The Sense of an Ending

by Julian Barnes

  Veronica, as I’d anticipated, didn’t enjoy being treated like an insurance company. I’ll spare you the tedium of our exchanges and cut to its first practical consequence. I received a letter from Mrs Marriott enclosing what she described as ‘a fragment of the disputed document’. She expressed the hope that the next months might bring a full restitution of my legacy. I thought this showed a lot of optimism.

  The ‘fragment’ turned out to be a photocopy of a fragment. But – even after forty years – I knew it was authentic. Adrian wrote in a distinctive italic hand with an eccentric ‘g’. Needless to say, Veronica hadn’t sent me the first page, or the last, or indicated where this one came in the diary. If ‘diary’ was still the right word for a text set out in numbered paragraphs. This is what I read:

  5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does the bet take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one horse to engross the stake on the next one.

  5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers? Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these signs are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble?

  5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, a1, a2, s, v?

  5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility?

  5.8 Or is ‘link’ a false metaphor?

  5.9 But allowing that it is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on either side, or on the whole chain? But what do we mean by ‘the whole chain’? How far do the limits of responsibility extend?

  6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if Tony

  And there the photocopy – this version of a version – stopped. ‘So, for instance, if Tony’: end of the line, bottom of the page. If I hadn’t immediately recognised Adrian’s handwriting, I might have thought this cliffhanger a part of some elaborate fakery concocted by Veronica.

  But I didn’t want to think about her – not for as long as it was possible to avoid doing so. Instead I tried to concentrate on Adrian and what he was doing. I don’t know how best to put this, but as I looked at that photocopied page I didn’t feel as if I was examining some historical document – one, moreover, requiring considerable exegesis. No, I felt as if Adrian was present in the room again, beside me, breathing, thinking.

  And how admirable he remained. I have at times tried to imagine the despair which leads to suicide, attempted to conjure up the slew and slop of darkness in which only death appears as a pinprick of light: in other words, the exact opposite of the normal condition of life. But in this document – which I took, on the basis of this one page, to consist of Adrian’s rational arguing towards his own suicide – the writer was using light in an attempt to reach greater light. Does that make sense?

  I’m sure psychologists have somewhere made a graph of intelligence measured against age. Not a graph of wisdom, pragmatism, organisational skill, tactical nous – those things which, over time, blur our understanding of the matter. But a graph of pure intelligence. And my guess is that it would show we most of us peak between the ages of sixteen and twenty-five. Adrian’s fragment brought me back to how he was at that age. When we had talked and argued, it was as if setting thoughts in order was what he had been designed to do, as if using his brain was as natural as an athlete using his muscles. And just as athletes often react to victory with a curious mixture of pride, disbelief and modesty – I did this, yet how did I do this? by myself? thanks to others? or did God do it for me? – so Adrian would take you along on the journey of his thought as if he himself didn’t quite believe the ease with which he was travelling. He had entered some state of grace – but one that did not exclude. He made you feel you were his co-thinker, even if you said nothing. And it was very strange for me to feel this again, this companionship with one now dead but still more intelligent, for all my extra decades of life.

  Not just pure, but also applied intelligence. I found myself comparing my life against Adrian’s. The ability to see and examine himself; the ability to make moral decisions and act on them; the mental and physical courage of his suicide. ‘He took his own life’ is the phrase; but Adrian also took charge of his own life, he took command of it, he took it in his hands – and then out of them. How few of us – we that remain – can say that we have done the same? We muddle along, we let life happen to us, we gradually build up a store of memories. There is the question of accumulation, but not in the sense that Adrian meant, just the simple adding up and adding on of life. And as the poet pointed out, there is a difference between addition and increase.

  Had my life increased, or merely added to itself? This was the question Adrian’s fragment set off in me. There had been addition – and subtraction – in my life, but how much multiplication? And this gave me a sense of unease, of unrest.

  ‘So, for instance, if Tony …’ These words had a local, textual meaning, specific to forty years ago; and I might at some point discover that they contained, or led to, a rebuke, a criticism from my old clear-seeing, self-seeing friend. But for the moment I heard them with a wider reference – to the whole of my life. ‘So, for instance, if Tony …’ And in this register the words were practically complete in themselves and didn’t need an explanatory main clause to follow. Yes indeed, if Tony had seen more clearly, acted more decisively, held to truer moral values, settled less easily for a passive peaceableness which he first called happiness and later contentment. If Tony hadn’t been fearful, hadn’t counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval … and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn’t been Tony.

  But Tony was and is Tony, a man who found comfort in his own doggedness. Letters to insurance companies, emails to Veronica. If you’re going to bugger me about, then I’m going to bugger you about back. I carried on sending her emails more or less every other day, and now in a variety of tones, from jokey exhortations to ‘Do the right thing, girl!’, to questions about Adrian’s broken-off sentence, to half-sincere enquiries about her own life. I wanted her to feel that I might be waiting whenever she clicked on her inbox; and I wanted her to know that even if she instantly deleted my messages, I would be aware that this was what she was doing, and not surprised, let alone hurt. And that I was there, waiting. ‘Ti-yi-yi-yime is on my side, yes it is …’ I didn’t feel I was harassing her; I was just after what was mine. And then, one morning, I got a result.

  ‘I’m coming up to town tomorrow, I’ll meet you at 3 in the middle of the Wobbly Bridge.’

  I’d never expected that. I thought everything would be done at arm’s length, her methods being solicitors and silence. Maybe she’d had a change of mind. Or maybe I’d got under her skin. I’d been trying to, after all.

  The Wobbly Bridge is the new footbridge across the Thames, linking St Paul’s to Tate Modern. When it first opened, it used to shake a bit – either from the wind or the mass of people tramping across it, or both – and the British commentariat duly mocked the architects and engineers for not knowing what they were doing. I thought it beautiful. I also liked the way it wobbled. It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instabi
lity beneath our feet. Then they fixed it and it stopped wobbling, but the name stuck – at least for the time being. I wondered about Veronica’s choice of location. Also if she’d keep me waiting, and from which side she’d arrive.

  But she was there already. I recognised her from a distance, her height and stance being instantly familiar. Odd how the image of someone’s posture always remains with you. And in her case – how can I put it? Can you stand impatiently? I don’t mean she was hopping from one foot to the other; but an evident tenseness suggested she didn’t want to be there.

  I checked my watch. I was exactly on time. We looked at one another.

  ‘You’ve lost your hair,’ she said.

  ‘It happens. At least it shows I’m not an alcoholic.’

  ‘I didn’t say you were. We’ll sit on one of those benches.’

  She headed off without waiting for an answer. She was walking swiftly, and I would have had to run a few steps to get alongside her. I didn’t want to give her this pleasure, so followed a few paces behind to an empty bench facing the Thames. I couldn’t tell which way the tide was running, as a whippy crosswind stirred the water’s surface. Above, the sky was grey. There were few tourists; a rollerblader rattled past behind us.

  ‘Why do people think you’re an alcoholic?’

  ‘They don’t.’

  ‘Then why did you bring it up?’

  ‘I didn’t bring it up. You said I’d lost my hair. And it happens to be a fact that if you’re a very heavy drinker, something in the booze stops your hair falling out.’

  ‘Is that true?’

  ‘Well, can you think of a bald alcoholic?’

  ‘I’ve got better things to do with my time.’

  I glanced at her and thought: You haven’t changed, but I have. And yet, oddly, these conversational tactics made me almost nostalgic. Almost. At the same time, I thought: You look a bit whiskery. She was wearing a utilitarian tweed skirt and a rather shabby blue mackintosh; her hair, even allowing for the breeze off the river, seemed unkempt. It was the same length as forty years earlier, but heavily streaked with grey. Or rather, it was grey streaked with the original brown. Margaret used to say that women often made the mistake of keeping their hair in the style they adopted when they were at their most attractive. They hung on long after it became inappropriate, all because they were afraid of the big cut. This certainly seemed to be the case with Veronica. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

  ‘So?’ she said.

  ‘So?’ I repeated.

  ‘You asked to meet.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘You mean you didn’t?’

  ‘If you say I did, I must have.’

  ‘Well, is it yes or no?’ she asked, getting to her feet and standing, yes, impatiently.

  I deliberately didn’t react. I didn’t suggest she sit down, nor did I stand up myself. She could leave if she wanted – and she would, so there was no point trying to hold her back. She was gazing out over the water. She had three moles on the side of her neck – did I remember them or not? Each, now, had a long whisker growing out of it, and the light caught these filaments of hair.

  Very well then, no small talk, no history, no nostalgia. To business.

  ‘Are you going to let me have Adrian’s diary?’

  ‘I can’t,’ she replied, without looking at me.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘I burnt it.’

  First theft, then arson, I thought, with a spurt of anger. But I told myself to keep treating her like an insurance company. So, as neutrally as possible, I merely asked,

  ‘For what reason?’

  Her cheek twitched, but I couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a wince.

  ‘People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries.’

  ‘Your mother must have read it. And so must you, to decide which page to send me.’ No answer. Try another tack. ‘By the way, how did that sentence continue? You know the one: “So, for instance, if Tony …”?’

  A shrug and a frown. ‘People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries,’ she repeated. ‘But you can read this if you like.’

  She pulled an envelope from her raincoat pocket, handed it to me, turned, and walked off.

  When I got home, I checked through my sent emails and, of course, I’d never asked for a meeting. Well, not in so many words, anyway.

  I remembered my initial reaction to seeing the phrase ‘blood money’ on my screen. I’d said to myself: But nobody got killed. I’d just been thinking about Veronica and me. I hadn’t considered Adrian.

  Another thing I realised: there was a mistake, or a statistical anomaly, in Margaret’s theory of clear-edged versus mysterious women; or rather, in the second part of it, about men being attracted to either one sort or the other. I’d been attracted to both Veronica and Margaret.

  I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However … who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

  But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

  I didn’t open the envelope Veronica gave me for a day and a half. I waited because I knew she would expect me not to wait, to have my thumb at the flap before she was out of sight. But I knew the envelope was hardly likely to contain what I wanted: for instance, the key to a left-luggage locker where I would find Adrian’s diary. At the same time, I wasn’t convinced by her prim line about not reading other people’s diaries. I thought her quite capable of arson to punish me for ancient wrongs and failings, but not in defence of some hastily erected principle of correct behaviour.

  It puzzled me that she had suggested a meeting. Why not use Royal Mail and so avoid an encounter which she clearly found distasteful? Why this face-to-face? Because she was curious to set eyes on me again after all these years, even if it made her shudder? I rather doubted it. I ran through the ten minutes or so we had spent in one another’s company – the location, the change of location, the anxiety to be gone from both, what was said and what was unsaid. Eventually, I came up with a theory. If she didn’t need the meeting for what she had done – which was give me the envelope – then she needed it for what she had said. Which was that she had burnt Adrian’s diary. And why did she have to put that into words by the grey Thamesside? Because it was deniable. She didn’t want the corroboration of the printed-out email. If she could falsely assert that I was the one who had asked for a meeting, it wouldn’t be a stretch for her to deny that she had ever admitted arson.

  Having arrived at this tentative explanation, I waited until the evening, had my supper, poured an extra glass of wine, and sat down with the envelope. It didn’t have my name on it: perhaps more evidence of deniability? Of course I didn’t give it to him. Nor did I even meet him. He’s just an email pest, a fantasist, a bald cyberstalker.

  I could tell, from the band of grey shading to black round the edge of the first page, that here was another photocopy. What was it with her? Did she never deal in authentic documents? Then I noticed the date at the top, and the handwriting: my own, as it used to be, all those years ago. ‘Dear Adrian,’ the letter began. I read it through, got to my feet, took my glass of wine, poured it rather splashily back into th
e bottle, and made myself a very large whisky.

  How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.

  Dear Adrian – or rather, Dear Adrian and Veronica (hello, Bitch, and welcome to this letter),

  Well you certainly deserve one another and I wish you much joy. I hope you get so involved that the mutual damage will be permanent. I hope you regret the day I introduced you. And I hope that when you break up, as you inevitably will – I give you six months, which your shared pride will extend to a year, all the better for fucking you up, says I – you are left with a lifetime of bitterness that will poison your subsequent relationships. Part of me hopes you’ll have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge, yea unto the next generation and the next. See Great Art. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two (and you’re not great art, just a cartoonist’s doodle). So I don’t wish you that. It would be unjust to inflict on some innocent foetus the prospect of discovering that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism. So keep rolling the Durex on to his spindly cock, Veronica. Or perhaps you haven’t let him go that far yet?