Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  In later years she wondered if these wan ambitions had communicated themselves to Gregory. If the child in the uterus can sense and be damaged by parental arguments, how much more likely that the born child can absorb silent hopes—hopes which hang in the air as heavy as the smell of pear drops. Was it perhaps Jean’s doing that Gregory became a wary, unrebellious adolescent, and later a withdrawn young man? He was polite and presentable; no one objected to his roundish, pinkish face, to the schoolmasterly look his horn-rimmed glasses gave him; yet occasionally Jean caught herself thinking, You could be anyone else. You could. You could be someone who wasn’t my son at all. But this, she realized, was roughly what she had hoped for him in the first place. May you be unremarkable. May you not chase impossibilities.

  Her more spoken hopes for Gregory went like this: Don’t settle your life too soon. Don’t do something at twenty which will tie you down for the rest of your life. Don’t do what I did. Travel. Enjoy yourself. Find out who and what you are. Explore.

  Gregory understood his mother’s urgings, but felt, as children do, that they were really back-dated wishes for the parent rather than pertinent hopes for the child. True, he didn’t want to tie himself down; but he didn’t much want to travel. True, he wanted to find out who he was, whatever that meant; but he wanted to do it without exploring much. Enjoy himself? Yes, he wanted to enjoy himself. Or rather, he wanted to want to enjoy himself. The rest of the world, it seemed to Gregory, had a much securer hold on pleasure than he did. They saw what it was, did what was required to have it, and had it. How could they know in advance where pleasure lay? Presumably, they examined other people, noted what they enjoyed, did the same, and had enjoyment themselves. To Gregory things did not seem so simple. When he examined groups of people intent on pleasure—pub drinkers, sports fans, seaside bathers—he felt crisp envy, but also furtive embarrassment. Perhaps some dislocation had taken place inside him. Pleasure, he was aware, could be obtained only if you believed in pleasure. The pilot at the end of the runway believes in flight. It’s not just a question of knowledge, of understanding aerodynamics; it’s also a question of belief. Gregory would sit shuddering on the tarmac; the tower would give him the off; but halfway down the runway he always jammed on the brakes. He didn’t believe this kite could fly.

  He had girlfriends, but he found, when he was with them, that he never felt quite what he was expected to feel: the inaccessibility of group pleasure, he realized, could even extend to gatherings of two. Sex didn’t make him feel lonely; but it didn’t, on the other hand, make him feel particularly accompanied. As for male camaraderie, there often seemed something false about it. Groups of men got together because they feared complications. They wanted to make things simpler for themselves; they wanted certainty; they wanted definite rules. Look at monasteries. Look at pubs.

  Gregory didn’t travel, nor did he marry. For most of his life he lived near Jean, which she at first tried to discourage but later accepted as a pale compliment. Gregory tried various jobs in his first years of adulthood, but concluded that one was much the same as another. All jobs were boring, but you had to have one, because the point of a job was to make you value the time when you were away from it. When he told people this, they thought he was being cynical, but he wasn’t. It just seemed obvious. Life depended on contrasts, and continued to do so until you ran into the ultimate contrast.

  Gregory worked in an insurance office. He liked the job because people asked him little about it. They would observe that they were sure it was interesting work, and he would nod, and they would ask if they could take out a policy against its raining on their holidays, and he would say yes they could, and they would laugh and say fancy that, then seem to run out of interest. This suited Gregory.

  It also suited him to be dealing with life insurance. When he took it up he had not yet come to the conclusion that life was absurd—he was still weighing this up—but he had certainly decided that your job ought to be absurd. The concept of “useful work,” which politicians dealt in, made no sense to Gregory. It seemed to him that work was useful only to the extent that it was useless, that it mocked itself. Painting the Forth Bridge sounded an excellent job, because no sooner had you finished than you had to start again. Life insurance could not aspire to such a perfection of irony, but it had its aptness. Gregory particularly enjoyed telling people how much they got if they died. He relished the greed and calculation on their faces: all this money they would get in exchange for such a simple thing as being dead. Once he was explaining a policy to a man in his mid-twenties—such and such payable per month, this much on death, this much on maturation of the policy—when he was interrupted.

  “So if I sign this today, and I die tomorrow, then I get £25,000?”

  At first Gregory was professionally suspicious of the man’s enthusiasm. He explained about paying the initial premium, about the policy’s invalidity in case of suicide or concealment of serious illness …

  “Yes, yes, yes,” said the man impatiently. “But if I’d paid up, and if, quite by accident”—he stressed this enthusiastically—“I went under a bus tomorrow, I’d get £25,000?”

  “Yes.” Gregory didn’t like to point out that it was the man’s widow or parent or whoever that would actually get the money. It seemed almost in bad taste to do so.

  But this was why he liked life insurance. Of course there was much euphemism involved, much disguise of a policy as a pension; but when it came down to it, what people were trying to do was get the best deal they could out of being dead. People—the sort of people he dealt with—had been educated in thrift; they had been taught to shop around; and they applied their normal commercial senses to the largest matters as well. Even those who admitted that they themselves would not actually get the money could still be entranced by the transaction. Death may come and steal me away, but oh boy, what a daft move it is on his part, because it leaves the wife rolling in money. If only Death had realized that, he wouldn’t have been so greedy.

  Life insurance. Even the phrase was a glowing oxymoron. Life. You couldn’t insure it, ensure it, assure it; but people thought they could. They sat across the desk from Gregory and weighed up the advantages of their own extinction. Sometimes he thought he didn’t understand people at all. They were on such shoulder-rubbing terms with everything: they were greasily familiar with pleasure, they hobnobbed and bargained with Death. They didn’t seem at all surprised to be alive in the first place; once here, they made the best of it; and when departing, they struck the best deal they could. How strange. How admirable, he supposed, but how strange.

  Other people’s lives, deaths and pleasures: they seemed increasingly mysterious to Gregory. He peered out at them through his horn-rimmed spectacles and wondered why they did the things they did. Perhaps they did such things—ordinary things—because they didn’t bother too much with the why or the how; perhaps Gregory was hobbled by thought. His mother, for instance: look at the way she had suddenly started travelling all over the world. If you asked her why, she’d smile and say something about ticking off the Seven Wonders. But that wasn’t why. And yet why didn’t seem to bother her.

  Gregory had never wanted to travel: perhaps having been carted round England at an early age had something to do with it. He made the occasional trip, never more than a hundred miles or so, to see what life was like away from where he lived. It seemed very much the same. Travel made you tired, it made you fretful, it flattered you. People said that travel broadened the mind. Gregory didn’t believe this. What it did was give the illusion of broadening the mind. For Gregory, what broadened the mind was staying at home.

  When he thought of travel, he also remembered Cadman the Aviator. In Shrewsbury, at the church of St. Mary’s, Gregory had come across a commemorative tablet. The full circumstances of Cadman’s flight were not explained, but it appeared that in 1739 the modern Icarus had built himself a pair of wings, climbed to the top of the church and jumped off. He died, of course. The pilot error of pri
de; but also, as with Icarus, a technical fault:

  ’Twas not for want of skill;

  Or Courage, to perform the task, he fell:

  No, no—a faulty cord, being drawn too tight,

  Hurry’d his soul on high to take her flight,

  Which bid the body here beneath, good night.

  Occasionally, when he saw Jean off at some airport, Gregory would think of Cadman. One of the first modern aeroplane crashes. Fatalities 100 percent—the usual ratio. Cadman didn’t lack courage (the plaque was right), just brains. Gregory imagined trying to work out the Aviator’s chances of survival. No, he definitely wouldn’t have been allowed to sell him a life insurance policy.

  But there was something else about Cadman. Apart from the manner of death, Gregory remembered the epitaph’s poetic argument. The Aviator was seeking to fly and failed; but while his body fell and was crushed, his soul rose and flew instead. It was, no doubt, a moral lesson about ambition and human conceit: if God had intended us to fly, he would have given us wings. But did not the story also imply that God rewarded the brave by giving them eternal life? If so—if Heaven was gained by courage—then Gregory didn’t rate his chances.

  He recalled a scene from his childhood. Launching a model aeroplane from … not a church tower, but a flat roof or something. He’d obviously failed to attach the engine properly to the fuselage, because the jet had torn itself loose. The aeroplane had fallen down, like Cadman’s body, while the engine had screamed off up the garden like Cadman’s soul on its way to Heaven.

  Was this how people—the people who smiled shyly across his desk when he mentioned thousands of pounds—thought of death? Gregory imagined a more public version of his own back-garden experiment: the space launch. The huge, lumbering rocket, like the body, and the tiny capsule on top of it, like the soul. The body packed with enough fuel to enable the soul to outsoar the lapping gravity of the earth. If you looked at the fat carrot on the launch pad, you might think the rocket the important part, but it wasn’t. The rocket was disposable, like Cadman’s body; it was merely there to launch the soul.

  Gregory puzzled with these images for a while, before remembering the end of his Vampire’s flight. Jean had found its engine in the ginger beech hedge at the bottom of the garden. Argument? Perhaps the soul does outsoar the body, but only for a certain time, a certain distance. The soul might be superior to the body without being as different from it as people imagined. The soul might be made of a more durable material—aluminium as against balsa wood, say—but one which would eventually prove just as susceptible to time and space and gravity as did poor Cadman’s body, or his own gold-painted Vampire.

  Rachel had always seemed the least probable of Gregory’s girlfriends. He was passive by nature, and left little trace of himself on the world. Jean sometimes thought that if you covered his fingertips with aeroplane glue, you could peel away a set of prints with scarcely a whorl. Faint in personality, he normally went for even fainter, more passive girls: girls with transparent skin and a defeated manner. Rachel was small and fierce, with swivelling brown eyes and short, tightly curled blond hair of the sort Jean imagined you might get on some rare brand of mountain sheep. Rachel not only knew her own mind, she knew other people’s as well, especially Gregory’s. Jean had heard about the attraction of opposites, but still did not give the relationship long.

  The first time Gregory brought Rachel home there was an argument about lavatory seats. This, at any rate, was how Jean remembered the occasion; though Rachel, who had debated as if the Battle of Britain might turn on the skirmish, later claimed not to remember the discussion. It was one of those rows which came from nowhere—the normal source of rows, according to Jean. After living with Michael, she felt she had had enough of them for a lifetime. But nowadays women seemed to be starting more than they used to. And Rachel worked in one of those neighbourhood law centres; weren’t they meant to help keep the peace?

  “Well, what about lavatory seats?” this girl suddenly shouted at Gregory, her brown eyes opening wider, her hair seeming to bristle. Jean could have been mistaken, but didn’t think the matter had come up before. “Who do you think they’re designed for?”

  “Oh, people,” replied Gregory with a pedantic and, as his mother thought, rather charming half-smile.

  “Men,” Rachel had explained, slowing the vowel with condescending patience. “Meeeeen.”

  “I didn’t know you had any … trouble,” said Gregory, sensing perhaps that an entirely pacific response would cause more irritation. “I mean, has someone had to pull you out?”

  “When I sit there,” this surprising creature announced, “I think, this was made for men by other men. What do you think?” She turned to Jean.

  “I don’t honestly think about it, I’m afraid.” Her tone was vague rather than prim.

  “Well, there you are,” commented Gregory with an unwise complacency.

  “There you are, there you aren’t,” shouted Rachel, preferring vigour of argument to immediate logic. “Steps,” she said. “Stepladders as well. Getting off trains. Pedals on a car. The Stock Exchange.”

  Gregory laughed. “You can’t expect …”

  “Why not? Why not? Why shouldn’t you learn? Why is it always us? What about changing a wheel? Why are the nuts screwed on so bloody hard that a woman can’t bloody shift them?”

  “Because if they weren’t your bloody wheels would bloody fall off.”

  But Rachel was undeterred. “Headrests,” she continued. “Judges. Printers. Taxi drivers. Language.”

  Jean found herself chuckling.

  “What are you laughing at? It’s worse for you.”

  “Why is it worse for me?”

  “Because you grew up not knowing it.”

  “I don’t think you know me quite well enough to say that.” Jean liked Rachel’s unselfconsciousness, and her confidence. “No, I wasn’t laughing at you, dear. I was thinking about the Stock Exchange.”

  “What about it?”

  “Well, when I was a child I remember being warned against the Stock Exchange. It was put on a level with gambling and swindling and going on strike.”

  “You don’t take things seriously,” said Rachel crossly. “You ought to take things seriously.”

  “Well,” said Jean, trying to take things seriously, “perhaps it’s a good idea for women to … to adapt. Perhaps it makes their minds more flexible. Perhaps we ought to be sorry for men. The way they can’t adapt.”

  “That’s a man’s argument.”

  “Is it? Isn’t it just an argument?”

  “No, it’s a man’s argument. It’s one of those they handed to us because they knew it wouldn’t work. Like giving us a set of spanners that don’t fit the nuts.”

  “Perhaps that’s why you can’t change a wheel,” said Gregory, smiling to himself.

  “Fuck off, Gregory.”

  Yes, thought Jean. I don’t give this more than a few weeks. On the other hand, I do rather like her.

  They visited Jean several more times, and on each occasion Gregory seemed a little less there; the presence of this forceful girl rendered him almost translucent. Rachel increasingly addressed her remarks to Jean. One afternoon when Gregory had made some unappreciated joke about lavatory seats and disappeared, Rachel said quietly, “Come to a film tomorrow.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “And … don’t tell Gregory.”

  “All right.”

  How strange, Jean thought the next morning, to be going out with her own son’s girlfriend. Well, “going out” was probably the wrong phrase for the cinema and a Chinese meal. But even so, she felt excited and fussed about her clothes until she began to embarrass herself. “I’ll pick you up at seven,” Rachel had said, quite naturally; and the words had echoed strangely for Jean. That was what the young men in Austin Sevens, the courtiers with motorbike and sidecar, were supposed to have said. The suitors she had never had, forty years ago. Now the words were finally uttered by a
girl, someone less than half her age.

  The film, which Rachel had chosen, was harsh, Germanic and political; even the moments of tenderness in it were swiftly revealed to be illusory or manipulative. Jean disliked it strongly, but also found it completely interesting. This sort of response was something she increasingly noticed. Previously—a word which covered all her life—she had been interested in what she liked, and not interested in what she disliked; more or less, anyway. She had assumed everyone was like this. But a new layer of responsiveness seemed to have grown; now she was sometimes bored by what she approved of and could sympathize with what she disapproved of. She wasn’t entirely sure how beneficial this development was; but the fact that it was taking place was undeniable, and surprising.

  Rachel had paid for Jean’s cinema ticket and also let her know she would be paying for dinner.

  “But I’ve got some money.” Jean began to dig in her handbag while the waiter had still to take their order. She pulled out some five-pound notes crumpled into balls. This was how she carried money, as it reduced the vague shame attached to producing it. Screw the notes and they could be used, or discussed, without too much embarrassment.

  Rachel leaned across the table, folded Jean’s hands round the money and pushed it back into the bag. Among the fluff and makeup at the bottom, a dull glint read: JEAN SERJEANT XXX.

  “You’re not out with a man now,” said Rachel.

  Jean smiled. Of course she wasn’t. And yet, in a curious way, she was. Or, more exactly, she was behaving as if she were. The care she’d taken with her clothes, the way she hadn’t quite said what she thought about the film as they left the cinema; her air of subordination to Rachel when they got to the restaurant. Perhaps it was just age’s deference to youth; perhaps not. “But you’ve made me put my money away,” she said. “That’s what men do.”