Metroland Read online

  Praise for Julian Barnes’s

  METROLAND

  “One would have to look hard to find a wryer, more lovingly detailed account of intellectual and sexual innocence abroad.… Metroland portrays at once the disturbing aspects of adulthood and the consolations of maturity, a balance that makes one glad Julian Barnes is still young and still writing.”

  –Jay Parini, The New York Times

  “Barnes’s books … celebrate the human imagination, the human heart, the boisterous diversity of our gene pool, our activities, our delusions.… They thrill the mind and the emotions; and he achieves, without tricks or puns, what Nabokov loved: esthetic bliss.”

  –Chicago Sun-Times

  “If all works of fiction were as thoughtful, as subtle, as well constructed, and as funny as Metroland, there would be no more talk of the death of the novel.”

  –New Statesman

  “Julian Barnes is one of a handful of innovative English novelists who have succeeded in pulling the English novel out of the provincial rut in which it lay.”

  –Newsday

  “Flighty, playful … Barnes succeeds in vividly re-creating teenage precociousness, particularly what it feels like to be a young male encountering love and sex.”

  –Los Angeles Times

  Julian Barnes

  METROLAND

  Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford University, and now lives in London. His first six novels – Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert’s Parrot, Staring at the Sun, A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters, and Talking It Over – have brought him international acclaim. His newest novel, The Porcupine, has just been published.

  ALSO BY Julian Barnes

  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

  First Vintage International Edition, November 1992

  Copyright © 1980 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 by Jonathan Cape Ltd.,

  London, in 1980.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Barnes, Julian.

  Metroland/Julian Barnes. – 1st Vintage International ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-79777-3

  I. Title.

  [PR6052.A6657M47 1992]

  823′.914–dc20 92–50092

  Author photo © Miriam Berkley

  v3.1

  To Laurien

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  PART ONE Metroland (1963)

  One Orange Plus Red

  Two Two Small Boys

  Three Rabbit, Human

  Four The Constructive Loaf

  Five J’habite Metroland

  Six Scorched Earth

  Seven Mendacity Curves

  Eight Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity

  Nine Big D

  Ten Tunnels, Bridges

  Eleven SST

  Twelve Hard and Low

  Thirteen Object Relations

  PART TWO Paris (1968)

  One Karezza

  Two Demandez Nuts

  Three Redon, Oxford

  Four Beatific Couples

  Five Je t’aime bien

  Six Object Relations

  PART THREE Metroland II (1977)

  One Nude, Giant Girls

  Two Running Costs

  Three Stiff Petticoat

  Four Is Sex Travel?

  Five The Honours Board

  Six Object Relations

  PART ONE

  Metroland (1963)

  A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu

  Rimbaud

  There is no rule against carrying binoculars in the National Gallery.

  On this particular Wednesday afternoon in the summer of 1963, Toni had the notebook and I had the glasses. So far, it had been a productive visit. There had been the young nun in men’s spectacles who smiled sentimentally at the Arnolfini Wedding, and then, after a few moments, frowned and made a disapproving cluck. There had been the anoraked girl hiker, so transfixed by the Crivelli altarpiece that we simply stood on either side of her and noted the subtlest parting of the lips, the faintest tautening of skin across the cheekbones and the brow (‘Spot anything on the temple your side?’ ‘Zero’ – so Toni wrote down Temple twitch; LHS only). And there had been the man in the chalk-stripe suit, hair precisely parted an inch above his right ear, who twitched and squirmed in front of a small Monet landscape. He puffed out his cheeks, leaned back slowly on his heels, and exhaled like a discreet balloon.

  Then we came to one of our favourite rooms, and one of our most useful pictures: Van Dyck’s equestrian portrait of Charles I. A middle-aged lady in a red mackintosh was sitting in front of it. Toni and I walked quietly to the padded bench at the other end of the room, and pretended interest in a tritely jocund Franz Hals. Then, while he shielded me, I moved forward a little and focussed the glasses on her. We were far enough away for me to be able to whisper notes to Toni quite safely; if she heard anything, she’d take it for the usual background murmur of admiration and assent.

  The gallery was fairly empty that afternoon, and the woman was quite at ease with the portrait. I had time to impart a few speculative biographical details.

  ‘Dorking? Bagshot? Forty-five, fifty. Shoppers’ return. Married, two children, doesn’t let him fug her any more. Surface happiness, deep discontent.’

  That seemed to cover it. She was gazing up at the picture now like an icon-worshipper. Her eyes hosed it swiftly up and down, then settled, and began to move slowly over its surface. At times, her head would cock sideways and her neck thrust forward; her nostrils appeared to widen, as if she scented new correspondences in the painting; her hands moved on her thighs in little flutters. Gradually, her movements quietened down.

  ‘Sort of religious peace,’ I muttered to Toni. ‘Well, quasi-religious, anyway; put that.’

  I focussed on her hands again; they were now clasped together like an altar-boy’s. Then I tilted the binoculars back up to her face. She had closed her eyes. I mentioned this.

  ‘Seems to be recreating the beauty of what’s in front of her; or savouring the after-image; can’t tell.’

  I kept the glasses on her for a full two minutes, while Toni, his biro raised, waited for my next comment.

  There were two ways of reading it: either she was beyond the point of observable pleasure; or else she was asleep.

  1 • Orange Plus Red

  Cut privet still smells of sour apples, as it did when I was sixteen; but this is a rare, lingering exception. At that age, everything seemed more open to analogy, to metaphor, than it does now. There were more meanings, more interpretations, a greater variety of available truths. There was more symbolism. Things contained more.

  Take my mother’s coat, for example. She had made it herself, on a dressmaker’s dummy which lived under the stairs and told you everything and nothing about the female body (see what I mean?). The coat was reversible, pillar-box red on one side, an expansive black and white check on the other; the lapels, being made of the inner material, provided what the pattern called ‘a dash of contrast at the neck’ and chimed with the large square patch pockets. It was, I now see, a highly skilful piece of needlework; then, it proved to me that my mother was a turncoat.

  This evi
dence of duplicity was corroborated one year when the family went to the Channel Islands for a holiday. The size of the coat’s pockets, it transpired, was exactly that of a flat-pack of 200 cigarettes; and my mother walked back through the customs with 800 contraband Senior Service. I felt, by association, guilt and excitement; but also, further down, a private sense of being right.

  Yet there was even more to be extracted from this simple coat. Its colour, like its structure, had secrets. One evening, walking home from the station with my mother, I looked at her coat, which was turned to show its red side, and noticed that it had gone brown. I looked at my mother’s lips and they were brown. If she had withdrawn her hands from her (now murkily) white gloves, her fingernails, I knew, would also be brown. A trite occurrence nowadays; but in the first months of orange sodium lighting it was wonderfully disturbing. Orange on red gives dark brown. Only in suburbia, I thought, could it happen.

  At school the next morning I pulled Toni out of a pre-assembly kickaround and told him about it. He was the confidant with whom I shared all my hates and most of my enthusiasms.

  ‘They even fug up the spectrum,’ I told him, almost weary at yet another outrage.

  ‘What the fug do you mean?’

  There was no ambiguity about the ‘they’. When I used it, it meant the unidentified legislators, moralists, social luminaries and parents of outer suburbia. When Toni used it, it meant their inner London equivalents. They were, we had no doubt, exactly the same sort of people.

  ‘The colours. The street lamps. They fug up the colours after dark. Everything comes out brown, or orange. Makes you look like moonmen.’

  We were very sensitive about colours at that time. It had all started one summer holiday, when I’d taken Baudelaire with me to read on the beach. If you look at the sky through a straw, he said, it looks a much richer shade of blue than if you look at a large patch of it. I communicated the discovery to Toni on a postcard. After that, we started worrying about colours; they were – you couldn’t deny it – ultimates, purities of extra value to the godless. We didn’t want bureaucrats fugging around with them. They’d already got at

  ‘… the language …’

  ‘… the ethics …’

  ‘… the sense of priorities …’

  but these you could, in the last analysis, ignore. You could go your own swaggering way. But if they got at the colours? We couldn’t even count on being ourselves any more. Toni’s swarthy, thick-lipped Middle-European features would be completely negrified by sodium. My own snub-nosed, indeterminately English face (still excitedly waiting for its great leap into adulthood) was more immediately secure; but doubtless ‘they’ would think up some satirical ploy for it.

  As you can see, we worried about large things in those days. And why not? When else can you get to worry about them? You wouldn’t have caught us fretting about our future careers, because we knew that by the time we were grown up, the state would be paying people like us simply to exist, simply to walk about like sandwich-men advertising the good life. But stuff like the purity of the language, the perfectibility of self, the function of art, plus a clutch of capitalised intangibles like Love, Truth, Authenticity … well, that was different.

  Our coruscating idealism expressed itself naturally in a public pose of raucous cynicism. Only a strongly purifying motive could explain how hard and how readily Toni and I pissed on other people. The mottoes we deemed appropriate to our cause were écraser l’infâme and épater la bourgeoisie. We admired Gautier’s gilet rouge, Nerval’s lobster; our Spanish Civil War was the bataille d’Hemani. We chanted in concert:

  Le Belge est très civilisé

  Il est voleur, il est rusé

  Il est parfois syphilisé

  Il est donc très civilisé.

  The final rhyme delighted us, and we used to work the blurred homophone into our stilted French conversation classes at every opportunity. First, you would set up some worthy fumbler with a gallingly contemptuous remark delivered in simple language; the fumbler would lurch into

  ‘Je ne suis pas, er, d’accord avec ce qui, ce que?’ (a frowning look at the master) ‘Barbarowski a, um, juste dit …’

  then one of our sniggering cabal would jump in, before the master could rouse himself from his depression at how thick the fumbler was, with a

  ‘Carrément, M’sieur, je crois pas que Phillips soit assez syphilisé pour bien comprendre ce que Barbarowski vient de proposer …’

  – and every time they let it go.

  We were, you may have guessed, mostly doing French. We cared for its language because its sounds were plosive and precise; and we cared for its literature largely for its combativeness. French writers were always fighting one another – defending and purifying the language, ousting slang words, writing prescriptive dictionaries, getting arrested, being prosecuted for obscenity, being aggressively Parnassian, scrabbling for seats in the Académie, intriguing for literary prizes, getting exiled. The idea of the sophisticated tough attracted us greatly. Montherlant and Camus were both goalkeepers; a Paris-Match photo of Henri de going up for a high ball, which I had sellotaped inside my locker, was as venerated as Geoff Glass’s signed portrait of June Ritchie in A Kind of Loving.

  There didn’t seem to be any sophisticated toughs in our English course. There certainly weren’t any goalkeepers. Johnson was tough, but hardly swish enough for us: after all, he hadn’t even got across the Channel until he was nearly dead. Blokes like Yeats, though, were the other way round: swish, but always fugging around with fairies and stuff. How would they both react if all the reds in the world turned to brown? One would hardly notice it had happened; the other would be blinded by the shock.

  2 • Two Small Boys

  Toni and I were strolling along Oxford Street, trying to look like flâneurs. This wasn’t as easy as it might sound. For a start, you usually needed a quai or, at the very least, a boulevard; and, however much we might be able to imitate the aimlessness of the flânerie itself, we always felt that we hadn’t quite mastered what happened at each end of the stroll. In Paris, you would be leaving behind some rumpled couch in a chambre particulière; over here, we had just left behind Tottenham Court Road Underground station and were heading for Bond Street.

  ‘How about écrasing someone?’ I suggested, twirling my umbrella.

  ‘Not really up to it. I did Dewhurst yesterday.’ Dewhurst was a prefect destined for the priesthood, whom Toni had, we agreed, totally crushed in the course of a vicious metaphysical discussion. ‘But I might be up to an épat.’

  ‘Sixpence?’

  ‘Okay.’

  We wandered along while Toni looked for subjects. Ice-cream vendors? Small fry, and hardly bourgeois enough. That policeman? Too dangerous. They came into the same category as pregnant women and nuns. Suddenly, Toni hoiked his head at me and started pulling off his school tie. I did the same, rolled it round four fingers, and pocketed it. Now we were just two unidentifiable boys in white shirts, grey trousers, and black jackets lightly specked with dandruff. I followed him across the road towards a new boutique (how we disapproved of these linguistic imports); in large yellow capitals it announced MAN SHOP. It was, we suspected, one of those new and dangerous places where they’re into the changing-room after you, with rape in mind, before you can pull up your trousers. Toni looked round the assistants and picked out the most respectable-looking: ageing, greying, separate collar, a thick margin of cuff, even a tie-pin. Clearly a left-over from the previous ownership.

  ‘Yes, sir, can I help you?’

  Toni gazed past him at the open-fronted wooden drawers of Banlon socks.

  ‘I’d like one man and two small boys, please.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’ said tie-pin.

  ‘One man and two small boys, please,’ repeated Toni in a dogged-customer voice. The rules of the épat declared that you should neither giggle nor give ground. ‘It doesn’t matter about the size.’

  ‘I don’t understand, sir.’ That sir
was pretty cool in the circs, I thought. I mean, the guy must be about to crack, mustn’t he?

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Toni quite brusquely, ‘call yourself a Man Shop? I can see I shall have to go elsewhere.’

  ‘I suggest you do, sir. And which school are you at?’

  We beat it.

  ‘Cool fugger,’ I complained to Toni as we flâned on at top speed.

  ‘Yeah. Think I épated him much?’

  ‘Must have done, must have done.’ I’d been really impressed, especially by the way Toni had picked the right assistant, not just the one nearest the door. ‘Anyway, you get your tanner.’

  ‘I’m not worried about that. I just want to know if I épated him.’

  ‘ ’Course you did. ’Course you did. Wouldn’t have asked for our school otherwise. Anyway, did you notice that sir?’

  Toni gave a squint-grin, his mouth sliding across as if loyal to his eyes.

  ‘Yeah.’

  It was that time of life when being sirred is of inestimable importance; a token coveted out of all proportion to its value. It was better than being allowed to use the front steps at school; better than not having to wear a cap; better than sitting on the sixth-form balcony during break; better, even, than carrying an umbrella. And that was saying something. I once carried my umbrella to school and back every day of a three-month summer term during which it never rained. The status, not the function, counted. Inside the school, you displayed it – fencing with your peers, pinning the shoes of smaller boys to the floor with a sharpened ferrule; but outside, it made a man of you. Even if you were scarcely five feet, your face a battlefield of acne shaded by vigorous adolescent fuzz; even if you walked lopsidedly, weighed down by a festering cricket-bag full of rotting rugger shirts and gangrenous boots; as long as you had your umbrella, there was always an outside chance you might collect a sir from someone, an outside chance of a bout of surging pleasure.