Nothing to Be Frightened Of by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

you are doing your duty and listening to the Test Match”), announcing his acquisition of stamps for me and matchboxes for my brother. (I had forgotten the matchboxes, remembering only that he collected orange papers.) Then there are cards from my brother and me, full of adolescent jocosity. Me to him from France: “Holiday began with a superb burst of 5 cathedrals. Tomorrow a quick burn-up of the chateaux of the Loire.” He to me from Champéry, where Dad had taken him on a school outing: “We arrived here safely, and, except for the ham sandwiches, we were satisfied with the journey.”
    I can’t date the earliest postcards, the stamps having been steamed off—doubtless for my collection—and with them the postmarks. But I note the varying ways my father signs off to his mother: “Leonard,” “Yours as ever, Leonard,” up to “Love, Leonard” and even “Love and kisses, Leonard.” On cards to my mother he is “Pip,” “Your Pip,” “As ever, Pip,” “Lots of love, Pip” and “All my love, Pip”: rising gradations from the unreachable days of the courtship which led to my existence. I follow my father through his trail of changing names. He was christened Albert Leonard, and known to his parents and siblings as Leonard. When he became a schoolmaster the Albert took over, and in common rooms he was known for forty years as “Albie” or “Albie boy”—though this might have been derived from his initials, A.L.B.—and occasionally, in satirical mode, as “Wally,” after the Arsenal full back Wally Barnes. My mother disliked both given names (doubtless Wally too), and decided to call him Pip. After Great Expectations ? But he was hardly Philip Pirrip, any more than she was Estella. During the war, when he was in India with the RAF, he changed again. I have two of his dip pens, hand-decorated along the shaft by a local artisan. A blood-red sun sets over a minaretted temple, and also over my father’s name: “Rickie Barnes 1944 Allahabad.” Where did that Rickie spring from, and go to? The following year, my father came back to England, and back to being Pip. It’s true he had a certain boyishness to him, but the name suited him decreasingly as he turned sixty, seventy, eighty . . .
    He brought home various artefacts from India: the brass tray, the inlaid cigarette box, the ivory letter-knife with the elephant on top, and the pair of collapsible side tables which often collapsed. Then there was an item which in my childhood seemed as desirable as it was exotic: the circular leather pouffe. Who else in Acton had an Indian leather pouffe? I used to take running dives at it; later, when we moved from inner to outer suburbia and I was beyond childish gestures, I used to drop my full adolescent weight down onto it, with a kind of aggressive affection. This also elicited a vaguely farty noise as the air was squeezed out through the joins in the leather. Eventually, the seams began to give way under my maltreatment, and I made the sort of discovery psychoanalysts might relish. For what Rickie Barnes had brought back from Allahabad or Madras was not, of course, a full, fat pouffe, but rather a decorated leather casing which he—now Pip again—and his wife had to stuff.
    They stuffed it with the letters of their courtship and early married years. I was an idealistic adolescent, who swerved easily into cynicism when confronted with life’s realities; this was one such moment. How could they have taken their love letters (doubtless kept in ribboned bundles), torn them into tiny pieces, and then watched other people’s fat arses hunker down on top? “They”: I meant, of course, my mother, since such practical recycling fitted my reading of her, rather than what I judged to be my father’s more sentimental nature. How to imagine that decision, and that scene? Did they tear the letters up together, or did she do it while he was at work? Did they argue, did they agree, did one of them secretly resent