The Sense of an Ending

Susie grew up, and people started calling her Susan. When she was twenty-four, I walked her up the aisle of a register office. Ken is a doctor; they have two kids now, a boy and a girl. The photos of them I carry in my wallet always show them younger than they are. That’s normal, I suppose, not to say ‘philosophically self-evident’. But you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.

Margaret’s second husband turned out to be not quite peaceable enough: he took off with someone who looked rather like her, but was that crucial ten years younger. She and I remain on good terms; we meet at family events and sometimes have lunch. Once, after a glass or two, she became sentimental and suggested we might get back together. Odder things have happened, was the way she put it. No doubt they have, but by now I was used to my own routines, and fond of my solitude. Or maybe I’m just not odd enough to do something like that. Once or twice we’ve talked of sharing a holiday, but I think we each expected the other to plan it and book the tickets and hotels. So that never happened.

I’m retired now. I have my flat with my possessions. I keep up with a few drinking pals, and have some women friends — platonic, of course. (And they’re not part of the story either.) I’m a member of the local history society, though less excited than some about what metal detectors unearth. A while ago, I volunteered to run the library at the local hospital; I go round the wards delivering, collecting, recommending. It gets me out, and it’s good to do something useful; also, I meet some new people. Sick people, of course; dying people as well. But at least I shall know my way around the hospital when my turn comes.

And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It’s been interesting to me, though I wouldn’t complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.

I survived. ‘He survived to tell the tale’ — that’s what people say, don’t they? History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.

TWO

Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.

Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire — and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records — in words, sound, pictures — you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’

I still read a lot of history, and of course I’ve followed all the official history that’s happened in my own lifetime — the fall of Communism, Mrs Thatcher, 9/11, global warming — with the normal mixture of fear, anxiety and cautious optimism. But I’ve never felt the same about it — I’ve never quite trusted it — as I do events in Greece and Rome, or the British Empire, or the Russian Revolution. Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history — even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?

When we’re young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren’t that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I’ve never much minded this myself.