Authors: Julian Barnes
Janet/Rusty was the first girl with whom I exchanged kisses of respectable duration; the first, that is, with whom I realised that you were only allowed to breathe through your nose. Initially, it was like being at the dentist’s: you spent all the time hoping that your one operative air-passage wouldn’t clog up before you got out of the chair. Gradually, though, I got my confidence. After that, it felt more like snorkelling.
I snorkelled a lot with Janet. She was almost the love of part of my life.
‘She was almost the love of part of my life.’
‘You said.’
‘Does it still sound OK?’
‘Yeah, it’s OK – wry, if thin-blooded; but I suppose that’s about right. So why didn’t you ever shoot one past Rusty?’
‘Why are your metaphors always taken from sport? Scoring, shooting, hurling, hitting a home run. Why do you make it sound so competitive?’
‘Because it is, it is. And if you don’t look out, you’ll get relegated. Rusty, I mean, Rusty …’ He did a lost-for-lust face and waved his hands around like a black-and-white minstrel.
‘Did you fancy her then?’
‘Fancy her? If it hadn’t been for you, I’d …’
‘… ’ve scored five goals, three boundaries, two knock-outs, eight home runs and broken the marathon record while you were about it.’
‘Pole vault.’
‘Javelin.’
‘Shot putt.’ He pretended to juggle two monster breasts in his weighed-down palms.
‘Hop, step and thump.’
‘Why not, Chris?’
‘Just because you can, it doesn’t mean you have to.’
‘If you can, and you want to, then you ought to.’
‘If you do just because you ought to, then you don’t really want to.’
‘If you can, and you want to, and you don’t, then you’re queer.’
‘It was the man in Rusty I loved.’
Rusty/Janet and I spent quite some time not undressing each other. Partly it was lack of opportunity, although – as I would argue grandly to myself – the ingenious and the desperate always find some sodden undergrowth, some disc-slipping back seat, or nervous shop doorway flicker-lit by passing cars. But then, I suppose we weren’t desperate, and our ingenuity
was limited to making our parents believe that we didn’t really mind whether we were left alone or not; that way, we were left alone more.
Sometimes, though, we’d go in for a playful, partial, half-amused investigation of each other. We’d expose a small area of the other’s body – a crescent of breast, a band of belly, a shoulder, a thigh. On the few occasions we undressed totally, there was a sense of let-down afterwards. But it wasn’t, I came to realise later, the sense of frustration at not making love; it was a vaguer feeling, the sort of dissatisfaction you get when you’ve achieved something rather than the sort you get when you’ve failed. I wondered whether the pleasure of striving didn’t exceed the pleasure of achievement, of victory, of orgasm. Maybe the ultimate in sexual fulfilment would prove to be
karezza
? It is, I used to tell Toni from the sanctuary of virginity, only our competitive, games-playing society which makes us head noisily for the white tape of orgasm.
2 • Demandez Nuts
Still, I don’t know how important all that stuff is.
Paris. 1968. Annick. A delightful Breton name, isn’t it? The -ick, by the way, is pronounced with a long i, to rhyme with pique, which isn’t appropriate, at least not at first.
I’d gone to Paris to do some research for part of a thesis I’d undertaken so that I could get a grant and go to Paris. A completely normal sense of priorities among post-graduates. At the time, friends of mine were loafing their way – constructively or otherwise – through most of the capital cities of Europe, after developing furious interests in matters which could only be thoroughly investigated where the relevant papers happened to be. In my case, it was ‘The Importance and Influence of British Styles of Acting in the Paris Theatre 1789–1850’. You always need to shove at least one big date (1789, 1848, 1914) into your title, because it looks more efficient, and flatters the general belief that everything changes with the eruption of war. Actually, as I rapidly discovered, things do change: thus, in the years immediately after 1789, the British Styles of Acting had very little Importance and Influence in the Paris Theatre, for the simple reason that no British actor in his right mind would have risked his skin over there while the Revolution was on. I suppose I should have guessed this. But to tell the truth, the only thing I knew about British acting in France when I invented the subject was that Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson in 1827. She, of course, as it turned out, was Irish; but then I was only applying for money for six
months in Paris, and the financial authorities weren’t an over-sophisticated bunch.
‘
Can-can, frou-frou, vin blanc
, French knickers,’ was Toni’s comment when I told him I was off to Paris. He was going to Morocco for his de-Anglification, and was already racking up spoolfuls of tortured hisses and grunts on his Grundig.
‘Kif. Hashish. Lawrence of Arabia. Dates,’ was my reply, though I felt it lacked a certain edge.
But it wasn’t really like that. I’d already been to Paris many times before 1968, and didn’t go with any of the naïve expectations Toni was greedy to attribute to me. I’d already done the Paree side of it in my late teens: green Olympia Press paperbacks, ocular loitering from boulevard cafés, thrusting leather G-strings and pouches in a Montparnasse simulation-dive. I’d done the city-as-history bit while a student, I-spying the famous in Père Lachaise, and coming back exultant over an unexpected find: the catacombs at Denfer-Rochereau, where post-Revolutionary history and personal glooming could be sweetly combined as you wandered among vaults of transplanted skeletons, sorted and stacked by bone rather than body: neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls suddenly rose up before the groping light of your candle. I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés round the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.
I chose Paris because it was a familiar place where I could, if I wanted to, live alone. I knew the city; I knew the language; I wouldn’t be harassed by the food or the climate. It was too large to have a menacingly hospitable colony of English émigrés. There would be little to stop me concentrating on myself.
I was lent a flat up in Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7-
bis
Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a friend-of-a-friend. It was an airy, slightly derelict studio-bedroom with a creaky French floor and a fruit machine in the corner which worked off a supply of old francs kept on a shelf. In the kitchen was a rack of home-made calvados which I was allowed
to drink provided I replaced each bottle with a substitute one of whisky (I lost money on the deal, but gained local colour).
I installed my few possessions, greased up to the concierge, Mme Huet, in her den of house-plants and diarrhoeic cats and back numbers of
France Dimanche
(she tipped me off about each
nouvelle intervention chirurgicale à Windsor
), registered at the Bibliothèque Nationale (which wasn’t too conveniently close) and began to fancy myself, at long last, as an autonomous being. School, home, university, friends – all in their different ways offered a consensus of values, ambitions, approved styles of failure. You accepted bits, you reacted against bits, you reacted against reacting against bits, and the constant swaying motion of this process gave you the illusion of advance. Here, at last, though, I could really work it out. I’d take a breather and really work it all out.
Well, perhaps not straight away. Just to come here, sit down, and start methodically working out your life: wouldn’t that be succumbing to exactly the sort of channelled, Civil Service thinking which I had heroically scorned? So for the first few weeks I loafed, without much trouble or guilt. I called in on the Howard Hawks season which is always playing somewhere in Paris. I sat around knowingly in some of the less celebrated squares and gardens. I rediscovered that smirk which goes with riding first class on a second-class Métro ticket. I looked up a few reports of Revolutionary performances of Addison’s
Cato
(the play was a favourite of Marat’s). I leafed through accounts of Being Artistic in Paris. I lounged about at Shakespeare & Company. I read Hemingway’s posthumous Paris memoirs, rumoured to have been written by his wife (‘Out of the question,’ Toni had assured me, ‘they’re so badly written they must be authentic’).
I did some rather delicate drawings according to the Haphazard Principle. The theory was that everything is intrinsically interesting, that art shouldn’t just concentrate on high-spots (I know
some
people have taken that line before). So you carry your sketch-book everywhere, and stop not according to the official, received interestingness of what you see, but according
to some random factor which you decide on that day – like being jostled in the street, or seeing two bicycles abreast, or smelling coffee. Then you freeze, stay pointing in the direction you were heading, and examine the first thing your eye falls on. In a way, it’s a development of the old theory Toni and I had called the Constructive Loaf.
I also dabbled in a little writing. Dabbled, that is, with sober enthusiasm. Memory tests, for example, like describing the horse-butcher I patronised once a week (always – I confess to the parody – every Friday) but whom I’d never really looked at until I tried to describe him and realised how much I was missing. Another exercise was to sit at an open window and simply write down what you saw; next day you checked on the selectivity of your vision. Then a few stylistic exercises, inspired by Queneau, intended as knuckle-looseners. And lots of letters, some of them (to my parents) describing what I wasn’t doing, and the longer, more cutely phrased ones to Toni describing what I was.
It was a very pleasant existence. Naturally, Toni (who had lasted three weeks in Africa and was now starting work as a WEA lecturer) wrote to rebuke me for its economic unreality. I argued in reply that happiness depended necessarily on the unreality of one plane of your life: that in one area (emotional, financial, professional) you should be living beyond your resources. Hadn’t Toni and I laid it down at school?
Horses for courses
Husband your forces
Too few resources
Ends in divorces.
And then, after a month in Paris, I met Annick. Shouldn’t this have added further unreality, further living beyond resources, further happiness? But did it? What was it, that old school adage? Two plusses make a minus?
I met her, I always smile to recall, as a result of one of my rare visits to the Bibliothèque Nationale. I’d put in almost a whole hour there, skimming through some early Victor Hugo
letters to see if he had anything to say about English acting while he was working on
Cromwell
(he did and he didn’t, if you really want to know – just the odd biassed phrase or two); exhausted by the sight of mass scholarship in action, I’d knocked off early for a quick
vin blanc cassis
at a bar in the Rue de Richelieu which usually competed with the library for my presence. This wasn’t inappropriate: the atmosphere here was strongly reminiscent of the Bib Nat itself. The same soporific, businesslike attention to what was in front of you; the quiet shaking of newspapers instead of book pages; the sagely nodding heads; the professional sleepers. Only the espresso machine, snorting like a steam engine, insisted on where you were.
My eye drifted round the comforting visual clichés of the place: the framed law against public drunkenness; the stainless steel counter; the food list offering an austere choice between
sandwich
and
croque
; the wall of libelling mirrors; the murdered-tree hat rack hidden behind the door; the dusty plastic plants up on a high shelf. This time, though, my eye suddenly alighted on
‘
Mountolive
!’
There it lay, on the plastic wicker seat of a chair at the next table. The
Livre de Poche
edition, with a bookmark far enough into it to indicate at least doggedness, and probably enthusiasm.
She turned as I spoke. I suddenly thought, ‘Christ I don’t normally do this,’ and my eyes went out of focus as if dissociating themselves from my voice. I’ll have to say something.
‘You’re reading
Mountolive
?’ I managed to croak in the local
patois
, and the strain of this modest cerebration persuaded my eyes back into line. She was …
‘As you see.’
(Quick, quick, think of something.)
‘Have you read the others?’ She had sort of dark hair and …
‘I have read the first two. Naturally, I haven’t read
Clea
yet.’ Of course not, pretty dumb question, her skin was rather sallow, but unblemished, of course that’s often the case, it’s only fair skins which get …
‘Oh, naturally. Are you enjoying it?’ Why did I keep asking these fucking obvious questions? Of course she was, or she wouldn’t have read two and a half books. Why didn’t I show I’d read it, tell her that I adored the
Quartet
, that I’d read everything Durrell wrote which I could get my hands on, that I even knew someone who wrote Pursewarden poems.
‘Yes, very much, though I don’t understand why this one is written more simply and more conventionally than the other two.’ Her clothes were grey and black, though that didn’t make her look dowdy at all, no she was smart, colours didn’t really register so much as the overall …
‘I agree. I mean, I also don’t know. Would you like another coffee my name’s Christopher Lloyd.’ What’ll she say? Is she wearing an engagement ring? Does it matter if she says no? Does
Merci
mean Yes thank you or No thank you, shit I can’t remember.
‘Yes.’
Ah. A breather at last. A minute or two at the bar. No, don’t hurry, Gaspard, or whatever your name is, serve everybody else first. Hey, there must be lots of people out in the street who need serving before me. No, actually, come to think of it, better serve me now – she might think I’m one of those people who are so polite they never actually get a drink in theatre intervals. But what shall I have, better not have another of the same, it’s only 5.30. Can’t change to sophisticated spirits or she’ll think me a potential
clochard
, what about a beer, don’t really want one, oh well, hope it doesn’t seem too grovelling,