Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

‘You suddenly seem to know a lot about her,’ I replied.

‘Don’t you start getting pert with me, Paul.’ Her colour was rising.

‘Leave The Lad alone, Bets,’ said my father quietly.

‘It’s not me who should be leaving him alone.’

‘Please may I get down now, Mummy?’ I asked with an eight-year-old’s whine. Well, if they were going to treat me like a child…

‘Maybe we should ask them round for sherry.’ I couldn’t tell if my father was being dense, or whimsically ironic.

‘Don’t you start as well,’ my mother said sharply. ‘He doesn’t get it from me.’

I went to the tennis club the next afternoon, and the next. As I started hacking away with two Carolines and a Hugo I noticed Susan in play on the court beyond. It was fine while I had my back to her game. But when I looked past my opponents and saw her rocking gently sideways on the balls of her feet as she prepared to receive serve, I lost immediate interest in the next point.

Later, I offer her a lift.

‘Only if you’ve got a car.’

I mumble something in reply.

‘Whatski, Mr Casey?’

We are facing one another. I feel at the same time baffled and at ease. She is wearing her usual tennis dress, and I find myself wondering if its green buttons undo, or are merely ornamental. I have never met anyone like her before. Our faces are at exactly the same height, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, ear to ear. She is clearly noticing the same.

‘If I were wearing heels, I could see over the net,’ she says. ‘As it is, we’re seeing eye to eye.’

I can’t work out if she is confident or nervous; if she is always like this, or just with me. Her words look flirty, but didn’t feel so at the time.

I have put the hood of my Morris Minor convertible down. If I am operating a bloody taxi service, then I don’t see why the bloody Village shouldn’t see who the bloody passengers are. Or rather, who the passenger is.

‘By the way,’ I say, as I slow and put the car into second. ‘My parents might be asking you and your husband round for sherry.’

‘Lordy-Lordy,’ she replies, putting her hand in front of her mouth. ‘But I never take Mr Elephant Pants anywhere.’

‘Why do you call him that?’

‘It just came to me one day. I was hanging up his clothes, and he’s got these grey flannel trousers, several pairs of them, with an 84-inch waistline, and I held up one pair and thought to myself, that looks just like the back half of a pantomime elephant.’

‘My dad says he hits a golf ball as if he hates it.’

‘Yes, well. What else do they say?’

‘My mother says you’ll be getting fat, what with all the lifts I’m giving you.’

She doesn’t reply. I stop the car at the end of her driveway and look across. She is anxious, almost solemn.

‘Sometimes I forget about other people. About them existing. People I’ve never met, I mean. I’m sorry, Casey, maybe I should have… I mean, it isn’t as if… oh dear.’

‘Nonsense,’ I say firmly. ‘You said a young man like me should have a reputation. It seems I’ve now got a reputation for operating a taxi service. That’ll do me for the summer.’

She remains downcast. Then says quietly, ‘Oh Casey, don’t give up on me just yet.’

But why would I, when I was falling smack into love?

So what words might you reach for, nowadays, to describe a relationship between a nineteen-year-old boy, or nearly-man, and a forty-eight-year-old woman? Perhaps those tabloid terms ‘cougar’ and ‘toy boy’? But such words weren’t around then, even if people behaved like that in advance of their naming. Or you might think: French novels, older woman teaching ‘the arts of love’ to younger man, ooh la la . But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. We were English, and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress. But there was never anyone less scarlet than Susan; and, as she once told me, when she first heard people talking about adultery, she thought it referred to the watering-down of milk.

Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn’t call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn’t.

An exchange between my parents (read: my mother) and me, one of those English exchanges which condenses paragraphs of animosity into a pair of phrases.

‘But I’m nine-teen .’

‘Ex actly – you’re only nineteen.’

We were each other’s second lover: quasi-virgins, in effect. I had had my sexual induction – the usual bout of tender, anxious scuffle-and-blunder – with a girl at university, towards the end of my third term; while Susan, despite having two children and being married for a quarter of a century, was no more experienced than me. In retrospect, perhaps it would have been different if one of us had known more. But who, in love, looks forward to retrospect? And anyway, do I mean ‘more experienced in sex’ or ‘more experienced in love’?

But I see I’m getting ahead of myself.

That first afternoon, when I had played in with my Dunlop Maxply and laundered whites, there was a huddle in the clubhouse over tea and cakes. The blazers were still assessing me for suitability, I realized. Checking that I was acceptably middle class, with all that this entailed. There was some joshing about the length of my hair, which was mostly contained by my headband. And almost as a follow-on to this, I was asked what I thought about politics.

‘I’m afraid I’m not remotely interested in politics,’ I replied.

‘Well, that means you’re a Conservative,’ said one committee member, and we all laughed.

When I tell her about this exchange, Susan nods and says, ‘I’m Labour, but it’s a secret. Well, it was until now. So what do you make of that, my fine and feathered friend?’

I say that it doesn’t bother me at all.

The first time I went to the Macleod house, Susan told me to come in the back way and walk up through the garden; I approved such informality. I pushed open an unlocked gate, then followed an unsteady brick path alongside compost heaps and bins of leaf mould; there was rhubarb growing up through a chimney pot, a quartet of raggedy fruit trees and a vegetable plot. A dishevelled old gardener was double-digging a square patch of earth. I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant. He nodded back.

As Susan was boiling the kettle, I looked around me. The house was similar to ours, except that everything felt a bit classier; or rather, here the old things looked inherited rather than bought second-hand. There were standard lamps with yellowing parchment shades. There was also – not exactly a carelessness, more an insouciance about things not being orderly. I could see golf clubs in a bag lying in the hallway, and a couple of glasses still not cleared away from lunch – perhaps even the previous night. Nothing went uncleared-away in our house. Everything had to be tidied, washed, swept, polished, in case someone called round unexpectedly. But who might do so? The vicar? The local policeman? Someone wanting to make a phone call? A door-to-door salesman? The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism. Whereas here, people like me called round and the place looked, as my mother would no doubt have observed, as if it hadn’t seen a duster for a fortnight.