The Sense of an Ending

The other night, I allowed myself another drink, turned on my computer, and called up the only Veronica in my address book. I suggested we meet again. I apologised for anything I might have done to make things awkward on the previous occasion. I promised that I didn’t want to talk about her mother’s will. This was true, too; though it wasn’t until I wrote that sentence that I realised I had barely given Adrian or his diary a thought for quite a few days.

‘Is this about closing the circle?’ came her reply.

‘I don’t know,’ I wrote back. ‘But it can’t do any harm, can it?’

She didn’t answer that question, but at the time I didn’t notice or mind.

I don’t know why, but part of me thought she’d suggest meeting on the bridge again. Either that, or somewhere snug and promisingly personal: a forgotten pub, a quiet lunchroom, even the bar at the Charing Cross Hotel. She chose the brasserie on the third floor of John Lewis in Oxford Street.

Actually, this had its convenient side: I needed a few metres of cord for restringing a blind, some kettle descaler, and a set of those patches you iron on the inside of trousers when the knee splits. It’s hard to find this stuff locally any more: where I live, most of those useful little shops have long been turned into cafés or estate agents.

On the train up to town, there was a girl sitting opposite me, plugged into earphones, eyes closed, impervious to the world outside, moving her head to music only she could hear. And suddenly, a complete memory came to me: of Veronica dancing. Yes, she didn’t dance — that’s what I said — but there’d been one evening in my room when she got all mischievous and started pulling out my pop records.

‘Put one on and let me see you dance,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘Takes two to tango.’

‘OK, you show me and I’ll join in.’

So I stacked the autochanger spindle with 45s, moved across to her, did a skeleton-loosening shrug, half-closed my eyes, as if respecting her privacy, and went for it. Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms: the head-jerking and the foot-prancing, the shoulder-twisting and the pelvis-jabbing, with the bonus of ecstatically raised arms and occasional grunting noises. After a bit, I opened my eyes, expecting her to be still sitting on the floor and laughing at me. But there she was, leaping about in a way that made me suspect she’d been to ballet classes, her hair all over her face and her calves tense and full of strut. I watched her for a bit, unsure if she was sending me up or genuinely grooving along to the Moody Blues. Actually, I didn’t care — I was enjoying myself and feeling a small victory. This went on for a while; then I moved closer to her as Ned Miller’s ‘From a Jack to a King’ gave way to Bob Lind singing ‘Elusive Butterfly’. But she didn’t notice and, twirling, bumped into me, nearly losing her balance. I caught her and held her.

‘You see, it’s not that difficult.’

‘Oh, I never thought it was difficult,’ she replied. ‘Good. Yes. Thank you,’ she said formally, then went and sat down. ‘You carry on if you want to. I’ve had enough.’

Still, she had danced.

I did my errands in the haberdashery, kitchen and curtain departments, then went to the brasserie. I was ten minutes early but of course Veronica was already there, head down, reading, confident that I would find her. As I put my bags down, she looked up and half-smiled. I thought: you don’t look so wild and whiskery after all.

‘I’m still bald,’

I said. She held on to a quarter-smile.

‘What are you reading?’

She turned the cover of her paperback towards me. Something by Stefan Zweig.

‘So you’ve finally got to the end of the alphabet. Can’t be anyone left after him.’ Why was I suddenly nervous? I was talking like a twenty-year-old again. Also, I hadn’t read any Stefan Zweig.

‘I’m having the pasta,’ she said.

Well, at least it wasn’t a put-down.

While I inspected the menu, she carried on reading. The table looked out over a criss-cross of escalators. People going up, people going down; everyone buying something.

‘On the train up I was remembering when you danced. In my room. In Bristol.’

I expected her to contradict me, or take some indecipherable offence. But she only said, ‘I wonder why you remembered that.’ And with this moment of corroboration, I began to feel a return of confidence. She was more smartly dressed this time; her hair was under control and seemed less grey. She somehow managed to look — to my eye — both twentyish and sixtyish at the same time.

‘So,’ I said, ‘how’ve the last forty years been treating you?’

She looked at me. ‘You first.’