The Sense of an Ending

After his death, her mother had sold the house in Chislehurst and moved up to London. She did art classes, started smoking, and took in lodgers, even though she’d been left well provided for. She had remained in good health until a year or so ago, when her memory began to fail. A small stroke was suspected. Then she started putting the tea in the fridge and the eggs in the breadbin, that sort of thing. Once she nearly set the house on fire by leaving a cigarette burning. She remained cheerful throughout, until she suddenly went downhill. The last months had been a struggle, and no, her end had not been gentle, though it had been a mercy.

I reread this email several times. I was looking for traps, ambiguities, implied insults. There were none – unless straightforwardness itself can be a trap. It was an ordinary, sad story – all too familiar – and simply told.

When you start forgetting things – I don’t mean Alzheimer’s, just the predictable consequence of ageing – there are different ways to react. You can sit there and try to force your memory into giving up the name of that acquaintance, flower, train station, astronaut… Or you admit failure and take practical steps with reference books and the internet. Or you can just let it go – forget about remembering – and then sometimes you find that the mislaid fact surfaces an hour or a day later, often in those long waking nights that age imposes. Well, we all learn this, those of us who forget things.

But we also learn something else: that the brain doesn’t like being typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As if it’s saying: Don’t imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline – life’s much more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory-loops. That’s what, to my consternation, I found happening to me now. I began to remember, with no particular order or sense of significance, long-buried details of that distant weekend with the Ford family. My attic room had a view across roofs to a wood; from below I could hear a clock striking the hour precisely five minutes late. Mrs Ford flipped the broken, cooked egg into the waste bin with an expression of concern – for it, not me. Her husband tried to get me to drink brandy after dinner, and when I refused, asked if I were a man or a mouse. Brother Jack addressed Mrs Ford as ‘the Mother’, as in ‘When does the Mother think there might be fodder for the starving troops?’ And on the second night, Veronica did more than just come upstairs with me. She said, ‘I’m going to walk Tony to his room,’ and took my hand in front of the family. Brother Jack said, ‘And what does the Mother think of that?’ But the Mother only smiled. My goodnights to the family that evening were hasty as I could feel an erection coming on. We walked slowly up to my bedroom, where Veronica backed me against the door, kissed me on the mouth and said into my ear, ‘Sleep the sleep of the wicked.’ And approximately forty seconds later, I now remember, I was wanking into the little washbasin and sluicing my sperm down the house’s pipework.

On a whim, I Googled Chislehurst. And discovered that there’d never been a St Michael’s church in the town. So Mr Ford’s guided tour as he drove us along must have been fanciful – some private joke, or way of stringing me along. I doubt very much there’d been a Café Royal either. Then I went on Google Earth, swooping and zooming around the town. But the house I was looking for didn’t seem to exist any more.

The other night, I allowed myself another drink, turned on my computer, and called up the only Veronica in my address book. I suggested we meet again. I apologised for anything I might have done to make things awkward on the previous occasion. I promised that I didn’t want to talk about her mother’s will. This was true, too; though it wasn’t until I wrote that sentence that I realised I had barely given Adrian or his diary a thought for quite a few days.

‘Is this about closing the circle?’ came her reply.

‘I don’t know,’ I wrote back. ‘But it can’t do any harm, can it?’

She didn’t answer that question, but at the time I didn’t notice or mind.

I don’t know why, but part of me thought she’d suggest meeting on the bridge again. Either that, or somewhere snug and promisingly personal: a forgotten pub, a quiet lunchroom, even the bar at the Charing Cross Hotel. She chose the brasserie on the third floor of John Lewis in Oxford Street.

Actually, this had its convenient side: I needed a few metres of cord for restringing a blind, some kettle descaler, and a set of those patches you iron on the inside of trousers when the knee splits. It’s hard to find this stuff locally any more: where I live, most of those useful little shops have long been turned into cafés or estate agents.