Talking It Over by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online

braindead Ollie, actually jumped to the conclusion that these outward behavioural tics were reliable indicators of reciprocated attraction. Which not too surprisingly in my view led to a misunderstanding which, while ultimately regrettable, was surely purged of culpability on the part of the hapless instructor. And the idea that I resisted her desire to vamoose from my apartment, that I was unmoved when she burst into tears – how could I, an aficionado of opera, fail to respond to lachrymosity? – is a ridiculous exaggeration. The Principal, a frightful piece of lava from a volcano long extinct, actually insisted that I relinquish domestic tuition, simperingly permitted the murky phrase sexual harassment to hover in the air between us, and indicated that in the course of the aestival recess he might be reconsidering the terms and conditions of my employment. I replied that as far as I was concernedhis terms and conditions of employment were best used as a rectal implant preferably without benefit of anaesthetic, which roused him to suggest that perhaps the whole matter would best be served by being turned over to the florid authority of Her Majesty’s Judiciary, via PC Plod, or at the very least to some banal tribunal vested with the right to dilly-dally over contretemps between master and servant. I replied that of course such decisions were entirely his prerogative, then I fell into a musing mood and sought to recall something Rosa had asked me the previous week about English social customs. Was it normal, she had enquired, for elderly gentlemen making termly investigations into your scholastic progress to indicate where you were to sit for interview by laying their hand on the sofa cushion, and then, when you sat down, failing to remove their hand? I acquainted the Principal with the burden of my reply to Rosa: I had explained that it was less a question of manners than of physiology, and that extreme decrepitude and senescence did often lead to withering of the bicep and tricep muscles, which in turn led to a breakdown in the chain of command from cerebral GHQ to courting finger. Only later, I told the now somewhat quivering Principal, only later, when Rosa had gone, did it come to mind that one or two of the other girls had made of me the same enquiry over the past twelve months. I could not quite remember their identities, but were those currently in statu pupillare to be assembled in a décontractée atmosphere – rather like, say, a police line-up – I felt sure that the whole matter could be discussed as an appendix to their weekly class ‘Britain in the 1980s’. The Principal had by this time become almost as fluorescent as the neon sign outside his academy, and we eyeballed one another in aspirit entirely lacking in camaraderie. I thought I might have lost my job, but I wasn’t sure. My bishop pinned his queen; his bishop pinned my queen. Was it to be stand-off or mutual destruction?
    All of which needs to be taken into account when assessing my brilliance that summer. As I say, I didn’t trouble Stu and Gillie about my career hiccup: a trouble shared is not, in my experience, a trouble halved, but rather a trouble broadcast on the mighty tannoy of gossip. Ahoy there, anyone wish to evacuate from a great height upon the doleful Ollie?
    Looking back, it might actually have helped that I was a bit blue. The fact that they reserved me a front row seat in the Big Top of their felicity did assist in throttling back the glooms. And what more practical way of repaying them than to ensure that their own little seedling of bonheur had time to sprout and shoot, to root and burgeon? By my dancing presence I kept the pests away. I was their aphid spray, their cat-dust, their slug-pellet.
    Playing Cupid, I should have you know, isn’t just a matter of flying around Arcadia and feeling your tiny winkle throb when the lovers finally kiss. It’s to do with timetables and street maps, cinema times and menus, money and