Cross Channel Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR Julian Barnes’s

  CROSS CHANNEL

  “Barnes has in abundance style and intelligence.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “There appears to be nothing within the range of English prose that Julian Barnes cannot do…. Cross Channel [is] Barnes’s smart and funny collection of stories.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “These are learned stories, each written in the style of its age or its characters. Some carry echoes of Somerset Maugham or Guy de Maupassant. Some are pure originals.”

  —Washington Post

  “Finely balanced stories…. Artful narratives linked together by the shadows and crosscurrents between England and France…. Barnes has exposed both biases and fallen prey to neither.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Barnes keeps us pleasurably off-balance. We read these stories as we might ride a horse that is a little more than we can manage; we become riders who surprise ourselves.”

  —Newsday

  “The opening of the English Channel tunnel marks the end of the old relationship between the English and the French. Barnes’s creative synthesis in this collection catches that moment hauntingly, while providing very fine reading pleasure.”

  —Washington Times

  Julian Barnes

  CROSS CHANNEL

  Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford, and now lives in London. He is the author of seven novels—including Flaubert’s Parrot, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, and, most recently, The Porcupine—and a book of essays, Letters from London.

  BOOKS BY JULIAN BARNES

  Metroland

  Before She Met Me

  Flaubert’s Parrot

  Staring at the Sun

  A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters

  Talking It Over

  The Porcupine

  Letters from London 1990-1995

  Cross Channel

  TO PAT

  CONTENTS

  INTERFERENCE

  JUNCTION

  EXPERIMENT

  MELON

  EVERMORE

  GNOSSIENNE

  DRAGONS

  BRAMBILLA

  HERMITAGE

  TUNNEL

  INTERFERENCE

  HE LONGED FOR DEATH, and he longed for his gramophone records to arrive. The rest of life’s business was complete. His work was done; in years to come it would either be forgotten or praised, depending upon whether mankind became more, or less, stupid. His business with Adeline was done, too: most of what she offered him now was foolishness and sentimentality. Women, he had concluded, were at base conventional: even the free-spirited were eventually brought down. Hence that repellent scene the other week. As if one could want to be manacled at this stage, when all that was left was a final, lonely soaring.

  He looked around his room. The EMG stood in the corner, a monstrous varnished lily. The wireless had been placed on the washstand, from which the jug and bowl had been removed: he no longer rose to rinse his wasted body. A low basketwork chair, in which Adeline would sit for far too long, imagining that if she enthused enough about the pettinesses of life he might discover a belated appetite for them. A wicker table, on which sat his spectacles, his medicines, Nietzsche, and the latest Edgar Wallace. A writer with the profligacy of some minor Italian composer. ‘The lunch-time Wallace has arrived,’ Adeline would announce, tirelessly repeating the joke he had told her in the first place. The Customs House at Calais appeared to have no difficulty allowing the lunch-time Wallace through. But not his ‘Four English Seasons’. They wanted proof that the records were not being imported for commercial purposes. Absurd! He would have sent Adeline to Calais had she not been needed here.

  His window opened to the north. He thought of the village nowadays solely in terms of nuisance. The butcher lady with her motor. The farms that pumped their feed every hour of the day. The baker with his motor. The American house with its infernal new bathroom. He briefly thought his way beyond the village, across the Marne, up to Compiègne, Amiens, Calais, London. He had not returned for three decades — perhaps it was almost four — and his bones would not do so on his behalf. He had given instructions. Adeline would obey.

  He wondered what Boult was like. ‘Your young champion’, as Adeline always characterised him. Forgetting the intentional irony when he had first bestowed this soubriquet on the conductor. You must expect nothing from those who denigrate you, and less from those who support you. This had always been his motto. He had sent Boult his instructions, too. Whether the fellow would understand the first principles of Kinetic Impressionism remained to be seen. Those damn gentlemen of the Customs House were perhaps listening to the results even now. He had written to Calais explaining the situation. He had telegraphed the recording company asking if a new set could not be dispatched contraband. He had telegraphed Boult, asking him to use his influence so that he might hear his suite before he died. Adeline had not liked his wording of that message; but then Adeline did not like much nowadays.

  She had become a vexing woman. When they had first been companions, in Berlin, then in Montparnasse, she had believed in his work, and believed in his principles of life. Later she had become possessive, jealous, critical. As if the abandoning of her own career had made her more expert in his. She had developed a little repertoire of nods and pouts which countermanded her actual words. When he had described the plan and purpose of the ‘Four English Seasons’ to her, she had responded, as she all too regularly did, ‘I am sure, Leonard, it will be very fine’, but her neck was tight as she said it, and she peered at her darning with unnecessary force. Why not say what you think, woman? She was becoming secretive and devious. For instance, he pretty much suspected that she had taken to her knees these last years. Punaise de sacristie, he had challenged. She hadn’t liked that. She had liked it less when he had guessed another of her little games. ‘I will see no priest,’ he had told her. ‘Or, rather, if I so much as smell one I shall attack him with the fire-tongs.’ She hadn’t liked that, oh no. ‘We are both old people now, Leonard,’ she had mumbled.

  ‘Agreed. And if I fail to attack him with the fire-tongs, consider me senile.’

  He banged on the boards and the maid, whatever was her name, came up at a trot. ‘Numéro six,’ he said. She knew not to reply, but nodded, wound the EMG, put on the first movement of the Viola Sonata, and watched the needle’s stationary progress until it was time, with fleet and practised wrists, to flip the record over. She was good, this one: just a brief halt at a level crossing, then the music resumed. He was pleased. Tertis knew his business. Yes, he thought, as she lifted the needle, they cannot gainsay that. ‘Merci,’ he murmured, dismissing the girl.

  When Adeline returned, she looked questioningly at Marie-Thérèse, as she always did. ‘Numéro six,’ replied the maid.

  The first movement of the Viola Sonata. He must have been angry; either that or suddenly fearful over his reputation. She had come to understand the shorthand of his requests, to read his mood from the music he demanded. Three months ago he had heard his last Grieg, two months ago his last Chopin. Since then, not even his friends Busoni and Sibelius; just the music of Leonard Verity. The Second Piano Quartet, the Berlin Suite, the Oboe Fantasy (with the revered Goossens), the Pagan Symphony, the Nine French Songs, the Viola Sonata … She knew the articulations of his work as once she had known the articulations of his body. And she admitted that in general he recognised what was finest in his output.

  But not the ‘Four English Seasons’. She had thought, from the moment he had first talked about it, then blocked it out with his thinned fingers on the piano, that the scheme was misconceived. When he told her it was in four movements, one fo
r each season, beginning with spring and ending with winter, she judged it banal. When he explained that it was not, of course, a mere programmatic representation of the seasons but a kinetic evocation of the memory of those seasons filtered through the known reality of other, non-English seasons, she judged it theoretical. When he chuckled at the notion that each movement would fit perfectly on the two sides of a gramophone record, she judged it calculating. Suspicious of the early sketches, she had liked the work no more in published form; she doubted that hearing it would convert her.

  They had always agreed, from the beginning, to value truth above mere social form. But when truths collide, and one of them is dismissed as the squalid personal opinion of an ignorant, foolish Frenchwoman, then perhaps there was something to be said for social form. Heaven knew, she had always admired his music. She had given up her career, her life, for him; but instead of weighing with him this now seemed to count against her. The truth was, she thought—and this was her truth — that some composers had a fine late flowering and others did not. Perhaps the elegy for solo ’cello would be remembered, though Leonard grew suspicious nowadays at her too frequent praise of it; but not the ‘Four English Seasons’. Leave such things to Elgar, she had said. What she had meant was: you seem to me to be courting the country you deliberately left, indulging a nostalgia of the kind you have always despised; worse, you seem to be inventing a nostalgia you do not truly feel in order to indulge it. Having scorned reputation, you now appear to be seeking it. If only you had said to me, triumphantly, that your work would not fit on to gramophone records.

  There were other truths, or squalid personal opinions, that she could not transmit to him. That she herself was not well, and the doctor had talked of surgery. She had replied that she would wait until the current crisis was over. By which she meant, until Leonard is dead, when it will not matter to me whether I submit to surgical intervention or not. His death had priority over hers. She did not resent this.

  She did, however, resent being called a punaise de sacristie. She had not been going to Mass, and the idea of confession, after all these decades, struck her as grotesque. But everyone must approach eternity in their own way, and when she sat alone in an empty church she was contemplating extinction, not its palliation by ritual. Leonard would pretend not to see the difference. ‘Thin end of the wedge,’ he would say — had said. For her, it was simply that they adopted different stances before the inevitable. Of course he did not like or understand this. He was growing more tyrannical as he reached the end. The weaker his strength, the more he asserted it.

  The fire-tongs sounded the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth on the ceiling above. He must have heard, or guessed, her return. She ran heavily upstairs, banging an elbow on the turn of the banister. He sat in bed with the tongs aloft. ‘Brought that priest of yours?’ he enquired. But for once he was smiling. She fussed with his blankets and he pretended to object; but as she bent beside him, he laid his hand on her nape, just below her coiled and greying bun, and called her ma Berlinoise.

  She had not anticipated, when they moved to Saint-Maure-de-Vercelles, that they would live quite so separately from the village. Pedantically, he had explained once more. He was an artist, did she not see? He was not an exile, since that implied a country to which he could, or would, return. Nor was he an immigrant, since that implied a desire to be accepted, to submit yourself to the land of adoption. But you did not leave one country, with its social forms and rules and pettinesses, in order to burden yourself with the parallel forms and rules and pettinesses of another country. No, he was an artist. He therefore lived alone with his art, in silence and in freedom. He had not left England, thank you very much, in order to attend a vin d’honneur at the mairie, or to tap his thigh at the local kermesse and offer a cretinous grin of approval to a squawking bugler.

  Adeline learned that she must deal with the village in a swift and necessary fashion. She also found a way to translate Leonard’s profession de foi into less rebarbative terms. M’sieur was a famous artist, a composer whose work had been played from Helsinki to Barcelona; his concentration must not be disturbed, lest the wonderful melodies forming within him be interrupted and lost for ever. M’sieur is like that, his head is in the clouds, it is just that he does not see you, otherwise, of course, he would tip his hat, why, sometimes he does not even notice me when I am standing in front of his face …

  After they had been living in Saint-Maure for ten or so years, the baker, who played third cornet in the band of the sapeurs-pompiers, shyly asked her if M’sieur would as a special honour write a dance, preferably a polka, for their twenty-fifth anniversary. Adeline pronounced it unlikely, but agreed to put the request to Leonard. She chose a time when he was not working on a composition, and seemed to be of sunny temperament. Later, she regretted that she had not chosen a moment of foul temper. For, yes, he said, with a curious smile, he would be delighted to write a polka for the band; he, whose work was performed from Helsinki to Barcelona, was not so proud that he would not do such a thing. Two days later, he gave her a sealed manila envelope. The baker was delighted and asked her to convey his particular thanks and respects to M’sieur. A week later, when she entered the boulangerie, he would not look at her or speak to her. Finally, he asked why M’sieur had chosen to laugh in their faces. He had scored the piece for three hundred players when they had only twelve. He had called it a polka but it did not have the rhythm of a polka; rather, that of a funeral march. Nor could Pierre-Marc or Jean-Simon, both of whom had made some musical studies, discern the slightest melody in the piece. The baker was regretful, yet also angry and humiliated. Perhaps, Adeline suggested, she had taken the wrong composition by mistake. She was handed the manila envelope and asked what the English word ‘poxy’ meant. She said she was not sure. She pulled out the score. It was headed ‘Poxy Polka for Poxy Pompiers’. She said she thought the word meant ‘bright’, ‘vivid’, ‘shining like the brass on your uniforms’. Well then, Madame, it was a pity that the piece did not appear bright and vivid to those who would not now play it.

  More years passed, the baker handed over to his son, and it was the turn of the English artist, the irregular M’sieur who did not even tip his hat to the curé when he met him, to ask a favour. Saint-Maure-de-Vercelles was just within range of the British Broadcasting Corporation. The English artist had a high-powered wireless that enabled him to pick up music from London. Reception, alas, was of greatly varying quality. Sometimes the atmosphere caused problems, there were storms and bad weather, against which nothing could be done. The hills beyond the Marne were not of great assistance, either. However, M’sieur had discovered, by deduction, one day when every single house in the village had fallen silent for a wedding, that there were also local forms of disturbance, from electric motors of all kinds. The butcher had such a machine, two of the farmers pumped their feed by this method, and of course the baker with his bread … Could they be prevailed upon, just for an afternoon, as an experiment, of course … Whereupon the English artist heard the opening bars of Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony, that grave grumble from the lower strings and bassoons, which was normally below the threshold of audibility, with a sudden and refreshed clarity. And so the experiment was to be repeated from time to time, by permission. Adeline was the go-between on such occasions, a little apologetic, but also playing on the snobbery of the notion that Saint-Maure-de-Vercelles had living in its midst a great artist, one whose greatness embellished the village, and whose glory would shine the brighter if only the farmers would pump their feed by hand, the boulanger would confect his bread without electricity, and the butcher lady would turn off her motor as well. One afternoon Leonard discovered a new source of disturbance, which took powers of detection to locate and then delicacy of negotiation to disarm. The American ladies who were fair-weather occupants of that converted mill-house beyond the lavoir had naturally installed all manner of appliances, which in Leonard’s view were quite superfluous to life. One of these in particular a
ffected the reception on M’sieur’s high-powered wireless. The English artist did not even have a telephone; but the two American ladies had had the decadence, and the impertinence, to install a water closet operated by electricity! It took a certain tact, a quality Adeline had developed increasingly over the years, to persuade them, on certain occasions, to delay their flushing.

  It was difficult to explain to Leonard that he could not require the village to fold its shutters every time he wanted to listen to a concert. Besides, there were occasions when the American ladies simply forgot, or appeared to forget, the Englishman’s demand; while if Adeline entered the boulangerie and found that the baker’s old father, still third cornettist for the sapeurs-pompiers, was in charge, she knew there was little point in even asking. Leonard tended to become irate when she failed, and his normal pallor was blasted with puce. It would have been easier had he felt able to offer a word of direct thanks himself, perhaps even a small present; but no, he acted as if countrywide silence was his prerogative. When he first became seriously ill, and the wireless was transported to his bedroom, he wished to hear more and more concerts, which strained the sympathy of the village. Happily, over the last few months he had wanted nothing but his own music. Adeline might still be dispatched to obtain a vow of muteness from the village, but she would only pretend to go, confident that by the time the concert was due to begin Leonard would have decided not to bother with the wireless that evening. Instead, he would prefer her to wind up the EMG, shuffle the horn, and play him the Oboe Fantasy, the French Songs, or the slow movement of the Pagan Symphony.

  Those had been brave days, in Berlin, Leipzig, Helsinki, Paris. England was death to the true artist. To be a success there you had to be a second Mendelssohn: that was what they were waiting for, like a second Messiah. In England they had fog between the ears. They imagined themselves talking about art but they were only talking about taste. They had no concept of freedom, of the artist’s needs. It was all Jesus and marriage in London Town. Sir Edward Elgar, knight, Order of Merit, Master of the King’s Musick, baronet, husband. ‘Falstaff’ was a worthy piece, there was fine stuff in the Introduction and Allegro, but he had wasted his time with Jesus, with those infernal oratorios. Parry! Had he lived long enough, he would have set to music the entire Bible.