Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

‘Good for you, Grandma. Thanks.’

A very rude woman. But I didn’t know any. Someone from the tennis club, persecuting me further? The bank about my overdraft? Maybe Grandma was beginning to lose her marbles. At which point, the phone went again.

‘Joan,’ said the very rude voice of Joan. ‘It’s Susan. Get over there. She wants you, not me. You , now .’ And she put the phone down.

‘Aren’t you having your breakfast?’ asked Grandma as I rushed out.

At the Macleods’, the front door was open, and I walked around until I found her fully dressed, handbag beside her, on the sofa in the sitting room. She didn’t look up when I greeted her. I could only see the top of her head, or rather, the curve of her headscarf. I sat down beside her, but she immediately turned her face away.

‘I need you to drive me up to town.’

‘Of course, darling.’

‘And I need you not to ask me any questions. And absolutely not to look at me.’

‘Whatever you say. But you’ll need to tell me roughly where we’re going.’

‘Head for Selfridges.’

‘Are we in a hurry?’ I allowed myself that question.

‘Just drive safely, Paul, just drive safely.’

We got to near Selfridges and she directed me down Wigmore Street, then left up one of those streets where private doctors practise.

‘Park here.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘I’d rather not. Get yourself some lunch. This won’t be quick. Do you need some money?’

I had indeed come without my wallet. She gave me a ten-shilling note.

As I turned back into Wigmore Street, I saw ahead of me John Bell & Croyden, where she had gone for her Dutch cap. A terrible realization came upon me. That the system had failed, that she’d found herself pregnant, and was even now dealing with the consequences. The Abortion Law was still going through Parliament, but everyone knew there were doctors – and not just at the backstreet end – who would perform ‘procedures’ more or less on demand. I imagined the conversation: Susan explaining how she had got herself pregnant by her young lover, hadn’t had sex with her husband for two decades, and how a child would destroy her marriage and endanger her own mental health. That would be enough for any doctor, who would agree to what went down euphemistically in medical records as a D&C: dilatation and curettage. Just a little scraping away at the lining of the womb – which would also scrape away the embryo attached to its wall.

I was working all this out as I sat in an Italian café having my lunch. I didn’t know what I thought – or rather, I thought several incompatible things. The notion of being a father while still a student struck me as terrifying and crazy. But it also struck me as, well, kind of heroic. Subversive yet honourable, annoying yet life-affirming: noble. I didn’t think it would get me into the Guinness Book of Records – no doubt there were twelve-year-olds hard at work getting their grannies’ best friends pregnant, but it would certainly make me exceptional. And irritate the hell out of the Village.

Except that now it wasn’t going to happen. Because Susan was getting rid of our child at this very moment, just around the corner. I felt sudden rage. A woman’s right to choose – yes, I believed in that, theoretically and actually. Though I also believed in a man’s right to be consulted.

I went back to the car and waited. After an hour or so she turned the corner and came towards me, head lowered, scarf pulled around her cheeks. She averted her face from me as she got into the car.

‘Right,’ she said. ‘That’s that for the moment.’ There was something slurry about her articulation. The anaesthetic, presumably – if they used any. ‘Home, James, and don’t spare the horses.’

Normally I was charmed by her turns of phrase. Not this time.

‘First tell me where you’ve been.’

‘The dentist.’

‘The dentist?’ So much for my imaginings. Unless this was just another euphemism among women of Susan’s class.

‘I’ll tell you when I can, Casey Paul. I can’t tell you now. Don’t ask.’

Of course not. I drove her home, as carefully as I could.

Over the next days, she told me bit by bit what had happened. She had been sitting up late, listening to the gramophone. Macleod had gone to bed an hour previously. She kept playing over and over again the slow movement of Prokofiev’s third piano concerto, which we’d heard a few days before at the Festival Hall. Then she put the record back in its sleeve and went upstairs. She was just reaching for the handle of her bedroom door when her hair was seized from behind, and with the words, ‘How’s your fucking musical education coming along?’, her husband smashed her face into the closed door. Then he had gone back to bed.

The dentist’s examination showed that her two front teeth were broken beyond repair. The two teeth on either side of them would probably have to go as well. There was a crack in her upper jaw which would, over time, heal itself. The dentist would make her a plate. He asked if she wanted to talk about how it had happened, but didn’t press her when she said she would rather not.

As the bruising came up in all its furious colours, and she powdered over it as well as she could; as I drove her up to town and back for appointment after appointment; as I wasn’t able to get her to look at me for days, or kiss me for weeks; as I realized I would never again be able to tap her ‘rabbit teeth’, long discarded in some Wimpole Street waste bin; as I understood that I now had greater responsibilities than before; as I found myself wondering, and not idly, how I might kill Gordon Macleod; as first my Grandma and then my returning parents drove me mad with their careful, safe, banal views of life; as Susan’s bravery and lack of self-pity nearly broke my heart; as I absented myself from her house a good hour before Macleod’s daily return; as I accepted her word – or was it his word? – that nothing like this would ever happen again; as anger and pity and horror washed through me; as I realized that Susan would have to leave the bastard somehow, with me or without me, but obviously with me; as at the same time a kind of impotence overcame me; as all this was happening, I learned a little more about the Macleod marriage.

Of course, that bruise on her upper arm had not just been the size of a thumbprint, it was the imprint of an actual thumb as he forced her to sit in a chair and listen to his denunciations. There had been grabbings and slappings, and more than a punch or two. He would put a glass of sherry down in front of her and order her to ‘join in the fun’. When she declined, he would grasp her by the hair, pull her head back and hold the glass to her lips. Either she drank, or he poured it down her chin, and throat and dress. It was all verbal and physical, never sexual; though whether there was anything sexual behind it… well, that is beyond my competence, or, indeed, interest. Yes, it was usually connected to his drinking, but not necessarily; yes, she was frightened of him, except that mostly she wasn’t. She had learnt to manage him over the years. Yes, every time he attacked her, it was of course her fault – according to him; she drove him to it with her airy bloody insolence – that had been one of his phrases. Also, her irresponsibility; also, her stupidity. At some point after he had smashed her face against the door, he had gone downstairs and bent Prokofiev’s third piano concerto until the record broke.

It was, I suppose, ignorance and snobbery on my part which had hitherto made me assume that domestic violence was confined to the lower classes, where things were done differently, where – as I understood from my reading rather than from a close familiarity with backstreet life – women would rather their husbands hit them than be unfaithful to them. If he beats you, it shows he loves you, and all that crap. The idea of violence being inflicted by husbands with a Cambridge degree seemed to me incomprehensible. Of course, it was not a matter I’d had reason to think about before. But if I had, I would probably have guessed that violence among working-class husbands was connected to inarticulacy: they fell back on their fists whereas middle-class husbands fell back on words. Both these myths took some years to dispel, despite the present evidence.