Love, Etc

by Julian Barnes

  He filled me in on the last ten years. It all sounds pretty rosy. Gillian’s career has really taken off since they came back to London. Their two daughters are a pride and joy. They’re living in an up-and-coming part of town. And Oliver himself has ‘several projects in development.’

  Not so many that he could afford to buy his own round (you’ll have to forgive me for noticing such things). He didn’t exactly ply me with questions either, though he did ask at one point how my ‘greengrocery business’ was getting along. I said it was … profitable. This wasn’t the first word that came to mind, but it was the word I wanted Oliver to hear. I could have said it was fun, or a challenge, or time-consuming, or hard work, or whatever, but the way he asked the question made me pick the word profitable.

  He nodded in a slightly resentful way, as if there was some direct connection between people voluntarily handing over money for the best organic produce at The Green Grocer and other people not handing over money to Oliver to help him ‘develop his projects.’ And as if it was my duty, as the champion of the profit principle, to feel guilty about this. But I don’t, you see.

  And here’s another thing. You know how some friendships get stuck the way they were when they first began? Like in families, where someone’s still the little sister in the eyes of her big brother even though she’s drawing her pension. Well, that’s all changed between Oliver and me. I mean, in the pub he still treated me as if I was his kid sister. It’s the same for him. But not for me. I feel quite different now.

  Afterwards, I ran through some of the questions he didn’t ask. In the old days I might have felt a bit hurt. Not any more. I wonder if he noticed that I didn’t ask anything about Gillian. I let him tell me, but I didn’t ask.

  Gillian Sophie was doing her homework when Oliver came home. He was a bit drunk—not pissed, but in that three-drinks-on-an-empty-stomach mood. You know the scenario—the man returning home and half-expecting praise for doing so? Because in the back of his mind is the time before he got married when the evening would have rolled on without let or hindrance? So there’s a little edge of I don’t know what, aggression, resentment, which you in turn resent, because after all you didn’t stop him going out and you honestly wouldn’t mind if he stayed out longer, in fact all evening, because you like an evening alone with the children from time to time. Which makes things a little strained.

  ‘Where’ve you been, Daddy?’

  ‘Down the pub, Soph.’

  ‘Are you drunk?’

  Oliver wheeled around the room, doing drunk and breathing all over Sophie, who pretended to faint and wave the fumes away with her hand.

  ‘Who’ve you been getting drunk with?’

  ‘An old friend. An old mucker. An American plutocrat.’

  ‘What’s a plutocrat?’

  ‘Someone who earns more than I do.’ Like the rest of the world, I thought.

  ‘Did he get drunk too?’

  ‘Drunk? He got so drunk his contact lenses fell out.’

  Sophie laughed. I relaxed. For a moment. Wrongly. Do you think children have an instinct at such times?

  ‘So who is he?’

  Oliver looked at me. ‘He’s just Stuart.’

  ‘That’s a funny name—Just Stuart.’

  ‘Well, he’s a lawyer, you see. In all respects except that of actually being a lawyer.’

  ‘Daddy, you are drunk.’ Oliver breathed over her again, Sophie gagged again, and seemed to be going back to her homework. ‘So how do you know him?’

  ‘Him?’

  ‘Just Stuart the Plutocrat.’

  Again Oliver looked at me. I couldn’t tell if Sophie was picking up on it. ‘How do we know Just Stuart?’ he asked me. Oh, thanks a bunch, I thought. You keep your hands clean. I also thought: now isn’t the time.

  ‘He was someone we knew,’ I said rather vaguely.

  ‘Obviously,’ she replied, sounding older than her years.

  ‘Sandwich,’ I said to Oliver. ‘Bed,’ I said to Sophie. They know that voice of mine. I know it too, and don’t like to hear it too often. But what else can you do?

  Oliver was away in the kitchen for quite a while and came back with a big chip butty. He’s got this deep fryer he’s ridiculously proud of, with some kind of filter that’s meant to absorb the fumes. It doesn’t, of course.

  ‘The secret of a good chip butty,’ he said, not for the first time, ‘is that the heat of the chips melts the butter on the bread.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘So that it runs down your wrists.’

  ‘No. So—Stuart?’

  ‘Ah, Stuart. He’s in the pink. In the grey. In the money. Wouldn’t let me buy my round—you know how it is when plutocracy strikes.’

  ‘I don’t think either of us knows that.’

  According to Oliver, Stuart is the same as ever, apart from being a plutocrat, and a beer bore who talks a lot about pigs.

  ‘Are you seeing him again?’

  ‘Didn’t arrange to.’

  ‘Have you got his number?’

  Oliver gave me a look and slopped up some butter from his plate. ‘He didn’t give it me.’

  ‘You mean he refused?’

  There was some chewing, then a stagey sigh. ‘No, I mean that I didn’t at any point ask and he didn’t at any point offer.’

  I felt relieved when I heard this. It was worth Oliver’s irritation. He’s probably just over on a brief trip.

  Do I want to see Stuart again? I asked myself that question later. And I don’t know the answer. I’m usually good at making my mind up about things—well, someone has to be around here—but I realise that when it comes to this, I want someone else to make the decision for me.

  Anyway, I shouldn’t think it will arise.

  Terri I have friends living out on the Bay. They told me how the crabbers work. They start in the middle of the night, around two-thirty, and go through till the morning. They lay out this line, that can be as long as five hundred yards, with weights every few yards and the bait’s attached to them. The bait they use is generally eel. Then after they’ve laid out the line, they begin to pull it in, and this is where you need a good eye and a lot of skill. The crabs will be holding onto the eel, but crabs aren’t stupid, they aren’t going to let themselves be pulled up into the air and just picked off and flung into the basket, are they? So just before the crab comes to the surface, just before it might let go, the crabber has to reach smoothly into the water and scoop it out.

  As my friend Marcelle says: remind you of something?

  Stuart What did you think of Oliver’s behaviour? I mean, honestly? I don’t know what I was expecting. Perhaps I was expecting something I couldn’t admit to myself. But I’ll tell you this. I wasn’t expecting nothing. I wasn’t expecting, Hi Stuart, my old chum, my old mucker, haven’t seen you for a few years, yes you may buy me a drink, and then another, let me touch my forelock to you kind sir, and another, and in between I’ll carry on patronising you just where I left off. That’s what I call nothing. Perhaps it was a bit naïve of me.

  But there are lots of things about life that aren’t straightforward, don’t you find? Not liking your friends, for instance. Or rather, liking them and not liking them at the same time. Not that I think of Oliver as a friend any more, of course. Although he obviously still thinks of me as a friend. You see, that’s another complication: A thinks of B as a friend, but B doesn’t think of A as a friend. Friendship can be more complicated than marriage, if you ask me. I mean, marriage, that’s the ultimate challenge for most people, isn’t it? The moment when you put your whole life on the line, when you say, here I am, this is what I stand for, I’ll give you everything I’ve got. I don’t mean worldly goods, I mean heart and soul. In other words, we’re aiming for a hundred percent, aren’t we? Now we may not get that hundred percent, most likely we won’t, or we might get it for a while and then settle for less, but we’ll be aware of that figure, that completeness, existing. What used to be called an ideal. I g
uess we call it a target nowadays. And then when things go wrong, when the percentage drops below an agreed target figure—say fifty percent—you have this thing called divorce.

  But with friendship, it’s not so simple, is it? You meet someone, you like them, you do things together—and you’re friends. But you don’t have a ceremony saying you are, and you don’t have a target. And sometimes you’re only friends because you have friends in common. And there are friends you don’t see for a while who you pick up with straight away, right where you left off; and others where you have to start all over again. And there’s no divorce. I mean, you can quarrel, but that’s another thing. Now Oliver just thought we could pick up from where we’d left off—no, from a point some way before we left off. Whereas I wanted to look and see.

  What I saw, in a nutshell, was this. I offer him a drink, he asks for a Skullsplitter. I say what about a Belhaven Wee Heavy. He laughs at me for being a pedant and having a sense-of-humour bypass. ‘Joke, Stuart. Joke.’ The point is: Oliver doesn’t know there is a beer called Skullsplitter. It’s made in the Orkneys and it’s got a wonderfully creamy taste. Someone said it was a bit like fruit cake. Raisiny. That’s why I suggested a Belhaven instead. But Oliver doesn’t know all this, and it doesn’t cross his mind that I do. That after ten years I might know one or two things more than I did before.

  Oliver So what do you think my portly chum is worth? With that question, as with so many others, one may take the high road or the low road, and for once you will catch Oliver snapping the Velcro fasteners on his trampoline-soled trainers and joining the democratic thrum. La rue basse, s’il vous plaît. We are not discussing the moral avoirdupois of the said individual, but requiring brusquer information. Stuart: is he replete with the long green? While quaffing and quenching with him I did not, out of sheer tact, enquire too subcutaneously about his sojourn in the Land of the Fee, but it did strike me that if the liquidity was sloshing around his calves like a Venetian flood-tide he might—to switch city-states—care to Medici some of the moolah in my direction. There are times when the artist is not ashamed to play his sempiternal role as the recipient of alms. The lien between art and suffering is a gilded cord which can bind a touch tightly. Another day, another dolour.

  And I am aware that in the world of PC Plod’s notebook, the Puginesque witness box, and the gnarled hand on the Bible, in the world of Mr-Valiant-for-Truth, Stuart is not in the strictest sense of the term portly. If anything, his corporeal lineaments suggest the rank axillary fug of the gymnasium, or the spiritual aridity of the domestic exercise bicycle. Perhaps he swings a pair of Indian clubs while yodelling along to his Frank I field records. Don’t ask me. All I pump is irony.

  I also, you might have noticed, deal in subjective truth—so much more real, and more reliable, than the other sort—and according to that criterion Stuart was, is now, and ever more shall be so, portly. His soul is portly, his principles are portly, and I trust his deposit account is portly too. Do not be misled by the slim husk he currently presents for inspection.

  He did tell me one interesting fact, which may or may not relate to the above. He told me that pigs can suffer from anorexia. Did you know that?

  Gillian I said to Oliver, ‘Did Stuart ask after me?’

  He looked a bit vague. He was about to reply, then stopped, looked vague again, and said, ‘I’m sure he did.’

  ‘And what did you reply?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I mean, Oliver, when Stuart asked you about me, you must have answered something. So what did you say?’

  ‘Oh, the usual … stuff.’

  I waited, which normally works with Oliver. But he just got vague again. Which means either that Stuart never asked after me, or that Oliver can’t remember what he said, or that he can but doesn’t want to repeat it.

  What do you think ‘the usual stuff’ about me is?

  7

  DINNER

  Gillian When I said we fall into bed and don’t have sex, you did know it was a joke, didn’t you? I should think we have sex about as often as the national average, whatever that is. As often as you do, perhaps. And some of the time it’s national average sex. I’m sure you know what I mean. I’m sure you’ve had it yourself. You may be just about to have it, when you finish this bit.

  It goes like this. Not as often as it used to be (and not at all when Oliver was ill). More and more on the same nights every week—Friday, Saturday, Sunday. No, that sounds like boasting. One of the three. Usually Saturday—Friday I’m too tired, Sunday I’m thinking about Monday. So, Saturday. A bit more often in hot weather, a bit more often on holiday. You can’t rule out the effect of a sexy film, either, though to tell the truth that seems to work in the opposite way nowadays. When I was younger screen sex used to get my juices flowing. Now I find I sit there thinking, it’s not like that—and I don’t mean it’s not like that for me, I mean it’s not like that for anyone else either. So it doesn’t work as an aphrodisiac. It still does for Oliver, though, which can cause a problem.

  You catch yourself thinking, well, we could always put it off to another time—it’s not as if we’re going anywhere. That moment of wanting gets more … fragile, I think. You’re watching a TV programme, half-thinking about going to bed, then you change channels, watch some rubbish and within twenty minutes you’re both yawning and the moment’s gone. Or one of you wants to read and the other one doesn’t and he/she lies there in the half-dark waiting for the light to be put out, and then the waiting, the hope, turns to mild resentment, and the moment goes, and that’s it. Or, a few days go past—more than usual, anyway—and you find that time works both ways simultaneously. On the one hand you miss sex and on the other you begin to forget about it. When we were kids we used to think that monks and nuns must be secretly randy all the time. Now I think: I bet they don’t worry about it at all, most of them, I bet it just goes away.

  Don’t get me wrong. I like sex; so does Oliver. And I still like sex with Oliver. He knows what I like and what I want. Orgasm is not a problem. We know the best way to get there, for both of us. You could say that was almost part of the problem. If there is one. I mean, we almost always make love in the same way—same amount of time, same length of (horrid word) foreplay, same position, or positions. And we do it like that because that’s what works best—that’s what experience has told us we like best. So it becomes a tyranny, or obligation, or something. In any case, impossible to get out of. The rule about married sex, if you’re interested—and you may not be—is that after a few years you aren’t allowed to do anything you haven’t done before. Yes, I know, I’ve read all those articles and advice columns about how to spice up your sex-life, about getting him to buy you special underwear, and sometimes just having a romantic candlelit dinner for two, and setting aside quality time to be together, and I just laugh because life isn’t like that. My life, anyway. Quality time? There’s always another load of washing.

  Our sex-life is … friendly. Do you know what I mean? Yes, I can see that you do. Perhaps all too well. We’re partners in the act. We enjoy one another’s company in the act. We do our best for one another, we look after one another in the act. Our sex-life is … friendly. I’m sure there are worse things. Much worse.

  Have I put you off? He or she beside you has had their light out for some time now. They’re doing that breathing which is meant to sound like sleep but doesn’t really. You probably said, ‘I’ll just finish this bit,’ and got a friendly grunt in reply, but then you read on a bit longer than you thought. But it doesn’t matter now, does it? Because I’ve put you off. You don’t feel like sex any more. Do you?

  Marie Just Stuart and Pluto the Cat are coming to dinner.

  Sophie Plutocrat.

  Marie Pluto the Cat.

  Sophie It’s plutocrat. It means having lots of money.

  Marie Just Stuart and Pluto the Cat are coming to dinner.

  Stuart I offered to take them out, but they said there were problems
getting a babysitter. I was fairly relieved by the time I got there, because I’d been driving through some pretty unfamiliar pages of the A–Z. Where they’re living now does not qualify as prime restaurant territory. Nothing but what Oliver in the old days used to call botulism takeaways.

  I got lost a few times in the dark and the rain, and started wishing the city had been built on the grid system. Anyway, I finally got to their bit of north-east London. ‘Mixed’ is one way of describing it. Estate agents might call it ‘up-and-coming’ and hope not to get sued. Do you still talk about ‘gentrification’ over here? That used to be the word. But I’ve been out of the loop for a while. Looking at the street Oliver and Gillian live in, I couldn’t make up my mind: were the houses coming up in the world, or the people going down, or the other way around? One house with a burglar alarm, the next boarded up; one with a carriage lamp, the next in multiple occupancy with a landlord who hasn’t painted it since the war. There were a couple of skips, but they somehow looked depressing. Is there a word for it when gentrification doesn’t work?

  They live in the bottom half of a small terrace house: they have the basement and part of the ground floor. The metal handrail wobbled as I went down the steps and there was standing water by the door. ‘37A’ was painted on the brickwork in a hand I could tell wasn’t Gillian’s. Oliver answered the bell, took the bottle from my hand, examined it and said, ‘How witty.’ Then he started reading out the back label. ‘Contains sulfites,’ he quoted. ‘Tut, tut, Stuart, where are your green credentials?’

  Now this is a complex question. I was about to say that while I was theoretically in favour of organic wines, the practicalities were complicated—indeed, I did start saying something along these lines—when Gillian came out of the kitchen. Actually, it’s more an alcove or a galley than a kitchen. She was drying her hands on a tea-towel. Oliver immediately started jumping about, doing a fatuous act—‘Gillian, this is Stuart, Stuart, may I present …’ and so on—but I didn’t pay him any attention and I don’t think she did either. She looked—she looked like a proper woman, if you know what I mean. I don’t mean grown-up—though I do mean that as well—and I don’t mean older—though I do mean that as well. No, she looked like a proper woman. I could try and describe her, and what the differences were, but that wouldn’t convey things properly because I wasn’t standing there making an inventory. I was just sort of taking her in, seeing her again, in a general sort of way, if you know what I mean.