The Sense of an Ending

I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life. Not just because he saw, thought, felt and acted more clearly than the rest of us; but also because of when he died. I don’t mean any of that First World War rubbish: ‘Cut down in the flower of youth’ — a line still being churned out by our headmaster at the time of Robson’s suicide — and ‘They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old.’ Most of the rest of us haven’t minded growing old. It’s always better than the alternative in my book. No, what I mean is this. When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later… later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It’s a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear.

Or, to put it another way. Someone once said that his favourite times in history were when things were collapsing, because that meant something new was being born. Does this make any sense if we apply it to our individual lives? To die when something new is being born — even if that something new is our very own self? Because just as all political and historical change sooner or later disappoints, so does adulthood. So does life. Sometimes I think the purpose of life is to reconcile us to its eventual loss by wearing us down, by proving, however long it takes, that life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

Imagine someone, late at night, a bit drunk, writing a letter to an old girlfriend. He addresses the envelope, puts on a stamp, finds his coat, walks to the postbox, shoves the letter into it, walks home and goes to bed. Most likely, he wouldn’t do all that last bit, would he? He’d leave the letter out for posting in the morning. And then, quite possibly, have second thoughts. So there’s a lot to be said for email, for its spontaneity, immediacy, truth to feeling, even its gaffes. My thinking — if that isn’t too grand a word for it — went like this: why take Margaret’s word for it? — she wasn’t even there, and can only have her prejudices. So I sent an email to Veronica. I headed it ‘Question’, and asked her this: ‘Do you think I was in love with you back then?’ I signed it with my initial and hit Send before I could change my mind.

The last thing I expected was a reply the next morning. This time she hadn’t deleted my subject heading. Her reply read: ‘If you need to ask the question, then the answer is no. V.’

It perhaps says something of my state of mind that I found this response normal, indeed encouraging.

It perhaps says something else that my reaction was to ring up Margaret and tell her of the exchange. There was a silence, then my ex-wife said quietly, ‘Tony, you’re on your own now.’

You can put it another way, of course; you always can. So, for example, there is the question of contempt, and our response to it. Brother Jack gives me a supercilious wink, and forty years later I use what charm I have — no, let’s not exaggerate: I use a certain false politeness — to get information out of him. And then, instantly, I betray him. My contempt in exchange for your contempt. Even if, as I now admit, what he actually felt towards me back then might have been just an amused lack of interest. Here comes my sister’s latest — well, there was one before him, and there’ll doubtless be another along soon. No need to examine this passing specimen too closely. But I — I — felt it as contempt at the time, remembered it as such, and delivered the feeling back.

And maybe with Veronica I was trying to do something more: not return her contempt, but overcome it. You can see the attraction of this. Because rereading that letter of mine, feeling its harshness and aggression, came as a profound and intimate shock. If she hadn’t felt contempt for me before, she’d have been bound to after Adrian showed her my words. And bound also to carry that resentment down the years, and use it to justify withholding, even destroying, Adrian’s diary.

I was saying, confidently, how the chief characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends. But what if I’m wrong? What if by some means remorse can be made to flow backwards, can be transmuted into simple guilt, then apologised for, and then forgiven? What if you can prove you weren’t the bad guy she took you for, and she is willing to accept your proof?