The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  You are home one evening when the phone goes. It is one of the lodgers.

  “I think you’d better come round. We’ve had the police. With guns.”

  You repeat the words to Anna, then run for your car. In Henry Road there is an ambulance outside the house, its blue light revolving, its doors open. You park, walk across, and there she is, in a wheelchair facing out towards the street, with a broad bandage around her forehead which has pushed her hair up into a Struwwelpeter shock. Her expression, as often when a sudden crisis has worked itself out, is one of slightly amused calm. She surveys the street, the ambulance men fixing the wheelchair in place, and your own arrival, as if from a throne. The blue light revolves against the steadier sodium orange. It is real and unreal at the same time; filmic, phantasmagoric.

  Then the chair slowly rises on its hoist, and as the ambulance doors are about to be closed, she lifts her hand in a pontifical blessing. You ask the ambulance men where they are taking her and follow in your car. When you get to the A&E department, they are already taking preliminary details.

  “I’m her next of kin,” you say.

  “Son?” they ask. You nearly agree, for speed, but they might query the difference of surname. So, once again, you are her nephew.

  “He’s not really my nephew,” she says. “I could tell you a thing or two about this young man.”

  You look at the doctor, lying to him with a slight frown and a tiny movement of the head. You collude in the notion that Susan is temporarily off among the nutters.

  “Ask him about the tennis club,” she says.

  “We’ll come to that, Mrs. Macleod. But first…”

  And so the process continues. They will keep her in overnight, perhaps run a test or two. It may just be shock. They will call you when they are ready to release her. The ambulance men have said it was just a cut, but as it was on the forehead there was a lot of blood. It may need a stitch or two, maybe not.

  The next day, they release her, still in full dispossession of her faculties.

  “About time too,” she says, as you walk her to the car park. “It really has all been frightfully interesting.”

  You know this mood only too well. Something has been observed, or experienced, or discovered, which has little to do with anything, yet is of extreme, overwhelming interest, and must be reported.

  “Let’s wait until we get you home first.” You have slipped into the language of the hospital, where everything is done or asked for in the name of “us.”

  “All right, Mr. Spoilsport.”

  At Henry Road, you take her to the kitchen, sit her down, make her a cup of tea with extra sugar and give her a biscuit. She ignores them.

  “Well,” she begins, “it was all so fascinating. Such fun. You see, these two men with guns got into the house last night.”

  “With guns?”

  “That’s what I said. With guns. Do stop interrupting before I’ve barely even started. So yes, two men with guns. And they were going round looking for something. I don’t know what.”

  “Were they robbers?” You feel you are allowed to ask questions which don’t challenge the essential veracity of her fantasy.

  “Well, that’s what I thought might be the case. So I said to them, ‘The gold bullion is under the bed.’ ”

  “Wasn’t that a bit rash?”

  “No, I thought it would put them off the scent. Not that I knew what the scent was, of course. They were both quite polite and well mannered. For gunmen, that is. They didn’t want to bother me, they would just go about their business if I didn’t mind.”

  “But didn’t they shoot at you?” You indicate her forehead, now decorated with a large gauze patch.

  “Lord, no, they were much too polite for that. But it was rather an interruption to the evening, so I felt obliged to call the police.”

  “Didn’t they try and stop you?”

  “Oh no, they were all in favour. They agreed with me that the police might help them find what they were looking for.”

  “But they didn’t tell you what that was?”

  She ignores you and continues.

  “But the thing I really wanted to tell you was that they had these feathers everywhere.”

  “Gosh.”

  “Feathers sticking out of their bottoms. Feathers in their hair. Feathers everywhere.”

  “What sort of guns did they have?”

  “Oh, who knows about guns?” she says dismissively. “But then the police came, and I answered the door to them, and they sorted everything out.”

  “Was there a gunfight?”

  “A gunfight? Don’t be ridiculous. The British police are far too professional for that.”

  “But they arrested them?”

  “Naturally. Why else do you think I called them?”

  “So how did you cut your head?”

  “Well, of course I can’t remember that. It’s the least interesting part of the story in my view.”

  “I’m glad it all worked out in the end.”

  “You know, Paul,” she says, “sometimes I’m really disappointed in you. It was so enjoyable and so fascinating, but you keep coming up with these banal comments and banal questions. Of course it all worked out in the end. Everything always does, doesn’t it?”

  You don’t answer. After all, you have your pride. And in your opinion, the notion that everything works out in the end, and the counternotion that nothing ever does, are both equally banal.

  “Now don’t sulk. It’s been one of the most interesting twenty-four hours of my life. And everyone—everyone—was very nice to me indeed.”

  The gunmen. The police. The ambulance men. The hospital. The Russkis. The Vatican. And all’s right with the world, then.

  * * *

  —

  That evening, over takeaway pizzas, I recounted the whole lurid episode to Anna. I told it fondly, concernedly, almost amusedly, if not quite. The fantasy gunmen, the real policemen, the gold bullion, the feathers, the ambulance men, the hospital. I omitted some of Susan’s strictures on my character. I was also aware, however, that Anna was not reacting as I had expected.

  Eventually, she said, “That all sounds a great waste of public money.”

  “That’s an odd way to look at it.”

  “Is it? Police, firearms squad—Special Branch—ambulance, hospital. All of them dashing around making a fuss of her, just because she’s gone on a bender. And that includes you too.”

  “Me? What do you expect me to do when the lodger calls and says there are armed police in the house?”

  “I didn’t expect you to do anything different.”

  “Well then—”

  “Just as I wouldn’t expect you to do anything different if we were going out for a meal, or a film, or leaving for a holiday and already running late for our flight.”

  I thought about this. “No, I don’t expect I would. Behave differently.”

  We were reaching a stand-off, I realised. One of the reasons I’d gone for Anna in the first place was that she always spoke her mind. This had a downside to it as well as an upside. I suppose all character traits do.

  “Look,” I said. “We talked about…all this when we first got together.” Somehow, I couldn’t say Susan’s name at that moment.

  “You talked. I listened. I didn’t necessarily agree.”

  “Then you misled me.”

  “No, Paul, you didn’t explain the full extent of it to me. Maybe in future when I get out my diary to write in a dinner date or a play or a weekend away, I should always add a note saying: subject to the extent of Susan Macleod’s alcoholic intake.”

  “That’s very unfair.”

  “It may be unfair but it also happens to be true.”

  We paused. It was a question of whether either of us wanted
to take it further. Anna did.

  “And while we’re about it, Paul, I may as well say that Susan Macleod…is not really my kind of woman.”

  “I see.”

  “I mean, I shall always try to be kind to her for your sake.”

  “Yes, well, that’s very generous of you. And while we’re about it, I may as well say that I once promised her there would always be room in my life for her, even if it was just an attic.”

  “Paul, I don’t want an attic in my life.” And then she said it. “Especially not with a madwoman in it.”

  I let that last remark fill the silence that was growing between us. Eventually, no doubt sounding prim, I said, “I’m sorry you think she’s mad.”

  She didn’t withdraw her assertion. I realised that I was the only person in the world who understood Susan. And even if I’d moved out, how could I abandon her?

  Anna and I continued for a few more weeks, each of us half-concealing our thoughts from the other. But I wasn’t surprised when she bailed on the relationship. Nor, by then, did I blame her.

  * * *

  —

  And so, by the end, you have tried soft love and tough love, feelings and reason, truth and lies, promises and threats, hope and stoicism. But you are not a machine, switching easily from one approach to another. Each strategy involves as much emotional strain on you as on her; perhaps more. Sometimes, when, lightly drunk, she is in one of her airy, exasperating moods, denying both reality and your concern for her, you find yourself thinking: she may be destroying herself in the long term, but in the short term, she’s doing more damage to you. Helpless, frustrated anger overwhelms you; and, worst of all, righteous anger. You hate your own righteousness.

  You remember the running-away fund she gave you when you were at university. You have never thought to make use of it before. Now, you take it all out, in cash. You go to a small, anonymous hotel towards the bottom of the Edgware Road, just up from Marble Arch. This is not a fashionable or expensive part of town. Next door is a small Lebanese restaurant. In the five days you are there, you do not drink. You want your mind to be lucid; you do not want either your anger or your self-pity to be exaggerated or distorted. You want your emotions to be whatever they are.

  You remove a bunch of prostitutes’ business cards from a nearby telephone box. They have been attached with Blu-Tack, and before laying them out on the small desk in your hotel room, you roll off the sticky little balls of adhesive and drop them in the wastepaper basket. You do this in a deliberate way. Then you lay the cards out like a game of patience and decide which of these glamorous women who do “hotel calls” you wish to fuck. You make your first phone call. The woman, naturally, looks nothing like the photo on the card. You note this, without caring, let alone protesting: on the scale of disappointment, this is nothing. The location and the transaction are the exact opposite of all you have previously imagined love and sex to be. Still, it is fine for what it is. Efficient, pleasurable, emotion-free; fine.

  On the wall is a cheap print of a Van Gogh cornfield with crows. You enjoy looking at it: again, an efficient, second-rate, counterfeit pleasure. You think there is something to be said for the second-rate. Perhaps it is more reliable than the first-rate. For instance, if you were in front of the real Van Gogh, you might get nervous, be full of jacked-up expectations about whether or not you were reacting properly. Whereas no one—you, least of all—cares how you respond to a cheap print on a hotel wall. Perhaps that is how you should live your life. You remember, when you were a student, someone maintaining that if you lowered your expectations in life, then you would never be disappointed. You wonder if there is any truth in this.

  When desire returns, you order up another prostitute. Later, you have a Lebanese dinner. You watch television. You lie on your bed, deliberately not thinking about Susan or anything to do with her. You do not care how anyone might judge you if they could see where you are and what you are doing. Doggedly, and almost without actual pleasure, you continue to spend your running-away fund until all that remains is enough for your bus fare back to SE15. You do not reproach yourself; nor do you experience guilt, now or later. You never tell anyone about this episode. But you begin to wonder—not for the first time in your life—if there is something to be said for feeling less.

  THREE

  He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

  * * *

  —

  He had kept a little notebook for decades now. In it he wrote down what people said about love. Great novelists, television sages, self-help gurus, people he met in his years of travelling. He assembled the evidence. And then, every couple of years or so, he went through and crossed out all the quotations he no longer believed to be true. Usually, this left him with only two or three temporary truths. Temporary, because the next time round, he would probably cross those out as well, leaving a different two or three now standing.

  * * *

  —

  He had found himself on a train to Bristol the other day. Across the aisle was a woman with the Daily Mail spread out in front of her. He saw the bright headline, accompanied by a large photo. HEADMISTRESS, 49, SANK 8 GLASSES OF WINE, DROPPED CRISPS DOWN HER TOP, AND SAID TO PUPIL, “COME AND GET ’EM.” After such a headline, what need to read the story? And what chance of the reader finding a different moral to the one so fiercely implied? Any more than would have been the case, half a century previously, had the newspaper’s hot moralism been applied to a story which, at the time, hadn’t even made the local Advertiser & Gazette. For the next ten minutes and more he worked on the headline his own case might have elicited. He finally came up with: NEW BALLS, ANYONE? TENNIS CLUB SCANDAL AS HOUSEWIFE, 48, AND LONG-HAIRED STUDENT, 19, EXPELLED OVER RUMPY-PUMPY. As for the text below, it would write itself: “There were shock waves behind the lace curtains and laurel hedges of leafy Surrey last week as steamy allegations emerged of…”

  * * *

  —

  Some people, when they grow old, decide to live by the sea. They watch the tides approach and recede, foam bubbling on the beach, further out the breakers, and perhaps, beyond all this, they hear the oceanic waves of time, and in such hinted outer vastness find some consolation for their own minor lives and impending mortality. He preferred a different liquid, with its own movements and its own destination. But he saw nothing eternal in it: just milk turning into cheese. He was suspicious of the grander view of things, and wary of indefinable yearnings. He preferred the daily dealings of reality. And he also admitted that his world, and his life, had slowly shrunk. But he was content with this.

  * * *

  —

  For instance, he thought he probably wouldn’t have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

  * * *

  —

  So, that familiar question of memory. He recognised that memory was unreliable and biased, but in which direction? Towards optimism? That made initial sense. You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph—his own had hardly been that—but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful. Purposeful? That would be pitching it a bit high. Still, an optimistic memory might make it easier to part from life, might soften the pain of extinction.

  But you could equally argue the opposite. If memory is biased towards pessimism, if, retrospectively, all appears blacker and bleaker than it actually was, then this might make life easier to leave beh
ind. If, like dear old Joan, dead now these thirty years and more, you had already been to hell and back in your lifetime, then what fear of actual hell, or, more probably, eternal nonexistence? There drifted into his mind words caught on the headcam of a British soldier in Afghanistan—words spoken by another soldier as he executed a wounded prisoner. “There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt,” the man had said before pulling the trigger. Impressive to have Shakespeare half-quoted on the modern battlefield, he had thought at the time. Why had that come into his head? Perhaps Joan’s swearing had been the connection. So he considered the upside to feeling that life was just a fucking coil to be shuffled off. And men were just cunts; not women, men. There might also be an evolutionary advantage to a pessimistic memory. You wouldn’t mind making room for others in the food queue; you could see it as a social duty to wander off into the wilderness, or allow yourself to be staked out on some hillside for the greater good.

  * * *

  —

  But that was theory; and here was practicality. As he saw it, one of the last tasks of his life was to remember her correctly. By which he didn’t mean: accurately, day by day, year by year, from beginning to middle to end. The end had been terrible, and far too much middle had overhung the beginning. No, what he meant was this: it was his final duty, to both of them, to remember and hold her as she had been when they were first together. To remember her back to what he still thought of as her innocence: an innocence of soul. Before such innocence became defaced. Yes, that was the word for it: a scribbling-over with the wild graffiti of booze. Also, a losing of the face, and his subsequent inability to see her. To see, to recall what she had been like before he lost her, lost sight of her, before she disappeared into that chintz sofa—“Look, Casey Paul, I’m doing my disappearing act!” Lost sight of the first person—the only person—he had loved.