Talking It Over by Julian Barnes
Praise for Julian Barnes’s
Talking It Over
“The funniest, cleverest book I’ve read in years … Talking It Over isn’t just … a boffo modern novel of manners. Barnes got me seriously involved with his comic characters. I’ll remember them with great affection.”
—Edward Hower, Chicago Tribune
“Barnes has created vivid, idiosyncratic voices.… The book is beautifully constructed, with the narrators’ memories overlapping just so, telling stories that sometimes differ widely and sometimes oh-so-subtly.… Barnes writes like a dream.”
—Village Voice Literary Supplement
“Talking It Over is rich and fully realized.… Mr. Barnes spins a story of intrigue and dazzlement.”
—Kingston Whig-Standard Magazine
“What is impossible to suggest … is Barnes’s almost magical skill in making his three-part counterpoint work so well.… Each character alters as it revolves and alters back, sometimes with hilarious sharpness.”
—Los Angeles Times Book Review
“I was drawn irresistibly into the story.… Barnes brings to bear all the powers of a scrupulous intelligence. He pushes reason all the way past its breaking point, the point where it gives way not just to unreason but to pathos.”
—Stephen Goodwin, USA Today
“Barnes proves himself once again to be a master of wit and playful technique.”
—Vogue
“… packed full of funny and incongruous observations on contemporary life.”
—Vancouver Sun
Julian Barnes
Talking It Over
Julian Barnes was born in Leicester, England, in 1946, was educated at Oxford University, and now lives in London. His five previous novels—Metroland, Before She Met Me, Flaubert’s Parrot, Staring at the Sun, and A History of the World in 10½ Chapters—have brought him international acclaim. His newest novel, The Porcupine, has just been published.
ALSO BY Julian Barnes
Metroland
Before She Met Me
Flaubert’s Parrot
Staring at the Sun
A History of the World in 10½ Chapters
The Porcupine
FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, NOVEMBER 1995
Copyright © 1991 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 Great Britain by Jonathan Cape Limited, London, in 1991. First published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1991.
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., for permission to reprint excerpts from “Three Cigarettes in an Ash Tray” by Eddie Miller and W.S. Stevenson, copyright © 1982 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc., and excerpts from “Walkin’ After Midnight” by Alan Block and Don Hecht, copyright © 1956, copyright renewed 1984 by Acuff-Rose Music, Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Used by permission.
eISBN: 978-0-307-79788-9
v3.1
to Pat
He lies like an eye-witness.
RUSSIAN SAYING
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
1: His, His or Her, Their
2: Lend Us a Quid
3: That Summer I Was Brilliant
4: Now
5: Everything Starts Here
6: Stave Off Alzheimer’s
7: Now Here’s a Funny Thing
8: OK, Boulogne It Is
9: I Don’t Love You
10: I’m Not Sure I Can Believe This
11: Love, & c.
12: Spare Me Val. Spare Yourselves Val.
13: What I Think
14: Now There’s One Cigarette in the Ashtray
15: Tidying Up
16: De Consolatione Pecuniae
17: Sont fous, les Anglais
Also by Julian Barnes
1: His, His or Her, Their
Stuart My name is Stuart, and I remember everything.
Stuart’s my Christian name. My full name is Stuart Hughes. My full name: that’s all there is to it. No middle name. Hughes was the name of my parents, who were married for twenty-five years. They called me Stuart. I didn’t particularly like the name at first – I got called things like Stew and Stew-Pot at school – but I’ve got used to it. I can handle it. I can handle my handle.
Sorry, I’m not very good at jokes. People have told me that before. Anyway, Stuart Hughes – I think that’ll do for me. I don’t want to be called St John St John de Vere Knatchbull. My parents were called Hughes. They died, and now I’ve got their name. And when I die, I’ll still be called Stuart Hughes. There aren’t too many certainties in this great big world of ours, but that’s one of them.
Do you see the point I’m making? Sorry, absolutely no reason why you should. I’ve only just started. You scarcely know me. Let’s start again. Hullo, I’m Stuart Hughes, nice to meet you. Shall we shake hands? Right, good. No, the point I’m trying to make is this: everyone else around here has changed their name. That’s quite a thought. It’s even a bit creepy.
Now, did you notice how I said everyone followed by their? ‘Everyone has changed their name.’ I did it deliberately, probably just to annoy Oliver. We had this tremendous row with Oliver. Well, an argument, anyway. Or at least a disagreement. He’s a great pedant, Oliver. He’s my oldest friend, so I’m allowed to call him a great pedant. Soon after Gill met him – that’s my wife, Gillian – she said to me, ‘You know, your friend talks like a dictionary.’
We were on a beach just up from Frinton at the time, and when Oliver heard Gill’s remark he went into one of his spiels. He calls them riffs, but that’s not my sort of word. I can’t reproduce the way he talks – you’ll have to listen to him for yourself – but he just sort of zooms off. That’s what he did then. ‘What kind of dictionary am I? Do I have a thumb index? Am I bilingual?’ And so on. He went on like this for a while, and ended up asking who was going to buy him. ‘What if nobody wants me? Disregarded. Dust on my top fore-edge. Oh no, I’m going to be remaindered, I can see it, I’m going to be remaindered.’ And he started thumping the sand and wailing at the seagulls – real Play for Today stuff – and an elderly couple who were listening to a radio behind a wind-break looked quite alarmed. Gillian just laughed.
Anyway, Oliver’s a pedant. I don’t know what you think about everyone followed by their. Probably not very much, no reason why you should. And I can’t remember how it first came up, but we had this argument. Oliver and Gillian and me. We each had a different opinion. Let me try and set down the opposing points of view. Perhaps I’ll do the minutes of the meeting, like at the bank.
OLIVER said that words like everyone and someone and no-one are singular pronouns and must therefore be followed by the singular possessive pronoun, namely his.
GILLIAN said you couldn’t make a general remark and then exclude half the human race, because fifty per cent of the time that someone will turn out to be female. So for reasons of logic and fairness you ought to say his or her.
OLIVER said we were discussing grammar not sexual politics.
GILLIAN said how could we separate the two, because where did grammar come from if not from grammarians, and almost all grammarians – probably every single one of them for all she knew – were men, so what did we expect; but mainly she was talking common sense.
OLIVER rolled his eyes back, lit a cigarette and said that the very phrase common sense was a contradiction in terms, and if Man – at which point he pretended to
STUART then came up with a solution. His being either inaccurate or insulting or quite possibly both, and his or her being diplomatic but awfully cumbersome, the obvious answer was to say their. Stuart put forward this compromise suggestion with full confidence, and was surprised by its rejection by the rest of the quorum.
OLIVER said that, for instance, the phrase someone put their head round the door sounded as if there were two bodies and one head, like in some frightful Russian scientific experiment. He referred to the displays of freaks which used to take place at funfairs, mentioning bearded ladies, deformed sheep’s foetuses and many similar items until called to order by the Chair (= me).
GILLIAN said that in her opinion their was just as cumbersome and just as obviously diplomatic as his or her, but why was the meeting being so squeamish about making a point anyway? Since women had for centuries been instructed to use the masculine possessive pronoun when referring to the whole human race, why shouldn’t there be some belated corrective action, even if it did stick in a few (masculine) throats?
STUART continued to maintain that their was best, being representative of the middle course.
The MEETING adjourned sine die.
I thought about this conversation for quite a while afterwards. Here we were, three reasonably intelligent people discussing the merits of his and his or her and their. Tiny little words, yet we couldn’t agree. And we were friends. Yet we couldn’t agree. Something about this worried me.
How did I get on to that? Oh yes, everyone else around here has changed their name. It’s true, and it’s quite a thought, isn’t it? Gillian, for example, she changed her name when she married me. Her maiden name was Wyatt, but now she’s called Hughes. I don’t flatter myself that she was eager to take my name. I think it was more that she wanted to get rid of Wyatt. Because you see that was her father’s name, and she didn’t get on with her father. He walked out on her mother, who was stuck for years afterwards with the name of someone who’d left her. Not very nice for Mrs Wyatt, or Mme Wyatt as some people call her because she was French originally. I suspected that Gillian was getting rid of Wyatt as a way of breaking with her father (who didn’t even come to the wedding, incidentally) and pointing out to her Mum what she ought to have done years before. Not that Mme Wyatt took the hint, if the hint was there.
Typically, Oliver said that after the marriage Gill ought to call herself Mrs Gillian Wyatt-or-Hughes, that is if she wanted to be logical and grammatical and commonsensical and diplomatic and cumbersome. He’s like that, Oliver.
Oliver. It wasn’t his name when I met him. We were at school together. At school he was called Nigel, or sometimes ‘N.O.’, or occasionally ‘Russ’, but Nigel Oliver Russell was never called Oliver. I don’t think we even knew what the O stood for; perhaps he lied about it. Anyway, the point is this. I didn’t go to university, Nigel did. Nigel went off for his first term, and when he came back he was Oliver. Oliver Russell. He’d dropped the N, even from the name printed on his cheque-book.
You see, I remember everything. He went in to his bank and got them to print new cheque-books, and instead of signing ‘N.O. Russell’, he now signed ‘Oliver Russell’. I was surprised they let him do that. I thought he’d have to change his name by deed-poll or something. I asked him how he’d done it but he wouldn’t tell me. He just said, ‘I threatened to take my overdraft elsewhere.’
I’m not as clever as Oliver. At school I sometimes used to get better marks than him, but that was when he chose not to exert himself. I was better at maths and science and practical things – you only had to show him a lathe in the metal workshop for him to pretend he had a fainting fit – but when he wanted to beat me, he beat me. Well, not just me, everyone. And he knew his way around. When we had to play at being soldiers in the Cadet Force, Oliver was always Excused Boots. He can be really clever when he wants to be. And he’s my oldest friend.
He was my best man. Not strictly speaking, because the wedding was in a register office, and you don’t have a best man. In fact, we had a silly argument about that as well. Really silly; I’ll tell you about it some other time.
It was a beautiful day. The sort of day everyone should have their wedding on. A soft June morning with a blue sky and a gentle breeze. Six of us: me, Gill, Oliver, Mme Wyatt, my sister (married, separated, changed her name – what did I tell you?) and an aged aunt of some sort dug up by Mme Wyatt at the last minute. I didn’t catch her name but I bet it wasn’t original.
The registrar was a dignified man who behaved with the correct degree of formality. The ring I’d bought was placed on a plum-coloured cushion made of velvet and winked at us until it was time to put it on Gill’s finger. I said my vows a bit too loud and they seemed to echo round the light oak panelling of the room; Gill seemed to overcompensate and whispered hers so that the registrar and I could only just hear. We were very happy. The witnesses signed the register. The registrar handed Gill her wedding lines and said, ‘This is yours, Mrs Hughes, nothing to do with this young man here.’ There was a big municipal clock outside the town-hall, and we took some photographs underneath it. The first photo on the roll said 12.13, and we had been married three minutes. The last one on the roll said 12.18, and we had been married eight minutes. Some of the pictures have silly camera angles because Oliver was fooling around. Then we all went to a restaurant and had grilled salmon. There was champagne. Then more champagne. Oliver made a speech. He said he wanted to toast a bridesmaid but there weren’t any around so he was jolly well going to toast Gill instead. Everyone laughed and clapped and then Oliver used a whole heap of long words and each time he used one we all whooped. We were in a sort of back room, and at one point we gave a particularly loud whoop at a particularly long word and a waiter looked in to see if we were calling for anything and then went away. Oliver finished his speech and sat down and was slapped on the back. I turned to him and said, ‘By the way, someone just put their head round the door.’
‘What did they want?’
‘No,’ I repeated, ‘someone just put their head round the door.’
‘Are you drunk?’ he asked.
I think he must have forgotten. But I remember, you see. I remember everything.
Gillian Look, I just don’t particularly think it’s anyone’s business. I really don’t. I’m an ordinary, private person. I haven’t got anything to say. Wherever you turn nowadays there are people who insist on spilling out their lives at you. Open any newspaper and they’re shouting Come Into My Life. Turn on the television and every second programme has someone talking about his or her problems, his or her divorce, his or her illegitimacy, his or her illness, alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual violation, bankruptcy, cancer, amputation, psychotherapy. His vasectomy, her mastectomy, his or her appendicectomy. What are they all doing it for? Look At Me, Listen To Me. Why can’t they simply get on with things? Why do they have to talk about it all?
Just because I don’t have a confessional nature doesn’t mean that I forget things. I remember my wedding ring sitting on a fat burgundy cushion, Oliver leafing through the telephone directory looking for people with silly names, how I felt. But these things aren’t for public consumption. What I remember is my business.
Oliver Hi, I’m Oliver, Oliver Russell. Cigarette? No, I didn’t think you would. You don’t mind if I do? Yes I do know it’s bad for my health as a matter of fact, that’s why I like it. God, we’ve only just met and you’re coming on like some rampant nut-eater. What’s it got to do with you anyway? In fifty years I’ll be dead and you’ll be a sprightly lizard slurping yoghurt through a straw, sipping peat-bog water and wearing health sandals. Well, I prefer this way.
Shall I tell you my theory? We’re all going to get either cancer or heart disease. There are two human t
I’m Oliver, and I remember all the important things. The point about memory is this. I’ve noticed that most people over the age of forty whinge like a chainsaw about their memory not being as good as it used to be, or not being as good as they wish it were. Frankly I’m not surprised: look at the amount of garbage they choose to store. Picture to yourself a monstrous skip crammed with trivia: singularly ununique childhood memories, 5 billion sports results, faces of people they don’t like, plots of television soap operas, tips concerning how to clean red wine off a carpet, the name of their MP, that sort of thing. What monstrous vanity makes them conclude the memory wants to be clogged up with this sort of rubbish? Imagine the organ of recollection as a left-luggage clerk at some thrumming terminus who looks after your picayune possessions until you next need them. Now consider what you’re asking him to take care of. And for so little money! And for so little thanks! It’s no wonder the counter isn’t manned half the time.
My way with memory is to entrust it only with things it will take some pride in looking after. For instance, I never remember telephone numbers. I can just about remember my own, but I don’t rack up the angst if I have to extract the address book and look up Oliver Russell in it. Some people – grim arrivistes in the kingdom of the mind – talk about training your memory, making it fit and agile like an athlete. Well, we all know what happens to athletes. Those hideously honed oarsmen all conk out in middle age, footballers develop hinge-creaking arthritis. Muscle tears set solid, discs weld together. Look at a reunion of old sportsmen and you will see an advertisement for geriatric nursing. If only they hadn’t taxed their tendons so fiercely …