Pulse

by Julian Barnes

  So my mother pulls a face and my father frowns. They walk on until the contents of the concrete bin become clearer: a curving slope of purply-red muck. My mother – and I am guessing here, though her vocabulary is familiar to me – now says something like,

  ‘Pretty whiffy.’

  My father can see what my mother’s referring to: a pile of marc. That’s the name, apparently, for what’s left after grapes have been crushed – the discarded skins and stalks and pips and so on. My parents know about this sort of thing; in their non-fanatical way they are keen on their food and drink. That’s why they were on this farm track in the first place – looking for a few bottles of that year’s wine to take home. I’m not indifferent to food and drink, just regard them more pragmatically. I know which foods are healthiest and also most energy-providing. And I know precisely how much alcohol relaxes me and gives me a good time, and how much is too much. Jake, who is both fitter and more hedonistic than me, once told me what they say about martinis: ‘One’s perfect. Two’s too many. And three’s not enough.’ Except in my case: I once ordered a martini – and half was just about right.

  So my father approaches this great heap of detritus, stops about ten feet away and consciously sniffs. Nothing. Five feet – still nothing. Only when he puts his nose almost into the marc does anything register. Even so, it’s just a faint version of the pungent smell his eyes – and his wife – tell him exists. My father’s response is more one of curiosity than alarm. For the rest of the holiday he monitors the ways in which his nose lets him down. Benzene fumes when filling up the car – nothing. A double espresso in a village bar – nothing. Flowers cascading over a crumbly wall – nothing. The half-inch of wine a hovering waiter has poured into his glass – nothing. Soap, shampoo – nothing. Deodorant – nothing. That was the oddest thing of all, Dad told me: to be putting on deodorant and not be able to smell something you were putting on to stop something else you also couldn’t smell.

  They agreed there wasn’t much point in doing anything until they got home. Mum expected she’d have to badger Dad to call the health centre. The two of them shared a reluctance to bother the doctor unless it was serious. But each thought something that happened to the other was more serious than if it was happening to them. Hence the necessity to badger. Eventually, one might simply ring up and book an appointment in the other’s name.

  This time, my father did it for himself. I asked what had decided him. He paused. ‘Well, if you want to know, son, it was when I realised I couldn’t smell your mum.’

  ‘You mean, her perfume?’

  ‘No, not her perfume. Her skin. Her … self.’

  There was a fond, absent look in his eye as he said it. I didn’t find this at all embarrassing. He was just a man at ease with what he felt about his wife. There are some parents who make a display of marital emotion in front of their children: look at us, see how young we still are, how dashing, aren’t we just the picture? My parents weren’t like this at all. And I envied them the more for it, that they didn’t need to show off.

  When you run in our group, there’s the leader, Jake, who sets the pace and also makes sure no one falls too far behind. At the front are the heavy guys who keep their heads down, check their watches and heart monitors, and talk, if at all, about hydration levels and how many calories they’ve done. At the back are those who aren’t fit enough to run and talk at the same time. And in between are the rest of us, who like both the exercise and the chat. But there’s a rule: no one’s allowed to monopolise anyone else, not even if they’re going out together. So one Friday evening, I checked my stride to fall in with Janice, our newest recruit. Her running gear had clearly not been bought at the local shop where the rest of us go; it was looser cut, and silkier, and had needless bits of piping on it.

  ‘So what brings you to our town?’

  ‘Been here two years, actually.’

  ‘So what brought you to our town?’

  She ran a few yards. ‘Boyfriend.’ Ah. Then a few more yards. ‘Ex-boyfriend.’ Ah, better – maybe she’s running him off. But I didn’t like to probe. Anyway, there’s another rule in the group: keep it light when you’re running. No British foreign policy, and no big emotional stuff either. Sometimes it makes us sound like a bunch of hairdressers, but it’s a useful rule.

  ‘Only a couple more k.’

  ‘So be it.’

  ‘Fancy a drink afterwards?’

  She looked across and up at me. ‘So be it,’ she repeated with a grin.

  She was easy to talk to, mainly because I did all the listening. And more of the looking too. She was slim, neat, black-haired, well manicured, with a slightly off-centre tweak to her nose that I found instantly sexy. She was in motion a lot, gesturing, flicking at her hair, looking away, looking back; I found this exhilarating. She told me she worked in London as PA to the section head of a women’s magazine I’d just about heard of.

  ‘Do you get lots of free samples?’

  She stopped and looked at me; I didn’t know her well enough to tell if she was really put out or just pretending. ‘I can’t believe that’s the first question you ask me about my job.’

  It had seemed reasonable enough to me. ‘OK,’ I replied, ‘Let’s pretend I’ve already asked you fourteen acceptable questions about your job. Question 15: do you get lots of free samples?’

  She laughed. ‘Do you always do things in the wrong order?’

  ‘Only if it makes someone laugh,’ I replied.

  My parents were plump, and good advertisements for plumpness. They took little exercise, and their response to having a big lunch was to lie down and sleep it off. They treated my fitness programme as a youthful eccentricity: the only time they reacted as if I was fifteen rather than thirty. In their view, serious exercise was appropriate only for people like soldiers, firemen and the police. Once, up in London, they had found themselves outside one of those gyms which let you glimpse some of the activities within. It’s meant to be alluring, but my parents were horrified.

  ‘They all looked so solemn,’ my mother said.

  ‘And most of them had earphones and were listening to music. Or watching TV screens. As if the only way to concentrate on getting fit was not to concentrate on it.’

  ‘They were ruled by those machines, ruled.’

  I knew better than to try and convince my parents of the pleasures and rewards of exercise, from increased mental alertness to heightened sexual capacity. I’m not boasting, I promise. It’s true, it’s well documented. Jake, who goes on hiking holidays with a succession of girlfriends, told me about a paradox he’d discovered. He said that if you walk for, say, three or four hours, you build up a good appetite, enjoy a nice dinner, and as often as not fall asleep as soon as you get into bed. Whereas if you walk for seven or eight hours, you find yourself less hungry, but when you get to bed you’re unexpectedly more up for it – both of you. Perhaps there’s a scientific reason for this. Or else the act of reducing expectation to near zero frees up the libido.

  I’m not going to speculate on my parents’ sex life. I’ve no reason to think it was anything other than what they wanted it to be – which I realise is a contorted way of putting things. Nor do I know if they were still happily active, in contented decline, or if sex for them was an unmourned memory. As I say, my parents held hands whenever they felt like it. They danced together with a kind of concentrated grace, deliberately old-fashioned. And I didn’t really need an answer to a question I didn’t anyway want to put. Because I’d seen the look in my father’s eye when he talked about not being able to smell his wife. It didn’t matter one way or the other if they were actually having sex. Because their intimacy was still alive.

  When Janice and I first got together, we used to head straight back to her place after we’d finished running. She’d tell me to take off my trainers and socks and lie down on the bed while she took a quick shower. Knowing what was coming, I’d usually have a bulge in my shorts by the time she reappeared with a towe
l wrapped round her. You know how most women have that trick of tucking the towel in just above their breasts with some kind of fold which keeps it all in place? Janice had a different trick: she tucked the towel in just below her breasts.

  ‘Look what’s on my bed,’ she’d say with a twitch of a smile. ‘What big beast is this on my bed?’

  No one had ever called me that before, and I’m just as susceptible to flattery as the next man.

  Then she’d kneel on the bed and pretend to inspect me. ‘What a big sweaty beast we’ve got here.’ She’d hold my cock through my shorts and start sniffing at me, at my forehead, then my neck, then my armpits, then she’d pull up my singlet and begin licking my chest and breathing me in, all the while tugging on my cock. The first time it happened, I just came on the spot. Later, I learnt to hold myself back.

  And the thing was, she didn’t just smell of the shower. She used to put scent on her breasts and hold them above my face.

  ‘Here are your free samples,’ she’d say.

  Then she’d lower a nipple until it was tickling the end of my nose, and tease me by making me guess the name of the perfume. I never knew the answer, but I was in heaven anyway, so I’d usually make up some silly brand instead. You know, Chanel No. 69, that sort of thing.

  Speaking of which. Sometimes, after she’d teased my nose, she’d swivel round above me, and the towel would be gone, and she’d lower herself on to my face, and pull down the top of my shorts. ‘What’ve we got here?’ she’d say in a carrying whisper. ‘We’ve got a big sweaty stinky beast, that’s what we’ve got.’ And then she’d take my cock in her mouth.

  The GP looked up my father’s nostrils, and said these things often righted themselves over time. It might just be the aftereffect of a virus Dad didn’t even know he’d picked up. Give it another six weeks or so. Dad gave it another six weeks, went back, and was given a prescription for some nasal spray. Two squirts up each nostril night and morning. By the end of the course nothing had changed. The doctor offered to refer him to a specialist; naturally, Dad didn’t want to bother one.

  ‘It’s quite interesting, you know.’

  ‘Is it?’ I was round at my parents’ place, smelling midmorning Nescafé. I didn’t believe it could be ‘interesting’ when something went wrong with the body. Painful, irritating, frightening, time-consuming, but not ‘interesting’. That’s why I took such care of my own body.

  ‘People think of the obvious things – roses, gravy, beer. But I was never much of a one for smelling roses.’

  ‘But if you can’t smell, you can’t taste, right?’

  ‘That’s what they say – that all taste is really smell. But it doesn’t seem to apply in my case. I can still taste food and wine the same.’ He paused. ‘No, that’s not quite right. Some white wines seem more acidic than they used to. I wonder why.’

  ‘Is that what’s interesting?’

  ‘No. It’s the other way round. It’s not what you miss, it’s what you don’t miss. It’s a relief not to smell traffic, for instance. You walk past a bus in the market square just sitting there with its engine running, spewing out oily fumes. You’d hold your breath before.’

  ‘I’d carry on holding it, Dad.’ Breathing in noxious fumes without even noticing? The nose was there for a purpose, after all.

  ‘You don’t notice the smell of cigarettes, that’s another plus. Or the smell of them on someone – I’ve always hated that. BO, burger vans, Saturday-night vomit on the pavement …’

  ‘Dogshit,’ I suggested.

  ‘Funny you should mention that. It’s always made me heave. But I stepped in some the other day and cleaning it off didn’t really bother me at all. In the old days I’d have put the shoe outside the back door and left it there for a few days. Oh, and now I cut up onions for Mum. They don’t have any effect on me. No tears, nothing. That’s a plus.’

  ‘That is interesting,’ I said, half meaning it. Actually, I found it typical of my father’s ability to put a positive spin on almost anything. He would have said that examining matters from every point of view was part of his legal habit. I thought him an incorrigible optimist.

  ‘But you know … It’s things like stepping outside in the morning and sniffing the air. Now I just register whether it’s warm or nippy. And furniture polish, I miss that. Shoe polish too. I hadn’t thought of it until now. Doing your shoes without being able to smell anything – just imagine it.’

  I didn’t need to, or want to. Coming over all elegiac about tins of Kiwi polish – I hoped I’d never end up like that.

  ‘And, of course, there’s your mum.’

  Yes, my mum.

  Both my parents wore glasses, and I sometimes used to imagine them sitting up in bed reading, then putting their book or magazine down, and turning off the bedside light. When did they say goodnight to one another? Before taking off their glasses or after? Before turning out the light or after? But now I suddenly thought: isn’t smell meant to be a central factor in sexual arousal? Pheromones, those primitive things that order us about at the very moment we think we’re really in charge. My father complained that he couldn’t smell my mother. Perhaps he meant – had always meant – something more than that.

  Jake used to say I had a nose for trouble. With women, he meant. That’s why I was still unmarried at thirty. So are you, I replied. Yes, but I like it that way, he said. Jake is a big, rangy, curly-haired fellow who comes on to women in a gentle, unthreatening manner. It’s as if he’s saying, Look, I’m here, I’m fun, I’m not long-term, but you’ll probably enjoy me and afterwards we can still be friends. Quite how he manages to convey such a complicated message with little more than a grin and a lifted eyebrow is beyond me. Perhaps it’s those pheromones.

  Jake’s parents split up when he was ten. That’s why he’s got no big expectations, he says. Enjoy the day, he says, keep things light. It’s as if he’s applied the rules of his running group to the rest of his life as well. Part of me’s impressed by this attitude, but most of me doesn’t want it or envy it.

  The first time Janice and I split up, Jake took me to a wine bar, and while I sipped my daily allowance of a single glass, he told me, in a sympathetic, roundabout way, how in his opinion she was untruthful, manipulative and quite possibly psychopathic. I replied that she was a lively, sexy but complicated girl whom I sometimes couldn’t read, especially at the moment. Jake asked, in an even more roundabout way, if I realised that she’d come on to him in the kitchen when he was round to supper three weeks previously. I told him he was just misreading her friendly manner. That’s why she’s a psychopath, he replied.

  But Jake often called people psychopaths when they were simply more focused than he was, so I didn’t take it too much amiss, and a couple of weeks later Janice and I were back together. In that first rush of renewed sex and excitement and truthfulness, I nearly told her what Jake had said, but thought better of it. Instead, I asked if she’d ever thought of going off with someone else, and she said yes, for about thirty seconds, so I gave her marks for honesty and asked who, and she said no one I knew, and I accepted that, and not long afterwards we got engaged.

  I said to my mother, ‘You do like Janice, don’t you?’

  ‘Of course I do. As long as she makes you happy.’

  ‘That sounds … conditional.’

  ‘Well, it is. It would be. A mother’s love is unconditional. A mother-in-law’s love is conditional. That’s how it’s always been.’

  ‘So if she made me unhappy?’

  My mother didn’t reply.

  ‘And if I made her unhappy?’

  She smiled. ‘I’d put you across my knee.’

  As it turned out, we almost didn’t get to the wedding. We each postponed once, and even got an official warning from Jake about discussing heavy stuff while out running. When I put it off Janice said it was really because I was scared to commit. When she put it off it was because she wasn’t sure about marrying someone who was scared to commit. So somehow
it was my fault both times.

  One of my father’s bridge partners suggested acupuncture. Apparently it had done wonders for the fellow’s sciatica.

  ‘But you don’t believe in that stuff, Dad.’

  ‘I’ll believe in it if it cures me,’ he replied.

  ‘But you’re a rationalist, like me.’

  ‘We don’t have a monopoly of knowledge in the West. Other countries know things too.’

  ‘Sure,’ I agreed. But I felt a kind of alarm, as if things were slipping. We need our parents to remain constant, don’t we? And all the more so when we’re grown up ourselves.

  ‘Do you remember – no, you’d’ve been too young – those photos of Chinese patients having open-heart surgery? All they had by way of anaesthetic was acupuncture and a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book.’

  ‘What chance those photos were complete fakes?’

  ‘Why should they be?’

  ‘Mao worship. Proof of the superiority of the Chinese way. Also, if it worked, keeping down medical costs.’

  ‘You see, you said if it worked.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it.’

  ‘You’re too cynical, son.’

  ‘You’re not cynical enough, Dad.’

  He went to this … whatever acupuncturists call their surgery or clinic, in a house on the other side of town. Mrs Rose wore a white smock, like a nurse or dentist; she was fortyish and sensible-looking, Dad told us. She listened to his story, took his medical details, asked if he suffered from constipation, and explained the principles of Chinese acupuncture. Then she left the room while he stripped to his underpants and lay down under a paper sheet with a blanket on top of it.

  ‘It was all very professional,’ he reported. ‘She starts by taking your pulses. In Chinese medicine there are six, three on each side. But the ones on the left wrist are more important because they’re for the major organs – heart, liver and kidneys.’

  I didn’t say anything – just felt my alarm growing. And I expect my father read my mood.

  ‘I said to Mrs Rose, “I’d better warn you, I’m a bit sceptical”, and she said that didn’t matter because acupuncture works whether you believe in it or not.’