Authors: Julian Barnes
After lunch, Toni and I went round the garden. He ignored the ‘escapist’ flowers, and cross-questioned me on the soil, the varieties of vegetable, the likely yield. The year he had spent on a co-operative farming venture in Wales seemed to have left him with some empirical knowledge, but little understanding of horticultural principle.
‘So this is it, eh?’ he asked me with an undermining smile as we stared creatively at a row of swede. ‘So this is it?’
I thought I’d duck that one until its thrust became clearer, so I answered with another question.
‘You’re much more … political than you used to be, aren’t you?’
‘I’m more left-wing, if that’s what you mean. Man is never not political.’
‘Come on. We were totally passive about it as adolescents. Totally scornful and uninterested, don’t you remember? It was art that counted wasn’t it?
We
are the movers and shakers, don’t you remember that
we
emphasis?’
‘I remember that we were totally Tory.’
‘I don’t think that’s right at all. We hated the fat cats, didn’t we? And the
bon bourgeois
? “
Le Belge est voleur
…” ’ I began, but couldn’t remember the rest of it.
‘We had apathy and distaste, I agree, but they’re fundamental planks of the Tory platform, aren’t they? Christ, don’t you remember Cuba? What were we doing – cheering on Kennedy as if he were Robert Ryan in
The Battle of the Bulge
,’ (wasn’t that right?) ‘And what did we think about Profumo? Mainly envy: that was the result of our analysis of the socio-political crisis.’
‘But
poetry
makes nothing happen,’ I said with a reasonable-man cadence.
‘Too fucking right. So if you want to make things happen, don’t write poetry. I don’t know why I do; change from wanking, I suppose. Picked up a book of poems in Dillon’s the other day, didn’t get past the preface – it said “This book was written to change the world”. Too fucking ironic for words.’
‘Why get so heated?’
‘Because the
reason
poetry makes nothing happen is because those same old fat cats won’t let it.’
‘Who won’t let it? Which fat cats? Come on, be precise.’
‘Imprecise fucking fat cats. Movable fat cats. Because poetry’s packaged as a late-night slot, a quite minority taste unquote, like water-skiing or goat-fucking or something. Who reads it? Who’s been told it counts?’
‘There’s a lot of poetry in the papers.’
‘Ha – the more, the less. That’s just fucking infill. They ring up some tame cunt and say, “Oh Jonathan, can we have a four-by-two this week?” or “I’m afraid our ballet critic’s sprained his wrist doing capital letters, could we have something long with short lines? Rhymes, please, you know our readers like rhymes.” ’
‘I don’t thing that’s very fair.’ (Frankly, I thought it was paranoid, the crabby disenchantment of an unsuccessful writer.)
‘ ’Course it’s not
fair.’
(Toni pronounced ‘fair’ with the sarcasm he normally reserved for ‘Tory’) ‘But it’s the way it works. Ask for poetry in a shop and you get jolly ballads or dead cunts’ stuff. What’s it to do with now? Same with novels: it’s all smugglers and asshole rabbits and
history.’
‘And we all know what history is,’ I cued nostalgically (better get him off this, I thought).
‘The lays of the victors. Quite. But why doesn’t anyone take books seriously any more? I mean, apart from academics, and what the fuck good are they – they’re only reviewers delivering their copy a hundred years late. Why does everyone sneer when a writer makes a political statement? Why does anything left-wing have to be trendy before it’s read, and by the time it’s trendy it’s already a force for conservatism? And why the
fuck’
(he seemed to be drawing breath at long last) ‘why the
fuck
don’t people buy my fucking books?’
‘Too dirty?’ I suggested. He laughed, began to calm down, and started awarding marks to the garden again.
‘And why haven’t you done anything, you budding fat cat?’
I didn’t tell him about my projected history of transport around London.
‘Oh, me, gee, shucks, I’m into life.’
He laughed again, though quite sympathetically, or so it seemed to me.
(But isn’t it true that I’m – not ‘into life’, I wouldn’t put it like that – I’m more serious? At school I would have called myself serious, whereas I was merely intense. In Paris I did
call myself serious – imagined, indeed, that I was heading for some grand synthesis of life and art – but I was probably only attaching an inordinate, legitimating importance to unreflecting pleasure. Nowadays I’m serious about different things; and I don’t fear my seriousness will collapse beneath me.)
‘You mean you don’t live in a rented room any more,’ was Toni’s comment when I paraphrased this to him. We were now at the bottom of the garden; looking through the trellis of bean-rods you could just make out the dormer window at the top of the house: one day, it would be Amy’s room, or perhaps Amy’s brother’s.
‘Well, up to a point. It’s satisfying knowing your roof doesn’t leak.’
‘Caveman,’ murmured Toni in one of our school accents.
‘And in having your family huddled round you under your protection.’
‘Chauvinist.’
‘And actually, you know, in having a child.’ (I wouldn’t normally have mentioned this, because Toni’s ‘wife’ had recently had what Toni called a Hoover-job; yet I felt under unfair attack.)
‘But I thought it was a mistake.’
‘She wasn’t exactly planned, no; but I don’t see that that makes any difference.’
‘Well, I just think it’s an odd formula: get the London Rubber Company to put pinpricks in the end of every Durex, and we get a new maturity in our population: serious-minded, caring, mortgaged up to their balls. They might even start buying my fucking books.’
We walked on, and stopped by the dwarf peas.
‘By the way,’ he said, working his elbow up and down in a licentious gesture from the past, ‘had a bit on the side yet?’
My first instinct was to tell him to mind his own sodding business. My second was to ignore the question. My third (why does it take so long?) was to say simply,
‘No.’
‘That’s interesting.’
‘Why is No interesting?’ (What did he have to be superior about?) ‘You mean how amazing that I’ve been faithful for six years? That you wouldn’t have lasted a week?’
‘No, what’s interesting is the pause before the No. Is it – No but I wouldn’t half mind a bit? No but I nearly got some last week? No because Marion shags me out too much?’
‘Actually, it was: Shall I smash his face in – No, on second thoughts I’ll tell him the truth. I take it you and Kally have some modern arrangement?’
‘Modern, old, don’t mind what you call it – anything except your soiled old Judaeo-Christian rubbish topped up with Victorian wankers’ sex-hatred.’ He stared at me belligerently.
‘But I’m not Jewish, I don’t go to church, I don’t wank – I merely love my wife.’
‘That’s what they all say. And you can still go on saying it when you’ve had the other. I take it you do still believe that when you die, you die?’
‘Of course.’
‘Well, that’s a relief. Then how the fuck can you bear to think that until you die you’ll never fuck another woman? How can you bear it? I’d just go mad. I mean, I’m sure Marion’s terrific and all that and puts her heels in your ears and drains you as dry as a loofah, but even so …’
I wanted to end the conversation, but the image he had produced of Marion was so suddenly, so oddly hurtful (keep your filthy thoughts off my wife); besides, who did he think he was to lecture me?
‘Well, I’m not going into the details you’d doubtless enjoy, but our sex life’ (I paused, already feeling almost disloyal) ‘has, well quite enough variety …’
Toni worked his elbow up and down again.
‘You don’t mean …’
I had to head this one off quickly: ‘Look, just because you live on the Metropolitan Line, it doesn’t mean you haven’t heard of …’ I felt angry, then suddenly prim, and couldn’t finish my sentence. I felt assailed by the images I had started up of my own accord.
‘Careful where you put your tongue,’ said Toni delightedly. ‘Careless talk costs wives.’
‘And as for not … sleeping with anyone else, I don’t see it how you see it. I don’t spend my whole time in bed with Marion thinking, “I hope I don’t die before I’ve had it away with somebody else”. And anyway, once you’re used to … caviare you don’t get an urge for … boiled cod.’
‘There are more fish in the sea than that. Fish, fish, fish.’ Toni didn’t go on, waited smiling, inviting me to continue. I was irritated, as much at my awkward choice of metaphor as anything.
‘And anyway, I don’t believe in this new orthodoxy. It used to be, don’t screw around because you’ll be unhappy and catch VD and give it to your wife and have mad children, like in Strindberg or Ibsen or whoever it was. Now it’s screw around otherwise you’ll become a bore and won’t meet new people and will eventually become impotent with everyone except your wife.’
‘Which isn’t true?’
‘Of course it isn’t true; it’s just fashionable prejudice.’
‘Then why does it upset you? Why get so agitated when you defend what you believe in?’
‘Because people like you keep nagging people like me and writing books about it. Do you remember, when we were kids, someone came up with the theory of the Adulterous Prop? I’m not saying, in some cases, it isn’t a valid idea. It’s just that nowadays what you get is a bloody great set of scaffolding.’
Toni paused; I could sense the counter-attack coming.
‘So you’re not a faithful husband because of, say, God’s command?’
‘Of course not.’
‘Perhaps because of a categorical imperative: Screw not, lest thy wife be screwn?’
‘No, I’m not possessive in that way.’
‘Maybe it’s not a question of principle with you at all?’
I felt apprehensive, as if I were being guided towards a sheep-dip and didn’t know what was going to be in it. Acid, no doubt, knowing Toni. He went on,
‘Have you ever discussed it with Marion?’
‘No.’
‘Why not? I thought it was the first thing couples discussed.’
‘Well, to be quite honest, I have thought of mentioning it once or twice, but I don’t see how you can bring it up without making the other person think that there’s something behind it all’
‘Or rather someone.’
‘If you like.’
‘So you don’t know whether she’d mind or not?’
‘I’m sure she’d mind. Just as I’d mind the other way round.’
‘But she hasn’t asked you either?’
‘No, I said not.’
‘So it’s just …’
‘… a feeling. But a strong one. I know it; I feel it.’
Toni sighed, with unnecessary breathiness; here comes the sheep-dip, I thought.
‘What is it,’ (trying to redirect him) ‘aren’t I interested enough in adultery for you?’
‘No, I was just thinking how things change. Do you remember, when we were at school, when life had a capital letter and it was all Out There somehow, we used to think that the way to live our lives was to discover or deduce certain principles from which individual decisions could be worked out? Seemed obvious to everyone but wankers at the time, didn’t it? Remember reading all those late Tolstoy pamphlets called things like
The Way We Ought To Live
? I was just wondering really if you would have despised yourself then if you’d known you were going to end up making decisions based on hunches which you could easily verify, but couldn’t be bothered to? I mean, I don’t think I find it particularly surprising; I just find it depressing.’
There was a long silence during which we didn’t look at each other. I had the feeling that this time
esprit d’escalier
was going to take even longer to come than normal. Toni eventually continued:
‘I mean, perhaps I’m just as bad. I suppose I make lots of
decisions on grounds of selfishness which I call pragmatism. I suppose in a way that’s just as bad as you.’
It was as if, having drowned me, he had stood around waiting for the body to be washed up, and then offered it some half-hearted artificial respiration.
We walked back to the house, and I told him a lot about plants on the way.
3 • Stiff Petticoat
The irony was that while I was being dressed down by Toni I could have said more; a little more, anyway. But maybe there’s a pleasure in knowing that you’re being wrongly assessed.
Can you confess to virtue? I don’t know, but I’ll give it a try. It’s a shady enough concept nowadays, after all. Perhaps virtue sounds too strong a word, though, implies something too positive. Or perhaps not. Who am I to shrug off a compliment? If you can commit a crime by failing to pull a drowning man out of a pond, then why can’t you be called virtuous for resisting temptation?
It began with a chance encounter on the 5.45 from Baker Street. I was waiting for it to pull out when a briefcase raked my ribs. I shifted sideways to allow room for the sort of slack-thighed fatty that the line caters for, when I heard,
‘Lloyd. It is Lloyd, isn’t it?’ I turned.
‘Penny.’ I knew he was Tim; he knew I was Chris; but even during the season when, as quail-boned twelve-year-olds, we’d played left and right centre together in a house rugger team, we’d never ventured beyond surnames. Later, he’d gone into the Maths sixth and become a prefect: membership of two despised classes had made him no longer acceptable company, merely a person to be nodded at in corridors while Toni and I loudly discussed the dynamic ambiguity of Hopkins.
He still looked chunky, curly-haired and prefectorial; his commuter’s rig hardly changed him at all. I knew he’d gone up to Cambridge on a Shell scholarship: £700 a year in exchange
for three years of his post-graduate life (usual bit of boss-class strong-arming, Toni and I had thought). As the train bored its way to Finchley Road, he filled me in on the rest: met his geography-teaching wife at – of all unpleasant ideas – a pyjama party; stayed with Shell for five years, then went to Unilever; three kids, two cars; struggling to pay for private education – the usual tale of banal prosperity.