The Sense of an Ending

Then I thought more about Adrian. From the beginning, he had always seen more clearly than the rest of us. While we luxuriated in the doldrums of adolescence, imagining our routine discontent to be an original response to the human condition, Adrian was already looking farther ahead and wider around. He felt life more clearly too – even, perhaps especially, when he came to decide that it wasn’t worth the candle. Compared to him, I had always been a muddler, unable to learn much from the few lessons life provided me with. In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian’s terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse – a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred – about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded – and how pitiful that was.

Average, that’s what I’d been, ever since I left school. Average at university and work; average in friendship, loyalty, love; average, no doubt, at sex. There was a survey of British motorists a few years ago which showed that ninety-five per cent of those polled thought they were ‘better than average’ drivers. But by the law of averages, we’re most of us bound to be average. Not that this brought any comfort. The word resounded. Average at life; average at truth; morally average. Veronica’s first reaction to seeing me again had been to point out that I’d lost my hair. That was the least of it.

The email she sent in reply to my apology read: ‘You just don’t get it, do you? But then you never did.’ I could hardly complain. Even if I found myself pathetically wishing she’d used my name in one of her two sentences.

I wondered how Veronica had retained possession of my letter. Did Adrian leave her all his stuff in his will? I didn’t even know if he’d made one. Perhaps he’d kept it inside his diary, and she’d found it there. No, I wasn’t thinking clearly. If that’s where it had been, Mrs Ford would have seen it – and then she certainly wouldn’t have left me five hundred pounds.

I wondered why Veronica had bothered to answer my email, given that she affected to despise me completely. Well, maybe she didn’t.

I wondered if Veronica had punished Brother Jack for passing on her email address.

I wondered if, all those years ago, her words ‘It doesn’t feel right’ were simply a politeness. Perhaps she hadn’t wanted to sleep with me because the sexual contact we’d had during the time she was deciding just wasn’t enjoyable enough. I wondered if I’d been awkward, pushy, selfish. Not if, how.

Margaret sat and listened through the quiche and salad, then the pannacotta with fruit coulis, as I described my contact with Jack, the page of Adrian’s diary, the meeting on the bridge, the contents of my letter and my feelings of remorse. She put her coffee cup back on its saucer with a slight click.

‘You’re not still in love with the Fruitcake.’

‘No, I don’t think I am.’

‘Tony, that wasn’t a question. It was a statement.’

I looked across at her fondly. She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me. And let me go on and on about myself. I smiled at her, in a way she also doubtless knew too well.

‘One of these days I’ll surprise you,’ I said.

‘You do still. You have today.’

‘Yes, but I want to surprise you in a way that makes you think better of me rather than worse.’

‘I don’t think the worse of you. I don’t even think the worse of the Fruitcake, though admittedly my estimation of her has always been below sea level.’

Margaret doesn’t do triumphalism; she also knew that she didn’t have to point out that I’d ignored her advice. I think she quite likes being a sympathetic ear, and also quite likes being reminded why she’s glad not to be married to me any more. I don’t mean that in a bitchy sense. I just think it’s the case.

‘Can I ask you something?’

‘You always do,’ she replied.

‘Did you leave me because of me?’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I left you because of us.’

Susie and I get on fine, as I have a tendency to repeat. And that will do as a statement I would happily swear to in a court of law. She’s thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. Yes, thirty-four. We haven’t had any sort of falling-out since I sat in the front row of an oak-panelled municipal room and then did my job as a witness. I remember thinking at the time that I was signing off on her – or, more exactly, signing myself off. Duty done, only child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer’s and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That’d be a start.