Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

‘So,’ Barney told us, as we reassembled for another term, and were exchanging dismal tales of Life at Home. ‘I’d been back about three weeks, and it’s ten in the morning and I’m still in bed. Well, there’s nothing to get up for in Pinner, is there? Then I hear the bedroom door open, and my mum and dad come in. They sit on the end of my bed, and Mum starts asking me if I know what time it is.’

‘Why can’t they learn to knock?’ asked Sam. ‘You might have been in mid-wank.’

‘So, naturally I said that it was probably morning by my reckoning. And then they asked what I was planning to do that day, and I said I wasn’t going to think about it till after breakfast. My dad gave this sort of dry cough – it’s always a sign that he’s starting to boil up. Then my mum suggests I might get a holiday job to earn a little pin money. So I admit that it hadn’t exactly crossed my mind to apply for temporary employment in some menial trade.’

‘Nice one, Barney,’ we chorused.

‘And then my mum asked if I was planning to idle away my whole life, and you know, I was beginning to get annoyed – I’m like my father in that, slow burn, except I don’t give that little warning cough. Anyway, my dad suddenly loses it, stands up, rips open the curtains and shouts,

‘“We don’t want you treating this place like a fucking hotel!”’

‘Oh, that old one. We’ve all had that. So what did you say?’

‘I said, “If this was a fucking hotel, the fucking management wouldn’t burst into my room at ten in the morning and sit on my fucking bed and bollock me.”’

‘Barney, you ace!’

‘Well, it was very provoking, I thought.’

‘Barney, you ace!’

So the Macleod household consisted of Susan, Mr E.P., and two daughters, both away at university, known as Miss G and Miss NS. There was an old char who came twice a week, Mrs Dyer; she had poor eyesight for cleaning but perfect vision for stealing vegetables and pints of milk. But who else came to the house? No friends were mentioned. Each weekend, Macleod played a round of golf; Susan had the tennis club. In all the times I joined them for supper, I never met anyone else.

I asked Susan who their friends were. She replied, in a casually dismissive tone I hadn’t noted before, ‘Oh, the girls have friends – they bring them home from time to time.’

This hardly seemed an adequate response. But a week or so later, Susan told me we were going to visit Joan.

‘You drive,’ she said, handing me the keys to the Macleods’ Austin. This felt like promotion, and I was fastidious with my gear-changing.

Joan lived about three miles away, and was the surviving sister of Gerald, who donkey’s years previously had been sweet on Susan, but then had died suddenly from leukaemia, which was beastly luck. Joan had looked after their father until his death and had never married; she liked dogs and took an afternoon gin or two.

We parked in front of a squat, half-timbered house behind a beech hedge. Joan had a cigarette on when she answered the door, embraced Susan and looked at me inquisitively.

‘This is Paul. He’s driving me today. I really need my eyes testing, I think it’s time for a new prescription. We met at the tennis club.’

Joan nodded, and said, ‘I’ve shut the yappers up.’

She was a large woman in a pastel-blue trouser suit; she had tight curls, brown lipstick, and was approximately powdered. She led us into the sitting room and collapsed into an armchair with a footstool in front of it. Joan was probably about five years older than Susan, but struck me as a generation ahead. On one arm of her chair was a face-down book of crosswords, on the other a brass ashtray held in place by weights concealed in a leather strap. The ashtray looked precariously full to me. No sooner had Joan sat down than she was up again.

‘Join me in a little one?’

‘Too early for me, darling.’

‘You’re not exactly driving,’ Joan replied grumpily. Then, looking at me, ‘Drink, young sir?’

‘No thank you.’

‘Well, suit yourselves. At least you’ll have a gasper with me.’

Susan, to my surprise, took a cigarette and lit up. It felt to me like a friendship whose hierarchy had been established long ago, with Joan as senior partner and Susan, if not subservient, at any rate the listening one. Joan’s opening monologue told of her life since she’d last seen Susan, which seemed to me largely a catalogue of small annoyances triumphantly overcome, of dog-talk and bridge-talk, which resolved itself into the headline news that she had recently found a place ten miles away where you could get her favourite gin for some trifling sum less than it cost in the Village.

Bored out of my skull, half-disapproving of the cigarette Susan appeared to be enjoying, I found the following words coming out of my mouth:

‘Have you factored in the petrol?’

It was as if my mother had spoken through me.

Joan looked at me with interest verging on approval. ‘Now, how would I do that?’

‘Well, do you know how many mpg you get from your car?’

‘Of course I do,’ Joan replied, as if it were outrageous and spendthrift not to know. ‘Twenty-eight on average around here, a bit over thirty on a longer trip.’

‘And how much do you pay for petrol?’

‘Well, that obviously depends on where I buy it, doesn’t it?’

‘Aha!’ I exclaimed, as if this made the matter even more interesting. ‘Another variable. Have you got a pocket calculator, by any chance?’

‘I’ve got a screwdriver,’ said Joan, laughing.

‘Pencil and paper, at least.’

She fetched some and came to sit next to me on the sofa, reeking of cigarettes. ‘I want to see this in action.’

‘So how many off-licences and how many petrol stations are we talking about?’ I began. ‘I’ll need the full details.’

‘Anyone would think you’re from the Inland Fucking Revenue,’ said Joan with a laugh and a thump on my shoulder.

So I took down prices and locations and distances, identifying one case of spurious false economy, and came up with her two best options.

‘Of course,’ I added brightly, ‘this one would be even more advantageous if you walked into the Village rather than drove.’

Joan gave a mock shriek. ‘But walking’s bad for me!’ Then she took my table of calculations, went back to her chair, lit up another cigarette, and said to Susan, ‘I can see that he’s a very useful young man to have around.’

As we were driving away, Susan said, ‘Casey Paul, I didn’t know you could be so wicked. You had her eating out of your hand by the end of it.’

‘Anything to help the rich save money,’ I replied, carefully shifting gear. ‘I’m your man.’

‘You are my man, strange as it may seem,’ she agreed, slipping her flattened hand beneath my left thigh as I drove.

‘By the way, what’s wrong with your eyes?’

‘My eyes? Nothing, as far as I know.’

‘Then why did you go on about having them tested?’

‘Oh, that? Well, I have to have a form of words to cover you.’

Yes, I could see that. And so I became ‘the young man who drives me’ and ‘my tennis partner’, and later, ‘a friend of Martha’s’ and even – most implausibly – ‘a kind of protégé of Gordon’s’.

I don’t remember when we first kissed. Isn’t that odd? I can remember 6–2; 7–5; 2–6. I can remember that old driver’s ears in foul detail. But I can’t remember when or where we first kissed, or who made the first move, or whether it was both of us at the same time. And whether perhaps it was not so much a move as a drift. Was it in the car or in her house, was it morning, noon or night? And what was the weather like? Well, you certainly won’t expect me to remember that .