The Only Story

by Julian Barnes

  It used to be said that the Bhutanese were the happiest people on earth. In Bhutan there was little materialism, but a strong sense of kinship, society and religion. Whereas he lived in the materialistic West, where there was little religion and a weaker sense of both society and family. Did this give him an advantage, or a disadvantage?

  More recently, the happiest people on earth were said to be the Danes. Not because of their supposed hedonism, but because of the modesty of their expressed hopes. Instead of aiming for the stars and the moon, their ambition was only to reach the next streetlamp and, being pleased when they did so, were the happier for it. He remembered again that woman, somebody’s girlfriend, who said that she had lowered her expectations because this made you less likely to be disappointed. And therefore more happy? Was this what it was like to be Danish?

  As for whether strength of feeling correlated to degree of happiness, his own experience now led him to doubt it. You might as well say, the more you ate, the better your digestion; or, the faster you drove, the quicker you got there. Not if you drove into a brick wall. He remembered that time, out in his Morris Minor with Susan, when the accelerator cable had broken, or jammed, or whatever. They were certainly roaring away up that hill, until he had the wit to disengage the clutch. He’d been doing two things at the same time: panicking and thinking clearly. That’s how his life had been, back then. Nowadays, he always thought clearly; but occasionally, he found he missed the panic.

  And here was another factor, whether you were Bhutanese, Danish or British. If the statistics of happiness depend on personal reporting, how can we be sure that anyone is as happy as they claim to be? What if they aren’t telling the truth? No, we have to assume that they are, or at least that the testing system allows for lying. So the real question lay beneath: assuming that those canvassed by anthropologists and sociologists are reliable witnesses, then surely “being happy” is the same as “reporting yourself happy”? Whereupon any subsequent objective analysis—of brain activity, for instance—becomes irrelevant. To say sincerely that you are happy is to be happy. At which point, the question disappears.

  And if that was so, then perhaps the argument could be extended. For example, to say that you had once been happy, and to believe what you were saying, was the same as actually to have been happy. Could that be true? No, that was surely specious. On the other hand, the emotional record was not like a history book; its truths were constantly changing, and true even when incompatible.

  For instance, he had noticed during his life one difference between the sexes in the reporting of relationships. When a couple broke up, the woman was more likely to say, “It was all fine until x happened.” The x being a change of circumstances or location, the arrival of an extra child, or, all too often, some routine—or not so routine—infidelity. Whereas the man was more likely to say, “I’m afraid it was all wrong from the start.” And he would be referring to a mutual incompatibility, or a marriage made under duress, or an unrevealed secret on one or both sides, which had later emerged. So she was saying, “We were happy until,” while he was saying, “We were never really happy.” And when he had first noticed this discrepancy, he had tried to work out which of them was more likely to be telling the truth; but now, at the other end of his life, he accepted that both were doing so. “In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.”

  * * *

  —

  When he bought a half-share in the Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese Company, he had imagined himself as a kind of owner-manager. Co-owner–co-manager. He had a desk and a chair and a rather decrepit computer terminal; he also had his own white coat, though was rarely required to put it on. Hillary ran the office. He had imagined himself running Hillary; but she didn’t need running. He offered to help out and muck in; though mainly he watched things happen around him, and smiled. When Hillary went on holiday, he was allowed to take over her desk.

  Where he proved most useful to the company (which only consisted of five people) was stall-holding at farmers’ markets. It wasn’t easy to find someone regular, and Barry, who’d done it for years, was growing unreliable. He was happy to stand in when required. Driving to one of the nearby towns, setting up the stall, laying out the cheeses, their captions, the tasting plates, the plastic cup of toothpicks. He wore a tweed cap and a leather apron, but knew he hardly passed for Somerset born-and-bred. Behind him was a plastic backdrop bearing a colour photograph of happy goats. The other stall-holders were friendly; he would swap two fivers for a tenner, two tenners for a twenty. He explained to customers the age of the cheeses and their characteristics: this one rolled in ash, this in chives, this in crushed chillis. He enjoyed doing all this. It gave him the level of social interaction he required nowadays: cheerful, mutually sustaining, with no question of intimacy—even if he did sometimes flirt lightly with Betty of Betty’s Best Home-Made Pies. It passed the time. Ah, that phrase. A sudden memory of Susan talking about Joan. “We’re all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.” Back then, it had sounded like a counsel of despair; now, it struck him as normal, and emotionally practical.

  * * *

  —

  Despite having no expectation of, nor desire for, some final relationship—or perhaps because of this—he often found himself drawn to all those public displays of wantingness. The personal ads, the “soulmates” columns, the TV dating shows, and those newspaper features where couples go for a meal, mark one another out of ten, report on or confess to inept chopstick behaviour, and then answer (or not) the question of whether they had kissed. “A quick hug” or “Only on the cheek” were frequent responses. Some blokes would answer smugly, “A gentleman never tells.” It was meant to sound sophisticated, but showed far too much class deference: “gentlemen,” in his experience, were as boastful as any other males. Still, he followed all these brave, tentative forays of the heart with a mixture of tenderness and scepticism. He hoped it might work out for them, even as he doubted that it would.

  * * *

  —

  “A gentleman never tells.” Well, it might occasionally be true. For instance, Uncle Humphrey, stinking of booze and cigars, coming into Susan’s bedroom to demonstrate “a party kiss,” and then demanding one (or more) on an annual basis. He doubted Uncle Humph had “told.” But this hardly made him a “gentleman”—quite the opposite. Uncle Humph, whose lechery had resulted in Susan not believing in the afterlife. Had his behaviour affected her in other ways? Impossible to tell, at this distance. And so he dismissed that long-dead uncle from his mind.

  * * *

  —

  He preferred to remember Joan. He wished he’d known her as a bounding tennis champion, then as a girl who went off the rails, then as a kept woman. Was the man who kept her, and then dismissed her, a “gentleman”? Susan had withheld his name, and there was no finding it now.

  He smiled at the thought of Joan. He remembered the yappers, and Sibyl, the elderly golden retriever. Which of them had died first, Joan or Sibyl? She’d asked him to send flowers. Though for whom was never made clear. Whenever he’d been tempted to get a dog, he heard Joan’s warning voice about them dying on you. So he never got a dog. Nor was he ever tempted to do crosswords or drink gin.

  * * *

  —

  “Little man, you’ve had a busy day.”

  This is the greeting she often sings at you, when you visit her on home leaves.

  Except when it is:

  “Clap hands, here comes Charlie,

  Clap hands, good time Charlie,

  Clap hands, here comes Charlie now.”

  Martha, to your continuing surprise, never objects to your visits, and never asks you for money. She looks after her mother herself, with an occasional nurse in attendance. You get the impression
that Martha’s husband is doing well in…whatever he does. She told you once, which means you can no longer ask.

  Susan’s mind has slipped a little more each time you see her. Short-term memory disappeared a while ago, and long-term memory is a shifting, blurry palimpsest from which clear but unconnected phrases will occasionally be picked out by her fading brain. What often rises to the surface are songs and catchphrases from decades previously.

  “High o’er the fence leaps Sunny Jim,

  Force is the food that raises him.”

  Some advertising jingle for a breakfast cereal—from her own childhood? from that of her children? In your house, you had Weetabix.

  She has long ago ceased to drink; indeed, she has forgotten that she was ever a drinker. She seems to know that you are, or were, something in her life, but not that she once loved you, and you loved her in return. Her brain is ragged, but her mood is strangely stable. The panic and pandemonium have drained out of her. She is alarmed by neither your arrival nor your departure. Her manner is satirical at times, disapproving at others, but always a little superior, as if you aren’t a person of much consequence. You find all this agonising, and try to resist the temptation to believe that you deserve what you are getting.

  “He’s a dirty stop-out, that one,” she will confide to the nurse in a stage whisper. “I could tell you things about him that would make your hair stand on end.”

  The nurse looks at you, so you shrug and smile, as if to say, “What can you do, it’s so sad, isn’t it?” while realizing that even now you are betraying her, even in this new and last extremity of hers. Because she could, of course, tell the nurse a thing or two about you, and the nurse’s hair might well stand on end.

  You remember her saying that she wasn’t afraid of death, and that her only regret would be over not knowing what happened afterwards. But now she has very little past and—literally—no thought for the future. She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

  “You’re a played-out generation.”

  “Got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.”

  “Clap hands, here comes…Sunny Jim.”

  “One of the worst criminals in the world.”

  “Where’ve you been all my life?”

  At least, you think, there is something of her still left among these shreds and patches.

  “Oh dear, what can the matter be?

  Three old ladies got locked in the la-va-tree,

  They were there from Monday to Saturday,

  Reading the Radio Times.”

  Yes, you remember teaching her that one. So at least she hasn’t turned into an entirely different person. You’ve heard about that happening: pillars of the church screaming obscenities, sweet old ladies turning into Nazis, and so on. But this is faint comfort. Perhaps, if she became unrecognizable and slipped completely out of character, it would all be less painful to deal with.

  Once—and naturally in front of the nurse—she dredges up a football song which can only have come from you:

  “If I had the wings of a sparrow,

  If I had the arse of a crow,

  I’d fly over Tottenham tomorrow,

  And shit on the bastards below.”

  But the nurse has, of course, heard far worse in her years of caring for the elderly and demented, so she merely cocks an eyebrow at you and asks,

  “Chelsea supporter?”

  What makes it unbearable, what makes you so exhausted and depressed after twenty minutes in her presence that you want to run outside and howl, is this: though she can’t name you, never asks you any questions or answers any of yours, she still, at one level, registers your presence and responds to it. She doesn’t know who the fuck you are, or what you do, or even your fucking name, but at the same time, she recognises you, and judges you morally and finds you wanting. It is this which urges you to run out of the house and howl; and this which makes you realise that, perhaps at some similar unconscious level, in some remote part of your brain, you still love her. And because this awareness is unwelcome, it makes you want to howl the more.

  * * *

  —

  And while he was tormenting himself, here was a question he would often arrive at when his mind followed a particular trail of memory. Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice?

  And if he couldn’t decide, perhaps the answer was: both.

  * * *

  —

  But she had marked his life in so many ways, some for the better, some the worse. She had made him more generous and open to others though also more suspicious and enclosed. She had taught him the virtue of impulsiveness; but also its dangers. So he had ended up with a cautious generosity and a careful impulsiveness. His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a “use by” date on it.

  He always remembered what she had said to him after they left Joan’s house that day. Like most young men, especially those first in love, he had viewed life—and love—in terms of winners and losers. He, obviously, was a winner; Joan, he assumed, had been a loser, or, more likely, not even a competitor. Susan had put him right. Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story.

  At the time, he had been sobered by her words, and Joan’s story had made him think of her quite differently. Then, over the years, as his life developed, as caution and carefulness began to predominate, he realised that he, no less than Joan, had had his love story, and perhaps there wasn’t another one to come. So now he better understood how couples clung to their own story—each, often, to a separate part of it—long after it had gone cold on them, even to the point where they were not sure they could bear one another. Bad love still contained the remnant, the memory, of good love—somewhere, deep down, where neither of them any longer wanted to dig.

  He found himself often wondering about other people’s love stories; and sometimes, because he was a calm and unintimidating presence, they would confide in him. Mostly, it was women who did so, but that was unsurprising; men—himself a prime example—were both more covert and less eloquent. And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling—that such tales were the equivalent of Winston Churchill in an Aylesbury backstreet, all rouged and made up for the Pathé News camera—even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.

  * * *

  —

  On the one hand, there were the furrow-dwellers, tunnelling deeper into the earth, and who, understandably, were not communicative about their inner selves. And at the other extreme were those who would tell you their entire lives, their only story, either in a series of outpourings, or in a single episode. Where had he been that time? He could see the beachfront bar with its silly cocktails, feel the warm night breeze, hear the thudding backbeat from tinny loudspeakers. He was at ease with the world, watching other people’s lives develop. No, that was too grand a way of putting it: he was observing the young get cheerfully drunk and turn their minds to sex, romance and something more. But though he was indulgent—even sentimental—about the young, and protective of their hopes, there was one scene he was superstitious about, and preferred not to witness: the moment when they flung away their lives because it just felt so right—when, for instance, a smiling waiter delivered a mound of mango sorbet with an engagement rin
g glittering in its domed apex, and a bright-eyed proposer fell to bended knee in the sand…The fear of such a scene would often lead him to an early night.

  So he was sitting at the bar, halfway through his third and theoretically final cigarette of the evening, when a man in beach shorts and flip-flops climbed onto the stool beside him.

  “Mind if I bum one?”

  “Be my guest.” He passed across the pack, then some hotel book-matches with a palm tree on the cover.

  “Smokers, we’re a dying breed, right?”

  The fellow was probably in his forties, as lightly drunk as he was, English, genial, unpushy. None of that fake bonhomie you sometimes encountered, the assumption that you must have more in common than you did. And so they sat there quietly, smoking away, and maybe the lack of false small talk encouraged the man to turn and announce in a level, meditative tone,

  “She said she wanted to rest on my shoulder as lightly as a bird. I thought that sounded poetic. Also, bloody brilliant, just what a fellow needs. Never went for clingy.”

  The man paused. Paul was always happy to supply a prompt.

  “But it didn’t work out?”

  “Two problems.” The fellow inhaled, then blew the smoke into the scented air. “Number one, birds fly away, don’t they? That’s in their nature, as a bird, isn’t it? And number two, before they do, they always shit on your shoulder.”