Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

‘Clap hands, here comes… Sunny Jim.’

‘One of the worst criminals in the world.’

‘Where’ve you been all my life?’

At least, you think, there is something of her still left among these shreds and patches.

Yes, you remember teaching her that one. So at least she hasn’t turned into an entirely different person. You’ve heard about that happening: pillars of the church screaming obscenities, sweet old ladies turning into Nazis, and so on. But this is faint comfort. Perhaps, if she became unrecognizable and slipped completely out of character, it would all be less painful to deal with.

Once – and naturally in front of the nurse – she dredges up a football song which can only have come from you:

But the nurse has, of course, heard far worse in her years of caring for the elderly and demented, so she merely cocks an eyebrow at you and asks,

‘Chelsea supporter?’

What makes it unbearable, what makes you so exhausted and depressed after twenty minutes in her presence that you want to run outside and howl, is this: though she can’t name you, never asks you any questions or answers any of yours, she still, at one level, registers your presence and responds to it. She doesn’t know who the fuck you are, or what you do, or even your fucking name, but at the same time, she recognizes you, and judges you morally and finds you wanting. It is this which urges you to run out of the house and howl; and this which makes you realize that, perhaps at some similar unconscious level, in some remote part of your brain, you still love her. And because this awareness is unwelcome, it makes you want to howl the more.

And while he was tormenting himself, here was a question he would often arrive at when his mind followed a particular trail of memory. Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice?

And if he couldn’t decide, perhaps the answer was: both.

But she had marked his life in so many ways, some for the better, some the worse. She had made him more generous and open to others; though also more suspicious and enclosed. She had taught him the virtue of impulsiveness; but also its dangers. So he had ended up with a cautious generosity and a careful impulsiveness. His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a ‘use by’ date on it.

He always remembered what she had said to him after they left Joan’s house that day. Like most young men, especially those first in love, he had viewed life – and love – in terms of winners and losers. He, obviously, was a winner; Joan, he assumed, had been a loser, or, more likely, not even a competitor. Susan had put him right. Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story.

At the time, he had been sobered by her words, and Joan’s story had made him think of her quite differently. Then, over the years, as his life developed, as caution and carefulness began to predominate, he realized that he, no less than Joan, had had his love story, and perhaps there wasn’t another one to come. So now he better understood how couples clung to their own story – each, often, to a separate part of it – long after it had gone cold on them, even to the point where they were not sure they could bear one another. Bad love still contained the remnant, the memory, of good love – somewhere, deep down, where neither of them any longer wanted to dig.

He found himself often wondering about other people’s love stories; and sometimes, because he was a calm and unintimidating presence, they would confide in him. Mostly, it was women who did so, but that was unsurprising; men – himself a prime example – were both more covert and less eloquent. And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling – that such tales were the equivalent of Winston Churchill in an Aylesbury backstreet, all rouged and made up for the Pathé News camera – even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.

On the one hand, there were the furrow-dwellers, tunnelling deeper into the earth, and who, understandably, were not communicative about their inner selves. And at the other extreme were those who would tell you their entire lives, their only story, either in a series of outpourings, or in a single episode. Where had he been that time? He could see the beachfront bar with its silly cocktails, feel the warm night breeze, hear the thudding backbeat from tinny loudspeakers. He was at ease with the world, watching other people’s lives develop. No, that was too grand a way of putting it: he was observing the young get cheerfully drunk and turn their minds to sex, romance, and something more. But though he was indulgent – even sentimental – about the young, and protective of their hopes, there was one scene he was superstitious about, and preferred not to witness: the moment when they flung away their lives because it just felt so right – when, for instance, a smiling waiter delivered a mound of mango sorbet with an engagement ring glittering in its domed apex, and a bright-eyed proposer fell to bended knee in the sand… The fear of such a scene would often lead him to an early night.

So he was sitting at the bar, halfway through his third and theoretically final cigarette of the evening, when a man in beach shorts and flip-flops climbed on to the stool beside him.

‘Mind if I bum one?’

‘Be my guest.’ He passed across the pack, then some hotel book-matches with a palm tree on the cover.

‘Smokers, we’re a dying breed, right?’

The fellow was probably in his forties, as lightly drunk as he was, English, genial, unpushy. None of that fake bonhomie you sometimes encountered, the assumption that you must have more in common than you did. And so they sat there quietly, smoking away, and maybe the lack of false small talk encouraged the man to turn and announce in a level, meditative tone,

‘She said she wanted to rest on my shoulder as lightly as a bird. I thought that sounded poetic. Also, bloody brilliant, just what a fellow needs. Never went for clingy.’

The man paused. Paul was always happy to supply a prompt.

‘But it didn’t work out?’

‘Two problems.’ The fellow inhaled, then blew the smoke into the scented air. ‘Number one, birds fly away, don’t they? That’s in their nature, as a bird, isn’t it? And number two, before they do, they always shit on your shoulder.’

And with that he stubbed out his cigarette, nodded, and walked off down the beach towards the gentle tide.

It came into his head, in one of those whimsical, sentimental moods he always sought to guard against, to try and make one of Susan’s famous upside-down cakes. Over the years, he had become a competent baker, and so imagined that he could work out what had gone wrong. Too much fruit, too little baking powder, too much flour – that was his best guess.