They must have caught the plane, because they turned up at the same hotel, an oasitic place with snowy Atlas mountains rising behind sunlit tangerine groves. Walking to the bougain-villaea-draped main building on the first morning, he had noticed the girl sitting at a table with water-colour equipment strewn in front of her. His curiosity about what she might have lost at Casablanca airport was forcefully reactivated. Special factor-X sun-cream? Her list of local contacts? More than that, surely: something which had made her livid and her companion hot-cheeked. A contraceptive item whose absence would imperil the holiday? Insulin capsules? Colonic depth-charges? Henna rinse? He became retrospectively troubled on her behalf and quietly obsessed with the whole incident. He began inventing her life for her, filling the psychological distance between raging traveller and calm water-colourist. For several days his speculations became more baroque as he protracted his ignorance like a temptation. At last, his fear of losing what the girl knew - and what she doubtless failed to value at its true worth - became too much. He approached her one afternoon, banally praised her work, and then, with an awful, tense casualness, as if some chance of happiness were being wagered, asked what she had lost at Casablanca. ‘Oh,’ she had replied in a sharp, dismissive voice, ‘my boarding card.’ He had wanted to bark with pleasure, but merely stood there like some desperate, pop-eyed fiancé, uncertain which delighted him the more: the excess of his misprisions or the primness of the truth. The following day she and her companion departed, as if they had fulfilled their function - which for him at least they had.
He looked out at the French landscape, idly attending to its sparse novelties. Thin drainage ditches and sleepy canals. Hilltop water-towers, some shaped like egg-cups, others like golf tees. Pencil-sharpened church spires instead of square English towers. A First World War cemetery waving a high tricolor. But his mind kept pulling back. Agadir: yes, that other misprision, half a century ago, when he had taught as an assistant in Rennes. That year of his life was now compressed in his brain to a few anecdotes whose final narrative form had long since been arrived at. But there was something else, not really an anecdote, and therefore likely to be a truer memory. His pupils had been friendly - or at any rate had treated him with humorous curiosity - except for one particular boy. He couldn’t summon a name, a face, an expression; all that remained was the boy’s place - back row, slightly right of centre - in the small, oblong classroom. At some point, and how it came about he no longer knew, the pupil had remarked point-blank that he hated the English. Asked why, he said because they had killed his uncle. Asked when, he said in 1940. Asked how, he said that the Royal Navy had treacherously attacked the French fleet at Mers-el-Kebir. You killed my uncle: you. To the young assistant d’anglais, the hatred and its cause had come as a complicating historical shock.
Mers-el-Kebir. Just a minute, that wasn’t anywhere near Agadir. Mers-el-Kebir was near Oran: Algeria, not Morocco. Old fool. Old fart. You made the local connection but you missed the overall structure. Except here he hadn’t even made the local connection. Hardened in your least acceptable characteristics. He rambled, even to himself. His train of thought had jumped the points, and he hadn’t even noticed.
Someone handed him a hot towel; his face drained it to a cold damp rag. Start again. 1940: start there. Very well. 1940, he could safely say, was seventy-five years ago. His generation had been the last to have a memory of the great European wars, to have that sort of history entwined into its family. Exactly a hundred years ago his grandfather had set off for the First World War. Exactly seventy-five years ago his father had set off for the Second World War. Exactly fifty years ago, in 1965, he had begun to wonder if, for him, it would be third time lucky. And so it had proved: throughout his lifetime, his great, historical, European luck had held.
A hundred years ago, his grandfather had volunteered and been shipped out to France with his regiment. A year or two later he had come back, invalided out with trench foot. Absolutely nothing of his time there had survived. There were no letters from him, no buff field-postcards, no bar of silky ribbons snipped from his tunic; not a button, not a souvenir piece of Arras lace had been passed down. Grandma had developed into a zealous thrower-out in her later years. And this lack of the slightest souvenir was complicated by another layer of mistiness, of concealment. He knew, or thought he knew, or at least had believed for half his life, that his grandfather would talk freely about his enlistment, training, departure for France, and arrival there; but beyond this point he would not, or could not, go. His stories always stopped at the front line, leaving others to imagine frantic charges across the cloying mud towards a merciless greeting. Such taciturnity had seemed more than understandable: correct, perhaps even glamorous. How could you put the carnage of that time into mere words? His grandfather’s silence, whether imposed by trauma or by heroic character, had been appropriate.
But one day, after both his grandparents were dead, he had asked his mother about her father’s terrible war, and she had sapped his convictions, his story. No, she had said, she didn’t know where in France he had served. No, she didn’t think he had been anywhere near the front line. No, he’d never used the phrase ‘over the top’. No, he hadn’t been traumatised by his experiences. So why, then, did he never talk about the war? His mother’s answer had come after a lengthy pause for judgment. ‘He didn’t talk about it because I don’t think he thought it was interesting.’
And there it was. Nothing to be done about it now. His grandfather had joined the Missing of the Somme. He had come back, it was true; it was just that he had lost everything later. His name might as well be chiselled on the great arch at Thiepval. No doubt there was some regimental listing of him in a livre d’or, documentation of that absent strip of medals. But this would not help. No act of will could recreate that putteed and perhaps mustachioed figure of 1915. He was gone beyond memory, and no plump little French cake dipped in tea would release those distant truths. They could only be sought by a different technique, the one in which this man’s grandson still specialised. He, after all, was meant to thrive on knowing and not knowing, on the fruitful misprision, the partial discovery and the resonant fragment. That was the point de départ of his trade.
Tommies they had been called a hundred years ago, while France was being deforested for trench props. Later, when he had taught in Rennes, he and his compatriots were known as les Rosbifs: an affectionate tag for those sturdy, reliable if unimaginative islanders to the north. But later still a new name was discovered: les Fuck-offs. Britain had become the problem child of Europe, sending its half-hearted politicians to lie about their obligations, and sending its civilian guerrillas to swagger the streets, ignorant of the language and haughty about the beer. Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! The Tommies and the Roastbeefs had become the Fuck-offs.
Why should he be surprised? He had never much believed in the melioration, let alone the perfectibility of the human race; its small advances seemed to come from random mutation as much as social or moral engineering. In the tunnel of memory, Lenny Fulton’s nose-ring was given a passing tweak, to a murmur of ‘Up the Dragons, eh, cunt?’ Oh, forget it. Or rather, take a longer view: it hadn’t always been jolly old Tommies and Roastbeefs, had it? For centuries before, back to Joan of Arc (as quoted in the OED) they’d been Goddems and Goddams and Goddons, blaspheming ravagers of the happy land to the south. From Goddem to Fuck-off: not very far. And in any case, old men grumbling about rowdy youth: what a tired leitmotif that was. Enough complaining.
Except, complaint wasn’t quite right. Did he mean embarrassment, shame? A little, but not mainly. The Fuck-offs had been an offence against sentimentality, that is what he thought he meant. Judgments on other countries are seldom fair or precise: the gravitational pull is towards either scorn or sentimentality. The first no longer interested him. As for sentimentality, that was sometimes the charge against him for his view of the French. If accused, he would always plead guilty, claiming in mitigation that this is what othe
r countries are for. It was unhealthy to be idealistic about your own country, since the least clarity of vision led swiftly to disenchantment. Other countries therefore existed to supply the idealism: they were a version of pastoral. This argument occasionally provoked a further charge of cynicism. He did not care; he did not much care what anyone thought of him nowadays. Instead, he chose to imagine some French counterpart to himself, travelling in the opposite direction and gazing out at an unstrung hop field: an old man in a Shetland pullover entranced by marmalade, whisky, bacon and eggs, Marks and Spencer, le fair-play, le phlegme, and le self-control; by Devonshire cream teas, shortbread biscuits, fog, bowler hats, cathedral choirs, Xeroxed houses, double-decker buses, Crazy Horse girls, black cabs and Cotswold villages. Old fart. French old fart. Yes, but why grudge him this necessary exotic? Perhaps the true offence of les Fuck-offs had been the offence against this imagined Frenchman’s sentimentality.
He had scarcely noticed the journey: countryside projected behind glass, twenty minutes of tunnel, then more projected countryside. He could have got off at Lille and visited the last surviving French slag-heap: he’d always meant to do that. There had been hundreds of anthracitic mounds gleaming black in the rain when he’d first come to this part of France. As the industry was run down, the abandoned heaps grew picturesque: green, suspiciously symmetrical pyramids such as nature would never craft. Later, some technique was found for pulping or liquefying the slag - he couldn’t remember the details - and for some time now there had only been a single heap left, one stripped of its vegetation and showing its authentic blackness again. This remnant had become part of the Somme heritage trail: stroke the pit pony, study the diorama in which a black-faced miner stands behind glass like neolithic man, slalom down the slag-heap. Except that visitors were expressly forbidden to climb the heap; nor was any piece of slag to be removed. Uniformed guards protected the mineral as if it had true rather than assumed value.
Was this history coming full circle? No, a full circle was never achieved: when history tried that trick, it missed its orbit like a spacecraft piloted by someone who’d had too many bottles of this Meursault. What history mainly did was eliminate, delete. No, that wasn’t right either. He thought about digging his vegetable patch in north London: you toiled and you lifted, and each year’s double-spitting brought something different to the surface; yet the actual size of the surface remained constant. So you only uncovered that Guinness shard, filter-tip, bottle-top and ribbed condom at the expense of digging in other stuff from previous years. And what were they planning to dig in now? Well, there was a proposal before the European Parliament to rationalise the First World War cemeteries. All terribly low-key and respectful, of course, and larded with promises of sensitive democratic consultation; but he was old enough to know how governments operated. So, at some point, perhaps after his death, but inescapably, they would delete the graveyards. It would come. A century of memory is surely enough, as one smug debater had put it. Just keep a single example, following the established precedent of the slag-heap, and plough up the rest. Who needed more?
They had passed Roissy. A yardful of indolent commuter trains told him they were nearing Paris. The old red belt of northern suburbs. More iridescent graffiti on raw concrete, as in London. Except that here some Minister of Culture had declared the taggers to be artists, working in a form worthy to be set alongside the self-expressions of hip-hop and skateboarding. Old fart. It would serve him right if it had been the same Minister who had awarded him the green stud he now wore in his buttonhole. He looked down at it: another little vanity, like being dissatisfied with his photograph. He inspected his suit, which fitted him approximately: fashion and body profile kept moving in opposite directions. His waistband cut into an expanding stomach, while his legs had shrunk and his trousers hung loosely. People no longer carried string-bags for their shopping, but he remembered the way such bags would bulge eccentrically with vegetables, fitting their shape to the contents. This was what he had become: an old man lumpy and misshapen with memories. Except for a fault in the metaphor: memories, unlike vegetables, had a quality of cancerous growth. Each year your string-bag bulged the more, grew ever heavier, and pulled you lop-sided.
What was he, finally, but a gatherer and sifter of memories: his memories, history’s memories? Also, a grafter of memories, passing them on to other people. It was not an ignoble way of passing your life. He rambled to himself, and no doubt to others; he trundled, like an old iron-wheeled alembic creaking from village to village and distilling local tastes. But the best of him, the strength of him, was still able to practise his profession.
The train made a polite, gingerly entrance to the Gare du Nord. In the tunnel of memory, Lenny Fulton skimmed his nose-ring under the seat as if he had never worn it, and raced for the door. The rest of them, memories and presences, here and elsewhere, nodded awkward farewells. The train manager thanked them for travelling Eurostar and hoped to welcome them on board again soon. Bands of cleaners stood ready to occupy the train and remove from it the faint historical detritus left by this group of passengers, preparing it for another group who would nod awkward greetings and leave their own faint detritus. The train gave out a vast and muted mechanical sigh. Noise, life, a city resumed.
And the elderly Englishman, when he returned home, began to write the stories you have just read.
ALSO BY Julian Barnes
“His literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled among contemporary English novelists.” —New Republic
FLAUBERT’S PARROT
An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert, Flaubert’s Parrot also investigates the obsession of the detective, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73136-9
A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10 ½ CHAPTERS
Beginning with a revisionist account of the voyage of Noah’s ark (narrated by one of its passengers) and ending with a sneak preview of heaven, Julian Barnes’s tour de force is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73137-7
LETTERS FROM LONDON
Formidably articulate and outrageously funny, Letters from London is international voyeurism at its best—a peek into the British mindset from the vantage point of one of the most erudite and witty British minds.
Literature/Nonfiction/0-679-76161-6
TALKING IT OVER
Through the indelible voices of three narrators—stolid Stuart; glamorous, epigrammatic Oliver; and the cryptic beauty Gillian, who has the bad luck to love them both—Julian Barnes reconstructs the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.
Fiction/Literature/0-679-73687-5
Vintage International
Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:
1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).
FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BUCK LIZARD EDITION, FEBRUARY 1997
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 in hardcover by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1996. First published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.
“Interference,” “Experiment,” and “Evermore” were originally published in The New Yorker. “Gnossienne” and “Dragons” were originally published in Granta.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Barnes, Julian.
Cross channel / Julian Barnes.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
I. British—Travel—France—History—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A6657C76 1996 95-44427
823′.914—dc20 CIP
Random House Web address: h
ttp://www.randomhouse.com/
Author photograph © Jillian Edelstein
eISBN: 978-0-307-55544-1
v3.0
Julian Barnes, Cross Channel
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