9 Retrospectively imagined memorials: Cross Channel and The Lemon Table

He was gone beyond memory, and no plump little French cake dipped in tea would release those distant truths.

CC, 206

Barnes has written two volumes of loosely connected short stories.¹ The first, Cross Channel (1995), is explicitly focused on a topic often associated with Barnes and his writing, the relationship between England and France. The second, The Lemon Table (2004), engages a number of themes that striate Barnes’s work, such as ageing and death. It is a collection that treats in fictional form issues raised by his later memoir Nothing to Be Frightened of.

Cross Channel assembles stories of the British and Irish in France across modern history. Its closing story ‘Tunnel’ concludes by explaining that all the stories have been written by an ‘elderly Englishman’ who has returned from France on the Eurotunnel train in 2015. This writer stands as a surrogate for the older Barnes, an author who has apparently taken elements of his train journey as imaginative platforms on which to develop the earlier stories. Thus the writer encounters modern-day marauding football-fan ‘Dragons’ (the title of the seventh story) and sees from the train a First World War cemetery in France that prompts him to think of the inscriptions of names on Lutyens’s Somme memorial arch at Thiepval, reminding the reader of ‘Evermore’. It transpires that a woman in the compartment is a Master of Wine, which recalls the story ‘Hermitage’, about two British women who take over a French vineyard, but also the end of ‘Experiment’, which mentions a female Master of Wine who seemingly provides the key to the narrator’s supposition about his Uncle Freddy’s Parisian tale of sex and the surrealists. Passing reference is additionally made to both cycling and cricket, the subjects of other stories.

Underlining this connection between the final story and the writing of the others is the theme of memory. This is of course one of Barnes’s principal touchstones throughout his writing: as Oliver rather tricksily says in Talking It Over, ‘If you remember your past too well you start blaming your present for it. Look what they did to me, that’s what caused me to be like this, it’s not my fault’ (TO, p. 15). In certain respects, a similar charge might be made for andagainst the heritage culture of England, England, but it is the twists of memory that figure most prominently in Barnes’s writings. He explains, for example, why he thinks that present circumstances affect how we remember the past: ‘It’s as if some adjusting mechanism is going on all the time which you’re unaware of, which is fitting your past and adjusting it to some version of how you’ve turned out, which you weren’t even aware needed a propaganda department to justify.’² In ‘Experiment’, one explanation for this is at least implied: ‘when I rebuked my uncle for the contradictoriness of his memories, he gave a contented little smile. “Marvellous, the subconscious, isn’t it?” he replied. “So inventive” ’ (CC, p. 46).

Suspicious as ever of the reconstructive workings of the mind, Barnes in ‘Tunnel’ uses the phrase ‘retrospectively imagined’ (CC, p. 197) instead of ‘remembered’ to exemplify its Wordsworthian attention to the ‘tunnel of memory’ (CC, p. 210). Barnes is thus interested in connecting the stories across history as imagined reconstructions that have little pretension to ‘truth’ but, as always with Barnes, do have claims to revealing truths. Such a perspective is personified in the ageing writer: ‘This was what he had become: an old man lumpy and misshapen with memories. Except for a fault in the metaphor: memories, unlike vegetables, had a quality of cancerous growth. Each year your string-bag bulged the more, grew ever heavier, and pulled you lop-sided’ (CC, p. 210). The conceit of the story collection is underlined here: ‘What was he finally but a gatherer and sifter of memories: his memories, history’s memories?’ (CC, p. 210). This is the case not simply with the relationship the writer has with the preceding narratives, but with the stories’ own thematic interest in retrospective imagination. For example, ‘His story didn’t always begin in the same way’ is the opening line of ‘Experiment’, one of the more unusual stories in Cross Channel (CC, p. 45). The line could encapsulate Barnes’s approach to questions of history, and also memory. In ‘Melon’, Barnes’s cricket story, the General admits that he has trouble recalling the names of all the players in his team: ‘Normally he remembered Wood. It was Etheridge whom he forgot. Etheridge or Edmeads. Once he had forgotten himself. He had the other ten names but could not seize the eleventh. How could this happen, that a man forgets himself ?’ (CC, p. 86). This final question rings throughout Barnes’s work in which people are repeatedly unsure or distrustful of their memories of themselves. If memory forges identity, forgetfulness feeds imagination but detaches the individual from life; losing the past precipitates an inclination towards death.

In ‘Evermore’, Miss Moss queries the concept of a ‘collective memory’ and wonders about the ambiguity inherent in the notion of the passing on of memories. She conjectures whether the young could have memory grafted on to guarantee the inscriptions that confidently say soldiers will be remembered ‘For all future time’ (CC, p. 100). As in all his writing, Barnes avoids sentimentality here but the story’s poignancy rests on the knowledge that all specificity will be forgotten, and the living memory of the war will perish in a general feeling of unease without detail: ‘The war would be levelled to a couple of museums, a set of demonstration trenches, and a few names, shorthand for pointless sacrifice’ (CC, p. 110). The thematic play with memorials and memory also invokes the trauma of shell-shock, which is embodied in Miss Moss’s memories of her short marriage to the shrapnel-wounded Denis: ‘he could never remember what had been happening. He had guilt and pain, but no specific memory of what he felt guilty about’ (CC, p. 101).

‘Evermore’ is as much about death as it is about memory, and Cross Channel begins with a perspective that looks forward to termination. ‘Interference’ is a story about an English composer in France that starts with the sentence ‘He longed for death’ (CC, p. 3). This interest in the individual’s emotional relationship with life’s endpoint illustrates the main theme of the second volume, The Lemon Table, which assembles stories first published between 1996 and 2003. While ‘Evermore’ conjectures whether ‘man is only a clerical error corrected by death’ (CC, p. 98), The Lemon Table demonstrates that Barnes wishes to focus in his later work on two understandings of ‘the end of life’. The first is the death of youth, the second the death of old age (NF, p. 42). When he was himself only approaching a pensionable age he wrote the stories of The Lemon Table, which concerns rage, old age, and death. At publication, Barnes, born in 1946, was still under 60. When he was the other side of that milestone he published in 2008 the ‘memoir’, as the book jacket calls it, that serves as a non-fiction companion piece to The Lemon Table. A book about books, anecdotes, and thoughts about final things, as well as Barnes’s own experiences of mortality, this meditation on the second death is pointedly entitled Nothing to Be Frightened of, echoing Arthur’s first memory at the very start of Arthur & George, when he is shown his grandmother’s corpse, perhaps ‘to impress upon the child that death was nothing to be feared’ (AG, p. 3).

That frightening ‘Nothing’, which Barnes says is the most exact, true, and meaningful word according to Renard (NF, p. 100 and p. 164), was first discussed as ‘Big D’ in Metroland. It is not so much the experience of dying that Christopher Lloyd fears in that novel, as what comes after: ‘I wouldn’t mind Dying at all, I thought, as long as I didn’t end up Dead at the end of it’ (M, p. 54). While in Metroland Christopher is for the most part privately tormented by any thought of eternal oblivion, at The Lemon Table death-talk is de rigueur. Taking his cue from the lemon’s supposed representation of death in Chinese symbolism, Barnes’s book is so called because he has demanded of himself that each story talks about the shortcomings of old age in the expectation of an unhappy ending. We find in the final story, ‘The silence’, that the original Lemon Table was a convivial discussion group that Sibelius attended in a Helsinki restaurant in the 1920s, where it was ‘obligatory – to talk about death’ (LT, p. 206; NF, pp. 23–4).

Thus obliged to discuss death, Barnes’s collection features several stories in which there are artists contemplating mortality, about which their art seems to provide little solace: ‘“so much work, talent and courage, and then everything is over…To be misunderstood, and then to be forgotten, such is the artist’s fate” ’ (LT, p. 209), thinks Barnes’s octogenarian Sibelius. The story ends with the composer calling for a lemon, having earlier declared that he wishes to have the slow movement of his Fourth Symphony played at his funeral and ‘to be buried with a lemon clasped in the hand which wrote those notes’ (LT, p. 211). ‘The silence’, evoking also Hamlet’s dying words, has the last word on death in Barnes’s second collection, charting connections between art and life, or silence and death, through music, just as ‘Interference’, about a fictionalised Delius trying to tune into BBC broadcasts of his compositions across la manche, stands as a suitably resonant opening to Cross Channel, providing an excellent metaphor for the place of (even English) art in French life and the miscommunications that pepper all Barnes’s stories, whether on the subject of the Anglo-Saxons and the Gauls, men and women, or the old and the young.

Another of The Lemon Table’s leitmotifs is sounded by the reference to Sibelius’s Fourth Symphony. It seems the composition was referred to by one critic as a ‘bark bread symphony’, which alluded ‘to the days when the poor used to adulterate flour with finely ground bark’ (LT, p. 211). This is to say that for the critic Sibelius’s music ‘expressed a sullen and unpleasant view of life in general’ (LT, p. 211). This resonates because ‘Bark’ is the title of one of the earlier stories in the collection: the narrative of a gourmand who gambles on outliving his peers, and subsequently finds sorrow and bitterness which result in a loss of appetite for life. Here again bark represents at best a resigned and at worst a sour negativity as a man for whom food has been a lifelong passion chooses and chews bark while others drink ‘life-shortening concoctions’ (LT, p. 129) that he thinks should mean they die before him. At the tale’s conclusion, he finally gnaws miserably on a piece of bark while listening to his adult son’s ‘prattle’ and ‘idiocies’ (LT, p. 136) and the man who has previously enjoyed reflecting ‘contentedly on the folly of those around him’ (LT, p. 123) dies with his linen nightcap in his hand, the equivalent of Sibelius’s lemon.

Cross Channel has ten tales, each with a single-word title. The Lemon Table has only four one-word entitled stories among its eleven: ‘Bark’, plus ‘Hygiene’, ‘Vigilance’, and ‘Appetite’. Intriguingly, ‘Bark’, itself referenced in ‘The silence’, mentions the title of each of the other three stories: ‘the populace should be prompted to vigilance’ (LT, p. 128); ‘At the start it was simply a matter of hygiene’ (LT, p. 132);‘He chewed on a sliver of tree bark, but without appetite’ (LT, p. 136). These are thus cross-referencing stories that riff and play on some shared themes and phrases, but neither of Barnes’s collections was conceived as an homogeneous whole like A History of the World.

‘Bark’ is set in nineteenth-century France and focuses on an elderly widower, Delacour, who falls for a young maid called Jeanne at the new bathhouse. He has employed Jeanne for sex, in which he has read it is healthy to indulge moderately. The bathhouse has been ‘built as a matter of hygiene and general beneficence’ by 40 subscribers, one of whom urges Delacour to ‘renounce’ his sexual arrangement; but Delacour is too much in love. ‘Nothing in those experiences of my youth advised me of the possibility that carnal delight might lead to feelings of love. I imagined – no, I was sure – that it was always the other way round’ (LT, p. 131). That Jeanne is the illegitimate daughter of the other subscriber who has urged his abstinence is also not something Delacour discovers until the man dies and Jeanne is pregnant. Delacour, who has spent his later life studying the law, concludes that the world is making ‘less sense than it should’ (LT, p. 135). Reason has not brought happiness: his gambling, which others thought a vice, ‘seemed the application of a logical scrutiny to human behaviour’, his gourmandism, which others saw as indulgence, ‘seemed a rational approach to human pleasure’ (LT, p. 136). Delacour has found that his rational approach to life is insufficient: ‘we make such certainties as we can’ (LT, p. 132) but nature and appetite make other choices. At the end of applying the rational exercise of free will to life, Delacour has no appetite left and he is discovered dead, having seemingly lost the will or the reason to live. Observing the inadequacy of his rationalism, he has concluded that, while he may have chosen how to approach his love of gambling, food and Jeanne, these were not desires that he chose to have. The corresponding section of Nothing to Be Frightened of conjectures that while ‘we might think we are free in acting as we want, we cannot determine what it is that we want’, and Barnes quotes Einstein’s comment that ‘a Being endowed with higher insight and more perfect intelligence … would smile about man’s illusion that he was acting according to his own free will’ (NF, p. 117).³ Here as elsewhere the later memoir illuminates the earlier stories, not explaining them but revealing their concerns in fresh light.

Like ‘Bark’, ‘The revival’ is a story of renunciation and last love which also asks ‘whether the heart drags in sex, or sex drags in the heart’ (LT, p. 94). Barnes’s protagonist is the writer Turgenev, whose viewpoint he has already noted in Something to Declare as ‘after the age of forty, the basis of life is renunciation’ (SD, p. 211; cf. NF, pp. 89–90). In ‘The Revival’, Turgenev is again ‘a connoisseur of the if-only’, and therefore a writer who favours the ‘past-conditional’ (LT, p. 95). Barnes here anatomises the fiction writer’s preference for the conditional tense in opposition to the appetite of the twenty-first-century world for instant gratification and constant non-fictional actuality. In his story he also draws this contrast between the mystery and imaginings of ‘love’ and the numbers and consummation of ‘sex’.

In Nothing to Be Frightened of Barnes reconsiders his own choice of the conditional in the light of his philosopher brother’s suspicion and rejection of it. His brother sees the conditional as simply hypothetical, making the indulgence of it seem against reason. Barnes himself feels that the hypothetical – imagining what might or might have been the case – is a useful guide to action. Because indulging the conditional encourages us to act as we think others might want (instead of merely doing what we want), there is also an ethical dimension that impinges on the social contract’s faith in reciprocity. So, when the undertaker asks Barnes if the religious symbols should be removed from the walls of the crematorium in which his mother lies, he answers that ‘I thought that this is what she would have wanted’ (NF, p. 5). His brother perceives this as a ‘hypothetical want of the dead’, doubly objectionable to the rationalist because it is both conjectural and passé: out of date because attributed to someone who no longer has preferences, let alone preferences upon which it might be possible to speculate. Barnes believes his brother thinks we can only do what we want and ‘to indulge the maternal hypothetical was as irrational as if he were to pay attention to his own past desires’ (NF, p. 6).

The indulgence of past and passed desires is one of the subjects of ‘The revival’ and part of the storywriter’s stock-in-trade. Here, the past-conditional has a particular appeal of safety: ‘The alluring hypothetical does not refer to the future’ though Turgenev also ‘had another tactic: that of hurrying into the future in order to confirm the impossibility of love in the present’ (LT, p. 93). Avoiding reality, avoiding the present, is also what the novelist does, inasmuch as the hypothetical is stock-in-trade. But for Barnes this is the way in which the fiction writer approaches the truth, in imitation of the fabulist and the seeming safety of the merely conjectural: ‘art, of course, is only a beginning, only a metaphor’ (NF, p. 57). Barnes argues that the novel as a genre ‘tells beautiful, shapely lies which enclose hard, exact truths’ (NF, p. 78), suggesting that, through the suspension of disbelief, writer and reader are better able to explore aspects of life and death by avoiding a preoccupation with facts. Barnes’s understanding of ‘truth’ is here not absolutist (cf. his discussion of religion: ‘A beautiful, shapely story telling hard, exact lies’ (NF, p. 78)) but relativist, perceiving art as telling ‘more truth than anything else’, and truth as something that ‘can save us – up to a point – that’s to say, enlighten us, move us, elevate us, even heal us’ (NF, p. 75). Barnes also realizes that this is not a rationalist truth – it is an emotional one – which he explores through fiction. That he does this studiously and allusively has somewhat ironically led to the common view that he is a writer who inspires limited emotional engagement, tending to talk about love and art without eliciting the reader’s affective investment in his often cerebral stories.⁴

Another facet to Barnes’s interest in truth as opposed to fact is once more his take on memory. While his brother Jonathan, the philosopher, is portrayed as distrusting the ‘essential truth’ of memories per se, Barnes distrusts the ways in which we colour them (NF, p. 29).⁵ Some of this dispute hinges on different interests in objective and subjective truth. For Barnes as a novelist he ‘is less interested in the exact nature of truth, more in the nature of the believers, the manner in which they hold their beliefs, and the texture of the ground between the competing narratives’ (NF, p. 240). Barnes gives examples from three generations of his family’s disputes over memory and truth, forgetting neither the links between memory and identity (see NF, pp. 140–1) nor the ends towards which truth may be put: ‘fiction… uses lies to tell the truth and truth to tell lies’ (NF, p. 240). Barnes consequently revisits his understanding of what the novelist does and concludes that fictionalising involves recording and manipulating different versions of stories he doesn’t remember, echoing the start of England, England, where Martha Cochrane replies ‘I don’t remember’ to the question ‘“What’s your first memory?” ’ (EE, p. 3)

In line with this view of art, on The Lemon Table’s final page Sibelius avers in ‘The silence’ that ‘one may express the truth in more than one way’ (LT, p. 212), which is inevitably linked to different ways of imagining, and indeed of remembering: ‘My brother distrusts most memories. I do not mistrust them, rather I trust them as workings of the imagination, as containing imaginative as opposed to naturalistic truth. Ford Madox Ford could be a mighty liar, and a mighty truth-teller, at the same time, and in the same sentence’ (NF, pp. 244–5). The novelist tells non-remembered, unremembered or misremembered stories, which none the less express truths. As Barnes remarks of the elderly English protagonist of the final story in Cross Channel, who has written ‘the stories you have just read’: ‘What was he, finally, but a gatherer and sifter of memories: his memories, history’s memories? Also, a grafter of memories, passing them on to other people’ (CC, p. 210).

Arguably, the novelist in Barnes’s world seems to work like the twice-told legend of the gunshots that are ‘extra’ in ‘The story of Mats Israelson’, and which tourists pay for in order ‘to awaken the echoes’ in the passages of the Falun mines (LT, p. 31 and p. 47). Many characters in The Lemon Table, from Sibelius in his Silence and Turgenev in his Revival, try to reawaken the echoes, usually unsuccessfully, just as Barnes reawakens stories from other writers and artists in order to mine the truths hidden between different versions or pastiches of the past. Or, as Barnes quotes Stravinsky as saying: ‘“I wonder if memory is true, and I know that it cannot be, but that one lives by memory nonetheless and not by truth” ’ (NF, p. 228).

‘The story of Mats Israelson’, set in late nineteenth-century Sweden, is indebted to a real-life incident that was also used by the German Romantic E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822) in his tale ‘The mines of Falun’. This is a gothic narrative of a young sailor lured to the mines and later to his death, on the morning of his wedding, by an apparition of an old man who died in the mines on St John’s Day over a hundred years ago and ‘always prophesied that some calamity would happen as soon as the miners’ impulse to work ceased to be sincere love for the marvellous metals and ores’.⁶ The sailor’s bride returns annually to the mines on her catastrophic wedding day, which is also St John’s Day, and fifty years after the cave-in that killed her betrothed sees his corpse brought to the surface, beautifully preserved. Hoffmann’s story was inspired, though the name is not mentioned, by the legend of Mats Israelson, whose preserved body was discovered in the Falun mines and identified by his would-be bride of several decades earlier. Barnes uses the story as the centerpiece of his protagonist Anders’s attempts to engage the interest of Barbro Lindwall, but Anders tells the story of Mats Israelson badly and she has ‘little imagination’, though she ‘would like to visit Falun’ (LT, pp. 31–2). When Barbro decides not to meet Anders on one occasion for the sake of their reputations, their unspoken love is left to languish for many years, not least because both are married to others, and Anders resolves that like Mats he will ‘remain frozen, preserved, at this moment’ (NF, p. 35). Many years later, dying of cancer, he calls Barbro to his death bed in Falun to see what remains of an idealized and unexplored love. However, as in the Hoffmann story where the petrified young man ‘crumbles into dust’ in the arms of his aged, dying bride, Anders and Barbro discover their love cannot bear exposure to the light of day. In the case of Anders and Barbro this is because their mutual attraction cannot overcome their inability to communicate: he cannot convey his love as he could not get across the story of Mats Israelson and Barbro leaves him thinking that he has summoned her to him for sex on the false pretext that he is dying.

Despite the collection’s overall sardonic take on the book’s working title, ‘rage and age’, several stories also embrace more sanguine attitudes and assert equanimity if not defiance before the dying of the light (NF, p. 181). ‘Knowing French’ is composed of a series of letters written over three years to ‘Barnes’ by an octogenarian lady. Geoffrey Braithwaite writes in Flaubert’s Parrot about the reader– writer relationship: ‘You expect something from me too, don’t you? It’s like that nowadays. People assume they own part of you, on no matter how small an acquaintance; while if you are reckless enough to write a book, this puts your bank account, your medical records, and the state of your marriage irrevocably into the public domain’ (FP, p. 86). Flaubert disagreed, and so does Barnes but he has imagined a ‘correspondence’ after this fashion in ‘Knowing French’. The story also responds to Virginia Woolf ’s essay ‘On not knowing French’ from 1929. In the essay Woolf argues that to know French one needs to be familiar not just with the language but with the idioms, nuances, and living vitality of its cultural usage. Woolf admires the writing of Conrad in English, as a second language speaker, but observes that it is deeply idiosyncratic, whereas ‘to know a language one must have forgotten it’. It is not enough to parrot the words and phrases.

Forgetting and misremembering are never far from the surface of Barnes’s stories and this is true also of ‘Knowing French’. On 18 February 1986, Sylvia Winstanley, after the synchronicity of reading Flaubert’s Parrot and then observing a caged grey parrot through someone’s window, writes to a Dr Barnes from her perch in Pilcher House. On 4 March, in response to one of Barnes’s missing letters, like those of Juliet Herbert to Flaubert, Winstanley asks ‘So why did you say you were a doctor?’, suggesting she has read Flaubert’s Parrot as the work of Barnes not Braithwaite. She is a methodical reader, like Braithwaite, and has come to the ‘B’ section of her library after reading through the ‘A’ section, and is seemingly confusing ontological planes at the age of ‘rising eighty-one’ (LT, p. 139). Winstanley refers to the coming together in her experience of the real and the written about parrot as ‘Coincidence? Of course’ (LT, p. 140). She addresses Barnes as the narrator of Flaubert’s Parrot and gently admonishes him for Braithwaite’s disbelief in coincidence, which she argues is a simple occasional veridical fact of life and that his objection can apply only to the attribution of (divine or supernatural) intention to coincidence (FP, p. 66). Her parrot on a perch has prompted her to ‘chase the writer’ (FP, p. 12), in her own way, and Winstanley in her old folkery (a term also used by Oliver in Talking It Over, TO, p. 96) is concerned like Braithwaite about how we seize time: ‘A parrot’s perch catches the eye. We look for the parrot. Where is the parrot? We still hear its voice; but all we can see is a bare wooden perch. The bird has flown’ (FP, p. 60). What remains is the memory and the question: is a memory something you have or something you’ve lost?⁷

In the interstices of Sylvia’s letters we find responses to communications from Barnes that echo his perspective in Nothing to Be Frightened of or statements in his novels where the principal consolation for mortality is the oxymoronic weak promise of temporary immortality offered by art. Sylvia observes Christopher Lloyd’s comment from Metroland quoted above, ‘You write that you are not afraid of dying as long as you don’t end up dead as a result’ (LT, p. 153), but adds that her own problems are manifold. Not only is shesurrounded by the dying and those who ask ‘Am I dead yet?’, but she is also without anyone to join her at the proverbial Lemon Table, because ‘There’s nobody here to talk to about death’ (LT, p. 153). Barnes therefore fits this bill but is also someone who, unlike her fellow ‘incarcerees’ (LT, p. 141), is neither deaf nor mad.

In a book that is against serenity, a comparatively timorous counterpart to Sylvia and her courage while staring death in the face is the protagonist at the centre of The Lemon Table’s first story (LT, p. 21). ‘A short history of hairdressing’ concerns an ‘ageing geezer… afraid of sex’ whose name, like Jean Serjeant’s son in Staring at the Sun, is Gregory. The story follows him from youth to senior citizenship through his experiences at the ‘Barnet Shop’ (LT, p. 18), chronicling the changes in his hirsuteness, which ends with ‘long mattressy’ eyebrows but ‘thinning hair he’d soon have to comb more carefully’ (LT, p. 16, p. 21). The story also records changes in his life, which amount to little that he considers important because he is simply ‘one who stayed at home, went to work, and had his hair cut. His life, he admitted, had been one long cowardly adventure’ (LT, p. 20). In the third part of his story, Gregory, with two grown-up children, has been married longer than his hairdresser has been alive, though the story intimates that Gregory has hardly lived at all. Now, his one act of rebellion, or ‘timid victory’, is to decline after forty years the rear view of his ‘short back and sides’, achieving at least a ‘Revolt against the tyranny of the bloody mirror’ (LT, p. 22, p. 3).

Challenging the signs of ageing and the promise of death may be small rebellions, but that visceral and primal revolt against the conditions of the universe is the fundamental driving force of Barnes’s second story collection, and also of his later memoir. Barnes records how his very being is repulsed by the inevitability of total, eternal annihilation: it is a certainty in which all wants will be merely the future wishes of the dead and sooner or later forgotten. The Lemon Table does not despair at this however, because observing the capacity to exercise intelligence and humour forces us to realise that the only way to live is as if we were not going to die while forcing ourselves to sit at the lemon table periodically to reflect on the necessity and indeed the advantages of mortality, like Sylvia Winstanley, who puts forward as good a case for death and dying as Barnes is able to muster anywhere in Nothing to Be Frightened of:

Main reasons for dying: it’s what others expect when you reach my age; impending decrepitude and senility; waste of money – using up inheritance – keeping together brain-dead incontinent bag of old bones; decreased interest in The News, famines, wars, etc.; fear of falling under total power of Sgt. Major; desire to Find Out about Afterwards (or not?).

(LT, p. 151)

That ‘Barnes’ in his stories or memoir cannot elsewhere provide a superior answer is not a shortcoming, merely a necessity for a nonbeliever. This is chiefly because, as he notes, death happens to us for no other reason than because the universe happens to us. Sylvia Winstanley also adumbrates her main reasons for not dying, but can think of nothing more than rebelling against the expectations of some and avoiding distress to others. She concludes that, distressing though it may be for all involved, there are more reasons for dying than not, and so death ought to be nothing to be frightened of.

It remained for Barnes’s 2005 novel Arthur & George to explore this point at length in fiction the year after The Lemon Table was published. This is a novel about differences between thinking, believing, and knowing: themes that equally apply to detection and discussion at The Lemon Table. Arthur begins the novel as a child outside a room wanting to go in where his deceased grandmother lies and ‘to see’ death. He becomes in later life a child who still wants to see the dead as he strives to prove his mother’s existence beyond the grave using spiritualism. After his demise, the story ends with another ‘innocent’, George, also wanting ‘to see’ into death, peering not through a door ajar but through binoculars at a distant stage, beyond a drawn-aside curtain.