Talking It Over by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page A

organisation. You have to be both jaunty cheerleader and lithe psychiatrist. You require the binary skill of being absent when present, and present when absent. Don’t ever tell me that Love’s dimpled pander doesn’t earn his pesetas.
    I’ll let you in on a little theory of mine. You know that Gillian’s father decamped with a nereid when his daughter was as yet but ten, or twelve, or fifteen or something – at what is falsely termed ‘an impressionable age’, as if all ages were notso characterisable. Now, I have heard tell in the sultry dens of Freudianism that the psychological scar inflicted by this act of parental desertion frequently induces the daughter, when she is of an age to start questing for a swain, to seek a substitute for the departed archetype. In other words, they fuck older men. This has, in point of fact, always struck me as behaviour verging on the pathological. For a start, have you ever looked at old men, the sort of old men who seduce young women? The roguish high-bummed stride, the fuck-me tan, the effulgent cuff-links, the reek of dry-cleaning. They snap their fingers as if the world is their wine-waiter. They demand, they expect … It’s disgusting. I’m sorry, I’ve got a thing about it. The thought of liver-spotted hands clamped on tense juve breasts – well, …hie me to the vomitorium prontol And the other point which lies beyond the reef of my comprehension: if you have been deserted by Daddy, then why react by going to bed with Daddy-substitutes, by donating la fleur de I’âge to a line-up of old gropers? Aha, the textbooks reply, you’re missing the point: what the girl is doing is seeking a replacement for the security that was roughly torn from her; she is looking for a father who won’t desert her. Fair enough, but my point is this: if you’re bitten by a pye-dog and the wound becomes infected, is it sensible behaviour to carry on hanging out with pye-dogs? I would say, on balance, not. Buy a cat, own a budgie, but don’t hang out with pye-dogs. So what does the girl do? She hangs out with pye-dogs. This is, I have to admit, one murky compartment of the female psyche which has yet to benefit from the oven-scourer of Reason. And besides which, I find it disgusting.
    How, you might ask, does this theory of mine applyto the case in point? Granted, my steatopygous chum is not of an age with the aforementioned silver-haired Lothario who rode off into the sunset with a nifty piece of under-age crumpet strapped to his roofrack, i.e., Gill’s dad. But one is forced, upon contemplating Stuart, to conclude that if he is not currently d’un certain âge , he nevertheless might as well be. Let us consider the facts of the matter. He is the owner of two medium-dark-grey suits and two dark-dark-grey suits. He is employed doing whatever it is he does by a bank whose caring dirigeants wear pin-striped underpants and will look after him until he retires. He contributes to the pension fund and has taken out life insurance. He has a half-share in a 25-year mortgage plus top-up loan. He is modest in his appetites and (sparing your blushes) somewhat attenuated in his sexuality. All that’s stopping him being welcomed into the great freemasonry of the over-fifties is that he happens to be thirty-two. And this is what Gillian senses, this is what she knows she wants. Bohemian pyrotechnics are not what marriage to Stu promises. Gillian has landed herself nothing other than the youngest older man she could find.
    But would it have been fair to point all this out as they nuzzled one another on some Anglian plage and assumed I wasn’t noticing? That’s not what friends are for. And besides, I was pleased for Stuart, whose derrière , voluminous and pensile as it was, had not spent much of its existence in the beurre . He clutched onto Gillian’s hand with alarming gratitude, as if previously girls had always insisted on his wearing oven-gloves. He seemed to lose a little of his clumsiness