The Sense of an Ending

Veronica: interesting, that joint letter. Your malice mixed with his priggishness. Quite a marriage of talents. Like your sense of social superiority versus his sense of intellectual superiority. But don’t think you can outsmart Adrian as you (for a time) outsmarted me. I can see your tactics – isolate him, cut him off from his old friends, make him dependent on you, etc., etc. That might work in the short term. But in the long? It’s just a question of whether you can get pregnant before he discovers you’re a bore. And even if you do nail him down, you can look forward to a lifetime of having your logic corrected, to breakfast-table pedantry and stifled yawns at your airs and graces. I can’t do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.

Compliments of the season to you, and may the acid rain fall on your joint and anointed heads.

Tony

Whisky, I find, helps clarity of thought. And reduces pain. It has the additional virtue of making you drunk or, if taken in sufficient quantity, very drunk. I reread this letter several times. I could scarcely deny its authorship or its ugliness. All I could plead was that I had been its author then, but was not its author now. Indeed, I didn’t recognise that part of myself from which the letter came. But perhaps this was simply further self-deception.

At first, I thought mainly about me, and how – what – I’d been: chippy, jealous and malign. Also about my attempt to undermine their relationship. At least I’d failed in this, since Veronica’s mother had assured me the last months of Adrian’s life had been happy. Not that this let me off the hook. My younger self had come back to shock my older self with what that self had been, or was, or was sometimes capable of being. And only recently I’d been going on about how the witnesses to our lives decrease, and with them our essential corroboration. Now I had some all too unwelcome corroboration of what I was, or had been. If only this had been the document Veronica had set light to.

Next I thought about her. Not about how she might have felt on first reading the letter – I would come back to this – but why she had handed it over. Of course, she wanted to point out what a shit I was. But it was more than this, I decided: given our current stand-off, it was also a tactical move, a warning. If I tried to make any legal fuss about the diary, this would be part of her defence. I would be my very own character witness.

Then I thought about Adrian. My old friend who had killed himself. And this had been the last communication he had ever received from me. A libel on his character and an attempt to destroy the first and last love affair of his life. And when I had written that time would tell, I had underestimated, or rather miscalculated: time was telling not against them, it was telling against me.

And finally I remembered the postcard I’d sent Adrian as a holding response to his letter. The fake-cool one about everything being fine, old bean. The card was of the Clifton Suspension Bridge. From which a number of people every year jump to their deaths.

The next day, when I was sober, I thought again about the three of us, and about time’s many paradoxes. For instance: that when we are young and sensitive, we are also at our most hurtful; whereas when the blood begins to slow, when we feel less sharply, when we are more armoured and have learnt how to bear hurt, we tread more carefully. Nowadays I might try to get under Veronica’s skin, but I would never try to flay it from her bit by bloody bit.

It was not, in retrospect, cruel of them to warn me that they were an item. It was just the timing of it, and the fact that Veronica had seemed to be behind the whole idea. Why had I reacted by going nuclear? Hurt pride, pre-exam stress, isolation? Excuses, all of them. And no, it wasn’t shame I now felt, or guilt, but something rarer in my life and stronger than both: remorse. A feeling which is more complicated, curdled, and primeval. Whose chief characteristic is that nothing can be done about it: too much time has passed, too much damage has been done, for amends to be made. Even so, forty years on, I sent Veronica an email apologising for my letter.