Staring at the Sun by Julian Barnes Page A

took tea; she helped, she donated; she became, in her own mind, rather anonymous. She wasn’t miserable, though she was scarcely happy; she was well enough liked, without joining any of the village’s central conspiracies; she was, she slowly decided, rather ordinary. Michael certainly thought her ordinary. But there were worse things than that. As a child, she had sometimes thought she might become special, or at least wife to someone special; but then all children thought that, didn’t they? Extra flesh softened the angles of her face. A low, grey sky, in which single clouds could scarcely be discerned, always threatened rain.
    At times, over the years, she wondered if Michael might be having an affair. There were no lipsticked collars or furtive photographs, there was no hurried replacing of the telephone; but then, given Michael’s profession, there probably wouldn’t be. The only evidence came from the way he sometimes looked at her, as if peering down from eighteen thousand feet towards a smoking merchantman. She never asked; he never volunteered. Who could tell about another life?
    Her parents died. When she was thirty-eight her periods stopped, a matter for neither surprise nor regret: her existence, she felt, had long since finished defining itself. Did she sometimes want to scream in the middle of the night? Who didn’t? She had only to look at the lives of other women to realize things could be worse. Her first grey hair appeared, and she did nothing about it.
    Almost a year after her periods stopped she became pregnant. She made the doctor test her twice before accepting his decision, and explained the surprise this information caused her. He replied that such things were not unknown and murmured with a polite vagueness about trains to London. Jean thanked him briskly and went home to tell Michael.
    She wasn’t really aware that she was testing him, though in later years admitted to herself that she must have been. At first he was cross, in an unfamiliar way, almost cross with himself; perhaps he wanted to accuse her of having an affair but couldn’t, either because of the improbability or because of his own bad conscience.Then he said firmly that it was too late for them to have children and that she should get rid of it. Then he remarked on what a strange turn of events it had been after twenty-odd years. Then he elaborated, declaring the whole story pretty rum and chuckling at the surprise the chaps would get. Then a relaxed, bovine expression came into his face, and he went silent; perhaps he was playing out short scenes of paternity in his head. Finally, he turned to Jean and asked what she thought about it all.
    “Oh, I’m going to have the baby and leave you.” She had not intended to say anything like this at all; but somehow the words, spoken out of instinct and with no conscious courage, failed to surprise her. They seemed not to surprise Michael either; he just laughed.
    “There’s mah lass,” he said in a funny accent she would normally have found embarrassing; now, she just found it puzzling. Michael clearly didn’t understand anything about anything.
    “But I expect I’ll leave you and then have the baby. I expect I’ll do it that way round.” Again, the words failed to surprise her; now that she was rehearsing them, they seemed not merely irrefutable, but almost a banality. She felt no fear either, even though she expected Michael to be cross.
    Instead, he patted her on the arm, said “We’ll talk about it in the morning,” and started telling her about a series of clothing thefts from a local department store which had finally been cleared up. A two-way mirror had been installed in a ladies’ changing room, and an alarmed detective-sergeant, crouching in a cupboard, had apprehended a transvestite shoplifter stuffing blouses into his bra.
    She wanted to say, Look, it’s not really anything to do with you; the decision, that is. I want a more difficult life, that’s all. What