Staring at the Sun

by Julian Barnes

  “Anyway, you see, I don’t want to.”

  “Ah. Well, that’s a different argument altogether.”

  Jean looked at Rachel, at her jutting chin and fierce brown eyes. How could anyone look so cross; and not cross with disappointment, but cross with desire? All sorts of phrases surfaced in Jean’s mind—she’s quite a pretty thing; so full of character; I’m really rather fond of her—but they were, she realized, the clichés with which age defuses youth. She felt sorry for Rachel, still young enough for things to turn out right or wrong; the pride or the guilt still lay ahead. And then, beyond that pride or guilt, an age which Jean almost feared to hope for: an age of detachment, a state as much visceral as cerebral. Nowadays, when she heard a story or watched a film, she cared much less whether the ending was happy or unhappy; she just wanted it to turn out properly, correctly, in accordance with its own logic. It was like this with the film of your life. Her ambitions were no longer specifically for happiness or financial security or freedom from disease (though they included all three), but for something more general: the continuing certainty of things. She needed to know that she would carry on being herself.

  She couldn’t explain all this to Rachel, which is why she said, Anyway, you see, I don’t want to. But later, lying awake on a warm night, she wasn’t even sure she had meant this. She thought of Prosser in the dispersal hut, rattling the pennies in his pocket. She thought of men in blue uniforms passing the salt more politely than usual and being quiet in corners.

  She didn’t surprise herself too much when she agreed to sleep with Rachel. The old need praise just as much as the young, she had said; and desire is a form of praise.

  “I’m not so nice to look at anymore,” she said when they reached Rachel’s flat. She thought of her breasts, her upper arms, her stomach. “Can you lend me a nightdress?”

  Rachel laughed and said that she didn’t own one, but fetched something that served. Jean went to the bathroom, cleaned her teeth, washed, climbed into bed and turned out the light. She lay facing away from the middle of the bed. She heard Rachel’s steps, then the weight of a body landing close. Thump. Like Uncle Leslie in the sloping meadow behind the dogleg fourteenth. Jean whispered, “I think you might have to let me off tonight.”

  Rachel fitted herself into the angles of Jean’s back. Spoons, Jean thought from her childhood. She and Michael had been like a spoon and a knife. Perhaps this was the answer.

  “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to,” Rachel said. Jean exhaled in a half murmur. But what if you didn’t want to do anything at all? She lay tensely as Rachel stroked her, making sure she didn’t give any inadvertent signal which might be read as pleasure. After a while Rachel stopped. They went to sleep.

  Twice more they tried, if try was the word: Jean lay turned away on her side, wearing a borrowed nightdress, holding her breath. She wanted to want to—but the actual achievement of wanting seemed inaccessible. When it seemed that Rachel was asleep, Jean relaxed; she was also struck by how well she then slept. She wondered if they could possibly go on like this. It seemed unlikely. But the idea of anything more brought on thoughts of panic, dryness, age.

  “I don’t suppose I have the courage to go to bed with you properly, dear,” she said the next time they met.

  “It’s not brave to go to bed with people. It’s usually the opposite.”

  “It seems very brave to me. Far too brave. You’ll have to let me off.”

  “We haven’t really tried much, you know.”

  “I like the sleeping part,” said Jean, instantly regretting the remark. Rachel was frowning. Why did sex always make people cross? Then a worrying thought came to her.

  “You remember that story you told me … about not enjoying yourself with someone … a man, in bed?”

  “Yes.”

  “Was that Gregory?”

  Rachel laughed. “No, of course not. If it was, I wouldn’t have told you.” Jean felt relieved: at least there wasn’t some terrible sexual curse running through her family, which was inevitably visited upon Rachel. Later, though, she began to fret: if Rachel could manage a difficult lie with her body, she could surely manage an easy one with her tongue.

  Perhaps, despite what Rachel said, it was brave to go to bed with people. Or at least it could be brave. And perhaps she’d run out of her stock of courage. Like Sun-Up Prosser: windy, got the wind up; yellow; burnt twice. Rachel said it had been brave to leave Michael and brave to bring up Gregory on her own. Jean hadn’t seen these actions as brave, merely obvious. Perhaps bravery was a matter of doing the obvious when other people saw it as unobvious. Like Rachel and going to bed. It seemed obvious, and therefore not at all brave, to Rachel; to Jean, unobvious, and it drained her of all courage. People just get used up, Jean thought; their batteries can’t be recharged, and nothing can be done about it. Oh dear.

  Or perhaps it wasn’t really anything to do with courage. Perhaps there should be a different word in peacetime. You shouldn’t be allowed to use the word brave unless you were a fireman or a bomb-disposal officer or something. You just did things, or you didn’t do things, that was all.

  The news that Uncle Leslie was ill came in a shouted telephone call from his landlady, Mrs. Brooks. Since Leslie’s return from America, late enough after the war’s end for almost nobody to notice, he had sustained himself by a variety of undisclosed jobs, a little gambling, and some astute sponging. He always lived in digs, sometimes moving on rather hurriedly, but in general behaving well. As he grew older his system of barter became more highly developed. “You wouldn’t mind changing this plug for me, would you, Mr. Newby?” “You wouldn’t mind letting me share your spot of lunch, would you, Mrs. Ferris?” That was the first conversation Gregory could remember his great-uncle taking part in. Several times in recent years Leslie had taken Gregory to the pub, but on no occasion had Gregory seen money change hands, except when it was his round. Perhaps as closing time approached Leslie turned into one of those tame soaks who trundle round the bar collecting glasses in exchange for an evening’s drinks, and who echo in a vowel-stretching parody the publican’s cry of “Time, gentlemen, please!”

  “Hello, little Jeanie.” It had been years since he had called her that. She was over sixty, but she didn’t mind at all.

  “How are you?”

  “I’m going under, that’s how I am. I’m going under.”

  “Is that what the doctors say?”

  “They don’t say because I don’t ask.” Uncle Leslie looked thin and yellow, his moustache was ragged and his thinning black hair held together by a whirlpool of Brylcreem. “So I’ve got that thing we don’t talk about. I’ve got a dose of if-he-doesn’t-ask-we-won’t-tell-him.”

  Jean sat on his bed and took his cold, brittle hand. “You’ve always been such a brave person,” she said. “I don’t think I’d have set foot outside the country if I hadn’t thought of you doing it first. And you sent me to the Pyramids.”

  “Well, I don’t advise you to follow me where I’m off to now.” Jean was silent. There wasn’t much to say. “Anyway, I was always a bit windy. You probably thought I was quite a dashing fellow, when you were a little girl. I was just as windy then as I am now. Always running away. Always running. I was never brave.”

  “There’s no bravery without fear,” said Jean rather forcefully. She didn’t want Uncle Leslie falling into self-pity. Besides, that was the truth.

  “Maybe not,” said Uncle Leslie. His eyes were closed now; he gave a faint yellow smile. “But I can tell you this. You can have the fear without getting the bravery.”

  Jean didn’t know what to say, until she remembered a little rustic shelter like an overgrown bird-box.

  “Leslie, when we used to go down the Old Green Heaven …”

  “Ah, do you think that’s where old golfers go when they die?” Again, she didn’t know what to say. “No, it’s all right, little Jeanie. Old golfers never die, they only lose their balls.”

  “When
we went down the Old Green Heaven, you used to do your cigarette trick.”

  “Which one was that?”

  “You used to smoke a whole cigarette without any of the ash dropping off. You used to bend your head back slowly until all the ash was balanced on top of itself.”

  “Did I do that?” Leslie smiled. At least he had some knowledge, some secrets left. Mostly, the only thing people wanted to find out from those in his position was what it was like to die. “And you want to know the trick?”

  “Yes, please.”

  “The trick is, you put a needle down the middle of the fag. All that business with bending your head back is just to make it look more real. Same reason you don’t do it in a breeze, or outdoors if you can help it, and you get everyone to hold their breath. Make them feel they could wreck it if they don’t behave. Always helps, that. You could probably smoke it pointing downwards in a gale and the ash wouldn’t drop off. Not that I’ve tried. But it’s hardly the best fag you’ll smoke. You keep thinking it tastes of metal.”

  “Leslie, you are a clever old thing.”

  “Well, you’ve got to keep something up your sleeve, haven’t you?”

  On Jean’s second visit Leslie looked weaker, and he asked to see Gregory. Since the age of five—when Leslie officially began to acknowledge his existence—his great-nephew had been the recipient of a riddling series of Christmas presents. When six he had been sent a fretwork pipe rack; at seven, a set of stereoscopic viewing cards without the viewer; at ten, the Lysander kit with the missing undercarriage; at eleven, a bicycle pump; at twelve, three linen handkerchiefs with the initial H. Only one letter out, he had thought. When he was fourteen he was sent some French currency which was twenty years out of date and which got him treated as an incompetent fraudster when he tried to change it at the bank; and when he was twenty-one, he received a signed photo of Uncle Leslie, taken many years before, possibly in America. After some early disappointment, Gregory had begun to be secretly proud of his presents; to him they didn’t indicate casualness on the part of the giver, but the opposite: a determination to bestow on his great-nephew something entirely characteristic of Uncle Leslie. In this they never failed. Gregory even went for several years in quiet fear that the stereoscopic viewer might turn up, or that his mother might give him one. That would have ruined everything.

  Mrs. Brooks, with whom Leslie had lodged for almost five years, was a thin, vague woman who for no accountable reason always shouted. It was nothing to do with deafness, as Uncle Leslie had once proved by secretly turning on her radio very softly and watching her reaction; simply a habit which had remained uncorrected for so long that nobody knew its origin, or much cared.

  “HE’S VERY POORLY,” she bellowed into the road as she opened the door to Gregory. “I CAN’T SEE HIM GETTING ANY BETTER,” she roared to the ground and first floors of her establishment as she wrestled Gregory’s coat from him. Fortunately, Uncle Leslie’s room was on the top floor: a large attic whose tendency to overheat in summer and whose proximity to the gurgling water tanks gave him more than enough leverage when it came to the occasional negotiations about the putative rent.

  With shooing motions Gregory had kept Mrs. Brooks down on the ground floor. Now he knocked quietly on the attic door and went in. He’d never visited Leslie in his digs before, and on entering immediately felt a strange nostalgia: of course, he thought, this is where all my Christmas presents came from. The place resembled a low-turnover charity shop: there was a rack of clothes manifestly not intended for the same person; three Hoovers, with spares for a fourth; a cut-glass flower vase with a yellowish scum mark halfway up; a scatter of paperbacks with the top right-hand corner cut off and prices in shillings and pence; a very early Electrolux shaver, nacreous pink in its box, and so old-fashioned in design that it looked like something else, perhaps a sexual appliance of unpopular function; a stack of unmatching dinner plates; several suitcases whose combined capacity far exceeded the contents of the room; and a standard lamp which was switched on even at eleven o’clock on a spring morning.

  “Dear Boy,” murmured Leslie, somehow capitalizing the “Boy” and making Gregory feel it was a term awarded only to the most grown-up people. “Dear Boy.”

  Gregory ignored the plaited-rope linen box with the stoved-in top which appeared to serve as a chair and sat on his uncle’s bed. He didn’t know what to say on these occasions—he assumed it must be one of “these occasions”; but it didn’t matter, since Leslie, even when silent for minutes at a time, was always somehow in charge. Mrs. Brooks was on his mind.

  “Did she tell you how I made her let me die here?”

  Gregory knew better than to come-come his uncle. “No.”

  “Told her I’d blab to the Income Tax if she didn’t let me.”

  “Leslie, you old villain.” Gregory felt it was the kindest compliment he could pay; Leslie took it as intended, and laid a finger along the side of his nose. He seemed too weak to be able to tap it.

  “Silly old thing even had to pretend she was my long-lost sister-in-law or something. Only way the hospital would release me. ‘That’s right,’ I said to her, ‘you claim the body.’ They didn’t like that at the hospital. Have a pill, meboy.” He gestured towards the line of plastic cylinders by his bedside. Gregory shook his head. “Can’t say I blame you, lad. Don’t care for them myself.”

  They sat in silence for a while, Leslie with his eyes closed. His hair was as black as it had ever been—perhaps he had some cut-price potion in his sponge bag, Gregory thought—but his eyebrows were pure white and his moustache half-and-half. His skin had yellowed and fallen away from the bones of his face; yet even in repose there was something about his expression that could charm. He looked like the sort of fairground barker who invites you in to see the Bearded Lady. You go in, and you know the lady’s beard is simply glued on, and he knows that you know, and you know that he knows that you know, but it is somehow impossible to hold this against him. “Don’t miss the Bearded Lady,” you find yourself announcing as you stumble out past the hesitating crowd. “Finest Bearded Lady south of Hadrian’s Wall.”

  Occasionally, Leslie would say something, his eyes trying to open as his mouth did. He didn’t mention his death again, and Gregory assumed the matter was now closed. He talked a little of Jean, at one point confiding to Gregory, “She used to be a real screamer, your mum,” before closing his eyes again.

  Gregory wondered what he meant. Perhaps “screamer” was someone who was “fast,” as they used to call it. But that hardly seemed right for his mother. It must be some piece of prewar slang. He’d look it up if he remembered.

  After a while he wanted to tell Leslie how fond he had always been of him, and how much he had enjoyed those wartime years Jean disapproved of. But this seemed tactless, somehow, almost cruel. Instead, he murmured, “Do you remember those stereoscopic cards you gave me? I was thinking about them only the other day.”

  “The what?”

  “Those cards. Sort of colour transparencies, only two of them side by side. Then you put them in a viewer and held it up to the light and saw pictures of African game parks or the Grand Canyon. Only … only you never gave me the viewer.” Try as he might, Gregory couldn’t keep a note of complaint out of his voice, even though he felt no such emotion inside.

  “Huh,” said Leslie, his eyes firmly shut. “Huh.” Was he reflecting on his own meanness or his nephew’s ingratitude? Slowly, the eyes opened and directed themselves past Gregory’s shoulder. “If you look over there you’ll probably find the other bit.”

  “No. No, Uncle, really. I … I don’t really want the other bit.”

  One eye stayed open briefly, surveyed him, judged him too daft for words and closed itself. A couple of minutes later, Leslie said, “Take the shaver instead.”

  “What?”

  “I said take the shaver instead.” Gregory looked across to the top of the chest of drawers. The Electrolux gleamed pinkly at him.

  “Thanks v
ery much.” It was, he realized, the perfect present.

  “Because if you don’t she’ll only take it to do her legs with.”

  Gregory chuckled, and a faint smile tweaked his lips. He gazed at his uncle’s fairground face. Finally, without opening his eyes, Leslie pronounced the last words Gregory heard him say.

  “This isn’t about the Common Market, you know.”

  Indeed not. Gregory rose, placed his hand flat against his uncle’s shoulder, gave him the softest shake that was possible, collected the shaver from the chest of drawers, hid it in a pocket in case Mrs. Brooks thought he had stolen it (which is precisely what she did think when she discovered it was missing) and left.

  After Leslie’s death, Gregory helped Mrs. Brooks clean out the attic.

  “BETTER SEND IT ALL TO OXFAM,” she shouted, just to alert the second and third floors of her establishment. When they moved the bed, Gregory trod on something that crunched sharply. It was a small bag of fish and chips, thrown there months before and long desiccated of their oil. Gregory picked it up and looked around for the wastepaper basket. There wasn’t one. All this junk, he thought, and nowhere to throw it.

  At his office, while he bargained with those who sought money in exchange for their demise, Gregory thought back over Uncle Leslie’s life and death. He had been not just touched, but impressed by Leslie’s behaviour on that last visit. He had mentioned his impending death as soon as Gregory arrived, had wrapped it up in a joke, and then talked about other things. He hadn’t made it into a farewell, though that was certainly what it was; he hadn’t given way to self-pity or encouraged tears in his visitor. All of which made Leslie’s death less upsetting than it might have been. Gregory supposed that Leslie had been, for want of a better word, brave.

  It seemed to make a point, this death. Leslie, who had run away from the war, who had fiddled and scrounged, who might have been called a spiv even by Jean if he hadn’t been a member of the family, had died with courage, even grace. Or was that too neat, too much of a morality? After all, they weren’t certain Leslie had actually run away from the war—that was only what Jean’s father said; Leslie himself referred to the time as “when I was Stateside.” They didn’t know either that his bartering system of life wasn’t forced on him by penury; and Gregory didn’t really know how Leslie had died, how the end had been. Perhaps the pills took away all his pain; in which case, could you be said to be brave? Well, yes, in that you had to face the knowledge of your own death. But perhaps they had pills to take away that knowledge, to purge and sweeten it. Gregory expected that they did.