Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  A foot of snow lay on the ground and the sun, now almost level with the horizon, had thrown a firm-wristed sweep of orange across the mountains opposite. The sun’s kingdom began exactly at the snow line: above, the orange mountain crests had orange snow beneath indolent orange clouds; drop below the line and everything changed into dry browns and buffs and umbers, while far, far down, some murky greens enclosed a trickle of silver—like a Lurex thread in a dull tweed suit. Jean gripped the frosty guardrail and was glad to be alone, glad that what she saw didn’t have to be translated into words, to be reported, discussed, annotated. The extravagant fish-eye view was bigger, deeper, wider, grander, savager, more beautiful and more frightening than she had thought possible; but even this alignment of excited adjectives failed her. Rachel, Gregory’s most combative girlfriend, had told her before she set off, “Yeah, it’s like coming all the time.” No doubt she’d been trying to shock, and these remembered words were indeed shocking; but only in their inadequacy. Sex—even the resounding sex Jean imagined but had never experienced—could be no more than playing the Shoelace Game, little tickles on the soles of your feet as the laces snaked away, compared to this. Someone else had promised, “It’s like looking at the Creation”—but that too was only words. Jean was fed up with words. If the Canyon shrank the watchers at its rim to midges, it shrank their noises—the prattle, the whoops, the camera clicks—into mere insect hum. This wasn’t a place where you made self-deprecating jokes, fiddled with your exposure meter, or threw snowballs. This was a place beyond words, beyond human noise, beyond interpretation.

  It was said that the great Gothic cathedrals of Europe had the power to convert by their mere presence. It wasn’t just a question of impressing the peasants: sophisticated minds had also said to themselves, If something as beautiful as this exists, how can the idea which produced it not be true? One cathedral is worth a hundred theologians capable of proving the existence of God by logic. The mind longs for certainty, and perhaps it longs most for a certainty which clubs it down. What the mind can understand, what it can ploddingly prove and approve, might be what it most despises. It longs to be attacked from behind, in a dark street, certainty a knife at the throat.

  Perhaps the Canyon acted like a cathedral on religiously inclined tourists and startlingly argued without words the power of God and the majesty of his works. Jean’s response was the opposite. The Canyon stunned her into uncertainty. Over dinner she sat thinking, and tried not to use words as she did so; or at least, to use them gingerly. Therefore was the word she allowed to set most solid in her mind. The Canyon, therefore … If the Canyon is the question, what is the answer? If the Canyon is the answer, what is the question? The Canyon, therefore …? Even the sceptic’s response, the Canyon, therefore nothing, seemed a large answer. It was said that one of the worst tragedies of the spirit was to be born with a religious sense into a world where belief was no longer possible. Was it an equal tragedy to be born without a religious sense into a world where belief was possible?

  The next morning, before departure, Jean rested her body once more against the frosty guardrail and gazed at the Canyon. Now the sun was reaching down into it, groping towards the river. High grassy plateaus lay hundreds, perhaps thousands, of feet below her. The mountain crests, their soirée of orange glory gone, had become sombre and distant in their morning dress; the snow blinked whitely across. Following its own buzz, a light aeroplane came into view. The first tourist flight of the day, an insect hovering over an enormous wound. For a while it flew level with Jean, then dropped to examine the wandering fissure which enclosed the river. How strange, Jean thought, to stand on the ground and yet be higher than an aeroplane; seeing the wings and fuselage from above was like seeing the rare side of a leaf or a moth. It was somehow against nature, the idea of an aeroplane flying beneath the surface of the earth; as it would be if some surfacing submarine continued to rise out of the water and leaped into the air, a monstrous flying fish.

  Against nature. Was that right? We said “against nature” when we meant “against reason.” It was nature which provided the miracles, the hallucinations, the beautiful trickery. Forty years ago nature had shown to a Catalina pilot a motorcyclist calmly riding across the surface of the Atlantic four hundred and fifty miles off the Irish coast. Nature had done that. Reason had subsequently denied the apparition. It was against reason, not against nature. Reason, and man’s ingenuity, had erected the first Six Wonders of the World that Jean had visited. Nature had thrown up the seventh, and it was the seventh which had thrown up the questions.

  Through the RAF Benevolent Fund she traced Sun-Up Prosser’s widow. Not Prosser anymore, but Redpath, with an address near Whitby. Jean wrote, and a few days later received a postcard of a fishing port under a bright blue sky. “Pop in any time you’re passing. Derek and I like a chat about old times. Fancy Tommy coming up after all this time! P.S. Weather not like on card.”

  It was a smart semidetached council house on a small estate which hadn’t yet settled into the side of a hill; the trees were leafless poles protected by cylinders of wire mesh and the concrete bus shelters were still unstained by damp or graffiti. Jean managed to be passing rather sooner than Olive Redpath had anticipated.

  “Well, what can it be that’s so urgent after it’s waited all these years I wonder.” It was halfway between a statement and a question. Jean was handed a cup of coffee and seated in the chair opposite the television. Olive and Derek sat on the divan, Derek behind a vapour trail of cigarette smoke. The divan, Jean noticed, was covered in the sort of bright check material much used for aeroplane seats.

  “Oh, it was just that I was, actually, passing. I had to go to Manchester.”

  “Manchester. That’s passing!” Mrs. Redpath cackled at the profligate and impenetrable ways of southerners. She was stout, bosomy and aggressively welcoming. “Hear that, Derek? Manchester!”

  “Surprised you got here safely,” said Derek, taking an unusually long rest from his cigarette. “They do say there be cannibals hereabouts.”

  “Well, it’s not really urgent, I suppose. It’s just that I thought I’d better do it while it was on my mind.”

  “Strike while the iron’s hot,” said Olive.

  “Your … your late husband …”

  “Tommy.”

  “Tommy … Tommy was billeted on us during the war. With me and my parents. After he was posted from West Malling. While he was with us we used to talk quite a lot …” She didn’t know how to put it exactly.

  “One of his popsies, were you?” Olive enquired with a genial laugh.

  “No, no, not at all …”

  “It doesn’t bother me if you were, love. I like to think of old Tommy having a last cuddle or two. He always were a bit of a charmer.”

  Was he? Jean certainly didn’t remember him as a charmer. A bit awkward, fierce, even rude sometimes; capable of being nice. No, charm hadn’t seemed one of his components.

  “No. I mean, I can see why you might have thought …”

  “First thing I said, didn’t I, Derek? Fancy that, I said, one of old Tommy’s popsies popping out of the woodwork after all these years. I wouldn’t have thrown him out if I’d known.”

  “Thrown him out?”

  “When we moved, yes, I threw him out. Well, what was the point? When was it, Derek, nine or ten years ago?”

  Derek pondered the question as he slowly inhaled and exhaled, then replied, “It’s always longer than you think nowadays.”

  “Well, whenever it was, ten or twelve years ago, I threw Tommy out. We were moving, and something had to go, and I hadn’t looked at the stuff for years, and his old whatjercallit, battledress or something, I don’t know why I had it anyway, it got the moth. So I threw it all out. Letters, photos, a few silly things I didn’t look at ’cause it might upset me. Derek were all in favour.”

  “No, that’s putting it strong, love.”

  “Derek wasn’t against, anyway. But what I say is, Tommy’s got
his little place in my heart, what does he want a place in my attic as well for?” Olive, who had seemed to be moving towards tears, suddenly roared with laughter, her motion shaking some ash from Derek’s cigarette. “He was a lovely boy, from what I remember of him, Tommy. But then life must go on, mustn’t it?”

  “Yes,” said Jean.

  “Quicker than you think,” put in Derek.

  “Not that I’d have thought you were his type,” Olive said quizzically.

  “Oh, I wasn’t,” said Jean. There was a pause. “I was wondering … We lost touch with him when he was posted. I was wondering … when he was with us he was so keen to get back to flying.”

  “Was he?” said Olive. “I always thought he had a bit of a yellow streak in him myself.” She noticed the change in Jean’s expression. “You sure you weren’t one of his popsies? You’re behaving as if you were. No, I’m only trying to say what I mean. No point doing otherwise, is there?”

  “No,” replied Jean. “I wasn’t shocked. I just thought he was brave. I thought they were all brave.”

  “Well, Tommy P. had one eye open for the back door, if you catch my drift. Not that I ever held it against him. That’s why I was a bit surprised when I heard he’d gone back to flying.”

  “He always seemed so keen to.”

  “So you say. Well, you do surprise me. Still, we can’t settle it now, and I haven’t got his letters since I threw him out.” Olive chuckled. “Anyway, I was a bit more surprised than you must have been. And then, let me see …” She paused, even though she must have told the story many times before. “It can only have been a few days after that, a week maybe, and I got a letter from his squadron thingy …”

  “Leader,” Derek supplied.

  “… leader, thank you, saying he was missing, believed killed in action. I was a bit of a heap at that, I don’t mind telling you. I mean, I was really soft on Tommy, only been married a year or so, going to start a family as soon as the war was over … So I wrote to the squadron thingy and said, What action? Killed in what action? And he wrote and said he was sorry all over again, and said Tommy was a wonderful fellow, though how he can have known that seeing as Tommy had only been posted a few days, and then something about security reasons or whatever. I wrote back and said, That’s not good enough, I want to know and I’m coming to see you. And before he could write back and say that was against security thingies, I set off. More coffee, love?”

  “No thanks.”

  “The Cona’s on, so just say. Well, I got there, which wasn’t easy, and I saw the squadron fellow and said, Listen, what action? Killed in what action? Where? He was nice enough, but said he couldn’t tell me. I said who do you think I am, Lord Haw-Haw? My Tommy’s been killed and I want to know where. And eventually he said France, and I said well that narrows it down, I thought it might be Iceland. And anyway what do you mean, missing and killed? If he’s missing maybe he isn’t killed, and if he’s killed he isn’t missing, is he? So the squadron fellow said that Tommy had got, what was the word, detached from the rest of the fellows—I said that was just like him, going off on his own—and that a bit later one of the other pilots had seen a Hurricane coming down out of control and he went to take a look and it was Tommy, and this other fellow watched it and it went down and hit the ground.

  “So I said, I want to talk to this fellow. He said it was against regulations, but I carried on like a woman for a bit, said I’d sit in his office till I got what I wanted and so on, wept buckets—well, that wasn’t hard, and do you know what he said?”

  “He said you’d have to sign the Official Secrets Act,” put in Derek.

  “I know you know, stupid. So I said that’s all right by me. Get them out. So I signed whatever it was, could have been signing for dentures for all I knew, and they took me to this fellow. Mac something, I don’t remember. But the squadron fellow had obviously given him a talking- to beforehand. He just said over France, going down. I said how did you know it was Tommy? He said there were numbers on the side of the aeroplane. Went past nice and slow, did it, so that you could read them, but he could see I was upset. I was crying again, and all I could think of was how big the numbers were. And then this Mac fellow stood up and shook my hand and said that was all he knew but if I happened to be in the Three Ships at about eight he might just have remembered a bit more.

  “I was in the pub at opening time, I don’t mind telling you. I might even have been a bit tipsy by the time he turned up; but I remember everything he said. They were over France, about eight of them, and they noticed that Tommy was sort of drifting away. Looking for the back door, I wouldn’t have been surprised. So the fellow in charge calls him up on the whatsit …”

  “Radio,” murmured Derek, helping, not answering.

  “… radio and told him to get back in line. There wasn’t any reply. He tried several times, but it looked as if Tommy’s radio wasn’t working. Then they noticed he was beginning to climb away from them, and the fellow in charge told this Mac to go and see if he could catch him up. He said it wasn’t easy because Tommy seemed to be climbing straight into the sun, and you couldn’t see too much. But after a bit he got near enough to see that Tommy was still there—he hadn’t fainted or anything. He had his hand up in front of his face. It must have been so that he wasn’t blinded by the sun. That’s what they did, this Mac said, when they were climbing into the sun. So he tried talking to Tommy on the radio, but he wouldn’t answer. He fired his guns, but that didn’t work either.

  “So the fellow in charge told him to get back and join the others, and let Tommy do whatever was in his sweet mind to do. I mean, it sounds like his plane had gone wrong, doesn’t it, and he couldn’t stop it going up? So Mac sets off to rejoin the others, and when he’s halfway there he sees this Hurricane coming down in a dive. I said, that’s when you read the numbers. He looked a bit shamefaced and said the aeroplane was out of control, and he didn’t see the numbers, but when it was sort of level with him, he could see the pilot. Well, he could see the outline of the pilot. He obviously couldn’t tell that it was Tommy, but he said whoever it was had their hand held up in front of their eyes like Tommy had when he was climbing. And then Mac followed him down for a bit, but there wasn’t any chance. And there wasn’t a parachute either. And that was my Tommy gone.”

  Derek put his arm round Olive and cuddled her, the smoke from his cigarette curling up her shoulder and drifting into her hair.

  Jean didn’t know what to say; she sat and waited.

  “Do you remember him well?” Olive eventually asked.

  “Yes,” said Jean, “I remember him well. I was quite young at the time. He … he used to make me All Clear sandwiches.”

  Olive didn’t respond to this. “Did you notice the way he always had the top button of his tunic undone?”

  “No, I don’t think I did.”

  “Did you notice the way he was always looking round—couldn’t keep his head still?”

  “Yes, I remember that.” Michael had commented on it, had used it to prove that Prosser was shifty. “I assumed he had a twitch or something.”

  “Twitch?” said Olive crossly. “No bloody twitch. Listen, love, if you were flying one of those Hurricanes you had to turn your head every three seconds or you were dead.” In the cardiganed nook of Derek’s shoulder, Olive turned her head from side to side, squinting into the sun for a Messerschmitt. “You got into the habit, you see.”

  “I see.”

  “That’s why he always had the top button of his tunic undone. You were allowed that because you had to turn your head so much. It was a privilege. They allowed you that.” Olive continued to turn her head from side to side, stopping only to take a draw from Derek’s cigarette.

  “I see.”

  “No one understood Tommy like I did,” said Olive rather fiercely, and Derek cuddled her in silence.

  On the train home, Jean stared out the window and thought about Sun-Up Prosser’s last flight. It could have been a technic
al fault, of course: he might have got stuck in a climb; he might have been so busy trying to control the aeroplane that he couldn’t answer the R/T or the other pilot’s guns. But she doubted this. It all sounded too close to what she’d once heard him say, forty years earlier. Climbing into the sun, watching it through slightly parted fingers. The air getting thinner; the aeroplane skidding about and climbing more slowly. The patch of frost forming inside the Perspex hood. The gathering cold. The thinning oxygen. The gradual invasion of contentment, then of joy. The slowness; the happy slowness of it all …

  When Jean gave birth to Gregory, when she suckled him, when she despatched him to school, when she stood on the zigzag fire escape outside Towcester and watched his Vampire glide gently down while its engine plumed off in pointless acceleration, she had all the normal wishes for her son. May you do well, may you be happy, may you be healthy, may you be intelligent, may you be loved; may you love me. As he bent patiently over a latticework of aeroplane struts, as he dampened the tissue paper and waited for time to pull it taut, as he filled the room with pear drops, she idly constructed her own images, the accepted ways in which each generation sees its relationship to the next. They stand on our shoulders, she thought, and with the added height they can see farther. They can also, from up there, look back at the path we have taken, and avoid making the mistakes we did. We are handing something on to them—a torch, a relay baton, a burden. As we weaken, they grow strong: the young man carries the ancestor on his back and leads his own child by the hand.

  But she had also seen enough to doubt all this. These images appeared strong, but they were made only of balsa wood and tissue paper. As often as not the parent stands on the child’s shoulders, crushing it into the soft soil. The child sees all too well the parent’s mistakes, but learns only to make quite different mistakes. The parent indeed hands something on to the child: haemophilia, syphilis, hay fever. The ancestor dutifully loaded on the back causes a slipped disc, the child in the hand a wrenched shoulder. And so Jean also wished for her son the negative things, the avoidances. May you avoid misery, poverty, disease. May you be unremarkable. May you do the best you can but not chase impossibilities. May you be safe within yourself. May you not get burnt, even once.