A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

lectures beforehand, and he could easily pass up the chance of seeing Venice recede yet again. It would still be there the following year, a centimetre or two nearer the waterline, its pinky complexion, like his own, flaking a little more.
    On deck, Tricia gazed at the city until the campanile of San Marco became a pencil-stub. She had first met Franklin three months ago, when he’d appeared on the chat-show for which she was a junior researcher. They’d been to bed a few times, but not much so far. She had told the girls at the flat she was going awaywith a schoolfriend; if things went well, she’d let on when she got back, but for the moment she was a little superstitious. Franklin Hughes! And he’d been really considerate so far, even allotting her some nominal duties so that she wouldn’t look too much like just a girlfriend. So many people in television struck her as a bit fake – charming, yet not altogether honest. Franklin was just the same offscreen as on: outgoing, jokey, eager to tell you things. You believed what he said. Television critics made fun of his clothes and the tuft of chest-hair where his shirt parted, and sometimes they sneered at what he said, but that was just envy, and she’d like to see some of those critics get up and try to perform like Franklin. Making it look easy, he had explained to her at their first lunch, was the hardest thing of all. The other secret about television, he said, was how to know when to shut up and let the pictures do the work for you – ‘You’ve got to get that fine balance between word and image.’ Privately, Franklin was hoping for the ultimate credit: ‘Written, narrated and produced by Franklin Hughes’. In his dreams he sometimes choreographed for himself a gigantic walking shot in the Forum which would take him from the Arch of Septimius Severus to the Temple of Vesta. Where to put the camera was the only problem.
    The first leg of the trip, as they steamed down the Adriatic, went much as usual. There was the Welcome Buffet, with the crew sizing up the passengers and the passengers warily circling one another; Franklin’s opening lecture, in which he flattered his audience, deprecated his television fame and announced that it was a refreshing change to be addressing real people instead of a glass eye and a cameraman shouting ‘Hair in the gate, can we do it again, love?’ (the technical reference would be lost on mast of his listeners, which was intended by Franklin: they were allowed to be snobbish about TV, but not to assume it was idiots’ business); and then there was Franklin’s other opening lecture, one just as necessary to bring off, in which he explained to his assistant how the main thing they must remember was to have a good time. Sure he’d have to work – indeed, there’d be times when much as he didn’t want to he’d be forced to shuthimself away in his cabin with his notes – but mostly he felt they should treat it as three weeks’ holiday from the filthy English weather and all that backstabbing at Television Centre. Tricia nodded agreement, though as a junior researcher she had not yet witnessed, let alone endured, any backstabbing. A more worldly-wise girl would have readily understood Franklin to mean ‘Don’t expect anything more out of me than this’. Tricia, being placid and optimistic, glossed his little speech more mildly as ‘Let’s be careful of building up false expectations’ – which to do him credit was roughly what Franklin Hughes intended. He fell lightly in love several times each year, a tendency in himself which he would occasionally deplore but regularly indulge. However, he was far from heartless, and the moment he felt a girl – especially a nice girl – needing him more than he needed her a terrible flush of apprehension would break out in him. This rustling panic would usually make him suggest one of two things – either that the girl move into his flat, or that she move out of his life –