Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

I wasn’t so much constructing my own idea of love as first doing the necessary rubble-clearance. Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about love, didn’t seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. ‘Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart/’Tis woman’s whole existence.’ How wrong – how gender-biased, as we might now say – was that? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, came the earthy sex-wisdom exchanged between profoundly ignorant if yearningly lustful schoolboys. ‘You don’t look at the mantlepiece while poking the fire.’ Where had that come from? Some bestial dystopia full of nocturnal, myopic grunting?

But I wanted her face there all the time: her eyes, her mouth, her precious ears with their elegant helices, her smile, her whispered words. So: I would be flat on my back, she would be lying on top of me, her feet slipped between mine, and she would place the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and say,

‘Now we see eye to eye.’

Put it another way. I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish.

I have a sudden attack of – what? – fear, propriety, unselfishness? I say to her, thinking she will know more,

‘You see, I haven’t been in love before, so I don’t understand about love. What I’m worried about is that, if you love me, it will leave you less for the other people you love.’

I don’t name them. I meant her daughters; and perhaps even her husband.

‘It’s not like that,’ she answers at once, as if it is something she too has thought about, and has solved. ‘Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.’

So I didn’t.

‘There’s something I need to explain,’ she begins. ‘E.P.’s father was a very nice man. He was a doctor. He collected furniture. Some of these things were his.’ She points vaguely at a heavy oak coffer and a grandfather clock I have never yet heard strike the hour. ‘He actually hoped E.P. would become a painter, so he gave him the middle name of Rubens. Which was a bit unfortunate because some of the boys at school assumed he must be Jewish. Anyway, he did the usual schoolboy sketches, which everyone said were promising. But he never became more than promising, so was a disappointment to his father in that department. Jack – the father – was always very kind to me. He used to twinkle at me.’

‘I can’t say I blame him for that.’ I wonder what might be coming next. Surely not some intergenerational imbroglio?

‘We’d only been married a couple of years when Jack got cancer. I’d always thought he would be someone I could go to if I got in any trouble, and now he was going to be taken from me. I used to go and sit with him, but I would get so upset that it usually ended up with him consoling me rather than the other way round. I asked him once what he thought about it all, and he said, “Of course I’d prefer it otherwise, but I can’t complain that I haven’t had a fair crack of the whip.” He liked me being with him, maybe because I was young and didn’t know very much, and so I stayed there till the end.

‘That day – the last day – the doctor – the one looking after him, who was a good friend as well – came in and said quietly, “It’s time to put you under, Jack.” “You’re right,” came the reply. He’d been in terrible pain for too long, you see. Then Jack turned to me and said, “I’m sorry our acquaintance has been so brief, my dear. It’s been wonderful knowing you. I’m aware that Gordon can be a difficult row to hoe, but I’ll die happy knowing that I leave him in your safe and capable hands.” And then I kissed him and left the room.’

‘You mean, the doctor killed him?’

‘He gave him enough morphine to put him to sleep, yes.’

‘But he didn’t wake up?’

‘No. Doctors used to do that in the old days, especially among themselves. Or with a patient they’d known a long time, where there was trust. Easing the suffering is a good idea. It’s a terrible disease.’

‘Even so. I’m not sure I’d want to be killed.’

‘Well, wait and see, Paul. But that’s not the point of the story.’

‘Sorry.’

‘The point of the story is “safe and capable”.’

I think about this for a while. ‘Yes, I see.’ But I’m not sure that I did.

‘Where do you usually go for your holidays?’ I ask.

‘Paul, that’s such a hairdresser’s question.’

In reply, I lean over and tuck her hair behind her ears, stroking the helices gently.

‘Oh dear,’ she goes on. ‘All these conventional expectations people have of one. No, not you, Casey Paul. I mean, why does everyone have to be the same? We did have a few holidays once, when the girls were young. About as successful as the Dieppe Raid, I’d say. E.P. was not at his best on holidays. I don’t see what they’re for, really.’

I wonder if I shouldn’t press any further. Perhaps something catastrophic had happened on one of their holidays.

‘So what do you say when hairdressers ask you that question?’

‘I say, “We’re still going to the usual place.” And that makes them think we’ve talked about it before and they’ve forgotten, so they usually let me off after that.’

‘Maybe you and I should have a holiday.’

‘You might have to teach me what they’re for.’

‘What they’re for ,’ I say firmly, ‘is for being with someone you love a few hundred miles away from this sodding Village where we both live. Being with them all the time. Going to bed with them and waking up with them.’

‘Well, put like that, Casey…’

So you see, there were some things I knew and she didn’t.

We are sitting in the cafeteria of the Festival Hall before a concert. Susan has noticed early on that when my blood sugar drops I become, in her words, ‘a bit of a grumpus’, and she is now feeding me up to prevent this. I am probably having a something-and-chips; she will content herself with a cup of coffee and a few biscuits. I love these escapes we make up to London, just for a few hours, being together, away from the Village, from my parents and her husband and all that stuff, in the noise and crush of the city, waiting for the silence and then the sudden floatingness of music.

I am about to say all this when a woman comes and sits at our table without a pretence of asking if we mind. A woman of middle age, by herself; that is all she was, though in memory I might have translated her into some version of my mother – at any rate, a woman who could be counted upon to disapprove of my relationship with Susan. And so, after a couple of minutes, knowing exactly what I am doing, I look across and say to Susan, in a clear, exact voice,

‘Will you marry me?’

She blushes, covers her ears and bites her lower lip. With a bang and a push and a stomp, the invader picks up her cup and makes for another table.

‘Oh, Casey Paul,’ says Susan, ‘you are mighty wicked.’

I was having supper at the Macleods’. Clara was there too, back from university. Macleod was at the head of the table with his flagon of whatever, a mugful of spring onions in front of him like a jar of tulips.

‘You might be aware,’ he said to Clara, ‘that this young man appears to have joined our household. So be it.’

I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was being pedantically welcoming or slyly indicating his disdain. I looked across at Clara, but got no help with interpretation.

‘Well, we shall see, shan’t we?’ he continued, appearing to contradict his first pronouncement. He took in a mouthful of spring onion and shortly afterwards burped gently.