Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

I was still musing when the door banged back against the bookcase, then rebounded far enough to be kicked again. Macleod stood there in his dressing gown, which – and this I do remember – was plaid, with a maroon cord tied and dangling. Below were his elephant pyjamas and leather slippers.

‘What are you doing here?’ he asked, in a tone of voice normally attached to the words ‘Fuck off’.

My default position of insolence kicked in.

‘Reading,’ I replied, waving the book in his direction.

He stomped across and ripped it from my hand, briefly inspected it, then threw it like a frisbee across the room.

I couldn’t help grinning. He thought he was chucking my book away, when it was one of his own. Hilarious!

That was when he hit me. Or rather, aimed a succession of blows – three, I’m pretty sure – one of which landed as a wrist slapping the side of my head. The other two flailed past.

I got up and tried to hit him back. I think I aimed one blow, which skidded off his shoulder. Neither of us was doing any snappy defensive work; we were just equally incompetent attackers. Well, I’d never hit anyone before. He, I assume, had, or had at least tried to.

While he was concentrating on what to say, or where to hit, next, I squirmed past him, ran to the back door, and escaped. I was relieved to get back to a house where I hadn’t been assaulted since a few doubtless-merited spankings a decade and more previously.

No, that wasn’t quite true – about never having hit someone. In my first year at school, the gym master had encouraged us all to enter the annual boxing competition, which was organised by weight and age. I had absolutely no desire to inflict or receive pain. But I noticed that, with only a few hours to go, there were no entrants listed under my category. So I gave my name in, expecting to win by walkover.

Unfortunately for me – for both of us – another boy, Bates, had the same idea at almost the same time. So we found ourselves in the ring together, two skinny, scared things in plimsolls, vests and house shorts, with these big bobbly gloves suddenly at the end of our arms. For a couple of minutes we each did a reasonably good job of feinting attacks and then back-pedalling at great speed, until the gym master pointed out that neither of us had yet landed a blow.

‘Box!’ he had commanded.

Whereupon I leaped at the unprepared Bates, whose gloves were down near his knees, and punched him on the nose. He squealed, looked at the sudden blood on his clean white vest and burst into tears.

And so I became school boxing champion in the under-12, under-6-stone category. Naturally, I never fought again.

The next time I went to the Macleod house, Susan’s husband couldn’t have been friendlier. Perhaps that was when he showed me how to do the crossword, making it some kind of exclusive male preserve. Or at any rate, a Susan-excluding one. So I put the book-room incident down as an aberration. And anyway, it might have been partly my fault. Perhaps I should have engaged him about which version of the Dewey system his library was organized under. No, I can see that might have been equally provoking.

How much time then went by? Let’s call it six months. Again, it was lateish. At the Macleod house, unlike my own, there was a main staircase near the front door, and a narrower one near the kitchen, presumably for those mob-capped servants now replaced by machines. Often, when I visited Susan during term time, I would sleep in a small attic room which could be reached from either direction. Susan and I had been listening to the gramophone – preparing for a concert – and the music was still in my head when I reached the top of the back stairs. All of a sudden there came a kind of roar, and something which might have been a kick or a trip, accompanied by a thump on the shoulder, and I found myself falling back down the stairs. I managed somehow to grab the banister, wrenching my shoulder but just about keeping my balance.

‘You fucking bastard!’ I said automatically.

‘Whatski?’ came an answering bellow from above. ‘Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?’

I looked up at the squat bully glaring down at me from the semi-darkness. I thought that Macleod must be absolutely, certifiably mad. We stared at one another for a few seconds, then the dressing-gowned figure stomped away, and I heard a distant door close.

It wasn’t Macleod’s fists I was afraid of – not principally. It was his anger. We didn’t do anger in my family. We did ironic comment, snappy rejoinder, satirical elaboration; we did exact words forbidding a certain action, and more severe ones condemning what had already taken place. But for anything beyond this, we did the thing enjoined upon the English middle classes for generations. We internalised our rage, our anger, our contempt. We spoke words under our breath. We might have written some of those words down in private diaries if we kept them. But we also thought that we were the only ones reacting like this, and it was a little shameful, and so we internalised it all even further.

When I got to my room that night, I placed a chair at an angle, wedged under the door knob, as I’d seen done in films. I lay in bed thinking: Is this what the adult world is really like? Underneath it all? And how close beneath the surface does it – will it – lie?

I had no answers.

I didn’t tell Susan about either of these incidents. I internalised my anger and shame – well, I would, wouldn’t I?

And you’ll have to imagine long spells of happiness, of delight, of laughter. I’ve described them already. That’s the thing about memory, it’s… well, let me put it like this. Have you ever seen an electric log-splitter in action? They’re very impressive. You cut the log to a certain length, lay it on the bed of the machine, press the button with your foot, and the log is pushed on to a blade shaped like an axe-head. Whereupon the log splits pure and straight down the grain. That’s the point I’m trying to make. Life is a cross section, memory is a split down the grain, and memory follows it all the way to the end.

So I can’t not continue. Even if this is the hardest part to remember. No, not to remember – to describe. It was the moment when I lost some of my innocence. That may sound like a good thing. Isn’t growing up a necessary process of losing one’s innocence? Maybe, maybe not. But the trouble with life is, you rarely know when that loss is going to happen, do you? And how it will be, afterwards.

My parents were away on holiday, and my granny – my mother’s mother – had been drafted in to look after me. I was, of course, twenty – only twenty – so obviously couldn’t be left in the house by myself. What might I get up to, whom might I import, what might I organize – a bacchanalia of middle-aged women, perhaps – what might the neighbours think, and who might subsequently refuse to come for sherry? Grandma, widowed some five years, didn’t have anything better to do. I had naturally – innocently – loved her as a child. Now I was growing up and she seemed boring. But that was a loss of innocence I could handle.

At this time, I used to sleep quite late during the holidays. It could have been mere idleness, or a belated reaction to the stress of the university term; or, perhaps, some instinctive unwillingness to re-enter this world I still called home. I would sleep on until eleven without compunction. And my parents – to their credit – never came in and sat on my bed and complained that I was treating the place like a hotel; while Grandma was happy to cook me breakfast at lunchtime if that’s what I wanted.

So it was probably closer to eleven than ten when I stumbled downstairs.

‘There’s a very rude woman asking for you,’ said Grandma. ‘She’s rung three times. She told me to wake you up. Actually, the last time to “B” wake you up. I said I’m not interfering with his beauty sleep.’