Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

‘Sounds like it, doesn’t it?’

I drive to Susan’s house.

‘I got one too,’ she says.

Her letter is much the same as mine, except more strongly worded. Instead of her membership being terminated ‘due to the circumstances’ it is terminated ‘due to the evident circumstances of which you will be fully aware’. The adjusted wording is for Jezebels, for scarlet women.

‘How long have you been a member?’

‘Thirty years, I suppose. Give or take.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s my fault.’

She shakes her head in disagreement.

‘Shall we protest?’

No.

‘I could burn the place down.’

No.

‘Do you think we were spotted somewhere?’

‘Stop asking questions, Paul. I’m thinking.’

I sit down beside her on the chintz sofa. What I don’t like to say, or not immediately, is that part of me finds the news exhilarating. I – we – are a cause of scandal! Love persecuted yet again by small-minded petty officialdom! Our expulsion might not have been an Obstacle on which Passion Thrives, but the moral and social condemnation implicit in the phrase ‘due to the circumstances’ act, to my mind, as an authentication of our love. And who does not want their love authenticated?

‘It’s not as if we were caught snogging in the long grass behind the roller.’

‘Oh, do be quiet, Paul.’

So I sit there quietly, my thoughts noisy. I try to remember cases of boys expelled from my school. One for pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a master’s car. One for getting his girlfriend pregnant. One for being drunk after a cricket match, urinating in a train compartment and then pulling the communication cord. At the time, all this seemed pretty impressive stuff. But my own rule-breaking struck me as thrilling, triumphant, and, most of all, grown-up.

‘Well, now look what the cat’s brought in,’ was Joan’s greeting as she answered the door a few afternoons later. I hadn’t warned her of my visit. ‘Just give me a moment to shut up the yappers.’

The door closed again, and I stood by an elderly boot scraper thinking about the distance that had grown between Susan and me since the tennis club’s dismissal of us. I had let my exhilaration show too clearly, which displeased her. She said that she was still ‘thinking’. I couldn’t see what there was to think about. She told me there were complications I didn’t understand. She told me not to come round until the weekend. I felt downcast, like one awaiting judgement even though no crime that I could see had been committed.

‘Sit yourself down,’ Joan instructed as we reached the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room. ‘You’ll have something to put a few hairs on your chest?’

‘Yes, please.’ I didn’t drink gin – I hated the smell of it, and it made me feel even worse than wine or beer did. But I didn’t want to come across as a prig.

‘Good man.’ She handed me a tumblerful. There was a smear of lipstick at its rim.

‘That’s an awful lot,’ I said.

‘We don’t pour fucking pub measures in this establishment,’ she replied.

I sipped at the thick, oily, lukewarm substance which didn’t smell at all like the juniper berries on the bottle.

Joan lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction as if to nudge me.

‘So?’

‘So. Well. Perhaps you’ve heard about the tennis club.’

‘The Village tom-tom speaks of nothing else. The drumheads have been taking a real pasting.’

‘Yes, I thought you—’

‘Two things, young man. One, I don’t want to know any details. Two, how can I help?’

‘Thank you.’ I was genuinely touched, but also puzzled. How could she help if she didn’t know the details? And what counted as a detail? I thought about this.

‘Come on. What are you here to ask me?’

That was the problem. I didn’t know what I’d come to ask. I somehow thought that what I wanted from Joan would become clear to me when I saw her. Or she would know anyway. But it hadn’t, and she apparently didn’t. I tried to explain this, haltingly. Joan nodded, and let me sip my gin and ponder.

Then she said, ‘Try lobbing me the first question that comes into your head.’

I did so without reflecting. ‘Do you think Susan would leave Mr Macleod?’

‘My, my,’ she said quietly. ‘You are aiming high, young man. That’s a pair of balls you’ve got on you. Talk about one step at a time.’

I grinned inanely at what I took to be a compliment.

‘So have you asked her?’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?’

‘I don’t care about money,’ I replied.

‘That’s because you’ve never had to.’

This was true; but not in the sense that I was rich. My state education had been free, I received a council grant to attend university, I lived at home in the holidays. But it was also true that I didn’t care about money – indeed, in my world view, to care about money meant deliberately to turn your eyes away from the most important things in life.

‘If you’re going to be a grown-up,’ said Joan, ‘you’ve got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.’

I remembered what I’d been told about Joan’s early life – her being a ‘kept woman’ or whatever, living no doubt from cash handouts and rent-payings and gifts of clothes and holidays. Is that what she meant by being grown-up?

‘I suppose Susan’s got some.’

‘Have you asked her?’

‘Gosh, no.’

‘Well, maybe you should.’

‘I’ve got a running-away fund,’ I said defensively, without explaining where it had come from.

‘And how much rattles around in your little piggy bank?’

It was odd how I never took offence at anything Joan said. I just assumed that beneath her brusqueness she was kind-hearted and on my side. But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

‘Five hundred pounds,’ I said proudly.

‘Yes, well, you could certainly run away on that. It’ll keep you for a few weeks in Le Touquet-Paris-Plage as long as you don’t go near the casino. And then you’ll come running back to England.’

‘I suppose so.’ Even if I’d never thought of Le Touquet-Paris-Plage as a destination. Was that where fleeing lovers went?

‘You’re going back to college next month, aren’t you?’

‘Yes.’

‘And you’re going to keep her in a kitchen cupboard there? A wardrobe?’

‘No.’

I felt stupid and hopeless. No wonder Susan was ‘thinking’ about it all. Was I merely entertaining some romantic notion of flight, a ladder with no steps attached?

‘It’s a bit more complicated than working out how to save me on the gin and the petrol.’

I had been brought solidly down to earth, as Joan no doubt intended.

‘Can I ask you something different?’

‘Off you go.’

‘Why do you cheat at crosswords?’

Joan laughed loudly. ‘You cheeky bugger. I suppose Susan told you. Well, it’s a fair question, and one I can answer.’ She took another pull of her gin. ‘You see – I hope you never get there yourself – but some of us get to the point in life where we realize that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. And one of the few side-benefits of that is you know you’re not going to go to hell for filling in the wrong answers in the crossword. Because you’ve been to hell and back already and you know all too well what it’s like.’

‘But the answers are in the back of the book.’

‘Ah, but you see, to me that would be cheating.’

I felt absurdly fond of her. ‘Is there anything I can do for you, Joan?’ I found myself asking.

‘Just don’t cause Susan any harm.’