The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  “Well done, Casey Paul,” she says. Giving me both names was usually a sign of approval.

  “I should have thought of that earlier. Actually, I should have just switched off the bloody ignition. That would have done it. But it didn’t cross my mind.”

  “I think there’s a garage over the hill,” she says, getting out, as if such an event were entirely routine.

  “Were you scared?”

  “No. I knew you’d sort it out, whatever it was. I always feel safe with you.”

  I remember her saying that, and me feeling proud. But I also remember the feel of the car as it raced out of control, as it resisted the brakes, as it bucked and slewed across the road.

  * * *

  —

  I must tell you about her teeth. Well, two of them, anyway. The middle front ones at the top. She called them her “rabbit teeth” because they were perhaps a millimetre longer than the strict national average; but that, to me, made them the more special. I used to tap them lightly with my middle finger, checking that they were there, and secure, just as she was. It was a little ritual, as if I was taking an inventory of her.

  * * *

  —

  Everyone in the Village, every grown-up—or rather, every middle-aged person—seemed to do crosswords: my parents, their friends, Joan, Gordon Macleod. Everyone apart from Susan. They did either The Times or The Telegraph; though Joan had those books of hers to fall back on while waiting for the next newspaper. I regarded this traditional British activity with some snootiness. I was keen in those days to find hidden motives—preferably involving hypocrisy—behind the obvious ones. Clearly, this supposedly harmless pastime was about more than solving cryptic clues and filling in the answers. My analysis identified the following elements: 1) the desire to reduce the chaos of the universe to a small, comprehensible grid of black-and-white squares; 2) the underlying belief that everything in life could, in the end, be solved; 3) the confirmation that existence was essentially a ludic activity; and 4) the hope that this activity would keep at bay the existential pain of our brief sublunary transit from birth to death. That seemed to cover it!

  One evening, Gordon Macleod looked up from behind a cigarette smokescreen and asked,

  “Town in Somerset, seven letters, ends in N.”

  I thought about this for a while. “Swindon?”

  He made a tolerant tut-tut. “Swindon’s in Wiltshire.”

  “Is it really? That’s a surprise. Have you ever been there?”

  “Whether I have or not is hardly relevant to the business in hand,” he replied. “Look at it on the page. That might help.”

  I went and sat next to him. Seeing a lineup of six blank spaces followed by an N didn’t help me any the more.

  “Taunton,” he announced, putting in the answer. I noticed the eccentric way he did his capital letters, lifting the pen from the page to make each stroke. Whereas anyone else would produce an N from two applications of pen to paper, he made three.

  “Continue mocking Somerset town. That was the clue.”

  I thought about this, not very hard, admittedly.

  “Taunt on—continue mocking. Taunt on—TAUNTON. Get it, young fellermelad?”

  “Oh, I see,” I said nodding. “That’s clever.”

  I didn’t mean it, of course. I was also thinking that Macleod must certainly have got the answer before he asked me. So then I added an extra clause to my analysis of the crossword—or, as Macleod preferred to call it, The Puzzle: 3b) false confirmation that you are more intelligent than some give you credit for.

  “Does Mrs. Macleod do the crossword?” I asked, already knowing the answer. Two could play at this game, I thought.

  “The Puzzle,” he replied with some archness, “is not really a female domain.”

  “My mum does the crossword with my dad. Joan does the crossword.”

  He lowered his chin and looked at me over his spectacles.

  “Then let us posit, perhaps, that The Puzzle is not the domain of the womanly woman. What do you say to that?”

  “I’d say I don’t have enough experience of life to come to a conclusion on that one.” Though inwardly I was reflecting on the phrase “womanly woman.” Was it uxorious praise, or some kind of disguised insult?

  “So that gives us an O in the middle of twelve down,” he went on. Suddenly there was an “us” involved.

  I gazed at the clue. Something about an arbiter in work and a leaf.

  “TREFOIL,” Macleod muttered, writing it in, three strokes of his pen on the R, where others would construct it from two. “You see, it’s REF—arbiter—in the middle of TOIL—work.”

  “That’s clever too,” I falsely enthused.

  “Standard. Had it before a few times,” he added with a touch of complacency.

  2b) the further belief that once you have solved something in life, you will be able to solve it again, and the solution will be exactly the same the second time around, thus offering assurance that you have reached a pitch of maturity and wisdom.

  Macleod decided, without my asking, to teach me the ins and outs of The Puzzle. Anagrams, and how to spot them; words hidden inside other combinations of words; setters’ shorthand and their favourite tricks; common abbreviations, letters and words drawn from chess annotation, military ranks, and so on; how a word may be written upwards in the solution to a down clue, or backwards in an across clue. “ ‘Running west,’ you see, that’s the giveaway.”

  Correction to 4). To begin: “the hope that this arse-bendingly boring activity would keep…”

  Later, I tried making an anagram out of WOMANLY WOMAN. I didn’t get anywhere, of course. WANLY MOWN LOOM and other bits of nonsense were all I turned up.

  Further addition: 1a) a successful means of taking your mind off the question of love, which is all that counts in the world.

  Nonetheless, I continued to keep Macleod company while he puffed away at his Players and filled his grids with strangely mechanical pen strokes. He seemed to enjoy explaining clues to me, and took my occasional half-meant whistles and grunts as applause.

  “We’ll make a Puzzle-solver of him yet,” he remarked to Susan over supper one evening.

  Sometimes, we did things together, he and I. Nothing major, or for a long time, anyway. He asked me for my help with some rope-and-pin instrument in the garden, designed to ensure that the cabbages he was planting out were in regimental lines. A couple of times, we listened to a test match on the radio. Once, he took me with him to fill up the car with what he referred to as “petroleum.” I asked which garage he was intending to patronise. The nearest, he told me, unsurprisingly. I told him that I had done an analysis of price versus distance in the matter of Joan’s gin, and what my findings had been.

  “How incredibly boring,” he commented, and then smiled at me.

  I realised that I had seen his eyes on more than one occasion recently. Whereas Susan hadn’t seen them in years. Maybe she was exaggerating. Or maybe she hadn’t been looking too hard in the first place.

  NOW ONLY MMWAA…no, that wasn’t any good either.

  * * *

  —

  Here is something I often thought at this time: I’ve been educated at school and university, and yet, in real terms, I know nothing. Susan barely went to school, but she knows so much more. I’ve got the book-learning, she’s got the life-learning.

  Not that I always agreed with her. When she was talking about Joan, she’d said: “We’re all just looking for a place of safety.” I pondered these words for a while afterwards. The conclusion I came to was this: maybe so, but I’m young, I’m “only nineteen,” and I’m more interested in looking for a place of danger.

  * * *

  —

  Like Susan, I had euphemistic phrases to describe our relationship. We just seem to have this rapport acr
oss the generations. She’s my tennis partner. We both like music and go up to London for concerts. Also, art exhibitions. Oh, I don’t know, we just get on somehow. I have no idea who believed what, and who knew what, and how much my pride made it all flauntingly obvious. Nowadays, at the other end of life, I have a rule of thumb about whether or not two people are having an affair: if you think they might be, then they definitely are. But this was decades ago, and perhaps, back then, the couples you thought might be, mainly weren’t.

  * * *

  —

  And then there were the daughters. I wasn’t much at ease with girls at that time of my life, neither the ones I met at university, nor the Carolines at the tennis club. I didn’t understand that they were mostly just as nervous as I was about…the whole caboodle. And while boys were good at coming up with their own, homemade bullshit, girls, in their understanding of the world, often seemed to fall back on The Wisdom of Their Mothers. You could sniff the inauthenticity when a girl—knowing no more than you did about anything—said something like: “Everyone’s got twenty-twenty vision with hindsight.” A line which could have issued word for word from the mouth of my mother. Another piece of appropriated maternal wisdom I remember from this time was this: “If you lower your expectations, you can’t be disappointed.” This struck me as a dismal approach to life, whether for a forty-five-year-old mother or a twenty-year-old daughter.

  But anyway: Martha and Clara. Miss G. and Miss N.S. Miss Grumpy and Miss Not So (Grumpy). Martha was like her mother physically, tall and pretty, but with something of her father’s querulous temperament. Clara was plump and round, but entirely more equable. Miss Grumpy disapproved of me; Miss Not So was friendly, even interested. Miss Grumpy said things like, “Haven’t you got a home of your own to go to?” Miss Not So would ask what I was reading and once, even, showed me some poetry she’d written. But I wasn’t much of a judge of poetry, then or now, so my response probably disappointed her. This was my preliminary assessment, for what it was worth.

  If I was uneasy with girls generally, I was the more so with ones who were a bit older than me, let alone ones whose mother I was in love with. This awkwardness of mine seemed to emphasise the insouciance with which they moved about their own house, appeared, disappeared, spoke or failed to speak. My reaction to this was possibly a bit crude, but I decided to be no more interested in them than they were in me. This seemed to amount to less than a passing 5 percent. Which was fine by me, because more than 95 percent of my interest was in Susan.

  Since Martha disapproved of me the more, it was to her, in a spirit of either challenge or perversity, that I said:

  “I think I should explain. Susan’s a kind of mother-substitute for me.”

  No, it wasn’t very good, in any way. It probably sounded false, a slimy attempt at ingratiation. Martha took her time about replying, and her tone was acerbic.

  “I don’t need one, I’ve already got a mother.”

  Did I mean any part of my lie? I can’t believe that I did. Strange as it may seem I never reflected on our age difference. Age felt as irrelevant as money. Susan never seemed a member of my parents’ generation—“played-out” or not. She never pulled any sort of rank on me, never said, “Ah, when you’re a bit older, you’ll understand” and stuff like that. It was only my parents who harped on about my immaturity.

  Aha, you might say, but surely the fact that you told her own daughter that for you she was a mother-substitute is a complete giveaway? You may claim it was insincere, but don’t we all make jokes to allay our inner fears? She was almost exactly the same age as your mother, and you went to bed with her. So?

  So. I see where you’re going—bus number 27 to a crossroads near Delphi. Look, I did not want, at any point, on any level, to kill my own father and sleep with my own mother. It’s true that I wanted to sleep with Susan—and did so many times—and for a number of years thought of killing Gordon Macleod, but that is another part of the story. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think the Oedipus myth is precisely what it started off as: melodrama rather than psychology. In all my years of life I’ve never met anyone to whom it might apply.

  You think I’m being naive? You wish to point out that human motivation is deviously buried, and hides its mysterious workings from those who blindly submit to it? Perhaps so. But even—especially—Oedipus didn’t want to kill his father and sleep with his mother, did he? Oh yes he did! Oh no he didn’t! Yes, let’s just leave it as a pantomime exchange.

  Not that prehistory doesn’t matter. Indeed, I think prehistory is central to all relationships.

  * * *

  —

  But I’d much rather tell you about her ears. I missed my first sight of them at the tennis club, when she had her hair pulled back by that green ribbon which matched the piping and buttons of her dress. And normally, she wore her hair down, curling over her ears and descending to mid-neck. So it wasn’t until we were in bed and I was rummaging and rootling around her body, into every nook and cranny, every overexamined and underexamined part of her, that, crouched above, I swept back her hair and discovered her ears.

  I’d never thought much about ears before, except as comic excrescences. Good ears were ears you didn’t notice; bad ears stuck out like bat wings, or were cauliflowered from a boxer’s punch, or—like those of that furious driver at the zebra crossing—were coarse and red and hairy. But her ears, ah, her ears…from the discreet, almost absent lobe they set off northwards at a gentle angle, but then at the midpoint turned back at the same angle to return to her skull. It was as if they had been designed according to aesthetic principle rather than the rules of auditory practicality.

  When I point this out to her, she says, “It’s probably so all that rubbish scoots past them and doesn’t go inside.”

  But there was more. As I explored them with the tips of my fingers, I discovered the delicacy of their outer rim: thin, warm, gentle, almost translucent. Do you know the word for that outermost whorl of the ear? It’s called the helix. Plural: helices. Her ears were part of her absolute distinctiveness, expressions of her DNA. The double helix of her double helices.

  Later, turning my mind to what she might have meant by the “rubbish” that scooted past her astonishing ears, I thought: well, being accused of frigidity, that’s a major piece of rubbish. Except that this word had gone straight into her ears and thence her brain and was lodged there, permanently.

  * * *

  —

  As I said, money had no more relevance to our relationship than age. So it didn’t matter that she paid for things. I had none of that foolish masculine pride in such circumstances. Perhaps I even felt my lack of money made my love for Susan the more virtuous.

  After a few months—maybe longer—she announces that I need a running-away fund.

  “What for?”

  “For running away. Everyone should have a running-away fund.” Just as every young man should have a reputation. Where had this latest idea come from? A Nancy Mitford novel?

  “But I don’t want to run away. Who from? My parents? I’ve more or less left them anyway. Mentally. You? Why should I want to run away from you? I want you to be in my life forever.”

  “That’s very sweet of you, Paul. But it’s not a specific fund, you see. It’s a sort of general fund. Because at some point everyone wants to run away from their life. It’s about the only thing human beings have in common.”

  This is all way above my head. The only running away I might contemplate is running away with her rather than from her.

  A few days later, she gives me a cheque for £500. My car had cost me £25; I lived for a term at university on under £100. The sum seemed both very large and also meaningless. I didn’t even think it “generous.” I had no principles about money, either for or against. And it was entirely irrelevant to our relationship—that much I knew. So when I got back to Sussex, I went into
town, opened a deposit account at the first bank I came to, handed over the cheque and forgot about it.

  * * *

  —

  There’s something I probably should have clarified earlier. I may be making my relationship with Susan sound like a sweet summer interlude. That’s what the stereotype insists, after all. There is a sexual and emotional initiation, a lush passage of treats and pleasures and spoilings, then the woman, with a pang but also a sense of honour, releases the young man back into the wider world and younger bodies of his own generation. But I’ve already told you that it wasn’t like this.

  We were together—and I mean together—for ten or a dozen years, depending on where you start and stop counting. And those years happened to coincide with what the newspapers liked to call the Sexual Revolution: a time of omni-fucking—or so we were led to believe—of instant pleasures, and loose, guilt-free liaisons, when deep lust and emotional lightness became the order of the day. So you could say that my relationship with Susan proved as offensive to the new norms as to the old ones.

  * * *

  —

  I remember her, one afternoon, wearing a print dress with flowers on it, going over to a chintz sofa and plumping herself down on it.

  “Look, Casey Paul! I’m disappearing! I’m doing my disappearing act! There’s nobody here!”

  I look. It is half-true. Her stockinged legs show clearly, as do her head and neck, but all the middle parts are suddenly camouflaged.

  “Wouldn’t you like that, Casey Paul? If we could just disappear and nobody could see us?”

  I don’t know how serious, or how merely skittish, she is being. So I don’t know how to react. Looking back, I think I was a very literal young man.