Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  Two days later Mrs. Serjeant put Jean’s winter underwear on the edge of the bed, then a thick dress, her winter coat, a scarf and a blanket. She seemed displeased but resigned.

  “Come on. Uncle Leslie’s had a whip-round.” Uncle Leslie’s whip-round, Jean discovered, included a taxi. Her first taxi. On the way to the aerodrome she took care not to appear overexcited. At Hendon her mother stayed in the car. Jean took her father’s hand, while he explained to her that the wooden parts of a De Havilland were made of spruce. Spruce was a very hard wood, he said, almost as hard as the metal parts of the aeroplane, so she was not to worry. She had not been worrying.

  Sixty-minute sightseeing tour of London; departures on the hour. Among the dozen passengers were two more children wrapped up like parcels although it was only August; perhaps their uncles had had whip-rounds as well. Her father sat across the aisle and stopped her when she tried to lean past him and look out: the point of the flight, he explained, was medical, not educational. He spent the whole trip gazing at the back of the wicker seat in front of him and holding on to his kneecaps. He seemed as if he might get overexcited at any minute. When the De Havilland banked, Jean could see, beyond its chubby engines and the crisscross of the struts, something that might be Tower Bridge. She turned to her father.

  “Shh,” he said. “I’m concentrating on getting you better.”

  It was almost a year before she and Uncle Leslie went screaming again. They popped down the Old Green Heaven, of course; but somehow Leslie’s driving at the dogleg fourteenth had acquired a new accuracy. When, finally, the next summer, he drew the club head across the face of the ball and produced a high, wailing slice, the ball seemed to know exactly where it was meant to go. So did they: through the long rough, across the damp beech wood, over the slimy stile, and into the sloping meadowland. They screamed into the warm air and thumped down on their backs. Jean found herself scanning the sky for aeroplanes. She rolled her eyes round in their sockets, and searched to the edge of her vision. No clouds and no aeroplanes: it was as if she and Uncle Leslie had emptied the sky with their noise. Nothing but blue.

  “Well,” said Leslie, “I think I’ll award myself a free drop.” They had not looked for his ball on their way through the wood, and they did not look for it on the way back either.

  The third time they went screaming, there was an aeroplane. Jean hadn’t noticed it while they were bawling at the heavens; but when they were supine and panting, and the clouds were bobbing on their tethers, she became aware of a distant buzzing. Too regular to be an insect; sounding both near and distant at the same time. It appeared, briefly and more noisily, between two clouds, then vanished, reappeared and buzzed slowly towards the horizon, losing height. She imagined chubby engines, whistling struts, and children wrapped like parcels.

  “When Lindbergh flew the Atlantic,” Leslie commented from a few feet away, “he had five sandwiches with him. He only ate one and a half.”

  “What happened to the others?”

  “What others?”

  “The other three and a half.”

  Uncle Leslie stood up; he looked moody. Perhaps she wasn’t allowed to talk, even though they weren’t on the fairway. Finally, as they scuffled in the beechnuts, this time looking for the ball, he said, in an irritated mutter, “They’re probably in a sandwich museum.”

  A sandwich museum, Jean wondered to herself: were there such things? But she knew not to ask any further. And gradually, over the next couple of holes, Leslie’s mood improved. On the seventeenth, after a quick look up and down the fairway, he became conspiratorial again.

  “Shall we play the Shoelace Game?”

  He’d never mentioned it before, but she agreed at once.

  Blatantly, Uncle Leslie kicked his ball across to the short rough. When they caught up with it, he bent down and took off his brown-and-white co-respondent shoes. He laid the loose ends of the laces in a cross on the middle of the inner sole, looked at her and nodded. She took off her black walking shoes and did the same. She watched as, with a comic formality, he worked first his toes, then the rest of his feet, back into his shoes. She did the same; he winked, bent down on one knee like a suitor, patted her calf and slowly tugged both laces out from the soft underside of her left foot. Jean giggled. It felt wonderful. Ticklish at first and gradually more ticklish, but with a thrust of pleasure pushing right up into her stomach. She closed her eyes, and Uncle Leslie with a teasing pull, eased the laces out from underneath her right foot. It was even better with your eyes closed.

  Then it was his turn. She crouched down at his feet. His shoes seemed enormous from this distance. His socks smelt distantly of the barnyard.

  “One at a time for me,” he whispered, and she seized the first lace close to where it disappeared into its eyelet. She pulled; nothing happened; she pulled again, more sharply; he wiggled his foot, and the lace came suddenly free.

  “No good,” he said. “Too quick. Put it back.”

  He arched his foot, and she poked the long brown lace back into his shoe, between his damp sock and the inner sole. Then she pulled again, more smoothly; the lace came out with slow ease, and from the silence overhead she deduced that she had done it correctly. One by one, she pulled out the other three ends of his laces. He patted her on the head.

  “I think a little seven iron, don’t you? Toss it up, bit of backspin, Bob’s your uncle.”

  “Can we do it again?”

  “Certainly not.” He addressed the ball, shuffled his feet as if he’d still got the laces trapped, and waggled the club head with loose wrists. “Got to let the batteries recharge, haven’t we?” She nodded; he pushed the ball a few inches on to a mossier clump of grass where it sat up well, fiddled his feet some more, struck a clean shot towards the flag and set off down the fairway. “Laces!” he shouted back at her, and she stooped to tie them up.

  But they did play the Shoelace Game again, quite often. Not always at the Old Green Heaven; sometimes, rather suddenly and furtively, when they were at home. The rules were always the same: Uncle Leslie went first and pulled out both laces; she went second and tugged one at a time. Once, she tried to play it by herself; but it was not the same. She wondered if the game made you ill. Everything nice was supposed to make you ill. Chocolates, cakes, figs made you ill; screaming gave you the whooping cough. What did the Shoelace Game give you?

  Presumably she would find out the answer to that quite soon. And then, as she grew up, she would find out the other answers. Answers to all sorts of questions. How to decide which club to use. Whether there was a sandwich museum. Why your Jews didn’t enjoy golf. Whether her father had been frightened in the De Havilland or just concentrating. How that Musso knew which way the paper folded. Why food looked quite different when it came out at the other end of your body. How to smoke a cigarette without the ash falling off it. Whether Heaven was up the chimney, as she secretly suspected. And why the mink was excessively tenacious of life.

  Jean didn’t even understand what was meant by that last phrase; but in time she might discover the question, and later she might discover the answer. She knew about the mink because of Aunt Evelyn’s prints. There were two of them, left behind years earlier with a promise of early collection, and subsequently shuffled from wall to wall. In the end, they were put in Jean’s room. Father wondered if one of them wasn’t unsuitable; but Mother insisted that Evelyn’s pictures stay together. It was only honest, she said.

  The horizontal picture showed two men in a forest somewhere; they wore old-fashioned clothes and hats. The one with the beard was holding up a ferret by the scruff of its neck, while the other man, the one without the beard, leaned on his gun. There was a pile of dead ferrets at his feet. Except that they weren’t ferrets, because the title of the picture was Mink Trapping; and underneath was a story Jean had read many times.

  The Mink, like the muskrat and ermine long-tailed weasel, does not possess much cunning, and is easily captured in any kind of trap; it is taken in s
teel traps and box traps, but more generally in what are called deadfalls. It is attracted by any kind of flesh, but we have usually seen the traps baited with the head of a ruffed grouse, wild duck, chicken, jay, or other bird. The Mink is excessively tenacious of life, and we had found it still alive under a deadfall, with a pole lying across its body pressed down by a weight of 150 lbs., beneath which it had been struggling for nearly twenty-four hours.

  “Excessively tenacious of life” was not the only part she didn’t yet understand. What was a ruffed grouse? Or a muskrat? She knew what a wild duck was, and there had been a pair of barking jays last spring in the beech wood at the dogleg fourteenth, and they had chicken for Sunday lunch when her father had done a customer a favour. Mrs. Baxter would come in to pluck and draw it for her mother in the morning, and would call back at about five o’clock for one of the legs, which would be wrapped in greaseproof paper. Jean’s father liked to make jokes about Mrs. Baxter’s leg while he was carving, jokes which made his daughter giggle and his wife purse her lips.

  “Does Mrs. Baxter have the head as well?” Jean once asked.

  “No, dear. Why?”

  “What do you do with it?”

  “Throw it in the dustbin.”

  “Shouldn’t you keep it to sell to the mink trappers?”

  “You just get them to call, my girl,” replied her father jovially. “You just get them to call.”

  The vertical print in Jean’s room showed a ladder set up against a tree, with words painted on the rungs. INDUSTRY said the bottom rung; TEMPERANCE said the second, though really it only said TEMPERAN, because the last two letters were cut off by the knee ot the ladder climber. Then came PRUDENCE, INTEGRITY, ECONOMY, PUNCTUALITY, COURAGE and, the top rung, PERSEVERANCE. In the foreground people were queuing to climb the tree, which had Christmas balls hanging from its leaves, with more words written on them like “Happiness,” “Honor,” “the Favor of God” and “Goodwill to Men.” In the background were people who didn’t want to climb the tree; they were gambling, swindling, betting, going on strike and entering a large building called Stock Exchange.

  Jean understood the general intention of the picture, though sometimes she absently confused this tree with the Tree of Knowledge, which she had heard about in Scripture. The Tree of Knowledge was clearly a bad thing to have climbed; this tree was clearly a good thing, even if she didn’t really understand all the words on the rungs, or the two written on the main shafts of the ladder: MORALITY, said one, HONESTY, the other. Some of the words she thought she understood. Honesty meant keeping Aunt Evelyn’s two pictures together, and not moving your ball to a better position when no one was looking; Punctuality meant not being late for school; Economy was what her father did at the shop and her mother did at home; Courage—well, Courage was going up in aeroplanes. She would doubtless understand the other words in time.

  Jean was seventeen when the war began, and the event made her feel relieved. Things had all been taken out of her hands; she no longer needed to feel guilty. For the preceding few years her father had taken the full weight of various political crises firmly on his shoulders; that was his duty, after all, as Head of the Household. He would read the news to them from the Daily Express, with pauses after each paragraph, and explain the bulletins on the wireless. It often felt to Jean as if her father owned a small family business which was being threatened by a gang of foreigners with outlandish names, illegal business methods and cutthroat pricing. Her mother knew all the right responses; she knew the different noises to make when names like Benes, Daladier and Litvinov came up, and when it was best to throw up her hands in confusion and let Father explain it to her again from the beginning. Jean tried to be interested, but it sounded to her like a story which had begun a long time ago, even before she was born, and which she would never completely master. At first she used to keep silent at the names of those sinister foreign businessmen with their lorry-loads of stolen digestive biscuits and poached pheasants; but even silence wasn’t safe—it suggested lack of proper concern—so she would occasionally ask questions. The trouble was, how could you know what questions to ask? It seemed to her that you were in a position to ask a really correct question only if you already knew the answer, and what was the point in that? Once, coming out of a bored reverie, she had asked Father about this new woman prime minister of Austria called Ann Schluss. That had been a mistake.

  War, of course, was men’s business. Men conducted it, and men—tapping out their pipes like headmasters—explained it. What had women done in the Great War? Given out white feathers, stoned dachshunds, gone out to nurse in France. First they sent men off to fight, then they patched them up. Was it likely to be any different this time? Probably not.

  Even so, Jean felt obscurely that her inability to understand the European crisis was partly responsible for its continuation. She felt guilty about Munich. She felt guilt about the Sudetenland. She felt guilty about the Nazi-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. If only she could remember whether you could trust the French or not. Was Poland more important than Czechoslovakia? And what was this about Palestine? Palestine was in the desert and the Jews wanted to go there. Well, at least this confirmed what Uncle Leslie had said about Jews: that they didn’t like golf anyway. Nobody who liked golf would choose to go and live in the desert. It would be like playing out of the bunker all the time. Perhaps the golf courses out there had fairways made of sand and bunkers made of grass.

  So when the war began, Jean was relieved. It was all Hitler’s fault: it was nothing to do with her. And at least it meant that something was happening. The war counted as another Incident: this was how she viewed it at first. The men were called up, Mother joined the WVS, and Jean was finally allowed to cut off the broad yellow-brown plait which had run down her back for so many years. Her father mourned its loss, but was persuaded that the saving on soap and water when Jean washed her hair would significantly help the war effort. Sentimentally, he asked for the plait when it was cut and kept it on a shelf in his potting shed for several weeks, until his wife threw it out.

  There had been secret discussions among the Serjeants about whether Jean should get a job; but with Mother joining the WVS it was thought she would be better off keeping house. “Good practice, girl,” said her father with a wink. Good practice: not that she felt in any way up to whatever it was she was practicing for. When she looked at her parents, she was daunted by how grown-up they were. How long would it take before she was as grown-up as that?

  They knew their own minds; they had opinions; they could tell right from wrong. She felt she could tell right from wrong only because she had been repeatedly informed of the difference; her opinions were twitching, vulnerable tadpoles compared with the honking frogs that were her parents’ views; while as for knowing your own mind, this seemed a bewildering process. How could you know your own mind without using your mind to discover your mind in the first place? A dog circling in pursuit of its own cropped tail. Jean felt tired at the very thought.

  The other part of growing up was getting to look like someone. Her father, who managed the grocery at Bryden, looked like a man who managed a grocery: he was round and neat, hitched up his sleeves with a pair of elasticated steel bands, and seemed as if he was kind but had a reserve of severity—the sort of man who knew that a pound of flour was a pound of flour and not fifteen ounces, who could tell which biscuits were in which square tin without even looking at the label, and who could put his hand close, oh so close, to the whirring bacon slicer without shaving the skin from his palm.

  Jean’s mother also looked like someone, with her pointy nose and rather protuberant blue eyes, with her hair caught back in a bun during the daytime when she wore her bottle-green-and-claret WVS uniform, or loose in the evenings when she listened to Father and knew exactly what questions to ask. She had gone on salvage drives and helped collect thousands of tin cans; she had spent weeks threading strips of coloured fabric through camouflage netting (“Just like making a huge carpet,
Jean”); she had baled paper, filled in at the mobile canteen, packed vegetable hampers for minesweepers. No wonder she knew her own mind; no wonder she looked like someone.

  Jean would sometimes stare into the mirror, inspecting herself for signs of change; but her straight hair lay sullenly flat on her head, and her blue eyes were marred by silly flecks. An article in the Daily Express had explained that many film stars in Hollywood were successful because their faces were heart-shaped. Well, there was no hope for that now; she was far too square-jawed. If only these bits of her face would start looking as if they belonged together. Oh, do get on with it, she sometimes whispered at the mirror. Mother once caught her at self-examination and commented, “You’re not pretty, but you’ll do.”

  I’ll do, she thought. My parents think I’ll do. But would anybody else? She missed Uncle Leslie. They weren’t allowed to talk about him nowadays, but she often thought of him; he had always been on her side. Once, they’d been walking up the long tenth at the Old Green Heaven, Jean carrying the sand iron in the good-luck position, and she’d asked him, “What will I do when I grow up?”

  It had seemed natural to ask, natural to assume that he would be more likely to know than she. Uncle Leslie, with his brown-and-white co-respondent shoes and his quietly rattling clubs, had taken the head of the sand iron and waggled it from side to side on her shoulder. Then he put his hand on the back of her neck and murmured, “The sky’s the limit, little Jeanie. The sky’s the limit.”

  Not much happened in the war at first, it seemed to Jean; but then it got going and people started to be killed. She also began to understand it better: who was trying to run Father out of business, and the names of his shifty associates. She felt fiercely about these foreigners with their underhand tricks. She saw a fat thumb with a dirty nail pressing down on the scales. Perhaps she ought to join up. But Father thought she was doing more good where she was. “Keep the home fires burning,” he said.