Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

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.

‘Your gardener’s jolly hard-working,’ I say, for want of a better conversational opener.

Susan looks at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Gardener? That’s the Master of the Establishment, as it happens. His Lordship.’

‘I’m terribly sorry. Please don’t tell him. I just thought…’

‘Still, I’m glad he looks up to snuff. Like a real gardener. Old Adam. Precisely.’ She hands me a cup of tea. ‘Milk? Sugar?’

You understand, I hope, that I’m telling you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story – my story! my life! – are either dead or far dispersed. So I’m not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first. But again, I’m only guessing.

For instance, I remember lying in bed one night, being kept awake by one of those stomach-slapping erections which, when you are young, you carelessly – or carefreely – imagine will last you the rest of your life. But this one was different. You see, it was a kind of generalised erection, unconnected to any person, or dream, or fantasy. It was more about just being joyfully young. Young in brain, heart, cock, soul – and it just happened to be the cock which best articulated that general state.

It seems to me that when you are young, you think about sex most of the time, but you don’t reflect on it much. You are so intent on the who, when, where, how – or rather, more often, the great if – that you think less about the why and the whither. Before you first have sex, you’ve heard all sorts of things about it; nowadays far more, and far earlier, and far more graphically, than when I was young. But it all amounts to the same input: a mixture of sentimentality, pornography and misrepresentation. When I look back at my youth, I see it as a time of cock-vigour so insistent that it forbade examination of what such vigour was for.

Perhaps I don’t understand the young now. I’d like to talk to them and ask how things are for them and their friends – but then a shyness creeps in. And perhaps I didn’t even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

But in case you’re wondering, I don’t envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction. I was walking to meet Susan one afternoon, and had reached the Village’s zebra crossing. There was a car approaching, but with a lover’s normal eagerness, I started to cross anyway. The car braked, harder than its driver had evidently wanted to, and hooted at me. I stopped where I was, right in line with the car’s bonnet, and stared back at the driver. I admit I was perhaps an annoying sight. Long hair, purple jeans, and young – filthy, fucking young. The driver wound down his window and swore at me. I strolled round to him, smiling, and keen on confrontation. He was old – filthy, fucking old, with an old person’s stupid red ears. You know those sorts of ears, all fleshy, with hairs growing on them inside and out? Thick, bristly ones inside; thin, furry ones outside.

‘You’ll be dead before I will,’ I informed him, and then dawdled off as irritatingly as I could manage.

So, now that I am older, I realize that this is one of my human functions: to allow the young to believe that I envy them. Well, obviously I do in the brute matter of being dead first; but otherwise not. And when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet – and this is curious – the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another. But of course, this isn’t possible. My care is not required, and their confidence insane.

It was a matter of some pride to me that I seemed to have landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove. I have no wish – certainly not at this late stage – to demonise them. They were products of their time and age and class and genes – just as I am. They were hard-working, truthful and wanted what they thought was the best for their only child. The faults I found in them were, in a different light, virtues. But at the time…

‘Hi, Mum and Dad, I’ve something to tell you. I’m actually gay, which you probably guessed, and I’m going on holiday next week with Pedro. Yes, Mum, that Pedro, the one who does your hair in the Village. Well, he asked me where I was going for my holidays, and I just said “Any suggestions?” and we took it from there. So we’re off to a Greek island together.’

I imagine my parents being upset, and wondering what the neighbours would say, and going to ground for a while, and talking behind closed doors, and theorising difficulties ahead for me which would only be a projection of their own confused feelings. But then they would decide that times were changing, and find a little quiet heroism in their ability to accommodate this unanticipated situation, and my mother would wonder how socially appropriate it would be to let Pedro carry on cutting her hair, and then – worst stage of all – she would award herself a badge of honour for her new-found tolerance, all the while giving thanks to the God in whom she did not believe that her father hadn’t lived to see the day…

Yes, that would have been all right, eventually. As would another scenario then popular in the newspapers.