Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder. Which was the correct – or the more correct – formulation: ‘Life is beautiful but sad’, or ‘Life is sad but beautiful’? One or the other was obviously true; but he could never decide which.

Yes, love had been a complete disaster for him. And for Susan. And for Joan. And – back before his time – it might well have been so for Macleod as well.

He skimmed through a few crossed-out entries, then slid the notebook back in the drawer. Perhaps he had always been wasting his time. Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.

Then there was the case of Eric. Of all his friends, Eric had truly been a man of good intentions, and therefore had always ascribed good intentions to others. Hence the lack of rebuke after he’d received a kicking at the fair. In his early thirties, working in a local planning department, and with a decent little house in Perivale, Eric had become involved with a younger American woman. Ashley said she loved him; a love which expressed itself as wanting to be with him all the time and never wanting to meet his friends. And Ashley wouldn’t sleep with him, no, not now anyway, but certainly later. Ashley had her faith, you see, and Eric, having been religious himself in his youth, could understand and appreciate that. Ashley wasn’t a member of an established church, because look at all the harm established churches had caused; Eric could see that too. Ashley said that if he loved her, and agreed with her contempt for worldly possessions, then he would surely join her in such beliefs. And so Eric, temporarily cut off from his friends, put his little house up for sale, planning to give the proceeds to some cockamamie sect in Baltimore, after which the couple would move there and be married by some cockamamie religious theorist, or shaman, or sham, whereupon Eric, in exchange for his Perivale house, would be granted squatter’s rights in perpetuity in his new wife’s body. Fortunately, almost at the last minute, some survival instinct asserted itself, and he had cancelled his instructions to the estate agent, whereupon Ashley vanished from his life for ever.

It had been a real disaster for Eric. He had lost his belief in the good intentions of others, and with it the ability fully to give himself over to love. If only he’d been inoculated with Susan’s suspicion of missionaries. But that hadn’t been part of Eric’s pre-history.

It was odd how the long-dead Gordon Macleod still nagged at him. More than Susan did, in truth. She was now resolved in his mind, and would remain so, even if she would also continue to cause him pain. Whereas Macleod was unresolved. So he would find himself imagining what it was like in Macleod’s head during those last, mute years, goggling at the wife who had left him, at the housekeeper and nurse whose presence irritated him, at his old pal Maurice who said, ‘Down the hatch, chum,’ then poured whisky straight from the bottle until it soaked his pyjamas.

So, there was Macleod lying on his back, day after day, knowing that this was not going to end well. Macleod was thinking back over his life. Macleod was remembering when he had first set eyes on Susan, at some dance or tea party, peopled with girls who on the whole wanted to have fun, and men who on the whole were not in respectably reserved occupations. And she was dancing with these spivs and black-marketeers – that’s what his envy turned them all into. Even the honest ones were just fancy boys and fancy men. But she went for none of them. Instead she chose that twerp with the goofy grin who could really dance – about the only thing he could do – yet whose flat feet or heart flutter had kept him out of uniform. What was his bloody name? Gerald. Gerald. And then the two of them had danced while he, Gordon, looked on. Then the twerp had died of leukaemia – they’d have done better to send him up in a bomber and let him do a hand’s turn before he pegged it, in Gordon’s view.

Susan was of course upset – inconsolable, they said – but he, Gordon, had stepped in and declared that he was the sort of chap she could rely on, both during the war and after. She had struck him as not exactly flighty, but a bit – what? irresponsible? No, that wasn’t quite right. She eluded him, and she laughed at some of the things he said – and not just the jokes, either – and such improbable, indeed impertinent reactions had made him fall smack in love with her. He told her that it didn’t matter how she felt now, because he was confident that she would come to love him in time, and she had replied, ‘I’ll do my very best.’ Then they’d just thrown themselves into it, as many did during the war. At the altar, he had turned to her and asked, ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ But it hadn’t worked. The being together hadn’t worked, the sex hadn’t worked, except for successful impregnation; but otherwise, it led to no intimacy. So, their love was a disaster. But that of course was no reason not to stay married, back in those days. Because one could still be fond, couldn’t one? And there were the girls. He had long craved a son, but Susan hadn’t wanted any more after Martha and Clara. So that was the end of that part of their life. Separate beds to begin with; then, as she complained about his snoring, separate rooms. But one continued to be fond; if increasingly exasperated.

So he ventriloquised Gordon Macleod, in a way he could never have done while he still hated him. Was he getting anywhere nearer the truth?

He remembered another angry man: the furious driver with red, hairy ears, hooting and shouting at him on the Village’s zebra crossing. And in reply he had sneered, ‘You’ll be dead before I am.’ At the time he believed that the function of the old was to envy the young. So, now that his turn had come, did he envy the young? He didn’t think so. Did he disapprove of them, was he shocked by them? Sometimes, but that was only fair: what they deserved, what he deserved. He had shocked his mother with the cover of Private Eye . Now he was himself shocked when some YouTube thread took him to a woman singing of love gone wrong: her title, and refrain, was ‘Bloody Mother-Fucking Asshole’. He had shocked his parents with his sexual behaviour. Now he was shocked when sex was so often portrayed as mindless, heartless, thoughtless shagging. But why the surprise? Each generation assumes that it has got sex just about right; each patronises the previous generation but feels queasy about the succeeding one. This was normal.

As for the wider question of age, and mortality; no, he didn’t think he felt a panic at the shutting of the doors. But maybe he hadn’t yet heard their hinges creak loudly enough.

Occasionally, people would ask him, either slyly or sympathetically, why he had never married; others assumed or implied that he must have been, back there, back then. He would deploy an English reticence and an array of demurrals, so the enquiries rarely came to anything. Susan had predicted that one day he would have an act of his own, and she had been proved right. His act, which had developed without his really noticing, was that of someone who had never – not really, not truly – ever been in love.

There was nothing between a very long answer and a very short one: this was the problem. The long answer – in an abbreviated form – would involve, of course, his own pre-history. His parents, their characters and interaction; his view of other marriages; the damage he’d seen families do; his escape from his own into the Macleod household, and the brief illusion that he’d fallen into some magical world; then a second disillusionment. Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, for ever shy. So he had come to believe that such a way of life was not for him; and had never subsequently found anyone to change his mind. Although it was true that he had proposed to Susan in the cafeteria of the Royal Festival Hall, and later to Kimberly in Nashville. This would require a parenthesis or two of explication.