Metroland by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

and planting-out and tappets, while Mary and Nigel were ‘allowed’ to do the washing-up, I lolled like a pasha in Arthur’s collapsing garage armchair with three dozen copies of the Express . ‘This America’ was the juiciest column in my connoisseur’s opinion, with at least one sex story a day; next came the film reviews, the gossip column (posh adulteries got me going), the occasional Ian Fleming serialisation, and cases of rape, incest, exposure and indecent behaviour. I lapped up this version of the life to come with the sheets tented over my knees. You couldn’t get up to tricks on these occasions; but in any case the scene was cosy rather than orgasmic. It also gave me lots of material to swap with Gould, whose father always let him read the News of the World in the hope that this would let him out of telling his son the facts of life.
    ‘Getting on all right, are we? Sitting comfortably?’
    The old fugger had deliberately sneaked in quietly. Still, there’s nothing like a surprise for making you lose your hard, and I wasn’t troubled on that score.
    ‘Sorry to interrupt, lad, but I thought you wouldn’t mind giving me a hand getting some stuff down from the loft. It’s rather difficult spotting all the nails in the floor, and I know your eyesight’s better than mine.’

8 • Sex, Austerity,
War, Austerity
    One of the things that would change, when you were Out There Living, would be the sort of notebooks you kept. You wouldn’t be writing down what you didn’t like doing, or what you’d wished you’d done but hadn’t, or what you planned to do in the future; instead, you’d be writing down what you actually did. And since you would only do what you wanted to do, your Deeds Book would read like your Fantasy Book did now, only with a heart-stopping change of tense.
    ‘You know,’ I remember saying to Toni one evening, after some (‘pulse down, tolerance and benevolence raised, sense of civic place, cerebral cleansing’) Vivaldi, ‘it’s really not a bad time to be, comment le dire , young.’
    ‘Nnnnaa?’
    ‘Well, no war. No National Service. More women around than men. No secret police. Getting away with books like Lady C . Not bad.’
    ‘You’ve never had it, Osgood.’ (Toni liked to invent misprints)
    ‘No, really. I think it’ll be great once we get out.’
    ‘I think you’re probably right. Do you see they’re calling them the Sexy Sixties already?’
    ‘Sexy, saucy Sixties.’ You almost got hard at the sound.
    ‘I suppose it all happens in cycles.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Well, sex for a start. They had a lot of it in the Twenties as well. It probably all goes in cycles, like: Twenties, Thirties,Forties, Fifties – Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity; Sixties, Seventies, Eighties, Nineties - Sex, Austerity, War, Austerity?’
    Toni cocked an eyebrow. Put like that, it didn’t sound too big a deal.
    ‘Which gives us,’ I interpreted, ‘eight years of sauciness, then a thirty-year wait, with a chance of being killed in the middle. Terrific’
    ‘Still,’ said Toni, determined not to be downcast, ‘what could we do in eight years?’
    ‘Who could we do in eight years?’
    ‘Just think, though, it could be worse. If you were born in 1915, by the time you were up to it, there’d be Austerity; after that you might get killed; and by the time you got any, you’d be forty-five.’
    ‘You’d have to get married, wouldn’t you?’
    ‘There were Army brothels.’
    ‘What if you were in the Navy?’
    It did seem as if our parents’ generation had been very unlucky.
    ‘Well, we can’t help the way their cookie crumbled.’
    ‘Do you think we ought to be nicer to them?’
    But it didn’t really work out like that. As my Complaints Book proved, every year was full of the same landlocked desires, the same gangrenous resentments, the same modes of inactivity. They say that adolescence is a dynamic period, the mind and body thrusting forward to new discoveries all the time. I