Love, Etc

by Julian Barnes

  And if we are all therefore criminals, which of us shall condemn the other? Is my case more egregious than yours? I was entangled, at the time I met Gillian, with a señorita from the land of Lope, name of Rosa. Unsatisfactorily entangled, but I would say that, wouldn’t I? Stuart was doubtless entangled with a ballet class of fantasies and a wank mag of regrets at the time he met Gillian. And Gillian was unequivocally, indeed legally, entangled with the said Stuart at the time she and I met. You will say it is all a matter of degree, and I will reply: no, it is a matter of absolutes.

  And if, in your pressingly legalistic way, you insist on bringing charges, then what can I say except mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa, but I didn’t exactly nerve-gas the Kurds, did I? Additionally and alternatively, as the lawyers amongst you bifurcatingly put it, I would argue that the replacement of Stuart by Oliver in the heart of Gillian was—as you silky, wiggy, mouthy bipeds tend not to put it—no bad thing. She was, as the phrase goes, trading up.

  Anyway, that was all years ago, a quarter of our lifetimes ago. Doesn’t the term fait accompli spring to mind? (I shan’t push my luck with droit de seigneur or jus primae noctis.) Hasn’t anyone heard of the statute of limitations? Seven years for any number of torts and crimes, as I understand it. Isn’t there a statute of limitations for wife-stealing?

  Gillian What people want to know, whether they ask it directly or not, is how I fell in love with Stuart and married him, then fell in love with Oliver and married him, all within as short a space as is legally possible. Well, the answer is that I did just that. I don’t especially recommend you try it, but I promise it’s possible. Emotionally as well as legally.

  I genuinely loved Stuart. I fell in love with him straightforwardly, simply. We got on, the sex worked, I loved the fact that he loved me—and that was it. And then, after we were married, I fell in love with Oliver, not simply at all, but very complicatedly, entirely against my instincts and my reason. I refused it, I resisted it, I felt intensely guilty. I also felt intensely excited, intensely alive, intensely sexy. No, as a matter of fact we didn’t ‘have an affair,’ as the saying goes. Just because I’m half French people start muttering ménage à trois. It wasn’t remotely like that. It felt much more primitive for a start. And besides, Oliver and I didn’t sleep with one another until Stuart and I had separated. Why are people such experts on what they don’t know about? Everyone ‘knows’ that it was all about sex, that Stuart wasn’t much good in bed, whereas Oliver was terrific, and that while I might look pretty level-headed I’m a flirt and a tart and probably a bitch as well. So if you really want to know, the first time Oliver and I went to bed together he had a serious attack of first-night nerves and absolutely nothing happened. The second night wasn’t much better. Then we got going. In a funny sort of a way, he’s much more insecure in that area than Stuart.

  The point is, you can love two people, one after the other, one interrupting the other, like I did. You can love them in different ways. And it doesn’t mean one love is true and the other is false. That’s what I wish I could have convinced Stuart. I loved each of them truly. You don’t believe me? Well, it doesn’t matter, I no longer argue the case. I just say: it didn’t happen to you, did it? It happened to me.

  And looking back, I’m surprised it doesn’t happen more often. Long afterwards my mother said, apropos of some other emotional situation, I can’t remember, some twosome or threesome, she said, ‘The heart has been made tender, and that is dangerous.’ I could see what she meant. Being in love makes you liable to fall in love. Isn’t that a terrible paradox? Isn’t that a terrible truth?

  3

  WHERE WERE WE?

  Oliver Where were we? For the moment, a tangential observation. Strange how each of those three words encloses its successor, each shedding of letters echoing the sense of loss we always feel when casting the Orphean glance over the shoulder. A poignant diminution, once noticed. Compare and contrast—as the pedagogues used to put it—the lives of the principal English Romantic poets. Align them first by length of name: Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, Keats. Now consider their respective dates: 1770–1850, 1772–1834, 1792–1822, 1795–1821. What delight for the numerologist and truffler of arcana! The man with the longest name lived the longest, the one with the shortest lived the shortest, and so on in between. Better still, the first-born died the last, the last-born died the first! They tuck into one another like Russian dolls. Enough to make you believe in divine purpose, eh? Or at least, divine coincidence.

  Where were we? All right, just this once I’ll play the game of plodding particularity. I’ll pretend that memory is laid out like a newspaper. Very well: turn to the foreign news, colour stories, very very downpage. Small Incident in Minervois Village: Not Many Killed.

  I was just, at that random moment you choose to specify, disappearing from your sight (perhaps for ever, you thought; perhaps you loosed a cry of ‘Good riddance’ in the general direction of my vulnerable scapulae), taking the corner by the Cave Coopérative in my trusty Peugeot. A 403, you surely recall? Tiny radiator grille like a gaoler’s spyhole. Greeny-grey livery redolent of an epoch doubtless due for revival. Don’t you find it wearisome that nowadays they revive and fetishize decades almost before they’re finished? There should be a reverse statute of limitations. No, you may not revive the Sixties: it’s still only the Eighties. And so on.

  So there I was, two-wheeling out of your sight past glinting steel silos crammed with the crushed blood of the Minervois grape, while Gillian was doing a fast-fade in my rear-view mirror. A gauche term, don’t you find—rear-view mirror—so filled with plod and particularity? Compare the snappier French: rétroviseur. Retrovision: how much we wish we had it, eh? But we live our lives without such useful little mirrors magnifying the road just travelled. We barrel up the A61 towards Toulouse, looking ahead, looking ahead. Those who forget their history are condemned to repeat it. The rétroviseur: essential for not just road safety but the race’s survival. Oh dear, I feel an advertising slogan coming on.

  Gillian Where were we? I was standing in the middle of the village street in my dressing-gown. There was blood on my face, and it had dripped onto Sophie. Spots of blood on a baby’s forehead: like some Black Sabbath blessing. I looked a fright anyway, which was deliberate. I’d been getting at Oliver for a day or more, nagging at him, working him up to a pitch. It was all planned. All my plan. I knew Stuart would be watching. I made a very specific calculation. I thought that if Stuart could see Oliver being vile to me, and me being vile to Oliver, he’d think our marriage wasn’t to be envied and that would help him get on with his own life. My mother told me how he’d visit her and go on for hours about the past. I was trying to break that cycle for him, give him—what’s that word people use?—give him closure. My other calculation was that Oliver and I would get through it, that I could manage things. That’s what I’m good at, after all.

  So I was standing there like a scarecrow, like a madwoman. The blood was from Oliver hitting me with the car keys in his hand. I knew the village’s eyes were on me. I knew we’d have to leave. The French are much more bourgeois than the British when it comes down to it. The proprieties matter. Anyway, I’d tell Oliver that being in the village was part of the trouble.

  But of course the eyes which were on me that really counted were Stuart’s. I knew he was there, up in his hotel room. And I was thinking: have I got away with it? Will I make it work?

  Stuart Where were we? I remember exactly where I was. The room cost 180 francs a night, and the wardrobe door swung open again every time you shut it. The television had an indoor aerial which you had to keep adjusting. Dinner was trout with almonds followed by crème caramel. I slept badly. Breakfast was an extra thirty francs. Before breakfast I would stand at my window, looking across to their house.

  That morning I was watching Oliver drive off, doing his car no good, racing the engine in second. He seemed to have forgotten there were another two gears available. He’s always been hope
less with machinery. My window was open and I could hear this screeching from the car, and it was as if the whole village was screeching, and my head was screeching too. And there in the middle was Gillian. Still in her dressing-gown, the baby in her arms. She was turned away from me so I couldn’t see her face. A couple of cars went past, but it was as if she hadn’t heard them. She just stood there like a statue, looking in the direction Oliver had gone. After a while, she turned round and stared more or less straight at me. Not that she could have seen me, or known I was there. She had a handkerchief pressed against her face. Her dressing-gown was bright yellow, which seemed all wrong. Then she went slowly back into the house and shut the door.

  I thought: so it’s come to this?

  Then I went downstairs and had breakfast (30FF).

  4

  IN THE MEANTIME

  Gillian When we were in France we knew a pair of nice middle-aged Englishmen with a house up in the hills where the garrigue starts. One of them was a truly terrible painter and I had to be tactful about that. But they were one of those couples you meet from time to time who seem to have got their lives worked out. They’d cleared the land themselves and left the olive trees; there was a terrace and a small pool, art books and a pile of vine logs for barbecues; they even seemed to know the secret of getting a breeze to blow on a hot day. One of the best things about them was that they never gave us advice—you know, third stallholder on the left in the Tuesday market in the lower town of Carcassonne if you want the best … and you can’t trust plumbers except for … I used to take Sophie up there on hot afternoons. One day we were sitting on the terrace, and Tom looked away from me, down the valley. ‘Not that it’s any of our business,’ he murmured, as if to himself, ‘but all I’d say is, never get ill in a foreign language.’

  It became a sort of house joke. If Sophie sneezed, Oliver would come over all serious and say, ‘Now, Soph, don’t get ill in a foreign language.’ I can see him now, rolling around on the floor with her like a puppy, talking joined-up nonsense all the time, holding her up to look at the scarlet flowers on his climbing beans. I can’t say the last ten years have been easy, but Oliver’s always been a good father, whatever else you think of him.

  But I realised that Tom meant something more general. He wasn’t talking about knowing the French for antibiotics—anyway, my French is good enough, and Oliver always got by, even if it meant spouting opera in the pharmacie. No, he meant: if you’re going to be an expatriate, make sure you’ve got the temperament for it because anything that goes wrong gets exaggerated. Everything that goes right makes you feel terrifically pleased with yourself—you made the right decision, you made the break—but anything that goes wrong—quarrels, drains, unemployment, whatever—is likely to be twice as much nuisance.

  So I knew that if things were going to be rough for a while, we ought to come home. Apart from not wanting to face the village. So by the time Oliver got back from Toulouse on that fateful day I’d put the house with an estate agent and arranged to leave the keys with Mme Rives. I was very straightforward with Oliver; that’s to say, as straightforward as you can be when you’re keeping up a major deceit. I told him France wasn’t working out. I told him the jobs weren’t coming my way. I told him we should be grown-up enough to admit that the experiment had failed. And so on. I blamed myself. I was calm throughout, but said I’d been feeling stress, and admitted my jealousy of that girl he’d been teaching was irrational and unfounded. Finally, I said there was no reason why he shouldn’t bring his beloved Peugeot back to England. And that, I think, was the key which turned the lock. Oh, yes, and I’d made a good dinner.

  In short, it was one of those scenes common to all marriages, where things are half-talked about, and then a decision is made based on all the other things you haven’t talked about.

  We came home. Another thing we hadn’t talked about was having another child. I thought we needed the cement. So for as long as was necessary I was a little less careful, and Marie came along. Oh, don’t look at me like that. Half the marriages I know began with an unexpected pregnancy, and quite a few have had a tricky patch glossed over with another baby. That’s probably how you came into the world yourself, if you care to delve into your own history.

  I picked up my professional life again. I still had contacts. I took on Ellie as my assistant. We rent a small studio half a mile away. We really need a bigger space, as the work’s been expanding. Well, it needed to. I’ve been the breadwinner most of the time. It’s been tough on Oliver. He’s got lots of energy but he’s not … robust.

  Life has settled down again. I love my work, I love my children. Oliver and I get on well. I never expected him to be a nine-to-fiver when I married him. I encourage his projects, but I don’t necessarily count on them coming to anything. He’s companionable, he’s funny, he’s a good father, he’s nice to come home to. He cooks. I take everything on a day-to-day basis. That’s the only way, isn’t it?

  Look, I’m not Little Mary Sunshine. There’ve been … bad times. And I’m a normal mother, that’s to say in the night I have terrible fears. And in the daytime too. Sophie and Marie have only got to behave like the normal, lively girls they are—they’ve only got to behave as if they trusted the world, as if the world was going to be nice to them, they’ve only got to leave the house with that optimism on their faces—for my stomach to get tight with fear.

  Stuart Some clichés are true. Like America being the land of opportunity. At least, a land of opportunity. Some clichés aren’t true, like Americans having no sense of irony, or America being a melting pot, or America being the home of the brave and the land of the free. I lived there for almost ten years and knew lots of Americans and liked them. I even married one of them.

  But they’re not British. Even the ones who look British aren’t British, especially them. Which is fine by me. What’s that other cliché? Two nations separated by a common language? Yes, that’s true too. When someone used to shout at me, ‘How ya doin’?’ I’d automatically wave and holler back, ‘Good,’ though sometimes I’d deliberately put on a very English accent, which made them laugh. I’d say things like ‘I guess’ and ‘Sure’ and ‘You got it,’ and probably other stuff I didn’t notice.

  But it’s what’s underneath the words that makes the difference. For instance, my marriage—my second one, my American one—ended in divorce after five years. Now in England the voice-over would go, ‘His marriage failed after five years.’ I mean the voice-over in your own head, the one that comments on your life as you live it. But in the States the voice-over went, ‘His marriage succeeded for five years.’ They’re a nation of serial marriers, the Americans. I’m not referring to the Mormons, either. I think it’s because at heart they’re a profoundly optimistic people. There may be other explanations, but that’s the one I believe.

  Anyway, I’d better get on with my story. I was with the bank, in Washington, and after a couple of years, I started to become a bit American. I went native. Not Native American, but … Anyway. In Britain I’d have been sitting across a desk from people authorising small loans and thinking that in time—if I remained diligent and responsible—I would be in a position to authorise larger loans. But after a year or two in the States, I started to think: why him, why her, why not me? So I crossed to the other side of the desk.

  I opened a restaurant with a friend. This may surprise you, and it would have surprised me in England. But not over there. Over there you are a realtor one day and training to be a judge the next. I liked food, I understood money, I had a friend who cooked well. We found a site, got a loan, engaged a designer, hired staff and hey presto—we had a restaurant. Simple. Not simple in the doing, but simple in the thinking, and once you get the thinking right the doing is easier. We called it Le Bon Marché, to suggest reasonable prices as well as fresh produce. The style was fusion—French, Californian, Thai. You’d have liked it.

  Then I sold out to my partner and moved down to Baltimore. Started another restaura
nt. That did well too. But after a while … This is the thing about the States. In England it would be called ‘not sticking at it’ or ‘not knowing what you want.’ In the States, it’s normal. You succeed, you look for something else to succeed at. You fail, you still look for something else to succeed at. Profoundly optimistic, as I say.

  Organic food distribution, that’s what I got into next. It seemed to me an obvious growth area. You’ve got an ever-increasing number of consumers, especially in the cities, most of them affluent enough and concerned enough to pay more for uncontaminated produce. And you’ve got a growing number of producers, naturally in rural areas, many of them too local or too idealistic or too busy to understand distribution. It’s a question of making the connection. Farmers’ markets are all very well, but in my view they’re a promotional thing, almost a tourist thing. Basically, it’s a choice between retail outlets and box schemes. The box schemes are a bit amateurish and the stores often don’t know enough about marketing. Or they think that because they’re pure and virtuous they don’t need to promote themselves. They don’t understand that even today—especially today—virtue needs to be marketed.

  So that’s what I did. Distribution and marketing, that’s what I concentrated on. The fact of the matter is, a lot of organic food producers are about as in touch with modern civilisation as the Amish. And a lot of the retail outlets are still run by hippie types who think that being prompt and efficient is disgustingly middle-class and being able to add up correctly is a sin. Whereas their customers are increasingly normal middle-class people who don’t particularly need a dose of counter-culture every time they want a parsnip without poison in it. As I say, it was a question of making the connection.