The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  —I realise that I had absolutely no notion how the Macleods behaved with one another when I was not there. I was probably too absolutist to give it a thought.

  —I also realise that, in comparing the two households, I might have made it sound as if at home we ate peas off a knife while scratching our bottoms. No, we were well brought-up. Our standard of table behaviour was on the whole better than that on display at the Macleods’.

  —Also, not all my parents’ friends were as passively disapproving of my generation as I may have portrayed them. Some were actively so. One holiday weekend, we all went over to Sutton for dinner with the Spencers. The wife had known my mother since training college days; the husband was a small, aggressive mining engineer, of Belgian origin, who specialised in locating and appropriating the mineral wealth of Africa on behalf of some international company. It must have been a sunny day (though not necessarily) because, peeking from my top pocket, was a recently acquired pair of mirrored sunglasses. I had bought them from Barney, who specialised in the bulk purchase and import of exotic items for resale to those wishing to quietly demonstrate their essential hipsterdom. He had sourced the glasses from somewhere behind the Iron Curtain—Hungary, I think. Anyway, we had scarcely got out of the car when Mine Tiny Host approached me and, ignoring my outstretched hand, ripped the sunglasses from my pocket with the words, “These are a piece of shit.” Unlike, say, his own cable-knit sweater, corduroy trousers, signet ring and deaf aid.

  —She makes a big cake for the Fancy Boys. Big in the sense of wide and long. When the mixture is poured into the tin, it is three-quarters of an inch deep. By the time it comes out of the oven, it has risen slightly to a height of about an inch. There is mixed fruit inside, all of which has sunk to the bottom.

  Even I, back then, can recognise that it is not, by average baking standards, a success. But she has a way of making it so.

  “What sort of cake is that, Mrs. Macleod?” asks one of the FBs.

  “It’s an upside-down cake,” she replies, flipping it over on its wire rack. “Look how the fruit has all risen to the top.”

  Then she cuts us big slices, which we scoff.

  She can probably turn base metal into gold, I think.

  —I said how my credo was love and truth; I loved her, and I saw the truth. But I must also admit that this coincided with the period when I lied to my parents more often than before or since. And, to a lesser degree, to almost everybody else I knew. Though not to Joan.

  —While I do not analyse my love—the whence, why, whither of it—I do sometimes try, when alone, to think about it lucidly. This is difficult; I have no previous experience, and am quite unprepared for the full engagement of heart and soul and body that being with Susan involves—the intensity of the present, the thrill of the unknown future, the discarding of all the mingy preoccupations of the past.

  I lie in bed at home, trying to put feelings into words. On the one hand—and this is the part to do with the past—Jove feels like the vast and sudden easing of a lifelong frown. But simultaneously—this is the part to do with the present and the future—it feels as if the lungs of my soul have been inflated with pure oxygen. I only think like this when alone, of course. When I am with Susan, I’m not thinking what it’s like to love her; I’m just being with her. And maybe that “being with her” is impossible to put into any other words.

  * * *

  —

  Susan never minded my solo visits to Joan; she wasn’t possessive about one of the few friends her marriage seemed to permit. I came to enjoy the mugfuls of cut-price gin; after a while, Joan allowed the yappers in, and I got used to the distraction of Yorkshire terriers grazing on my shoelaces.

  “We’re leaving,” I told her one July afternoon.

  “We? You and I? Where are we going, young Master Paul? Do you have your belongings tied up in a red-spotted handkerchief on a stick?”

  I should have known she wouldn’t let me get away with earnestness.

  “Susan and I. We’re off.”

  “Off where? For how long? A cruise, is it? Send me a postcard.”

  “There’ll be lots of postcards,” I promised.

  It was odd, my relationship with Joan was a kind of flirting. Whereas my relationship with Susan barely had any flirting in it at all. We must have gone through all that preliminary stuff without noticing—smack into love—and so had no need for it. We had our jokes and our teases and our private phrases, of course. But I suppose it all felt—was—too serious for flirting.

  “No,” I said. “You know what I mean.”

  “Yes, I know what you mean. I’ve been wondering about it for some time. Given the circumstances. Half wanting it to happen, half not. But you’ve got guts, the pair of you, I’ll say that.”

  I didn’t think of it in terms of guts. I thought of it in terms of inevitability. Also, doing what we both deeply wanted.

  “And how is Gordon taking it all?”

  “He calls me her fancy boy.”

  “I’m surprised he doesn’t call you her fucking fancy boy.”

  Yes, well, probably that too.

  “I shan’t say I hope you know what you’re doing because it’s perfectly obvious neither of you has any idea what you’re doing. Now, don’t pull that face at me, Master Paul. No one ever does, not in your position. And I’m not going to say, Look after her, and all that stuff. I’m just going to keep my thumbs bloody hard crossed for you.”

  She came out to the car with me. Before getting in, I moved towards her. She raised a palm.

  “No, none of that fucking huggy-huggy stuff. There’s too much of it around, everyone suddenly behaving like foreigners. Be off with you before I shed a tear.”

  Later, I went over what she had and hadn’t said to me, and wondered if she’d been spotting parallels I’d missed. No one ever knows what they’re doing, not in your position. Off up to London, eh? Fancy boy, kept woman. And who’s got the money? Yes, Joan was ahead of me.

  Except that it wasn’t going to be like that. I could hardly imagine Susan back on the Macleod doorstep in three years’ time, tongue-tied, emotionally blasted, begging silently to be taken in, her life essentially over. I was confident that wasn’t going to happen.

  * * *

  —

  There was no exact Moment of Leaving, neither a surreptitious midnight skedaddle, nor some formal departure with luggage and waving handkerchiefs. (Who would have waved?) It was a long-drawn-out detaching, so that the moment of rupture was never clearly marked. Which didn’t stop me trying to mark it, with a brief letter to my parents:

  Dear Mum and Dad,

  I am moving up to London. I shall be living with Mrs. Macleod. I shall send you an address as and when.

  Yours, Paul

  That seemed to cover it. I thought the “as and when” sounded properly grown-up. Well, so I was. Twenty-one. And ready to fully indulge, fully express, fully live my life. “I’m alive! I’m living!”

  * * *

  —

  We were together—under the same roof, that is—for ten or more years. Afterwards, I continued to see her regularly. In later years, less often. When she died, a few years ago, I acknowledged that the most vital part of my life had finally come to a close. I shall always think of her well, I promised myself.

  * * *

  —

  And this is how I would remember it all, if I could. But I can’t.

  TWO

  Susan’s running-away fund contained enough to buy a small house in Henry Road, SE15. The price was low—gentrification, and juice bars, lay far in the future. The place had been in multi-occupation: a euphemism for locks on every door, asbestos panelling, a squalid kitchenette on a half-landing, personal gas meters and personal stains in every room. Through that late summer and early autumn we stripped it all back, joy
fully, the dandruff of distemper in our hair. We threw out most of the old furniture, and slept on a double mattress on the floor. We had a toaster, a kettle, and dined off takeaways from the Cypriot taverna at the end of the road.

  We needed a plumber, electrician and gas man, but did the rest ourselves. I was good at rough carpentry. I made myself a desk from two broken-up chests of drawers topped with cut-down wardrobe doors; then sanded, filled and painted it until it stood, immovably heavy, at one end of my study. I cut and laid coconut matting, and tacked carpet up the stairs. Together we ripped off the parchmenty wallpaper, back to the leprous plaster, then roller-painted it in cheery, non-bourgeois colours: turquoise, daffodil, cerise. I painted my study a sombre dark green, after Barney told me that the labour wards of hospitals were that colour, to calm expectant mothers. I hoped it might have the same effect on my own laborious hours.

  I had taken to heart Joan’s sceptical “And, to start at the beginning, what would you do for money?” Given that I didn’t care about the stuff, I could have lived off Susan; but, given that our relationship was going to last a lifetime, I acknowledged that at some point I would have to support her rather than the other way round. Not that I knew how much money she had. I never asked about the finances of the Macleod household, nor whether Susan had a traditional Auntie Maud who would conveniently leave her all she had.

  So I decided to become a solicitor. I had no exaggerated ambitions for myself; my exaggerated ambitions were all for love. But I thought of the law because I had an orderly mind, and a capacity to apply myself; and every society needs lawyers, doesn’t it? I remember a woman friend once telling me her theory of marriage: that it was something you should “dip into and out of as required.” This may sound dismayingly practical, even cynical, but it wasn’t. She loved her husband, and “dipping out” of marriage didn’t mean adultery. Rather, it was a recognition of how marriage worked for her: as a reliable ground bass to life, as something you jogged along with until such time as you needed to “dip into” it, for succour, expressions of love and the rest. I could understand this approach: there is no point demanding more than your temperament requires or provides. But as far as I understood my life at this time, I required the opposite equation. Work would be something I jogged along with; love would be my life.

  * * *

  —

  I began my studies. Each morning, Susan cooked me breakfast; each evening, supper—unless I fetched us a kebab or sheftalia. Sometimes, when I arrived back, she would sing at me, “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.” She also took my washing to the launderette and brought it home for ironing. We still went to concerts and art exhibitions. The mattress on the floor became a double bed, in which we slept together night after night, and where some of my cinematic assumptions about love and sex became subject to adjustment. For instance, the notion of lovers falling blissfully asleep in one another’s arms resolved itself into the actuality of one lover falling asleep half on top of the other, and the latter, after a certain amount of cramp and interrupted circulation, gently shifting out from beneath while trying not to wake her. I also discovered that it wasn’t only men who snored.

  My parents didn’t reply to my change-of-address letter; nor did I invite them to visit the house in Henry Road. One day I returned from college to find Susan in agitated mood. Martha Macleod, Miss Grumpy herself, had descended without warning for a tour of inspection. She was bound to have noted that whereas in the Village her mother had slept in a single bed, now she had a double one. Fortunately, in my dark green study, the sofa bed had been pulled out, and left unmade by me that morning. But then, as Susan remarked, two doubles hardly make a single. My own attitude to Martha Macleod’s likely disapproval of our sleeping arrangements was—would have been—one of pride and defiance. Susan’s was more complicated, though I admit I didn’t spend much time on its nuances. After all, were we living together or were we not?

  When she reached the two undecorated attic rooms at the top of the house, Martha had apparently said,

  “You should have lodgers.”

  When Susan had demurred, her daughter’s reply, delivered either as argument or instruction, was:

  “It would be good for you.”

  Quite what she meant by this we debated that evening. True, there was an economic argument for lodgers: they would make the house more or less self-sufficient. But what was the moral argument? Perhaps that lodgers would give Susan something more to do than wait for the return of her shameless lover. Martha might also have intended that lodgers would somehow dilute my noxious presence, and camouflage the reality of number 23 Henry Road—of Fancy Boy Number One living brazenly with an adulteress still more than twice his age.

  If Martha’s visit had troubled Susan, it also, on further thought, troubled me. I had failed to consider her future relations with her daughters. My focus had all been on Macleod, on getting Susan away from him, and now, from a safe distance, divorcing him. For our joint sake, but mainly for hers. She had to scrub this mistake from her life and give herself the legal as well as the moral freedom to be happy. And being happy consisted of living with me, alone and unfettered.

  * * *

  —

  It was a quiet neighbourhood, and we received few visitors. I remember one Saturday morning being stirred from the law of tort by the front doorbell. I heard Susan invite someone—two someones, a man and a woman—into the kitchen. About twenty minutes later, I heard her say, as she shut the front door,

  “I’m sure you feel a whole lot better now.”

  “Who was that?” I asked as she passed my door. She looked in to see me.

  “Missionaries,” she replied. “God damn and blast them, missionaries. I let them get it all off their chests and then sent them on their way. Better to waste their puff on me than someone they might convert.”

  “Not actual missionaries?”

  “It’s a general term. Actual missionaries are the worst, of course.”

  “You mean, these were Jehovah’s Witnesses, or Plymouth Brethren, or Baptists, or something?”

  “Or something. They asked me if I was worried about the state of the world. It’s an obvious catch question. Then they bored on about the Bible as if I’d never heard of it. I nearly told them I knew all about it and that I was a flaming Jezebel.”

  And with that she left me to my studies. But instead I mused on these sudden bursts of fierce opinion, which so endeared her to me. I had been educated by books, she by life, I thought again.

  * * *

  —

  One evening, the phone went. I picked it up and gave the number.

  “Who is that?” said a voice I immediately recognised as Macleod’s.

  “Well, who’s that?” I replied, with fake casualness.

  “Gor-don Mac-leod,” he said with extended heaviness. “And whom might I be having the honour of speaking to?”

  “Paul Roberts.”

  As he banged the receiver down, I found myself wishing I’d said Mickey Mouse, or Yuri Gagarin, or the chairman of the BBC.

  I didn’t tell Susan about this. I didn’t see the point.

  * * *

  —

  But a few weeks later we received a visit from a man called Maurice. Susan had met him before, once or twice. He might have had a connection to Macleod’s office. There must have been some arrangement made. It seemed he had picked a time when I would be there too. I’m not sure about it all, at this distance—maybe it was just luck on his part.

  I failed to ask any of the obvious questions at the time. And if I had, perhaps Susan would have had the answers, perhaps not.

  He was a man of fiftyish, I suppose. In my memory I have given him—or he has acquired over the years—a trench coat, and perhaps a broad-brimmed hat, underneath which he wore a suit and tie. He was perfectly cordial in behaviour. He shook my hand. He accepted a cup of cof
fee, he used the lavatory, he asked for an ashtray, and he talked about the bland, general topics adults went in for. Susan was in her hostess mode, which involved tamping down some of the things I most loved her for: her irreverence, her free-spirited laughter at the world.

  All I can remember is that at one point the conversation turned to the closure of Reynolds News. This was a paper—Reynolds News and Sunday Citizen, to give its full title—which had fallen on hard times, relaunched itself as a tabloid Sunday, and then finally closed—presumably not long before this conversation.

  “I don’t think it matters much,” I said. I didn’t really have any view on the matter. I might have seen a copy or two of Reynolds News, but was mainly just reacting to Maurice’s tone of deep concern.

  “You don’t?” he asked civilly.

  “No, not really.”

  “What about the diversity of the press? Isn’t that something to be valued?”

  “All the papers seem much the same to me, so I don’t see that one fewer of them matters much.”

  “Are you by any chance part of the Revolutionary Left?”

  I laughed at him. Not at his words, but at him. What the fuck did he take me for? Or perhaps, Who the fuck? He might as well have been a member of the tennis club committee, back at the Village.

  “No, I despise politics,” I said.

  “You despise politics? Do you think that’s an entirely healthy attitude? Do you find cynicism a comfortable position? What would you replace them with? You’d close down newspapers, you’d close down our way of doing politics? You’d close down democracy? That sounds like a Revolutionary Left position to me.”

  Now the fellow was really annoying me. I wasn’t out of my area of competence so much as my area of interest.