The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  * * *

  —

  Here’s something I need to explain. In all the time Susan and I were lovers, I never thought that we were “deceiving” Gordon Macleod, Mr. E.P. I never thought of him as being represented by that peculiar old word “cuckold.” Obviously, I didn’t want him to know. But I thought that what took place between Susan and me had nothing to do with him; he was irrelevant to it all. Nor did I have any contempt for him, any young-buck superiority because I was sexually active with his wife and he wasn’t. You may think this is just a normal lover’s normal self-delusion; but I don’t agree. Even when things…changed, and I felt differently about him, this aspect didn’t change. He had nothing to do with us, do you see?

  * * *

  —

  Susan, perhaps thinking that I was undervaluing her friend Joan, had told me, in a gently admonitory tone, that everyone had their own love story. I was happy to accept this, happy for everyone else to be or have been blessed, even if confident that they couldn’t possibly be as blessed as I was. But at the same time, I didn’t want Susan to tell me whether she had had her love story with Gerald, or with Gordon, or was having it with me. Whether there were one, two or three stories to her life.

  * * *

  —

  I am round at the Macleods’ one evening. It is getting late. Macleod has already gone to bed, and is snoring away his flagons and his gallons. She and I are on the sofa; we have been listening to some music we recently heard at the Festival Hall. I look at her in a way which makes my attentions and desires plain.

  “No, Casey. Kiss me hardly.”

  So I kiss her hardly, just a brush on the lips, nothing to raise her colour. We hold hands instead.

  “I wish I didn’t have to go home,” I say self-pityingly. “I hate home.”

  “Then why do you call it home?”

  I haven’t thought of this.

  “Anyway, I wish I could stay here.”

  “You could always pitch a tent in the garden. I’m sure there’s some spare tarpaulin in the garage.”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “I could always climb out of a window afterwards.”

  “And be arrested for burglary by a passing copper? That would land us in the Advertiser & Gazette.” She paused. “I suppose…”

  “Yes?” I hope she is coming up with a master plan.

  “This thing actually turns into a sofa bed. We could put you up here. If E.P. finds you before he goes to work, we’ll say—”

  But just at that moment the phone rings. Susan picks it up, listens, looks at me, says, “Yes,” pulls a solemn face and places her hand over the mouthpiece.

  “It’s for you.”

  It is, of course, my mother, demanding to know where I am, which I find an otiose question, given that my current address would be right next to the number in the phone book which she must have just consulted. Also, she wants to know when I shall be back.

  “I’m a bit tired,” I say. “So I’m staying here on the sofa bed.”

  My mother has recently had to put up with a certain amount of insolent lying from me; but insolent truth-telling is pushing things too far.

  “You’ll be doing no such thing. I’ll be outside in six minutes.” And then she puts the phone down.

  “She’ll be outside in six minutes.”

  “Lawks-a-mercy,” says Susan. “Do you think I should offer her a glass of sherry?”

  We giggle away the next five-and-three-quarter minutes until we hear a car out in the road.

  “Off you go now, you dirty stop-out,” she whispers.

  My mother was behind the wheel in her pink dressing gown over her pink nightdress. I didn’t check to see if she was driving in bedroom slippers. She was halfway down a cigarette, and before putting the car into gear, flicked the glowing stub out onto the Macleods’ driveway.

  I got in, and as we drove my mood switched from pert indifference to furious humiliation. An English silence—one in which all the unspoken words are perfectly understood by both parties—prevailed. I got into my bed and wept. The matter was never referred to again.

  * * *

  —

  Susan’s innocence was the more surprising because she never tried to hide it. I’m not sure she ever tried to hide anything—it was against her nature. Later—well, what came later, came later.

  But, for instance—and I can’t remember how the subject came up—she once said that she wouldn’t necessarily have gone to bed with me if it hadn’t been for the known fact that it was bad for a man not to have “sexual release.” This is all that remains of the words spoken between us, that simple phrase.

  Perhaps it was more ignorance than innocence. Or call it folk wisdom; or patriarchal propaganda. And it set me wondering. Did this mean that she didn’t desire me as much as I desired her—constantly, naggingly, utterly? That sex for her meant something different? That she was only going to bed with me for therapeutic reasons, because I might explode like a hot-water cylinder or car radiator if I didn’t have this necessary “release”? And was there no equivalent of this in female sexual psychology?

  Later, I thought: But if that’s how she imagines male sexuality to operate, what about her husband? Did she never wonder about his need for “release”? Unless, of course, she had seen him explode and so realised the consequences. Or perhaps E.P. went to prostitutes in London—or to the front half of some pantomime elephant? Who knew? Perhaps this explained his oddity.

  His oddity, her innocence. And of course I didn’t tell her in reply that young men—all young men in my experience—when deprived of female company, didn’t have a problem with “sexual release,” for the simple reason that they are, were and always would be wanking away like jackhammers.

  * * *

  —

  Her innocence, my overconfidence; her naivety, my crassness. I was going back to university. I thought it would be funny to buy her a large fat carrot as a farewell present. It would be a joke; she would laugh; she always laughed when I laughed. I went to a greengrocer’s and decided a parsnip would be funnier. We went for a drive and stopped somewhere. I gave her the parsnip. She didn’t laugh at all, just threw it over her shoulder, and I heard it thump against the back seat of the shooting brake. I have remembered this moment all my life, and though I haven’t blushed for many years, I would blush, if I could, about that.

  * * *

  —

  We managed a brief holiday. I can’t remember what lies we told in order to have a few days of truth together. It must have been out of season. We went somewhere near the south coast. I can’t remember a hotel, so perhaps we rented a flat. What we said, thought, discovered about one another—all gone. I do remember a broad, empty beach somewhere. Perhaps it was Camber Sands. We photographed one another with my camera. I did handstands on the beach for her. She is wearing a coat and the wind is whipping her hair back, and her hands, holding her coat closed at the neck, are enclosed in large, black false-fur gloves. Behind her is a distant row of beach huts, and a one-storey, shuttered café. No one else is in sight. You could, if you wanted, look at these photographs and deduce the season; also, no doubt, the weather. At this distance, both are meaningless to me.

  I was wearing a tie, that’s another detail. I had taken off my jacket to do handstands for her. The tie falls straight down the middle of my upturned face, obscuring my nose, dividing me into two halves. Backhand and forehand.

  * * *

  —

  I didn’t get much post in those days. Cards from friends, letters from the university reminding me about stuff, bank statements.

  “Local postmark,” said my mother, handing me an envelope. The address was typed, and there was a heartening “Esq.” after my name.

  “Thanks, Mum.”

 
“Aren’t you going to open it?”

  “I shall, Mum.”

  She huffed off.

  The letter came from the secretary of the tennis club. He was informing me that my temporary membership had been terminated with immediate effect. Further, that “due to the circumstances,” none of the membership fee I had paid was refundable. The “circumstances” were not specified.

  Susan and I had arranged to meet at the club for a pick-up foursome. So after lunch I took my racket and sports bag and set off as if for the courts.

  “Was the letter interesting?” my mother asked impedingly.

  I waved my racket in its press.

  “Tennis club. Asking if I want to join on a permanent basis.”

  “That’s gratifying, Paul. They must be pleased with your game.”

  “Sounds like it, doesn’t it?”

  I drive to Susan’s house.

  “I got one too,” she says.

  Her letter is much the same as mine, except more strongly worded. Instead of her membership being terminated “due to the circumstances” it is terminated “due to the evident circumstances of which you will be fully aware.” The adjusted wording is for Jezebels, for scarlet women.

  “How long have you been a member?”

  “Thirty years, I suppose. Give or take.”

  “I’m sorry. It’s my fault.”

  She shakes her head in disagreement.

  “Shall we protest?”

  No.

  “I could burn the place down.”

  No.

  “Do you think we were spotted somewhere?”

  “Stop asking questions, Paul. I’m thinking.”

  I sit down beside her on the chintz sofa. What I don’t like to say, or not immediately, is that part of me finds the news exhilarating. I—we—are a cause of scandal! Love persecuted yet again by small-minded petty officialdom! Our expulsion might not have been an Obstacle on which Passion Thrives, but the moral and social condemnation implicit in the phrase “due to the circumstances” act, to my mind, as an authentication of our love. And who does not want their love authenticated?

  “It’s not as if we were caught snogging in the long grass behind the roller.”

  “Oh, do be quiet, Paul.”

  So I sit there quietly, my thoughts noisy. I try to remember cases of boys expelled from my school. One for pouring sugar into the petrol tank of a master’s car. One for getting his girlfriend pregnant. One for being drunk after a cricket match, urinating in a train compartment and then pulling the communication cord. At the time, all this seemed pretty impressive stuff. But my own rule-breaking struck me as thrilling, triumphant, and, most of all, grown-up.

  * * *

  —

  “Well, now look what the cat’s brought in” was Joan’s greeting as she answered the door a few afternoons later. I hadn’t warned her of my visit. “Just give me a moment to shut up the yappers.”

  The door closed again, and I stood by an elderly boot scraper thinking about the distance that had grown between Susan and me since the tennis club’s dismissal of us. I had let my exhilaration show too clearly, which displeased her. She said that she was still “thinking.” I couldn’t see what there was to think about. She told me there were complications I didn’t understand. She told me not to come round until the weekend. I felt downcast, like one awaiting judgement even though no crime that I could see had been committed.

  “Sit yourself down,” Joan instructed as we reached the fag-fogged, gin-scented den that was nominally her sitting room. “You’ll have something to put a few hairs on your chest?”

  “Yes, please.” I didn’t drink gin—I hated the smell of it, and it made me feel even worse than wine or beer did. But I didn’t want to come across as a prig.

  “Good man.” She handed me a tumblerful. There was a smear of lipstick at its rim.

  “That’s an awful lot,” I said.

  “We don’t pour fucking pub measures in this establishment,” she replied.

  I sipped at the thick, oily, lukewarm substance which didn’t smell at all like the juniper berries on the bottle.

  Joan lit a cigarette and blew the smoke in my direction as if to nudge me.

  “So?”

  “So. Well. Perhaps you’ve heard about the tennis club.”

  “The Village tom-tom speaks of nothing else. The drumheads have been taking a real pasting.”

  “Yes, I thought you—”

  “Two things, young man. One, I don’t want to know any details. Two, how can I help?”

  “Thank you.” I was genuinely touched, but also puzzled. How could she help if she didn’t know the details? And what counted as a detail? I thought about this.

  “Come on. What are you here to ask me?”

  That was the problem. I didn’t know what I’d come to ask. I somehow thought that what I wanted from Joan would become clear to me when I saw her. Or she would know anyway. But it hadn’t, and she apparently didn’t. I tried to explain this, haltingly. Joan nodded, and let me sip my gin and ponder.

  Then she said, “Try lobbing me the first question that comes into your head.”

  I did so without reflecting. “Do you think Susan would leave Mr. Macleod?”

  “My, my,” she said quietly. “You are aiming high, young man. That’s a pair of balls you’ve got on you. Talk about one step at a time.”

  I grinned inanely at what I took to be a compliment.

  “So have you asked her?”

  “Gosh, no.”

  “And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?”

  “I don’t care about money,” I replied.

  “That’s because you’ve never had to.”

  This was true; but not in the sense that I was rich. My state education had been free, I received a council grant to attend university, I lived at home in the holidays. But it was also true that I didn’t care about money—indeed, in my world view, to care about money meant deliberately to turn your eyes away from the most important things in life.

  “If you’re going to be a grown-up,” said Joan, “you’ve got to start thinking about grown-up things. And number one is money.”

  I remembered what I’d been told about Joan’s early life—her being a “kept woman” or whatever, living no doubt from cash handouts and rent-payings and gifts of clothes and holidays. Is that what she meant by being grown-up?

  “I suppose Susan’s got some.”

  “Have you asked her?”

  “Gosh, no.”

  “Well, maybe you should.”

  “I’ve got a running-away fund,” I said defensively, without explaining where it had come from.

  “And how much rattles around in your little piggy bank?”

  It was odd how I never took offence at anything Joan said. I just assumed that beneath her brusqueness she was kindhearted and on my side. But then lovers always assume that people are on their side.

  “Five hundred pounds,” I said proudly.

  “Yes, well, you could certainly run away on that. It’ll keep you for a few weeks in Le Touquet–Paris–Plage as long as you don’t go near the casino. And then you’ll come running back to England.”

  “I suppose so.” Even if I’d never thought of Le Touquet–Paris–Plage as a destination. Was that where fleeing lovers went?

  “You’re going back to college next month, aren’t you?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you’re going to keep her in a kitchen cupboard there? A wardrobe?”

  “No.”

  I felt stupid and hopeless. No wonder Susan was “thinking” about it all. Was I merely entertaining some romantic notion of flight, a ladder with no steps attached?

  “It’s a bit more complicated than working out how to save me on the gin an
d the petrol.”

  I had been brought solidly down to earth, as Joan no doubt intended.

  “Can I ask you something different?”

  “Off you go.”

  “Why do you cheat at crosswords?”

  Joan laughed loudly. “You cheeky bugger. I suppose Susan told you. Well, it’s a fair question, and one I can answer.” She took another pull of her gin. “You see—I hope you never get there yourself—but some of us get to the point in life where we realise that nothing matters. Nothing fucking matters. And one of the few side benefits of that is you know you’re not going to go to hell for filling in the wrong answers in the crossword. Because you’ve been to hell and back already and you know all too well what it’s like.”

  “But the answers are in the back of the book.”

  “Ah, but you see, to me that would be cheating.”

  I felt absurdly fond of her. “Is there anything I can do for you, Joan?” I found myself asking.

  “Just don’t cause Susan any harm.”

  “I’d rather cut my own throat,” I replied.

  “Yes, I think you might even mean that.” She smiled at me. “Now, off with you, and mind your driving. I can see you’re not yet hardened to the gin.”

  I was about to put the car into gear when there was a tap at the window. I hadn’t heard her behind me. I wound the window down.

  “Don’t ever care what they say about you,” Joan said, looking at me intently. “For instance, some kindly neighbours assume I’m just a ghastly old lezzer living alone with my dogs. So, a failed lezzer at that. Water off a duck’s back. That’s my advice if you want it.”

  “Thank you for the gin,” I replied, and released the handbrake.

  * * *

  —

  Joan was demanding that I be grown-up. I was prepared to try if it helped Susan; but I still regarded adulthood with some horror. First, I wasn’t sure that it was attainable. Secondly, even if attainable, I wasn’t sure it was desirable. Thirdly, even if desirable, then only by comparison with childhood and adolescence. What did I dislike and distrust about adulthood? Well to put it briefly: the sense of entitlement, the sense of superiority, the assumption of knowing better if not best, the vast banality of adult opinions, the way women took out compacts and powdered their noses, the way men sat in armchairs with their legs apart and their privates heavily outlined against their trousers, the way they talked about gardens and gardening, the spectacles they wore and the spectacles they made of themselves, the drinking and the smoking, the terrible phlegmy racket when they coughed, the artificial smells they applied to conceal their animal smells, the way men went bald and women shaped their hair with aerosols of glue, the noxious thought that they might still be having sex, their docile obedience to social norms, their snarky disapproval of anything satirical or questioning, their assumption that their children’s success would be measured by how well they imitated their parents, the suffocating noise they made when agreeing with one another, their comments about the food they cooked and the food they ate, their love of stuff I found disgusting (especially olives, pickled onions, chutneys, piccalilli, horseradish sauce, spring onions, sandwich spread, stinky cheese and Marmite), their emotional complacency, their sense of racial superiority, the way they counted their pennies, the way they hunted for food trapped between their teeth, the way they weren’t interested enough in me, and the way they were too interested in me when I didn’t want them to be. This was just a short list, from which Susan was naturally and entirely exempt.