Authors: Julian Barnes
‘Do you think,’ Toni mused, ‘we could call that an é;pat?’
‘Well, they were certainly all dead bourgeois, that’s for sure. Do you think they knew we were fugging around with them, though?’
‘I think they might have done.’
‘Yeah, me too.’ I was always keen to claim as many épats as possible. Toni, on the other hand, tended to be a bit pernickety.
‘But I think it might be presuming a bit much to think that they’ll reflect for very long on what we were trying to teach them about the games ethic.’
‘Isn’t it still an épat even if they don’t hoist it in?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Nor do I.’
We cycled on; now, two in every three lamps were casting their unreal light.
‘What will become of them all?’
‘Poor fuggers. Bank managers, I suppose.’
‘They can’t all become bank managers.’
‘I don’t know about that. There’s nothing to say they can’t.’
‘No; true.’ Toni became quite excited. ‘Hey, what about that? What about if the
whole school
, apart from us, became bank managers. Wouldn’t that be great?’
It would be terrific. It would be perfect.
‘And how do you see us?’ I usually deferred to Toni on matters of the future.
‘I see us,’ he replied, ‘as artists-in-residence at a nudist colony.’
That too would be terrific; perfect.
We cycled back to Eastwick. Ahead lay more discussions; then, the blindfolds, and on with (‘Clear water; Hampton Court maze?; shoulders wanting to swing; chirpiness – bit as if you’ve just had a blood transfusion. Stuttgart CO/Münchinger’) Bach.
13 • Object Relations
Things.
How does adolescence come back most vividly to you? What do you remember first? The quality of your parents; a girl; your first sexual tremor; success or failure at school; some still unconfessed humiliation; happiness; unhappiness; or, perhaps, a trivial action which first revealed to you what you might later become? I remember things.
When I look back, I always seem to be sitting up in bed at the day’s end; too sleepy to read, yet too awake to put off the light and face the tentacular fears of the night.
The walls of my bedroom are ash grey, a colour appropriate to the local
Weltanschauung
. To my left is my bookcase, each paperback (Rimbaud and Baudelaire within reach) lovingly covered in transparent Fablon. My name is written in each one, on the top edge of the inside front cover, so that the Fablon, folded over to a depth of half an inch, covers the decisive capitals of
CHRISTOPHER LLOYD
. This device prevents erasure and, in theory, theft.
Next, my dressing-table. A crocheted mat; two hairbrushes so stuffed with hair that I have abandoned them and taken to a comb; clean socks and white shirt for the morning; a blue plastic knight, made up from a model kit given me by Nigel one Christmas, and left half-painted; finally, a small musical box which I play continually even though I don’t like its dreary Swiss tune – I just play it for the weary, grinding way it behaves when the power begins to run out and the spiked drum strains to flick the metal fingers.
A grey wall, with a curling poster of Monet’s greyest version of Rouen Cathedral. My Dansette record player, with a few experimental discs beside it.
To my right, a wardrobe, lockable but never locked. At the bottom of it is a deliberate pile of papers, holiday hats, deflated beach balls, discarded jeans and secondhand box-files, all heaped up to hide a few precious things (a copy of
Reveille
, a letter or two from Toni) which I hope won’t be discovered. Also in the wardrobe, my two school jackets, my best greys, my second-best greys, my third-best greys, my cricket trousers. When I shut the door, half a dozen metal hangers tinkle to remind me of clothes I don’t have. The whole room is full of things I don’t have.
Next, a chair draped with the day’s dumped clothes. Propped against it is a suitcase on which, every so often, I mentally stick labels. The labels indicate several generations of travel; some are grubby and tattered; all imply
l’adieu suprême des mouchoirs
. I can go; I will go. So far the case is label-less: it is all to come. One day I shall fix the real labels on myself. It is all to come.
Last, my bedside table, containing the only object which has actually come from abroad – the bedside lamp. A fat wine flask wrapped in plastic cane, it was brought back from some Portuguese resort by a roving cousin, and has devolved to me from my sister; it upset her. My watch, which I despise because it doesn’t have a second hand. A Fablon-covered book.
Objects redolent of all I felt and hoped for; yet objects which I myself had only half-willed, only half-planned. Some I chose, some were chosen for me, some I consented to. Is that so strange? What else are you at that age but a creature part willing, part consenting, part being chosen?
PART TWO
Paris (1968)
Moi qui ai connu Rimbaud, je sais
qu’il se foutait pas mal si A
était rouge ou vert. Il le voyait
comme ça, mais c’est tout
.
Verlaine to Pierre Louÿs
‘So you lived in Paris for a while?’
‘Yuh.’
‘When was that?’
I never actually lie, though for a time I used to try and discourage the obvious follow-ups. I would never mention May for a start. Early summer was the nearest I’d admit to.
‘Nineteen …’ (a frown of bad memory; mouth like a fish’s searching on the surface) ‘… must have been sixty-eight.’
Increasingly, though, the year has little effect, and I no longer feel it’s cheating to start blurring my dates. ‘Oh, late Sixties.’ ‘Sixty-seven, eight, round about then.’ For a few years, however, I used to have to dodge out of the way of a variety of replies.
‘Oh, what, when those awful …’ friends of my parents would begin, eyeing me palely and filling my pockets with cobblestones.
‘Did you see anything of …’ was the usual, mid-way response, as if we were running through films seen, or mutual friends.
And then there was a third type of follow-up, the cool one I felt most uneasy with.
‘Ah,’ (a shift in the chair, a tapping of the pipe, or some other settling social gesture)
‘les événements
.’ It wouldn’t have been so bad if it had been put as a question. But it would always be a statement; then there would be a respectful, rallying pause, disturbed only, say, by the creak of an unbroken leather jacket. If I failed to leap into the silence, there
would (with the kindly assumption that I was suffering from shellshock) be a helpful supplementary:
‘I knew a guy out there at the time …’ or
‘Now what I’ve always found unclear …’ or
‘Right on …’
The point is – well I was there, all through May, through the burning of the Bourse, the occupation of the Odéon, the Billancourt lock-in, the rumours of tanks roaring back through the night from Germany. But I didn’t actually see anything. I can’t, to be honest, remember even a smudge of smoke in the sky. Where did they put up all their posters? Not where I was living. Neither can I remember the newspaper headlines of the time; I suppose the papers went on as usual – I might have remembered if they’d stopped. Louis XVI (if you’ll forgive the comparison) went out hunting on the day the Bastille fell, came home and wrote in his diary that evening,
‘Rien
’. I came home and wrote for weeks on end, ‘Annick’. Not just that, of course: her name would be followed by paragraphs of hoarse delight, wry self-congratulation, and feigned moping; but was there any room in that panting, exultant journal for any ‘sharp vignettes of the struggle’, for any lumbering political reflections? I haven’t kept the diary, but I can’t believe there was.
Recently, Toni showed me a letter I’d written him from Paris, which contained a rare comment on the crisis. My explanation of the troubles, it seems, was that the students were too stupid to understand their courses, became mentally frustrated, and because of the lack of sports facilities had taken to fighting the riot police. ‘You may have seen a rather well-structured photograph’, I wrote, ‘of a group of police chasing a student into the river. The student is turning sideways towards the camera. A touch of Lartigue about it. At least he got some exercise.
Mens seina in corpore seino
.’
Toni still occasionally quotes me phrases from that letter when he thinks I’m getting complacent; which is most of the time. Apparently, the student involved was drowned – or at least that’s what some people said – though even if it were true,
I wasn’t to know at the time, was I? Toni, naturally enough, is fairly scathing about my whole Parisian experience.
‘Absolutely fucking typical. Only time you’ve been in the right place at the right time in your whole life, I’d say, and where are you? Holed up in an attic stuffing some chippy. It almost makes me believe in cosmic order, it’s so appropriate. I suppose you were mending your bike during that skirmish of 14–18? Doing your eleven-plus during Suez?’ (Actually, yes, more or less) ‘And what about the Trojan wars?’
‘On the lav.’
1 • Karezza
At twenty-one, I used to say I believed in the deferment of pleasure; I was usually misunderstood. Deferment was the word, not rejection or repression or abandonment or all the other terms it automatically got translated into. I’m less sure now, though I do believe in the balanced, delicate leading-in of the individual to experience. This isn’t prescriptive; just sensible. How many kids of twenty-one today are sentiently burnt out; or worse, find it chic to believe they are? Isn’t a diet of extremity senseless and, finally, comic? Isn’t the whole structure of experience built on contrast?
What I’m leading up to is that when I arrived in Paris, with almost two decades of education behind me, plus an enthralled reading in the classics of passion – Racine, Marivaux, Laclos were trusted guides – I was still a virgin. Now, don’t jump to all those conclusions (puritanism lurking behind stance of worldly knowledge; fear of sex disguised as austerity; sneaky jealousy of today’s kids) because I know them already. The fact that pubescents nowadays are getting stuck in before their testicles are fully descended doesn’t bother me in itself. Not really. Not very often.
‘Maybe you just don’t like sex?’ Toni would whisper at me, after what we called the Common Pursuit had led, in his case, to joining the Great Tradition. ‘Time to Revalue, kid,’ he commanded.
‘I know I like it – that’s why I can refuse it.’ I liked this argument.
‘You can’t mean you know you like it; you mean you think you will like it.’
‘All right.’ If he wanted to put it that way. ‘Anyway, De Rougemont says passion thrives on obstacles.’
‘That doesn’t mean you have to build your own. Do It Yourself artist. Why don’t you want to get in there and root? Root de toot. I mean, Christ, I want to root everyone.’ Toni made a few rolling, nasal pig-noises. ‘I can barely think of a woman I
don’t
want to fuck. Think of all that pussy out there, Chris; all that dripping fur. You’re not exactly a warpie. It’s true you don’t seem to have the tremendous drive that I’ve got’ (Toni, admittedly, did look older, more rabbit-hungry) ‘but I should think most women, given the opportunity, would go down on you like a ton of bricks. I mean, knock out those over seventy, no fifty, and those under fifteen, nuns, religious screw-ups, most newly marrieds but not all, a few million with malnutrition whom you probably wouldn’t want to touch, your mother, your sister, no on second thoughts we may as well leave her in you never know, your gran, plus June Ritchie and anyone I happen to be going around with at the time – and what have we got? Hundreds of millions of women all of whom mightn’t be averse to breaking in the old dick. French, Italians,
Swedes
,’ (he cocked an eyebrow) ‘Americans, Persians …?’ (he put his head on one side) ‘Japanese – the inscrutable yoni?
Malaysians
? Creoles? Eskimos? Burmese?’ (an impatient shrug) ‘Red Indians? Latvians?
Irish
?’ (then, crossly) ‘Zulus?’ He paused, a shopkeeper who has spread out his best stuff and knows that if you only address your mind to the matter, you’ll find something you like.
‘I didn’t realise you wanked over the atlas.’
‘Graduated from the
National Geographic
.’
‘Well, who didn’t?’
‘But you could have by now, couldn’t you?’ (Toni, like a dutiful air-traffic controller, was always monitoring what he called my ‘near misses’) ‘There was that nurse, wasn’t there, who said if you were good, the next time you could have chocolates?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that girl who wasn’t Jewish, wasn’t Catholic and had been to X-films?’
‘Yes.’
‘And that woman when you were on the Christmas post?’
‘I might have lost my bonus.’
‘That’s what it’s all about, kid, losing your bonus. And Rusty, for fuck’s sake, Rusty …’
Rusty was actually Janet, but Toni had given her a pulp sobriquet partly, I think, because of his tendency to Americanise sex; but officially because, he claimed, he was afraid that if I didn’t finally hurl one past her (as he, not I, would have put it), she might rust up.
After leaving school, I’d spent a couple of months knocking around with Rusty. She was the local solicitor’s daughter and fulfilled our SST qualifications. (Though in her case, it was more like TSS. She had big tits and was unhappy. Toni deduced with impregnable logic that she was unhappy because, as soon as her tits became larger than her mother’s, her parents gave her a hard time; so she had Suffered; and if you had Suffered, you couldn’t not have Soul.) Janet and I used to lie around in the sun, which I almost enjoyed (though I suspected I would always be oppidan at heart: my cool soul needed to be indoors, like a stick of rhubarb growing best in an upturned chimney-pot). We went for walks and laughed at golfers; we tried learning to smoke; we thought about the capital-F Future. I explained that I was part of the Anger Generation; she asked me if this meant I wasn’t going to take a job; I said I wasn’t sure – you could never tell which way Anger was going to jump; she said she understood.