The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  * * *

  —

  I told Eric that I had met this family and fallen in love. I described the Macleods, their house and their way of life, relishing my characterizations. It was the first grown-up thing that had happened to me, I told him.

  “So which of the daughters have you fallen in love with?” Eric asked.

  “No, not one of the daughters, the mother.”

  “Ah, the mother,” he said. “We like that,” he added, giving me marks for originality.

  * * *

  —

  One day, I notice a dark bruise on her upper arm, just below where the sleeve of her dress ends. It is the size of a large thumbprint.

  “What’s that?” I ask.

  “Oh,” she says carelessly, “I must have knocked it against something. I bruise easily.”

  Of course she does, I think. Because she’s sensitive, like me. Of course the world can hurt us. That’s why we must look after one another.

  “You don’t bruise when I hold your wrists.”

  “I don’t think the wrists bruise, do they?”

  “Not if I’m holding you.”

  * * *

  —

  The fact that she was “old enough to be my mother” did not go down well with my mother. Nor my father; nor her husband; nor her daughters; nor the Archbishop of Canterbury—not that he was a family friend. I cared no more about approval than I did about money. Though disapproval, whether active or theoretical, ignorant or informed, did nothing but inflame, corroborate and justify my love.

  I had no new definition of love. I didn’t really examine what it was, and what it might entail. I merely submitted to first love in all its aspects, from butterfly kisses to absolutism. Nothing else mattered. Of course there was “the rest of my life,” both present (my degree course) and future (job, salary, social position, retirement, pension, death). You could say that I put this part of my life on hold. Except that’s not right: she was my life, and the rest wasn’t. Everything else could and must be sacrificed, with or without thought, as and when necessary. Though “sacrifice” implies loss. I never felt a sense of loss. Church and state, they say, church and state. No difficulty there. Church first, church always—though not in a sense the Archbishop of Canterbury would have understood it.

  I wasn’t so much constructing my own idea of love as first doing the necessary rubble clearance. Most of what I’d read, or been taught, about love, didn’t seem to apply, from playground rumour to high-minded literary speculation. “Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart / ’Tis woman’s whole existence.” How wrong—how gender-biased, as we might now say—was that? And then, at the other end of the spectrum, came the earthy sex-wisdom exchanged between profoundly ignorant if yearningly lustful schoolboys. “You don’t look at the mantelpiece while poking the fire.” Where had that come from? Some bestial dystopia full of nocturnal, myopic grunting?

  But I wanted her face there all the time: her eyes, her mouth, her precious ears with their elegant helices, her smile, her whispered words. So: I would be flat on my back, she would be lying on top of me, her feet slipped between mine, and she would place the tip of her nose against the tip of mine, and say,

  “Now we see eye to eye.”

  Put it another way. I was nineteen, and I knew that love was incorruptible, proof against both time and tarnish.

  * * *

  —

  I have a sudden attack of—what?—fear, propriety, unselfishness? I say to her, thinking she will know more,

  “You see, I haven’t been in love before, so I don’t understand about love. What I’m worried about is that, if you love me, it will leave you less for the other people you love.”

  I don’t name them. I meant her daughters; and perhaps even her husband.

  “It’s not like that,” she answers at once, as if it is something she too has thought about, and has solved. “Love’s elastic. It’s not a question of watering down. It adds on. It doesn’t take away. So there’s no need to worry about that.”

  So I didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  “There’s something I need to explain,” she begins. “E.P.’s father was a very nice man. He was a doctor. He collected furniture. Some of these things were his.” She points vaguely at a heavy oak coffer and a grandfather clock I have never yet heard strike the hour. “He actually hoped E.P. would become a painter, so he gave him the middle name of Rubens. Which was a bit unfortunate because some of the boys at school assumed he must be Jewish. Anyway, he did the usual schoolboy sketches, which everyone said were promising. But he never became more than promising, so was a disappointment to his father in that department. Jack—the father—was always very kind to me. He used to twinkle at me.”

  “I can’t say I blame him for that.” I wonder what might be coming next. Surely not some intergenerational imbroglio?

  “We’d only been married a couple of years when Jack got cancer. I’d always thought he would be someone I could go to if I got in any trouble, and now he was going to be taken from me. I used to go and sit with him, but I would get so upset that it usually ended up with him consoling me rather than the other way round. I asked him once what he thought about it all, and he said, ‘Of course I’d prefer it otherwise, but I can’t complain that I haven’t had a fair crack of the whip.’ He liked me being with him, maybe because I was young and didn’t know very much, and so I stayed there till the end.

  “That day—the last day—the doctor—the one looking after him, who was a good friend as well—came in and said quietly, ‘It’s time to put you under, Jack.’ ‘You’re right,’ came the reply. He’d been in terrible pain for too long, you see. Then Jack turned to me and said, ‘I’m sorry our acquaintance has been so brief, my dear. It’s been wonderful knowing you. I’m aware that Gordon can be a difficult row to hoe, but I’ll die happy knowing that I leave him in your safe and capable hands.’ And then I kissed him and left the room.”

  “You mean, the doctor killed him?”

  “He gave him enough morphine to put him to sleep, yes.”

  “But he didn’t wake up?”

  “No. Doctors used to do that in the old days, especially among themselves. Or with a patient they’d known a long time, where there was trust. Easing the suffering is a good idea. It’s a terrible disease.”

  “Even so. I’m not sure I’d want to be killed.”

  “Well, wait and see, Paul. But that’s not the point of the story.”

  “Sorry.”

  “The point of the story is ‘safe and capable.’ ”

  I think about this for a while. “Yes, I see.” But I’m not sure that I did.

  * * *

  —

  “Where do you usually go for your holidays?” I ask.

  “Paul, that’s such a hairdresser’s question.”

  In reply, I lean over and tuck her hair behind her ears, stroking the helices gently.

  “Oh dear,” she goes on. “All these conventional expectations people have of one. No, not you, Casey Paul. I mean, why does everyone have to be the same? We did have a few holidays once, when the girls were young. About as successful as the Dieppe Raid, I’d say. E.P. was not at his best on holidays. I don’t see what they’re for, really.”

  I wonder if I shouldn’t press any further. Perhaps something catastrophic had happened on one of their holidays.

  “So what do you say when hairdressers ask you that question?”

  “I say, ‘We’re still going to the usual place.’ And that makes them think we’ve talked about it before and they’ve forgotten, so they usually let me off after that.”

  “Maybe you and I should have a holiday.”

  “You might have to teach me what they’re for.”

  “What they’re for,” I say firmly, “is for being with
someone you love a few hundred miles away from this sodding Village where we both live. Being with them all the time. Going to bed with them and waking up with them.”

  “Well, put like that, Casey…”

  So you see, there were some things I knew and she didn’t.

  * * *

  —

  We are sitting in the cafeteria of the Festival Hall before a concert. Susan has noticed early on that when my blood sugar drops I become, in her words, “a bit of a grumpus,” and she is now feeding me up to prevent this. I am probably having a something-and-chips; she will content herself with a cup of coffee and a few biscuits. I love these escapes we make up to London, just for a few hours, being together, away from the Village, from my parents and her husband and all that stuff, in the noise and crush of the city, waiting for the silence and then the sudden floatingness of music.

  I am about to say all this when a woman comes and sits at our table without a pretence of asking if we mind. A woman of middle age, by herself; that is all she was, though in memory I might have translated her into some version of my mother—at any rate, a woman who could be counted upon to disapprove of my relationship with Susan. And so, after a couple of minutes, knowing exactly what I am doing, I look across and say to Susan, in a clear, exact voice,

  “Will you marry me?”

  She blushes, covers her ears and bites her lower lip. With a bang and a push and a stomp, the invader picks up her cup and makes for another table.

  “Oh, Casey Paul,” says Susan, “you are mighty wicked.”

  * * *

  —

  I was having supper at the Macleods’. Clara was there too, back from university. Macleod was at the head of the table with his flagon of whatever, a mugful of spring onions in front of him like a jar of tulips.

  “You might be aware,” he said to Clara, “that this young man appears to have joined our household. So be it.”

  I couldn’t tell from his tone whether he was being pedantically welcoming or slyly indicating his disdain. I looked across at Clara, but got no help with interpretation.

  “Well, we shall see, shan’t we?” he continued, appearing to contradict his first pronouncement. He took in a mouthful of spring onion and shortly afterwards burped gently.

  “One of the things the young man is kindly, if belatedly, addressing is the question of your mother’s musical education. Or, should I say, lack thereof.”

  Then, turning to me: “Clara was named after Clara Schumann, which was perhaps a little ambitious on our part. She has never, alas, displayed much aptitude for the pianoforte, has she?”

  I couldn’t tell if the question was addressed to mother or daughter. As for me, I had never heard of Clara Schumann, so felt at even more of a disadvantage.

  “Maybe, if your mother had begun her musical education earlier, she might have been able to pass on to you some of her now late-flowering enthusiasm.”

  I had never before been in a household in which the male presence was so overbearing and yet so ambiguous. Perhaps this happens when there is only one man around: his understanding of the male role can expand unchallenged. Or perhaps this was just what Gordon Macleod was like.

  Still, my inability to grasp tone was a lesser matter that evening. The greater problem was that, at nineteen, I was unskilled at knowing how to behave socially at the table of a man whose wife I was in love with.

  Dinner and conversation proceeded. Susan seemed half-absent; Clara was quiet. I asked a few polite questions and answered some rather more direct ones in return. As I had told the tennis club’s high representatives, I had absolutely no interest in politics; though I did follow current events. So this would have been a few years after the Sharpeville massacre, to which I must have alluded; and doubtless my words contained some element of pious condemnation. Well, I did think it was wrong to massacre people.

  “Do you even know where Sharpeville is?” The Head of the Table had evidently identified me as a mewling pinko.

  “It’s in South Africa,” I replied. But as I did so, I suddenly wondered if this was a trick question. “Or Rhodesia,” I added; then thought again. “No, South Africa.”

  “Very good. And what is your considered judgement on the political scene there?”

  I said something about being against shooting people.

  “And what might you advise the police forces of the world to do when confronted with a rioting mob of Communists?”

  I hated the way adults asked you questions in a way which implied that they already knew the answer you were going to give, and that it would always be a wrong or stupid one. So I said something, perhaps facetious, to the effect that just because they were dead, this didn’t prove they were Communists.

  “Have you ever been to South Africa?” Macleod roared at me.

  Susan stirred at this point. “We’ve none of us been to South Africa.”

  “True, but I think I know more about the situation there than the two of you put together.” It seemed that Clara was excused from complicity in ignorance. “If we were to pile his knowledge on top of your knowledge—Pelion on Ossa, as it were—it still wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.”

  The long silence was broken by Susan asking if anyone wanted any more to eat.

  “Have you got any beans, Mrs. Macleod?”

  Yes, I could be a cheeky bastard, I now realise. Well, I was only nineteen. I hadn’t a clue who or what Pelion and Ossa might be; I was more struck by the notion of piling my knowledge on top of Susan’s. That was what lovers did, after all: they added to one another’s understanding of the world. Also, to “know” someone, in the Bible anyway, meant to have sex with them. So I had already piled my knowledge on top of hers. Even if it didn’t amount to more than a hill of beans. However tall a hill of beans might be.

  * * *

  —

  She told me that her father had been a Christian Science practitioner with many adoring female acolytes. She told me that her brother who had disappeared in the war had gone to a prostitute a few weeks before his last flight because he wanted to “find out what it was all about.” She told me that she couldn’t swim because she had heavy bones. Things like this tumbled out of her in no particular order, and in response to no particular enquiry on my part, other than the tacit one of wanting to know everything about her. So she laid them out, as if expecting me to make sense, to make order, of her life, and of her heart.

  “Things aren’t what they look like, Paul. That’s about the only lesson I can teach you.”

  I wonder if she is talking about the sham of respectability, the sham of marriage, the sham of suburbia, or…but she carries on.

  “Winston Churchill, did I tell you about seeing him?”

  “You mean, you went to Number Ten?”

  “Silly, no. I saw him in a backstreet in Aylesbury. What was I doing there? Not that it matters. He was sitting in the rear seat of an open-topped car. And his face was all covered in makeup. Red lips, bright pink face. He looked bizarre.”

  “You’re sure it was Churchill? I didn’t realise he was…”

  “…one of them? No, it’s nothing like that, Paul. You see, they were waiting to drive him through the city centre—it was after we won the war, or maybe it was the General Election, and he was made up for the cameras. Pathé News and all that.”

  “How weird.”

  “It was. So quite a few people saw this strange painted mannequin in the flesh, but far more saw him on the newsreels, when he looked like they expected him to.”

  I think about this for a while. It strikes me as a comic incident, rather than a general principle of life. Anyway, my interests are elsewhere.

  “But you’re what you look like, aren’t you? You’re exactly what you look like?”

  She kisses me. “I hope so, my fine and feathered friend. I hope so for both our sakes.
”

  * * *

  —

  I used to prowl the Macleod house, part anthropologist, part sociologist, wholly lover. At first I naturally compared it to my parents’ house, which I therefore found wanting. Here there was style, and ease, and none of that absurd house-pride. My parents had better, more up-to-date kitchen equipment, but I gave them no credit for this; nor for the fact that their car was cleaner, their gutters recently sluiced, their soffits regularly painted, their bathroom taps buffed to a shine, their lavatory seats hygienically plastic rather than warmingly wooden. In our house, the television was taken seriously, and stood centrally; at the Macleods’, they called it the goggle-box and hid it behind a firescreen. They owned no such thing as a fitted carpet or a fitted kitchen, let alone a three-piece suite or a bathroom set in matching colours. Their garage was so full of tools, discarded sports equipment, gardening implements, old motor mowers (one working) and unwanted furniture that there was no room in it for the Austin. At first all this seemed stylish and idiosyncratic. I was initially seduced, then slowly disenchanted. My soul no more belonged in a place like this than in my parents’ house.

  And, more importantly, I believed that Susan didn’t belong here either. It was something I felt instinctively, and only understood much later, over time. Nowadays, when more than half the country’s children are born out of wedlock (wed-lock: I’ve never noticed the two parts of that term before), it’s not so much marriage that ties couples together as the shared occupation of property. A house or a flat can be as beguiling a trap as a wedding certificate; sometimes more so. Property announces a way of life, with a subtle insistence on that way of life continuing. Property also demands constant attention and maintenance: it’s like a physical manifestation of the marriage that exists within it.

  But I could see, all too well, that Susan had not been the recipient of constant attention and maintenance. And I’m not talking about sex. Or not just.