God and death: Julian Barnes

THE PAST CONDITIONAL

JULIAN BARNES

New Yorker 25 December 2006

What Mother would have wanted.

I don’t believe in God, but I miss Him. That’s what I say when the question is put. I once asked my brother, who has taught philosophy at Oxford, Geneva, and the Sorbonne, what he thought of such a statement, without revealing that it was my own. He replied with a single word: “Soppy.”

The person to begin with is my maternal grandmother, Nellie Louisa Scoltock, née Machin, who was a schoolteacher in Shropshire until she married my grandfather Bert Scoltock. Not Bertram, not Albert, just Bert: so christened, so called, so buried. He was a headmaster with a certain mechanical dash to him: a motorcycle-and-sidecar man, then the owner of a Lanchester, then, in retirement, the driver of a rather pompously sportif Triumph Roadster, with a three-person bench seat in front and two bucket seats when the top was down. By the time I knew my grandparents, they had retired and come south to be near their daughter. My grandmother went to the Women’s Institute: she pickled and bottled; she plucked and roasted the chickens and geese my grandfather raised. She was petite, outwardly unopinionated, with the thickened knuckles of old age; she needed soap to get her wedding ring off. Their wardrobe was full of home-knitted cardigans, Grandpa’s tending to feature more masculine cable-stitch. They were of that generation advised by dentists to have all their teeth out in one go. This was a normal rite of passage then: from being rickety-gnashered to fully porcelained in one leap, to all that buccal sliding and clacking, to social embarrassment and the foaming glass on the bedside table.

The change from teeth to dentures struck my brother and me as both grave and ribald. But my grandmother’s life had contained another enormous change, never alluded to in her presence. Nellie Louisa Machin had been brought up a Methodist. (The Scoltocks were Church of England.) At some point in her young adulthood, my grandmother had lost her faith and, in the smooth narration of family lore, found another: Socialism. I have no idea how strong or weak her religious faith had been, or what her family’s politics were; all I know is that she once stood for the local council as a Socialist and was defeated. By the time I knew her, in the nineteen-fifties, she had long since progressed to being a Communist. She must have been one of the few old-age pensioners in suburban Buckinghamshire who took the Daily Worker and—so my brother and I insisted to each other—fiddled the housekeeping money to send donations to the newspaper’s Fighting Fund.

In the late fifties, the Sino-Soviet Schism took place, and Communists were obliged to choose between Moscow and Peking. For most of the European faithful, this was not a difficult decision; nor was it for the Daily Worker, which received money, as well as directives, from Moscow. My grandmother, who had never been abroad in her life, who lived in genteel bungalowdom, decided for undisclosed reasons to throw in her lot with the Chinese. I welcomed her decision with self-interested enthusiasm: her newspaper was now supplemented by a monthly prayer book called China Reconstructs, posted directly from the distant continent, and she saved me the stamps from the biscuity envelopes. These stamps tended to celebrate industrial achievement—bridges and hydroelectric dams being much in evidence—or show various breeds of peaceful dove in mid-flight.

My brother did not compete for such offerings, because some years previously there had been a Stamp-Collecting Schism in our home. He had decided to specialize in the British Empire. I, to assert my difference, had announced that I would therefore specialize in a category that I named, with what seemed like logic to me, Rest of the World. The category was defined solely in terms of what my brother didn’t collect. I can no longer remember if this move was aggressive, defensive, or merely pragmatic. All I know is that it led to some occasionally baffling exchanges in the school stamp club, among philatelists only recently out of short trousers: “So, Barnesy, what do you collect?” “Rest of the World.”

My grandfather was a Brylcreem man, and the antimacassar on his Parker Knoll armchair—a high-backed number with wings for him to snooze against—was not merely decorative. His hair had whitened sooner than my grandmother’s; he had a clipped military mustache, a metal-stemmed pipe, and a tobacco pouch that distended his cardigan pocket. He also wore a chunky hearing aid, another aspect of the adult world—or, rather, the world on the farther side of adulthood—which my brother and I liked to mock. “Beg pardon?” we would shout satirically at each other, cupping our hands to our ears. Both of us used to wait and hope for the prized moment when my grandmother’s stomach would rumble loudly enough for Grandpa to be roused from his deafness with the inquiry “Telephone, Ma?” Then they would both go back to their newspapers. Grandpa, in his male armchair, his deaf-aid occasionally whistling, his pipe making a hubble-bubble noise as he sucked on it, would shake his head over the Daily Express, which described to him a world where truth and justice were constantly imperilled by the Communist Threat. In a softer, female armchair—in the red corner—Grandma would tut-tut away over her Daily Worker, which described to her a world where truth and justice, in their updated versions, were constantly imperilled by Capitalism and Imperialism.

Grandpa, by this time, had reduced his religious observance to watching “Songs of Praise” on television. He gardened; he grew his own tobacco and dried it in the garage loft, where he also stored dahlia tubers and old copies of the Daily Express, bound with hairy string. He favored my brother, taught him how to sharpen a chisel, and left him his chest of carpentry tools. I can’t remember him teaching (or leaving) me anything, though I was once allowed to watch while he killed a chicken in his garden shed. He took the bird under his arm, stroked it into calmness, then laid its neck on some kind of wringing machine screwed to the wall, and brought the handle down, while holding the bird’s body ever more tightly to control its final convulsions.

My brother remembers a ritual—never witnessed by me—that he calls the Reading of the Diaries. According to him, Grandma and Grandpa each kept diaries, and in the evenings would sometimes read out loud to each other what they had recorded five years earlier. The entries were apparently of stunning banality but frequent disagreement. Grandpa would propose, “Friday. Fine day. Worked in garden. Planted potatoes.” Grandma would reply, “Nonsense,” and counter-cite, “Rained all day. Too wet to work in the garden.” My brother also remembers that once, when he was very small, he went into Grandpa’s garden and pulled up all his onions. Grandpa beat him until he howled, then turned uncharacteristically white, confessed everything to our mother, and swore that he would never again raise his hand against a child. Actually, my brother doesn’t remember this, either the onions or the beating; he was just told the story repeatedly by our mother. And, indeed, if he were to remember it he might well be wary of it: he believes that many memories are false, “so much so that, on the Cartesian principle of the rotten apple, none is to be trusted unless it has some external support.” I am more trusting, or self-deluding, however, so shall continue as if all my memories were true.



Our mother, an only child, was christened Kathleen Mabel. She hated the Mabel, and complained about it to Grandpa, who replied that he “had once known a very nice girl called Mabel.” I have no idea about the progress or regress of her religious beliefs, though I own her prayer book, bound together with “Hymns Ancient and Modern” in soft brown suède, each volume inscribed in surprising green ink with her name and the date: “Dec: 25t.h 1932.” (I admire the punctuation: two full stops and a colon, with the stop beneath the “th” placed exactly between the two letters. You don’t get punctuation like that nowadays.) In my childhood, the three unmentionable areas were the usual ones: politics, religion, and sex. By the time I came to discuss these matters with her—the first two, that is, the third being permanently off the agenda—she was “true blue” in politics, a Tory, as I would guess she had always been. As for religion, she told me firmly that she didn’t want “any of that mumbo-jumbo” at her funeral. So when the time came, and the undertaker asked if I wanted the “religious symbols” removed from the crematorium wall, I told him that I thought this was what she would have wished.

The past conditional, by the way, is a tense of which my brother is highly suspicious. Waiting for the funeral to start, we had not an argument (which would have been against family tradition) but an exchange which demonstrated that, if I am a rationalist by my own standards, I am a fairly feeble one by his. When my mother was first incapacitated by a stroke, she happily agreed that my brother’s daughter C. should have the use of her car. This was the last in a long sequence of Renaults, the marque to which our mother had maintained a Francophiliac loyalty over four decades. So, as we waited in the crematorium car park, I was looking out for the familiar outline when, to my surprise, my niece arrived at the wheel of her boyfriend R.’s car. I observed—mildly, I am sure—“I think Ma would have wanted C. to come in her car.” My brother, just as mildly, took logical exception to this. He pointed out to me that there are the wants of the dead—i.e., things that people now dead once wanted; and there are hypothetical wants—i.e., things that people would or might have wanted. “What Mother would have wanted” was a combination of the two: a hypothetical want of the dead. It was therefore doubly questionable. “We can only do what we want,” he said, and to indulge the maternal hypothetical would be as irrational as if he were now to pay attention to his own past desires. I proposed in reply that we should try to do what our mother would have wanted (a) because we had to do something, and that something (unless we simply left her body to rot in the back garden of her bungalow) involved making choices; and (b) because we hope that when we die others will do what we in turn would have wanted.

I see my brother infrequently, and so I am often surprised by the ways in which his mind works, but he is quite genuine in what he says. In the car on the way back to London, we had an—to me—even more peculiar exchange about my niece and her boyfriend. They had been together a long time, though there was one period of estrangement, during which C. appeared with another man. My brother and his wife had found this interloper a wimp—indeed, my sister-in-law had taken a mere ten minutes to sort him out. I did not ask the manner of the sorting out. Instead, I asked, “But you approve of R.?”

“It’s irrelevant,” my brother replied, “whether or not I approve of R.”

“No, it’s not. C. might want you to approve of him.”

“On the contrary, she might want me not to approve of him.”

“But, either way, it’s not irrelevant to her whether or not you approve or disapprove.”

He thought this over for a moment. “You’re right,” he said.

You can perhaps tell from these exchanges that he is the older brother.



My mother had expressed no views about the music she wanted at her funeral. I chose the first movement of Mozart’s Piano Sonata in E-Flat Major, K. 282. It seemed to last about fifteen minutes, rather than the promised seven, and I found myself wondering at times if this was yet another Mozartean repeat, or if the crematorium’s CD player was skipping backward. The previous year, I had appeared on a radio program called “Desert Island Discs”; the Mozart I had chosen for that occasion was the Requiem. Afterward, my mother telephoned me and brought up the fact that during the program I had referred to myself as an agnostic. She told me that this was how my father used to describe himself, whereas she was an atheist. She made it sound as if being an agnostic were a wishy-washy liberal attitude, as opposed to the truth-and-market-forces nature of atheism. “What’s all this about death, by the way?” she continued. I explained that I didn’t like the idea of it. “You’re just like your father,” she replied. “Maybe it’s your age. When you get to my age, you won’t mind so much. I’ve seen the best of life anyway. And think about the Middle Ages—then life expectancy was really short, but nowadays we live seventy, eighty, ninety years. . . . People only believe in religion because they’re afraid of death.” My mother, as you can tell, was a clear-minded and opinionated woman who did not have much time for opposing views. Her dominance of the family, and her certainties about the world, made things usefully clear in childhood, restrictive in adolescence, and grindingly repetitive in adulthood.

After her cremation, I retrieved my Mozart CD from the “organist,” who, I found myself reflecting, was probably being paid his full organist’s fee for putting on and taking off a single CD track. My father, Albert Leonard Barnes, had been dispatched five years earlier, and at a different crematorium, by a working organist earning his money honestly, with Bach. Was this “what he would have wanted”? I don’t think he would have objected: he was a gentle, liberal-minded man who wasn’t much interested in music. In this, as in most things, he deferred—though not without many an ironic aside—to his wife. His clothes, the house they lived in, the car they drove—such decisions were hers. When I was an unforgiving adolescent, I judged him weak. Later, I found him compliant. Later still, clear in his views, but mostly disinclined to argue for them.

He died a modern death, in hospital, without his family, attended in his final hours by a nurse, after medical science had prolonged his life to the point where the terms on which it was being offered were unimpressive. My mother had visited him a few days previously, but had then gone down with shingles. On that final visit, she had said to him (quite characteristically), “Do you know who I am? Because the last time I was here you didn’t know what I was.” My father had replied (just as characteristically), “I think you’re my wife.”

I drove my mother to the hospital, where we were given a black plastic bag and a creamy holdall. She sorted through both very quickly, knowing exactly what she wanted and what was to be left for—or, at least, with—the hospital. It was a shame, she said, that he’d never got to wear the big brown slippers with Velcro fastenings that she’d got him a few weeks earlier; mysteriously to me, she took these home with her. She had a horror of being asked if she wanted to see her husband’s body. When Grandpa died, she told me, Grandma had been “useless” and had left her to do everything. But at the hospital Grandma, out of some wifely or atavistic need, had insisted on seeing the body, and could not be dissuaded. My mother had accompanied her. When Grandpa’s corpse was shown to them, Grandma turned to her daughter and said, “Doesn’t he look awful?”

The first time I went to church with my family—for a cousin’s wedding—I watched in amazement as my father dropped to his knees in the pew, then covered his forehead and eyes with one hand. Where did that come from, I asked myself, before—as far as I remember—making some halfheartedly imitative gesture of piety, which probably involved a certain amount of squinting around or through my fingers. It was one of those moments when your parents surprise you—not because you have learned something new about them but because you have discovered a further area in which you are ignorant. Was my father merely being polite? Did he worry that if he simply plonked himself down he would be taken for a Shelleyan atheist? I have no idea.

When my mother died, the undertaker, from a nearby village, asked if the family wanted to see the body. I said yes; my brother no. Actually, he said (to me, when I passed on the question), “Good God, no. I agree with Plato on that one.” I didn’t have the text he was referring to immediately in mind. “What did Plato say?” I asked. “That he didn’t believe in seeing dead bodies.” When I turned up at the undertaker’s—which was more like the rear extension to a haulage business—the funeral director said apologetically, “I’m afraid she’s only in the back room at the moment.” I looked at him questioningly, and he expanded: “She’s on a trolley.” I found myself replying, “Oh, she didn’t stand on ceremony,” though I couldn’t claim to know whether she would, or wouldn’t, have wanted to do so in the present circumstances.

She lay in a small, clean room with a cross on the wall; she was indeed on a trolley, with the back of her head toward me as I went in, thus avoiding an instant face-to-face. She seemed, well, very dead: eyes closed, mouth slightly open, and more so on the left side than on the right, which was just like her—she used to hang a cigarette in the right corner of her mouth and talk out of the other side. I tried to imagine her awareness, such as it might have been, at the moment of extinction. This had occurred a couple of weeks after she was moved from hospital to a residential home (a term that used to make me wonder what an “unresidential home” might be). She was quite demented by then, a dementia of alternating kinds: one in which she believed herself still in control of things, and constantly ticked off the nurses for imaginary mistakes; the other, acknowledging that she had lost control, in which she became a child again, with all her dead relatives still alive, and what her mother or grandmother had just said of pressing importance. Before her dementia, I had frequently found myself switching off during her solipsistic monologues; suddenly, she had become painfully interesting. I kept wondering where all this stuff was coming from, how her brain was producing this counterfeit reality. Nor could I feel any resentment now that she wanted to talk only about herself.

I was told that two nurses had been with her at the moment of death, and were engaged in turning her over when she had just “slipped away.” I like to imagine—because it would have been characteristic, and people should die as they have lived—that her last thought was addressed to herself, and was something like Oh, get on with it, then. But this is sentimentalism—what she would have wanted (or, rather, what I would have wanted for her)—and perhaps, if she was thinking anything, she was imagining herself as a child again, being turned in some fretful fever by her long-dead mother.

At the undertaker’s, I touched her cheek several times, then kissed her at the hairline. No, she didn’t look awful: there was nothing overpainted about her, and her hair, she would have been pleased to know, was looking good. (“Of course, I never dye it—it’s all natural,” she once boasted to my brother’s wife.) Was she so cold because she’d been in the freezer, or because the dead are naturally cold? Wanting to see her dead came more, I admit, from writerly curiosity than from filial feeling, but there was a bidding farewell to be done, for all my long exasperation with her. “Well done, Ma,” I murmured. She had, indeed, done the dying “better” than my father. He had endured a series of small, then larger, strokes, his decline stretching over years; she had gone from first attack to death altogether more efficiently and speedily. When I picked up her bag of clothes from the residential home, it felt heavier than I thought it should. First I discovered a full bottle of Harveys Bristol Cream, and then, in a square cardboard box, an untouched birthday cake, shop-bought by village friends who had visited her on her final, eighty-second birthday.

My father had died at the same age. I had always imagined that his would be the harder death for me, because I had loved him the more, whereas at best I could only be irritatedly fond of my mother. But it worked the other way round: what I had expected to be the lesser death proved more complicated, more hazardous. His death was just his death; her death was their death. And the subsequent house-clearing turned into an exhumation of what we had been as a family—though we were really one only for about the first thirteen or fourteen years of my life. Now, for the first time, I went through my mother’s handbag. Apart from the usual stuff, it contained a cutting from the Guardian listing the twenty-five greatest postwar English batsmen (though she never read the Guardian) and a photograph of our childhood dog, Max, a golden retriever. It was inscribed on the back in an unfamiliar hand, “Maxim, le chien,” and presumably taken by one of my father’s French assistants back in the early nineteen-fifties. Max had either run away or, more probably, been stolen, shortly after the picture was taken, and, wherever he had gone, he must have been dead himself for fifty-odd years. Though my father would have liked it, my mother would never have another dog after that.



Given this family background of fading religious belief, I might, as part of adolescent rebelliousness, have become devout. But my father’s agnosticism and my mother’s atheism were never fully expressed, let alone presented as exemplary attitudes, so perhaps their discreet non-beliefs didn’t seem to justify revolt. I might, I suppose, if it had been possible to choose, have become Jewish. I went to a school where, out of about nine hundred boys, a hundred and fifty or so were Jewish. On the whole, they seemed cleverer, and both socially and sartorially more advanced; they had better shoes (one contemporary even had a pair of elastic-sided Chelsea boots) and they knew about girls. They also got extra holidays, which seemed an advantage. And it would have usefully shocked my parents, who had the low-level anti-Semitism of their time and class. (As the credits rolled at the end of a TV play and a name like Aaronson occurred, one or the other of my parents might comment wryly, “Another Welshman.”) Not that they behaved any differently to my Jewish friends, one of whom was named, rightly, it seemed to me, Alex Brilliant. He was reading Wittgenstein at sixteen, and writing poetry that rippled with ambiguities—double, triple, quadruple, like heart bypasses. He took a scholarship to Cambridge, after which I lost sight of him; but I would occasionally think of him down the years, assuming that he had forged ahead in one of the liberal professions. I was over fifty when I learned that for more than half my life I had been thinking of someone as alive who was in fact dead. Brilliant had killed himself in his twenties, for no reason my informant could determine.

So I had no faith to lose, only a resistance (which felt more heroic than it was) to the mild regimen of God-referring that an English education entailed: Scripture lessons, morning prayers and hymns, and an annual Thanksgiving service at St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Giving thanks for what? Life, another year, exam results, the founding of the school?) And that was it, apart from the role of second shepherd in a nativity play at my primary school. I was never baptized, never sent to Sunday school. I have never been to a normal church service in my life. I do baptisms, marriages, funerals. I am constantly going into churches, but for architectural reasons, and—more widely—to get a sense of what Englishness once was.

My brother had slightly more liturgical experience than I did. As a Wolf Cub, he went to a couple of regular church services. “I seem to recall being mystified, an infantile anthropologist among the anthropophagi,” he writes. When I ask about his own de-Christianization, he replies, “Loss of faith? I never lost it, since I never had it to lose. But I realized it was all a load of balls on 7 Feb 1952, at 9.00. Mr. Ebbets, headmaster of Derwentwater Primary School, announced that the King had died, that he had gone to eternal glory and happiness in Heaven with God, and that in consequence we were all going to wear black armbands for a month. I thought that there was something fishy there, and How Right I Was. No scales fell from my eyes, there was no sense of loss, of a gap in my life, etc. etc. Nor have I ever had any religious inklings. I hope,” he adds, “that this story is true. It is certainly a very clear and lasting memory; but you know what memory is.”

My brother would have been just nine at the time of George VI’s death. My own final letting go of the remnant, or possibility, of religion happened at a more advanced age. As an adolescent, hunched over some book or magazine in the family bathroom, I used to tell myself that God couldn’t possibly exist, because the notion that he might be watching me with disapproval while I masturbated was absurd; even more absurd was the notion that all my dead ancestors might be lined up and watching, too. This wasn’t exactly a strong argument, more a mild yet convincing feeling. And it was, of course, self-interested: the thought of Grandma and Grandpa observing what I was up to would have seriously put me off my stroke.

As I record this now, however, I wonder why I didn’t think through more of the possibilities. Why did I assume that God, if He was watching, necessarily disapproved of how I was spilling my seed? Why did it not occur to me that, if the sky did not fall in as it witnessed my zealous and unflagging self-abuse, it was perhaps because the sky did not think it a sin? Nor did I have the imagination to conceive of my dead ancestors equally smiling on my actions: Go on, my son, enjoy it while you’ve got it; there won’t be anything like that when you’re a disembodied spirit; we wish we’d done more of it in our time, so have another one for us. Perhaps Grandpa would have taken his celestial pipe out of his mouth, given me an uncharacteristic wink, and murmured complicitly, “I once knew a very nice girl called Mabel.”