The Sense of an Ending

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, 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.