Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  Yet the better I got at talking, gesturing and immersion, the more inner resistance built up to the whole process. Years later, I read about a Californian experiment on Japanese-born GI brides. There was a large colony of such women, who still spoke Japanese as regularly as English: Japanese in the shops and amongst themselves, English at home. The women were interviewed about their lives twice, the first time in Japanese, the second in English. The results showed that in Japanese, the women were submissive, supportive creatures, aware of the value of tight social cohesion; in English, they were independent, frank, and much more outward-looking.

  I’m not saying anything quite as bisecting as this happened to me. But after a while I definitely became aware, if not of saying things I didn’t believe, at least of saying things I didn’t know I’d thought in ways I hadn’t previously considered. I found myself more prone to generalisation, to labelling and ticketing and docketing and sectioning and explaining and to lucidity – God, yes, to lucidity. I felt a kind of internal stirring; it wasn’t loneliness (I had Annick), it wasn’t homesickness, it was something to do with being English. I felt, too, as if one part of me was being faintly disloyal to another part.

  One afternoon, when querulously conscious of this resented metamorphosis, I went to visit the Musée Gustave Moreau. It’s an unwelcoming place near the Gare Saint-Lazare which closes for an extra rogue day in the middle of the week (as well as for the whole of August) and so has even fewer visitors than you might expect; you tend to hear about it on your third visit and get around to going on your fourth. Stacked to the ceiling with pictures and drawings, it was left to the State by Moreau when he died, and has been grudgingly kept up ever since. It was one of my favourite haunts.

  I offered the blue-uniformed gardien my student card, as I’d already done several times that spring. He never recognised me, and went through the same ritual every time. He would be sitting at his desk, a cigarette in his right hand held below the level of the top, and a Série Noire pressed down in front of him by his left hand. Such is the hierarchy of bureaucratic offences. He’d look up, see a customer, pull open his top drawer with the last two fingers of his right hand, deposit the loose, wet, oval fag on an ash-tray, close the drawer, turn over the Série Noire on to its stomach, press it down even flatter, reach for his roll of tickets, murmur ‘No reduction’, tear off a ticket, push it in front of me, take my three francs, shove across fifty centimes change, pick my ticket up again, tear it in half, drop one part of it in his waste-paper basket and return the other to me. By the time I had a foot on the stairs the smoke would be rising again and the book turned over.

  Upstairs was a huge, high barn of a studio, inadequately heated by a chunky black central stove which must have been inadequately heating it ever since Moreau’s time. Around the walls hung finished and half-finished paintings, many of them enormous and all complex, involving that odd mixture of private and public symbolism which at the time I found so beguiling. Large wooden chests with thin drawers, like massive butterfly cabinets, contained scores of preliminary drawings. You pulled out the drawers and squinted through your own reflection in the covering glass at faint pencilled swoops and dips, studded here and there with details that would later be transformed into golds and silvers, flashing head-dresses, breastplates, bejewelled girdles, encrusted swords, and all worked into a new and burnished version of the antique or the scriptural: laced with eroticism, tinged with necessary violence, coloured with a palette of controlled excess.

  ‘Wanker’s art, isn’t it?’ An English voice, blatantly unhushed, shot across the bare boards from the other side of the studio. I went back to studying a pen-and-ink drawing for ‘The Suitors’; then another, in sepia, heightened with white.

  ‘It’s weird. It’s really surreal. What a taste in women. Amazons.’ This was a different voice, again a man’s, but slower, deeper, more ready to admire. I looked into a few more butterfly cabinets, but my attention wasn’t wholly on the drawings. I could hear the philistines – their pockets still bulging with duty-free – creaking their way slowly round the other side of the studio.

  ‘But it’s whack-off art, isn’t it?’ (first voice again) ‘It’s all just wrist stuff.’

  ‘Well, dunno,’ (second voice) ‘I mean, he’s got lots to say, hasn’t he? That arm there’s rather good.’

  ‘None of your aesthetic rubbish here, Dave.’

  ‘It is a bit self-indulgent,’ (third voice, a girl’s, quiet but high in pitch) ‘but we’re coming to it a bit cold, aren’t we? There’s a lot of context we ought to know about, I expect. Do you think that’s Salomé?’

  ‘Dunno.’ (second voice) ‘Why’s she got his head on a zither? I thought she carried it round on a tray.’

  ‘Poetic licence?’ (girl)

  ‘Could be.’ (second voice – ‘Dave’ – again) ‘Doesn’t look like Egypt in the background, though, does it? And who are those poofy shepherds?’

  That was enough. I turned round and gave them a blast – in French of course. With all the abstract nouns it sounded quite heightened and professional. Wanking, as far as I knew, was la masturbation, and there’s a lot of vowel richness in the word, which always helps when you’re trying to inject contempt. I took them apart over Salomé, who was of course a Thracian woman with the head of Orpheus. I threw in Mallarmé, and Chassériau, to whom Moreau was apprenticed, and Redon, whose vapid, washy maunderings are called symbolist by some, but who is as far from Moreau as Burne-Jones is from Holman Hunt.

  There was a pause. The three of them, no older than me, stood there looking puzzled. The first voice, a sort of tough-looking runt in a brown leather jacket and frayed jeans, turned to the second, taller but weaker-looking, with conventional English clothes (tweed jacket, V-neck pullover, tie), and said,

  ‘Get any of that, Dave?’

  ‘All Greek to me.’ Then, belying his apparent mildness, he looked at me, said loudly, ‘Verdun’, and drew his forefinger across his throat.

  ‘Get any of it, Marion?’ She was about the same height as leatherjacket, with one of those pinkish, freckled and faintly furry English complexions; her manner, though quiet, seemed direct.

  ‘Some of it,’ she said. ‘But I think it was all an act anyway.’

  ‘Whaffor?’

  ‘I think he’s probably English.’

  I pretended not to understand. Leatherjacket and Dave prowled round me like pygmies with a television explorer. I felt my clothes being looked over, then my hair, then the book in my hand. It was Jean Giono’s Colline, so I felt OK; when they saw that I had seen them looking, I held it up to them. Leatherjacket studied it.

  ‘Pardong, Mossoo, but are you actuellement a Brit?’

  I waved the book at him again, for fear I might laugh. I was nervily puritanical about clothes at that time. Any departure from a neat conventional style of dressing indicated, as far as I was concerned, parallel departures from reason, lucidity, trustworthiness and emotional stability. I rarely stayed around long enough to question my prejudices; still, here was a man in fraying, faded jeans nearly making me laugh. What an odd trio: this fellow, a girl who didn’t have any make-up on at all as far as I could see, and ‘Dave’, who looked, well, almost as if he could have been a friend of mine.

  ‘Je suis practically sure que c’est un Brit.’ Dave this time. Leatherjacket fingered my lapel.

  ‘Pouvez-vous …’ and Dave seized him suddenly, and swung him off into a clumping, camping waltz. The girl looked at me in an entirely pleasant fashion. No, she didn’t have any makeup; but on the other hand, she looked OK without it. How curious.

  ‘What are you doing over here?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, this and that. Bit of research, bit of writing, bit of having a change from having to do things. And you?’

  ‘Holiday for a few weeks.’

  ‘And them?’

  ‘Dave works over here in a bank. Mickey’s doing research at the Courtauld; that’s why we’re here.’

  ‘Oh really?
’ (Oh Christ) ‘What into?’

  ‘Moreau, actually.’ She smiled.

  ‘Oh Christ. And I suppose his French is pretty good …’

  ‘His mother was French.’

  Oh well, you lose some, you lose some, as we would have said at school. Dave and Mickey came clockworking back, humming the Blue Danube.

  ‘Well, Marion?’

  ‘He is French after all,’ she replied, smiling again, ‘but his English is jolly good.’

  ‘Eep eep ourah,’ shouted Dave, ‘Tott-en’am ’Ot-spure. Mi-chel Ja-zy. Bobb-ee Moiré. I kees you both sheek.’

  He didn’t, fortunately. The gardien had got to the top of the stairs, Série Noire still in his left hand. He threw us out.

  We went to a bar and had a drink. Gradually we ironed out who was French and who English, despite Dave’s curious method of conversation, which consisted largely of proper names pronounced in a heavy French (or Franche, as he would say) accent, accompanied by a semi-hysterical gesture. Marion offered no behavioural mannerisms one could grab hold of – whatever was said, she remained quiet, direct, open, bright. Mickey was the hardest to master, though. Ego, charm, competitiveness, and a certain cunning, which made him pretend to know less than he did until he’d found out roughly how much you knew. The sort of character who makes me react by being academic, diffident, wry if possible, but basically straight.

  ‘You’re, um, working on Moreau, I gather?’ was my first halting, peace-making move.

  ‘More like he’s working on me. Cross-buttock and body-slam, and when you’ve got that weight on top of you, you submit.’

  Dave looked ready to come up with an impression, but couldn’t think of which bit of a wrestler to do.

  ‘But why don’t you like him?’

  ‘It’s all academic wanking, isn’t it, as I seem to have said before? I mean, the idea of academic symbolism, it’s fucking ridiculous, isn’t it?’

  ‘It’s an oxymoron.’

  ‘I’ll buy the last part. But he’s so earthbound. He’s clever, and can paint, and odd, I’ll give you that. But he’s frozen – it’s like his colours, they look as if they’re bright and weird, but in fact they’re actually rather dull if you look at them.’

  ‘Not like …’

  ‘Not like Redon. Quite.’

  ‘Redon,’ went Dave, ‘Redon. Oxfor’, Bah-nbri, Bur-meeng’am. Changez, changez.’ He whistled and chuffed.

  ‘Why are you working on him then?’

  ‘It’s the grant, man, the grant. It’s got me right here … aaaaargh.’ He gurgled as he clutched at his heart, acting fatally wounded. Dave leaned over him, pressed his ear to his chest.

  ‘You gotta tell me, Doc,’ Mickey panted in a wrecked way, ‘you gotta tell me. Am I hurt bad?’

  Dave pulled up one of Mickey’s eyelids, slapped him round the face a few times, and listened again. Marion watched impassively. Dave put on a frown.

  ‘Well, you’re an intelligent man; I think you can face the truth. It’s serious, certainly, but probably not fatal. You have a displaced bill-fold and your credit has crumpled in under the pressure. You have this draining problem, but I think I’ll be able to put in a plug.’

  ‘Thanks, Doc, you’re a pal. I couldn’t have taken it from anyone else.’ They stopped and looked at me. I said nothing, wondering what was going on.

  ‘You realise, of course,’ Dave went on, ‘that you’re suffering from acute alcohol shortage?’

  ‘Oh no, Doc, do you mean I could …’

  ‘Afraid so. It’s one of the acutest cases I’ve seen for some time. Just take a look at this.’ He held up Mickey’s empty glass.

  ‘No, no, no, I won’t, I can’t,’ Mickey began to shout, hiding his head in his arms.

  ‘You must look,’ Dave said firmly. ‘You must face these things.’ Gradually, he began to prise Mickey’s arms away from his head. He held up the glass in front of the patient’s eyes. Mickey did a faint.

  I got the point. I would have done so earlier if I hadn’t been watching the play. It was my round.

  4 • Beatific Couples

  When I wasn’t with Annick, or wandering the streets looking to catch life on the hip – that sudden nun, the clochard with Le Monde, the monstrous sadness of a barrel organ – I was with Mickey, Dave and Marion. In a month together they had become inseparable. I made the natural comparison with Jules et Jim; Mickey replied, with an unsettling candour, that he had landed the Jeanne Moreau part. It was true: he was the instigator, the provoker, the one for whose attention the other two competed. Dave competed by joining in, Marion by pretending to stand apart. Uncertain of my status, I tagged along with them on rounds of cafés, return visits to the Musée Gustave Moreau (the gardien never recognised us), and sudden trips out of Paris to the edge of the Beauce, or to the mad, polychrome chocolate factory at Noisiel.

  Marion was believed by her parents to be taking a course which the organisers – with Gallic modesty – called Civilisation: chunks of Descartes, lectures on the Code Napoléon, sessions of Rameau, coach-tours of Versailles and Sèvres. Marion frequently tempted herself with reasons for staying away. Lunch with me was one more easy reason.

  We began meeting every few days at a little café-restaurant called Le Petit Coq near the République (Métro: Filles du Calvaire); we lunched off long, tubular sandwiches the size of small dachshunds. It wasn’t an amorous conspiracy; we met because we had time on our hands. We discussed Mickey and Dave a lot. I would practise my new-found candour and offer frowningly serious analyses of my shifting responses to them; Marion was more reticent in judgment, but also more generous. She was, I noted, practical in her thoughts, sharp on both vagueness and pretension. She was easy to talk to; but also had an unsettling habit of asking me questions which I imagined I had escaped from, and wouldn’t have to put up with again before my return to England.

  ‘What are you going to do, then?’ she once asked, over our third or fourth lunch.

  (Do? What was I going to do? What could she mean? Was she asking for a pass? Surely not here; though she was looking pretty today, her boyishly cropped hair newly washed, and a pinky-brown dress tightly gathered at all the nice places. Do? She couldn’t actually mean …)

  ‘You mean … with … my life?’ I half-giggled, waiting for her to join in.

  ‘Of course. What’s funny?’

  ‘Well, it’s funny that you’re the first person of my own age who’s actually ever asked that. It’s so … authoritarian.’

  ‘Sorry, I’m not meaning to sound authoritarian; just curious. I wondered if you’d ever asked yourself the question.’

  I’d never needed to, that was part of the trouble – I was always getting asked it by others. When I was a child, the question always came down at me vertically, from above, along with orange ten-shilling notes at Christmas and Boots tokens and strange powders and scents and the occasional swipe. When I was an adolescent, it came from a different (but still downward) angle, from concerned masters armed with pamphlets and the word ‘life’, which they pronounced as if it were an item of Corps uniform. Finally, when I was a student, the question came horizontally, from parents sharing a bottle of wine, from tutors sharing a manly sex joke, once from a girl who thought that it would act as an anaphrodisiac. When, I wondered, would the angle change; when would I find myself looking down on the question?

  ‘Well, I suppose my problem’s always been the short term. There are quite a lot of jobs I wouldn’t mind ending up with. I wouldn’t mind running the BBC, for instance, and I’d like to have my own publishing firm and an art gallery on the side while of course always leaving time to lead the RPO. Then I wouldn’t mind being a General in a sort of way, and there’s the Cabinet, though I think I’ll keep that up my sleeve in case all else fails. I’d quite like to run a cross-Channel ferry, and architecture is definitely a possibility, and you think I’m joking but you’d be surprised that I’m not really.’

  Marion just looked at me, half smiling, half impatient. />
  ‘I mean I am up to a point, but then again I’m not. One problem is, I sometimes don’t feel I’m quite the right age. Do you have that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I mean, you may happen to think I’m rather immature, but actually I often don’t feel quite at ease with the age I’ve got. Sometimes, in a funny sort of way, I long to be a sprightly sixty-five. You don’t have that?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘It’s as if everyone has a perfect age to which they aspire, and they’re only truly at ease with themselves when they get there. I suppose with most people it’s between twenty-five and thirty-five, so the question doesn’t really arise, or if it does it’s in a disguised form: when they’ve passed thirty-five they assume their disgruntlement comes from being middle-aged and seeing senility and death on the way. But it also comes from leaving behind their perfect age.’

  ‘How very odd. Fancy looking forward to bed bottles and tripping over paving stones.’

  ‘I said a sprightly sixty-five.’

  ‘Oh, so it’s going to be all country walks and reading Peacock by the fire and having adoring grandchildren making you muffins?’

  ‘I don’t know. I don’t have a specific fantasy image. I just have a feeling. But only sometimes.’

  ‘Maybe you can’t face the struggle to make a living.’

  ‘Why do you think there is a struggle?’ (Hah, not letting her get away with that one too easily. Just because she wants to be a civil servant or something.)

  ‘Well, how are you going to support your wife and children?’