Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  “Number one, you know when you’ve got it. Number two, everyone else does as well. Number three, you know what it’s making you do while you’re doing it.”

  “What does it make you do?”

  “Makes you do everything. Not very much at first. You look in your mirror a bit more. Fly a bit higher or a bit lower than’s necessary. Get the safety bug. Break off a scrap a bit earlier than you normally would. Shoot a line or two in the mess. Find a few more things going wrong with the aeroplane than you did before. Little things that make you turn back a bit earlier, or make you lose touch with your formation.

  “Then comes the bit when you start to notice it. Probably because you notice other people noticing it. You get back and the ground crew do what they always do—look to see if the guns have been fired before you’re out of the cockpit. And if they haven’t been fired a couple of times in a row, you imagine them muttering a bit. Always the same word, you imagine. Windy. Windy. So you think, I’m not having them calling me windy, so what you might start doing is drift off from your formation, get into a bit of cloud and fire your guns. If you fire them long enough you run out of ammo and have to make for home anyway. And you give your ground crew the thumb as you taxi in, and tell them you’re pretty sure about a Heinkel—it was smoking pretty badly and while you didn’t see it go down, you thought if they did get back to Germany it would be on shanks’ pony—and they give a cheer and you half believe it yourself and wonder whether to mention it at debriefing, and you realize you have to because what if you were boasting about hits to your ground crew and not mentioning them to Intelligence, and someone found out? So you do, and before you know where you are you’ve knocked down the whole bloody Luftwaffe, who must have been flying through that load of cloud you fired your guns into.”

  “Is that what you did?”

  “That’s how it ended up the second time, when they posted me. The first time there were a few little signs, I wasn’t sure, they weren’t sure, so they took me off flying orders for a few days. But I knew when it happened the second time. Then I knew what the first time was.”

  “It was probably just nerves the first time.”

  “Yes, that’s just what it was. Nerves, being scared, windy, yellow, exactly. You know what they say, don’t you? A man burnt twice is finished.” Jean remembered that was the phrase he had used when she’d asked him about marrying Michael.

  “I’m sure that’s an old wives’ tale.”

  “Old wives know a thing or two.” He chuckled. “Ask mine.”

  “Tell me what it’s like, being scared.”

  “I’ve told you what it’s like. It’s running away. It’s being windy.”

  “But what’s it like inside?”

  Prosser pondered. He knew exactly what it felt like. He dreamed about what it felt like.

  “Well, some parts of it are like other things. Like trembling hands and a dry mouth and tense in the head—that’s all part of good healthy nerves before an op. Usually. Sometimes it isn’t. Normally you get these little signs in the dispersal hut, then when you’re off the ground they go away; then they might come back when there looks like being some action, but when you get close they go away again. Except that sometimes they’re there all the time, even when you’re coming back safely, and that’s a bad sign. And then you start to get the fear.”

  He paused, and looked across at Jean. She held his gaze as he went on.

  “Imagine swallowing something sour, like vinegar. Imagine you don’t just taste it in your mouth, but all the way down. Imagine you can taste it in your mouth, in your gullet, in your chest, in your stomach. Then imagine that it’s all congealing very slowly between your chest and your throat. Slowly congealing. Porridge made of vinegar, tasting everywhere. Sour in your mouth. Wet and slack in your stomach. Congealing like porridge between your throat and your chest. That means you can’t trust your voice. So sometimes you pretend the R/T has broken down; sometimes you pretend to be going through a strong silent patch. You keep your mouth shut and you let the sourness bump against your throat. Half your body is full of this sour sick, and because you can taste it all the time you think you can sick it up and get rid of it. But you can’t. It just stays there, cold and sour and congealing, and you know there’s no good reason for it ever to go away. Ever. Because it’s quite right to be there.”

  “It might go away,” she said, conscious of a false brightness in her voice; as if she’d patted an amputee and assured him his legs would start growing again soon.

  “Twice burnt,” he replied quietly.

  “I’m sure you can get it back,” she went on, her voice still full of district nurse. “Back to poaching over the dromes and things … whatever.”

  “That was before,” said Prosser. “That was when everyone was doing khaki knitting, wherever you looked. Remember?”

  “I’ve still got mine. I never quite finished it.”

  “That was it. Khaki knitting. Hate the Hun. Repel the invader. It was all nice and clear and you were happy. You thought you might die, but that didn’t seem so important; and you didn’t think how long it was going to last or anything, you just got on with it. And anyway it was all new. And bits of it were like the best bits of your life.”

  “Like watching the sun rise twice.”

  “Like watching the sun rise twice. Like taking some bombers across to their target and getting there and the reception committee throwing up a lot of dirt, and you just looked at it—green and yellow and red, hanging in the air—and you didn’t think about it hurting you, you thought about how it looked like paper streamers at a Saturday-night hop. Now it’s different. You can’t go on like that forever.”

  “And you don’t hate the Germans as much as you used to?” Jean thought they were getting somewhere. Perhaps courage comes from hatred, or at least it kept going by it. Sun-Up had lost his hate, that was all. Nothing shameful about this; quite the contrary.

  “No, no. I hate them just as much. Just exactly as much. Maybe for different reasons, but just exactly as much.”

  “Oh. Did … did something happen? Something awful?” Something which made you not brave anymore.

  Prosser smiled carefully, as if he really would make things simple for her if he could. It was just that he couldn’t.

  “Sorry. It’s not like that. The boy grows to manhood overnight. The man becomes a hero. The hero cracks. New boys arrive, new heroes are welded.” He was almost teasing her, though not in a way she’d ever been teased before. “It’s not like that. I didn’t crack—at least, not how everyone thinks of it. Things just run out after a while. The stocks are exhausted. There isn’t anything left. People tell you it’s just a question of having a break and recharging the batteries. But there are a lot of batteries that won’t recharge. Or not anymore.”

  “Don’t be so pessimistic,” she said, though she felt unconvinced by her cheerful voice. “You still love flying, don’t you?”

  “I still love flying.”

  “And you still hate the Germans?”

  “I still hate the Germans.”

  “Well, then, Mr. Prosser?”

  “Well, then, Mrs. soon-to-be Michael Curtis, I’m afraid you haven’t got a QED there.”

  “Oh. Oh, but I’m sure. I just know it. Think of the sunrises.”

  “Well,” said Prosser. “I’m not sure I want to anymore. You see the sun rise twice—you get burnt twice. That seems fair enough to me. Fair dos. Just better get used to it. May as well sling my hook.”

  “No, please don’t get used to it.”

  “I wasn’t serious.”

  The following week Jean returned to see Dr. Headley. She made herself promise not to find anything funny. Not that there was much likelihood of this.

  The circular tin came out again, and the French chalk rose, and the smearing of the jelly was demonstrated, and again Jean thought, lubricated by mucus? Perhaps it was a tube of mucus jelly. Then she was upended, as if she’d chosen the wrong machine at a fun f
air, and ordered to relax. She relaxed by floating, then flying away from what was happening to her. She was in a black Hurricane and the clouds were streaming past. Sun-Up Prosser had had a wicker seat installed in his cockpit and was taking her for a ride; it wasn’t just whooping cough, he said, that could be cured by flight. And he would show her his trick. Uncle Leslie had a good trick with a cigarette, but Prosser had an even better one with the sun. Here we go now, look over there past my shoulder, across the black wing, watch it rise, watch it rise. And now, down we go, down another ten thousand feet and wait for it, watch, the sun comes up once more. The ordinary miracle occurs. Do it again? No, not unless you want to join the submarine boys.

  “You try.” Relaxing had made things easier for Dr. Headley’s demonstration; the only trouble was, Jean hadn’t listened to a word of it. Now, as she tentatively grasped the slippery cap, compressed it into a figure eight and began to feed it into herself with no clear sense of direction, she concentrated and tensed. Dr. Headley, squatting on a stool and holding her wrist, was trying to guide her. Let’s get it over with, Jean thought at one point, and pushed hard. Ouch. Ouch.

  “No, no, silly girl. Now look what you’ve done. It’s all right, just a bit of healthy blood.” Dr. Headley was busy with a towel and some warm water. Then after a while she said, “Shall we go on?”

  Jean slipped back to a bright, cloudless dawn over the Channel and listened to Dr. Headley as if over the R/T. This side up, figure eight, neck of the womb, rim fitting neatly, comfortable, then later, hook the finger, pull. Instructions for some aerial manoeuvre. This made it all seem less humiliating; and less to do with her. “You may bleed just a little more,” said Dr. Headley.

  Then Jean was given final instructions on using the cap. When to put it in; how long afterwards to take it out; how to wash it, dry it, powder it, and put it away in its tin until next time. This reminded her of Father and his pipe: he always seemed to spend much longer filling and cleaning and poking it than he ever did smoking it. But perhaps all pleasures were like that.

  On the blacked-out train from Paddington, she found herself wondering if she had, as she supposed, lost her virginity. Had she? She felt as if she had—or rather she felt as she imagined she would if she had done so in the normal way. She felt burst; she felt interfered with. The rift in the lute—she didn’t know what that meant, but it sounded right. In her handbag was a small cardboard box; she didn’t know what to think about it. Was it a protector or an aggressor? Was it a protector that helped aggressors like Michael? Had she lost her virginity to it—or to a cousin from the same batch at the factory? Was she being silly and melodramatic? It was all for Michael, anyway. Worse things could happen. Worse things were happening—and most of them to men. You had to do your bit, didn’t you?

  The box in her handbag intimidated her; it made the ticket collector at the station loom like a customs officer. Any contraband with you, missie? No, nothing to declare. One explosive device. One rifted lute. One slightly bloodstained nether garment.

  Dr. Headley and the box had made everything seem certain and immutable. But this certainty didn’t bring confidence. She didn’t find herself looking forward to being in bed with Michael. Of course she loved him, of course it would be all right; of course he would know everything, and instinct would make up for any mutual ignorances. It would be beautiful; it might even be spiritual, as some people said; but what a pity some parts of it had to be so matter-of-fact. And would this matter-of-factness interfere with her responses? Would the box affect her Periodicity of Recurrence?

  When Jean got home, she surprised herself by turning again to Mrs. Barrett’s little maroon book. She turned to the chapter called The Fundamental Pulse, serious now, to find out what the promised deed would be like. Some people, she read, thought of it as a simple wave pattern of crests and hollows; but it was more complicated than that. “We have all,” the author of Our Ostriches explained,

  at some time, watched the regular ripples of the sea breaking against a sandbank, and noticed that the influx of another current of water may send a second system of waves at right angles to the first, cutting athwart them, so that the two series of waves pass through each other.

  Jean hadn’t ever been to the seaside, but she tried to imagine the pattern of cross-ripples. She heard gulls squawk and saw untrodden sand. It all sounded quite pleasant. Quite pleasant, but not very important. Maybe it was just funny?

  Uncle Leslie wasn’t at the wedding. Uncle Leslie had done a bunk. Jean’s parents were there, and Michael’s tall, long-nosed mother, who was either awkward or patronizing, Jean couldn’t decide, and a policeman friend of Michael’s who was best man and who whispered to her beforehand, “If I’m the best man why are you marrying the other fellow?” (which Jean didn’t think was an appropriate remark), and a cousin of Michael’s from Wales who had come down specially; but Uncle Leslie wasn’t there. One small family marrying into another small family: seven people who didn’t know each other very well trying to judge the right degree of celebration for a mufti wedding in wartime. Uncle Leslie would have ignored the niceties and insisted on a knees-up; he might have made a speech or done some tricks. Perhaps she missed him more because as a child she had planned to marry him. His absence seemed a double desertion. But then, Uncle Leslie had done a bunk.

  This, at any rate, had been her father’s interpretation of events. Uncle Leslie, having lived in England all his life, had caught a boat to New York shortly after Chamberlain’s return from Munich. Leslie’s summary of the facts, in a much debated letter from Baltimore, ran as follows: Chamberlain had proclaimed peace in our time, Leslie realized he wasn’t getting any younger and had decided to see the world, not long after he got to America the war had quite unexpectedly broken out, he was (just) too old to serve in uniform, there wasn’t any point in bringing another mouth to feed all the way across the Atlantic, the best thing to do was send food parcels as soon as he’d got set up in a job, and of course, he’d join the American army if the Yanks got involved in the kerfuffle, always assuming they’d have him.

  Father’s summary of the facts to Mother was rather different: I always knew your brother was a bit of a spiv, too old for the army stuff and nonsense what’s wrong with the Home Guard or firewatching or working in a munitions factory, not that your brother ever liked getting his hands dirty or using a spot of elbow grease, just because he sends food parcels he thinks that makes it all right, what’s for dinner tonight Mother a little bit of Conscience Pie followed by a slice of Conscience Pudding, well we may as well eat the stuff it’ll only go bad, but what does he mean by sending our Jean fancy underwear she’s only just had her plait cut off, I won’t see my daughter wearing things like this when the bombers are coming over it’s not decent, if he joins the American army I’ll swim the North Sea, perhaps our Hero of the Stratosphere on my right would like another slice of Conscience Pudding, it may taste sour but there’s no point letting it go to waste.

  In the first two years of the war they ate a lot of Conscience Pie. Father confiscated the underwear but handed it over to Jean when she married. This was Uncle Leslie’s only wedding present; she had written to give him the news, but he didn’t reply. Uncle Leslie went silent for the rest of the war. Father’s speculations on the reason were not always well received by Mother.

  When she married, Jean knew the following things:

  how to make beds with hospital corners;

  how to sew, patch and knit;

  how to make three sorts of pudding;

  how to lay a fire and blacken a grate;

  how to make old pennies bright again by soaking them

  in vinegar;

  how to iron a man’s shirt;

  how to plait hair;

  how to insert a Dutch cap;

  how to bottle fruit and make jam;

  how to smile when she didn’t feel like smiling.

  She was proud of these accomplishments, though she did not consider them an entirely adequate d
owry. She wished, for instance, that she knew the following:

  how to dance the waltz, quickstep and polka, for which there had been little call so far in her life;

  how to run without automatically folding her arms across her chest;

  how to know in advance whether her remarks were stupid or intelligent;

  how to predict the weather from a hanging piece of seaweed;

  how to tell why a chicken had stopped laying;

  how to judge when people were making fun of her;

  how to be helped into a coat without getting embarrassed;

  how to ask the right questions.

  Michael fiddled some petrol and they spent their honeymoon at a pub in the New Forest which had a few rooms above the bar. They drove down late on the Saturday afternoon. As they neared Basingstoke it began to get dark, and they proceeded on sidelights because of the blackout. Jean wondered how good Michael’s night vision was; he hadn’t been trained like Prosser. She felt frightened: in the first months of the war, she remembered, more people had been killed on the roads than by the enemy. She laid a hand on Michael’s arm at one point; but he seemed to misinterpret this and went faster.

  When they were shown to their room, Jean was daunted by the size of the bed. It looked enormous, threatening, active. It was telling her things, mocking and scaring her at the same time. Sporadic murmurs rose through the floor from the bar beneath. She turned her head into Michael’s shoulder and said, “Can we be friends tonight?”

  There was a pause, and a slight stiffening of his hand on her neck. Then he said, “Of course. It’s been a long drive.”

  He stroked her hair a little, then went off for a wash. Over dinner he was jovial and relaxed; he had telephoned his mother and asked her to pass on news of their arrival to the Serjeants. Jean rather wished she could have talked to her mother—a final briefing before the op—but what Michael had done was obviously for the best. She loved him very much, told him so, and asked if she could get into bed and turn out the light while he was in the bathroom. She lay between the sheets with a laundry smell in her nose and wondered what lay ahead. Outside it was a cloudless night and a full summer moon hung in the sky like a pathfinder’s flare; a bombers’ moon, they called it.