The Sense of an Ending

‘Well, can you think of a bald alcoholic?’

‘I’ve got better things to do with my time.’

I glanced at her and thought: You haven’t changed, but I have. And yet, oddly, these conversational tactics made me almost nostalgic. Almost. At the same time, I thought: You look a bit whiskery. She was wearing a utilitarian tweed skirt and a rather shabby blue mackintosh; her hair, even allowing for the breeze off the river, seemed unkempt. It was the same length as forty years earlier, but heavily streaked with grey. Or rather, it was grey streaked with the original brown. Margaret used to say that women often made the mistake of keeping their hair in the style they adopted when they were at their most attractive. They hung on long after it became inappropriate, all because they were afraid of the big cut. This certainly seemed to be the case with Veronica. Or maybe she just didn’t care.

‘So?’ she said.

‘So?’ I repeated.

‘You asked to meet.’

‘Did I?’

‘You mean you didn’t?’

‘If you say I did, I must have.’

‘Well, is it yes or no?’ she asked, getting to her feet and standing, yes, impatiently.

I deliberately didn’t react. I didn’t suggest she sit down, nor did I stand up myself. She could leave if she wanted – and she would, so there was no point trying to hold her back. She was gazing out over the water. She had three moles on the side of her neck – did I remember them or not? Each, now, had a long whisker growing out of it, and the light caught these filaments of hair.

Very well then, no small talk, no history, no nostalgia. To business.

‘Are you going to let me have Adrian’s diary?’

‘I can’t,’ she replied, without looking at me.

‘Why not?’

‘I burnt it.’

First theft, then arson, I thought, with a spurt of anger. But I told myself to keep treating her like an insurance company. So, as neutrally as possible, I merely asked,

‘For what reason?’

Her cheek twitched, but I couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a wince.

‘People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries.’

‘Your mother must have read it. And so must you, to decide which page to send me.’ No answer. Try another tack. ‘By the way, how did that sentence continue? You know the one: “So, for instance, if Tony…”?’

A shrug and a frown. ‘People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries,’ she repeated. ‘But you can read this if you like.’

She pulled an envelope from her raincoat pocket, handed it to me, turned, and walked off.

When I got home, I checked through my sent emails and, of course, I’d never asked for a meeting. Well, not in so many words, anyway.

I remembered my initial reaction to seeing the phrase ‘blood money’ on my screen. I’d said to myself: But nobody got killed. I’d just been thinking about Veronica and me. I hadn’t considered Adrian.

Another thing I realised: there was a mistake, or a statistical anomaly, in Margaret’s theory of clear-edged versus mysterious women; or rather, in the second part of it, about men being attracted to either one sort or the other. I’d been attracted to both Veronica and Margaret.

I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However… who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.

But time… how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time… give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.

I didn’t open the envelope Veronica gave me for a day and a half. I waited because I knew she would expect me not to wait, to have my thumb at the flap before she was out of sight. But I knew the envelope was hardly likely to contain what I wanted: for instance, the key to a left-luggage locker where I would find Adrian’s diary. At the same time, I wasn’t convinced by her prim line about not reading other people’s diaries. I thought her quite capable of arson to punish me for ancient wrongs and failings, but not in defence of some hastily erected principle of correct behaviour.