The Sense of an Ending

Hunt gave a brief nod to Colin’s attempt to undermine everything, as if morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence, something to be grown out of. Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It’s just a phase, they would insist. You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life — and truth, and morality, and art — far more clearly than our compromised elders.

‘Finn, you’ve been quiet. You started this ball rolling. You are, as it were, our Serbian gunman.’ Hunt paused to let the allusion take effect. ‘Would you care to give us the benefit of your thoughts?’

‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘What don’t you know?’

‘Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.’ He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us. ‘Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is — was — a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’

There was a silence. And no, he wasn’t taking the piss, not in the slightest.

Old Joe Hunt looked at his watch and smiled. ‘Finn, I retire in five years. And I shall be happy to give you a reference if you care to take over.’ And he wasn’t taking the piss either.

At assembly one morning, the headmaster, in the sombre voice he kept for expulsions and catastrophic sporting defeats, announced that he was the bearer of grievous news, namely that Robson of the Science Sixth had passed away during the weekend. Over a susurrus of awed mutterings, he told us that Robson had been cut down in the flower of youth, that his demise was a loss to the whole school, and that we would all be symbolically present at the funeral. Everything, in fact, except what we wanted to know: how, and why, and if it turned out to be murder, by whom.

‘Eros and Thanatos,’ Adrian commented before the day’s first lesson. ‘Thanatos wins again.’

‘Robson wasn’t exactly Eros-and-Thanatos material,’ Alex told him. Colin and I nodded agreement. We knew because he’d been in our class for a couple of years: a steady, unimaginative boy, gravely uninterested in the arts, who had trundled along without offending anyone. Now he had offended us by making a name for himself with an early death. The flower of youth, indeed: the Robson we had known was vegetable matter.

There was no mention of disease, a bicycling accident or a gas explosion, and a few days later rumour (aka Brown of the Maths Sixth) supplied what the authorities couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Robson had got his girlfriend pregnant, hanged himself in the attic, and not been found for two days.

‘I’d never have thought he knew how to hang himself.’

‘He was in the Science Sixth.’

‘But you need a special sort of slip knot.’

‘That’s only in films. And proper executions. You can do it with an ordinary knot. Just takes longer to suffocate you.’

‘What do we think his girlfriend’s like?’

We considered the options known to us: prim virgin (now ex-virgin), tarty shopgirl, experienced older woman, VD-riddled whore. We discussed this until Adrian redirected our interests.

‘Camus said that suicide was the only true philosophical question.’

‘Apart from ethics and politics and aesthetics and the nature of reality and all the other stuff.’ There was an edge to Alex’s riposte.

‘The only true one. The fundamental one on which all others depend.’

After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant. But in all other respects we judged that Robson had let us — and serious thinking — down. His action had been unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic: in other words, wrong. As for his suicide note, which according to rumour (Brown again) read ‘Sorry, Mum’, we felt that it had missed a powerful educative opportunity.