Джулиан Барнс - The Only Story

Susan’s dental plate caused her constant trouble; there were many drives up to town for adjustments. The dentist had also made the four new prosthetic teeth better aligned than the original ones, and shortened the central pair by a millimetre or two. A subtle change, but one always manifest to me. Those teeth I used to tap so lovingly were gone for ever; and I had no desire to touch their replacements.

One thing I never swerved from was the certainty that Gordon Macleod’s behaviour was a crime of absolute liability. And his responsibility was also absolute. A man hits a woman; a husband hits a wife; a drunkard hits a sober spouse. There was no defence, and no possible mitigation. The fact that it would never come to court, that middle-class England had a thousand ways of avoiding the truth, that respectability was no more shed in public than clothes, the fact that Susan would never accuse him to any authority, not even a dentist – all this had no relevance to me, except sociologically. The man was as guilty as hell, and I would hate him until the end of his days. This much I knew.

It was about a year after this that I went to see Joan and announced our intention of moving up to London.

You are an absolutist for love, and therefore an absolutist against marriage. You have given the matter much thought, and come up with many fanciful comparisons. Marriage is a dog kennel in which complacency lives and is never chained up. Marriage is a jewellery box which, by some mysterious opposite of alchemy, turns gold, silver and diamonds back into base metal, paste and quartz. Marriage is a disused boathouse containing an old, two-person canoe, no longer water-worthy, with holes in the bottom and one missing paddle. Marriage is… oh, you have dozens of such comparisons to hand.

You remember your parents, and your parents’ friends. They were, on the whole, and without giving them too much credit, decent people: honest, hard-working, polite with one another, no more than averagely controlling of their children. Family life meant for them much what it had meant for their parents’ generation, though with just enough extra social freedom to let them imagine themselves pioneers. But where was love in all of this, you asked. And you didn’t even mean sex – because you preferred not to think about that.

And so, when you had come into the Macleod household, and inspected a different way of living, you thought first about how circumscribed your own home seemed to be, how lacking in life and emotion. Then, gradually, you realized that the marriage of Gordon and Susan Macleod was actually in far worse shape than any marriage among your parents’ circle, and you became all the more absolutist. That Susan should live with you in a state of love was obvious; that she should leave Macleod was equally obvious; that she should divorce him – especially after what he had done to her – seemed not just an acknowledgement of the truth of things, not just a romantic obligation, but a necessary first step towards her becoming an authentic person once more. No, not ‘once more’: really, it would be for the first time. And how exciting must that be for her?

You persuade her to see a solicitor. No, she doesn’t want you to come with her. Part of you – the part that imagines a free, and freestanding, Susan in the near future – approves.

‘How did it go?’

‘He said that I was in a bit of a muddle.’

‘He said that ?’

‘No. Not exactly. But I explained things to him. Most things. Not you, obviously. And, well, I suppose he thought I’d just bolted. Done a bunk. Maybe he thought it was all to do with the Dreaded.’

‘But… didn’t you explain what had happened… what he did to you?’

‘I didn’t go into detail, no. I kept it general.’

‘But you can’t get a divorce on general grounds. You can only get a divorce on particular grounds.’

‘Now don’t get shirty with me, Paul, I’m doing my best.’

‘Yes, but…’

‘He told me that, for a starting point, I should go away and write it all down. Because he could see I found it hard to tell him about it directly.’

‘That sounds very sensible.’ Suddenly, you approve of this solicitor.

‘So that’s what I shall try to do.’

When, a couple of weeks later, you ask how her statement is coming along, she shakes her head without reply.

‘But you’ve got to do it,’ you say.

‘You don’t know how hard it is for me.’

‘Would you like me to help you?’

‘No, I have to do this by myself.’

You approve. This will be the start, the making, of the new Susan. You try some gentle advice.

‘I think what they need are specifics.’ You know a bit about divorce law by now. ‘Exactly what happened, and roughly when.’

Another two weeks later, you ask how she’s doing.

‘Don’t give up on me just yet, Casey Paul,’ is her reply. And whenever she says this to you – and you never think it is calculated, because she is not a calculating person – it tears at your heart. Of course you won’t give up on her.

And then, some weeks later, she gives you a few sheets of paper.

‘Don’t read it in front of me.’

You take it away, and from the first sentence, your optimism disperses. She has turned her life, and her marriage, into a comic short story, which sounds to you like something by James Thurber. Perhaps it was. It is about a man in a three-piece suit, called Mr Elephant Pants, who every evening goes to the pub – or the bar at Grand Central Station – and comes home in a state which alarms his wife and children. He knocks over the hatstand, kicks the flowerpots, shouts at the dog, so that there is a spreading of Great Alarm and Despondency, and he rackets away until he falls asleep on the sofa and snores so loudly that tiles fall off the roof.

You don’t know what to say. You say nothing. You pretend you are still considering this document. You know you have to be very gentle and very patient with her. You explain again about them needing to know specifics, the where and the when and, most importantly, the what. She looks at you and nods.

Slowly, over the next weeks and months, you begin to understand that it is not going to happen, not ever. She is strong enough to love you, strong enough to run off with you, but not strong enough to enter a court of law and give evidence against her husband about the decades of sexless tyranny, alcoholism and physical attack. She will not be able – even via her solicitor – to ask the dentist to describe her injuries. She cannot attest in public to what she is able to admit in private.

You realize that, even if she is the free spirit you imagined her to be, she is also a damaged free spirit. You understand that there is a question of shame at the bottom of it. Personal shame; and social shame. She may not mind being thrown out of the tennis club for being a Scarlet Woman, but she cannot admit to the true nature of her marriage. You remember old cases in which criminals – even murderers – would marry their female accomplices because a wife could not be compelled to give evidence against a husband. But nowadays, far away from the world of criminality, in the respectable Village and many, many similar, silent places across the land, there are wives who have been conditioned, by social and marital convention, not to give evidence against their husbands.

And there is another factor, of which, strangely, you have not thought. One calm evening – calm because you have officially given up on the project, and all false hope and annoyance have drained from you – she says to you quietly,

‘And anyway, if I did do it, he’d bring up the matter of you.’

You are astounded. You feel you had nothing to do with the break-up of the Macleod marriage; you were just the outsider who pointed out what would have been obvious to anyone. Yes, you fell in love with her; yes, you ran away with her; but that was consequence, not cause.