Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

‘My mum does the crossword with my dad. Joan does the crossword.’

He lowered his chin and looked at me over his spectacles.

‘Then let us posit, perhaps, that the Puzzle is not the domain of the womanly woman. What do you say to that?’

‘I’d say I don’t have enough experience of life to come to a conclusion on that one.’ Though inwardly I was reflecting on the phrase ‘womanly woman’. Was it uxorious praise, or some kind of disguised insult?

‘So that gives us an O in the middle of 12 down,’ he went on. Suddenly there was an ‘us’ involved.

I gazed at the clue. Something about an arbiter in work and a leaf.

‘TREFOIL,’ Macleod muttered, writing it in, three strokes of his pen on the R, where others would construct it from two. ‘You see, it’s REF – arbiter – in the middle of TOIL – work.’

‘That’s clever too,’ I falsely enthused.

‘Standard. Had it before a few times,’ he added with a touch of complacency.

2b) the further belief that once you have solved something in life, you will be able to solve it again, and the solution will be exactly the same the second time around, thus offering assurance that you have reached a pitch of maturity and wisdom.

Macleod decided, without my asking, to teach me the ins and outs of the Puzzle. Anagrams, and how to spot them; words hidden inside other combinations of words; setters’ shorthand and their favourite tricks; common abbreviations, letters and words drawn from chess annotation, military ranks, and so on; how a word may be written upwards in the solution to a down clue, or backwards in an across clue. ‘“Running west”, you see, that’s the giveaway.’

Correction to 4). To begin: ‘the hope that this arse-bendingly boring activity would keep…’

Later, I tried making an anagram out of WOMANLY WOMAN. I didn’t get anywhere, of course. WANLY MOWN LOOM and other bits of nonsense were all I turned up.

Further addition: 1a) a successful means of taking your mind off the question of love, which is all that counts in the world.

Nonetheless, I continued to keep Macleod company while he puffed away at his Players and filled his grids with strangely mechanical pen strokes. He seemed to enjoy explaining clues to me, and took my occasional half-meant whistles and grunts as applause.

‘We’ll make a Puzzle-solver of him yet,’ he remarked to Susan over supper one evening.

Sometimes, we did things together, he and I. Nothing major, or for a long time, anyway. He asked me for my help with some rope-and-pin instrument in the garden, designed to ensure that the cabbages he was planting out were in regimental lines. A couple of times, we listened to a test match on the radio. Once, he took me with him to fill up the car with what he referred to as ‘petroleum’. I asked which garage he was intending to patronise. The nearest, he told me, unsurprisingly. I told him that I had done an analysis of price versus distance in the matter of Joan’s gin, and what my findings had been.

‘How incredibly boring,’ he commented, and then smiled at me.

I realized that I had seen his eyes on more than one occasion recently. Whereas Susan hadn’t seen them in years. Maybe she was exaggerating. Or maybe she hadn’t been looking too hard in the first place.

NOW ONLY MMWAA… no, that wasn’t any good either.

Here is something I often thought at this time: I’ve been educated at school and university, and yet, in real terms, I know nothing. Susan barely went to school, but she knows so much more. I’ve got the book-learning, she’s got the life-learning.

Not that I always agreed with her. When she was talking about Joan, she’d said: ‘We’re all just looking for a place of safety.’ I pondered these words for a while afterwards. The conclusion I came to was this: maybe so, but I’m young, I’m ‘only nineteen’, and I’m more interested in looking for a place of danger.

Like Susan, I had euphemistic phrases to describe our relationship. We just seem to have this rapport across the generations. She’s my tennis partner. We both like music and go up to London for concerts. Also, art exhibitions. Oh, I don’t know, we just get on somehow. I have no idea who believed what, and who knew what, and how much my pride made it all flauntingly obvious. Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are. But this was decades ago, and perhaps, back then, the couples you thought might be, mainly weren’t.

And then there were the daughters. I wasn’t much at ease with girls at that time of my life, neither the ones I met at university, nor the Carolines at the tennis club. I didn’t understand that they were mostly just as nervous as I was about… the whole caboodle. And while boys were good at coming up with their own, home-made bullshit, girls, in their understanding of the world, often seemed to fall back on The Wisdom of Their Mothers. You could sniff the inauthenticity when a girl – knowing no more than you did about anything – said something like: ‘Everyone’s got twenty–twenty vision with hindsight.’ A line which could have issued word for word from the mouth of my mother. Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: ‘If you lower your expectations, you can’t be disappointed.’ This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

But anyway: Martha and Clara. Miss G and Miss NS. Miss Grumpy and Miss Not So (Grumpy). Martha was like her mother physically, tall and pretty, but with something of her father’s querulous temperament. Clara was plump and round, but entirely more equable. Miss Grumpy disapproved of me; Miss Not So was friendly, even interested. Miss Grumpy said things like, ‘Haven’t you got a home of your own to go to?’ Miss Not So would ask what I was reading and once, even, showed me some poetry she’d written. But I wasn’t much of a judge of poetry, then or now, so my response probably disappointed her. This was my preliminary assessment, for what it was worth.

If I was uneasy with girls generally, I was the more so with ones who were a bit older than me, let alone ones whose mother I was in love with. This awkwardness of mine seemed to emphasize the insouciance with which they moved about their own house, appeared, disappeared, spoke or failed to speak. My reaction to this was possibly a bit crude, but I decided to be no more interested in them than they were in me. This seemed to amount to less than a passing five per cent. Which was fine by me, because more than ninety-five per cent of my interest was in Susan.

Since Martha disapproved of me the more, it was to her, in a spirit of either challenge or perversity, that I said:

‘I think I should explain. Susan’s a kind of mother-substitute for me.’

No, it wasn’t very good, in any way. It probably sounded false, a slimy attempt at ingratiation. Martha took her time about replying, and her tone was acerbic.

‘I don’t need one, I’ve already got a mother.’

Did I mean any part of my lie? I can’t believe that I did. Strange as it may seem, I never reflected on our age difference. Age felt as irrelevant as money. Susan never seemed a member of my parents’ generation – ‘played-out’ or not. She never pulled any sort of rank on me, never said, ‘Ah, when you’re a bit older, you’ll understand’ and stuff like that. It was only my parents who harped on about my immaturity.

Aha, you might say, but surely the fact that you told her own daughter that for you she was a mother-substitute is a complete giveaway? You may claim it was insincere, but don’t we all make jokes to allay our inner fears? She was almost exactly the same age as your mother, and you went to bed with her. So?