Pulse

by Julian Barnes

  Except presumably it takes longer with sceptics and so costs more money. I didn’t say this either. Instead I let Dad tell us how Mrs Rose measured his back and marked it up with a felt-tip pen, then put little piles of stuff on his skin and set light to them, and he had to sing out when he felt the heat, and she’d pick them off him. Then there was more measurement and felt-pen markings, and she began sticking needles in him. It was all very hygienic and she dropped the used needles into a sharps box.

  At the end of the hour she left the room, he put his clothes back on and paid her fifty-five pounds. Then he went off to the supermarket to buy dinner. He described standing there in a sort of daze, not knowing what he wanted – or rather, wanting everything he looked at. He wandered around, buying all sorts of stuff, came home in a state of exhaustion, and had to take a nap.

  ‘So you see, it obviously works.’

  ‘You mean, you smelt your dinner?’

  ‘No, it’s early days – that’s only my first treatment. I mean, it clearly has some effect. Both physical and mental.’

  I thought to myself: feeling tired and buying food you don’t need, that sounds like a cure?

  ‘What do you think, Mum?’

  ‘I’m all for him trying something different if he wants to.’ She reached across the table and patted his arm, near where his mysterious new pulses lay hidden. I needn’t have asked – they would have discussed things beforehand and come to a joint conclusion. And as I well knew by now, divide and rule was never successful with my parents.

  ‘If it works, I might try it for my knee,’ she added.

  ‘What’s wrong with your knee, Mum?’

  ‘Oh, I sort of twisted it. I tripped and bashed it on the stairs. I’m getting a bit trippy in my old age.’

  My mother was fifty-eight. She was wide-hipped, with a good, low centre of gravity, and never wore silly shoes.

  ‘You mean, you’ve done this before?’

  ‘It’s nothing. Just age. Comes to us all.’

  Janice once said that you can never really tell about parents. I asked what she meant. She replied that by the time you were able to understand them, it was too late anyway. You could never find out what they were like before they met, when they met, before you were conceived, afterwards, when you were a small child …

  ‘Children often understand a lot,’ I said. ‘Instinctively.’

  ‘They understand what parents let them understand.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’

  ‘So be it. The point remains. By the time you think you’re capable of understanding your parents, most of the important things in their lives have already happened. They are who they are. Or rather, they are who they’ve decided to be – with you, when you’re around.’

  ‘I don’t agree.’ I couldn’t imagine my parents, once they closed the door, turning into other people.

  ‘How often do you think of your father as a reformed alcoholic?’

  ‘Never. That’s not how I think of him. I’m his son, not a social worker.’

  ‘Precisely. So you want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum. It doesn’t work like that. There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’

  ‘You’d be laughed out of court,’ I said.

  She looked at me. ‘I think that what happens with most couples over time is that they find a way of being with one another that is basically untruthful. It’s like the relationship depends on mutually assured self-deception. That’s its default setting.’

  ‘Well I still don’t agree.’ What I thought was: crap. Mutually assured self-deception – that doesn’t sound like you. It’s some phrase you picked up from that magazine you work for. Or from some bloke you wouldn’t mind fucking. But all I said was,

  ‘Are you calling my parents hypocrites?’

  ‘I’m talking generally. Why do you always take things personally?’

  ‘Then I don’t understand what you’re saying. And if I do, then I can’t think why you want to be married to me, or anybody else.’

  ‘So be it.’

  That was another thing. I was beginning to dislike her use of that phrase.

  Dad admitted that he hadn’t expected acupuncture to hurt as much as it did.

  ‘Do you tell her?’

  ‘Certainly. I say, “Ow.”’

  If Mrs Rose stuck a needle in and didn’t get the reaction she expected, she’d do it again, near the original spot, until she got what she was looking for.

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘It’s a sort of magnetic pull, an energy surge. And you can always tell because that’s when it hurts most.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘And then she does it in other places. The backs of the hands, the ankles. That’s even more painful – where there isn’t much flesh.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But in between she needs to see how your energy levels are coming along, so she’s always checking your pulses.’

  At which point I lost it. ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Dad. There’s only one pulse, you know that. By definition. It’s the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood.’

  My father didn’t reply, just cleared his throat slightly and looked at my mother. We don’t do rows in our family. We don’t want to do them, and we don’t know how to, anyway. So there was a silence, and then Mum started on another topic.

  Twenty minutes after his fourth treatment, my father walked into Starbucks and smelt coffee for the first time in months. Then he went to the Body Shop to get some shampoo for Mum, and said it was like being hit over the head by a rhododendron bush. He was almost nauseous. The smells were so rich, he said, that it was as if they had bright colours attached to them as well.

  ‘So what do you say about that?’

  ‘I don’t know what to say, Dad, except congratulations.’ I thought it was probably coincidence or auto-suggestion.

  ‘You’re not going to pretend it’s a coincidence?’

  ‘No, Dad, I’m not.’

  Mrs Rose, to his surprise, greeted his account neutrally, with a little head-nodding and some scribbling in a notebook. She then explained her proposed course of action. There would, if he agreed, be fortnightly appointments building towards the summer – by which she meant the Chinese, not the British, summer, because that, based on my father’s date of birth, would be his time of maximum responsiveness. She added that his energy levels were rising every time she checked his pulses.

  ‘Do you feel more energetic, Dad?’

  ‘That’s not what it’s about.’

  ‘And have you smelt anything since your last appointment?’

  ‘No.’

  Right, so ‘energy levels’ had nothing to do with ‘levels of energy’, and having higher ones didn’t increase his smelling power. Fine.

  Sometimes I wondered why I was being so hard on my father. Over the next three months he reported his findings matter-of-factly. From time to time he smelt things, but they had to be strong to get through: soap, coffee, burnt toast, toilet cleaner; twice, a glass of red wine; once, to his joy, the smell of rain. The Chinese summer came and went; Mrs Rose said that acupuncture had done all it could. My father, typically, blamed his own scepticism, but Mrs Rose repeated that attitude of mind was irrelevant. Since she was the one who proposed ending the treatment, I decided that she wasn’t a charlatan. But perhaps it was more that I didn’t want to think of Dad as the sort of person who could be taken in by a charlatan.

  ‘Actually, it’s your mother I’m more worried about.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘She seems, I don’t know, a bit off the pace nowadays. Maybe it’s just tiredness. She’s slower, somehow.’

  ‘What does she say?’

  ‘Oh, she says there’s nothing wrong. Or if there is, it’s just hormonal.’

  ‘What does she mean?’

  ‘I was rather hoping you could tell me.’

  That was another nice thing about my parent
s. There was none of that holding on to knowledge and power that some parents go in for. We were all adults together, on a plateau of equality.

  ‘I probably don’t know any better than you, Dad. But in my experience, “hormones” is a catch-all word for when women don’t want to tell you something. I always think: hang on, haven’t men got hormones as well? Why don’t we use them as an excuse?’

  My father chuckled, but I could see his anxiety wasn’t allayed. So on his next bridge night, I dropped in on Mum. As we sat in the kitchen, I could tell immediately that she hadn’t bought my excuse of ‘just being in the neighbourhood’.

  ‘Tea or coffee?’

  ‘Decaf or herbal tea, whatever you’re having.’

  ‘Well, I need a good dose of caffeine.’

  Somehow, it didn’t take more than that to bring me to the point.

  ‘Dad’s worried about you. So am I.’

  ‘Dad’s a worrier.’

  ‘Dad loves you. That’s why he notices things about you. If he didn’t, he wouldn’t.’

  ‘No, I suppose that’s right.’ I looked at her, but her gaze was elsewhere. It was perfectly clear to me that she was thinking about being loved. It could have made me feel envious, but it didn’t.

  ‘So tell me what’s wrong, and don’t mention hormones.’

  She smiled. ‘A bit tired. A bit clumsy. That’s all.’

  About eighteen months into the marriage, Janice accused me of not being straightforward. Of course, being Janice, she didn’t put it as straightforwardly as that. She asked why I always preferred discussing unimportant problems rather than important ones. I said I didn’t think this was so, but in any case, big things are sometimes so big that there’s little to say about them, whereas small things are easier to discuss. And sometimes we think this is the problem, whereas it’s actually that, which makes this seem trivial. She looked at me like one of my stroppier pupils, and said that was typical – a typical justification of my natural evasiveness, my refusal to face facts and deal with issues. She said she could always smell a lie on me. She actually put it like that.

  ‘Very well, then,’ I replied. ‘Let’s be straightforward. Let’s deal with issues. You’re having an affair and I’m having an affair. Is that facing facts or not?’

  ‘That’s what you think it is. You make it sound like a one-all draw.’ And then she explained the falseness of my apparent candour, and the difference between our infidelities – hers born of despair, mine of revenge – and how it was symptomatic that I thought the affairs were the significant thing, rather than the circumstances which gave rise to them. And so we came full circle to the original charges.

  What do we look for in a partner? Someone like us, someone different? Someone like us but different, different but like us? Someone to complete us? Oh, I know you can’t generalise, but even so. The point is: if we’re looking for someone who matches us, we only ever think of their good matching bits. What about their bad matching bits? Do you think we’re sometimes driven towards people with the same faults as we have?

  My mother. When I think of her now, there’s a phrase that comes to mind – one I used when Dad was rabbiting on about his six Chinese pulses. Dad, I said to him, there’s only one pulse – the pulse of the heart, the pulse of the blood. The photographs of my parents that I’m most attached to are those taken before I was born. And – thank you, Janice – I do actually think I know what they were like back then.

  My parents sitting on a pebble beach somewhere, his arm around her shoulders; he has a sports jacket with leather elbow patches, she’s in a polka-dot dress, looking out at the camera with passionate hopefulness. My parents on their honeymoon in Spain, with mountains behind them, both wearing sunglasses, so you have to work out how they’re feeling from their stance, their obvious relaxation with one another, and the sly fact that my mother has her hand slipped into my father’s trouser pocket. And then a picture which must have meant a lot to them despite its shortcomings: the two of them at a party, clearly more than a bit drunk, with the camera flash giving them the pink eyes of white mice. My father has absurd muttonchop whiskers, Mum frizzy hair, big hoop earrings and a kaftan. Neither looks as if they could possibly grow up enough to be a parent. I suspect this is the first picture ever taken of them together, the first time they are officially recorded as sharing the same space, breathing the same air.

  There’s also a photo on the sideboard of me with my parents. I’m about four or five, standing between them with the expression of a child who’s been told to watch the birdie, or however they might have put it: concentrating, but at the same time not quite certain of what’s going on. I’m holding a junior watering can, though I have no memory of being given a junior gardener’s kit, or indeed of having any interest, real or suggested, in gardening.

  Nowadays, when I examine this photo – my mother looking down at me protectively, my father smiling at the camera, a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other – I can’t help remembering Janice’s words. About how parents decide who they are before the child has any awareness of it, how they develop a front which the child will never be able to penetrate. Whether intentional or not, there was something poisonous in her remarks. ‘You want him to be Just a Dad. No one’s just a dad, just a mum.’ And then: ‘There’s probably some secret in your mother’s life you’ve never suspected.’ What am I to do with that thought? Even if I were to pursue it and find it led nowhere?

  There’s nothing mimsy or flaky about my mum and nothing – note this, please, Janice – nothing neurotically self-dramatising. She’s a solid presence in a room, whether talking or not. And she’s the person you would turn to if anything went wrong. Once, when I was little, she managed to gash herself in the thigh. There was no one else in the house. Most people would have called an ambulance, or at least disturbed Dad at his work. But Mum just got a needle and some surgical thread, pulled the wound together and sewed it up. And she’d do the same for you without turning a hair. That’s what she’s like. If there is a secret in her life, it’s probably that she helped someone and never told anybody about it. So fuck Janice, is what I say.

  My parents met when Dad had just qualified as a solicitor. He used to maintain that he’d had to chase off a number of rivals. Mum said there wasn’t any chasing to be done because everything was perfectly obvious to her from the day they met. Yes, Dad would reply, but the other fellows didn’t see it that way. My mother would look at him fondly, and I could never work out which of them to believe. Or perhaps that’s the definition of a happy marriage: both parties are telling the truth, even when their accounts are incompatible.

  Of course, my admiration for their marriage is partly conditioned by the failure of my own. Perhaps their example made me assume it was more straightforward than it turned out. Do you think there are people who have a talent for marriage, or is it just a question of luck? Though I suppose you could say that it’s luck to have such a talent. When I mentioned to Mum that Janice and I were going through a bad patch and trying to work at our marriage, she said,

  ‘I’ve never really understood what that means. If you love your job, it doesn’t feel like work. If you love your marriage, it doesn’t feel like work. I suppose you may be working at it, underneath. Just doesn’t feel like it,’ she repeated. And then, after a pause, ‘Not that I’m saying anything against Janice.’

  ‘Let’s not talk about Janice,’ I said. I’d already talked enough about Janice to Janice herself. Whatever we brought to that marriage, we sure as hell took nothing away from it, except our legal share of money.

  You would think, wouldn’t you, that if you were the child of a happy marriage, then you ought to have a better than average marriage yourself – either through some genetic inheritance or because you’d learnt from example? But it doesn’t seem to work like that. So perhaps you need the opposite example – to see mistakes in order not to make them yourself. Except this would mean that the best way for parents to ensure their children have happ
y marriages would be to have unhappy ones themselves. So what’s the answer? I don’t know. Only that I don’t blame my parents; nor, really, do I blame Janice.

  My mother promised that she would go to their GP if Dad saw a specialist about his anosmia. My father was typically reluctant. Others had it far worse than him, he said. He could still taste his food, whereas for some anosmiacs dinner was like chewing cardboard and plastic. He’d been on the internet and read about even more extreme cases – for instance, of olfactory hallucination. Imagine if fresh milk suddenly smelt and tasted sour, chocolate made you retch, meat was just like a sponge of blood to you.

  ‘If you dislocate your finger,’ my mother replied, ‘you don’t refuse to get it looked at because someone else has broken their leg.’

  And so the bargain was made. The waiting and the bureaucracy began, and they both ended up having MRI scans in the same week. What are the chances of that, I wonder.

  I’m not sure we ever know exactly when our marriage ends. We remember certain stages, transitions, arguments; incompatibilities which grow until they can’t be resolved or lived with. I think that for much of the time when Janice was attacking me – or, as she would put it, the time when I stopped paying attention to her and just went missing – I never really thought this was, or would cause, the end of our marriage. It was only when, for no reason I could comprehend, she turned on my parents that I first began to think: oh really, now she’s crossed the line. It’s true, we’d been drinking. And yes, I had exceeded my self-imposed limit – well exceeded it.

  ‘One of your problems is, you think your parents have the perfect marriage.’

  ‘Why is that one of my problems?’

  ‘Because it makes you think your marriage is worse than it is.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s their fault, is it?’

  ‘No, they’re fine, your parents.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘I said they’re fine. I just didn’t say the sun shines out of their arses.’

  ‘You don’t think the sun shines out of anyone’s arse, do you?’