The Sense of an Ending

Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

And finally I remembered the postcard I’d sent Adrian as a holding response to his letter. The fake-cool one about everything being fine, old bean. The card was of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. From which a number of people every year jump to their deaths.

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time’s many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully. Nowadays I might try to get under Veronica’s skin, but I would never try to flay it from her bit by bloody bit.

It was not, in retrospect, cruel of them to warn me that they were an item. It was just the timing of it, and the fact that Veronica had seemed to be behind the whole idea. Why had I reacted by going nuclear? Hurt pride, pre-exam stress, isolation? Excuses, all of them. And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made. Even so, forty years on, I sent Veronica an email apologising for my letter.

Then I thought more about Adrian. From the beginning, he had always seen more clearly than the rest of us. While we luxuriated in the doldrums of adolescence, imagining our routine discontent to be an original response to the human condition, Adrian was already looking farther ahead and wider around. He felt life more clearly too — even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle. Compared to him, I had always been a muddler, unable to learn much from the few lessons life provided me with. In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse — a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred — about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded — and how pitiful that was.

Average, that’s what I’d been, ever since I left school. Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British motorists a few years ago which showed that ninety-five per cent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of averages, we’re most of us bound to be average. Not that this brought any comfort. The word resounded. Average at life; average at truth; morally average. Veronica’s first reaction to seeing me again had been to point out that I’d lost my hair. That was the least of it.

The email she sent in reply to my apology read: ‘You just don’t get it, do you? But then you never did.’ I could hardly complain. Even if I found myself pathetically wishing she’d used my name in one of her two sentences.

I wondered how Veronica had retained possession of my letter. Did Adrian leave her all his stuff in his will? I didn’t even know if he’d made one. Perhaps he’d kept it inside his diary, and she’d found it there. No, I wasn’t thinking clearly. If that’s where it had been, Mrs Ford would have seen it — and then she certainly wouldn’t have left me five hundred pounds.

I wondered why Veronica had bothered to answer my email, given that she affected to despise me completely. Well, maybe she didn’t.

I wondered if Veronica had punished Brother Jack for passing on her email address.

I wondered if, all those years ago, her words ‘It doesn’t feel right’ were simply a politeness. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to sleep with me because the sexual contact we’d had during the time she was deciding just wasn’t enjoyable enough. I wondered if I’d been awkward, pushy, selfish. Not if, how.

Margaret sat and listened through the quiche and salad, then the pannacotta with fruit coulis, as I described my contact with Jack, the page of Adrian’s diary, the meeting on the bridge, the contents of my letter and my feelings of remorse. She put her coffee cup back on its saucer with a slight click.

‘You’re not still in love with the Fruitcake.’

‘No, I don’t think I am.’

‘Tony, that wasn’t a question. It was a statement.’