Cross Channel by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

oxen were roasted and the labourers drank their fill. They remained good-natured despite intoxication, and afterwards danced vigorously, directing their partners with the firm dexterity they daily used upon their barrows. Adèle was swung between Yorkey Tom and Straight-up Nobby. When it grew dark they set off fog signals in celebration of the day, and the sudden noise caused alarm among the fearful. The Fanal de Rouen reported the event at length, and while recalling once more the downfall of the Viaduct at Barentin, praised the Homeric stature of the English navvies and, in a benign confusion of cultures, likened them one last time to the builders of the great cathedrals.
    Ten years after the opening of the Rouen and Le Havre Railway, Thomas Brassey was officially rewarded for his many labours in France. By this time he had also built the Orléans and Bordeaux Railway, the Amiens and Boulogne, the Rouen and Dieppe, the Nantes and Caen, the Caen and Cherbourg. The Emperor Napoleon III invited him to a dinner at the Tuileries. The contractor sat near to the Empress, and was especially moved by her kindness in talking English to him for the greater part of the time. In the course of the evening the Emperor of the French ceremoniously invested Mr Brassey with the Cross of the Légion d’honneur. Upon receiving this insigne, the foreign contractor replied modestly, ‘Mrs Brassey will be pleased to have it.’

E XPERIMENT

    H IS STORY didn’t always begin in the same way. In the preferred version, my Uncle Freddy was in Paris on business, travelling for a firm which produced authentic wax polish. He went into a bar and ordered a glass of white wine. The man standing next to him asked what his area of activity was, and he replied, ‘Cire réaliste.’
    But I also heard my uncle tell it differently. For instance, he had been taken to Paris by a rich patron to act as navigator in a motor rally. The stranger in the bar (we are now at The Ritz, by the way) was refined and haughty, so my uncle’s French duly rose to the occasion. Asked his purpose in the city, he replied, ‘Je suis, sire, rallyiste.’ In a third, and it seemed to me most implausible version - but then the quotidian is often preposterous, and so the preposterous may in return be plausible - the white wine in front of my uncle was a Reuilly. This, he would explain, came from a small appellation in the Loire, and was not unlike Sancerre in style. My uncle was new to Paris, and had already ingested several glasses (the location having shifted to a petit zinc in the quartier Latin ), so that when the stranger (who this time was not haughty) asked what he was drinking, he felt that panic when a foreign idiom escapes the mind, and the further panic as an English phrase is desperately translated. The idiomatic modelhe chose was ‘I’m on the beer’, and so he said, ‘Je suis sur Reuillys.’ Once, when I rebuked my uncle for the contradictoriness of his memories, he gave a contented little smile. ‘Marvellous, the subconscious, isn’t it?’ he replied. ‘So inventive.’
    If the neighbouring drinker came in several physical forms, he likewise introduced himself variously as Tanguy, Prévert, Duhamel and Unik; once even as Breton himself. We can, at least, be sure of the date of this untrustworthy encounter: March 1928. Further, my Uncle Freddy, as even the most cautious commentators have agreed, is - was - none other than the mildly disguised ‘T.F.’, who appears in Session 5(a) of the Surrealist Group’s famously unplatonic dialogues about sex. The transcript of this session was published as an appendix to Recherches sur la sexualité, janvier 1928 - août 1932 . The notes state that my uncle was almost certainly introduced to the group by Pierre Unik, and that ‘T.F.’, contrary to the subsequent meanderings of his subconscious, was actually in Paris on holiday.
    We shouldn’t be too sceptical about my uncle’s undeserved entrée to the Surrealist