Cross Channel (25 page)

Tommies they had been called a hundred years ago, while France was being deforested for trench props. Later, when he had taught in Rennes, he and his compatriots were known as
les Rosbifs
: an affectionate tag for those sturdy, reliable if
unimaginative islanders to the north. But later still a new name was discovered:
les Fuck-offs
. Britain had become the problem child of Europe, sending its half-hearted politicians to lie about their obligations, and sending its civilian guerrillas to swagger the streets, ignorant of the language and haughty about the beer. Fuck off! Fuck off! Fuck off! The Tommies and the Roastbeefs had become the Fuck-offs.

Why should he be surprised? He had never much believed in the melioration, let alone the perfectibility of the human race; its small advances seemed to come from random mutation as much as social or moral engineering. In the tunnel of memory, Lenny Fulton’s nose-ring was given a passing tweak, to a murmur of ‘Up the Dragons, eh, cunt?’ Oh, forget it. Or rather, take a longer view: it hadn’t always been jolly old Tommies and Roastbeefs, had it? For centuries before, back to Joan of Arc (as quoted in the OED) they’d been Goddems and Goddams and Goddons, blaspheming ravagers of the happy land to the south. From Goddem to Fuck-off: not very far. And in any case, old men grumbling about rowdy youth: what a tired leitmotif that was. Enough complaining.

Except, complaint wasn’t quite right. Did he mean embarrassment, shame? A little, but not mainly. The Fuck-offs had been an offence against sentimentality, that is what he thought he meant. Judgments on other countries are seldom fair or precise: the gravitational pull is towards either scorn or sentimentality. The first no longer interested him. As for sentimentality, that was sometimes the charge against him for his view of the French. If accused, he would always plead guilty, claiming in mitigation that this is what other countries are for. It was unhealthy to be idealistic about your own country, since the least clarity of vision led swiftly to disenchantment. Other countries therefore existed to supply the idealism: they were
a version of pastoral. This argument occasionally provoked a further charge of cynicism. He did not care; he did not much care what anyone thought of him nowadays. Instead, he chose to imagine some French counterpart to himself, travelling in the opposite direction and gazing out at an unstrung hop field: an old man in a Shetland pullover entranced by marmalade, whisky, bacon and eggs, Marks and Spencer,
le fair-play
,
le phlegme
, and
le self-control
; by Devonshire cream teas, shortbread biscuits, fog, bowler hats, cathedral choirs, Xeroxed houses, double-decker buses, Crazy Horse girls, black cabs and Cotswold villages. Old fart. French old fart. Yes, but why grudge him this necessary exotic? Perhaps the true offence of
les Fuck-offs
had been the offence against this imagined Frenchman’s sentimentality.

He had scarcely noticed the journey: countryside projected behind glass, twenty minutes of tunnel, then more projected countryside. He could have got off at Lille and visited the last surviving French slag-heap: he’d always meant to do that. There had been hundreds of anthracitic mounds gleaming black in the rain when he’d first come to this part of France. As the industry was run down, the abandoned heaps grew picturesque: green, suspiciously symmetrical pyramids such as nature would never craft. Later, some technique was found for pulping or liquefying the slag - he couldn’t remember the details - and for some time now there had only been a single heap left, one stripped of its vegetation and showing its authentic blackness again. This remnant had become part of the Somme heritage trail: stroke the pit pony, study the diorama in which a black-faced miner stands behind glass like neolithic man, slalom down the slag-heap. Except that visitors were expressly forbidden to climb the heap; nor
was any piece of slag to be removed. Uniformed guards protected the mineral as if it had true rather than assumed value.

Was this history coming full circle? No, a full circle was never achieved: when history tried that trick, it missed its orbit like a spacecraft piloted by someone who’d had too many bottles of this Meursault. What history mainly did was eliminate, delete. No, that wasn’t right either. He thought about digging his vegetable patch in north London: you toiled and you lifted, and each year’s double-spitting brought something different to the surface; yet the actual size of the surface remained constant. So you only uncovered that Guinness shard, filter-tip, bottle-top and ribbed condom at the expense of digging in other stuff from previous years. And what were they planning to dig in now? Well, there was a proposal before the European Parliament to rationalise the First World War cemeteries. All terribly low-key and respectful, of course, and larded with promises of sensitive democratic consultation; but he was old enough to know how governments operated. So, at some point, perhaps after his death, but inescapably, they would delete the graveyards. It would come. A century of memory is surely enough, as one smug debater had put it. Just keep a single example, following the established precedent of the slag-heap, and plough up the rest. Who needed more?

They had passed Roissy. A yardful of indolent commuter trains told him they were nearing Paris. The old red belt of northern suburbs. More iridescent graffiti on raw concrete, as in London. Except that here some Minister of Culture had declared the taggers to be artists, working in a form worthy to be set alongside the self-expressions of hip-hop and skateboarding. Old fart. It would serve him right if it had been the same Minister who had awarded him the green stud he now wore in his buttonhole. He looked down at it: another
little vanity, like being dissatisfied with his photograph. He inspected his suit, which fitted him approximately: fashion and body profile kept moving in opposite directions. His waistband cut into an expanding stomach, while his legs had shrunk and his trousers hung loosely. People no longer carried string-bags for their shopping, but he remembered the way such bags would bulge eccentrically with vegetables, fitting their shape to the contents. This was what he had become: an old man lumpy and misshapen with memories. Except for a fault in the metaphor: memories, unlike vegetables, had a quality of cancerous growth. Each year your string-bag bulged the more, grew ever heavier, and pulled you lop-sided.

What was he, finally, but a gatherer and sifter of memories: his memories, history’s memories? Also, a grafter of memories, passing them on to other people. It was not an ignoble way of passing your life. He rambled to himself, and no doubt to others; he trundled, like an old iron-wheeled
alembic
creaking from village to village and distilling local tastes. But the best of him, the strength of him, was still able to practise his profession.

The train made a polite, gingerly entrance to the Gare du Nord. In the tunnel of memory, Lenny Fulton skimmed his nose-ring under the seat as if he had never worn it, and raced for the door. The rest of them, memories and presences, here and elsewhere, nodded awkward farewells. The train manager thanked them for travelling Eurostar and hoped to welcome them on board again soon. Bands of cleaners stood ready to occupy the train and remove from it the faint historical detritus left by this group of passengers, preparing it for another group who would nod awkward greetings and leave their own faint detritus. The train gave out a vast and muted mechanical sigh. Noise, life, a city resumed.

And the elderly Englishman, when he returned home, began to write the stories you have just read.

ALSO BY Julian Barnes

“His literary energy and daring are nearly unparalleled among contemporary English novelists.”    —
New Republic

FLAUBERT’S PARROT

An elegant work of literary imagination involving a cranky amateur scholar’s obsessive search for the truth about Gustave Flaubert,
Flaubert’s Parrot
also investigates the obsession of the detective, whose passion for the page is fed by personal bitterness—and whose life seems oddly to mirror those of Flaubert’s characters.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73136-9

A HISTORY OF THE WORLD IN 10 ½ CHAPTERS

Beginning with a revisionist account of the voyage of Noah’s ark (narrated by one of its passengers) and ending with a sneak preview of heaven, Julian Barnes’s tour de force is, in short, a complete, unsettling, and frequently exhilarating vision of the world.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73137-7

LETTERS FROM LONDON

Formidably articulate and outrageously funny,
Letters from London
is international voyeurism at its best—a peek into the British mindset from the vantage point of one of the most erudite and witty British minds.

Literature/Nonfiction/0-679-76161-6

TALKING IT OVER

Through the indelible voices of three narrators—stolid Stuart; glamorous, epigrammatic Oliver; and the cryptic beauty Gillian, who has the bad luck to love them both—Julian Barnes reconstructs the romantic triangle as a weapon whose edges cut like razor blades.

Fiction/Literature/0-679-73687-5

Vintage International

Available at your local bookstore, or call toll-free to order:

1-800-793-2665 (credit cards only).

FIRST VINTAGE CRIME/BUCK LIZARD EDITION, FEBRUARY 1997

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain in hardcover by Jonathan Cape, London, in 1996. First published in the United States in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1996.

“Interference,” “Experiment,” and “Evermore” were originally published in The New Yorker. “Gnossienne” and “Dragons” were originally published in Granta.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Barnes, Julian.
Cross channel / Julian Barnes.—1st American ed.
p. cm.
I. British—Travel—France—History—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6052.A6657C76 1996 95-44427
823′.914—dc20 CIP

Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/

Author photograph
©
Jillian Edelstein

eISBN: 978-0-307-55544-1

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