England, England Read online

  Acclaim for JULIAN BARNES’s

  England, England

  “Satire at its best.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “Sly philosophical and social commentary.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “Barnes has written nothing more poignant and enticing.”

  —The Sunday Times (London)

  “[Julian Barnes] has shown himself as master of intellectual fun.… [Barnes has] a marked gift for cultural observation.”

  —Newsday

  “Julian Barnes has produced the first classic dystopia of the 21st century.… In passages as brilliant as they are witty, Barnes satirizes the modern world’s obsession with imitation.”

  —The Christian Science Monitor

  “Moves with swiftness and precision. As the tale unfolds, with all its chicanery and reflectiveness, you begin to realize that beneath its sleek surface the satire is offering something more than irony or outrage.… [England, England] offers a qualified faith in what is genuine.”

  —Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

  “Hilarious.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  JULIAN BARNES

  England, England

  Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of eight novels, a book of stories, and a collection of essays. He has won both the Prix Médicis and the Prix Fémina, and in 1988 was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He lives in London.

  ALSO BY JULIAN BARNES

  Metroland

  Before She Met Me

  Flaubert’s Parrot

  Staring at the Sun

  A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters

  Talking It Over

  The Porcupine

  Letters from London

  Cross Channel

  FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, APRIL 2000

  Copyright © 1998 by Julian Barnes

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1998 and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Rnadom House, Inc., New York, in 1999.

  Vintage is a registered trademark and Vintage International and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:

  Barnes, Julian.

  England, England / Julian Barnes. — 1st American ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-55595-3

  I. Title

  PR6052.A6657E54 1999

  823’.914—dc21 98-46270

  Author photograph © Jillian Edelstein

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v3.1_r1

  To Pat

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part 1: England

  Part 2: England, England

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Part 3: Anglia

  1 : England

  ‘WHAT’S YOUR FIRST MEMORY?’ someone would ask. And she would reply, ‘I don’t remember.’

  Most people assumed it was a joke, though a few suspected her of being clever. But it was what she believed.

  ‘I know just what you mean,’ sympathizers would say, preparing to explain and simplify. ‘There’s always a memory just behind your first memory, and you can’t quite get at it.’

  But no: she didn’t mean that either. Your first memory wasn’t something like your first bra, or your first friend, or your first kiss, or your first fuck, or your first marriage, or your first child, or the death of your first parent, or your first sudden sense of the lancing hopelessness of the human condition – it wasn’t like any of that. It wasn’t a solid, seizable thing, which time, in its plodding, humorous way, might decorate down the years with fanciful detail – a gauzy swirl of mist, a thundercloud, a coronet – but could never expunge. A memory was by definition not a thing, it was … a memory. A memory now of a memory a bit earlier of a memory before that of a memory way back when. So people assertively remembered a face, a knee that bounced them, a springtime meadow; a dog, a granny, a woollen animal whose ear disintegrated after wet chewing; they remembered a pram, the view from a pram, falling out of a pram and striking their head on an upturned flower-pot which their brother had placed to climb up on and view the new arrival (though many years later they would begin to wonder if that brother had not wrenched them out of sleep and dashed their head against the flower-pot in a primal moment of sibling rage). They remembered all this confidently, uncontradictably, but whether it was the report of others, a fond imagining, or the softly calculated attempt to take the listener’s heart between finger and thumb and give it a tweak whose spreading bruise would last until love had struck – whatever its source and its intent, she mistrusted it. Martha Cochrane was to live a long time, and in all her years she was never to come across a first memory which was not in her opinion a lie.

  So she lied too.

  Her first memory, she said, was of sitting on the kitchen floor, which was covered in loosely woven raffia matting, the sort with holes in, holes she could poke a spoon into and make bigger and get smacked for – feeling safe because her mother was singing to herself in the background – she always sang old songs when she cooked, not the ones she liked listening to at other times – and even today when Martha turned on the radio and heard anything like ‘You’re the Top’ or ‘We’ll All Gather at the River’ or ‘Night and Day’ she would suddenly smell nettle soup or frying onions, wasn’t that the strangest thing? – and that was another, ‘Love Is the Strangest Thing,’ which always meant the sudden cut and seep of an orange for her – and there, spread out on the matting, was her Counties of England jigsaw puzzle, and Mummy had decided to help her by doing all the outside and the sea to begin with, which left this outline of the country in front of her, this funny-shaped piece of raffia floor, a bit like a bulgy old lady sitting on a beach with her legs stretched out – the legs being Cornwall, though of course she hadn’t thought that at the time, she didn’t even know the word Cornwall, or what colour the piece was, and you know what children are like with jigsaws, they just pick up any old piece and try to force it into the hole, so she probably picked up Lancashire and made it behave like Cornwall.

  Yes, that was it, her first memory, her first artfully, innocently arranged lie. And there was often someone else who had had the same jigsaw as a child, and a passage of soft competitiveness would ensue, about which piece they would do first – it usually was Cornwall, but sometimes it was Hampshire, because Hampshire had the Isle of Wight attached to it and stuck out into the sea and you could match the hole easily, and after Cornwall or Hampshire it might be East Anglia, because Norfolk and Suffolk sat on top of one another like brother and sister, or clutched one another like husband and wife, lying fatly coupled, or made the two halves of a walnut. Then there was Kent pointing its finger or its nose out at the Continent in warning – careful, foreigners over there; Oxfordshire playing spoons with Buckinghamshire and squashing Berkshire flat; Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire like side-by-side carrots or pine-cones; the smooth, sea-lion curve of Cardigan. They would remember how most of the large, clear counties were round the edge, and when you’d put them in it left an awkward muddle of smaller, odd-shaped counties in the middle, and you could never remember where Staffordshire went. And then they would try to recall the colours of the pieces, which had seemed so important at the time, as important as
the names, but now, so long afterwards, had Cornwall been mauve, and Yorkshire yellow, and Nottinghamshire brown, or was it Norfolk that was yellow – unless it was its sister, Suffolk? And these were the sorts of memories which, even if wrong, were less untrue.

  But this, she thought, might be a true, unprocessed memory: she had progressed from the floor to the kitchen table, and her fingers were swifter with the counties now, neater and more honest – not trying to force Somerset to be Kent – and she would usually work her way round the coastline – Cornwall, Devon, Somerset, Monmouthshire, Glamorgan, Carmarthen, Pembrokeshire (because England included Wales – that was the bulgy old lady’s stomach) – all the way back to Devon, and then fill in the rest, leaving the messy Midlands till last, and she would get to the end and a piece would be missing. Leicestershire, Derbyshire, Nottinghamshire, Warwickshire, Staffordshire – it was usually one of them – whereupon a sense of desolation, failure, and disappointment at the imperfection of the world would come upon her, until Daddy, who always seemed to be hanging around at this moment, would find the missing piece in the unlikeliest place. What was Staffordshire doing in his trouser pocket? How could it have got there? Had she seen it jump? Did she think the cat put it there? And she would smile her Nos and head-shakes at him, because Staffordshire had been found, and her jigsaw, her England, and her heart had been made whole again.

  This was a true memory, but Martha was still suspicious; it was true, but it wasn’t unprocessed. She knew it had happened, because it had happened several times; but in the resulting amalgamation the distinguishing marks of each separate time – which she would now have to make up, like when her father had been out in the rain and gave Staffordshire back to her damp, or when he bent the corner of Leicestershire – had been lost. Memories of childhood were the dreams that stayed with you after you woke. You dreamed all night, or for long, serious sections of the night, yet when you woke all you had was a memory of having been abandoned, or betrayed, caught in a trap, left on a frozen plain; and sometimes not even that, but a fading after-image of the emotion stirred by such events.

  And there was another reason for mistrust. If a memory wasn’t a thing but a memory of a memory of a memory, mirrors set in parallel, then what the brain told you now about what it claimed had happened then would be coloured by what had happened in between. It was like a country remembering its history: the past was never just the past, it was what made the present able to live with itself. The same went for individuals, though the process obviously wasn’t straightforward. Did those whose lives had disappointed them remember an idyll, or something which justified their lives ending in disappointment? Did those who were content with their lives remember previous contentment, or some moment of well-arranged adversity heroically overcome? An element of propaganda, of sales and marketing, always intervened between the inner and the outer person.

  A continuing self-deception as well. Because even if you recognized all this, grasped the impurity and corruption of the memory system, you still, part of you, believed in that innocent, authentic thing – yes, thing – you called a memory. At university Martha had made friends with a Spanish girl, Cristina. The common history of their two countries, or at least the contentious part, lay centuries back; but even so, when Cristina had said, in a moment of friendly teasing, ‘Francis Drake was a pirate,’ she had said No he wasn’t, because she knew he was an English hero and a Sir and an Admiral and therefore a Gentleman. When Cristina, more seriously this time, repeated, ‘He was a pirate,’ Martha knew that this was the comforting if necessary fiction of the defeated. Later, she looked up Drake in a British encyclopaedia, and while the word ‘pirate’ never appeared, the words ‘privateer’ and ‘plunder’ frequently did, and she could quite see that one person’s plundering privateer might be another person’s pirate, but even so Sir Francis Drake remained for her an English hero, untainted by this knowledge.

  When she looked back, then, she saw lucid and significant memories which she mistrusted. What could be clearer and more remembered than that day at the Agricultural Show? A day of frivolous clouds over serious blue. Her parents took her softly by the wrists and swung her high into the sky, and the clumpy grass was a trampoline when she landed. The white marquees with striped porticos, as solidly built as vicarages. A rising hill behind, from which careless, scruffy animals looked down on their pampered, haltered cousins in the show ring below. The smell from the back entrance to the beer tent as the day’s heat rose. Queuing for the portable toilets, and the smell not much different. Cardboard badges of authority dangling from buttons on shirts of Viyella check. Women grooming silky goats, men trundling proudly on veteran tractors, children in tears slipping from ponies while in the background swift figures repaired the shattered fences. St John’s Ambulance men waiting for people to faint or fall over guy-ropes or have heart attacks; waiting for things to go wrong.

  But nothing had gone wrong, not that day, not in her memory of that day. And she had kept the book of lists for many decades, knowing most of its strange poetry by heart. The District Agricultural and Horticultural Society’s Schedule of Prizes. Just a couple of dozen pages in a red paper cover, but to her much more: a picture book, though it contained only words; an almanac; an apothecary’s herbal; a magic kit; a prompt-book of memory.

  Three Carrots, long

  Three Carrots, short

  Three Turnips, any variety

  Five Potatoes, long

  Five Potatoes, round

  Six Broad Beans

  Six Scarlet Runners

  Nine Dwarf Beans

  Six Eschalots, large red

  Six Eschalots, small red

  Six Eschalots, large white

  Six Eschalots, small white

  Collection of Vegetables. Six distinct kinds. Cauliflowers, if included, must be shown on stalks.

  Tray of Vegetables. Tray may be dressed, but only parsley may be used.

  20 ears of Wheat

  20 ears of Barley

  Sward of Re-seeded Pasture in Tomato Box

  Sward of Permanent Pasture in Tomato Box

  Scheme goats must be halter led and there must be a two-yard space maintained at all times between them and non-scheme goats.

  All goats entered shall be female.

  Goats entered as Classes 164 and 165 shall have borne a kid.

  A Kid is defined as birth to 12 months.

  Jar of Marmalade

  Jar of Soft Fruit Jam

  Jar of Lemon Cheese

  Jar of Fruit Jelly

  Jar of Pickled Onions

  Jar of Salad Cream

  Friesian Cow in milk

  Friesian Cow in calf

  Friesian Heifer in milk

  Friesian Heifer Maiden not showing more than 2 broad teeth. Attested cattle must be halter led and there must be a three-yard space maintained at all times between them and non-attested cattle.

  Martha did not understand all the words, and very few of the instructions, but something about the lists – their calm organisation and their completeness – satisfied her.

  Three Dahlias, decorative, over 8” – in three vases

  Three Dahlias, decorative, 6”–8” – in one vase

  Four Dahlias, decorative, 3”–6” – in one vase

  Five Dahlias, miniature ball

  Five Dahlias, Pompom, under 2” diameter

  Four Dahlias, Cactus, 4”–6” – in one vase

  Three Dahlias, Cactus, 6”–8” – in one vase

  Three Dahlias, Cactus, over 8” – in three vases

  There was the whole world of Dahlias accounted for. None missing.

  She was swung up to the sky by her parents’ safe hands. She walked between the two of them on duckboards, under canvas, through hot, grassy air, and she read from her booklet with a creator’s authority. She felt as if the items laid out before them could not truly exist until she had named and categorised them.

  ‘So what do we have here, Miss Mouse?’

  ‘T
wo seven oh. Five Cooking Apples.’

  ‘That looks about right. Five of them. Wonder what sort they are.’

  Martha looked at the booklet again. ‘Any variety.’

  ‘Right-oh. Any Variety Cooking Apples – we must look out for them in the shops.’ He would pretend to be serious, but her mother would laugh and fiddle with Martha’s hair quite unnecessarily.

  They saw sheep clamped between the legs of sweating, big-biceped men and slipped out of their woolly car-coats in a whirr of buzzing clippers; wire cages held anxious rabbits so large and laundered they did not seem real; then there was the Parade of Stock, the Mounted Fancy Dress Competition and the Terrier Racing. Inside hot marquees were lardy cakes, drop scones, eccles cakes and flapjacks; Scotch eggs halved like ammonites; parsnips and carrots a yard long, tapering to the thinness of a candlewick; slick onions with their necks bent over and tied into submission with twine; clusters of five eggs, with a sixth broken into a judging dish beside them; beetroot cut to show rings like trees.

  But it was Mr A. Jones’s beans that glowed in her mind – then, later, and later still – like holy relics. They gave out red cards for first prize, blue for second prize, and white for commended. All the red cards on all the beans belonged to Mr A. Jones. Nine Runner Beans Any Variety, Nine Climbing Beans Round, Nine Dwarf Beans Flat, Nine Dwarf Beans Round, Six Broad Beans White, Six Broad Beans Green. He also won Nine Pods of Peas and Three Carrots Short, but these interested her less. For Mr A. Jones also had a trick with his beans. He laid them out on pieces of black velvet.

  ‘Looks like a jeweller’s window, eh, love?’ her father said. ‘Pair of earrings, anyone?’ He reached towards Mr A. Jones’s Nine Dwarf Beans Round, her mother giggled, and Martha said ‘No,’ quite loudly.

  ‘Oh, all right then, Miss Mouse.’

  He shouldn’t have done that, even if he hadn’t meant it. This wasn’t funny. Mr A. Jones could make a bean look perfect. Its colour, its proportions, its evenness. And nine beans that much more beautiful.