The Sense of an Ending

If Margaret and I had stayed together, I dare say I would have been allowed to be more of a doting grandfather. It’s not surprising Margaret’s been more use. Susie didn’t want to leave the kids with me because she didn’t think I was capable, despite all the nappies I’d changed and so on. ‘You can take Lucas to watch football when he’s older,’ she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on to the pitch – See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you’ve even understood what life’s about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football.

But Susie doesn’t notice that I dislike the game – or dislike what it’s become. She’s practical about emotions, Susie is. Gets that from her mother. So my emotions as they actually are don’t concern her. She prefers to assume that I have certain feelings and operate according to that assumption. At some level, she blames me for the divorce. As in: since it was all her mother’s doing, it was obviously all her father’s fault.

Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.

‘The question of accumulation,’ Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack – there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.

Adrian’s fragment also refers to the question of responsibility: whether there’s a chain of it, or whether we draw the concept more narrowly. I’m all for drawing it narrowly. Sorry, no, you can’t blame your dead parents, or having brothers and sisters, or not having them, or your genes, or society, or whatever – not in normal circumstances. Start with the notion that yours is the sole responsibility unless there’s powerful evidence to the contrary. Adrian was much cleverer than me – he used logic where I use common sense – but we came, I think, to more or less the same conclusion.

Not that I can understand everything he wrote. I stared at those equations in his diary without much illumination coming my way. But then I was never any good at maths.

I don’t envy Adrian his death, but I envy him the clarity of his life. Not just because he saw, thought, felt and acted more clearly than the rest of us; but also because of when he died. I don’t mean any of that First World War rubbish: ‘Cut down in the flower of youth’ – a line still being churned out by our headmaster at the time of Robson’s suicide – and ‘They shall grow not old as we that are left grow old.’ Most of the rest of us haven’t minded growing old. It’s always better than the alternative in my book. No, what I mean is this. When you are in your twenties, even if you’re confused and uncertain about your aims and purposes, you have a strong sense of what life itself is, and of what you in life are, and might become. Later… later there is more uncertainty, more overlapping, more backtracking, more false memories. Back then, you can remember your short life in its entirety. Later, the memory becomes a thing of shreds and patches. It’s a bit like the black box aeroplanes carry to record what happens in a crash. If nothing goes wrong, the tape erases itself. So if you do crash, it’s obvious why you did; if you don’t, then the log of your journey is much less clear.