The Sense of an Ending

But that was only the half of it. When I’d been trying to damage them, I’d written: ‘Part of me hopes you have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two.’ And then: ‘So I don’t wish you that. It would be unjust to inflict on some innocent foetus the prospect of discovering that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism.’ Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering. Of course I don’t – I didn’t – believe in curses. That’s to say, in words producing events. But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens – of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass – this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. The fact that the young me who cursed and the old me who witnessed the curse’s outcome had quite different feelings – this was monstrously irrelevant. If, just before all this started, you had told me that Adrian, instead of killing himself, had counterfactually married Veronica, that they had had a child together, then perhaps others, and then grandchildren, I would have answered: That’s fine, each to their own life; you went your way and I went mine, no hard feelings. And now these idle clichés ran up against the unshiftable truth of what had happened. Time’s revenge on the innocent foetus. I thought of that poor, damaged man turning away from me in the shop and pressing his face into rolls of kitchen towel and jumbo packs of quilted toilet tissue so as to avoid my presence. Well, his instinct had been a true one: I was a man against whom backs should be turned. If life did reward merit, then I deserved shunning.

Only a few days previously I’d been entertaining a dim fantasy about Veronica, all the while admitting that I knew nothing of her life in the forty and more years since I’d last seen her. Now I had some answers to the questions I hadn’t asked. She had become pregnant by Adrian, and – who knows? – perhaps the trauma of his suicide had affected the child in her womb. She had given birth to a son who had at some stage been diagnosed as … what? As not being able to function independently in society; as needing constant support, emotional and financial. I wondered when that diagnosis had been made. Was it soon after birth, or had there been a lulling pause of a few years, during which Veronica could take comfort in what had been saved from the wreckage? But afterwards – how long had she sacrificed her life for him, perhaps taking some crappy part-time job while he was at a special-needs school? And then, presumably, he had got bigger and harder to manage, and eventually the terrible struggle became too much, and she allowed him to be taken into care. Imagine what that must have felt like; imagine the loss, the sense of failure, the guilt. And here was I, complaining to myself when my daughter occasionally forgot to send me an email. I also remembered the ungrateful thoughts I’d had since first meeting Veronica again on the Wobbly Bridge. I thought she looked a bit shabby and unkempt; I thought she was difficult, unfriendly, charmless. In fact, I was lucky she gave me the time of day. And I’d expected her to hand over Adrian’s diary? In her place, I’d probably have burnt it too, as I now believed she had done.

There was no one I could tell this to – not for a long while. As Margaret said, I was on my own – and so I should be. Not least because I had a swathe of my past to re-evaluate, with nothing but remorse for company. And after rethinking Veronica’s life and character, I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for – and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. ‘Most lives’: my life.

So this image of him – this living, dead rebuke to me and the rest of my existence – was now overturned. ‘First-class degree, first-class suicide,’ Alex and I had agreed. What sort of Adrian did I have instead? One who had got his girlfriend pregnant, been unable to face the consequences, and had ‘taken the easy way out’, as they used to put it. Not that there can be anything easy about it, this final assertion of individuality against the great generality that oppresses it. But now I had to recalibrate Adrian, change him from a Camus-quoting repudiator for whom suicide was the only true philosophical question, into … what? No more than a version of Robson, who ‘wasn’t exactly Eros-and-Thanatos material’, as Alex had put it, when that hitherto unremarkable member of the Science Sixth had left this world with a parting ‘Sorry, Mum’.