Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  As we walked in, I casually tossed my jacket on to the armchair, so that when I invited Annick to sit down she would probably choose the sofa (she’d hardly go for the bed, despite its daytime disguise under an Indian coverlet and heap of cushions). If I was going to make a courting lunge at some stage, I didn’t want to get smacked in the belly by the arm of the chair. These thoughts weren’t really as brutal as they sound; they rented space in my mind in a provisional, hesitant way, and their tenancy made me feel slightly guilty. But I was thinking in the future conditional rather than the plain future; it’s the tense which minimises responsibility.

  So there we were, me in the chair, she on the sofa; sitting, sipping and looking. There was no gramophone in the flat; ‘Shall we play the fruit machine?’ seemed inappropriate. So we looked. I kept on not quite thinking of things to say. I wondered for a minute or two whether l’amour libre was the right translation for free love; and I’m glad I never found an answer.

  Does one always think, on such occasions, that the other person is much more at ease than you are? In this case, as far as I was actively thinking about Annick, I assumed that, given her better command of the local language she would, if she had anything she wanted to say, speak. She didn’t; I didn’t; and what gradually emerged was something different in quality from a mere extended pause in the conversation. It was agreed silence, combined with total concentration on the other person; the result was more erotic than I knew was possible. The force of this silence came from its spontaneity. Subsequently, if ever I’ve tried to re-create the effect, it’s always failed.

  We were, perhaps, six feet apart, and fully dressed, but the subtlety and strength of our erotic interchange were greater than much I subsequently came to know in the hurried, fiercer world of naked hand-to-hand. It wasn’t the sort of rough eye-gazing which passes for foreplay in the cinema. We started, admittedly, with each other’s eyes and face, but soon strayed, if always returning. Each ocular foray into a new area produced a new scurry of excitement; each twitch of muscle, each flicker at the corner of the mouth, each shift of the fingers across the face had a particular, tender, and, as it seemed at the time, unambiguous significance.

  We stayed like that for at least an hour, and afterwards we went to bed. It was a surprise. I won’t say a disappointment, because it was too interesting for that; but it was a surprise. The bits I’d looked forward to were almost a let-down; the bits I hadn’t known about were fun. In terms of penile pleasure there wasn’t much that was new; and the dominant features of our brief tussle were curiosity and awkwardness. But the other bits … the bits they never tell you about … that mixture of power, tenderness and sheer cocky glee which comes with the total offer of a woman’s body – why hadn’t I read about that before? And why didn’t they tell you about the football fan in the back of your skull, the man with the rattle and the scarf who shouts Yippee and stamps his feet on the terraces? And then, behind it all, there’s that funny sense of having discharged a social burden; as if, at last, you’ve finally joined the human race; as if, after all, you won’t now die a wholly ignorant man.

  Afterwards (that was a word which meant so much as a kid, a word which, catching you unexpectedly out of a wash of prose, could bring you up short with a hard-on, a word which, above all others, I had wanted to be able to write about myself); afterwards, when the fan at the back of the skull had put down his rattle and tucked away his scarf and the terraces had gone quiet; afterwards, then, I slipped off to sleep murmuring to myself, ‘Afterwards … afterwards …’

  The letter I wrote to Toni the next morning has been lost (or so he says); perhaps he’s being kind in not reminding me of the extravagant glee of my prose. I’ve still got his reply, though.

  Dear Chris,

  I have ironed the bunting, put the flags to air, set a fuse to the Thames, laid in the red paint. So you finally got them off. To borrow, or rather steal (since I’m sure she doesn’t want it back), a phrase from a girl friend’s letter which I was once posting for her and came unsealed in my hand, you have ‘laid down the burden of your virginity’. What a hoot. You are now allowed to read Les Fleurs du Mal in the grown-up edition and I can tell you a pun I made up the other day – ‘Elle m’a dit des maux d’amour’. Is it still grammatical this way round? I can’t remember any more.

  That said, or rather cela dit, I must out of friendship (not to say a duty to the truth) tell you that while the content of your letter brought me relief, for which much thanks, the tone left something to be desired. I liked the observation bits, but, well, to put it bluntly, you don’t have to fall in love, you know. It’s not necessarily a package deal, you know, really. Just because you’ve gushed in one direction, it doesn’t mean you have to in another as well. I expect you don’t want to hear any of this, and I’m sure it’s a waste of time – either you don’t need to be told, or else you won’t listen. But even if you won’t listen to me, remember the old Froggy proverb (which I’ll translate for your besotted mind), In love there is always one who kisses and one who offers the cheek. By the way, would you like me to send you any Durex?

  Be bad, and have one for me,

  Love,

  Toni.

  It was the sort of letter you half-read, smile at, and put aside. There’s some point in advising the totally inexperienced; but advice to those on whom life has turned either sour or ridiculously sweet – it’s a waste of postage. Besides, Toni and I were beginning to drift apart. The enemies who had given us common cause were no longer there; our adult enthusiasms were bound to be less congruent than our adolescent hates.

  So, the only advice I was open to at the time was,

  ‘No, not like that.’

  ‘Sorry. Like this?’

  ‘Almost …’

  ‘Well, it’ll only be luck if I get it right you know.’

  ‘More like this.’

  ‘Oh, I see. You mean …’

  ‘Mmmm.’

  And, in due course, I was mmmming and aaahing myself. Practical stuff, I began to discover, really was different from written stuff. At school, of course, we’d done all the necessary reading. We’d pored over Lady C. and dreamed of breasts hanging down above our heads like bells, and raindrops glistening during atavistic entwinings. We’d absorbed the great classics of Indian literature (and, as a result, practised PT a lot more energetically for some months, with a heaving sense of anticipation). We’d wondered, half-scared, about unguents.

  I can’t say that the texts we studied did us any harm; all I’d reproach them for is their misleading implications about the layout and functioning of muscles and tendons. The first time I tried anything remotely exploratory with Annick (I didn’t particularly want to; just felt that if I didn’t I might be thought someone with no sense of natural, inner rhythm), I got a shock. I’d been lying on top of her in what I would dismissively have called the missionary position (nowadays I reckon that the missionaries knew a thing or two) and decided to swing myself, casually and spontaneously, into the astride-kneeling-position. I swung my right leg out over Annick’s left, bent it up, and smiled at her. Then I tried to move my left leg. I had just got it on top of her right one, when the movement sent me pitching forward, my head landing square on her ear as she tried to twist out of the way of my involuntary butt. My left groin was being torn open, my cock was trapped and near to snapping point, my right leg frozen at an untenable position, my eyes, nose and mouth were put out of action by the engulfing pillow, and my arms capable of pushing only in unhelpful directions.

  ‘Sorry, did I hurt you,’ I mumbled as I twisted my head sideways (ow, again) and got some air.

  ‘You nearly broke my nose.’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What were you trying to do?’

  ‘I was trying to do this … ooowwwww.’

  I was stranded again, though this time my discouraged cock slipped out, and I keeled slowly over on my side.

  ‘Oh, I see.’

  She tucked me back in, twisted
and raised her body slightly as I moved each leg in turn, and suddenly we were there. We were doing it! We were doing a position! Astride-kneeling – it worked! The man with the football rattle was delighted. Two, four, six, eight, who do we appreciate?

  ‘Why did you want to do that?’ Annick asked with a smile as I sat on top of her, grinning. (Oh God, maybe you shouldn’t do it that way, not even with fully-lapsed Catholics.) But no; her smile was one of puzzled tolerance.

  ‘I thought it might be nice,’ I answered. Then, more honestly, ‘I read about it.’

  She smiled.

  ‘And is it?’ She pushed some hair off her face.

  (Well, it wasn’t painful, but on the other hand I suppose it wasn’t actively nice. Your legs were in too great a state of tension; you felt like a posing muscle-man, each cubic inch strained for the judge’s approval. On top of which, you couldn’t, I suddenly realised, move an inch. All the work would have to be done by your partner.)

  ‘I’m not sure.’

  ‘Did it say in the book it was nice?’

  ‘I don’t remember. It just said it was one of the things you could do. They wouldn’t have put it in if it wasn’t nice, would they?’

  I wondered privately whether this was one of those positions improved by the use of an unguent. Then, the solemnity in my voice became too much for Annick; she started laughing, I started laughing, my cock inevitably flopped out when attacked by such unfamiliar muscle spasms, and we rolled off into a hug.

  This amused honesty, when I reflected on it later, was what started my mind off on serious thoughts: those thoughts which chase their own tails. On the nights I was sleeping alone I would interrogate myself, pry for signs and hints; I would lie awake with my questions about love, and then deduce love from my own wakefulness.

  When I was with her, though, it was different, easy. Her honesty was infectious, too; though in my case I suspect it was as much a function of the nerves as of the intellect. Annick was the first person with whom I truly relaxed. Previously I had – even with Toni – been just honest for effect, competitively candid. Now, though the effect may have been the same to the outside observer, inside it felt different.

  It was, I discovered, surprisingly easy to slip into this new mode; though it needed a push. On the third night we spent together, as we were undressing, Annick asked,

  ‘What did you do on the first morning after I’d stayed here?’ My confusion was momentarily covered by the process of taking my trousers off; but as I hesitated, she went on,

  ‘And what did you feel?’

  That was even harder. Couldn’t very well admit to a mixture of gratitude and smugness, I thought.

  ‘I wanted you to go so that I could write down what happened,’ I offered cautiously.

  ‘Can I read it?’

  ‘Christ, no. Well, not yet anyway. Maybe some time.’

  ‘OK. And what did you feel?’

  ‘Smugness and gratitude. No, in the other order. You?’

  ‘I felt amused, at sleeping with an Englishman, and relieved that you could speak French, and guilty about what my mother would say, and eager to tell my friends what had happened, and … interested.’

  I then made some stumbling, embarrassed remarks in praise of her sincerity, and asked her how she had taught herself to act as she did.

  ‘What do you mean, taught? It’s not something you learn. Either you say what you mean or you don’t. That’s all.’

  That sounded rather less than all at first; but gradually I understood. The key to Annick’s candour was that there was no key. It was like the atom bomb: the secret is that there is no secret.

  Until I met Annick I’d always been certain that the edgy cynicism and disbelief in which I dealt, plus a cowed trust in the word of any imaginative writer, were the only tools for the painful, wrenching extraction of truths from the surrounding quartz of hypocrisy and deceit. The pursuit of truth had always seemed something combative. Now, not exactly in a flash, but over a few weeks, I wondered if it weren’t something both higher – above the supposed conflict – and simpler, attainable not through striving but a simple inward glance.

  Annick taught me honesty (at least the principle of it); she helped me learn about sex; in return I taught her – well, certainly nothing that could be encompassed by an abstract noun. After a while, this became a joke between us, a confirmation of national character: the French deal in the abstract, the theoretical, the generality; the English in the detail, the gloss, the rider, the exception, the particularity. We didn’t think it more than a half-truth on any wider scale, but in our own individual case it seemed to fit.

  ‘What do you think of Rousseau?’ I’d ask her; or existentialism; or the role of the cinema in society; or the theory of humour; or the process of decolonisation; or the mythification of De Gaulle; or the duty of the citizen in time of war; or the principles of neoclassical art; or Hegelian theory? She seemed at first dauntingly well-educated in the French manner, handling theories as easily as she forked spaghetti, backing her opinions with quotes, moving confidently from one discipline to another.

  It was weeks before I finally got round the back of her defences in any substantial way; and by that time my belief in a British system of haphazard personal insight – the Constructive Loaf en gros – had been shaken. We were discussing Rimbaud, when suddenly I began to notice that all the quotes she used to support her argument for Rimbaud as the self-destructive Romantic (as opposed to my version of him as the second modern poet after Baudelaire) came from the same poems: Le Bateau Ivre, Voyelles and Ophélie. Had she read Les Illuminations?

  ‘No.’

  Had she read the Letters?

  ‘No.’

  Had she read the rest of his poems?

  ‘No.’

  Better and better; I pressed the advantage home. She hadn’t read Ce qu’on dit au poète à propos des fleurs; she hadn’t read Les Déserts de l’Amour; she hadn’t even read Une Saison en Enfer. She certainly didn’t understand ‘JE est un autre’. When I’d finished, Annick asked,

  ‘Feeling better?’

  ‘What a relief. I thought you knew everything.’

  ‘No. It’s just that I say what I know, and no more, no less.’

  ‘Whereas I …?’

  ‘You know things you don’t say.’

  ‘And say things I don’t know?’

  ‘Of course; that goes without saying.’

  Second lesson. After honesty of response, honesty of expression. But how had the conversation been turned? I thought I was coming out on top and suddenly here I was back on the mat again, a manicured thumb prising out my jelly eyeball.

  ‘Why do you always come out on top?’

  ‘I don’t. I just learn silently. You learn melodramatically, by instruction not observation. And you like to be told you’re learning.’

  ‘Why are you so unbearably assured?’

  ‘Because you think I am.’

  ‘Why do I think you are?’

  ‘Because I never ask questions. “In life, there are only two real characters, the questioner and the answerer”.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘He asked. Guess.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘All right. Oscar Wilde – in translation, of course? Victor Hugo? D’Alembert?’

  ‘I don’t really want to know.’

  ‘Yes you do. Everyone always does.’

  ‘Anyway, I think it’s a crappy quote. I bet you made it up yourself.’

  ‘Of course I did.’

  ‘I thought so.’

  We stared at each other, excited a little by our first wrangle. Annick pushed her hair back off her right cheek, opened her mouth, and, in a parody of cinematic sensuality, ran the tip of her tongue across her top lip. She said gently,

  ‘Vauvenargues.’

  ‘Vauvenargues! Christ, I’ve never read him. I’ve only just heard of him.’ Annick licked her bottom lip as well.

  ‘You bitch! I bet that’s the only
line of Vauvenargues you know. I bet you got it out of Bédier-Hazard.’

  ‘ “Il faut tout attendre et tout craindre du temps et des hommes”.’

  ‘Et des femmes.’

  ‘ “Il vaut mieux … ” ’

  ‘OK, OK, I surrender. I don’t want to hear any more. You’re a genius, you’re the Bib Nat!’

  Defeat once used to make me cry; now it made me grumpy and aggressive. I looked at her and thought, I could easily dislike you.

  Her hair had fallen down over her face again. She pushed it away, and parted her lips once more. It may still have been parody, but if it was, you could still take it straight. I took it straight.

  When we had finished making love, she rolled away from me, over on to her left side. I squinted across at her small frame and gently heaving back, and felt weeks older. How strange that Time did these sudden rabbit-hops; at this rate I’d soon have matured all the way up to my real age. I watched a patch of freckles rise and fall and remembered the quaint, despairing fantasies Toni and I had elaborated. Now, the likelihood of castration by Nazi X-ray seemed really very remote, the theory of SST arid and academic. Pre-marital sex – a triple-épat, a double-écras at school – suddenly didn’t feel as if it had anything to do with the bourgeoisie. And what about structuring of the decades? If it were true, I’d only have one more year of Sex before plunging into thirty years of alternating War and Austerity. There didn’t seem much probability of that.

  Beside me, Annick was dreaming; a sigh of puzzled pain escaped from her. This is what it’s all about, I thought: an argument over Rimbaud (which I’d won – well, more or less), sex in the afternoon, a girl asleep, and me here – awake, on watch, observing. I crept out of bed, found my sketch pad, and made a painstaking drawing of Annick. Then I signed and dated it.

  3 • Redon, Oxford

  I went to Paris determined to immerse myself in the culture, the language, the street-life, and – I would doubtless have added, with hesitant casualness – the women. At first, I deliberately avoided English people, papers and books; my tongue refused anglicisms as it did whisky or Coca-Cola. I began to gesture: just as the tongue and lips are given more work by the precise placing of French vowels, so the hands are expected to go new places too. I brushed the side of my jaw with the backs of my fingers to indicate boredom. I learned to shrug up my shoulders while turning down my mouth. I linked my fingers in front of my stomach, palms turned inwards, then sprang both thumbs out while making a plopping noise with my lips. This last gesture – meaning roughly ‘Search me’– would have been ridiculed at school. I did it rather well.