The Sense of an Ending

by Julian Barnes

  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.

  That night a group of us went to Minsterworth in quest of the Severn Bore. Veronica had been alongside me. My brain must have erased it from the record, but now I knew it for a fact. She was there with me. We sat on a damp blanket on a damp riverside holding hands; she had brought a flask of hot chocolate. Innocent days. Moonlight caught the breaking wave as it approached. The others whooped at its arrival, and whooped off after it, chasing into the night with a scatter of intersecting torchbeams. Alone, she and I talked about how impossible things sometimes happened, things you wouldn’t believe unless you’d witnessed them for yourself. Our mood was thoughtful, sombre even, rather than ecstatic.

  At least, that’s how I remember it now. Though if you were to put me in a court of law, I doubt I’d stand up to cross-examination very well. ‘And yet you claim this memory was suppressed for forty years?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And only surfaced just recently?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you able to account for why it surfaced?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘Then let me put it to you, Mr Webster, that this supposed incident is an entire figment of your imagination, constructed to justify some romantic attachment which you appear to have been nurturing towards my client, a presumption which, the court should know, my client finds utterly repugnant.’ ‘Yes, perhaps. But –’ ‘But what, Mr Webster?’ ‘But we don’t love many people in this life. One, two, three? And sometimes we don’t recognise the fact until it’s too late. Except that it isn’t necessarily too late. Did you read that story about late-flowering love in an old people’s home in Barnstaple?’ ‘Oh please, Mr Webster, spare us your sentimental lucubrations. This is a court of law, which deals with fact. What exactly are the facts in the case?’

  I could only reply that I think – I theorise – that something – something else – happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions – resentment, a sense of injustice, relief – and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction. But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? That ugly letter of mine provoked remorse in me. Veronica’s account of her parents’ deaths – yes, even her father’s – had touched me more than I would have thought possible. I felt a new sympathy for them – and her. Then, not long afterwards, I began remembering forgotten things. I don’t know if there’s a scientific explanation for this – to do with new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways. All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me.

  So, anyway – and regardless of the barrister in my head – I emailed Veronica and suggested meeting again. Apologised for having done so much of the talking. Wanted to hear more about her life and her family. Had to come up to London at some point in the next few weeks. Did she fancy the same time, the same place?

  How did people in the old days bear it when letters took so long to arrive? I suppose three weeks waiting for the postman then must equate to three days waiting for an email. How long can three days feel? Long enough for a full sense of reward. Veronica hadn’t even deleted my heading – ‘Hello again?’ – which now struck me as rather winsome. But she can’t have taken offence, because she was giving me a rendezvous, a week hence, at five in the afternoon, at an unfamiliar Tube station in north London.

  I found this thrilling. Who wouldn’t? True, it hardly said, ‘Bring overnight clothes and passport,’ but you get to a time when life’s variations seem pitifully limited. Again, my first instinct was to phone Margaret; then I thought better of it. Anyway, Margaret doesn’t like surprises. She was – is – someone who likes to plan things. Before we had Susie she used to monitor her fertility cycle and suggest when it might be most propitious to make love. Which either set me in a state of hot anticipation, or – conversely, indeed usually – had the opposite effect. Margaret would never give you a mysterious rendezvous up a distant Underground line. Rather, she would meet you beneath the station clock at Paddington for a specific purpose. Not that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life at the time, you must understand.

  I spent a week trying to liberate new memories of Veronica, but nothing emerged. Maybe I was trying too hard, pressing on my brain. So instead I replayed what I had, the long-familiar images and the recent arrivals. I held them up to the light, turning them in my fingers, trying to see if they now meant something different. I began re-examining my younger self, as far as it’s possible to do so. Of course I’d been crass and naïve – we all are; but I knew not to exaggerate these characteristics, because that’s just a way of praising yourself for what you have become. I tried to be objective. The version of my relationship with Veronica, the one that I’d carried down the years, was the one I’d needed at the time. The young heart betrayed, the young body toyed with, the young social being condescended to. What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? ‘As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.’ Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?

  The time-deniers say: forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.

  Of course, I was far too early, so I got off the train one stop before and sat on a bench reading a free newspaper. Or at least, staring at it. Then I took a train to the next station, where an escalator delivered me to a ticket hall in a part of London unknown to me. As I came through the barrier I saw a particular shape and way of standing. Immediately, she turned and walked off. I followed her past a bus stop into a side street where she unlocked a car. I got into the passenger seat and looked across. She was already starting the engine.

  ‘That’s funny. I’ve got a Polo too.’

  She didn’t reply. I shouldn’t have been surprised. From my knowledge and memory of her, outdated though it was, car-talk was never going to be Veronica’s thing. It wasn’t mine either – though I knew better than to explain that.

  It was a hot afternoon still. I opened my window. She glanced beyond me, frowning. I closed the window. Oh well, I said to myself.

  ‘I was thinking the other day about when we watched the Severn Bore.’

  She didn’t reply.

  ‘Do you remember that?’ She shook her head. ‘Really not? There was a gang of us, up at Minsterworth. There
was a moon –’

  ‘Driving,’ she said.

  ‘Fine.’ If that was how she wanted it. After all, it was her expedition. I looked out of the window instead. Convenience stores, cheap restaurants, a betting shop, people queuing at a cash machine, women with bits of flesh spurting from between the joins of their clothes, a slew of litter, a shouting lunatic, an obese mother with three obese children, faces from all races: an all-purpose high street, normal London.

  After a few minutes, we got to a posher bit: detached houses, front gardens, a hill. Veronica turned off and parked. I thought: OK, it’s your game – I’ll wait for the rules, whatever they might be. But part of me also thought: Fuck it, I’m not going to stop being myself just because you’re back in your Wobbly Bridge state of mind.

  ‘How’s Brother Jack?’ I asked cheerily. She could hardly answer ‘Driving’ to that question.

  ‘Jack’s Jack,’ she replied, not looking at me.

  Well, that’s philosophically self-evident, as we used to say, back in the days of Adrian.

  ‘Do you remember –’

  ‘Waiting,’ she interrupted.

  Very well, I thought. First meeting, then driving, now waiting. What comes next? Shopping, cooking, eating and drinking, snogging, wanking and fucking? I very much doubt it. But as we sat side by side, a bald man and a whiskery woman, I realised what I should have spotted at once. Of the two of us, Veronica was much the more nervous. And whereas I was nervous about her, she clearly wasn’t nervous about me. I was like some minor, necessary irritant. But why was I necessary?

  I sat and waited. I rather wished I hadn’t left that free newspaper on the train. I wondered why I hadn’t driven here myself. Probably because I didn’t know what the parking restrictions would be like. I wanted a drink of water. I also wanted to pee. I lowered the window. This time, Veronica didn’t object.

  ‘Look.’

  I looked. A small group of people were coming along the pavement towards my side of the car. I counted five of them. In front was a man who, despite the heat, was wearing layers of heavy tweed, including a waistcoat and a kind of deerstalker helmet. His jacket and hat were covered with metal badges, thirty or forty of them at a guess, some glinting in the sun; there was a watch-chain slung between his waistcoat pockets. His expression was jolly: he looked like someone with an obscure function at a circus or fairground. Behind him came two men: the first had a black moustache and a kind of rolling gait; the second was small and malformed, with one shoulder much higher than the other – he paused to spit briefly into a front garden. And behind them was a tall, goofy fellow with glasses, holding the hand of a plump, Indianish woman.

  ‘Pub,’ said the man with the moustache as they drew level.

  ‘No, not pub,’ replied the man with the badges.

  ‘Pub,’ the first man insisted.

  ‘Shop,’ said the woman.

  They all spoke in very loud voices, like children just let out of school.

  ‘Shop,’ repeated the lopsided man, with a gentle gob into a hedge.

  I was looking as carefully as I could, because that was what I had been instructed to do. They must all, I suppose, have been between thirty and fifty, yet at the same time had a kind of fixed, ageless quality. Also, an obvious timidity, which was emphasised by the way the couple at the back were holding hands. It didn’t look like amorousness, more defence against the world. They passed a few feet away, without glancing at the car. A few yards behind came a young man in shorts and an open-neck shirt; I couldn’t tell if he was their shepherd, or had nothing to do with them.

  There was a long silence. Clearly, I was going to have to do all the work.

  ‘So?’

  She didn’t reply. Too general a question perhaps.

  ‘What’s wrong with them?’

  ‘What’s wrong with you?’

  That didn’t seem a relevant reply, for all its acrimonious tone. So I pressed on.

  ‘Was that young chap with them?’

  Silence.

  ‘Are they care-in-the-community or something?’

  My head banged back against the neck-rest as Veronica suddenly let out the clutch. She raced us round a block or two, charging the car at speed bumps as if it were a show-jumper. Her gear-changing, or the absence of it, was terrible. This lasted about four minutes, then she swerved into a parking space, riding up on the kerb with her front nearside wheel before bouncing back down again.

  I found myself thinking: Margaret was always a nice driver. Not just safe, but one who treated a car properly. Back whenever it was I had driving lessons, my instructor had explained that when you change gear, your handling of clutch and gear lever should be so gentle and imperceptible that your passenger’s head doesn’t move a centimetre on its spinal column. I was very struck by that, and often noticed it when others drove me. If I lived with Veronica, I’d be down the chiropractor’s most weeks.

  ‘You just don’t get it, do you? You never did, and you never will.’

  ‘I’m not exactly being given much help.’

  Then I saw them – whoever they were – coming towards me. That had been the point of the manoeuvre: to get ahead of them again. We were alongside a shop and a launderette, with a pub on the other side of the street. The man with the badges – ‘barker’, that was the word I’d been looking for, the cheery fellow at the entrance to a fairground booth who encourages you to step inside and view the bearded lady or two-headed panda – he was still leading. The other four were now surrounding the young man in shorts, so he was presumably with them. Some kind of care worker. Now I heard him say,

  ‘No, Ken, no pub today. Friday’s pub night.’

  ‘Friday,’ the man with the moustache repeated.

  I was aware that Veronica had taken off her seat belt and was opening her door. As I started to do the same, she said,

  ‘Stay.’ I might have been a dog.

  The pub-versus-shop debate was still going on when one of them noticed Veronica. The tweedy man took off his hat and held it against his heart, then bowed from the neck. The lopsided fellow started jumping up and down on the spot. The gangly chap let go of the woman’s grasp. The care worker smiled and held out his hand to Veronica. In a moment she was surrounded by a benign ambush. The Indian woman was now holding Veronica’s hand, and the man who wanted the pub was resting his head on her shoulder. She didn’t seem to mind this attention at all. I watched her smile for the first time that afternoon. I tried to hear what was being said, but there were too many voices overlapping. Then I saw Veronica turn, and heard her say,

  ‘Soon.’

  ‘Soon,’ two or three of them repeated.

  The lopsided chap jumped some more on the spot, the gangly one gave a big goofy grin and shouted, ‘Bye, Mary!’ They began following her to the car, then noticed me in the passenger seat and stopped at once. Four of them started waving frantically goodbye, while the tweedy man boldly approached my side of the car. His hat was still clutched over his heart. He extended his other hand through the car window, and I shook it.

  ‘We are going to the shop,’ he told me formally.

  ‘What are you going to buy?’ I asked with equal solemnity.

  This took him aback, and he thought about it for a while.

  ‘Stuff we need,’ he eventually replied. He nodded to himself and added, helpfully, ‘Requisites.’

  Then he did his formal little neck-bow, turned, and put his badge-heavy hat back on his head.

  ‘He seems a very nice fellow,’ I commented.

  But she was putting the car into gear with one hand and waving with the other. I noticed that she was sweating. Yes, it was a hot day, but even so.

  ‘They were all very pleased to see you.’

  I could tell she wasn’t going to reply to anything I said. Also that she was furious – certainly with me, but with herself as well. I can’t say I felt I had done anything wrong. I was about to open my mouth when I saw she was aiming the car at a speed bump, not slowing a
t all, and it crossed my mind that I might bite the end of my tongue off with the impact. So I waited till we had safely hurdled the bump and said,

  ‘I wonder how many badges that chap’s got.’

  Silence. Speed bump.

  ‘Do they all live in the same house?’

  Silence. Speed bump.

  ‘So pub night is Friday.’

  Silence. Speed bump.

  ‘Yes, we did go to Minsterworth together. There was a moon that night.’

  Silence. Speed bump. Now we turned into the high street, with nothing but flat tarmac between us and the station, as far as I remembered.

  ‘This is a very interesting part of town.’ I thought irritating her might do the trick – whatever the trick might be. Treating her like an insurance company lay well in the past.

  ‘Yes, you’re right, I should be getting back soon.’

  ‘Still, it was nice catching up with you the other day over lunch.’

  ‘Are there any Stefan Zweig titles you would particularly recommend?’

  ‘There are a lot of fat people around nowadays. Obese. That’s one of the changes since we were young, isn’t it? I can’t remember anyone at Bristol being obese.’

  ‘Why did that goofy chap call you Mary?’

  At least I had my seat belt on. This time Veronica’s parking technique consisted of getting both nearside wheels up on the kerb at a speed of about twenty miles an hour, then stamping on the brakes.

  ‘Out,’ she said, staring ahead.

  I nodded, undid my seat belt, and slowly got out of the car. I held the door open longer than necessary, just to annoy her one last time, and said,

  ‘You’ll ruin your tyres if you go on like that.’

  The door was wrenched from my hand as she drove off.

  I sat on the train home not thinking at all, really, just feeling. And not even thinking about what I was feeling. Only that evening did I begin to address what had happened.

  The main reason I felt foolish and humiliated was because of – what had I called it to myself, only a few days previously? – ‘the eternal hopefulness of the human heart’. And before that, ‘the attraction of overcoming someone’s contempt’. I don’t think I normally suffer from vanity, but I’d clearly been more afflicted than I realised. What had begun as a determination to obtain property bequeathed to me had morphed into something much larger, something which bore on the whole of my life, on time and memory. And desire. I thought – at some level of my being, I actually thought – that I could go back to the beginning and change things. That I could make the blood flow backwards. I had the vanity to imagine – even if I didn’t put it more strongly than this – that I could make Veronica like me again, and that it was important to do so. When she had emailed about ‘closing the circle’, I had completely failed to pick the tone as one of sardonic mockery, and taken it as an invitation, almost a come-on.