The Sense of an Ending

And later, at home, going over it all, after some time, I understood. I got it. Why Mrs Ford had Adrian’s diary in the first place. Why she had written: ‘P.S. It may sound odd, but I think the last months of his life were happy.’ What the second carer meant when she said, ‘Especially now.’ Even what Veronica meant by ‘blood money’. And finally, what Adrian was talking about on the page I’d been permitted to see. ‘Thus, how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, a¹, a², s, v?’ And then a couple of formulae expressing possible accumulations. It was obvious now. The first a was Adrian; and the other was me, Anthony — as he used to address me when he wanted to call me to seriousness. And b signified ‘baby’. One born to a mother — ‘The Mother’ — at a dangerously late age. A child damaged as a result. Who was now a man of forty, lost in grief. And who called his sister Mary. I looked at the chain of responsibility. I saw my initial in there. I remembered that in my ugly letter I had urged Adrian to consult Veronica’s mother. I replayed the words that would forever haunt me. As would Adrian’s unfinished sentence. ‘So, for instance, if Tony…’ I knew I couldn’t change, or mend, anything now.

You get towards the end of life — no, not life itself, but of something else: the end of any likelihood of change in that life. You are allowed a long moment of pause, time enough to ask the question: what else have I done wrong? I thought of a bunch of kids in Trafalgar Square. I thought of a young woman dancing, for once in her life. I thought of what I couldn’t know or understand now, of all that couldn’t ever be known or understood. I thought of Adrian’s definition of history. I thought of his son cramming his face into a shelf of quilted toilet tissue in order to avoid me. I thought of a woman frying eggs in a carefree, slapdash way, untroubled when one of them broke in the pan; then the same woman, later, making a secret, horizontal gesture beneath a sunlit wisteria. And I thought of a cresting wave of water, lit by a moon, rushing past and vanishing upstream, pursued by a band of yelping students whose torchbeams criss-crossed in the dark.

There is accumulation. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.

Also by Julian Barnes

FICTION

Metroland

Before She Met Me

Flaubert’s Parrot

Staring at the Sun

A History of the World in 10½ Chapters

Talking It Over

The Porcupine

Cross Channel

England, England

Love, Etc

The Lemon Table

Arthur & George

Pulse

NON-FICTION

Letters from London 1990–1995

Something to Declare

The Pedant in the Kitchen

Nothing to Be Frightened Of

TRANSLATION

In The Land of Pain

by Alphonse Daudet

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