The Sense of an Ending

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.