The Sense of an Ending

I told her the story of my life. The version I tell myself, the account that stands up. She asked about ‘those two friends of yours I once met’, without, it seemed, being able to name them. I said how I’d lost touch with Colin and Alex. Then I told her about Margaret and Susie and grand-parenthood, while batting away Margaret’s whisper in my head of ‘How’s the Fruitcake?’ I talked of my working life, and retirement, and keeping busy, and the winter breaks I took — this year I was thinking of St Petersburg in the snow for a change… I tried to sound content with my life but not complacent. I was in the middle of describing my grandchildren when she looked up, drank her coffee in one draught, put some money on the table and stood up. I started to reach for my own stuff when she said,

‘No, you stay and finish yours.’

I was determined not to do anything which might cause offence, so I sat down again.

‘Well, your turn next,’ I said. Meaning: her life.

‘Turn for what?’ she asked, but was gone before I could reply.

Yes, I knew what she’d done. She’d managed to spend an hour in my company without divulging a single fact, let alone secret, about herself. Where she lived and how, whether she lived with anyone, or had children. On her wedding finger she wore a red glass ring, which was as enigmatic as the rest of her. But I didn’t mind; indeed, I found myself reacting as if I’d been on a first date with someone and escaped without doing anything catastrophic. But of course it wasn’t at all like that. After a first date you don’t sit on a train and find your head flooded with the forgotten truth about your shared sex life forty years previously. How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren’t having ‘full sex’, all the elements of it — the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust — were there anyway. And how part of me hadn’t minded not ‘going the whole way’, didn’t mind the bouts of apocalyptic wanking after I’d seen her home, didn’t mind sleeping in my single bed, alone except for my memories and a swiftly returning erection. This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, fear of an overwhelming closeness I couldn’t handle.

The next week was very quiet. I restrung my blind, descaled the kettle, mended the split in an old pair of jeans. Susie didn’t call. Margaret, I knew, would be silent unless and until I got in touch with her. And then what would she expect? Apology, grovelling? No, she wasn’t punitive; she’d always accept a rueful grin on my part as acknowledgement of her greater wisdom. But that might not be the case this time. In fact, I might not be seeing Margaret for a while. Part of me felt distantly, quietly bad about her. At first I couldn’t make any sense of this: she was the one who had told me I was now on my own. But then I had a memory from a long way back, from the early years of our marriage. Some chap at work gave a party and invited me along; Margaret didn’t want to come. I flirted with a girl and she flirted back. Well, a bit more than flirting — though still way below even infra-sex — but I put a lid on it as soon as I sobered up. Yet it left me feeling excitement and guilt in equal proportions. And now, I realised, I was feeling something similar again. It took me some time to get this straight. Eventually I said to myself: Right, so you’re feeling guilt towards your ex-wife, who divorced you twenty years ago, and excitement towards an old girlfriend you haven’t seen in forty years. Who said there were no surprises left in life?

I didn’t want to press Veronica. I thought I’d wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years.

Well, perhaps it hadn’t been. Perhaps she’d gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart? You know how you read those stories from time to time about what the papers like to call ‘late-flowering love’? Usually about some old codger and codgeress in a retirement home? Both widowed, grinning through their dentures while holding arthritic hands? Often, they still talk what seems the inappropriate language of young love. ‘As soon as I set eyes on him/her, I knew he/she was the one for me’ — that sort of line. Part of me is always touched and wants to cheer; but another part is wary and baffled. Why go through that stuff all over again? Don’t you know the rule: once bitten, twice bitten? But now, I found myself in revolt against my own… what? Conventionality, lack of imagination, expectation of disappointment? Also, I thought, I still have my own teeth.