The Sense of an Ending

by Julian Barnes

  Still, enough of the courtesies. I have just a few precise things to say to each of you.

  Adrian: you already know she’s a cockteaser, of course – though I expect you told yourself she was engaged in a Struggle With Her Principles, which you as a philosopher would employ your grey cells to help her overcome. If she hasn’t let you Go All The Way yet, I suggest you break up with her, and she’ll be round your place with sodden knickers and a three-pack, eager to give it away. But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you. I leave a precise diagnosis to the headshrinkers – which might vary according to the day of the week – and merely note her inability to imagine anyone else’s feelings or emotional life. Even her own mother warned me against her. If I were you, I’d check things out with Mum – ask her about damage a long way back. Of course, you’ll have to do this behind Veronica’s back, because boy is that girl a control freak. Oh, and she’s also a snob, as you must be aware, who only took up with you because you were soon to have BA Cantab after your name. Remember how much you despised Brother Jack and his posh friends? Is that who you want to run with now? But don’t forget: give her time, and she’ll look down on you just as she looks down on me.

  Veronica: interesting, that joint letter. Your malice mixed with his priggishness. Quite a marriage of talents. Like your sense of social superiority versus his sense of intellectual superiority. But don’t think you can outsmart Adrian as you (for a time) outsmarted me. I can see your tactics – isolate him, cut him off from his old friends, make him dependent on you, etc., etc. That might work in the short term. But in the long? It’s just a question of whether you can get pregnant before he discovers you’re a bore. And even if you do nail him down, you can look forward to a lifetime of having your logic corrected, to breakfast-table pedantry and stifled yawns at your airs and graces. I can’t do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.

  Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.

  Tony

  Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk. I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

  At first, I thought mainly about me, and how – what – I’d been: chippy, jealous and malign. Also about my attempt to undermine their relationship. At least I’d failed in this, since Veronica’s mother had assured me the last months of Adrian’s life had been happy. Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

  Next I thought about her. Not about how she might have felt on first reading the letter – I would come back to this – but why she had handed it over. Of course, she wanted to point out what a shit I was. But it was more than this, I decided: given our current stand-off, it was also a tactical move, a warning. If I tried to make any legal fuss about the diary, this would be part of her defence. I would be my very own character witness.

  Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

  And finally I remembered the postcard I’d sent Adrian as a holding response to his letter. The fake-cool one about everything being fine, old bean. The card was of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. From which a number of people every year jump to their deaths.

  The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time’s many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully. Nowadays I might try to get under Veronica’s skin, but I would never try to flay it from her bit by bloody bit.

  It was not, in retrospect, cruel of them to warn me that they were an item. It was just the timing of it, and the fact that Veronica had seemed to be behind the whole idea. Why had I reacted by going nuclear? Hurt pride, pre-exam stress, isolation? Excuses, all of them. And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made. Even so, forty years on, I sent Veronica an email apologising for my letter.

  Then I thought more about Adrian. From the beginning, he had always seen more clearly than the rest of us. While we luxuriated in the doldrums of adolescence, imagining our routine discontent to be an original response to the human condition, Adrian was already looking farther ahead and wider around. He felt life more clearly too – even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle. Compared to him, I had always been a muddler, unable to learn much from the few lessons life provided me with. In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse – a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred – about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.

  Average, that’s what I’d been, ever since I left school. Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British motorists a few years ago which showed that ninety-five per cent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of averages, we’re most of us bound to be average. Not that this brought any comfort. The word resounded. Average at life; average at truth; morally average. Veronica’s first reaction to seeing me again had been to point out that I’d lost my hair. That was the least of it.

  The email she sent in reply to my apology read: ‘You just don’t get it, do you? But then you never did.’ I could hardly complain. Even if I found myself pathetically wishing she’d used my name in one of her two sentences.

  I wondered how Veronica had retained possession of my letter. Did Adrian leave her all his stuff in his will? I didn’t even know if he’d made one. Perhaps he’d kept it inside his diary, and she’d found it there. No, I wasn’t thinking clearly. If that’s where it had been, Mrs Ford would have seen it – and then she certainly wouldn’t have left me five hundred pounds.

  I wondered why Veronica had bothered to answer my email, given that she affected to despise me completely. Well, maybe she didn’t.

  I wondered if Veronica had punished Brother Jack for passing on her email address.

  I wondered if, all those years ago, her words ‘It doesn’t feel right’ were simply a politeness. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to sleep with me because the sexual contact we’d had during the time she was deciding just wasn’t enjoyable enough. I wondered if I’d been awkward, pushy, selfish. Not if, how.

  Margaret sat and listened through the quiche and salad, then the pannacotta with fruit coulis, as I described my contact w
ith Jack, the page of Adrian’s diary, the meeting on the bridge, the contents of my letter and my feelings of remorse. She put her coffee cup back on its saucer with a slight click.

  ‘You’re not still in love with the Fruitcake.’

  ‘No, I don’t think I am.’

  ‘Tony, that wasn’t a question. It was a statement.’

  I looked across at her fondly. She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me. And let me go on and on about myself. I smiled at her, in a way she also doubtless knew too well.

  ‘One of these days I’ll surprise you,’ I said.

  ‘You do still. You have today.’

  ‘Yes, but I want to surprise you in a way that makes you think better of me rather than worse.’

  ‘I don’t think the worse of you. I don’t even think the worse of the Fruitcake, though admittedly my estimation of her has always been below sea level.’

  Margaret doesn’t do triumphalism; she also knew that she didn’t have to point out that I’d ignored her advice. I think she quite likes being a sympathetic ear, and also quite likes being reminded why she’s glad not to be married to me any more. I don’t mean that in a bitchy sense. I just think it’s the case.

  ‘Can I ask you something?’

  ‘You always do,’ she replied.

  ‘Did you leave me because of me?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘I left you because of us.’

  Susie and I get on fine, as I have a tendency to repeat. And that will do as a statement I would happily swear to in a court of law. She’s thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. Yes, thirty-four. We haven’t had any sort of falling-out since I sat in the front row of an oak-panelled municipal room and then did my job as a witness. I remember thinking at the time that I was signing off on her – or, more exactly, signing myself off. Duty done, only child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer’s and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That’d be a start.

  If Margaret and I had stayed together, I dare say I would have been allowed to be more of a doting grandfather. It’s not surprising Margaret’s been more use. Susie didn’t want to leave the kids with me because she didn’t think I was capable, despite all the nappies I’d changed and so on. ‘You can take Lucas to watch football when he’s older,’ she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on to the pitch – See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you’ve even understood what life’s about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football.

  But Susie doesn’t notice that I dislike the game – or dislike what it’s become. She’s practical about emotions, Susie is. Gets that from her mother. So my emotions as they actually are don’t concern her. She prefers to assume that I have certain feelings and operate according to that assumption. At some level, she blames me for the divorce. As in: since it was all her mother’s doing, it was obviously all her father’s fault.

  Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.

  ‘The question of accumulation,’ Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack – there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

  Adrian’s fragment also refers to the question of responsibility: whether there’s a chain of it, or whether we draw the concept more narrowly. I’m all for drawing it narrowly. Sorry, no, you can’t blame your dead parents, or having brothers and sisters, or not having them, or your genes, or society, or whatever – not in normal circumstances. Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there’s powerful evidence to the contrary. Adrian was much cleverer than me – he used logic where I use common sense – but we came, I think, to more or less the same conclusion.

  Not that I can understand everything he wrote. I stared at those equations in his diary without much illumination coming my way. But then I was never any good at maths.

  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.