Talking It Over by Julian Barnes

  So you see, in a way I’ve come round to Oliver’s point of view, to what he was insultingly trying to explain to me when we were both drunk and I ended up nutting him. Love operates according to market forces, he said, as a justification for stealing my wife. Now, a bit older and a bit wiser, I’m beginning to agree: love does have many of the same properties as money.

  None of this means that I’ve forgiven the two of them for the Business. It isn’t over either, for that matter. It isn’t finished yet. I don’t know what’s to be done, how or when … I’ve got to get it out of my system … How?

  As I see it, there are two systems. Pay Now, or Pay Later. Pay Now works as I’ve just described – and works very efficiently, provided you take the normal economic precautions. Pay Later is called love. It doesn’t surprise me that on the whole people seem to choose Pay Later. We all like hire purchase. But we rarely read the small print when we make the deal. We never think of the interest rates … we never calculate the final cost … Give me Pay Now.

  Sometimes people say to me, when I explain how I feel about things, Yes, I can see your point of view. It must make things simpler. But the thing about buying sex (we are, of course, usually drunk by the time such levelling takes place), the thing about buying sex – they say authoritatively, never having bought it in their lives – is that whores don’t kiss. They say this a little sadly, and thinking fondly of their wives who do kiss (but who? who else? I want to ask). I nod, and don’t bother to disillusion them. People have such sentimental ideas about hookers. People think they just simulate the act of love, then retire behind a screen of modesty, saving their hearts and their lips for their beloved. Well, some of that may be true. But whores don’t kiss? Of course they do. You just have to pay them enough. Think about where else they’ll agree to put their lips in exchange for money.

  I don’t want your pity. I’m wiser than I used to be, and you can’t patronise me so easily now. You may not like me (perhaps you never did). But as I say, I’m no longer in the business of being liked.

  Money can’t buy you love? Oh yes it can. And as I say, love is just a system for getting someone to call you Darling after sex.

  17: Sont fous, les Anglais

  Gordon Gordon’s the name. No, no reason why you should. Gordon Wyatt. That ring a bell?

  I shouldn’t be talking to you, I’m sure it’s against the rules. After all, you know what you think about me, don’t you? Filthy old lecher, seducer of schoolgirls, abandoner of wife and child … A chap can’t expect to get much of a hearing with those labels attached.

  Points to make re the case of Gordon Wyatt, long ago court-martialled and sent to the salt-mines:

  1) She was bags of fun when we met, Marie-Christine. Married her, brought her back to England. She had an affair after we’d been married a year or so. Thought I didn’t twig. Course I twigged. Gives a chap a bit of a jolt, but I got over it. Suspected she had another fling after Gillian was born, not altogether sure. I could have handled that. What I couldn’t handle was the way she stopped being fun. Got all sort of middle-aged before her time, had ideas about things. Awful. Didn’t suit her at all. Kept on being right, if you know what I mean.

  2) Access to daughter refused by the court on grounds of applicant’s delinquency in respect of young women (did they think I’d try and seduce my own daughter, for God’s sake?). Subsequent private requests for access always peremptorily denied by Madame. Decision time: do you go on trying to see your child knowing that everything is against you (contempt of court, gentlemen of the law, bailiffs, etc.) and torturing yourself with hope, or do you make a clean break? Ditto, what about the said child: best for her to think there’s a Possible Someone out there, or a Definite No-one? Not easy.

  3) Main thing to say is, I won’t put up with this slander on my wife. My present wife. I didn’t ‘seduce’ her, she didn’t do a Lolita act on me. We met (out of school as it happens), and bang, that was that. Nothing to be done. Been in love ever since, never a cross word, two smashing kids. Course it was hard to get a job teaching anywhere else. Made ends meet for a while with some translation work, still do a little. But Christine’s become the breadwinner. I’m what they call a ‘house-husband’ I suppose. Taken to it like a duck to water as well, which would have surprised Madame. To be quite honest, I don’t know what women are complaining about. I love being ‘stuck at home’, as they say.

  Ah, there’s the door. Look, I did promise I wouldn’t ever go on the record about all this. Christine doesn’t really like it. The past is another country and all that. So, mum’s the word, if you don’t mind. Much obliged. Cheerio, then.

  Oliver I drive this antique Peugeot 403. Bought it off a peasant who probably fancied himself in a Toyota Land Cruiser. It’s a sort of greeny-grey – they don’t make colours like that any more, not for cars – and all rounded at the corners. Tiny radiator grille like a gaoler’s spyhole. Very retro. Has been known to break down usefully on occasion, as well.

  Every morning I climb behind the wheel to the creak of ancient leather and drive up to Toulouse. I motor carefully through the village because of Monsieur Lagisquet’s dog. I don’t know what brand it is, but its immediate characteristics are medium size, conker-brownness and a raging affability. Its less immediate characteristic was explained to us by Monsieur Lagisquet the first time Gill and I were walking through the village and this four-legged tongue hurled itself upon us. ‘Il est sourd,’ said the owner, ‘il n’entend pas.’ A deaf dog. God how sad. Mega-sad. Imagine not being able to hear its master’s fluted whistle any more.

  So I motor carefully, nodding to the locals like minor British royalty. Past the dusty rhombus which is half village square and half café forecourt, where a couple of senior citizens sip their morning beverage from fat cups bearing the slogan of Choky. Past the racks of Totalgaz outside the alimentation and the faded ads painted on the side wall for BRILLIANTINE PARFUMÉE and SUZE. The names, the names! Then past the disused lavoir next to the little bridge – où sont les blanchisseuses d’antan? – and swing on to the main road by the Cave Coopérative. Like most villages around here, ours has two castles: the old château fort, whose walls once ran with blood, and this new one in shiny stainless steel, where the red juice comes from the crushed grape rather than the crushed prisoner. The arts of war and the arts of peace! Architects should make more of the comparison, I feel: the glinting silos of the Cave Coopérative should be topped with satirical pepperpot towers, and trompe-l’oeil arrow-slits might embellish the lustrous verticals.

  This is the life, I tend to reflect as I romp through the vineyards. A little Cinsault, a peppering of Mourvèdre, a jolt of Malbec and a stiffy of Tempranillo: mix them up and make them nice, pop goes the weasel. We’re VDQS at the moment, but hoping for promotion.

  See that little tower over there – the round stone job? A humble store-shed, yet built to resist the lapping of time as well as the boll-weevil. Impressive? Nasalise that air, cop that hanging hawk in the sky. Isn’t this the life? Excuse me a mo while I give a royal wave to yonder blue-bibbed workman breast-feeding his shovel. And I was the one who used to be so gloomy about things. I used to say that life was like invading Russia: a flying start, a grim slowing down, a fearful scuffle with General January, then blood on the snow. But now I don’t see things like that. There’s no reason why the route shouldn’t be a sunny back road through a vineyard, is there? Everything’s so much more cheerful down here. Maybe it’s just as simple as the sun. Do you remember when they discovered the connection between depression and the level of domestic illumination? Bump up your wattage and save on psychiatrist’s bills! Why shouldn’t it work for the great outdoors as well? The argument from climate certainly applies to Jolly Ollie nowadays.

  It’s an hour or so up the A61 to Toulouse, with early morning mist steaming off the meadows and lapping round the farmhouses like dry ice. Then I slew the 403 to a stop in the School’s courtyard and scatter bons mots like sunflower seed among the waiting pupils.
They’re so well-dressed and … well, pretty. Boys and girls alike. And they want to learn English! Isn’t it amazing? I know the pedagogue is meant to enthuse his charges by an infectious zest for learning and all that, but the principle doesn’t apply when faced with a row of damp corn-sacks on a rainy Tuesday off the Edgware Road. Here it’s the other way round: they make me want to teach!

  And I do, all day. Then a leisurely coup de rouge perhaps, with a pupil who has a little trouble getting her mind round the various kinds of past tense (don’t we all?), and a sauntering return through the vineyards. From a couple of kilometres away you catch the steel flash of the Cave Coopérative in the clear low sun. I pass my favourite road sign: ROUTE INONDABLE. Such Gallic economy. In England it would be DANGER ROAD LIABLE TO FLOODING. Here, just ROUTE INONDABLE. Then carefully through the village, and into the welcoming arms of wife and child. How she hugs me, the iridescent bambino, little Sal. She clings to me like a wet shower-curtain. Isn’t this the life?

  Gillian Now listen to me. To me.

  I think I had better start with a description of the village in which we live. It’s south-east of Toulouse, in the department of the Aude, on the edge of the Minervois, near the Canal du Midi. The village is surrounded by vineyards, although this wasn’t always the case. If you drive around here nowadays, you might think this is how it has always been, because most of it looks so old, but that isn’t true. Everything changed with the arrival of the railway. Previously, areas like this had to be largely self-sufficient, from an agricultural point of view. So there were sheep for wool, and cattle for milk, goats perhaps, and vegetables and fruit, and – I don’t know, probably sunflowers for oil and chick-peas and so on. But the railway changed the economic profile of the region, as it did everywhere, flattened it out. People stopped farming sheep because the wool that came on the railway was cheaper than the wool they could make. Mixed agriculture died out. There’s an occasional goat in a back garden, of course, but that’s about it. Nowadays the whole region makes wine. So what happens when some other region makes better, cheaper wine than ours, when our slopes and our vines have been exploited to the best of their ability and yet simply can’t compete? We won’t starve, of course, we’ll be put on the Euro-dole by the economists. We’ll be paid to produce wine that nobody wants, to make it and then turn it into vinegar or simply pour it away. And that will be a second impoverishment, do you see? That will be sad.

  Those little stone towers in the fields are a reminder of what it was like. People think they’re just store-sheds, but they used to have sails on them: they were windmills, they used to grind the corn from the very fields in which they sat. Now they’ve been amputated, they’ve lost their butterfly wings. And you saw the ‘castle’ on your way through the village? Everyone calls it ‘the castle’ nowadays, and Oliver makes up stories of derring-do and boiling oil. Of course the area has been fought over, at the time of the Cathar rebellion mainly; and I think the English came this way a century or two later. But this is a small village in the middle of a plain entirely lacking in strategic importance. So it never needed a castle. That squat tower is just the old grain store, nothing more.

  The only bit of the village which attracts visitors is the medieval frieze on the west end of the church. It runs all the way along the outside wall, doing a curve over the door in the middle. There are about thirty-six carved stone heads, alternating in design. Half of them are angels’ heads, the other half skulls with a neat pair of crossed bones beneath. Paradise, hell, paradise, hell, paradise, hell, they go. Or perhaps it’s resurrection and death, resurrection and death, resurrection and death, clatter, clatter like the railway that passes. Except that we don’t believe in hell and resurrection any more. And to me the angels don’t look like angels, but like small children. No, like a small child, my daughter, Sophie Anne Louise. We gave her three names, all of which exist in English as well as French, so she can change her name just by changing her accent. But those heads, now rubbed flatter with time, they remind me of my daughter. And they say to me now, life, death, life, death, life, death.

  What is it about this place? I never thought so much about time and death in London. Here everything is calm and beautiful and quiet, and my life has been worked out for better or for worse, and I find myself thinking of time and death. Is it Sophie’s doing?

  The fountain, for instance. It’s just a normal, slightly grandiose public fountain, put up in the reign of Charles X. An obelisk made from the pink marble they still quarry on the other side of the mountain. There are four Pan heads at the base with pea-shooters coming out of their mouths. Except that the water doesn’t flow from these spouts any more. It must have been wonderful when they put it up in 1825 and drew the first fresh water from the dusty distant hills. But nowadays the villagers prefer the bottled variety, and the fountain is dry. Instead, it now doubles as a war memorial. On one sloping side, a list of the twenty-six men this small village lost in the First World War. On the opposite side, three lost in the Second World War, then underneath one mort en Indochine. On a third side you can make out the original inscription of 1825 cut into the pink marble:

  MORTELS, SONGEZ BIEN

  LE TEMS PROMPT A S’ENFUIR

  PASSE COMME CETTE EAU

  POUR NE PLUS REVENIR

  Water is like life, it says. Only the water doesn’t flow here any more.

  I watch the old women. For housework they wear button-through print over-dresses; not exactly overalls, smarter than that. They come out every morning and sweep the pavement outside their houses. Then they sweep the roadway. They do, they brush the dust off the first few feet of the tarmac with their old brooms. Later in the day, when the heat dies down, they are back out on the pavement again, this time sitting on little upright rush-seated chairs. They sit there until after dark, knitting, chatting, feeling the heat of the day disappear, and you realise now why they swept the road. Because it’s part of their front yard, where they like to sit.

  New money from Montpellier comes in this direction at weekends, but not to our village. We aren’t picturesque enough for them: they take their jeeps elsewhere and light their hibachis where there is a hill view. Here they find it flat and dull, and there is no Video d’Oc to supply their wants. We have two bars, a hotel-restaurant just opposite where we live, a boulangerie which has started making pain noir and pain complet since the épicerie began to stock bread as well, and a hardware shop which sells light bulbs and rat poison. Last year most of the country celebrated the Bicentennial of the French Revolution. In our village the only display was outside M. Garruet’s hardware store: he’d ordered six plastic brooms, two red, two white and two blue, and stuck them in a display pot outside his shop. The bristles were the same colour as the handles: they looked very jolly. Then someone bought both the red ones – a passing communist, one old woman said – and that rather put paid to the display. That was the end of the Bicentennial for us, though we heard the fireworks from other villages.

  Every Wednesday morning at 9.00 the fish-van comes up from the coast and stops in the village square. We buy dorade and something called a passard which I’ve never been able to find the translation for. The square is a sort of wonky oblong and has a little central alley of brutally pollarded limes beneath which the old men play boules; the women sometimes bring their rush-seated chairs to watch this activity from which they are always excluded. The men play in the evenings under floodlight; beyond their heads you can see the black tips of a distant row of conifers. Everyone knows what that means in a French village: the graveyard.

  The mairie and the PTT are side by side, two halves of the same building. The first few times I went to buy a stamp I found myself in the mairie by mistake.

  You’re not interested in this, are you? Not really. I’m boring you, I can tell. You want to hear about other things. Very well.

  Stuart Shall I tell you something I always slightly resented? This is probably going to sound incredibly petty, but it’s true.

 
At the weekends she used to have a lie-in. I’d be the first to get up. We always had a grapefruit, or at least, one of the mornings we did, either Saturday or Sunday. I’d be the one to decide. If I went down and felt like a grapefruit on Saturday, I’d take it out of the fridge, cut it in half and put each half in a bowl. Otherwise we’d have it on the Sunday. Now, when I’d eaten my half, I’d look at Gillian’s sitting in its bowl. I’d think, that’s hers, she’s going to eat that when she wakes up. And I’d carefully take out all the pips from her half, so she wouldn’t have to do it herself. Sometimes there were quite a lot.

  Do you know, in all the time we were together, she never noticed this. Or if she did notice, she never mentioned it. No, that wouldn’t have been like her. She simply can’t have noticed. I kept expecting her to cotton on, and each weekend I was just a tiny bit disappointed. I used to think, Perhaps she believes some new strain of seedless grapefruit has been invented. How does she think grapefruit reproduce?

  Maybe she’s discovered the existence of pips by now. Which of them cuts the grapefruit? I can’t imagine Oliver … oh shit.

  It’s not over. I don’t know how it’s not over, but it isn’t yet. Something’s got to be done, something’s got to be seen. I’ve gone away, they’ve gone away, but it’s not over.

  Oliver She’s stronger than me, you know. Woof! Woof, woof! And I like it. Bind me with silken cords, please.

  Oh, I see I’ve said that before. No need to scowl so. The scowl and the sigh – they’re so un-life-enhancing, I find. Gillie does a little sigh sometimes when I’m being troppo entertaining. It can be a strain, you know, sensing the expectation out there in the hushed blackness. People are either performers or audience, aren’t they? And sometimes I do wish the audience would try it out on stage just for once.