The Sense of an Ending

Perhaps we wouldn’t have been so hard on Robson if it hadn’t been for one central, unshiftable fact: Robson was our age, he was in our terms unexceptional, and yet he had not only conspired to find a girlfriend but also, incontestably, to have had sex with her. Fucking bastard! Why him and not us? Why had none of us even had the experience of failing to get a girlfriend? At least the humiliation of that would have added to our general wisdom, given us something to negatively boast about (‘Actually, “pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole” were her exact words’). We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.

This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents — were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature — theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical — but they were just dry wanks. Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. That’s what Phil Dixon had told us anyway. And the only person — apart from Robson — whose life so far contained anything remotely novel-worthy was Adrian.

‘Why did your mum leave your dad?’

‘I’m not sure.’

‘Did your mum have another bloke?’

‘Was your father a cuckold?’

‘Did your dad have a mistress?’

‘I don’t know. They said I’d understand when I was older.’

‘That’s what they always promise. How about explaining it now, that’s what I say.’ Except that I never had said this. And our house, as far as I could tell, contained no mysteries, to my shame and disappointment.

‘Maybe your mum has a young lover?’

‘How would I know. We never meet there. She always comes up to London.’

This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids’ story?

In our final history lesson of the year, Old Joe Hunt, who had guided his lethargic pupils through Tudors and Stuarts, Victorians and Edwardians, the Rise of Empire and its Subsequent Decline, invited us to look back over all those centuries and attempt to draw conclusions.

‘We could start, perhaps, with the seemingly simple question, What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?’

‘History is the lies of the victors,’ I replied, a little too quickly.

‘Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. Simpson?’

Colin was more prepared than me. ‘History is a raw onion sandwich, sir.’

‘For what reason?’

‘It just repeats, sir. It burps. We’ve seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.’

‘Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, wouldn’t you say?’

We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria.

‘Finn?’

‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.”’

‘Is it, indeed? Where did you find that?’

‘Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He’s French.’

‘So one might have guessed. Would you care to give us an example?’

‘Robson’s suicide, sir.’

There was a perceptible intake of breath and some reckless head-turning. But Hunt, like the other masters, allowed Adrian special status. When the rest of us tried provocation, it was dismissed as puerile cynicism — something else we would grow out of. Adrian’s provocations were somehow welcomed as awkward searchings after truth.

‘What has that to do with the matter?’