Authors: Julian Barnes
‘Well, you can take one to read in the car; but you’ll have to leave it in the car. It’s rude to go visiting with a book.’
‘Isn’t it rude to go visiting when you don’t really want to go visiting?’
‘Christopher, go and wash.’
‘Can I take a book to the bathroom?’
And so on. I could prolong these conversations indefinitely without exhausting my mother’s patience; her only indication of disapproval was to call me by my name. She knew I would be going. I did too.
As soon as the washing-up was over, we climbed into our chunky Morris Oxford, black with plum upholstery. Mary would stare vacuously out of the window and let her hair be blown over her face without brushing it away. Nigel bent over a mag. I used to hum and whistle, always starting off with a Guy Béart song I’d heard on long wave, whose first line was
‘Cerceuil à roulettes, tombeau à moteur’
. This was partly to make myself uncheerful, and partly a protest against the Front Seat’s refusal to use the Motorola. It had come with the car and was, in my view, the chief selling point of this non-foreign, non-streamlined, non-red, non-sports car. There was even a sticker in the back window, which had resisted various applications of soapy water, advertising the Motorola: it read
I’VE BEEN EXPOSED TO RADIO ACTIVITY
. We weren’t allowed to use it on the road, because, the Front Seat maintained, it would be distracting to the driver (and we weren’t allowed to use it in the garage because that ran down the battery).
Twenty minutes of safe driving brought us to Uncle Arthur’s bungalow near Chesham. He was a humorous old fugger – cunning, stingy, and usually lying. He lied in a way I
always found engaging: not for profit, or even for effect, but simply because it gave him a thrill. Toni and I had once done a pilot study of lying, and after a thorough examination of everyone we knew had plotted a Mendacity Curve on a piece of graph paper. It looked like the horizontal cross-section of a pair of tits, with the nipples at ages sixteen and sixty. Arthur and I were probably peaking at just about the same time.
‘Hullo all,’ he shouted as we turned into the drive. He was white-haired, stooped more than he needed to because it gained him unearned sympathy, and dressed with an aggressive scruffiness designed to make you feel sorry for his bachelor life. My theory was that he’d only remained unmarried because there was no one rich enough to keep him who was also stupid enough not to see through him. ‘Did you make good time?’
‘Not too bad, Arthur,’ replied my father, winding up his window. ‘Bit of a hold-up at Four Roads, but I suppose you’ve got to expect that.’
‘Yes, bloody Sunday motorists. Oops, excuse my French.’ Arthur had just pretended to spot me getting out of the car. ‘And how are you, lad? Brought some reading I see.’ It was a small pocket edition of Flaubert’s
Dictionnaire des Idées Reçues
.
‘Yes, Uncle, I knew you wouldn’t mind.’ (With a half-glance at my mother)
‘Of course not, ’course not. Need a bit of help, first, though.’
Uh-huh.
Melodramatically, Arthur straightened up his back with his thickened fingers, then kneaded away at the cable-stitches of his cardigan as if they were strings of seized-up muscles.
‘Been having a bit of trouble with a stump out back. Come and have a look. Why don’t the rest of you go in?’ (Nigel was always spared chores like this because of an obscure chest complaint; Mary on the grounds of being a girl; my parents on the grounds of being parents.)
Still, I had to admire the old sod. If his back was playing up, it must have been because some chair-cushions had turned nasty on it. He knew better than to go digging up stumps so soon after Sunday lunch. Half an hour with the show page of
the
Sunday Express
was about all the exercise he’d have taken. But it was all part of an elaborate revenge Arthur had been taking on me for years. During my age of innocence, he’d met us one Sunday with some tale about shagging himself out in the garden. While he was boring on to my father about brassica, I’d whipped into the lounge and given his chair a quiet feel. Hot as goose-shit, just as I’d thought. When the others came in I’d casually remarked,
‘Uncle, you can’t have been digging the garden like you said – your chair’s still warm.’
He’d scanned me with an unforgiving glance, then rushed off with an energy untypical of one who’d just been tangling with cabbage stumps. ‘Ferdinand,’ we’d heard him shouting. ‘Ferdinand.
FERDINAND
!!’ From the hall, a friendly pad of paws, some slobbery mouth-noises, a solid crump as brogue hit labrador. ‘And never let me catch you in my chair again.’
Ever afterwards I would find that Arthur had stored up some small but unpleasant task for me, like turning an inaccessible lug to let the sump-oil out of his car (‘
Do
mind your clothes, lad’), or clearing patches of nettles (‘Sorry about the gloves, lad, they seem to have rather a lot of holes in them’), or nipping down to catch the post (‘You’ll have to run there in order to catch it-tell you what, I’ll time you.’ This was a mistake: I got my own back by walking there, missing the post, and running back). This time it was an enormous fugging tree-stump. Arthur had grazed a shallow trench round it, laid bare a few thin, unimportant rootlets, and deliberately piled some loose earth over a huge root as thick as a thigh.
‘Shouldn’t give you much trouble, lad. Not unless there’s a tap down deep, of course.’
‘There’s that big one you’ve covered up as well,’ I said. When we were alone together we came close to owning up. I liked him.
‘Covered up, whaddya mean, son? That? Is there a root under there? My, my. You’d never think a stump like that would need so many roots, would you? Still, I’m sure an intellectual young chappie like yourself will be able to puzzle
it out. By the way, the head does tend to fly off the pick every now and then. See you for tea. My, it is getting chilly.’ And he wandered off.
There were various incompetence ploys open to me. There was throwing-the-earth-all-over-the-place- (like on to the lettuce cloches) -in-a-fit-of-enthusiasm. There was breaking-the-tools; though this led to trouble with my father. The best one I thought of – though had to abandon as I couldn’t find a bow-saw – was cutting the stump off at ground level and covering the whole thing up with earth (‘Oh, sorry, Uncle, you didn’t say you wanted me to dig the whole area up – I thought you just wanted to avoid tripping over it in the dark’).
Finally, as a compromise, I decided on delaying tactics. I dug in a wide circle of radius four feet or so, all round the stump, occasionally cutting off the odd spindly, unimportant root, but never remotely threatening the solidity of the thing. I worked parodically, with a maniac zest, ignoring four o’clock and finally drawing my uncle out into the garden again.
‘Don’t catch cold,’ I shouted as he approached, ‘it’s chilly out here if you’re not working.’
‘Just come to see if you’ve finished. Christ Albloodymighty, what d’you think you’re doing, you berk?’ I had by this time sunk a trench a foot wide and nearly three spits deep all round the stump.
‘Sapping it, Uncle,’ I explained in a professional tone. ‘After what you said about the tap-root, I thought I’d better dig wide and deep to start with. I’ve got those out so far,’ I said proudly, pointing to a tiny pile of twig-like roots.
‘Bloody Ruskin,’ my uncle shouted at me, ‘bloody little intellectual wanker. Give you a pig’s arse you wouldn’t know what to do with it, would you, son?’
‘Is tea ready, Uncle?’ I asked politely.
After tea, which I used to spend watching hopefully for Arthur’s over-dunked ginger-nut to cascade down his cardigan, I got down to some quiet erectile browsing in the garage. In those days, you didn’t just dream about sex almost all the time,
you also got hard at the slightest provocation. Travelling to school, I’d often have to pull my satchel over my thighs and frenziedly conjugate something to myself in an attempt to get the tumour down by Baker Street. Small-ads for ex-WRAC bloomers, pseudo-histories of Roman circuses, even the
Demoiselles d’ Avignon
for Christ’s sake: they all worked, all had me digging in my trouser pocket to make readjustments.
The attraction of Arthur’s garage was his neatly strung bundles of the
Daily Express
. Arthur Saved Things. I expect it started during the war and was justified by his usual dog-leg logic. He probably thought tying up your newspapers was a slightly less tiring form of digging for victory. Still, I didn’t complain. While the grown-ups got down to discussing mortgages and planting-out and tappets, while Mary and Nigel were ‘allowed’ to do the washing-up, I lolled like a pasha in Arthur’s collapsing garage armchair with three dozen copies of the
Express
. ‘This America’ was the juiciest column in my connoisseur’s opinion, with at least one sex story a day; next came the film reviews, the gossip column (posh adulteries got me going), the occasional Ian Fleming serialisation, and cases of rape, incest, exposure and indecent behaviour. I lapped up this version of the life to come with the sheets tented over my knees. You couldn’t get up to tricks on these occasions; but in any case the scene was cosy rather than orgasmic. It also gave me lots of material to swap with Gould, whose father always let him read the
News of the World
in the hope that this would let him out of telling his son the facts of life.
‘Getting on all right, are we? Sitting comfortably?’
The old fugger had deliberately sneaked in quietly. Still, there’s nothing like a surprise for making you lose your hard, and I wasn’t troubled on that score.
‘Sorry to interrupt, lad, but I thought you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand getting some stuff down from the loft. It’s rather difficult spotting all the nails in the floor, and I know your eyesight’s better than mine.’
8 • Sex, Austerity,
War, Austerity
One of the things that would change, when you were Out There Living, would be the sort of notebooks you kept. You wouldn’t be writing down what you didn’t like doing, or what you’d wished you’d done but hadn’t, or what you planned to do in the future; instead, you’d be writing down what you actually did. And since you would only do what you wanted to do, your Deeds Book would read like your Fantasy Book did now, only with a heart-stopping change of tense.
‘You know,’ I remember saying to Toni one evening, after some (‘pulse down, tolerance and benevolence raised, sense of civic place, cerebral cleansing’) Vivaldi, ‘it’s really not a bad time to be,
comment le dire
, young.’
‘Nnnnaa?’
‘Well, no war. No National Service. More women around than men. No secret police. Getting away with books like
Lady C
. Not bad.’
‘You’ve never had it, Osgood.’ (Toni liked to invent misprints)
‘No, really. I think it’ll be great once we get out.’
‘I think you’re probably right. Do you see they’re calling them the Sexy Sixties already?’
‘Sexy, saucy Sixties.’ You almost got hard at the sound.
‘I suppose it all happens in cycles.’
‘What?’
‘Well, sex for a start. They had a lot of it in the Twenties as well. It probably all goes in cycles, like: Twenties, Thirties,
Forties, Fifties – Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity; Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties - Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity?’
Toni cocked an eyebrow. Put like that, it didn’t sound too big a deal.
‘Which gives us,’ I interpreted, ‘eight years of sauciness, then a thirty-year wait, with a chance of being killed in the middle. Terrific’
‘Still,’ said Toni, determined not to be downcast, ‘what could we do in eight years?’
‘Who
could we do in eight years?’
‘Just think, though, it could be worse. If you were born in 1915, by the time you were up to it, there’d be Austerity; after that you might get killed; and by the time you got any, you’d be forty-five.’
‘You’d have to get married, wouldn’t you?’
‘There were Army brothels.’
‘What if you were in the Navy?’
It did seem as if our parents’ generation had been very unlucky.
‘Well, we can’t help the way their cookie crumbled.’
‘Do you think we ought to be nicer to them?’
But it didn’t really work out like that. As my Complaints Book proved, every year was full of the same landlocked desires, the same gangrenous resentments, the same modes of inactivity. They say that adolescence is a dynamic period, the mind and body thrusting forward to new discoveries all the time. I don’t remember it like that. It all seemed remarkably static. Each year new curricula were fed us, which closely resembled the old curricula; each year a few more people sirred us; each year we were allowed to stay up a bit later on Saturday evenings. But none of the structures changed; power and irresponsibility resided where they always had; the levels of love, awe and resentment remained the same.
‘Eight years, then.’
Somehow, it didn’t seem very long.
9 • Big D
There were a few private things which I didn’t confide to Toni. Actually, only one: the thing about dying. We always laughed about it, except on the rare occasions when we knew the person involved. Lucas, for instance, wing-forward in the Thirds, was found one morning by his mother, gassed. But even then, we were more interested in the rumours than in the fact of his death. A girl friend? The family way? Unable to face parents?
There must, I suppose, have been some causal connection between the arrival in my head of the fear of Big D, and the departure of God; but if so, it was a loose exchange, with no formal process of reasoning present. God, who had turned up in my life a decade earlier without proof or argument, got the boot for a number of reasons, none of which, I suspect, will seem wholly sufficient: the boringness of Sundays, the creeps who took it all seriously at school, Baudelaire and Rimbaud, the pleasure of blasphemy (dangerous, this one), hymn-singing and organ music and the language of prayer, inability any longer to think of wanking as a sin, and – as a clincher – an unwillingness to believe that dead relatives were watching what I was doing.