Julian Barnes: Pulse

‘I’m saying there’s a camaraderie. If you go up to someone on the pavement outside a pub or a restaurant and ask to buy a cigarette, they’ll always give you one.’

‘I thought you didn’t smoke.’

‘No, but if I did, they would.’

‘I spy a late switch into the conditional tense.’

‘I told you, all smokers are liars.’

‘Sounds like a matter to be discussed after we’ve all departed.’

‘What’s Dick laughing at?’

‘Oh, prosthetic balls. It’s just the idea. Or the phrase. Multiple application, I’m sure. French foreign policy, Hillary Clinton.’

‘ Dick .’

‘I’m sorry, I’m just an old-fashioned guy.’

‘You’re just an old-fashioned child.’

‘Ouch. But Mummy, when I grow up, will I be allowed to smoke?’

‘All this stuff about politicians needing balls. It’s just… bollocks.’

‘Touché.’

‘You know, I’m surprised that pal of yours didn’t go back to the doctor, or the surgeon, and say, Can I have a different sort of cancer instead of the one that makes you chop my bollocks off?’

‘It wasn’t like that. He had a choice of different approaches. He chose the most radical.’

‘You can say that again. Nothing 60/40 about it.’

‘How can you do 60/40 when you’ve only got two balls?’

‘60/40 is a metaphor.’

‘Is it?’

‘Everything’s a metaphor at this time of night.’

‘On which note, can you call us a literal taxi?’

‘Do you remember the morning after a big smoke? The cigarette hangover?’

‘Most mornings. The throat. The dry nose. The chest.’

‘And the way it was clearly separable from the booze hangover you often had at the same time.’

‘Booze makes you loose, fags make you tight.’

‘Eh?’

‘Smoking constricts the blood vessels. That’s why you could never start the day with a decent crap.’

‘Was that why?’

‘Speaking as a non-doctor, that was your problem.’

‘So we’re back where we began?’

‘Which is where?’

‘The inverted plastic bag and -’

‘Dick, now we really are going.’

But we didn’t. We stayed, and talked some more, and decided that Obama would beat McCain, that the Conservatives were only temporarily indistinguishable from the Labour Party, that al-Qaida would certainly attack the 2012 Olympics, that in a few years Londoners would start getting nostalgic about bendy buses, that in a few decades vineyards would once again be planted along Hadrian’s Wall as in Roman times, and that, in all probability, for the rest of the life of the planet, some people somewhere would always be smoking, the lucky buggers.

‘I THOUGHT THAT went very well,’ Jane said, patting her handbag as the train doors closed with a pneumatic thump. Their carriage was nearly empty, its air warm and stale.

Alice knew to treat the remark as a question seeking reassurance. ‘ You were certainly on good form.’

‘Oh, I had a nice room for a change. It always helps.’

‘They liked that story of yours about Graham Greene.’

‘They usually do,’ Jane replied with a slight air of complacency.

‘I’ve always meant to ask you, is it true?’

‘You know, I never worry about that any more. It fills a slot.’

When had they first met? Neither could quite remember. It must have been nearly forty years ago, during that time of interchangeable parties: the same white wine, the same hysterical noise level, the same publishers’ speeches. Perhaps it had been at a PEN do, or when they’d been shortlisted for the same literary prize. Or maybe during that long, drunken summer when Alice had been sleeping with Jane’s agent, for reasons she could no longer recall or, even at the time, justify.

‘In a way, it’s a relief we’re not famous.’

‘Is it?’ Jane looked puzzled, and a little dismayed, as if she thought they were.

‘Well, I imagine we’d have readers coming to see us time and again. They’d expect some new anecdotes. I don’t think either of us has told a new story in years.’

‘Actually, we do have people coming to see us again and again. Just fewer than… if we were famous. Anyway, I think they like hearing the same stories. When we’re on stage we’re not literature, we’re sitcom. You have to have catchphrases.’

‘Like your Graham Greene story.’

‘I think of that as a bit more than a… catchphrase, Alice.’

‘Don’t prickle, dear. It doesn’t suit.’ Alice couldn’t help noticing the sheen of sweat on her friend’s face. All from the effort of getting from taxi to platform, then platform to train. And why did women carrying rather more poundage than was wise think floral prints were the answer? Bravado rarely worked with clothes, in Alice’s opinion – at least, after a certain age.

When they had become friends, both were freshly married and freshly published. They had watched over each other’s children, sympathised through divorces, recommended each other’s books as Christmas reading. Each privately liked the other’s work a little less than they said, but then, they also liked everyone else’s work a little less than they said, so hypocrisy didn’t come into it. Jane was embarrassed when Alice referred to herself as an artist rather than a writer, and thought her books strove to appear more highbrow than they were; Alice found Jane’s work rather formless, and at times bleatingly autobiographical. Each had had a little more success than they had anticipated, but less, looking back, than they thought they deserved. Mike Nichols had taken an option on Alice’s Triple Sec , but eventually pulled out; some journey-man from telly had come in and made it crassly sexual. Not that Alice put it like this; she would say, with a faint smile, that the adaptation had ‘skimped on the book’s withholdingness’, a phrase some found baffling. Jane, for her part, had been second favourite for the Booker with The Primrose Path , had spent a fortune on a frock, rehearsed her speech with Alice, and then lost out to some fashionable Antipodean.

‘Who did you hear it from, just out of interest?’

‘What?’

‘The Graham Greene story.’

‘Oh, that chap… you know, that chap who used to publish us both.’

‘Jim?’

‘Yes, that’s right.’

‘Jane, how can you possibly forget Jim’s name?’

‘Well, I just did.’ The train blasted through some village halt, too fast to catch the signboard. Why did Alice need to be so stern? She wasn’t exactly spotless herself. ‘By the way, did you ever sleep with him?’

Alice frowned slightly. ‘You know, to be perfectly honest, I can’t remember. Did you?’

‘I can’t either. But I suppose if you did, then I probably did as well.’

‘Doesn’t that make me sound a bit of a tart?’

‘I don’t know. I thought it made me sound more of a tart.’ Jane laughed, to cover the uncertainty.

‘Do you think it’s good or bad – the fact that we can’t remember?’

Jane felt back on stage, facing a question she was unprepared for. So she reacted as she usually did there, and referred the matter back to Alice: the team leader, head girl, moral authority.

‘What do you think?’

‘Good, definitely.’

‘Why?’

‘Oh, I think it’s best to have a Zen approach to that sort of thing.’

Sometimes, Alice’s poise could make her rather too oblique for ordinary mortals. ‘Are you saying it’s Buddhist to forget who you slept with?’

‘It could be.’

‘I thought Buddhism was about things coming round again in different lives?’