Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

Those charged first few months had reordered his present and determined his future, even up to now. But what if, for instance, he and Susan hadn’t been attracted to one another? What if one of their many cover stories had been true? He was a young man who drove her because she needed new glasses. He was a friend of one or both of the daughters. He was a kind of protégé of Gordon’s. Now, in his state of slowly acquired calmness, he found he could easily imagine things other than they had been; the facts and feelings quite different.

Curious, he pursued this untaken path. For instance, he started helping Old Man Macleod with the gardening. As well as playing tennis with Susan, he took up golf, had lessons at the club and would often partner Gordon – as he’d been asked to call him – round the local eighteen holes when the dew still sparkled on the fairways. There was something about his presence which relaxed Old Man Macleod: that gruffness was only a mask, and Paul was able to help him relax a bit more on the tee; he even taught him (after flipping through an American golf manual) how to love that little dimpled ball rather than hate it. He – Casey Paul, as more than Susan now called him – discovered that he rather liked a drink: gin with Joan, beer with Gordon, an occasional glass of sherry with Susan; though all agreed that at a certain point enough was enough and one more was too many. And then – why not pursue this alternative life to, if not a logical, at least a conventional conclusion – what if he and one of the Macleod daughters became (as their parents would have put it) ‘sweet on one another’? Martha or Clara? Obviously Clara, who took more character traits from Susan. But this was counter-factual, and so he chose Martha.

The immediate consequence was that the Macleods did indeed come round to have sherry with his parents – an occasion he and Martha had been dreading, but which actually passed off quite well. The two couples were never going to make a harmonious bridge four, but there was nothing like fixing a date with the vicar of St Michael’s for everyone to overlook incompatibilities. And – since this counterfactual had now got way out of hand – he decided to decorate the wedding day with the most extravagantly beautiful weather, even unto a double rainbow. Then, on a whim, he chose to award himself the sister he never had. To stir things up a bit for his parents, he made her a lesbian. Oh, and she brought her baby along to the ceremony. The only baby in the western world who didn’t cry at an inappropriate moment during a wedding. Why not?

He shook his head to clear this strange vision that had come upon him. There were two ways of looking at life; or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississippi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that pre-history ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississippi, tugged and bullied, smacked and wheedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life – his own, of course – could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realized that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving.

On further thought, he decided that the unlikeliest part of his counterfactual was that Martha would ever have considered him a potential husband.

Did he feel regret at what he always thought of as his ‘handing back’ of Susan? No: the proper word for that might be guilt; or its sharper colleague, remorse. But there was also an inevitability to it, which lent the action a different moral colouring. He found that he simply couldn’t go on. He couldn’t save her, and so he had to save himself. It was as simple as that.

No, of course it wasn’t; it was much more complicated. He could have gone on, both fooling and torturing himself. He could have gone on, calming her down and reassuring her even when her mind and memory ran in three-minute loops, from fresh surprise at his presence, even though he’d been sitting in the same chair for two hours, via rebuke for his non-existent absence, through to alarm and panic, which he would quieten with soft talk and gentle memories that she would pretend to agree with even though she’d long ago drunk those memories clean out of her head. No, he could have gone on, acting as an emotional home help, watching over her progressive disintegration. But he would have had to be a masochist. And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the realization that love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger. His love had gone, had been driven out, month by month, year by year. But what shocked him was that the emotions which replaced it were just as violent as the love which had previously stood in his heart. And so his life and his heart were just as agitated as before, except that she was no longer able to assuage his heart. And that, finally, was when he had to hand her back.

He wrote a joint letter to Martha and Clara. He didn’t go into emotional detail. He merely explained that he was obliged to travel on business for an extended period – perhaps several years – and would obviously not be able to take Susan with him. He would be leaving in three months, which he hoped would be enough time for them to make the appropriate arrangements. If, at some future point, it became necessary to put her into some kind of residential care, he would do what he could to help; though at present he was not in a position to contribute.

And most of this was true.

There was one visit he was obliged to make before going abroad. Was he dreading it or looking forward to it? Both, probably. It was five o’clock by the time he rang the bell, answered this time not by a counterpoint of yapping but by a single, distant bark. When Joan opened the door, there was a placid, elderly golden retriever beside her. She looked so foggy-eyed that it might as well have been a guide dog, he thought.

It was winter; Joan wore a tracksuit with a few cigarette burns on the bosom, and a pair of Russian house socks in which she padded along as softly as her dog. The sitting room mixed woodsmoke with cigarette smoke. The chairs were the same, but older; their occupants were the same, but older. The retriever, which answered to the name of Sibyl, panted from the journey to the front door and back.

‘The yappers all died on me,’ Joan said. ‘Don’t ever have dogs, Paul. They die on you, and then there comes a point when you don’t know whether to get one last one or not. One for the road. So here we are, Sibyl and me. Either I’ll die and break her heart or she’ll die and break mine. Not much of a choice, is it? The gin’s over there. Help yourself.’

He did so, choosing the least filthy of the tumblers.

‘So how are you keeping, Joan?’

‘As you can see. Pretty much the same, except older, drunker, lonelier. How about you?’

‘I’m thirty. I’m going abroad for a few years. Work. I’ve handed Susan back.’

‘Like a parcel? It’s a bit fucking late, isn’t it? Taking her back to the shop and asking for a refund?’

‘It’s not like that.’ He realized he might have some difficulty explaining to one drunk woman why he was leaving another.