The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  “Nice one, Barney,” we chorused.

  “And then my mum asked if I was planning to idle away my whole life, and you know, I was beginning to get annoyed—I’m like my father in that, slow burn, except I don’t give that little warning cough. Anyway, my dad suddenly loses it, stands up, rips open the curtains and shouts,

  “ ‘We don’t want you treating this place like a fucking hotel!’ ”

  “Oh, that old one. We’ve all had that. So what did you say?”

  “I said, ‘If this was a fucking hotel, the fucking management wouldn’t burst into my room at ten in the morning and sit on my fucking bed and bollock me.’ ”

  “Barney, you ace!”

  “Well, it was very provoking, I thought.”

  “Barney, you ace!”

  * * *

  —

  So the Macleod household consisted of Susan, Mr. E.P., and two daughters, both away at university, known as Miss G. and Miss N.S. There was an old char who came twice a week, Mrs. Dyer; she had poor eyesight for cleaning but perfect vision for stealing vegetables and pints of milk. But who else came to the house? No friends were mentioned. Each weekend, Macleod played a round of golf; Susan had the tennis club. In all the times I joined them for supper, I never met anyone else.

  I asked Susan who their friends were. She replied, in a casually dismissive tone I hadn’t noted before, “Oh, the girls have friends—they bring them home from time to time.”

  This hardly seemed an adequate response. But a week or so later, Susan told me we were going to visit Joan.

  “You drive,” she said, handing me the keys to the Macleods’ Austin. This felt like promotion, and I was fastidious with my gear-changing.

  Joan lived about three miles away, and was the surviving sister of Gerald, who donkey’s years previously had been sweet on Susan, but then had died suddenly from leukaemia, which was beastly luck. Joan had looked after their father until his death and had never married; she liked dogs and took an afternoon gin or two.

  We parked in front of a squat, half-timbered house behind a beech hedge. Joan had a cigarette on when she answered the door, embraced Susan and looked at me inquisitively.

  “This is Paul. He’s driving me today. I really need my eyes testing, I think it’s time for a new prescription. We met at the tennis club.”

  Joan nodded, and said, “I’ve shut the yappers up.”

  She was a large woman in a pastel-blue trouser suit; she had tight curls, brown lipstick, and was approximately powdered. She led us into the sitting room and collapsed into an armchair with a footstool in front of it. Joan was probably about five years older than Susan, but struck me as a generation ahead. On one arm of her chair was a face-down book of crosswords, on the other a brass ashtray held in place by weights concealed in a leather strap. The ashtray looked precariously full to me. No sooner had Joan sat down than she was up again.

  “Join me in a little one?”

  “Too early for me, darling.”

  “You’re not exactly driving,” Joan replied grumpily. Then, looking at me, “Drink, young sir?”

  “No thank you.”

  “Well, suit yourselves. At least you’ll have a gasper with me.”

  Susan, to my surprise, took a cigarette and lit up. It felt to me like a friendship whose hierarchy had been established long ago, with Joan as senior partner and Susan, if not subservient, at any rate the listening one. Joan’s opening monologue told of her life since she’d last seen Susan, which seemed to me largely a catalogue of small annoyances triumphantly overcome, of dog-talk and bridge-talk, which resolved itself into the headline news that she had recently found a place ten miles away where you could get her favourite gin for some trifling sum less than it cost in the Village.

  Bored out of my skull, half-disapproving of the cigarette Susan appeared to be enjoying, I found the following words coming out of my mouth:

  “Have you factored in the petrol?”

  It was as if my mother had spoken through me.

  Joan looked at me with interest verging on approval. “Now, how would I do that?”

  “Well, do you know how many mpg you get from your car?”

  “Of course I do,” Joan replied, as if it were outrageous and spendthrift not to know. “Twenty-eight on average around here, a bit over thirty on a longer trip.”

  “And how much do you pay for petrol?”

  “Well, that obviously depends on where I buy it, doesn’t it?”

  “Aha!” I exclaimed, as if this made the matter even more interesting. “Another variable. Have you got a pocket calculator, by any chance?”

  “I’ve got a screwdriver,” said Joan, laughing.

  “Pencil and paper, at least.”

  She fetched some and came to sit next to me on the sofa, reeking of cigarettes. “I want to see this in action.”

  “So how many off-licences and how many petrol stations are we talking about?” I began. “I’ll need the full details.”

  “Anyone would think you’re from the Inland Fucking Revenue,” said Joan with a laugh and a thump on my shoulder.

  So I took down prices and locations and distances, identifying one case of spurious false economy, and came up with her two best options.

  “Of course,” I added brightly, “this one would be even more advantageous if you walked into the Village rather than drove.”

  Joan gave a mock shriek. “But walking’s bad for me!” Then she took my table of calculations, went back to her chair, lit up another cigarette, and said to Susan, “I can see that he’s a very useful young man to have around.”

  As we were driving away, Susan said, “Casey Paul, I didn’t know you could be so wicked. You had her eating out of your hand by the end of it.”

  “Anything to help the rich save money,” I replied, carefully shifting gear. “I’m your man.”

  “You are my man, strange as it may seem,” she agreed, slipping her flattened hand beneath my left thigh as I drove.

  “By the way, what’s wrong with your eyes?”

  “My eyes? Nothing, as far as I know.”

  “Then why did you go on about having them tested?”

  “Oh, that? Well, I have to have a form of words to cover you.”

  Yes, I could see that. And so I became “the young man who drives me” and “my tennis partner,” and later, “a friend of Martha’s” and even—most implausibly—“a kind of protégé of Gordon’s.”

  * * *

  —

  I don’t remember when we first kissed. Isn’t that odd? I can remember 6–2; 7–5; 2–6. I can remember that old driver’s ears in foul detail. But I can’t remember when or where we first kissed, or who made the first move, or whether it was both of us at the same time. And whether perhaps it was not so much a move as a drift. Was it in the car or in her house, was it morning, noon or night? And what was the weather like? Well, you certainly won’t expect me to remember that.

  All I can tell you is that it was—by the modern speed of things—a long time before we first kissed, and a long time after that before we first went to bed together. And that between the kissing and the bedding I drove her up to London to buy some contraception. For her, not me. We went to John Bell & Croyden in Wigmore Street; I parked round the corner while she went in. She returned with a brown, unbranded bag containing a Dutch cap and some contraceptive jelly.

  “I wonder if there’s a book of instructions,” she says lightly. “I’m a bit out of practice with all this.”

  In my mood—a kind of sombre excitement—I’m momentarily unsure if she’s referring to sex, or to putting in the cap.

  “I’ll be there to help,” I say, thinking that this covers both interpretations.

  “Paul,” she says, “there are some things it’s better for a man not to see. Or to think about
.”

  “OK.” This definitely means the second option.

  “Where will you keep it?” I ask, imagining the consequences of its discovery.

  “Oh, somewhere-somewhere,” she replies. None of my business, then.

  “Don’t expect too much of me, Casey,” she goes on rapidly. “Casey. That’s K.C. King’s Cross. You won’t be a crosspatch, will you? You won’t get all ratty and shirty with me, will you?”

  I lean across and kiss her, in front of whatever interested pedestrians Wimpole Street contains.

  I know already that she and her husband have separate beds, indeed separate rooms, and their marriage has been unconsummated—or rather, sex-free—for almost twenty years; but I haven’t pressed her for reasons or particulars. On the one hand, I am deeply curious about almost everybody’s sex life, past, present and future. On the other, I don’t fancy the distraction of other images in my head when I am with her.

  I am surprised that she needs contraception, that at forty-eight she is still having periods, and that what she refers to as The Dreaded has not yet arrived. But I am rather proud that it hasn’t. This is nothing to do with the possibility that she might get pregnant—nothing could be further from my thoughts or desires; rather it seems a confirmation of her womanliness. I was going to say girlishness; and perhaps that’s more what I mean. Yes, she is older; yes, she knows more about the world. But in terms of—what shall I call it? the age of her spirit, perhaps—we aren’t that far apart.

  * * *

  —

  “I didn’t know you smoked,” I say.

  “Oh, just the one, occasionally. To keep Joan company. Or I go out into the garden. Do you disapprove terribly?”

  “No, it just came as a surprise. I don’t disapprove. I just think—”

  “It’s stupid. Yes it is. I just take one of his when I’m fed up. Have you noticed the way he smokes? He lights up and puffs away as if his life depends upon it, and then, when he’s halfway through, he stubs it out in disgust. And that disgust lasts until he lights up the next one. About five minutes later.”

  Yes, I have noticed, but I let it go.

  “Still, it’s his drinking that’s more annoying.”

  “But you don’t?”

  “I hate the stuff. Just a glass of sweet sherry at Christmas, so as not to be accused of being a spoilsport. But it changes people. And not for the better.”

  I agree. I have no interest in alcohol, or in people getting “merry,” or “whistled,” or “half seas over” and all the other words and phrases which make them feel better about themselves.

  And Mr. E.P. was no exemplar of the virtues of drinking. While waiting for his dinner, he would sit at the table surrounded by what Susan called “his flagons and his gallons,” pouring from them into his pint mug with an increasingly unsteady hand. In front of him was another mug, stuffed with spring onions, on which he would munch. Then, after a while, he would belch quietly, covering his mouth in a pseudo-genteel manner. As a consequence, I have loathed spring onions for most of my life. And never thought much of beer either.

  * * *

  —

  “You know, I was thinking the other day that I haven’t seen his eyes for years. Not really. Not for years and years. Isn’t that strange? They’re always hidden behind his glasses. And of course I’m never there when he takes them off at night. Not that I want to see them especially. I’ve seen enough of them. I expect it’s the same for a lot of women.”

  This is how she tells me about herself, in oblique observations which don’t require a response. Sometimes, one leads on to another; sometimes, she lets drop a single statement, as if clueing me in to life.

  “The thing you have to understand, Paul, is that we’re a played-out generation.”

  I laugh. My parents’ generation don’t seem at all played out to me: they still have all the power and money and self-assurance. I wish they were played out. Instead, they seem a major obstacle to my growing up. What’s that term they use in hospitals? Yes, bed-blockers. They were spiritual bed-blockers.

  I ask Susan to explain.

  “We went through the war,” she says. “It took a lot out of us. We aren’t much good for anything anymore. It’s time your lot took charge. Look at our politicians.”

  “You aren’t suggesting I go into politics?” I am incredulous. I despise politicians, who all strike me as self-important creeps and smoothies. Not that I’ve ever met a politician, of course.

  “It’s exactly because people like you don’t go into politics that we’re in the mess we are,” Susan insists.

  Again, I am baffled. I’m not even sure who “people like me” might be. For my school and university friends, it seemed like a badge of honour not to be interested in all the matters which politicians endlessly discussed. And then their grand anxieties—the Soviet threat, the End of Empire, tax rates, death duties, the housing crisis, trade union power—would be endlessly regurgitated at the family hearth.

  My parents enjoyed television sitcoms, but were made uneasy by satire. You couldn’t buy Private Eye in the Village, but I would bring it back from university and leave it provocatively around the house. I remember one issue whose cover had a floppy 33 rpm disk loosely attached to it. Peeling off the record revealed the photo of a man sitting on the lavatory, trousers and pants round his ankles, shirttails keeping him decent. On to the neck of this anonymous squatter was montaged the head of the Prime Minister, Sir Alec Douglas-Home, with a bubble coming out of his mouth saying, “Put that record back at once!” I found it supremely funny, and showed it to my mother; she judged it stupid and puerile. Then I showed it to Susan, who was overcome with laughter. So that was everything decided, in one go: me, my mother, Susan and politics.

  * * *

  —

  She laughs at life, this is part of her essence. And no one else in her played-out generation does the same. She laughs at what I laugh at. She also laughs at hitting me on the head with a tennis ball; at the idea of having sherry with my parents; she laughs at her husband, just as she does when crashing the gears of the Austin shooting brake. Naturally, I assume that she laughs at life because she has seen a great deal of it, and understands it. “By the way,” I say, “what’s ‘whatski’?”

  “What do you mean, ‘What’s whatski’?”

  “I mean, What’s ‘whatski’?”

  “Oh, do you mean, ‘Whatski’s whatski’?”

  “If you like.”

  “It’s what Russian spies say to one another, silly,” she replies.

  * * *

  —

  The first time we were together—sexually, I mean—we each told the necessary lies, then drove across to the middle of Hampshire and found two rooms in a hotel.

  As we stand looking down at an acreage of magenta candlewick bedspread, she says,

  “Which side do you prefer? Forehand or backhand?”

  I have never slept in a double bed before. I have never slept a whole night with someone before. The bed looks enormous, the lighting bleak, and from the bathroom comes a smell of disinfectant.

  “I love you,” I tell her.

  “That’s a terrible thing to say to a girl,” she replies and takes my arm. “We’d best have dinner first, before we love one another.”

  I already have an erection, and there is nothing generalised about this one. It is very, very specific.

  She has a shyness to her. She never undresses in front of me; she is always in bed with her nightdress on by the time I come into the room. And the light would be out. I couldn’t care less about any of this. I feel I can see in the dark, anyway.

  * * *

  —

  Nor does she “teach me the arts of love,” that phrase you read in books. We are both inexperienced, as I said. And she comes from a generation in which the assumption is made that on th
e wedding night the man “will know what to do”—a social excuse to legitimise any previous sexual experience, however squalid, the man might have had. I don’t want to go into the specifics in her case, though she does occasionally drop hints.

  One afternoon, we are in bed at their house, and I suggest I ought to be going before “Someone” comes home.

  “Of course,” she replies musingly. “You know, when he was at school, he always preferred the front half of the elephant, if you catch my meaning. And maybe after school. Who knows? Everyone’s got a secret, haven’t they?”

  “What’s yours?”

  “Mine? Oh, he told me I was frigid. Not at the time. But later, after we’d stopped. When it was too late to do anything about anything.”

  “I don’t think you’re remotely frigid,” I say, with a mixture of outrage and possessiveness. “I think you’re…very warm-blooded.”

  She pats my chest in reply. I know little about the female orgasm, and somehow assume that if you manage to keep going long enough, it will at some point be automatically triggered in the woman. Like breaking the sound barrier, perhaps. As I am unable to take the discussion further, I start to get dressed. Later, I think: she is warm, she is affectionate, she loves me, she encourages me into bed, we stay there a long time, I don’t think she’s frigid, what’s the problem?

  * * *

  —

  We talk about everything: the state of the world (not good), the state of her marriage (not good), the general character and moral standards of the Village (not good) and even Death (not good).

  “Isn’t it strange?” she muses. “My mother died of cancer when I was ten and I only ever think of her when I’m cutting my toenails.”