The Sense of an Ending (10 page)

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe. Cars don’t have names like that any more, do they? I drive a Volkswagen Polo. But Humber Super Snipe – those were words that eased off the tongue as smoothly as ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. Humber Super Snipe. Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire. Jowett Javelin. Jensen Interceptor. Even Wolseley Farina and Hillman Minx.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested in cars, old or new. I’m vaguely curious why you might name a large saloon after such a small game bird as the snipe, and whether a Minx had a tempestuous female nature. Still, I’m not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knick-knack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time – love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions – and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives – then I plead guilty. I’m nostalgic for my early time with Margaret, for Susie’s birth and first years, for that road trip with Annie. And if we’re talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it’s possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn’t it? It also leads straight to the matter of Miss Veronica Ford.

‘Blood money?’

I looked at the words and couldn’t make sense of them. She’d erased my message and its heading, not signed her reply, and just answered with a phrase. I had to call up my sent email and read it through again to work out that grammatically her two words could only be a reply to my asking why her mother had left me five hundred pounds. But it didn’t make any sense beyond this. No blood had been spilt. My pride had been hurt, that was true. But Veronica was hardly suggesting that her mother was offering money in exchange for the pain her daughter had caused me, was she? Or was she?

At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn’t give me a simple answer, didn’t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her. Of course, at times I’d been tempted to set her down as the woman of mystery, as opposed to the woman of clarity I married in Margaret. True, I hadn’t known where I was with her, couldn’t read her heart or her mind or her motivation. But an enigma is a puzzle you want to solve. I didn’t want to solve Veronica, certainly not at this late date. She’d been a bloody difficult young woman forty years ago, and – on the evidence of this two-word, two-finger response – didn’t seem to have mellowed with age. That’s what I told myself firmly.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practised. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers. And something like that happens more generally, doesn’t it? The more you learn, the less you fear. ‘Learn’ not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Perhaps all I’m really saying is that, having gone out with Veronica all those years ago, I wasn’t afraid of her now. And so I began my email campaign. I was determined to be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie. Of course, it only takes a microsecond to delete an email, but then it doesn’t take much longer to replace the one deleted. I would wear her down with niceness, and I would get Adrian’s diary. There was no ‘undoused fire in my breast’ – I had assured Margaret of this. And as for her more general advice, let’s say that one advantage of being an ex-husband is that you no longer need to justify your behaviour. Or follow suggestions.

I could tell Veronica was perplexed by my approach. Sometimes she answered briefly and crossly, often not at all. Nor would she have been flattered to know the precedent for my plan. Towards the end of my marriage, the solid suburban villa Margaret and I lived in suffered a little subsidence. Cracks appeared here and there, bits of the porch and front wall began to crumble. (And no, I didn’t think of it as symbolic.) The insurance company ignored the fact that it had been a famously dry summer, and decided to blame the lime tree in our front garden. It wasn’t an especially beautiful tree, nor was I fond of it, for various reasons: it screened out light from the front room, dropped sticky stuff on the pavement, and overhung the street in a way that encouraged pigeons to perch there and crap on the cars parked beneath. Our car, especially.

My objection to cutting it down was based on principle: not the principle of maintaining the country’s stock of trees, but the principle of not kowtowing to unseen bureaucrats, baby-faced arborists, and current faddy theories of blame adduced by insurance companies. Also, Margaret quite liked the tree. So I prepared a long defensive campaign. I queried the arborist’s conclusions and requested the digging of extra inspection pits to confirm or disprove the presence of rootlets close to the house’s foundations; I argued over weather patterns, the great London clay-belt, the imposition of a region-wide hosepipe ban, and so on. I was rigidly polite; I aped my opponents’ bureaucratic language; I annoyingly attached copies of previous correspondence to each new letter; I invited further site inspections and suggested extra use for their manpower. With each letter, I managed to come up with another query they would have to spend their time considering; if they failed to answer it, my next letter, instead of repeating the query, would refer them to the third or fourth paragraph of my communication of the 17th inst, so that they would have to look up their ever-fattening file. I was careful not to come across as a loony, but rather as a pedantic, unignorable bore. I liked to imagine the moaning and groaning as yet another of my letters arrived; and I knew that at a certain point it would make bean-counting sense for them to just close the case. Eventually, exasperatedly, they proposed a thirty per cent reduction in the lime tree’s canopy, a solution I accepted with deep expressions of regret and much inner exhilaration.

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
,
a
¹
,
a
²
,
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.