The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  He had photographs, of course, and they helped. Smiling at him while leaning back against the trunk of a tree in some long-forgotten wood. Windswept on a broad empty beach with a row of shuttered huts in the distance behind her. There was even a picture of her in that tennis dress with the green trim. Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it.

  He tried to get his mind to catch her on the wing. To remember her gaiety, her laughter, her subversiveness and her love for him, before everything became occluded. Her dashingness, and her gallant attempt to make happiness when the odds were always against her, always against them. Yes, this was what he was after: Susan happy, Susan optimistic, despite not having much of a clue what the future held. That was a talent, a lucky slice of her character. He himself tended to look at the future and decide from an assessment of probabilities whether optimism or pessimism was the appropriate outlook. He brought life to his temperament; she brought her temperament to life. It was more risky, of course; it brought more joy, but it left you no safety net. Still, he thought, at least they hadn’t been defeated by practicality.

  There was all this; and there was also the way she accepted him simply as he was. No, better: she enjoyed him as he was. And she had confidence in him: she looked at him and didn’t doubt him; she thought he would make something of himself, and something of his life. Which in a sense he had done, though not as either of them would have foreseen.

  She would say, “Let’s pile all the Fancy Boys into the Austin and drive to the sea.” Or to Chichester Cathedral, or Stonehenge, or a secondhand bookshop, or a wood with a thousand-year-old tree at the centre of it. Or to a horror flick, however much they scared the daylights out of her. Or to a funfair, where they would hurtle round the dodgems, stuff themselves with candyfloss, fail to dislodge coconuts from their holders and be whirled into the air by various devices until all the puff had gone out of them. He didn’t know if he’d done all these things back then, with her; some perhaps later, some even with other people. But it was the kind of remembering he needed, and which brought her back even if she hadn’t actually been there.

  * * *

  —

  No safety net. One image would always recur, whenever he thought of her. He was holding her out of the window by her wrists, unable to pull her in or let her drop, both their lives in agonising stasis until something happened. And what had happened? Well, he had tried to organise people to pile mattresses high enough to break her fall; or, he had got the fire brigade to hold a jumping sheet; or…But they were locked together at the wrist like trapeze artists: he wasn’t just holding her, she was holding him. And in the end his strength gave way, and he let her go. And though her fall was cushioned, it was still very grievous because, as she had once told him, she had heavy bones.

  * * *

  —

  One entry in his notebook was, of course: “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” That was there for a few years; then he crossed it out. Then he wrote it in again; then he crossed it out again. Now he had both entries side by side, one clear and true, the other crossed out and false.

  * * *

  —

  When he thought back to life in the Village, he remembered it as being based on a simple system. For each ailment, there was a single remedy. TCP for a sore throat; Dettol for a cut; Disprin for a headache; Vicks for chestiness. And beyond that lay greater matters but still with unitary solutions. The cure for sex is marriage; the cure for love is marriage; the cure for infidelity is divorce; the cure for unhappiness is work; the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink; the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.

  As an adolescent, he had longed for more complication. And life had let him discover it. At times, he felt he had had enough of life’s complications.

  * * *

  —

  A few weeks after his row with Anna he gave up his rented room and moved back to Henry Road. Somewhere, in some novel he subsequently read, he had come across the sentence: “He fell in love like a man committing suicide.” It wasn’t quite like that, but there was a sense in which he had no choice. He couldn’t live with Susan; he couldn’t establish a separate life away from her; therefore he went back to live with her. Courage or cowardice? Or mere inevitability?

  At least by now he was familar with the patterned patternlessness of the life he was submitting to again. His reappearance was greeted not with happiness or relief, but with a blithe lack of surprise. Because such a return was always going to happen. Because young men must be allowed their delinquencies, but shouldn’t be congratulated when they returned to a place they should never have left. He noted this discrepant reaction but didn’t resent it; on the scale of things to be resented, it didn’t really signify.

  And so—for how long? another four, five years?—they continued under the same roof, with good days and bad weeks, swallowed rage, occasional outbursts and increasing social isolation. All this no longer made him feel interesting; instead, he felt a failure and an outcast. He never got close to another woman in this time. After a year or two, Eric could no longer stand the atmosphere, and moved out. The top two rooms were rented to nurses. Well, he couldn’t get policemen.

  But there was one discovery made during these years which surprised him, and which made his future life, when it came, easier. The office manager announced herself pregnant; they advertised for a stand-in, but could find no one suitable; he suggested himself for the job. It scarcely occupied the whole day, and he continued handling some legal aid cases. But he found the routine of admin, diary-keeping, mail, billings—even the banalities of maintaining the coffee machine and water cooler—gave him quiet satisfaction. In part, no doubt, because he often arrived from Henry Road in a state unfit for much more than low-level administration. But he also took unanticipated pleasure in running things. And his colleagues were straightforwardly grateful to him for making their lives easier. The contrast with Henry Road was blatant. When had Susan last thanked him for making her life less arduous than it would have been?

  The office manager, with many explanations about the thrilling surprise of maternal love, announced that she wouldn’t be returning. He took the job full-time; and, years later, this practical ability proved his means of escape. He managed offices for law firms, for charities, for NGOs, and so was able to travel, and move on when he needed to. He worked in Africa, and in North and South America. The routine satisfied a part of him he didn’t know existed. He remembered how, back at the Village tennis club, he’d been shocked at the way some of the older members played. They were certainly competent, but inexpressive and uninventive, as if merely following the instructions of some long-dead coach. Well, that had been them, then. Now he could run an office—wherever, whenever—like any grooved old hacker. He kept his satisfactions to himself. And over the years he had also learned to see the point of money: what it could—and couldn’t—do.

  There was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn’t take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarely disappointed.

  * * *

  —

  He had a duty to see back to how she had been, and to rescue her. But this wasn’t just about her. He had a duty to himself. To see back and…rescue himself? From what? From “the subsequent wreckage of his life”? No, that was stupidly melodramatic. His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterised. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty to see himself as he had once been. Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can’t change.

  * * *

  —

  He remembered, at school, being guided by masters through books and p
lays in which there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty. In those old stories, innocent but passionate love would run up against the duty owed to family, church, king, state. Some protagonists won, some lost, some did both at the same time; usually, tragedy ensued. No doubt in religious, patriarchal, hierarchical societies, such conflicts continued and still gave themes to writers. But in the Village? No church-going for his family. Not much of a hierarchical social structure, unless you counted the tennis and golf club committees, with their power to expel. Not much patriarchy, either—not with his mother around. As for family duty: he had felt no obligation to placate his parents. Indeed, nowadays the onus had shifted, and it was the parents’ job to accept whatever “life choices” their child might make. Like running off to a Greek island with Pedro the hairdresser, or bringing home that gymslip-mother-to-be.

  Yet this liberation from the old dogmas brought its own complexities. The sense of obligation became internalised. Love was a Duty in and of itself. You had a Duty to Love, the more so now that it was your central belief system. And Love brought many Duties with it. So, even when apparently weightless, Love could weigh heavily, and bind heavily, and its Duties could cause disasters as great as in the old days.

  * * *

  —

  Another thing he had come to understand. He had imagined that, in the modern world, time and place were no longer relevant to stories of love. Looking back, he saw that they had played a greater part in his story than he ever realised. He had given in to the old, continuing, ineradicable delusion: that lovers somehow stand outside of time.

  * * *

  —

  Now he was getting off the point. Susan and himself, all those years ago. There was her shame to deal with. But there was also, he knew, his shame.

  * * *

  —

  An entry from his notebook which had survived several inspections: “In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.” He had liked this remark since first discovering it. Because for him it opened out into a wider thought: that love itself is never absurd, and neither are any of its participants. Despite all the stern orthodoxies of feeling and behaviour that a society may seek to impose, love slips past them. You sometimes saw, in the farmyard, improbable forms of attachment—the goose in love with the donkey, the kitten playing safely between the paws of the chained-up mastiff. And in the human farmyard, there existed forms of attachment which were just as unlikely; and yet never, to their participants, absurd.

  * * *

  —

  One permanent effect of his exposure to the Macleod household had been a distaste for angry men. No, not distaste, disgust. Anger as an expression of authority, an expression of masculinity, anger as a prelude to physical violence: he hated it all. There was a hideous false virtue to anger: look at me, angry, look how I boil over because I am so filled with emotion, look how I am really alive (unlike all those cold fish over there), look how I am going to prove it by grabbing your hair and smashing your face into a door. And now look what you made me do! I’m angry about that too!

  It seemed to him that anger was never just anger. Love was, usually, in itself, just love, even if it impelled some to behave in ways which made you suspect there was no love present anymore, and perhaps never had been. But anger, especially the sort which coated itself in self-righteousness (and perhaps all anger did) was so often an expression of something else: boredom, contempt, superiority, failure, hatred. Or even something apparently trivial, like a chafing dependence on female practicality.

  * * *

  —

  Even so, and to his considerable surprise, he had finally stopped hating Macleod. True, the man was long dead—though it was perfectly possible, indeed reasonable, to hate the dead; and at one stage he imagined he would live with his hatred until the day he himself died. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

  He wasn’t sure about the chronology of it all. At some point, Macleod had retired, but continued to live on in that large house, attended by a cook-housekeeper to whom he behaved with elaborate, antiquated politeness. Once a week he would go to the golf club and hit a stationary ball as if it were a personal enemy. He would garden furiously, smoke furiously, turn on the goggle-box and drink along to it until he could still just get himself to bed. Often the thieving Mrs. Dyer would find the blank-screened set still buzzing when she arrived.

  Then, one winter morning, while he was planting out cabbages, Macleod had fallen to the hard ground and wasn’t discovered for hours; the stroke had done its worst. Half-paralysed, but fully silenced, he now depended on regular visits from a nurse, monthly ones from his daughters, more erratic ones from Susan. Maurice, his old pal from Reynolds News, would drop by from time to time, and, in knowing contravention of medical advice, would pull out a half-bottle of whisky and pour some of it down Macleod’s throat while the familiar eyes blinked back at him. By the time the housekeeper found him dead on the floor with the bedsheets wrapped round him, Susan had long since handed power of attorney to Martha and Clara. The house, with many unwanted contents, was sold to a dubious local who might have been fronting for a property developer.

  Somewhere in this sequence, he had stopped hating Macleod. He didn’t forgive him—he didn’t consider forgiveness the opposite of hatred—but he acknowledged that his seething antipathy and nighttime rages had become somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, he didn’t feel pity for Macleod, despite all the humiliations and infirmities visited upon him. These he regarded as inevitabilities; indeed, he nowadays regarded most things that happened as inevitabilities.

  The question of responsibility? That seemed a matter for outsiders: only those with a sufficient lack of evidence and knowledge could confidently apportion blame. He was, even at this distance, still far too involved to do so himself. And he had also reached a stage in life where he had started pursuing counterfactuals. What if this had happened rather than that? It was idle but involving (and perhaps held the question of responsibility at bay). For instance, what if he hadn’t been nineteen, with time on his hands and—while hardly aware of it—desperate for love when he had arrived at the tennis club? What if Susan, from religious or moral scruple, had discouraged his interest, and taught him nothing more than tactical astuteness when playing mixed doubles? What if Macleod had continued to hold a sexual interest in his wife? None of this might have happened. But given that it had, then if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into prehistory, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.

  Those charged first few months had reordered his present and determined his future, even up to now. But what if, for instance, he and Susan hadn’t been attracted to one another? What if one of their many cover stories had been true? He was a young man who drove her because she needed new glasses. He was a friend of one or both of the daughters. He was a kind of protégé of Gordon’s. Now, in his state of slowly acquired calmness, he found he could easily imagine things other than they had been; the facts and feelings quite different.

  Curious, he pursued this untaken path. For instance, he started helping Old Man Macleod with the gardening. As well as playing tennis with Susan, he took up golf, had lessons at the club and would often partner Gordon—as he’d been asked to call him—round the local eighteen holes when the dew still sparkled on the fairways. There was something about his presence which relaxed Old Man Macleod: that gruffness was only a mask, and Paul was able to help him relax a bit more on the tee; he even taught him (after flipping through an American golf manual) how to love that little dimpled ball rather than hate it. He—Casey Paul, as more than Susan now called him—discovered that he rather liked a drink: gin with Joan, beer with Gordon, an occasional glass of sherry with Susan; though all agreed that at a certain point enough was enough and one more was too many. And then—why not pursue this alternative life to, if not a logical, a
t least a conventional conclusion—what if he and one of the Macleod daughters became (as their parents would have put it) “sweet on one another”? Martha or Clara? Obviously Clara, who took more character traits from Susan. But this was counterfactual, and so he chose Martha.

  The immediate consequence was that the Macleods did indeed come round to have sherry with his parents—an occasion he and Martha had been dreading, but which actually passed off quite well. The two couples were never going to make a harmonious bridge four, but there was nothing like fixing a date with the vicar of St. Michael’s for everyone to overlook incompatibilities. And—since this counterfactual had now got way out of hand—he decided to decorate the wedding day with the most extravagantly beautiful weather, even unto a double rainbow. Then, on a whim, he chose to award himself the sister he never had. To stir things up a bit for his parents, he made her a lesbian. Oh, and she brought her baby along to the ceremony. The only baby in the Western world who didn’t cry at an inappropriate moment during a wedding. Why not?

  He shook his head to clear this strange vision that had come upon him. There were two ways of looking at life; or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississippi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that prehistory ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississippi, tugged and bullied, smacked and wheedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life—his own, of course—could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realised that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving.