The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  But with this comes a brute chronological fact. As far as you know, Susan only drank occasionally in all her years with Macleod. But now that she is living with you, she is—has become, is still becoming—an alcoholic. There is too much in this for you to entirely acknowledge, let alone bear.

  * * *

  —

  She is sitting up in her quilted bedjacket, the newspapers around her, at her elbow a mug of coffee long gone cold. She has a frown on her, and her chin is pushed forward, as if she has been ruminating all day. It is now six in the evening, and you are in your last year of law studies. You sit on the side of her bed.

  “Casey Paul,” she begins, in an affectionate, puzzled tone, “I’ve decided that there’s something seriously wrong.”

  “I think you may be right,” you answer quietly. At last, you think, perhaps this is the moment of breakthrough. That’s what’s meant to happen, isn’t it? Everything comes to a moment of crisis, and then the fever breaks, and all becomes clear and rational and happy again.

  “But I’ve been searching my wits all day and can’t get a handle on it.”

  Now where do you go? Do you start straight in again with the drinking? Suggest seeing the doctor again, a specialist, a psychiatrist? You are twenty-five, and quite untrained for this kind of situation. There are no articles in the newspaper headed, HOW TO COPE WITH YOUR MIDDLE-AGED FEMALE ALCOHOLIC LOVER. You are on your own. You have no theories of life yet, you only know some of its pleasures and pains. You still believe, however, in love, and in what love can do, how it can transform a life, indeed the lives of two people. You believe in its invulnerability, its tenacity, its ability to outrun any opponent. This, in fact, is your only theory of life so far.

  So you do the best you can. You take one of her wrists, and talk about how you met and fell in love, how you were chosen by lot and then threw in your lot together, how you had run away in the finest tradition of lovers, and you continue like this, meaning and believing every word, and then you gently suggest that she’s been drinking a little too much lately.

  “Oh, you’re always going on about that,” she replies, as if this were some tedious and pedantic obsession of yours, nothing really to do with her. “But if you want me to say so, then I will. Maybe I occasionally take a drop or two more than is good for me.”

  You quell the prompting inner voice which says: No, not a drop or two, a whole bottle or two more than is good for you.

  She goes on, “I’m talking about something much bigger than that. I think there’s something seriously wrong.”

  “You mean, something that causes your drinking? Something I don’t know about?” Your mind heads towards some terrible, defining event in her childhood, much worse than a “party kiss” from Uncle Humph.

  “Oh, you really can be a Great Bore at times,” she says mockingly. “No, much more important than that. What’s behind it all.”

  You are already losing a little patience. “And what do you think might be behind it all?”

  “Maybe it’s the Russkis.”

  “The Russkis?” You—well, yes—you yelp.

  “Oh Paul, do try and keep up. I don’t mean the actual Russkis. They’re just a figure of speech.”

  Like, say, the Ku Klux Klan or the KGB or the CIA or Che Guevara. You suspect that this one brief chance is slipping away, and you don’t know if it is your fault, her fault, or nobody’s fault.

  “OK,” you say. “The Russians are a figure of speech.”

  But she takes this only as sly impertinence.

  “It’s no good if you can’t follow. There’s something behind it all, just out of sight. Something which holds it all together. Something that, if we put it back together, would mend it all, would mend us all, don’t you see?”

  You give it your best shot. “You mean, like Buddhism?”

  “Oh don’t be absurd. You know what I think about religion.”

  “Well, it was just an idea,” you say jokingly.

  “And not a very good one.”

  How quickly it has gone from something tentative and gentle and hopeful to something irascible and mocking. And how far away from what you consider to be the problem, not just behind it all but on the surface and at all points in between: the bottles under the sink, under the bed, behind the bookshelves, in her stomach, in her head, in her heart. It may be true that you don’t know the cause, if indeed there is a single, identifiable cause, but it seems to you that you can only work with—against—the manifestations that erupt every day.

  You know what she means about religion, of course. There is her adamantine disapproval of missionaries, whether they seek to convert in distant lands or on suburban doorsteps. And there is also the Malta story, which she has told you more than once. When the girls were small, Gordon Macleod was posted to Malta for a couple of years. She went out and lived there for some of the time. And her abiding memory was of the priest’s bicycle. Yes, she would explain, it’s terribly Catholic out there. The church is all-powerful, and everyone’s very obedient. And the church keeps them down by making the women have as many children as possible: it’s absolutely impossible to obtain birth control on the island. They’re very backward in that regard—John Bell & Croyden would be run out of town—so you have to take the equipment out with you.

  Anyway, she goes on, it sometimes happens that a young bride doesn’t get pregnant immediately after marriage, say for a year or two, despite all her prayers. Or maybe there’s a woman who has two children and desperately wants a third but it isn’t happening. And in such cases, the priest will come round and prop his bicycle outside the front door, so everyone—especially the husband—knows not to interfere until the bicycle has gone. And when, nine months later—though of course it may take several goes—the family is blessed, that blessing is known as “the priest’s child,” and thought of as a gift from God. And sometimes there is more than one priest’s child in the family. Can you imagine that, Paul? Don’t you think it’s barbaric?

  You do think it’s barbaric—you say so every time. And now part of you—the doomful, despairing, sarcastic part of you—wonders whether, if it isn’t the Russkis who are behind it all, then it might be the Vatican.

  * * *

  —

  You still share a bed, but haven’t made love for a long time now. You don’t ask yourself how long in calendar terms, because what counts is how it feels in terms of the heart. You discover more about sex than you want to—or more than you should be allowed to discover while still young. Certain discoveries should be kept for later in life, when they might hurt less.

  You know already that there is good sex and bad sex. Naturally, you prefer good sex to bad sex. But also, being young, you think that even so, all things considered, taking the rough with the smooth, bad sex is better than no sex at all. And sometimes better than masturbation; though sometimes not.

  But if you think these are the only categories of sex that exist, you find you are mistaken. Because there is a category which you had not known to exist, something which isn’t, as you might have guessed had you heard about it before, merely a subcategory of bad sex; and that is sad sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

  Sad sex is when, the toothpaste in her mouth not fully disguising the smell of sweet sherry, she whispers, “Cheer me up, Casey Paul.” And you oblige. Though cheering her up also involves cheering yourself down.

  Sad sex is when she is already doped by a cheering-up pill, but you think that if you fuck her, it might cheer her up a bit more.

  Sad sex is when you are yourself in such despair, the situation so insoluble, the prehistory so oppressive, the very balance of your soul in doubt from day to day, moment to moment, that you think you may as well forget yourself for a few minutes, for half an hour, in sex. But you don’t forget yourself, or your state of soul, not for even a nanosecond.

  Sad se
x is when you feel you are losing all touch with her, and she with you, but this is a way of telling one another that the connection is still there, somehow; that neither of you is giving up on the other, even if part of you fears that you should. Then you discover that insisting on the connection is the same as prolonging the pain.

  Sad sex is when you are making love to a woman while thinking about how to kill her husband, even if this is something you would never be able to do, because you are not that sort of person. But as your body continues, so does your mind: you find yourself thinking, Yes, if you discovered him in the process of strangling her, you can imagine hitting him on the back of the head with a spade, or maybe stabbing him with a kitchen knife, though you realise that, given your hopelessness at fisticuffs, you might end up with the spade or the knife skidding off him and striking her instead. Then this parallel narrative in your head gets even madder, proposing that if you were to miss him and hit her instead, then it might be that you secretly wanted to harm her, because she—this woman now naked beneath you—has got you into this insoluble morass so early in your life.

  Sad sex is when she is sober, you both desire one another, you know that you will always love her regardless, just as she will always love you regardless, but you—both of you, perhaps—now realise that loving one another does not necessarily lead to happiness. And so your lovemaking has become less a search for consolation than a hopeless attempt to deny your mutual unhappiness.

  Good sex is better than bad sex. Bad sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than bad sex. Self-sex is better than no sex, except when no sex is better than self-sex. Sad sex is always far worse than good sex, bad sex, self-sex and no sex. Sad sex is the saddest sex of all.

  * * *

  —

  At college you meet Paula—blond, friendly, direct—who has switched to law after a short-service commission in the Army. You like her handwriting when she shows you a case summary from a lecture you missed. You invite her for coffee one morning, then start having sandwich lunches in the nearby public gardens. One evening you take her to the cinema and kiss her good night. You exchange phone numbers.

  A few days later, she asks, “Who’s that madwoman who lives in your house?”

  “I’m sorry?” Already there is a chill spreading through you.

  “I rang you up last night. A woman answered the phone.”

  “That would have been my landlady.”

  “She sounded as mad as a hatter.”

  You take a breath. “She’s a little eccentric,” you say. You want this conversation to stop, immediately. You wish it had never started. You wish Paula had never phoned the number you gave her. You very much don’t want her to be specific, but you know she is going to be.

  “I asked when you’d be back, and she said, ‘Oh, he’s very much the dirty stop-out, that young man, you can’t rely on him from one moment to the next.’ And then she came over all genteel and said something like, ‘If you will excuse me while I fetch a pencil, I shall pass on any message you may choose to leave.’ Well, I put the phone down before she came back.”

  She is looking at you expectantly, sure that you will provide her with an explanation that will satisfy her. It doesn’t have to be much; a joke might even do it. Various extravagant lies cross your mind until, preferring the quarter-truth to the self-interested obfuscation—and also feeling stubborn and defensive about Susan—you repeat,

  “She’s a little eccentric.”

  And that, unsurprisingly, is the end of your relationship with Paula. And you realise that such a pattern is likely to repeat itself with other friendly and direct girls whose handwriting you admire.

  * * *

  —

  Around this time, you stop thinking of her family by their nicknames. All that Mr. Elephant Pants and Miss Grumpy stuff was fine and funny at the time, part of the first silliness and proprietoriness of love. But it was also a facetious minimising of their presence in her life. And if you are beginning to think of yourself as grown-up—however forcedly and prematurely—then they should be allowed their own maturity as well.

  Another thing you notice is that you no longer fall easily into the private, teasing love language that used to pass between you. Perhaps the weight of what you have taken on has temporarily crushed out love’s decorativeness. Of course, you still love her, and tell her so, but in plainer terms nowadays. Perhaps, when you have solved her, or she has solved herself, there will be room again for such playfulness. You can’t be sure.

  Susan, however, continues using all the little phrases from her side of the relationship. It is her way of maintaining that nothing has changed, that she is fine, you are fine, all is fine. But she, you and it aren’t, and those familiar words sometimes cause a prickle of embarrassment, more often lurching pain. You let yourself into the house, deliberately making enough noise to alert her, and as you come down the short flight of stairs into the kitchen, you find her in a familiar pose: red-faced by the gas fire, wrinkling her brow at a newspaper as if the world really does need to sort itself out. Then she looks up brightly and says, “Where’ve you been all my life?” or “Here’s the dirty stop-out,” and your cheerfulness—even if briefly assumed—drains like bathwater. You look around and take stock of the situation. You open the store cupboards to see if there is something you can make into something. And she lets you get on with it, while offering occasional remarks designed to convey that she is still well capable of understanding a newspaper.

  “Things seem to be in a frightful mess, don’t you agree, Casey Paul?”

  And you ask, “Where exactly are we talking about?”

  And she replies, “Oh, just about everywhere.”

  At which point you might throw the emptied tin of plum tomatoes into the bin with some force, and she will chide you,

  “Temper, temper, Casey Paul!”

  * * *

  —

  By months of manoeuvring, you get her first to a GP and then to a consultant psychiatrist at the local hospital. She doesn’t want you to come with her, but you insist, knowing what will probably happen otherwise. You turn up at a quarter to three for a three o’clock slot. The waiting area already contains a dozen other patients, and you realise it is the hospital’s policy to book everyone in for the same time, which is when the consultant’s session begins. You can see their point: mad people—and at your age you use the term pretty broadly—are presumably not among the world’s most punctilious timekeepers: so it’s best to summon them all en bloc.

  She makes what might be an attempt to escape, heading off to the ladies. You let her go with a fifty-fifty expectation that she won’t return. But she does, and you find yourself reflecting cynically that she probably went to the hospital shop to check if they stocked booze, or maybe asked a few nurses where the bar was, only to receive the annoying news that the hospital doesn’t have one.

  You realise how sympathy and antagonism can coexist. You are discovering how many seemingly incompatible emotions can thrive, side by side, in the same human heart. You are angry with the books you have read, none of which have prepared you for this. No doubt you were reading the wrong books. Or reading them in the wrong way.

  You feel, even at this late, desperate stage, that your emotional situation is still more interesting than that of your friends. They (mostly) have girlfriends and (mostly) have peer sex; some have been inspected by their girlfriends’ parents, receiving approval, disapproval or judgement suspended. Most have a plan for their future life which includes this girlfriend—or, if not, one very similar. A plan to become furrow-dwellers. But for the moment, they have only the traditional clear-skinned joys, sane dreams and inchoate frustrations of young men in their mid-twenties with girlfriends of the same age. Yet here you are, in a hospital waiting area, surrounded by mad people, in love with a woman who is being characterised as potentially mad.

 
; And the strange thing is, part of you feels exhilarated by it. You think: not only do you love Susan more than they love their girlfriends—you must do, otherwise you wouldn’t be sitting here among all the nutters—but you are having a more interesting life. They may measure their girlfriends’ brains and breasts, and their future parent-in-laws’ deposit accounts, and imagine they have won; but you are still ahead of them because your relationship is more fascinating, more complicated and more insoluble. And the proof of this is that you are sitting here on a metal stacking chair, half-reading some discarded magazine, while your beloved dreams of—what? Escape, no doubt: escape from here, escape from you, escape from life? She too is staggering beneath the weight of extreme, unbearable and incompatible emotions. You are both in deep pain. And yet, aware as you are of the stupid, bolloxy world of male competitiveness, you tell yourself that you are still a winner. And when you get to this point in your thoughts, the next logical stage is: you’re a nutter as well. You are obviously one stark staring, complete and utter nutter. On the other hand, you are the youngest fucking nutter in the whole waiting area. So you have won again! Former under-12, under-6-stone school boxing champion becomes hospital’s under-26 nutter champion!

  At this moment a round, bald, suited man opens the door of the consulting room.

  “Mr. Ellis,” he calls quietly.

  There is no reply. Familiar with the inattention, selective deafness and other failings of his patients, the consultant raises his voice:

  “Mr. ELLIS!”

  Some old fool wearing three sweaters and an anorak gets to his feet; a towelling headband restrains the ten or so wisps of white hair that sprawl from his crown. He stands looking round for a moment, as if perhaps expecting applause for having recognised his own name, then follows the consultant into his office.