Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

‘I’d rather cut my own throat,’ I replied.

‘Yes, I think you might even mean that.’ She smiled at me. ‘Now, off with you, and mind your driving. I can see you’re not yet hardened to the gin.’

I was about to put the car into gear when there was a tap at the window. I hadn’t heard her behind me. I wound the window down.

‘Don’t ever care what they say about you,’ Joan said, looking at me intently. ‘For instance, some kindly neighbours assume I’m just a ghastly old lezzer living alone with my dogs. So, a failed lezzer at that. Water off a duck’s back. That’s my advice if you want it.’

‘Thank you for the gin,’ I replied, and released the handbrake.

Joan was demanding that I be grown-up. I was prepared to try if it helped Susan; but I still regarded adulthood with some horror. First, I wasn’t sure that it was attainable. Secondly, even if attainable, I wasn’t sure it was desirable. Thirdly, even if desirable, then only by comparison with childhood and adolescence. What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood? Well, to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children’s success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren’t interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn’t want them to be. This was just a short list, from which Susan was naturally and entirely exempt.

Oh, and another thing. The way, doubtless through some atavistic terror of admitting to real feelings, they ironised the emotional life, turning the relationship between the sexes into a silly running joke. The way men implied that women ran everything really; the way women implied that men didn’t really understand what was going on. The way men pretended they were the strong, and women had to be petted and indulged and taken care of; the way women pretended that, regardless of the accumulated sexual folklore, they were the ones who had the common sense and practicality. The way each sex blubbingly admitted that, for all the other’s faults, they still needed one another. Can’t live with ’em, can’t live without ’em. And they lived with ’em in marriage, which, as one wit put it, was an institution in the sense of mental institution. Who first said that, a man or a woman?

Unsurprisingly, I looked forward to none of this. Or rather, hoped it would never apply to me; indeed, believed I could make it not apply to me.

So, actually, when I said, ‘I’m nineteen!’ and my parents triumphantly replied, ‘Yes, you’re only nineteen!’ the triumph was also mine. Thank God I’m ‘only’ nineteen, I thought.

First love fixes a life for ever: this much I have discovered over the years. It may not outrank subsequent loves, but they will always be affected by its existence. It may serve as model, or as counterexample. It may overshadow subsequent loves; on the other hand, it can make them easier, better. Though sometimes, first love cauterizes the heart, and all any searcher will find thereafter is scar tissue.

‘We were chosen by lot.’ I don’t believe in destiny, as I may have said. But I do believe now that when two lovers meet, there is already so much pre-history that only certain outcomes are possible. Whereas the lovers themselves imagine that the world is being reset, and that the possibilities are both new and infinite.

And first love always happens in the overwhelming first person. How can it not? Also, in the overwhelming present tense. It takes us time to realize that there are other persons, and other tenses.

So (and this would have happened earlier, but I am only remembering it now): I am visiting her one afternoon. I know that at three o’clock, by which time her thieving daily will have left and there will be three-and-a-half hours before Mr E.P. returns, she will be waiting in bed for me. I drive to the Village, park, and set off along Duckers Lane. I am not in the least self-conscious. The more disapproval, real or imagined, from ‘the neighbours’, the better. I do not approach the Macleod house via the back gate and the garden. I turn down their driveway, walking openly and crunching the gravel, rather than discreetly, adulterously, on the grass edge alongside. The house is red-brick, symmetrical, with a central porch, above which is Susan’s narrow little bedroom. On each side of the porch, as a decorative feature, every fourth course of brick has been laid to jut out half a brick’s width. A couple of tempting inches, I now see, of handhold and foothold.

The lover as cat-burglar? Why not? The back door has been left open for me. But as I walk towards the porch, a lover’s confidence infuses me, and I decide that if I go at it with enough initial speed, I might be able to scoot up the ten feet or so of wall, which will get me to the flat, leaded roof on top of the porch. I take a run at it, filled with bravado, ardour and decent hand-eye coordination. Easy-peasy – and here I am, suddenly crouched on the leading. I have made enough noise to bring Susan to the window, first in alarm, then in surprised glee. Someone else would have rebuked me for my folly, told me I might have broken my skull, expressed all their fear and protectiveness: in short, made me feel a foolish and guilty boy. All Susan does is yank up the window and pull me in.

‘I could always get out the same way if Trouble Comes,’ I say pantingly.

‘That would be a lark.’

‘I’ll just go down and lock the back door.’

‘Ever the thoughtful one,’ says Susan, getting back into her single bed.

And that’s true, too. I am the thoughtful one. That’s part of my pre-history, I suppose. But it’s also about what I could have said to Joan: that I am prepared to be grown-up if it will help Susan.

I am a boy; she is a married woman of middle years. I have the cynicism, and the purported understanding of life; though I am the idealist as well as the cynic, convinced that I have both the will and the power to mend things.

And she? She is neither cynical nor idealistic; she lives without the mental clutter of theorising, and takes each circumstance and situation as it comes. She laughs at things, and sometimes that laughter is a way of not thinking, of avoiding obvious, painful truths. But at the same time I feel that she is closer to life than I am.

We don’t talk about our love; we merely know that it is there, unarguably; that it is what it is, and that everything will flow, inevitably and justly, from this fact. Do we constantly repeat ‘I love you’ in confirmation? At this distance, I can’t be sure. Though I do remember that when, after locking the back door, I climb into bed with her, she whispers,