Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  On Monday mornings Toni and I would ask each other the same questions.

  ‘écras anyone?’

  ‘ ’Fraid not.’

  ‘épat?’

  ‘Well, not exactly …’

  ‘Sirred?’

  A teasing smile of assent would rescue the whole weekend.

  We counted the number of times we were sirred; we remembered the best occasions and retailed them to each other in the tones of old roués recalling conquests; and, of course, we never forgot the first time.

  My own first time, on which I still dwelt happily, occurred when I was measured for my first pair of longs. It was in a thin, corridor-like shop in Harrow, which was wall-papered with boxes of clothes; racks of camouflage windcheaters and corduroy trousers as stiff as cardboard turned it into an obstacle course. Whatever colour you wore when you went into the shop, you always came out in grey or bottle-green. They did sell brown as well – but nobody, my mother assured me, wore brown until they were retired. On this occasion, I was booked to come out in grey.

  My mother, though timid in her family and social life, was always precise and authoritarian in shops. Some deep instinct told her that here was one hierarchy which would never be disturbed.

  ‘A pair of trousers, Mr Foster, please,’ she asked in an unfamiliarly confident voice. ‘Grey. Long.’

  ‘Certainly, madam,’ Mr Foster greased. Then, looking at me, ‘Long. Certainly, sir.’

  I could have fainted; I could, at the very least, have grinned. Instead I just stood, helpless with happiness, while Mr Foster knelt at my feet and piled on the praise.

  ‘Just measure you up, sir. Look straight ahead. Shoulders back. Legs apart, sir, please. That’s right.’

  From around his neck he slipped a tape measure, the end six inches of which were stiffened with a brass plate. Holding it at inch 5 (presumably to avoid arrest), he stabbed me sharply three times in the perineum.

  ‘Hold still, sir,’ he wheedled, largely for my mother’s benefit, in case she should wonder why he was taking so long. But there was no chance of my moving. Fear for one’s gonads, fear even of being bundled into a changing-cubicle and roughly raped, meant nothing beside being acknowledged as a man. Such was the disorienting pleasure that it never even occurred to me to whisper, as a sort of alarming comfort, the school cry of ‘Ruined!’

  3 • Rabbit, Human

  ‘RooooOOOOOOOOiiiiined …’

  It was the school cry, drawn out and modulated in the way we imagined hyenas to howl. Gilchrist did the screechiest, most fearing version; Leigh one with a breaking sob in the middle of the vowel howl; but everyone did it at least adequately. It voiced, however playfully, the virgin’s obsessive fear of castration. You came out with it on all appropriate occasions: when a chair was knocked over, a foot trodden on, a pencil case lost. It even came into our parody way of starting fights: combatants advanced on each other, the left hand clamped like a cricket box over the groin, the right hand outstretched, palm upwards, fingers working in the air like claws; meanwhile, onlookers let out miniature proxy squeaks of ‘RoooOOined’.

  But the parody had a chill to it. We had all read about Nazi castration by X-ray, and taunted one another with the possibility. If that happened, you were finished: literature proved that you got fat and ended up with a walk-on part, your only function being to make other people feel good. Either that, or economic circumstances forced you to become an opera singer in Italy. Quite how the whole terrifying process began, we were not altogether sure: but it had something to do with changing rooms, and public lavatories, and travelling late on the Underground.

  If by any chance – and it seemed a slim one – you did survive intact, clearly something nice must happen, otherwise the information wouldn’t be D-noticed. But what, precisely? And how to find out?

  Parents were obviously unreliable: double agents who got blown early on when trying to feed you some deliberate piece of misinformation. My own had been tossed an easy enough question – to which I naturally already knew the answer – and had botched their response. Reading the Bible for prep one evening, I hustled my mother’s mind out of the She competition page with

  ‘Mummy, what’s an oonuch?’

  ‘Oh, I’m not sure, dear, really,’ she answered in a level voice. (It could just be true that she wasn’t.) ‘Let’s ask your father. Jack, Christopher wants to know what a eunuch is …’ (Good play that, correcting pronunciation but disguising knowledge.) My father looked up from his accountancy magazine (didn’t he get enough of that stuff at work?), paused, ran his hand over his bald scalp, paused, took off his glasses, paused. All this time he was looking at my mother (had the Big Moment come?); all the same time I was pretending to glare at my Bible, as if vigorous examination of the context would answer my query. My father had just opened his mouth when my mother went on, in her shop voice

  ‘… it’s a sort of Abyssinian servant, I think, isn’t it, dear?’ I sensed that they were looking hard at each other. Suspicions confirmed, I scrammed as fast as possible:

  ‘Oh I see, yes, that fits the context … thanks.’

  Another alley sealed off. School, where in theory you learned things, wasn’t much help either. Colonel Lowson, the jumpy biology master whom we despised because he’d apologised to a boy after hitting him, had a red face anyway; but we were sure he would have blushed, had he been able, when twice a week for a whole term, we responded to his automatic ‘Any questions?’ at the end of the lesson with

  ‘When are we going to do human reproduction, sir, it’s on the syllabus?’

  We knew we had him there. Gilchrist, one of the form slickers, had got hold of the examining board syllabus and discovered the undeniable truth. The end of the General Science (Biology) course read: REPRODUCTION: PLANT, RABBIT, HUMAN. We monitored Lowson’s pedestrian progress through the course like Indian scouts watching a suicidally predictable troop of US Cavalry. Finally, there remained only two words left undiscussed on the whole syllabus –RABBIT, HUMAN –and two lessons left. Lowson had ridden into a box canyon.

  ‘Next week,’ Lowson began the first of these two final lessons, ‘I shall be doing revision …’

  ‘Ruined,’ sang out Gilchrist softly, and a disappointed murmur ran through the class.

  ‘… but today I’m going to be dealing with reproduction in mammals.’ Silence; one or two of us got hard-ons at the prospect. Lowson knew he wouldn’t have any trouble that day; and, while we took more notes than ever before, he told us about rabbits, partly in Latin. It didn’t, to be honest, sound much of a Big Deal. It obviously couldn’t be exactly the same. Surely the bit where … But then we began to realise that Lowson was getting away with it. Almost the entire forty-five minutes had gone. Our mounting discontent was evident. Finally, with a minute left:

  ‘Well, any questions?’

  ‘Sir, whennawe gonnado humreprdctionsir, onnasyllabus?’

  ‘Ah,’ he replied (and did we detect a smirk?), ‘it’s just the same principle as in other mammals.’ Then he marched out of the room.

  Elsewhere in the school, information was just as hard to come by, at least through official channels. The article on family planning in the ‘Home’ volume of the big encyclopaedia had been ripped out of the school library copy. The only other source of knowledge was much too risky – the Headmaster’s confirmation class. This contained a brief session on marriage ‘which you won’t need just yet but won’t do you any harm to know about’. There was indeed no harm in it: the most exciting phrase used by the gaunt and suspicious ruler of our lives was ‘mutual comfort and companionship’. At the end of the session, he indicated a pile of booklets on the corner of his desk.

  ‘Anyone who wants to know more can borrow one of these as he goes out.’

  He might as well have said, ‘Hands up those who abuse their bodies more than six times a day.’ I never saw anyone take a booklet. I never knew anyone who’d taken one. I never knew of anyone who knew of anyone who’d taken one. In all
probability, simply slowing down as you passed the Headmaster’s desk was a beating offence.

  We were left, as Toni frequently put it, to our own vices; and what we came up with was scrappy indeed. You couldn’t just ask other boys – like John Pepper, who claimed to have ‘had’ a married woman, or Fuzz Woolley, whose diary was full of red-ink crosses which supposedly represented the dates of his girl friend’s periods. You couldn’t ask, because all jokes and conversations on the subject implied mutual and equal knowledge; to admit ignorance would have undefined but dreadful consequences – like those of failing to pass on a chain letter.

  We had some grasp of the main event – even Lowson’s scanty briefing had left us with the concept of intromission; but the actual logistics of the matter were still hazy. Of more immediate and basic concern was what a woman’s body actually looked like. We relied a lot on the National Geographic Magazine, required reading for the school intellectuals; though it was sometimes hard to extrapolate much from a pygmy woman with patterned tattoo scars, body paint and a loincloth. Bra and corset ads, posters for X-films, and Sir William Orpen’s History of Art all chipped in a little. But it wasn’t until Brian Stiles pulled out his copy of Span, a pocket-sized nudist mag (stablemate of Spick), that things became a little clearer. So that’s what it’s like, we thought, gazing at the air-brushed lower belly of a female trampolinist.

  Though unremittingly carnal, we were also deeply idealistic. It felt like a pretty good mixture. We couldn’t bear Racine because, though the strength of emotion experienced by his characters was, we reckoned, probably about the same as we would undergo in our turn, the daisy-chains of passion on which his plots turned disgusted us. Corneille was our man; or rather, his women were our women – passionate yet dutiful, faithful and virginal. Toni and I debated the woman question a lot; though it rarely got off a familiar track.

  ‘So, we have to marry virgins?’ (It made no difference which of us began.)

  ‘Well, you don’t have to; but if you marry someone who isn’t a virgin she may turn out to be a nympho.’

  ‘But if you marry a virgin she may turn out to be frigid?’

  ‘Well, if she’s frigid, you can always get a divorce and start again.’

  ‘Whereas …’

  ‘… whereas if she’s a nympho, you can’t very well go to a judge and say she’s not letting you. You’re stuck with it. You’d be …’

  ‘… roooiined. Quite.’

  We thought of Shakespeare, Molière, and other authorities.

  They all agreed that the ridiculous husband was not something to be laughed at.

  ‘So, it has to be a virgin.’

  ‘It has to be.’

  And we’d shake hands on it.

  But our practical steps towards girls were more halting than our decisions of principle. How did you tell a nympho? How did you tell a virgin? How – hardest of all – did you tell a wife: someone who looked like a nympho but was actually a virgin.

  Most evenings, on our way home, Toni and I would eye a couple of chippies from the girls’ school who were usually waiting on Temple Underground station for the same train as us. Magenta uniforms, neat black hair both of them, and real stockings. Their school was just over the road from us, but sororisation was discouraged. They were even let out a quarter of an hour before us, so that they could get clear of … what? And what did the girls themselves think they were being allowed to get clear of? Ergo, any girls travelling on the same train as us had obviously waited around solely in order to travel on the same train as us. Ergo they wanted us to approach them. Ergo, they were potential nymphos. Ergo, Toni and I refused to return their shy smiles.

  4 • The Constructive Loaf

  Wednesday afternoons were always half-day holidays. 12.30, and a scatter of boys stuffing caps into satchels debouched from the side entrance of the High Victorian building on the Embankment; a few minutes later, a more sedate file of capless sixth-formers would saunter down the front steps, swinging their umbrellas casually. On Wednesdays, the History Society would run improving trips to Hatfield House; the CCF fanatics would grease their bayonets; boys would head off with a Swiss roll of towel under their arms, with foils, cricket bags, rancid fives gloves. The timid would make a dash for home, reasonably sure that rapists and castrators were not yet abroad on the Underground.

  Toni and I indulged in the Constructive Loaf. London, we had read somewhere, combined everything you could require. There was, of course, Travel as well, and we intended doing some of that later (even though we’d both been to the country and found it disappointingly empty), because all our authorities agreed that it was good for the brain. But London was where you started from; and it was to London that, finally, stuffed with wisdom, you returned. And the way to crack London’s secrets was the Loaf. Il vaut mieux gâcher sa jeunesse que de n’en rien faire.

  It was Toni who first put forward the concept of the Constructive Loaf. Our time, he argued, was spent being either compulsorily crammed with knowledge, or compulsorily diverted. His theory was that by lounging about in a suitably insouciant fashion, but keeping an eye open all the time, you could really catch life on the hip – you could harvest all the aperçus of the flâneur. Also, we liked loafing around and watching other people doing things and tiring themselves. We went to the alleys off Fleet Street to see gross rolls of newsprint being unloaded. We went to street markets and law courts, hovered outside pubs and bra-shops. We went to St Paul’s with our binoculars, ostensibly to examine the frescoes and mosaics of the dome, but actually to focus on people praying. We searched for prostitutes – the only other constructive loafers there were, we wittily thought – who in those days were still identifiable by a delicate gold chain round the ankle. We would ask each other,

  ‘Do you think she’s plying for trade?’

  We didn’t actually do anything except observe; though Toni was accosted one moist and foggy afternoon by a myopic (or desperate) whore. He answered her businesslike

  ‘How about it then, love?’

  with a confident if piccolo-voiced

  ‘How much will you pay me?’

  and claimed an épat.

  ‘Disqualified.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘You can’t épater la Bohème, It’s ridiculous.’

  ‘Why not? Whores are an integral part of bourgeois life. Remember your Maupassant. It’s like dogs taking after their masters: whores take on the petty values and rigidity of their clients.’

  ‘False analogy – the clients are the dogs, the whores are the mistresses …’

  ‘Doesn’t matter as long as you admit the principle of mutual influence …’

  Then we both realised that neither of us had noticed how the long-gone chippy had reacted. It was no épat if she’d liked the joke.

  This sort of contact, however, was deemed unrewarding. We preferred not to talk to people, as this got in the way of our observation of them. If asked specifically what we were looking for, we’d probably have said, ‘Rimbaud’s musique savante de la ville’. We wanted scenes, things, people, as if filling one of Big Chief I-Spy’s little books – but our book was not yet written, for it was only when we saw what we saw that we knew we were looking for it. Certain things were ideal and unattainable – like walking in spectral gas-light across damp cobblestones and hearing the distant cry of a barrel-organ – but we hunted jumpily for the original, the picturesque, the authentic.

  We hunted emotions. Railway termini gave us weepy farewells and coarse recouplings. That was easy. Churches gave us the vivid deceptions of faith – though we had to be careful in our manner of observation. Harley Street doorsteps gave us, we believed, the rabbit fears of men about to die. And the National Gallery, our most frequent haunt, gave us examples of pure aesthetic pleasure – although, to be honest, they weren’t as frequent, as pure, or as subtle as we’d first hoped. Outrageously often, we thought, the scene was one more appropriate to Waterloo or Victoria: people greeted Monet, or Seurat, or Goya as if
they had just stepped off a train – ‘Well, what a nice surprise. I knew you’d be here, of course, but it’s a nice surprise all the same. And my, aren’t you looking just as well as ever? Hardly a day older. No really …’

  Our reason for constantly visiting the Gallery was straightforward. We agreed – indeed, no sane friend of ours would bother to argue – that Art was the most important thing in life, the constant to which one could be unfailingly devoted and which would never cease to reward; more crucially, it was the stuff whose effect on those exposed to it was ameliorative. It made people not just fitter for friendship and more civilised (we saw the circularity of that), but better – kinder, wiser, nicer, more peaceful, more active, more sensitive. If it didn’t, what good was it? Why not just go and suck cornets instead? Ex hypothesi (as we would have said, or indeed ex vero), the moment someone perceives a work of art he is in some way improved. It seemed quite reasonable to expect that the process could be observed.

  To be candid, after a few Wednesdays at the Gallery, we felt a bit like those eighteenth-century physicians who combed battlefields and dissected fresh corpses to track down the seat of the soul. Still, some of them believed they’d got results; and there’d been that Swedish doctor who weighed his terminal patients, hospital bed and all, just before and just after death. Twenty-one grammes, apparently, made the vital difference. We didn’t expect any weight changes at the Gallery, but we thought ourselves entitled to something. You must be able to see something. And, at times, you did. But more often you found yourself noting extrinsic reactions, as a weary file of name-gloaters, school-sneerers, frame-freaks, colour-grousers, restoration loons and topographers trooped by. You got to know the quizzical chin-in-hand stance; the manly, combative, hands-on-hips square-up; the eyes-down-on-the-booklet position; the glazed XII-down, XIV-to-go trot. Sometimes, we wondered if we were any the wiser.