The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

You are not prepared for what happens next. You hear the psychiatrist’s voice, quite clearly, say,

  “And how are we today, Mr. Ellis?”

  You look at the closed door. You see that there is a three-inch gap between the foot of it and the floor. You guess that the consultant must be facing the door. You do not hear a reply from the deaf old fool, but perhaps there hasn’t been one, because next, loud enough to rouse the other nodding nutters, come the words,

  “SO HOW’S THE DEPRESSION, MR. ELLIS?”

  You are not sure if Susan has been paying attention. For yourself, you think this is unlikely to work.

  * * *

  —

  There is her shame, which is ever present. And then there is your shame, which sometimes presents itself as pride, sometimes as a kind of noble realism; but also, mostly, as what it is—just shame.

  * * *

  —

  You come back one evening to find her pie-eyed in a chair, the water glass by her side still containing a good inch or so of non-water. You decide to behave as if all this is completely normal—indeed, what domestic life is all about. You go into the kitchen and start looking around for something to turn into something. You find some eggs: you ask if she would like an omelette.

  “It’s easy for you,” she answers belligerently.

  “What’s easy for me?”

  “That’s a clever lawyer’s answer,” she replies, taking a swig right in front of you, which she rarely does. You are about to go back to cracking eggs, when she adds,

  “Gerald died today.”

  “Which Gerald?” You can’t immediately think of a Gerald among your mutual friends.

  “Which Gerald indeed? Mr. Clever. My Gerald. My Gerald that I told you about. The one I was engaged to. This was the day he died.”

  You feel terrible. Not because you have forgotten the date—she has never told you it before—but because, unlike you, she has her dead to remember. Her fiancé, the brother who disappeared out over the Atlantic, Gordon’s father—whose name you no longer remember—who had been soft on her. You have no such figures in your life, no griefs, no holes, no losses. So you don’t know what it’s like. Everyone should remember their dead, you believe, and everyone else should respect this need and desire. You are in fact rather envious, and wish you had a few dead of your own.

  Later, you become more suspicious. She has never mentioned the day of Gerald’s death before. And there is no way for you to check. Just as, in happier days, there was no way for you to check when she told you how many times the two of you had made love. Perhaps, when she heard your key turn in the lock, and she was unable to get up and also unwilling to hide the glass at her elbow, she decided—no, this is perhaps too deliberate a verb to describe her mental processes that evening—she “realised,” yes, she suddenly realised that it was the day of Gerald’s death. Though it could equally have been Alec’s, or that of Gordon’s father. Who could tell? Who knew? And who, in the end, cared?

  * * *

  —

  I said I never kept a diary. This isn’t strictly true. There was a point, in my isolation and turmoil, when I thought writing things down might help. I used a hardback notebook, black ink, one side of the paper. I tried to be objective. There was no point, I thought, in merely venting my feelings of hurt and betrayal. I remember that the first line I wrote down was:

  All alcoholics are liars.

  This was, obviously, not based on a huge sample or broad research. But I believed it at the time, and now, decades later, with more field experience, I believe it to be an essential truth about the condition. I went on:

  All lovers are truth-tellers.

  Again, the sample was small, consisting mainly of myself. It seemed to me evident that love and truth were connected; indeed, as I may have said, that to live in love is to live in truth.

  And then the conclusion to this quasi-syllogism:

  Therefore, the alcoholic is the opposite of the lover.

  This seemed not just logical, but also consistent with my observations.

  Nowadays, a lifetime later, the second of these propositions seems the weakest. I have seen too many examples of lovers who, far from living in truth, dwelt in some fantasy land where self-delusion and self-aggrandizement reigned, with reality nowhere to be found.

  Yet, even while I was compiling my notebook, searching to be objective, the subjective kept undermining me. For instance, I realised, looking back at our time in the Village, that whereas I thought of myself as both lover and truth-teller, the truths I had told were only to myself and Susan. I told lies to my parents, to Susan’s family, to my own close friends; I even dissembled at the tennis club. I protected the zone of truth with a rampart of lies. Just as she was now lying to me all the time about her drinking. As well as lying to herself. And yet she would still affirm that she loved me.

  So I began to suspect that I was wrong in considering alcoholism as the opposite of love. Perhaps they were much closer than I imagined. Alcoholism is certainly just as obsessive—as absolutist—as love; and maybe to the drinker the hit of booze is as powerful as the hit of sex is to the lover. So could the alcoholic be merely a lover who has shifted the object and focus of his or her—no, her—love?

  My observations and reflections had filled a few dozen pages when I came home one evening to find Susan in a state I knew all too well: red-faced, semi-coherent, quick to take offence, yet at the same time genteelly pretending that all was for the best in this best possible of worlds. I went to my room and discovered that my desk had been inexpertly rifled. I had, even then, a habit of orderliness, and knew what lived where. Since the desk contained my Notes on Alcoholism, I assumed, wearily, that she had probably read them. Still, I thought, perhaps in the long run the shock might have a useful effect on her. In the short run, evidently not.

  The next time I went to my notebook to make an addition, I saw that Susan had done more than just read it. She had left an annotation beneath my last entry, using the same black ink from the same pen. In an unsteady hand, she had written:

  With your inky pen to make you hate me.

  I didn’t accuse her of rifling my desk, reading my notebook, writing in it. I could imagine her saying, in a tone of polite protest, “No, I don’t think so.” I was weary of constant confrontation. But then, I was equally weary of a constant pretence that all was well, a constant evasion of the truth. I also realised that it would be impossible for me to write anything down in the future without picturing her at my desk studying my latest denunciations. This would be intolerable for both of us: the annotation of pain on my part, the dim yet irate acknowledgement of pain caused on her part. So I threw away the notebook.

  But that half-formed sentence of hers, written by a wonky hand with an unfamiliar pen, remained with me, and always has. Not least because of its ambiguity. Did she mean, “You use your inky pen to write down things which will then make you hate me”? Or did she mean, “I have left my mark with your inky pen because I want to make you hate me”? Critical and aggressive, or masochistic and self-pitying? Maybe she knew what she meant when she wrote the words, but there was no subsequent clarity to be found. You may judge the second interpretation oversubtle, and designed to let me off the hook. But—and this formed the basis of another of my long-lost notes—the alcoholic, in my experience, wants to provoke, to push away help, to justify her own isolation. So if she managed to convince herself that I hated her, all the more reason to turn for comfort to the bottle.

  * * *

  —

  You are taking her somewhere in the car. There is no need for her to fear the journey, and you will pick her up later and drive her home. But there are the usual delays before you can get her into the car. And as you are about to release the handbrake, she rushes back into the house and returns with a large, bright yellow plastic laundry bag, which she p
uts between her feet. She does not explain. You do not ask. This is where things have got to.

  And then you think, Oh Fuckit.

  “What’s that for?” you ask.

  “The thing is,” she replies, “I’m not feeling entirely well, and it’s just possible I might be sick. What with the car and all that.”

  No, you think, what with being drunk and all that. A doctor friend has told you that alcoholics sometimes throw up so violently that they can perforate their own oesophagus. As it happens, she doesn’t need to vomit, but she might as well have done. Because she has already filled your head with an image of her throwing up into this yellow bag, and you cannot stop seeing it. You might as well have listened to her dry retching and then wet retching, and can hear the vomit trickling into the bright yellow plastic. The smell, too, of course, in your small car. The excuses, the lies. Her lies, your lies.

  Because it is no longer just a question of her lying to you. When she does so, you have two choices: call her out on it, or accept what she says. Usually, out of weariness and a desire for peace—and yes, out of love—you accept what she says. You condone the lie. And so become a liar by proxy. And it is a very short step from accepting her lies to lying yourself—out of weariness, and a desire for peace, and also out of love—yes, that too.

  What a long way you have come. Years ago, when you started off lying to your parents, you did so with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence; it almost felt character-building. Later, you began to tell lies in all directions: to protect her, and to protect your love. Later still, she starts lying to you, to keep you from knowing her secret; and now she lies with a kind of relish, reckless of consequence. Then, finally, you begin lying to her. Why? Something to do with the need to create some internal space which you could keep intact—and where you could yourself remain intact. And this is how it is for you now. Love and truth—where have they gone?

  You ask yourself: Is staying with her an act of courage on your part, or an act of cowardice? Perhaps both? Or is it just an inevitability?

  * * *

  —

  She has taken to going to the Village by train. You approve: you think this comes from a recognition of her unfitness to drive. You take her to the station, she tells you the time of her return train, though, as often as not, she doesn’t turn up until the next one, or the one after. And when she says, “Don’t bother meeting me,” she is protecting her inner world. And when you reply, “Fine—sure you’ll be all right?” you are protecting yours.

  The phone goes one evening.

  “Is that Henry?”

  “No, sorry, wrong number.”

  You are about to put the phone down when the man reads your number to you.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “Well, good evening, sir. This is the transport police at Waterloo Station. We have a lady here in a…slightly distressed condition. We found her asleep in the train and, well, her handbag was open and there was a sum of money in it, so you see…”

  “Yes I see.”

  “She showed us this number and asked us to call Henry.”

  In the background you hear her voice. “Call Henry, call Henry.”

  Ah, her shorthand for Henry Road.

  So you drive to Waterloo, find the office of the railway police and there she is, sitting up, bright-eyed, waiting to be collected, knowing that it would happen. The two policemen are courteous and concerned. They are doubtless used to helping drunk old ladies found snoring in empty carriages. Not that she is old, just that when she is drunk, you think of her, suddenly, as a drunk old lady.

  “Well, thank you very much for looking after her.”

  “Oh, she was no trouble at all, sir. Quiet as a mouse. Look after yourself, Madam.”

  She gives a rather stately acknowledging nod. You take the arm of this piece of left luggage, and off you go. Your annoyance and despair, however, are cut by a certain pride in her having been “no trouble.” Though what if she had been?

  * * *

  —

  Eventually, more out of despair than hope, you try tough love, or at least what your understanding of that concept is. You don’t let her get away with anything. You call her out on her lies. You pour away whatever bottles you find, some in obvious places, some in such strange locations that she must have hidden them there while drunk, and then forgotten where she had put them. You get her banned from the three local shops which sell alcohol. You give them each a photo to keep behind the till. You do not tell her this; you think the humiliation of being refused service will jolt her. You never find out, and she merely gets round the obstruction by travelling further afield.

  You hear reports. Some people are shy about mentioning things to you, others not. A friend, on a bus a mile or so away from Henry Road, has spotted her down an alleyway next to an off-licence, raising a newly bought bottle to her lips. This image burns deep, and transforms itself from another’s account into your own private memory. A neighbour tells you that your auntie was in the Cap and Bells last Saturday night, downing five sherries in succession until they stopped serving her. “It’s not the kind of pub someone like her should be in,” the neighbour adds concernedly. “They get all sorts in there.” You picture the scene, from her ashamed first order at the bar to her unsteady walk home, and this too becomes part of your memory bank.

  You tell her that her behaviour is destroying your love for her. You do not mention hers for you.

  “Then you must leave me,” she says. She is flushed, dignified and logical.

  You know that you are not going to do this. The question is, whether or not she knows it too.

  You write her a letter. If spoken words of rebuke fly unhindered straight out of her head, perhaps written ones will stick. You tell her that the way she is going on, she will almost certainly die of a wet brain, that there is nothing more you can do for her, except come to her funeral, whenever that might be. You leave the letter on the kitchen table, in an envelope with her name on it. She never mentions receiving it, opening it, reading it. With your inky pen to make you hate me.

  You realise that tough love is also tough on the lover.

  * * *

  —

  You are taking her to Gatwick. Martha has invited her out to Brussels, where she is working as a Eurocrat. To your surprise, Susan agrees. You promise to make it as easy as possible for her. You will drive her to the airport and see her through check-in. She nods, then says straightforwardly,

  “You might have to let me have a drink before getting on the plane. Belgian courage.”

  You are more than relieved: almost encouraged.

  The night before she is half-packed and half-drunk. You go to bed. She continues packing and drinking. The next morning she comes to you with a cupped hand over her mouth.

  “I’m afraid I don’t think I shall be able to go.”

  You look at her without speaking.

  “I’ve lost my teeth. I can’t find them anywhere. I think I may have thrown them into the garden.”

  You don’t say anything except, “We have to leave by two.” You decide to let her go on destroying her life.

  But perhaps your failure to respond—to offer neither help nor rebuke—is, for once, the correct approach. An hour or two later, she is walking around with her teeth in, never alluding to either having lost them, or found them.

  At two o’clock you put her case in the back of the car, double-check her ticket and passport and set off. There have been no last-minute diversions, no scurrying for a bright yellow laundry bag. She sits beside you quiet as a mouse, in the railway policeman’s words.

  As you are approaching Redhill, she turns and says in a demurely puzzled way, as if you were more her chauffeur than her lover,

  “Would you mind very much telling me where we are going?”

  “You’re going to
Brussels. To visit Martha.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. There must be some mistake.”

  “That’s why you’ve got your ticket and your passport in your handbag.” Though they are actually in your pocket, as you don’t want them going the way of her teeth.

  “But I don’t know where she lives.”

  “She’s meeting you at the airport.”

  There is a pause.

  “Yes,” she says, nodding, “I seem to remember about this now.”

  There is no further resistance. Part of you thinks she should have a large label round her neck with her name and destination written on it, like a wartime refugee. With perhaps her gas mask in a box as well.

  At the bar you buy her a double schooner of sherry, which she sips with inattentive gentility. You think: it could be worse. This is how you react to situations nowadays. You have the lowest of expectations.

  The trip turns out to be a success. She has been shown the city, and brings you some postcards. Miss Grumpy, she announces, is nowadays Much Less So, perhaps influenced by a charming Belgian boyfriend who was in attendance. Her memories are clearer than usual, a sign that she has been temperate. You feel happy for her, if slightly resentful that she can clean up her act for others more easily than for you. Or so it seems.

  But then, she tells you that on the last morning, the real reason why her daughter invited her out became clear. She, Miss Grumpy, is of the opinion that her mother ought to go back to Mr. Gordon Macleod. Who is now very contrite and promises to be on his best behaviour if she returns. According to Susan, according to her daughter.

  * * *

  —

  To save time, and to save emotion, you address her, straightforwardly, as a drinker. No longer, There seems to be a problem, Do you know what it might be, Perhaps I can suggest…none of that. So one day you suggest Alcoholics Anonymous, not knowing if there is a branch near you.