The Sense of an Ending

I spent the next few days trying to think round all the angles and corners of Adrian’s death. While I could hardly have expected a farewell letter myself, I was disappointed for Colin and Alex. And how was I to think about Veronica now? Adrian loved her, yet he had killed himself: how was that explicable? For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out — perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out — promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there’s nothing like it, is there? Agreed?

But Adrian didn’t agree. Perhaps if it had been a different woman… or perhaps not — Alex had testified to Adrian’s exalted state the last time they’d met. Had something terrible happened in the intervening months? But if so, Adrian would surely have indicated it. He was the truth-seeker and philosopher among us: if those were his stated reasons, those were his true reasons.

With Veronica, I moved from blaming her for having failed to save Adrian to pitying her: there she was, having triumphantly traded up, and look what had happened. Should I express my condolences? But she would think me hypocritical. If I were to get in touch with her, either she wouldn’t reply, or she’d somehow twist things so that I’d end up not being able to think straight.

I did, eventually, find myself thinking straight. That’s to say, understanding Adrian’s reasons, respecting them, and admiring him. He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied criticism of the rest of us? No. Or at least, I’m sure he didn’t intend it as such. Adrian might attract people, but he never behaved as if he wanted disciples; he believed in us all thinking for ourselves. Might he have ‘enjoyed life’, as most of us do, or try to, had he lived? Perhaps; or he might have suffered guilt and remorse at having failed to match his actions to his arguments.

And none of the above alters the fact that it was still, as Alex put it, a fucking terrible waste.

A year on, Colin and Alex suggested a reunion. On the anniversary of Adrian’s death, the three of us met for drinks at the Charing Cross Hotel, then went for an Indian meal. We tried to invoke and celebrate our friend. We remembered him telling Old Joe Hunt he was out of a job, and instructing Phil Dixon about Eros and Thanatos. We were already turning our past into anecdote. We recalled cheering the announcement that Adrian had won a scholarship to Cambridge. We realised that though he had been to all our homes, none of us had been to his; and that we didn’t know — had we ever asked? — what his father did. We toasted him in wine at the hotel bar and in beer at the end of dinner. Outside, we slapped one another around the shoulders and swore to repeat the commemoration annually. But our lives were already going in different directions, and the shared memory of Adrian was not enough to hold us together. Perhaps the lack of mystery about his death meant that his case was more easily closed. We would remember him all our lives, of course. But his death was exemplary rather than ‘tragic’ — as the Cambridge newspaper had routinely insisted — and so he retreated from us rather quickly, slotted into time and history.

By now I’d left home, and started work as a trainee in arts administration. Then I met Margaret; we married, and three years later Susie was born. We bought a small house with a large mortgage; I commuted up to London every day. My traineeship turned into a long career. Life went by. Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first. I think that’s far too cynical. I enjoyed my marriage, but was perhaps too quiet — too peaceable — for my own good. After a dozen years Margaret took up with a fellow who ran a restaurant. I didn’t much like him — or his food, for that matter — but then I wouldn’t, would I? Custody of Susie was shared. Happily, she didn’t seem too affected by the break-up; and, as I now realise, I never applied to her my theory of damage.

After the divorce, I had a few affairs, but nothing serious. I would always tell Margaret about any new girlfriend. At the time, it seemed a natural thing to do. Now, I sometimes wonder if it was an attempt to make her jealous; or, perhaps, an act of self-protection, a way of preventing the new relationship from becoming too serious. Also, in my more emptied life, I came up with various ideas which I termed ‘projects’, perhaps to make them sound feasible. None of them came to anything. Well, that’s no matter; or any part of my story.