Metroland by Julian Barnes Page B

the sort of dissatisfaction you get when you’ve achieved something rather than the sort you get when you’ve failed. I wondered whether the pleasure of striving didn’t exceed the pleasure of achievement, of victory, of orgasm. Maybe the ultimate in sexual fulfilment would prove to be karezza ? It is, I used to tell Toni from the sanctuary of virginity, only our competitive, games-playing society which makes us head noisily for the white tape of orgasm.

2 • Demandez Nuts
    Still, I don’t know how important all that stuff is.
    Paris. 1968. Annick. A delightful Breton name, isn’t it? The -ick, by the way, is pronounced with a long i, to rhyme with pique, which isn’t appropriate, at least not at first.
    I’d gone to Paris to do some research for part of a thesis I’d undertaken so that I could get a grant and go to Paris. A completely normal sense of priorities among post-graduates. At the time, friends of mine were loafing their way – constructively or otherwise – through most of the capital cities of Europe, after developing furious interests in matters which could only be thoroughly investigated where the relevant papers happened to be. In my case, it was ‘The Importance and Influence of British Styles of Acting in the Paris Theatre 1789–1850’. You always need to shove at least one big date (1789, 1848, 1914) into your title, because it looks more efficient, and flatters the general belief that everything changes with the eruption of war. Actually, as I rapidly discovered, things do change: thus, in the years immediately after 1789, the British Styles of Acting had very little Importance and Influence in the Paris Theatre, for the simple reason that no British actor in his right mind would have risked his skin over there while the Revolution was on. I suppose I should have guessed this. But to tell the truth, the only thing I knew about British acting in France when I invented the subject was that Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson in 1827. She, of course, as it turned out, was Irish; but then I was only applying for money for sixmonths in Paris, and the financial authorities weren’t an over-sophisticated bunch.
    ‘ Can-can, frou-frou, vin blanc , French knickers,’ was Toni’s comment when I told him I was off to Paris. He was going to Morocco for his de-Anglification, and was already racking up spoolfuls of tortured hisses and grunts on his Grundig.
    ‘Kif. Hashish. Lawrence of Arabia. Dates,’ was my reply, though I felt it lacked a certain edge.
    But it wasn’t really like that. I’d already been to Paris many times before 1968, and didn’t go with any of the naïve expectations Toni was greedy to attribute to me. I’d already done the Paree side of it in my late teens: green Olympia Press paperbacks, ocular loitering from boulevard cafés, thrusting leather G-strings and pouches in a Montparnasse simulation-dive. I’d done the city-as-history bit while a student, I-spying the famous in Père Lachaise, and coming back exultant over an unexpected find: the catacombs at Denfer-Rochereau, where post-Revolutionary history and personal glooming could be sweetly combined as you wandered among vaults of transplanted skeletons, sorted and stacked by bone rather than body: neat banks of femurs and solid cubes of skulls suddenly rose up before the groping light of your candle. I’d even, by this time, stopped sneering at my exhausted compatriots who clogged the cafés round the Gare du Nord, waving fingers to indicate the number of Pernods they wanted.
    I chose Paris because it was a familiar place where I could, if I wanted to, live alone. I knew the city; I knew the language; I wouldn’t be harassed by the food or the climate. It was too large to have a menacingly hospitable colony of English émigrés. There would be little to stop me concentrating on myself.
    I was lent a flat up in Buttes-Chaumont (the clanking 7- bis Métro line: Bolivar, Buttes-Chaumont, Botzaris) by a