Read Online Talking It Over by Julian Barnes - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Julian Barnes
Ads: Link
all wobbly with existential peril. If she blinked I might vanish. Perhaps this was why I turned myself into some happy-snap Diane Arbus, seizing the cameraand cavorting mirthfully in search of an angle which would set off Stuart’s embryonically goitrous condition to a satirical T. Displacement activity. Pure despair, as you can see, fear of oblivion. Of course they never guessed.
It was my fault, and it wasn’t my fault. You see, I wanted a church wedding. I wanted to be best man. They couldn’t understand it at the time, and nor could I. None of us has any religious sense, there weren’t any fundamentalist kinsmen to pacify: the absence of a fellow in a frilly white frock wouldn’t have led to the thrust of disinheritance. But Ollie must have been prescient. I said I wanted to be best man, I said I wanted a church wedding. I rather went on about it. I started shouting. I came the Hamlets a bit. I was drunk at the time, if you must know.
‘Oliver,’ said Stu after a while, ‘you’re way out of order. This is our wedding. We’ve already asked you to be a witness.’
I reminded them both of the force of ancient ceremony, the ley-lines of hymeneal fortune, the gilded corrugations of the sacred text. ‘Go on,’ I urged in completion, ‘get done by a vie.’
Stuart’s plump little visage tightened as far as that was a physical possibility. ‘Oliver,’ he said, lapsing almost parodically at this solemn moment into the brute vocabulary of mercantilism, ‘we’ve asked you to be a witness and that’s our final offer.’
‘You’ll regret it,’ I yelled, a captain of industry from Mitteleurop thwarted by the Monopolies Commission. ‘You’ll regret it.’
What I mean by prescient is this. If we’d had a church wedding, she’d have done the white-lace-and-trimmings bit,the full veil-and-trail number. I might have looked at her outside the church and seen just another assembly-line bride. And then it might never have happened.
It was her face that did it. I didn’t know at the time. I thought I was just a bit hyper, like everyone else. But I was gone, sunk. Unimaginable change had happened. Fallen like Lucifer; fallen (this one is for you, Stu) like the stock market in 1929. I was also gone in the sense that I was transformed, made over. You know that story of the man who wakes up and finds he’s turned into a beetle? I was the beetle who woke up and saw the possibility of being a man.
Not that the organs of perception apprehended it at the time. As we sat there at the wedding-feast I held to the pedestrian belief that the rustling jetsam at my feet was merely the accumulation of champagne foil. (I had to insist on personally opening the little non-vintage number Stuart had secured in bulk. No-one knows how to open champagne nowadays, not even waiters. Especially waiters. The idea, I have to keep telling people, is not to make the cork go jolly pop and thus provoke an ejaculatory mousse from the bottle. No, the idea is to open it without so much as a nun’s fart. Hold the cork and turn the bottle, that’s the secret. How many times do I have to repeat it? Forget the flourish of the big white napkin, forget two thumbs on the cork’s corona, forget aiming at the bulbs in the recessed ceiling-lights. Just hold the cork and turn the bottle.) No, what blew against my ankles like tumbleweed that afternoon was not the crinkle of Mumm NV but the discarded skin of my former being, my beetle carapace, my sloughed and umber appurtenances.
Panic, that was the first reaction to whatever it was that hadjust happened. And it got worse when I realised I didn’t know where they were going for their lune de miel . (How duncical, by the way, for both French and English to retain the same phrase. You would think that one of us might scurry around for a new word instead of accepting linguistic hand-me-downs. Or perhaps that’s the point: the phrase is the same because the experience is the same. [ Honeymoon , by the
It was my fault, and it wasn’t my fault. You see, I wanted a church wedding. I wanted to be best man. They couldn’t understand it at the time, and nor could I. None of us has any religious sense, there weren’t any fundamentalist kinsmen to pacify: the absence of a fellow in a frilly white frock wouldn’t have led to the thrust of disinheritance. But Ollie must have been prescient. I said I wanted to be best man, I said I wanted a church wedding. I rather went on about it. I started shouting. I came the Hamlets a bit. I was drunk at the time, if you must know.
‘Oliver,’ said Stu after a while, ‘you’re way out of order. This is our wedding. We’ve already asked you to be a witness.’
I reminded them both of the force of ancient ceremony, the ley-lines of hymeneal fortune, the gilded corrugations of the sacred text. ‘Go on,’ I urged in completion, ‘get done by a vie.’
Stuart’s plump little visage tightened as far as that was a physical possibility. ‘Oliver,’ he said, lapsing almost parodically at this solemn moment into the brute vocabulary of mercantilism, ‘we’ve asked you to be a witness and that’s our final offer.’
‘You’ll regret it,’ I yelled, a captain of industry from Mitteleurop thwarted by the Monopolies Commission. ‘You’ll regret it.’
What I mean by prescient is this. If we’d had a church wedding, she’d have done the white-lace-and-trimmings bit,the full veil-and-trail number. I might have looked at her outside the church and seen just another assembly-line bride. And then it might never have happened.
It was her face that did it. I didn’t know at the time. I thought I was just a bit hyper, like everyone else. But I was gone, sunk. Unimaginable change had happened. Fallen like Lucifer; fallen (this one is for you, Stu) like the stock market in 1929. I was also gone in the sense that I was transformed, made over. You know that story of the man who wakes up and finds he’s turned into a beetle? I was the beetle who woke up and saw the possibility of being a man.
Not that the organs of perception apprehended it at the time. As we sat there at the wedding-feast I held to the pedestrian belief that the rustling jetsam at my feet was merely the accumulation of champagne foil. (I had to insist on personally opening the little non-vintage number Stuart had secured in bulk. No-one knows how to open champagne nowadays, not even waiters. Especially waiters. The idea, I have to keep telling people, is not to make the cork go jolly pop and thus provoke an ejaculatory mousse from the bottle. No, the idea is to open it without so much as a nun’s fart. Hold the cork and turn the bottle, that’s the secret. How many times do I have to repeat it? Forget the flourish of the big white napkin, forget two thumbs on the cork’s corona, forget aiming at the bulbs in the recessed ceiling-lights. Just hold the cork and turn the bottle.) No, what blew against my ankles like tumbleweed that afternoon was not the crinkle of Mumm NV but the discarded skin of my former being, my beetle carapace, my sloughed and umber appurtenances.
Panic, that was the first reaction to whatever it was that hadjust happened. And it got worse when I realised I didn’t know where they were going for their lune de miel . (How duncical, by the way, for both French and English to retain the same phrase. You would think that one of us might scurry around for a new word instead of accepting linguistic hand-me-downs. Or perhaps that’s the point: the phrase is the same because the experience is the same. [ Honeymoon , by the
Similar Books
