PEARL
K.
BELL
henhouse; a period of svelte progress recorded in ebullient despatches
as the enemy falls back; then the beginning of a long, morale-sapping
trudge with rations getting shorter and the first snowflakes upon your
face. The enemy burns Moscow and you yield to General January....
And this is the way he talks
all the time.
287
Stuart, without a university degree, plods away at a steady if unin–
spiring job as investment banker. Through a dating service he meets
Gillian, who restores paintings for museums and is as reticent and quiet as
Oliver is noisily talkative. Early on in the story, Gillian complains:
"Wherever you turn nowadays there are people who insist on spilling
out their lives at you.... Why can't they simply get on with things?
Why do they have to
talk
about it am" (But this is exactly what Barnes
has them doing page after page.) In short order Stuart and Gillian marry,
and at their wedding Oliver falls in love with the bride. In a cleverly de–
vised campaign, he then cadges his best friend's wife, along with his
whiskey and the odd handout. Love, he now tells us, suppressing his ha–
bitual contempt for such earnest pronouncements about Life, is the one
bright truth:
Love, etc.
The proposition is simple. The world divides into two
categories: those who believe that the purpose, the function, the bass
pedal and principal melody of life is love, and that everything else -
everything
else - is merely an
etc.:
and those, those unhappy many,
who believe primarily in the
etc.
of life, for whom love, however
agreeable, is but a passing flurry of youth, the pattering prelude to
nappy-duty, but not something as solid, steadfast, and reliable as, say,
home decoration. This is the only division between people that
counts.
Suddenly the biter's bit, the cynic displaced by the man of grand
passion. With only a faint rustle of guilt, Gillian divorces Stuart and
marries Oliver. But they don't live happily ever after, in part because
Stuart literally begins to haunt them, a silent figure of reproach at their
wedding, later in a hotel room from whose window he can watch their
comings and goings after they move to France. More telling, though, is
the change in Gillian's idea of Oliver now that they are bound in
domesticity: "He seemed terribly exotic when I first met him; now he
seems less colorful." Eventually, in a desperate move - she deliberately
provokes Oliver into striking her in public - Gillian manages to appease
her ex-husband, who will now presumably leave them in tattered peace.
End of novel.
