Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analysed it, sought to understand its shape, its colour, its weight and its boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshakeable given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of his, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.

He had read, some years before, that a common psychological trope in men’s attitude to women was the ‘rescue fantasy’. Perhaps it stirred in them memories of fairy tales in which valiant knights came across pretty maidens locked in towers by wicked guardians. Or those classical myths in which other maidens – usually naked – were chained to rocks for the sole purpose of being rescued by dauntless warriors. Who usually discovered a convenient sea serpent or dragon which had to be eliminated first. In modern, less mythical times, it appeared that the woman about whom men most had rescue fantasies was Marilyn Monroe. He had viewed this sociological datum with a degree of scepticism. Odd how rescuing her seemed inevitably to involve sleeping with her. Some rescue that would prove. Whereas in fact, as it seemed to him, the most effective way to rescue Marilyn Monroe would have been not to sleep with her.

He didn’t think that, as a nineteen-year-old, he had been suffering from a rescue fantasy with Susan. On the contrary, he suffered from a rescue reality. And unlike maidens in towers or chained to rocks, who attracted a whole swirl of knights looking for chivalric action, and unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom every Western man dreamed of liberating (if only to lock her up in a tower of his own making), in the case of Susan Macleod, there was not a great queue of knights, cinemagoers and Fancy Boys squabbling for the right to rescue her from her husband. He had believed he could save her; further, that only he could save her. That was no fantasy; it was practicality and brute necessity.

At this distance, he realized, he no longer had a memory of Susan’s body. Of course, he remembered her face, and her eyes and her mouth and her elegant ears, and what she looked like in her tennis dress; there were photographs to confirm all this. But a sexual memory of her body: that had gone. He couldn’t remember her breasts, their shape, their fall, their firmness or otherwise. He couldn’t remember her legs, what form they took, and how she parted them and what she did with them when they made love. He couldn’t remember her undressing. It was as if she’d undressed as women did on the beach, with lots of prim ingenuity beneath a capacious towel, but emerging in a nightdress rather than a swimming costume. Had they always made love with the lights out? He couldn’t remember. Perhaps he’d closed his eyes a lot.

She had a corset, that he remembered; well, doubtless several. Which had – whatever they were called – straps for holding up her stockings. Suspenders, that was it. How many per leg? Two, three? But he knew she only ever attached the front one. This private eccentricity came back to him now. As for what her bras had been like… At nineteen, he didn’t have the slightest underwear fetishism, any more than she took an erotic interest in his vests and pants. He couldn’t even remember what his pants had looked like at that age. He’d had a period of wearing string vests, which for some reason he had imagined to be cool.

She had no coquetry about her, that was certain. No flirty bits of flesh showing. How did they kiss? He couldn’t even remember that. Whereas, with later, lesser attachments, there were astonishing moments of sexual freeze-frame still in his head. Maybe, as you got better at sex, the sex became more memorable. Or maybe, the deeper your feelings, the less the particulars of sex mattered. No, neither of these were true. He was just trying to find a theory to explain an oddity.

He remembered when she had told him, just like that, how many times they had made love. A hundred and fifty-three, or some such number. Back then, it had thrown him into all sorts of pondering. Should he have been counting too? Was it a lapse in love that he wasn’t, or hadn’t? And so on. Now, he thought: a hundred and fifty-three, the number of times he had come up to that point. But what about her? How many orgasms had she had? Indeed, did she ever have one? There was pleasure and intimacy, surely; but orgasm? At the time he couldn’t tell, nor did he ask; nor know how to ask. To put it more truthfully, he had never thought of asking. And now it was too late.

He tried to imagine why she might have decided to count. To begin with, as a matter of pride and attentiveness, in bed with only the second lover of her life, and that after a long drought. But then he remembered the anguished whisper of her question, ‘You won’t leave me just yet, will you, Casey Paul?’ So maybe counting had turned from a matter of acclaim to one of anxiety and dismay: the fear that he might leave her, the fear that she might never have another lover. Was that it? He gave up. He stopped examining the past, chasing down what Joan had memorably called ‘my own distant experiences of cock and cunt’.

One evening, glass in hand, he was idly following the televised highlights of the Brazilian Grand Prix. He wasn’t much interested in the bland plutocracy of Formula One; but he did like to watch young men taking risks. In that respect, the race was gratifying. Heavy rain had made the track dangerous; pools of standing water sent even former world champions aquaplaning smack into the barriers; the race was stopped twice, and frequently brought under the control of the safety car. Everyone drove cautiously, except for nineteen-year-old Max Verstappen of the Red Bull team. He overtook his way from almost last place to third, making moves his elders and supposed betters declined to dare. The commentators, astonished by this display of skill and guts, sought explanation. And one of them provided it: ‘They say your risk profile doesn’t stabilise until you’re about twenty-five.’

This statement made him attend even more closely. Yes, he thought: a treacherous circuit, visibility reduced by spray to almost zero, others trepidatious while you felt invulnerable, going flat out thanks to a risk profile as yet unstabilised. Yes, he remembered that all too well. It was called being nineteen. And some would crash and some wouldn’t. Verstappen hadn’t. So far, anyway: though he had another six years to go before neurophysiology rendered him entirely sensible.

But if Verstappen was showing youthful fearlessness rather than true courage, did the same age disclaimer apply in reverse: to cowardice? He’d certainly been under twenty-five when he committed an act of cowardice which had haunted him all his life. He and Eric were staying at the Macleods’, and had gone off to a funfair in a hilly park. They were walking down from the top, side by side, chatting, and failed to notice a group of youths coming up towards them. As they drew level, one leaned into Eric with his shoulder, spinning him round; another tripped him, and a third went in with his boot. He took all this in with a kind of heightened peripheral vision – how long before Eric was on the ground? a second? two? – and had instantly, instinctively run away. He kept saying to himself, ‘Find a policeman, find a policeman,’ but even as he did so, he knew that wasn’t the reason he was running. He was afraid of getting beaten up himself. The rational part of him knew that policemen were a rare sight at funfairs. So he ran to the bottom of the hill on this futile, pretend quest, without actually asking anyone where he might find help. Then he walked back up, nauseous at what he might find. Eric was on his feet, blood on his face, feeling his ribs. He could no longer remember what had been said – whether he offered his fake excuse – and they drove back to the Macleod house. Susan bandaged Eric, with liberal use of Dettol, and insisted he stay until the bruising had gone down and the cuts mended. Which Eric had done. Neither then nor later had Eric rebuked him for cowardice, or asked why he’d disappeared.