Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  I also dabbled in a little writing. Dabbled, that is, with sober enthusiasm. Memory tests, for example, like describing the horse-butcher I patronised once a week (always – I confess to the parody – every Friday) but whom I’d never really looked at until I tried to describe him and realised how much I was missing. Another exercise was to sit at an open window and simply write down what you saw; next day you checked on the selectivity of your vision. Then a few stylistic exercises, inspired by Queneau, intended as knuckle-looseners. And lots of letters, some of them (to my parents) describing what I wasn’t doing, and the longer, more cutely phrased ones to Toni describing what I was.

  It was a very pleasant existence. Naturally, Toni (who had lasted three weeks in Africa and was now starting work as a WEA lecturer) wrote to rebuke me for its economic unreality. I argued in reply that happiness depended necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: that in one area (emotional, financial, professional) you should be living beyond your resources. Hadn’t Toni and I laid it down at school?

  Horses for courses

  Husband your forces

  Too few resources

  Ends in divorces.

  And then, after a month in Paris, I met Annick. Shouldn’t this have added further unreality, further living beyond resources, further happiness? But did it? What was it, that old school adage? Two plusses make a minus?

  I met her, I always smile to recall, as a result of one of my rare visits to the Bibliothèque Nationale. I’d put in almost a whole hour there, skimming through some early Victor Hugo letters to see if he had anything to say about English acting while he was working on Cromwell (he did and he didn’t, if you really want to know – just the odd biassed phrase or two); exhausted by the sight of mass scholarship in action, I’d knocked off early for a quick vin blanc cassis at a bar in the Rue de Richelieu which usually competed with the library for my presence. This wasn’t inappropriate: the atmosphere here was strongly reminiscent of the Bib Nat itself. The same soporific, businesslike attention to what was in front of you; the quiet shaking of newspapers instead of book pages; the sagely nodding heads; the professional sleepers. Only the espresso machine, snorting like a steam engine, insisted on where you were.

  My eye drifted round the comforting visual clichés of the place: the framed law against public drunkenness; the stainless steel counter; the food list offering an austere choice between sandwich and croque; the wall of libelling mirrors; the murdered-tree hat rack hidden behind the door; the dusty plastic plants up on a high shelf. This time, though, my eye suddenly alighted on

  ‘Mountolive!’

  There it lay, on the plastic wicker seat of a chair at the next table. The Livre de Poche edition, with a bookmark far enough into it to indicate at least doggedness, and probably enthusiasm.

  She turned as I spoke. I suddenly thought, ‘Christ I don’t normally do this,’ and my eyes went out of focus as if dissociating themselves from my voice. I’ll have to say something.

  ‘You’re reading Mountolive?’ I managed to croak in the local patois, and the strain of this modest cerebration persuaded my eyes back into line. She was …

  ‘As you see.’

  (Quick, quick, think of something.)

  ‘Have you read the others?’ She had sort of dark hair and …

  ‘I have read the first two. Naturally, I haven’t read Clea yet.’ Of course not, pretty dumb question, her skin was rather sallow, but unblemished, of course that’s often the case, it’s only fair skins which get …

  ‘Oh, naturally. Are you enjoying it?’ Why did I keep asking these fucking obvious questions? Of course she was, or she wouldn’t have read two and a half books. Why didn’t I show I’d read it, tell her that I adored the Quartet, that I’d read everything Durrell wrote which I could get my hands on, that I even knew someone who wrote Pursewarden poems.

  ‘Yes, very much, though I don’t understand why this one is written more simply and more conventionally than the other two.’ Her clothes were grey and black, though that didn’t make her look dowdy at all, no she was smart, colours didn’t really register so much as the overall …

  ‘I agree. I mean, I also don’t know. Would you like another coffee my name’s Christopher Lloyd.’ What’ll she say? Is she wearing an engagement ring? Does it matter if she says no? Does Merci mean Yes thank you or No thank you, shit I can’t remember.

  ‘Yes.’

  Ah. A breather at last. A minute or two at the bar. No, don’t hurry, Gaspard, or whatever your name is, serve everybody else first. Hey, there must be lots of people out in the street who need serving before me. No, actually, come to think of it, better serve me now – she might think I’m one of those people who are so polite they never actually get a drink in theatre intervals. But what shall I have, better not have another of the same, it’s only 5.30. Can’t change to sophisticated spirits or she’ll think me a potential clochard, what about a beer, don’t really want one, oh well, hope it doesn’t seem too grovelling,

  ‘Deux express, s’il vous plaît.’

  Carrying the coffees back, I concentrated on trying not to spill them. At the same time I concentrated on appearing not to be concentrating. All right, she was sitting with her back to the bar, but there may have been a sly mirror around; and in any case, you have to get the style right from the start – cool without being bourgeois, carefree without being sloppy. One of the coffees spilled over. Quick, which – give it her on grounds of equality, and to see how she handles it, or keep it for myself on grounds of chivalry and risk blowing the whole thing? Juggling this in my mind, I managed to spill the other coffee.

  ‘Sorry, they’re a bit full.’

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Sugar?’

  ‘No thanks. You’ve changed drink?’

  ‘Er yes. I didn’t want you to think I was a clo-clo.’

  She smiled. Even I almost smiled. There’s nothing like slang for easing initial doubts. It shows (a) sense of humour, (b) lively interest in the relevant foreign lingo, (c) awareness that friendly verbal intimacy can be attained with a Brit, and you aren’t going to have to discuss National Characteristics and le chapeau melon in a stilted fashion for the rest of the time.

  We chatted, smiled, drank our coffee, were averagely amused together, and put out a few feelers. I suggested how interesting it would be to look at the translation of the Quartet and gave myself marks for subtlety; she asked how long my research in Paris would take, and I thought, we’re not married yet, you know. Questions which mean nothing or a lot more. I was too jumpy to know whether or not I actually liked her; nonchalance and nervousness gripped me alternately, and according to no rational pattern. For instance, I bungled asking her what her name was: the question shot out of my mouth like an uncontrollable lump of food at a point when the conversation called for a follow-up question on Graham Greene’s reputation in France. On the other hand, I managed the when-shall-we-meet-again bit quite well, acting genuine, avoiding both hauteur and the more likely, more damaging self-abasement.

  I met Annick on a Tuesday, and we agreed we might meet at the same bar the following Friday. If she wasn’t there (there was some question of a cousin – why do the French always have cousins? The English don’t have cousins the way they do), then I would ring her at the number she had given me. I considered ducking the appointment, but eventually decided to let the heart speak, and rolled up. I had, after all, spent three days wondering what it would be like to be married to her.

  In fact, I’d thought about Annick so much that I couldn’t remember what she looked like. It was like putting layer after layer of papier mâché over an object and gradually seeing the original shape disappear. How terrible if I failed to recognise the woman I’d already been married to for three days. A student friend of mine, who shared similar fantasies and nerves, once worked out a good ploy to counter this difficulty: he had a special pair of broken specs which he would twirl ostentatiously in his hand while waiting for the girl. It al
ways seemed to work, he said; and moreover, when the stratagem was confessed to later, it unfailingly drew an affectionate response from the girl. It mustn’t be admitted too soon, of course; one shouldn’t, he told me, lead with weakness and incompetence, but they’re great standbys later, when you need to play them as warmly human characteristics.

  However, as I had perfect sight, I couldn’t very well use this ploy; I would just have to get there early and use the passionately-engrossed-in-a-book trick. By the afternoon of our rendezvous, I was trembly, two of my best fingernails were wrecked, and my bladder had been filling up all day with the speed of a lavatory cistern. My hair was OK, my clothes, after much self-debate, had been decided on, my underpants were changed (again) after last-minute re-inspection, and I’d chosen the book I wished to be discovered with: Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s Contes Cruels. I’d actually read it once before, so that I was well covered in case it turned out that she had too.

  All this may sound cynical and calculating; but that wouldn’t really be doing me justice. It was, I liked to think (perhaps still do think), more the result of a sensitive desire to please. It was as much a matter of how I imagined she would like me to appear as of how I would like to appear to her.

  ‘Salut!’

  I jerked my head out of old Villiers, the jerk and the excitement sending my eyes out of focus again. That solved the problem of whether I’d recognise her.

  ‘Oh, er salut!’ I started to get up as she started to sit down. We both stopped, laughed, and sat down. So that was what she looked like, yes, a little thinner than I’d remembered, and (when she took off her mackintosh) er, yes, they were, um, very nice, not enormous, but somehow … well, real? Only Soul and Suffering to go. Her hair was that dark brown sort of colour, centre-parted and dropping fairly straight to her shoulders, where it turned up; her eyes were nice, brown and I suppose the usual size and shape, but very lively; her nose was functional. She gesticulated a lot as we talked. I suppose what I liked most about her was the moving parts – her hands and eyes. You watched her talk as well as listened to her.

  We talked about the obvious things – my research, her job in a photographic library, Durrell, films, Paris. You usually do, despite fantasies about the instant meshing of minds, the joyful discovery of shared assumptions. We agreed about most things – but then we would, given my craven urge to please. I don’t mean I struck myself as spineless; and I did put in some dissent about Bergman’s sense of humour (arguing perkily that he had one). But there was a natural decorum to our investigations; the only major shared assumption was that we should not dislike each other.

  After a couple of drinks, we fell on the idea of a film. You can’t just go on talking, after all; best to lay down a little shared experience as soon as possible. We settled quickly on the new Bresson, Au Hasard Balthazar. You knew where you were – or at least where you were expected to be – with Bresson. Gritty, independent-minded, and shot in intellectual black-and-white; that’s what they said about his films.

  The cinema was near, gave a student reduction even on the evening show, and had enough right-looking people gazing at the stills outside. There was the usual array of hideous cartoon commercials, featuring animals of unidentifiable species. During my favourite commercial, the one with a squeaky matron urging ‘Demandez Nuts’, I was forced to suppress my normal, knowing, lubricious Anglo-Saxon giggle. I thought out a remark comparing English and French commercials, but was short of a word so didn’t bother to launch it. That was another advantage of going to the cinema.

  As we came out, I allowed the customary minute for us to get over our too-moved-to-speak reactions, then

  ‘What did you think?’ (Always get this in first)

  ‘Very sad. And very true. Lots of …’

  ‘Integrity?’

  ‘Yes, that’s right, integrity. Honesty. But lots of humour, too. But a sad humour.’

  You can’t go wrong with integrity. It’s a good thing to admire. Bresson had so much of it that once, when trying to film the silence of some mournful wood, he sent men out with guns to shoot the jarringly cheerful birds. I told Annick this story, and we agreed we didn’t know quite what to make of it. Did he do it because he found it was impossible to simulate a birdless wood by running a blank tape? Or out of some deep, puritanical sense of honesty?

  ‘Perhaps he just didn’t like birds?’ I quipped, having breathed the sentence over to myself beforehand, so that I could throw it off lightly.

  At that stage, every laugh counts double, every smile is a reason for sweaty self-congratulation.

  We flâned (we really did) our way to a bar, knocked off a couple of drinks, and I walked her to a bus stop. We’d chatted a fair amount and, during the permitted portions of silence, I’d been worrying about etiquette. We’d managed to cross the vous/tu barrier almost without noticing it, though as much in acknowledgment of student conventions as anything. But what, I wondered, about the first kiss? And anyway, would it, could it come so soon? I hadn’t a clue about French customs, though I knew not to ask: baiser, after all, meant fuck as well as kiss in French. Quite what was expected or permitted, I had no idea. Toni and I once had a rhyme

  A kiss on the first,

  You can do your worst;

  A kiss on the second,

  No more than you reckoned!

  While a kiss on the third –

  You slow fucking turd!

  – but this was written with the confidence of inexperience, and anyway, probably didn’t apply outside the Home Counties. Then I realised – of course, use the local customs. Take advantage of the ubiquity of le shake-hand. Give her your paw, hold hers longer than necessary and then, with a slow, sensual, irresistible strength, draw her gradually towards you while gazing into her eyes as if you had just been given a copy of the first, suppressed edition of Madame Bovary. Good thinking.

  Her bus drew up, I reached out an uncertain hand, she seized it quickly, dabbed her lips against my cheek before I saw what she was up to, released my slackened grasp, dug out her carnet, shouted ‘A bientôt’, and was gone.

  I’d kissed her! Hey, I’d kissed a French girl! She liked me! What’s more, I hadn’t even gone around for weeks beforehand finding out about her.

  I watched as her bus drove off. If it had been one of the old-style buses, Annick could have been standing on the open platform, one hand clutching the rail, the other, palely lit by a solitary street lamp, raised in a fragile salute; she would have looked like some tearful emigrant at the stern of a departing ship. As it was, the pneumatic doors had shut her off from me with a clump of rubber, and she stayed invisible as the bus growled and throbbed off.

  I walked to the Palais Royal feeling impressed with myself. I sat on a bench in the courtyard and inhaled the warm night. It felt as if everything was coming together, all at once. The past was all around; I was the present; art was here, and history, and now the promise of something much like love or sex. Over there in that corner was where Molière worked; across there, Cocteau, then Colette; there Blücher lost six million at roulette and for the rest of his life flew into a rage when the name of Paris was mentioned; there the first café mécanique was opened; and there, over there, at a little cutler’s in the Galerie de Valois, Charlotte Corday bought the knife with which she killed Marat. And bringing it all together, ingesting it, making it mine, was me – fusing all the art and the history with what I might soon, with luck, be calling the life. The Gautier which Toni and I quoted to each other at school sidled into my head – ‘Tout passe’, it murmured. Maybe, I replied, but not for quite a bloody long time; not if I have anything to do with it.

  I must write to Toni.

  I did; but he hid any avuncular pleasure he might have felt.

  Dear Chris,

  C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la chair. Get past the next set of lips and you might stir my interest. What have you been reading, what have you seen, and what, not who, have you been doing? You do realise, I hope, that Spring i
s not officially over yet, that you are in Paris, and that if I catch you anywhere near completing the cliché you can count on my lasting contempt. What about the strikes?

  Toni.

  I suppose he was right; in any case, the sickly gushiness of my own letter can readily be inferred from the tone of his reply. But by the time it arrived it was out of date.

  I lost my virginity on the 25th May 1968 (is it odd to remember the date? Most women remember theirs). You’ll want to hear the details. Hell, I wouldn’t mind hearing the details again; I don’t come out of this part all that badly.

  It was only our third night out together.

  I think that deserves a paragraph to itself. At the time it was a matter of quaint pride to me, as if I’d actually planned it that way. I hadn’t, of course.

  The pre-bed stuff was almost completely non-verbal, though probably not for the same reason on each side. We’d been to the flicks again: an oldie this time, Les Liaisons Dangereuses, the Vadim modern-dress version with Jeanne Moreau and (to our joint delight), lurking sardonically in the shadows, Boris Vian.

  When we came out I mentioned, in a formally casual way, the stock of calvados at my place. Its proximity was known.

  The flat was as I’d left it, which means as I’d half-arranged it. Reasonably tidy, but not obsessive either way. Books lying open as if in use (some of them were – all the best lies have an alloy of truth). Lighting low and from the corners – for obvious reasons, but also in case some eager, treacherous spot had come into bud during the course of the film. Glasses put away, but rewashed first, and rinsed not dried, so that the calvados wouldn’t have to be drained through its usual bobbing scum of tea-towel.