Love, Etc. Page 19
Gillian That’s the stupidest question I’ve ever heard. Me?
Yes, Oliver attacked me ten years ago.
Yes, Stuart attacked me recently.
But I provoked Oliver deliberately. Whereas I didn’t provoke Stuart. There’s no connection between the two incidents. None at all.
It’s a very stupid term, in my opinion. Professional victim.
Oliver [declined to answer any further questions]
Stuart I’m very glad you asked that. Personally I use Carnaroli— that’s what the Milanese use. Or Vialone Nano. That’s more Venetian. Let me give you a tip. If it’s a springtime risotto, asparagus or primavera, say, then at the end, instead of the normal tablespoonful of butter, I use crème fraîche. It sort of lightens it up. Just an idea.
20
WHAT DO YOU THINK?
Gillian There’s something I haven’t told you. Something Stuart said.
When we were making love—no, when he was raping me— no, let’s say when we were having sex—and I was trying to tell him it was a bad idea, I was going to say something about Oliver, but for some reason I couldn’t mention his name. So I found myself saying—and I know it must have sounded peculiar— something like ‘My husband’s sleeping upstairs.’
‘No,’ Stuart said. He stopped fucking me for a moment and looked at me quite seriously, but also aggressively. ‘I’m your husband. I’ve always been your husband. You’re my wife.’
‘Stuart,’ I said. I mean, he wasn’t some old fundamentalist with a beard. This was us, here, now.
‘I’m your husband,’ he repeated. ‘You may be Oliver’s mistress, but you’re my wife.’
Then he carried on fucking me.
Don’t you find that scary?
Oliver Plan A (forgive the lapse into Stuartese). Marry Mrs Dyer. Change name to Dyer in tribute. Support her like that ripe fruit in the hand until the stalk parts tenderly from the branch. Inherit her house. Live across the road from the newly remarried Hugheses. Try not to be a nuisance. The noble self-effacement worthy of Roncesblahblah. Celebrate reversibility—you recall it was my watchword?
Plant a new monkey-puzzle tree. Speed its growth, and let it mask the outside world before my own medlar-moment arrives.
Stuart You meet someone, you get to know them, you like them, they like you, you go to bed together. Then—at that point, or the next morning, or looking back—things become clearer, don’t they? Whether it’s likely to be once more out of curiosity or politeness on both sides (or never again out of politeness on both sides), or whether it’s going to be something to last the season, or whether—just possibly—it could run and run. It normally becomes clearer in your mind.
I suppose you could say that the present circumstances aren’t exactly normal. Yes, you could say that again.
Gillian I don’t believe in abortion. That’s to say, leaving aside things that happen in war zones and so on, I don’t believe in most of the abortions that take place in the world. I don’t contest any woman’s right, but I do contest the wisdom. It’s a big thing to bring a child into the world, but it’s a bigger thing to stop one coming into it. I know all the arguments, but the decision, it seems to me, is always made at a place beyond argument. The same place where all the other decisions about things like love and faith are made.
So if all goes well—and I am beginning to push the age limit—I’ll be having Stuart’s child. The start of that sentence doesn’t fit with the end, somehow.
And it’s no solution to go to bed with Oliver as soon as possible and pretend it’s his.
Could I say I was having an affair with person or persons unknown? Blame it on the non-existence of our sex-life? Except that I work at home and Oliver’s been housebound too recently. He knows what I do. My time is accounted for.
He’ll guess, of course. And I won’t deny it.
Oliver Plan B. Oliver of Roncesblahblah was not, I trow, famous for self-effacement. Honour propels me. Sound the mighty conch and onward into battle! Smite the uncircumcised! (A point heretofore unconsidered. Surprised you didn’t pop that one during your recent inquisition. Stuart—does he retain his sacred halo, his fleshly prepuce, or not? Cavalier or Roundhead, what do you think? [Me? Moi? As I say, you’ve missed your chance. Though if you like—and Oliver is so tristely short of funds nowadays—we could meet afterwards, and you can pay me to show you. Yes, lay my todger among the drachmae. Take a Polaroid. Entitle it: How Things Work.]) So—into battle? Fight for what is mine by right, honour, and the joining of hands. Woo and win again. Protect my lineage. What do you think?
Stuart What did I say about wanting?
I said, ‘Nowadays I know what I want and I don’t waste time with what I don’t want.’ I made it sound so clear-cut, didn’t I? And for a lot of the time it is, or has been. But only, I realise, with simple things, unimportant things. You want them, and you get them. Or you don’t.
With important things, though . . . Wanting may lead to getting, but getting isn’t the end of the story. It just throws up a new set of questions. Remember when Oliver said his business plan was to win the Nobel Prize? More chance of him winning a triple rollover on the Lottery, I think you’ll agree. But just imagine, for a moment, that he got what he wanted. Do we think that would solve his problems and he’d live happily ever after? I don’t think so. You could say that it’s easier never to get, just to want. Except that a life of wanting and not getting can be incredibly painful. Believe me.
Or am I just avoiding the issue? Talking about ‘wanting things,’ and not even mentioning Gillian’s name?
Sophie Stuart’s my Daddy and Daddy’s Marie’s Daddy, which is one of the things Daddy’s Down in the Dumps about. (We haven’t found a grown-up word for it yet.)
So maybe the answer’s for Dad and Mum to have another baby together. Then it would be two to one.
Hey, isn’t that brilliant? Brilliant. What do you think?
Gillian It didn’t work, did it? That’s the truth of it. Ten years ago, I engineered a scene which I thought would set Stuart free. But it seems to have had the opposite effect. I hoped he would see that my life with Oliver was nothing to be envied and this would get him off the hook. Do you know, when he first went to America, he used to send me these huge bunches of flowers. Anonymously. I made friends with the delivery company, gave them a story about a possible stalker, and they confirmed that they were all authorised from Washington. And Stuart, needless to say, was the only person I knew there. And obviously Oliver knew. We just never discussed it. Then we moved to France, and still he tracked us down. So I arranged this scene in the street, when I knew Stuart would be watching. But I totally miscalculated, because it must have made Stuart want to rescue me. And all those years I thought he was fine, off on his own, safe, the wounds healed.
If, instead, he’d seen the truth—that Oliver and I were happy—as we were, then—would that have set him free? Would he have had a completely different life? Might he never have come back? It’s that unanswered, unanswerable question about the lives we could have led and didn’t; the abandoned alternatives, the forgotten choices. What do you think?
Oliver Plan C. What did Dr Robb tell me? Yes—feeling that you’re not going to get better is all part of the depression. Well, I would agree, though my textual gloss would be different from hers. Back in my student days I had bar-stool acquaintance with a young doctor, recently qualified. One quaffing eve he was of doleful aspect. A senior sawbones had that afternoon instructed him—now that he was a grown-up whitecoat—to convey the terminally bad news to the assembled family of a patient who was even then being nibbled, gnawed and fatally munched by the rodent cancer. My chum had never played the fatal messenger before and was unversed in the ways of diplomacy; and yet, it seems to me, he was a veritable Sir Henry Wotton in the way he told the stricken family that their beloved hubby, sire and loinchild was certain to croak. What exactly did you say, I enquired, and his words to me still echo down the decades. ‘I told them that he
wasn’t going to get better.’
So young, and yet so wise! Are we any of us going to get better? Certainly not in the sense the philosophers understand. Nor in the sense of The Men Who Guess. The feeling that you’re not going to get better is indeed part of the depression—but which part? For Dr Robb it is a symptom, for Oliver the cause. We are none of us going to get better, so why send honest medical ambassadors to lie abroad for the good of their country? Plan C merely consists of acknowledging the facts as they are. We are all in the same boat, it is just that some admit we are holed below the waterline, while others bend their oblivious backs and pull on the oars until the rowlocks glow.
Look at that cliché. Worse, at the doomed attempt to give it life. What a disgrace. Shame on you, Ollie my sweet. But then, in self-defence, how appropriate. What are our lives but doomed attempts to revive a cliché?
Yes, that’s Plan C.
Plan A, Plan B. Plan C: Would You Rather?
Stuart What I mean by ‘more complicated’ is this. While I was away all those years, the Gill I carried around with me—quite literally in the case of that photo everyone seems a bit obsessed by—was the Gill I knew back then, the one I’d fallen in love with. That’s normal, isn’t it? And when I came back, I said to myself, she hasn’t changed a bit. I mean, she’s got the girls, and she does her hair in a different way, and she’s put on a bit of weight, and doesn’t wear any of the clothes I remember, and is living in reduced circumstances, but to me she was exactly the same. Is she? Maybe I just don’t want to admit that all these years of living with Oliver might have changed her. Exposure to his ways and thoughts and second-rate opinions. We’re talking ADIs and MRLs, as I said. Is it unrealistic to assume she’s still the same woman I fell in love with? After all, I’ve changed in the intervening years. And so, as I pointed out when we said hello, have you.
The sex didn’t make things clearer. On the contrary, it made me realise I’ve been deceiving myself by assuming it’s an open-and-shut case, that I’ve always loved Gill, always have and always will. Because the Gill of that sentence is the Gill of twelve years ago: that’s what I know I’ll always love. Always. Hard drive, as I said: beefy men with sledgehammers would have to smash up my heart. But what about the Gill of today? Will I have to fall in love with her all over again? Or am I halfway there already? A quarter? Three-quarters? Have you been in this sort of situation yourself? I’m a bit in the dark. I suppose the ideal solution would be to discover that although we’ve both changed, we’ve been developing in parallel directions, so that we haven’t ‘grown apart,’ as they say, even if we’ve been apart. And then—better still, and the biggest If—to find that she could come to love me again. Or—even better yet—to love me more this time round. Tell me, am I dreaming?
Now that it seems there’s an outside chance of getting back what I once had, part of me is beginning to wonder how much I want it. When things were impossible, they were clearer. Perhaps I’m just scared. After all, the stakes feel so much higher now. I suppose the key question is, could Gillian come to love me again?
What do you think?
Gillian Does Stuart love me? Still? Really? As he said?
That’s the key question.
What do you think?
Mme Wyatt Don’t ask me anything. Something will happen. Or nothing. And then, one after the other, over a long period of time, we’ll all die. You may die first, of course.
So as for me, I will wait. For something to happen. Or for nothing to happen.
JULIAN BARNES
LOVE, etc.
Born in Leicester in 1946, Julian Barnes is the author of nine novels, a book of stories, and two collections 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
Something to Declare
England, England
Cross Channel
Letters from London
The Porcupine
Talking It Over
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
Staring at the Sun
Flaubert’s Parrot
Before She Met Me
Metroland
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, JUNE 2002
Copyright © 2000 by Julian Barnes
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The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Barnes, Julian.
Love, etc. / Julian Barnes. —1st American ed.
p. cm.
1. Triangles (Interpersonal relations)—Fiction. 2. London (England)—Fiction.
3. Male friendship—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A6657 L68 2001
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