Metroland

by Julian Barnes

  ‘Well?’

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Good letter?’

  ‘I didn’t read it.’

  ‘Fuck, why not? I mean, if you aren’t interested in reading a carefully argued case against marriage now, then when are you?’

  ‘Well, the funny thing is I do seem rather less interested now than on other occasions. Were you going for an épat or something?’

  ‘Shit, no, we’ve grown out of that, haven’t we? No, I just thought you’d appreciate a certain historical overview of your contemplated action.’

  ‘Toni, how thoughtful.’

  ‘Don’t get me wrong. I mean, I quite like Marion, you know. Not my type, of course …’

  ‘Well that’s a relief – though I suppose historical circumstances might have prevented you taking her off my hands?’

  ‘I don’t follow you.’

  ‘Then fuck off, Toni.’

  ‘I really don’t see what you’re getting worked up about.’

  ‘Well, one of us is thick, then.’

  ‘Anyway, it’s interesting, you know – I looked up mariage the other day in the Frog dic. Did you know that all the phrases in which it’s used are disparaging: mariage de convenance, d’intérêt, blanc, de raison, à la mode … and so on.’

  ‘Mariage d’inclination?’

  ‘Missed it.’

  ‘I haven’t’ – and I put the phone down.

  And then I remember an overcast morning six years ago. 11.30. I was on the pavement outside Kennington Register Office with a small, sharp pain in my back and a large, indistinct one in my stomach. Marion and I were standing side by side trying to keep plausible smiles on our faces while squinting anxiously around to see if anyone had disobediently brought confetti. Friends with cameras kept trying to clown us into ridiculous poses. Marion did a fake-pregnancy shot, turning her feet out, leaning back, and acting nausea. Someone (Dave, I think) had brought along an antique shotgun, and we tried to persuade passers-by of the right age to pose pointing it at me. The trouble was, no one who looked respectable enough to be Marion’s father would agree to the sacrilege asked of them. Eventually, a semi-tramp pushing his possessions in a supermarket trolley came past, and we got him to stand with his back to the camera and aim the weapon at me. Afterwards, we had to wrestle the gun back off him, since he seemed to regard it as his fee.

  When we got back to Marion’s flat to change for the reception (the bargain with our parents had been a ‘proper’ reception in exchange for a ceremony on our own terms), I discovered the source of the pain in my back: I’d missed a packing pin when climbing into my new white shirt. As for the other pain, the roaming, restless one in my belly, I wondered, as I glanced across at Marion’s gentle, sweet, strong, happy, lovable face, if it was fear.

  Marion found me my first real job. I was supply teaching in Wandsworth at the time: twenty-five quid a week for the privilege of having your bicycle tyres let down each week by different kids at different schools, and of being asked by muscled fifteen-year-olds if you were queer. Even the weight of Toni’s approval (he liked people to have jobs they hated: called it ‘social yeast’) couldn’t alleviate my angry boredom. Fortunately Marion would come over to see me in my septic bedsitter; and I would lie staring up through the veil of her hair at the damp-stains on the ceiling.

  One day she was leafing through a pile of careers-board handouts and read: ‘Ewart Porter require trainee copywriter: £1,650 p.a., increments assessed every six months. Lively, adaptable …’ and all the usual bromides.

  ‘Not exactly what I had in mind.’

  ‘Is here what you had in mind?’

  To my surprise they took me on. To my further surprise, I enjoyed the job. Toni’s scorn was neutralised by Marion’s approval; also, it never felt like work. It was like being paid for playing sport, or doing crosswords; you even became exhilarated and competitive during big campaigns. I remember helping launch a new cooking fat called Lift, which duly justified our office joke and never got off the ground. We all felt we had to beat the rival cooking-fat slogans – ‘It’s as easy as Spry’ was one motto held up to us as a paragon of memorability. We toiled away at ‘Give your cooking Lift-off’ (astronaut with fluffy cakes), ‘Going up? Take a Lift’ (bellboy with fluffy cakes), and even – for a special offer – ‘Don’t look a Lift-horse in the mouth’ (frisky colt with fluffy cakes). It was ridiculous, but pleasant. Besides, I never saw it as a dangerous career. There were poets and novelists in advertising, they said; though I could never quite remember their names when asked. I did know that Eliot had worked in a bank.

  Three years later, through Dave, I moved to Harlow Tewson. They’d only been in business a short while, but already their catchily designed reference books were in every cork-tiled kitchen, pine-panelled bathroom and gaudy Renault 4. I’ve been an editor there for five years, with no regrets. It also doesn’t make me feel shitty: we don’t fight against making money, but we use good people, and we produce good books. At the moment, for instance, I’m working on a book about Italian Renaissance painting: a TV tie-in to go with a series of drama-documentaries based on Vasari. Toni – who objects to the idea that artists have lives as well as works – has already thought up our chapter titles for us: Buonarotti Bangs. Leo gets Lucky. Sandro Screws. Masaccio – and so on. There’s always a lot of so on with Toni.

  ‘What do you do on your walks, Chris?’

  (Once I would have responded, not dishonestly, but with a little deviousness: ‘Toning up the muscles for your delectation’, or something like that. But I’ve given up – I think – half-truths, just as I’ve given up meta-communication: wonderful in theory, but unreliable in practice.)

  ‘Oh, well, I suppose I think a bit.’

  ‘What about?’ She seemed sweetly troubled, as if she ought to be doing the same and hadn’t found time for it.

  ‘Oh, serious shit mostly.’

  ‘…?’

  ‘Stuff. Past – future; stuff. Secular confession, some of it. I pray, love and remember.’

  Again, a troubled smile. She came across and kissed me. I took her to be meta-communicating the fact that she wanted to kiss me (and for once let myself off checking up).

  ‘Love you,’ she said, breathing into my shoulder.

  ‘Love you back.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘And you front.’

  Marion giggled. In marriage, they say, all bad jokes are good jokes.

  Another comforting list I make is the list of reasons why I married Marion.

  Because I loved her of course.

  Why to that, then.

  Because she was (is) sensible, intelligent, pretty.

  Because she didn’t use love as a way of finding out about the world: didn’t look on the other person (I suppose I mean me) as a means of obtaining information.

  Because she didn’t sleep with me straight away, but didn’t hold out with reckless principle; and afterwards showed no remorse.

  Because deep down, I sometimes think, I fear her a little.

  Because I once asked her, ‘Will you love me regardless of what happens?’ and she replied, ‘You must be off your head.’

  Because she was the only child of comfortably-off parents. Money may not be the fuel of love, Auden said, but it makes excellent kindling.

  Because she tolerates my making restless lists like this.

  Because she loves me.

  Because if it’s true, as Maugham observed, that the tragedy of life is not that men die, but that they cease to love, then Marion is a person with whom even falling out of love would have its compensations.

  Because I have said that I love her, and there is no turning back. No cynicism is intended. The orthodoxy runs, that if a marriage is founded on less than perfect truth it will always come to light. I don’t believe that. Marriage moves you further away from the examination of truth, not nearer to it. No cynicism is intended there either.

  2 • Running Costs

  I don’t see so
much of Toni nowadays. We’re still nostalgic about each other, but realise that our paths have diverged. After Morocco, he went off to the States for a couple of years (from kif to kitsch as he put it); he came back, taught philosophy, and established himself as a callous academic reviewer; he published poems and two books of essays, and gradually become more involved in street politics. He lives now with a girl whose name we can never remember in the least fashionable part of the borough of Kensington he could find. The last time we asked him down we invited his ‘wife’ as well; but he said he’d come alone.

  ‘I’m sorry is it Kelly couldn’t come,’ said Marion as we were sitting down over an aperitif.

  ‘Kally. No, well, we believe in having separate friends you see.’

  ‘You mean that you didn’t want her to meet us? Or that she didn’t want to come? Which?’

  Toni looked a bit surprised. I think he thinks of Marion as unassertive because she’s quiet.

  ‘No, she’d probably like meeting you. We just have separate friends.’

  ‘Did you … tell her she was invited?’

  ‘Uh, mattrafact no.’

  ‘So we don’t get any choice about meeting her either?’

  ‘Don’t get heavy, Marion.’ (He pronounced it to rhyme with Carry On) ‘The situation’s quite clear isn’t it?’

  ‘Quite clear. I’d better get back to the lunch.’

  It was a bit embarrassing; I always forget between meetings how contrary Toni has remained. But then, you only have to look at us to see the ways we are going. I had on a crew-neck sweater, corduroy trousers and Hush Puppies. Toni wore couture jeans, a denim waistcoat, an ingeniously rumpled shirt, and a sort of stalker’s anorak; his hair was lacquered by neglect; and his battered shoulder bag contained, I imagine, lots of things I never needed. He still looked as swarthy and Jewish and energetic and two-shaves-a-day as ever; though I noticed he had lately taken to plucking the area where his eyebrows had once joined hands. He also seemed to talk a little differently from how I’d remembered: the accent was the same, but grammar and vocabulary had taken on a more demotic cast.

  I’d expected Toni to be combative – we’d both been so at school. I just hadn’t thought he would make such a big point out of a simple invitation. After some edgy conversation we sat down to lunch. Amy was perched in her high chair on Toni’s left, her yellow Pelican bib fastened round her neck. Immediately he made a great play of putting his anorak on and moving his place-setting a few inches to the right out of what he called chucking-range.

  ‘Never know when they’re going to chuck, you know,’ he told us with all the authority of a non-parent. He didn’t mean throw either.

  ‘She’s very good,’ Marion said firmly. ‘Aren’t you, pet? Except when she’s got bad wind, of course.’

  Toni pretended to quail. ‘Why is a normal baby like an unsuccessful crap?’ Marion frowned a little; I said I didn’t know. ‘Because they’re both all piss and wind.’ Marion passed him some soup without comment. Toni took the opportunity of moving a few more inches along the table. ‘No, you never can tell, you see. That’s why I always wear my baby clothes.’ (He waved a sleeve of his anorak) ‘Wear them for babies, slumming and gardening. Oh, and getting money out of the Arts Council.’

  ‘We qualify under the second as well as the first, I take it?’ asked Marion, understandably irritated.

  ‘Natch.’ Toni turned towards Amy and pulled his mouth into a clown’s grin. ‘Chuck, chuck, chuck,’ he gurgled in a rough parody of a doting uncle. ‘There’s a good little chucker. Just a little chuck for Toni.’ He held out one sleeve invitingly.

  ‘Very good indeed, love,’ I intervened, less than comfortably, waving my spoon over the watercress soup. Marion waited for Toni’s confirmation of the assessment; but he was too busy stuffing his mouth with bread.

  ‘Tell us about you, Toni,’ she said after a pause.

  ‘Ah; having a vasectomy – got to cut down running costs somehow. Writing for the Theatre-on-Wheels. Trying to get the local Labour fascists to haul ass. Doing some research for Koestler – A Study in Duplicity. Sponging meals off old school-friends.’

  ‘And their wives,’ Marion corrected.

  ‘And their delightfully ironic if somewhat tart wives.’

  At that moment, a sort of whoop came from Amy. She coughed, and then started to be gently sick; a milky stream ran down into her plastic catcher. Toni laughed his triumph. Amy gurgled at him in reply. He pretended to swab down his anorak, and we all relaxed. Once we adjusted to his apparent rudeness and solipsism we got on well enough. Marion once complained that she found Toni insensitive. I said it was more a case of a writer simply telling the truth as he saw it all the time. ‘I thought writers were meant to be more not less sensitive than other people,’ she’d answered. There’s a difference between sensitivity and politeness, I think I said; and can’t remember whether I convinced myself.

  After lunch, Toni and I went round the garden. He ignored the ‘escapist’ flowers, and cross-questioned me on the soil, the varieties of vegetable, the likely yield. The year he had spent on a co-operative farming venture in Wales seemed to have left him with some empirical knowledge, but little understanding of horticultural principle.

  ‘So this is it, eh?’ he asked me with an undermining smile as we stared creatively at a row of swede. ‘So this is it?’

  I thought I’d duck that one until its thrust became clearer, so I answered with another question.

  ‘You’re much more … political than you used to be, aren’t you?’

  ‘I’m more left-wing, if that’s what you mean. Man is never not political.’

  ‘Come on. We were totally passive about it as adolescents. Totally scornful and uninterested, don’t you remember? It was art that counted wasn’t it? We are the movers and shakers, don’t you remember that we emphasis?’

  ‘I remember that we were totally Tory.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s right at all. We hated the fat cats, didn’t we? And the bon bourgeois? “Le Belge est voleur …” ’ I began, but couldn’t remember the rest of it.

  ‘We had apathy and distaste, I agree, but they’re fundamental planks of the Tory platform, aren’t they? Christ, don’t you remember Cuba? What were we doing – cheering on Kennedy as if he were Robert Ryan in The Battle of the Bulge,’ (wasn’t that right?) ‘And what did we think about Profumo? Mainly envy: that was the result of our analysis of the socio-political crisis.’

  ‘But poetry makes nothing happen,’ I said with a reasonable-man cadence.

  ‘Too fucking right. So if you want to make things happen, don’t write poetry. I don’t know why I do; change from wanking, I suppose. Picked up a book of poems in Dillon’s the other day, didn’t get past the preface – it said “This book was written to change the world”. Too fucking ironic for words.’

  ‘Why get so heated?’

  ‘Because the reason poetry makes nothing happen is because those same old fat cats won’t let it.’

  ‘Who won’t let it? Which fat cats? Come on, be precise.’

  ‘Imprecise fucking fat cats. Movable fat cats. Because poetry’s packaged as a late-night slot, a quite minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something. Who reads it? Who’s been told it counts?’

  ‘There’s a lot of poetry in the papers.’

  ‘Ha – the more, the less. That’s just fucking infill. They ring up some tame cunt and say, “Oh Jonathan, can we have a four-by-two this week?” or “I’m afraid our ballet critic’s sprained his wrist doing capital letters, could we have something long with short lines? Rhymes, please, you know our readers like rhymes.” ’

  ‘I don’t thing that’s very fair.’ (Frankly, I thought it was paranoid, the crabby disenchantment of an unsuccessful writer.)

  ‘ ’Course it’s not fair.’ (Toni pronounced ‘fair’ with the sarcasm he normally reserved for ‘Tory’) ‘But it’s the way it works. Ask for poetry in a shop and you get jolly ballads or dead c
unts’ stuff. What’s it to do with now? Same with novels: it’s all smugglers and asshole rabbits and history.’

  ‘And we all know what history is,’ I cued nostalgically (better get him off this, I thought).

  ‘The lays of the victors. Quite. But why doesn’t anyone take books seriously any more? I mean, apart from academics, and what the fuck good are they – they’re only reviewers delivering their copy a hundred years late. Why does everyone sneer when a writer makes a political statement? Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism? And why the fuck’ (he seemed to be drawing breath at long last) ‘why the fuck don’t people buy my fucking books?’

  ‘Too dirty?’ I suggested. He laughed, began to calm down, and started awarding marks to the garden again.

  ‘And why haven’t you done anything, you budding fat cat?’

  I didn’t tell him about my projected history of transport around London.

  ‘Oh, me, gee, shucks, I’m into life.’

  He laughed again, though quite sympathetically, or so it seemed to me.

  (But isn’t it true that I’m – not ‘into life’, I wouldn’t put it like that – I’m more serious? At school I would have called myself serious, whereas I was merely intense. In Paris I did call myself serious – imagined, indeed, that I was heading for some grand synthesis of life and art – but I was probably only attaching an inordinate, legitimating importance to unreflecting pleasure. Nowadays I’m serious about different things; and I don’t fear my seriousness will collapse beneath me.)

  ‘You mean you don’t live in a rented room any more,’ was Toni’s comment when I paraphrased this to him. We were now at the bottom of the garden; looking through the trellis of bean-rods you could just make out the dormer window at the top of the house: one day, it would be Amy’s room, or perhaps Amy’s brother’s.

  ‘Well, up to a point. It’s satisfying knowing your roof doesn’t leak.’