Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  ‘Caveman,’ murmured Toni in one of our school accents.

  ‘And in having your family huddled round you under your protection.’

  ‘Chauvinist.’

  ‘And actually, you know, in having a child.’ (I wouldn’t normally have mentioned this, because Toni’s ‘wife’ had recently had what Toni called a Hoover-job; yet I felt under unfair attack.)

  ‘But I thought it was a mistake.’

  ‘She wasn’t exactly planned, no; but I don’t see that that makes any difference.’

  ‘Well, I just think it’s an odd formula: get the London Rubber Company to put pinpricks in the end of every Durex, and we get a new maturity in our population: serious-minded, caring, mortgaged up to their balls. They might even start buying my fucking books.’

  We walked on, and stopped by the dwarf peas.

  ‘By the way,’ he said, working his elbow up and down in a licentious gesture from the past, ‘had a bit on the side yet?’

  My first instinct was to tell him to mind his own sodding business. My second was to ignore the question. My third (why does it take so long?) was to say simply,

  ‘No.’

  ‘That’s interesting.’

  ‘Why is No interesting?’ (What did he have to be superior about?) ‘You mean how amazing that I’ve been faithful for six years? That you wouldn’t have lasted a week?’

  ‘No, what’s interesting is the pause before the No. Is it – No but I wouldn’t half mind a bit? No but I nearly got some last week? No because Marion shags me out too much?’

  ‘Actually, it was: Shall I smash his face in – No, on second thoughts I’ll tell him the truth. I take it you and Kally have some modern arrangement?’

  ‘Modern, old, don’t mind what you call it – anything except your soiled old Judaeo-Christian rubbish topped up with Victorian wankers’ sex-hatred.’ He stared at me belligerently.

  ‘But I’m not Jewish, I don’t go to church, I don’t wank – I merely love my wife.’

  ‘That’s what they all say. And you can still go on saying it when you’ve had the other. I take it you do still believe that when you die, you die?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘Well, that’s a relief. Then how the fuck can you bear to think that until you die you’ll never fuck another woman? How can you bear it? I’d just go mad. I mean, I’m sure Marion’s terrific and all that and puts her heels in your ears and drains you as dry as a loofah, but even so …’

  I wanted to end the conversation, but the image he had produced of Marion was so suddenly, so oddly hurtful (keep your filthy thoughts off my wife); besides, who did he think he was to lecture me?

  ‘Well, I’m not going into the details you’d doubtless enjoy, but our sex life’ (I paused, already feeling almost disloyal) ‘has, well quite enough variety …’

  Toni worked his elbow up and down again.

  ‘You don’t mean …’

  I had to head this one off quickly: ‘Look, just because you live on the Metropolitan Line, it doesn’t mean you haven’t heard of …’ I felt angry, then suddenly prim, and couldn’t finish my sentence. I felt assailed by the images I had started up of my own accord.

  ‘Careful where you put your tongue,’ said Toni delightedly. ‘Careless talk costs wives.’

  ‘And as for not … sleeping with anyone else, I don’t see it how you see it. I don’t spend my whole time in bed with Marion thinking, “I hope I don’t die before I’ve had it away with somebody else”. And anyway, once you’re used to … caviare you don’t get an urge for … boiled cod.’

  ‘There are more fish in the sea than that. Fish, fish, fish.’ Toni didn’t go on, waited smiling, inviting me to continue. I was irritated, as much at my awkward choice of metaphor as anything.

  ‘And anyway, I don’t believe in this new orthodoxy. It used to be, don’t screw around because you’ll be unhappy and catch VD and give it to your wife and have mad children, like in Strindberg or Ibsen or whoever it was. Now it’s screw around otherwise you’ll become a bore and won’t meet new people and will eventually become impotent with everyone except your wife.’

  ‘Which isn’t true?’

  ‘Of course it isn’t true; it’s just fashionable prejudice.’

  ‘Then why does it upset you? Why get so agitated when you defend what you believe in?’

  ‘Because people like you keep nagging people like me and writing books about it. Do you remember, when we were kids, someone came up with the theory of the Adulterous Prop? I’m not saying, in some cases, it isn’t a valid idea. It’s just that nowadays what you get is a bloody great set of scaffolding.’

  Toni paused; I could sense the counter-attack coming.

  ‘So you’re not a faithful husband because of, say, God’s command?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘Perhaps because of a categorical imperative: Screw not, lest thy wife be screwn?’

  ‘No, I’m not possessive in that way.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not a question of principle with you at all?’

  I felt apprehensive, as if I were being guided towards a sheep-dip and didn’t know what was going to be in it. Acid, no doubt, knowing Toni. He went on,

  ‘Have you ever discussed it with Marion?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Why not? I thought it was the first thing couples discussed.’

  ‘Well, to be quite honest, I have thought of mentioning it once or twice, but I don’t see how you can bring it up without making the other person think that there’s something behind it all’

  ‘Or rather someone.’

  ‘If you like.’

  ‘So you don’t know whether she’d mind or not?’

  ‘I’m sure she’d mind. Just as I’d mind the other way round.’

  ‘But she hasn’t asked you either?’

  ‘No, I said not.’

  ‘So it’s just …’

  ‘… a feeling. But a strong one. I know it; I feel it.’

  Toni sighed, with unnecessary breathiness; here comes the sheep-dip, I thought.

  ‘What is it,’ (trying to redirect him) ‘aren’t I interested enough in adultery for you?’

  ‘No, I was just thinking how things change. Do you remember, when we were at school, when life had a capital letter and it was all Out There somehow, we used to think that the way to live our lives was to discover or deduce certain principles from which individual decisions could be worked out? Seemed obvious to everyone but wankers at the time, didn’t it? Remember reading all those late Tolstoy pamphlets called things like The Way We Ought To Live? I was just wondering really if you would have despised yourself then if you’d known you were going to end up making decisions based on hunches which you could easily verify, but couldn’t be bothered to? I mean, I don’t think I find it particularly surprising; I just find it depressing.’

  There was a long silence during which we didn’t look at each other. I had the feeling that this time esprit d’escalier was going to take even longer to come than normal. Toni eventually continued:

  ‘I mean, perhaps I’m just as bad. I suppose I make lots of decisions on grounds of selfishness which I call pragmatism. I suppose in a way that’s just as bad as you.’

  It was as if, having drowned me, he had stood around waiting for the body to be washed up, and then offered it some half-hearted artificial respiration.

  We walked back to the house, and I told him a lot about plants on the way.

  3 • Stiff Petticoat

  The irony was that while I was being dressed down by Toni I could have said more; a little more, anyway. But maybe there’s a pleasure in knowing that you’re being wrongly assessed.

  Can you confess to virtue? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try. It’s a shady enough concept nowadays, after all. Perhaps virtue sounds too strong a word, though, implies something too positive. Or perhaps not. Who am I to shrug off a compliment? If you can commit a crime by failing to pull a drowning man out of a pond, then why can’t
you be called virtuous for resisting temptation?

  It began with a chance encounter on the 5.45 from Baker Street. I was waiting for it to pull out when a briefcase raked my ribs. I shifted sideways to allow room for the sort of slack-thighed fatty that the line caters for, when I heard,

  ‘Lloyd. It is Lloyd, isn’t it?’ I turned.

  ‘Penny.’ I knew he was Tim; he knew I was Chris; but even during the season when, as quail-boned twelve-year-olds, we’d played left and right centre together in a house rugger team, we’d never ventured beyond surnames. Later, he’d gone into the Maths sixth and become a prefect: membership of two despised classes had made him no longer acceptable company, merely a person to be nodded at in corridors while Toni and I loudly discussed the dynamic ambiguity of Hopkins.

  He still looked chunky, curly-haired and prefectorial; his commuter’s rig hardly changed him at all. I knew he’d gone up to Cambridge on a Shell scholarship: £700 a year in exchange for three years of his post-graduate life (usual bit of boss-class strong-arming, Toni and I had thought). As the train bored its way to Finchley Road, he filled me in on the rest: met his geography-teaching wife at – of all unpleasant ideas – a pyjama party; stayed with Shell for five years, then went to Unilever; three kids, two cars; struggling to pay for private education – the usual tale of banal prosperity.

  ‘Photographs?’ I asked, pretty bored.

  ‘What do you mean, photographs?’

  ‘Wife and kids – don’t you carry them around?’

  ‘I only see them every day and all weekend – why the hell should I carry their photos around?’

  I had to smile. I stared out of the window at a new tower-block hospital on the edge of playing fields: from high above, the football nets looked the size of hockey goals, the hockey goals like water-polo nets. An early-evening mist hung here and there at ankle height. I began to swap my life for his. Maybe it was guilt at having offended him, or maybe it was the truth, but my life, as it came out that evening, sounded rather like his, except for a lower fertility rate.

  Once I’d discarded my instinctive responses, I found that we got on well enough. I told him I was thinking of writing a social history of travel round London.

  ‘Bloody interesting,’ he said, and I couldn’t help feeling pleased. ‘Always wanted to know about that sort of stuff. Actually, I saw Dicky Simmons the other day – you remember him – and for some reason we got talking about all the disused tunnels there must be under London. Railway tunnels, post-office tunnels. He knows about things like that – works for the GLC now. Might be useful to you.’

  He might indeed. Simmons had been an embarrassing schoolboy: lonely, unpredictable, dandruffy, lacking in confidence. He didn’t look right either: and the regulation short haircut had only emphasised the ostentatious discord of his features. He spent his lunchtimes lurking in a corner of the sixth-form balcony, his bony, much-picked nose aimed at an obscure work of sexology, while with his free hand he tried pathetically to flatten back to his head a ninety-degree ear. There had been no hope, then, for Simmons.

  ‘Don’t jump,’ said Tim, ‘but Dicky and I are going to the OBA’s annual dinner next month. Come along and meet him.’

  I ruefully promised to bear it in mind. In the meantime, he asked Marion and me to ‘a little cheese-and-wine do’ the following Saturday. I said we’d come as long as we didn’t have to wear pyjamas.

  In the event, we couldn’t get a baby-sitter, so I went alone. The plot was trite: husband alone at party for the first time in years – drink in pipkinfuls – girl in Fifties revival clothes and lipstick (nostalgic, fetishist effect on husband) – talk of this and that and also of the other – both giggle-drunk – some flirting, verbal feel-up. And then, suddenly, it all started to go wrong; wrong, that is, in terms of my mild fantasy.

  ‘OK then?’ she suddenly said.

  ‘OK what?’ I replied. She looked at me for a few seconds, then said, in a threateningly sober tone.

  ‘OK so we go and fuck?’ (How old was she, for Christ’s sake: twenty? twenty-one?)

  ‘Oh well, I don’t know about that,’ I answered, suddenly a blushing fifteen, holding down my stiff petticoat.

  ‘Why not? Afraid to put your cock where your mouth is?’ She suddenly leaned forward and kissed me on the lips.

  I hadn’t felt this sort of panic for years. I thought, I hope to God it’s that new sort of lipstick which doesn’t come off on you. I looked around the room to see if anyone had noticed. I couldn’t see that anyone had. Then I looked again, seeking to catch someone’s eye, anyone’s. I couldn’t. Instead, I dropped my voice and said firmly,

  ‘I’m married.’

  ‘I’m not prejudiced.’

  The odd thing was, it didn’t feel like a tricky moral situation at all (maybe that was because I only half fancied her); just a tricky social situation. I recovered some of my nerve.

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. But you see, “I’m married” was short hand.’

  ‘It usually is. Which one is it this time – I’ll fuck you but don’t want to get involved; or I’ll fuck you and am interested but think we ought to get it all out in the open first; or My wife doesn’t understand me and I don’t know whether to fuck you or not but maybe we could just go somewhere and talk; or is it just plain I’m not going to fuck you?’

  ‘If those are the only available categories, then it’s the last.’

  ‘In that case’ – she leaned towards me, and I half-ducked to one side – ‘you shouldn’t tease cunt.’ Christ. Her detached zest was turning to aggression. Is that how they all talk nowadays? Ten years suddenly felt a long time. I thought, Stop, I’m the one who’s meant to be in his prime; I’m the one who’s experienced yet not set in his ways, principled yet flexible. That’s me.

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’

  ‘Well you wouldn’t deny that you were – how would you put it? – leading me on?’

  ‘Umm, no more than you were me.’ (You couldn’t compliment a girl these days without being sued for breach of promise.)

  ‘But I was trying to get off with you, wasn’t I?’

  ‘I admit I was … flirting with you.’

  ‘Well, then, you’re a cunt-teaser, aren’t you?’ and she repeated, in the clipped, condescending tone of one instructing a child, ‘Don’t tease cunt.’

  The odd thing was, I still found her rather attractive (though her features seemed to have become a little sharper by association); I still wanted to charm her in some way.

  ‘But why is everything so prescriptive and indivisible? Don’t you ever want to listen to just one track of a record? If you … I don’t know … open a packet of dates, do you have to scoff the lot?’

  ‘Thanks for the comparisons. It’s not a question of degree, just of honesty of intention. You were dishonest. You’re …’

  ‘All right, all right,’ (I didn’t want to be held down by the neck with my nose in that word again) ‘I admit a mild deception. But no more than if I’d asked you what job you did and you told me and I said “How interesting” even though I happened to think it the most boring job in the world. It’s just a fact of social protocol.’

  She looked at me with an expression poised between disbelief and contempt, then walked off. Why was I being accused of deviousness? I wondered, with a pained loyalty to myself. And why were there so many misunderstandings about sex?

  Later, on the train home, I remembered Toni’s Theory of Suburban Sex, which he had once elaborated to me when we were both sixteen and had yet to enter the land without signposts. London, he explained, was the centre of power and industry and money and culture and everything valuable, important and good; it was therefore, ex hypothesi, the centre of sex. Look at the number of gold-chained prostitutes for a start; and look at any Underground carriage – tight-clothed chippies all pressed up against Grosz caricatures. The closeness, the sweat, the urgency of the city all roared Sex at any observer of sensitivity. Now this sexual energy, he assured me, became g
radually dissipated as you moved away from the metropolis, until, by the time you got to Hitchin and Wendover and Haywards Heath, people had to look up books to find out what went where. This explained the widespread sexual abuse of animals in the countryside – simple ignorance. You don’t get animals being abused in the city.

  But in the suburbs, Toni went on (he was probably helping me understand my parents at the time), you are in a strange intermediate area of sexual twilight. You might think of the suburbs – Metroland, for instance – as being erotically soporific; yet the grand itch animated the most unlikely people. You never knew where you were: a chippy might turn you down; a golfer’s wife might rip off your school uniform without a by-your-leave and do gaudy, perverse things to you; shop assistants could jump either way. The Pope had formally banned nuns from living in the suburbs; Toni was quite confident of this. It was here, he maintained, that the really interesting bits of sex took place.

  There might, I thought that evening, be something in the Theory after all.

  4 • Is Sex Travel?

  Marion and I hadn’t seen Uncle Arthur for some months when Nigel rang to tell us he had died. I can’t claim the family was plunged into black; surprise was the nearest thing to grief any of us could muster. The last fifteen years hadn’t made me feel any more affectionate towards him; the most you could say was that I grew to respect the honesty of his dislike for me, and to value his warping self-sufficiency.

  As Arthur grew older he became more transparently and more insultingly mendacious. In his prime, his ploys had always been carefully prepared: the frangibility of his spinal cord or the old-soldier stiffness of his knee would be established early on: from his sincere glare you suspected he might be lying about them, but couldn’t be sure. Only later would he mention some task for which those lacking steel backs or teak knees were disqualified. Then you smiled your defeat.

  But in later years Arthur found no use for the smallest subtlety. He made no concession to style or politeness. ‘Fancy some tea?’ he would begin; then, rising a mere inch from the cushioned funk-hole of his armchair, would utter a lazy ‘Ouch’ and sink back.