Джулиан Барнс: The Only Story

‘Which side do you prefer? Forehand or backhand?’

I have never slept in a double bed before. I have never slept a whole night with someone before. The bed looks enormous, the lighting bleak, and from the bathroom comes a smell of disinfectant.

‘I love you,’ I tell her.

‘That’s a terrible thing to say to a girl,’ she replies and takes my arm. ‘We’d best have dinner first, before we love one another.’

I already have an erection, and there is nothing generalised about this one. It is very, very specific.

She has a shyness to her. She never undresses in front of me; she is always in bed with her nightdress on by the time I come into the room. And the light would be out. I couldn’t care less about any of this. I feel I can see in the dark, anyway.

Nor does she ‘teach me the arts of love’, that phrase you read in books. We are both inexperienced, as I said. And she comes from a generation in which the assumption is made that on the wedding night the man ‘will know what to do’ – a social excuse to legitimize any previous sexual experience, however squalid, the man might have had. I don’t want to go into the specifics in her case, though she does occasionally drop hints.

One afternoon, we are in bed at their house, and I suggest I ought to be going before ‘Someone’ comes home.

‘Of course,’ she replies musingly. ‘You know, when he was at school, he always preferred the front half of the elephant, if you catch my meaning. And maybe after school. Who knows? Everyone’s got a secret, haven’t they?’

‘What’s yours?’

‘Mine? Oh, he told me I was frigid. Not at the time. But later, after we’d stopped. When it was too late to do anything about anything.’

‘I don’t think you’re remotely frigid,’ I say, with a mixture of outrage and possessiveness. ‘I think you’re… very warm-blooded.’

She pats my chest in reply. I know little about the female orgasm, and somehow assume that if you manage to keep going long enough, it will at some point be automatically triggered in the woman. Like breaking the sound barrier, perhaps. As I am unable to take the discussion further, I start to get dressed. Later, I think: she is warm, she is affectionate, she loves me, she encourages me into bed, we stay there a long time, I don’t think she’s frigid, what’s the problem?

We talk about everything: the state of the world (not good), the state of her marriage (not good), the general character and moral standards of the Village (not good) and even Death (not good).

‘Isn’t it strange?’ she muses. ‘My mother died of cancer when I was ten and I only ever think of her when I’m cutting my toenails.’

‘And yourself?’

‘Whatski?’

‘Yourself – dying.’

‘Oh.’ She goes silent for a bit. ‘No, I’m not afraid of dying. My only regret would be missing out on what happens afterwards.’

I misunderstand her. ‘You mean, the afterlife?’

‘Oh, I don’t believe in that ,’ she says firmly. ‘It would all cause far too much trouble. All those people who spent their lives getting away from one another, and suddenly there they all are again, like some dreadful bridge party.’

‘I didn’t know you played bridge.’

‘I don’t. That’s not the point, Paul. And then, all those people who did bad things to you. Seeing them again.’

I leave a pause; she fills it. ‘I had an uncle. Uncle Humph. For Humphrey. I used to go and stay with him and Aunt Florence. After my mother died, so I would have been eleven, twelve. My aunt would put me to bed and tuck me in and kiss me and put out the light. And just as I would be getting off to sleep, there was a sudden weight on the side of the bed and it would be Uncle Humph, stinking of brandy and cigars and saying he wanted a goodnight kiss too. And then one time he said, “Do you know what a ‘party kiss’ is?” and before I could reply he rammed his tongue into my mouth and thrashed it around like a live fish. I wish I’d bitten it off. Every summer he did it, till I was about sixteen. Oh, it wasn’t as bad as for some, I know, but maybe that’s what made me frigid.’

‘You’re not ,’ I insist. ‘And with a bit of luck the old bastard will be in a very hot place. If there’s any justice.’

‘There isn’t,’ she replies. ‘There isn’t any justice, here or anywhere else. And the afterlife would just be an enormous bridge party with Uncle Humph bidding six no trumps and winning every hand and claiming a party kiss as his reward.’

‘I’m sure you’re the expert,’ I say teasingly.

‘But the thing is , Casey Paul, it would be dreadful, entirely dreadful, if in some way that man was still alive. And what you don’t wish for your enemies, you can hardly expect for yourself.’

I don’t know when the habit developed – early on, I’m sure – but I used to hold her wrists. Maybe it began in a game of seeing if I could encompass them with my middle fingers and thumbs. But it rapidly became something I did. She extends her forearms towards me, fingers making gentle fists, and says, ‘Hold my wrists, Paul.’ I encompass them both, and press as hard as I can. What the exchange was about didn’t need words. It was a gesture to calm her, to pass something from me to her. An infusion, a transfusion of strength. And of love.

My attitude to our love was peculiarly straightforward – though I suspect a peculiar straightforwardness is characteristic of all first love. I simply thought: Well, that’s the certainty of love between us settled, now the rest of life has to fall into place around it. And I was entirely confident that it would. I remembered from some of my school reading that Passion was meant to Thrive on Obstacles; but now that I was experiencing what I had only previously read about, the notion of an Obstacle to it seemed neither necessary nor desirable. But I was very young, emotionally, and perhaps simply blind to the obstacles others would find in plain sight.

Or perhaps I didn’t go by way of previous reading at all. Perhaps my actual thought was more like this: Here we are now, the two of us, and there is where we have to get to; nothing else matters. And though we did in the end get somewhere near to where I dreamed, I had no idea of the cost.

I said I couldn’t remember the weather. And there’s other stuff as well, like what clothes I wore and what food I ate. Clothes were unimportant necessities back then, and food was just fuel. Nor do I remember things I’d expect to, like the colour of the Macleods’ shooting brake. I think it was two-tone. But was it grey and green, or perhaps blue and cream? And though I spent many key hours on its leather seats, I couldn’t tell you their colour. Was the fascia panel made of walnut? Who cares? My memory certainly doesn’t, and it’s memory which is my guide here.

On top of this, there are things I can’t be bothered to tell you. Like what I studied at university, what my room there was like, and how Eric differed from Barney, and Ian from Sam, and which one of them had red hair. Except that Eric was my closest friend, and continued so for many years. He was the gentlest of us, the most thoughtful, the one who put most trust in others. And – perhaps because of these very qualities – he was the one who had most trouble with girls and, later, women. Was there something about his softness, and his inclination to forgive, which almost provoked bad behaviour in others? I wish I knew the answer to that, not least because of the time I let him down badly. I abandoned him when he needed my help; I betrayed him, if you will. But I’ll tell you about this later.

And another thing. When I gave you my estate agent’s sketch of the Village, some of it might not have been strictly accurate. For instance, the Belisha beacons at the zebra crossing. I might have invented them, because nowadays you rarely see a zebra crossing without a dutiful pair of flashing beacons. But back then, in Surrey, on a road with little traffic… I rather doubt it. I suppose I could do some real-life research – look for old postcards in the central library, or hunt out the very few photos I have from that time, and retrofit my story accordingly. But I’m remembering the past, not reconstructing it. So there won’t be much set-dressing. You might prefer more. You might be used to more. But there’s nothing I can do about that. I’m not trying to spin you a story; I’m trying to tell you the truth.