Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

So. I see where you’re going – bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It’s true that I wanted to sleep with Susan – and did so many times – and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I’ve never met anyone to whom it might apply.

You think I’m being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even – especially – Oedipus didn’t want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn’t! Yes, let’s just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

Not that pre-history doesn’t matter. Indeed, I think pre-history is central to all relationships.

But I’d much rather tell you about her ears. I missed my first sight of them at the tennis club, when she had her hair pulled back by that green ribbon which matched the piping and buttons of her dress. And normally, she wore her hair down, curling over her ears and descending to mid-neck. So it wasn’t until we were in bed and I was rummaging and rootling around her body, into every nook and cranny, every over-examined and under-examined part of her, that, crouched above, I swept back her hair and discovered her ears.

I’d never thought much about ears before, except as comic excrescences. Good ears were ears you didn’t notice; bad ears stuck out like batwings, or were cauliflowered from a boxer’s punch, or – like those of that furious driver at the zebra crossing – were coarse and red and hairy. But her ears, ah, her ears… from the discreet, almost absent lobe they set off northwards at a gentle angle, but then at the mid-point turned back at the same angle to return to her skull. It was as if they had been designed according to aesthetic principle rather than the rules of auditory practicality.

When I point this out to her, she says, ‘It’s probably so all that rubbish scoots past them and doesn’t go inside.’

But there was more. As I explored them with the tips of my fingers, I discovered the delicacy of their outer rim: thin, warm, gentle, almost translucent. Do you know the word for that outermost whorl of the ear? It’s called the helix. Plural: helices. Her ears were part of her absolute distinctiveness, expressions of her DNA. The double helix of her double helices.

Later, turning my mind to what she might have meant by the ‘rubbish’ that scooted past her astonishing ears, I thought: well, being accused of frigidity, that’s a major piece of rubbish. Except that this word had gone straight into her ears and thence her brain and was lodged there, permanently.

As I said, money had no more relevance to our relationship than age. So it didn’t matter that she paid for things. I had none of that foolish masculine pride in such circumstances. Perhaps I even felt my lack of money made my love for Susan the more virtuous.

After a few months – maybe longer – she announces that I need a running-away fund.

‘What for?’

‘For running away. Everyone should have a running-away fund.’ Just as every young man should have a reputation. Where had this latest idea come from? A Nancy Mitford novel?

‘But I don’t want to run away. Who from? My parents? I’ve more or less left them anyway. Mentally. You? Why should I want to run away from you? I want you to be in my life for ever.’

‘That’s very sweet of you, Paul. But it’s not a specific fund, you see. It’s a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It’s about the only thing human beings have in common.’

This is all way above my head. The only running away I might contemplate is running away with her rather than from her.

A few days later, she gives me a cheque for £500. My car had cost me £25; I lived for a term at university on under £100. The sum seemed both very large and also meaningless. I didn’t even think it ‘generous’. I had no principles about money, either for or against. And it was entirely irrelevant to our relationship – that much I knew. So when I got back to Sussex, I went into town, opened a deposit account at the first bank I came to, handed over the cheque and forgot about it.

There’s something I probably should have clarified earlier. I may be making my relationship with Susan sound like a sweet summer interlude. That’s what the stereotype insists, after all. There is a sexual and emotional initiation, a lush passage of treats and pleasures and spoilings, then the woman, with a pang but also a sense of honour, releases the young man back into the wider world and younger bodies of his own generation. But I’ve already told you that it wasn’t like this.

We were together – and I mean together – for ten or a dozen years, depending on where you start and stop counting. And those years happened to coincide with what the newspapers liked to call the Sexual Revolution: a time of omni-fucking – or so we were led to believe – of instant pleasures, and loose, guilt-free liaisons, when deep lust and emotional lightness became the order of the day. So you could say that my relationship with Susan proved as offensive to the new norms as to the old ones.

I remember her, one afternoon, wearing a print dress with flowers on it, going over to a chintz sofa and plumping herself down on it.

‘Look, Casey Paul! I’m disappearing! I’m doing my disappearing act! There’s nobody here!’

I look. It is half-true. Her stockinged legs show clearly, as do her head and neck, but all the middle parts are suddenly camouflaged.

‘Wouldn’t you like that, Casey Paul? If we could just disappear and nobody could see us?’

I don’t know how serious, or how merely skittish, she is being. So I don’t know how to react. Looking back, I think I was a very literal young man.

I told Eric that I had met this family and fallen in love. I described the Macleods, their house and their way of life, relishing my characterizations. It was the first grown-up thing that had happened to me, I told him.

‘So which of the daughters have you fallen in love with?’ Eric asked.

‘No, not one of the daughters, the mother.’

‘Ah, the mother,’ he said. ‘We like that,’ he added, giving me marks for originality.

One day, I notice a dark bruise on her upper arm, just below where the sleeve of her dress ends. It is the size of a large thumbprint.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘Oh,’ she says carelessly, ‘I must have knocked it against something. I bruise easily.’

Of course she does, I think. Because she’s sensitive, like me. Of course the world can hurt us. That’s why we must look after one another.

‘You don’t bruise when I hold your wrists.’

‘I don’t think the wrists bruise, do they?’

‘Not if I’m holding you.’

The fact that she was ‘old enough to be my mother’ did not go down well with my mother. Nor my father; nor her husband; nor her daughters; nor the Archbishop of Canterbury – not that he was a family friend. I cared no more about approval than I did about money. Though disapproval, whether active or theoretical, ignorant or informed, did nothing but inflame, corroborate and justify my love.

I had no new definition of love. I didn’t really examine what it was, and what it might entail. I merely submitted to first love in all its aspects, from butterfly kisses to absolutism. Nothing else mattered. Of course there was ‘the rest of my life’, both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that’s not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn’t. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though ‘sacrifice’ implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss. Church and state, they say, church and state. No difficulty there. Church first, church always – though not in a sense the Archbishop of Canterbury would have understood it.