The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  “Operating a taxi service now, are we?”

  I looked at her in bewilderment. It was always my mother who policed me. My father was milder, and less given to judgement. He preferred to allow things to blow over, to let sleeping dogs lie, not to stir up mud; whereas my mother preferred facing facts and not brushing things under the carpet. My parents’ marriage, to my unforgiving nineteen-year-old eye, was a car crash of cliché. Though I would have to admit, as the one making the judgement, that a “car crash of cliché” is itself a cliché.

  But I refused to be a cliché, at least this early in my life, and so I looked across at my mother with blank belligerence.

  “Mrs. Macleod will be putting on weight, the amount you’re ferrying her around” was my mother’s unkindly elaboration of her original point.

  “Not with all the tennis she plays,” I answered casually.

  “Mrs. Macleod,” she went on. “What’s her first name?”

  “I don’t actually know,” I lied.

  “Have you come across the Macleods, Andy?”

  “There’s a Macleod at the golf club,” he answered. “Short, fat guy. Hits the ball as if he hates it.”

  “Maybe we should ask them round for sherry.”

  As I winced at the prospect, my father replied, “There isn’t enough call for that, is there?”

  “Anyway,” continued my mother, tenacious of subject, “I thought she had a bicycle.”

  “You suddenly seem to know a lot about her,” I replied.

  “Don’t you start getting pert with me, Paul.” Her colour was rising.

  “Leave The Lad alone, Bets,” said my father quietly.

  “It’s not me who should be leaving him alone.”

  “Please may I get down now, Mummy?” I asked with an eight-year-old’s whine. Well, if they were going to treat me like a child…

  “Maybe we should ask them round for sherry.” I couldn’t tell if my father was being dense, or whimsically ironic.

  “Don’t you start as well,” my mother said sharply. “He doesn’t get it from me.”

  * * *

  —

  I went to the tennis club the next afternoon, and the next. As I started hacking away with two Carolines and a Hugo I noticed Susan in play on the court beyond. It was fine while I had my back to her game. But when I looked past my opponents and saw her rocking gently sideways on the balls of her feet as she prepared to receive serve, I lost immediate interest in the next point.

  Later, I offer her a lift.

  “Only if you’ve got a car.”

  I mumble something in reply.

  “Whatski, Mr. Casey?”

  We are facing one another. I feel at the same time baffled and at ease. She is wearing her usual tennis dress, and I find myself wondering if its green buttons undo, or are merely ornamental. I have never met anyone like her before. Our faces are at exactly the same height, nose to nose, mouth to mouth, ear to ear. She is clearly noticing the same.

  “If I were wearing heels, I could see over the net,” she says. “As it is, we’re seeing eye to eye.”

  I can’t work out if she is confident or nervous; if she is always like this, or just with me. Her words look flirty, but didn’t feel so at the time.

  I have put the top of my Morris Minor convertible down. If I am operating a bloody taxi service, then I don’t see why the bloody Village shouldn’t see who the bloody passengers are. Or rather, who the passenger is.

  “By the way,” I say, as I slow and put the car into second. “My parents might be asking you and your husband round for sherry.”

  “Lordy-Lordy,” she replies, putting her hand in front of her mouth. “But I never take Mr. Elephant Pants anywhere.”

  “Why do you call him that?”

  “It just came to me one day. I was hanging up his clothes and he’s got these grey flannel trousers, several pairs of them, with an eighty-four-inch waistline, and I held up one pair and thought to myself, that looks just like the back half of a pantomime elephant.”

  “My dad says he hits a golf ball as if he hates it.”

  “Yes, well. What else do they say?”

  “My mother says you’ll be getting fat, what with all the lifts I’m giving you.”

  She doesn’t reply. I stop the car at the end of her driveway and look across. She is anxious, almost solemn.

  “Sometimes I forget about other people. About them existing. People I’ve never met, I mean. I’m sorry, Casey, maybe I should have…I mean, it isn’t as if…oh dear.”

  “Nonsense,” I say firmly. “You said a young man like me should have a reputation. It seems I’ve now got a reputation for operating a taxi service. That’ll do me for the summer.”

  She remains downcast. Then says quietly, “Oh Casey, don’t give up on me just yet.”

  But why would I, when I was falling smack into love?

  * * *

  —

  So what words might you reach for, nowadays, to describe a relationship between a nineteen-year-old boy, or nearly-man, and a forty-eight-year-old woman? Perhaps those tabloid terms “cougar” and “toy boy”? But such words weren’t around then, even if people behaved like that in advance of their naming. Or you might think: French novels, older woman teaching “the arts of love” to younger man, ooh la la. But there was nothing French about our relationship, or about us. We were English, and so had only those morally laden English words to deal with: words like scarlet woman, and adulteress. But there was never anyone less scarlet than Susan; and, as she once told me, when she first heard people talking about adultery, she thought it referred to the watering-down of milk.

  Nowadays we talk about transactional sex, and recreational sex. No one, back then, had recreational sex. Well, they might have done, but they didn’t call it that. Back then, back there, there was love, and there was sex, and there was a commingling of the two, sometimes awkward, sometimes seamless, which sometimes worked out, and sometimes didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  An exchange between my parents (read: my mother) and me, one of those English exchanges which condenses paragraphs of animosity into a pair of phrases.

  “But I’m nine-teen.”

  “Exactly—you’re only nineteen.”

  * * *

  —

  We were each other’s second lover: quasi-virgins, in effect. I had had my sexual induction—the usual bout of tender, anxious scuffle-and-blunder—with a girl at university, towards the end of my third term; while Susan, despite having two children and being married for a quarter of a century, was no more experienced than me. In retrospect, perhaps it would have been different if one of us had known more. But who, in love, looks forward to retrospect? And anyway, do I mean “more experienced in sex” or “more experienced in love”?

  But I see I’m getting ahead of myself.

  * * *

  —

  That first afternoon, when I had played in with my Dunlop Maxply and laundered whites, there was a huddle in the clubhouse over tea and cakes. The blazers were still assessing me for suitability, I realised. Checking that I was acceptably middle class, with all that this entailed. There was some joshing about the length of my hair, which was mostly contained by my headband. And almost as a follow-on to this I was asked what I thought about politics.

  “I’m afraid I’m not remotely interested in politics,” I replied.

  “Well, that means you’re a Conservative,” said one committee member, and we all laughed.

  When I tell her about this exchange, Susan nods and says, “I’m Labour, but it’s a secret. Well, it was until now. So what do you make of that, my fine and feathered friend?”

  I say that it doesn’t bother me at all.

  * * *

  —

  The first time I went to
the Macleod house, Susan told me to come in the back way and walk up through the garden; I approved such informality. I pushed open an unlocked gate, then followed an unsteady brick path alongside compost heaps and bins of leaf mould; there was rhubarb growing up through a chimney pot, a quartet of raggedy fruit trees and a vegetable plot. A dishevelled old gardener was double-digging a square patch of earth. I nodded to him with the authority of a young academic approving a peasant. He nodded back.

  As Susan was boiling the kettle, I looked around me. The house was similar to ours, except that everything felt a bit classier; or rather, here the old things looked inherited rather than bought secondhand. There were standard lamps with yellowing parchment shades. There was also—not exactly a carelessness, more an insouciance about things not being orderly. I could see golf clubs in a bag lying in the hallway, and a couple of glasses still not cleared away from lunch—perhaps even the previous night. Nothing went uncleared-away in our house. Everything had to be tidied, washed, swept, polished, in case someone called round unexpectedly. But who might do so? The vicar? The local policeman? Someone wanting to make a phone call? A door-to-door salesman? The truth was that nobody ever arrived without invitation, and all that tidying and wiping was performed out of what struck me as deep social atavism. Whereas here, people like me called round and the place looked, as my mother would no doubt have observed, as if it hadn’t seen a duster for a fortnight.

  “Your gardener’s jolly hardworking,” I say, for want of a better conversational opener.

  Susan looks at me and bursts out laughing. “Gardener? That’s the Master of the Establishment, as it happens. His Lordship.”

  “I’m terribly sorry. Please don’t tell him. I just thought…”

  “Still, I’m glad he looks up to snuff. Like a real gardener. Old Adam. Precisely.” She hands me a cup of tea. “Milk? Sugar?”

  * * *

  —

  You understand, I hope, that I’m telling you everything as I remember it? I never kept a diary, and most of the participants in my story—my story! my life!—are either dead or far dispersed. So I’m not necessarily putting it down in the order that it happened. I think there’s a different authenticity to memory, and not an inferior one. Memory sorts and sifts according to the demands made on it by the rememberer. Do we have access to the algorithm of its priorities? Probably not. But I would guess that memory prioritises whatever is most useful to help keep the bearer of those memories going. So there would be a self-interest in bringing happier memories to the surface first. But again, I’m only guessing.

  * * *

  —

  For instance, I remember lying in bed one night, being kept awake by one of those stomach-slapping erections which, when you are young, you carelessly—or carefreely—imagine will last you the rest of your life. But this one was different. You see, it was a kind of generalised erection, unconnected to any person, or dream, or fantasy. It was more about just being joyfully young. Young in brain, heart, cock, soul—and it just happened to be the cock which best articulated that general state.

  * * *

  —

  It seems to me that when you are young, you think about sex most of the time, but you don’t reflect on it much. You are so intent on the who, when, where, how—or rather, more often, the great if—that you think less about the why and the whither. Before you first have sex, you’ve heard all sorts of things about it; nowadays far more, and far earlier, and far more graphically, than when I was young. But it all amounts to the same input: a mixture of sentimentality, pornography and misrepresentation. When I look back at my youth, I see it as a time of cock-vigour so insistent that it forbade examination of what such vigour was for.

  Perhaps I don’t understand the young now. I’d like to talk to them and ask how things are for them and their friends—but then a shyness creeps in. And perhaps I didn’t even understand the young when I was young. That could be true too.

  * * *

  —

  But in case you’re wondering, I don’t envy the young. In my days of adolescent rage and insolence, I would ask myself: What are the old for, if not to envy the young? That seemed to me their principal and final purpose before extinction. I was walking to meet Susan one afternoon, and had reached the Village’s zebra crossing. There was a car approaching, but with a lover’s normal eagerness, I started to cross anyway. The car braked, harder than its driver had evidently wanted to, and hooted at me. I stopped where I was, right in line with the car’s bonnet, and stared back at the driver. I admit I was perhaps an annoying sight. Long hair, purple jeans, and young—filthy, fucking young. The driver wound down his window and swore at me. I strolled round to him, smiling, and keen on confrontation. He was old—filthy, fucking old, with an old person’s stupid red ears. You know those sorts of ears, all fleshy, with hairs growing on them inside and out? Thick, bristly ones inside; thin, furry ones outside.

  “You’ll be dead before I will,” I informed him, and then dawdled off as irritatingly as I could manage.

  So, now that I am older I realise that this is one of my human functions: to allow the young to believe that I envy them. Well, obviously I do in the brute matter of being dead first; but otherwise not. And when I see pairs of young lovers, vertically entwined on street corners, or horizontally entwined on a blanket in the park, the main feeling it arouses in me is a kind of protectiveness. No, not pity: protectiveness. Not that they would want my protection. And yet—and this is curious—the more bravado they show in their behaviour, the stronger my response. I want to protect them from what the world is probably going to do to them, and from what they will probably do to one another. But of course, this isn’t possible. My care is not required, and their confidence insane.

  * * *

  —

  It was a matter of some pride to me that I seemed to have landed on exactly the relationship of which my parents would most disapprove. I have no wish—certainly not at this late stage—to demonise them. They were products of their time and age and class and genes—just as I am. They were hardworking, truthful and wanted what they thought was the best for their only child. The faults I found in them were, in a different light, virtues. But at the time…

  “Hi, Mum and Dad, I’ve something to tell you. I’m actually gay, which you probably guessed, and I’m going on holiday next week with Pedro. Yes, Mum, that Pedro, the one who does your hair in the Village. Well, he asked me where I was going for my holidays, and I just said, ‘Any suggestions?’ and we took it from there. So we’re off to a Greek island together.”

  I imagine my parents being upset, and wondering what the neighbours would say, and going to ground for a while, and talking behind closed doors, and theorising difficulties ahead for me which would only be a projection of their own confused feelings. But then they would decide that times were changing, and find a little quiet heroism in their ability to accommodate this unanticipated situation, and my mother would wonder how socially appropriate it would be to let Pedro carry on cutting her hair, and then—worst stage of all—she would award herself a badge of honour for her newfound tolerance, all the while giving thanks to the God in whom she did not believe that her father hadn’t lived to see the day…

  Yes, that would have been all right, eventually. As would another scenario then popular in the newspapers.

  “Hi, Parents, this is Cindy, she’s my girlfriend, well, actually a little bit more than that, as you can see, she’s going to be a ‘gymslip mum’ in a few months’ time. Don’t worry, she was dead legal when I swooped at the school gates, but I guess the clock’s ticking on this one, so you’d better meet her parents and book the registry office.”

  Yes, they could have coped with that too. Of course, their best-case scenario, as previously noted, was that down at the tennis club I would meet a nice Christine or Virginia whose emollient and optimistic nature would have been to their taste. And t
hen there could have been a proper engagement followed by a proper wedding and a proper honeymoon, leading to proper grandchildren. But instead I had gone to the tennis club and come back with Mrs. Susan Macleod, a married woman of the parish with two daughters, both older than me. And—until such time as I shrugged off this foolish case of calf love—there would be no engagement or wedding, let alone patter of tiny feet. There would only be embarrassment and humiliation and shame, and prim looks from neighbours and sly allusions to cradle-snatching. So I had managed to present them with a case so far beyond the pale that it could not even be admitted, much less sensibly discussed. And by now, my mother’s original idea of inviting the Macleods round for sherry had been definitively junked.

  * * *

  —

  This thing with parents. All my friends at university—Eric, Barney, Ian and Sam—had it in varying amounts. And we were hardly a pack of stoned hippies in shaggy Afghan coats. We were normal—normalish—middle-class boys feeling the irritable rub of growing up. We all had our stories, most of them interchangeable, though Barney’s were always the best. Not least because he gave his parents so much lip.

  “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.”