified as a solicitor. He used to maintain that he’d had to chase off a number of rivals. Mum said there wasn’t any chasing to be done because everything was perfectly obvious to her from the day they met. Yes, Dad would reply, but the other fellows didn’t see it that way. My mother would look at him fondly, and I could never work out which of them to believe. Or perhaps that’s the definition of a happy marriage: both parties are telling the truth, even when their accounts are incompatible.

Of course, my admiration for their marriage is partly conditioned by the failure of my own. Perhaps their example made me assume it was more straightforward than it turned out. Do you think there are people who have a talent for marriage, or is it just a question of luck? Though I suppose you could say that it’s luck to have such a talent. When I mentioned to Mum that Janice and I were going through a bad patch and trying to work at our marriage, she said,

‘I’ve never really understood what that means. If you love your job, it doesn’t feel like work. If you love your marriage, it doesn’t feel like work. I suppose you may be working at it, underneath. Just doesn’t feel like it,’ she repeated. And then, after a pause, ‘Not that I’m saying anything against Janice.’

‘Let’s not talk about Janice,’ I said. I’d already talked enough about Janice to Janice herself. Whatever we brought to that marriage, we sure as hell took nothing away from it, except our legal share of money.

You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happy marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer? I don’t know. Only that I don’t blame my parents; nor, really, do I blame Janice.

My mother promised that she would go to their GP if Dad saw a specialist about his anosmia. My father was typically reluctant. Others had it far worse than him, he said. He could still taste his food, whereas for some anosmiacs dinner was like chewing cardboard and plastic. He’d been on the internet and read about even more extreme cases – for instance, of olfactory hallucination. Imagine if fresh milk suddenly smelt and tasted sour, chocolate made you retch, meat was just like a sponge of blood to you.

‘If you dislocate your finger,’ my mother replied, ‘you don’t refuse to get it looked at because someone else has broken their leg.’

And so the bargain was made. The waiting and the bureaucracy began, and they both ended up having MRI scans in the same week. What are the chances of that, I wonder.

I’m not sure we ever know exactly when our marriage ends. We remember certain stages, transitions, arguments; incompatibilities which grow until they can’t be resolved or lived with. I think that for much of the time when Janice was attacking me – or, as she would put it, the time when I stopped paying attention to her and just went missing – I never really thought this was, or would cause, the end of our marriage. It was only when, for no reason I could comprehend, she turned on my parents that I first began to think: oh really, now she’s crossed the line. It’s true, we’d been drinking. And yes, I had exceeded my self-imposed limit – well exceeded it.

‘One of your problems is, you think your parents have the perfect marriage.’

‘Why is that one of my problems?’

‘Because it makes you think your marriage is worse than it is.’

‘Oh, so it’s their fault, is it?’

‘No, they’re fine, your parents.’

‘But?’

‘I said they’re fine. I just didn’t say the sun shines out of their arses.’

‘You don’t think the sun shines out of anyone’s arse, do you?’

‘Well, it doesn’t. But I like your dad, he’s always been nice to me.’

‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning, mothers and only sons. Do I have to spell it out?’

‘I think you just did.’

A few weeks later, one Saturday afternoon, Mum phoned in a bit of a fluster. She’d driven to an antiques fair in a nearby town to get Dad a birthday present, had a puncture on the way back, managed to get the car to the nearest petrol station, only to find – none too surprisingly – that the cashiers wouldn’t leave their tills. They probably didn’t know how to change a wheel anyway. Dad had said he was going to have a lie-down and -