The Sense of an Ending

What did I know of life, I who had lived so carefully? Who had neither won nor lost, but just let life happen to him? Who had the usual ambitions and settled all too quickly for them not being realised? Who avoided being hurt and called it a capacity for survival? Who paid his bills, stayed on good terms with everyone as far as possible, for whom ecstasy and despair soon became just words once read in novels? One whose self-rebukes never really inflicted pain? Well, there was all this to reflect upon, while I endured a special kind of remorse: a hurt inflicted at long last on one who always thought he knew how to avoid being hurt – and inflicted for precisely that reason.

‘Out!’ Veronica had instructed, having mounted the kerb at twenty miles an hour. Now I gave the word its wider resonance: Out of my life, I never wanted you near it again in the first place. I should never have agreed to meet, let alone have lunch, let alone take you to see my son. Out, out!

If I’d had an address for her, I would have sent a proper letter. I headed my email ‘Apology’, then changed it to ‘APOLOGY’, but that looked too screamy, so I changed it back again. I could only be straightforward.

Dear Veronica,

I realise that I am probably the last person you want to hear from, but I hope you will read this message through to the end. I don’t expect you to reply to it. But I have spent some time re-evaluating things, and would like to apologise to you. I don’t expect you to think better of me – but then, you could hardly think any worse. That letter of mine was unforgiveable. All I can say is that my vile words were the expression of a moment. They were a genuine shock for me to read again after all these years.

I don’t expect you to hand over Adrian’s diary. If you’ve burnt it, there’s an end to it. If you haven’t, then obviously, as it was written by the father of your son, it belongs to you. I’m puzzled why your mother left it to me in the first place, but that’s no matter.

I’m sorry to have been so vexatious. You were trying to show me something and I was too crass to understand. I would like to wish you and your son a peaceful life, as far as that’s possible in the circumstances. And if at any time I can do anything for either of you, I hope you won’t hesitate to get in touch.

Yours, Tony

It was the best I could do. It wasn’t as good as I’d wanted, but at least I meant every word of it. I had no hidden agenda. I didn’t secretly hope for anything out of it. Not a diary, not Veronica’s good opinion, not even an acceptance of my apology.

I can’t say whether I felt better or worse after sending it. I felt not very much. Exhausted, emptied-out. I had no desire to tell Margaret about what had happened. I thought more often of Susie, and of the luck any parent has when a child is born with four limbs, a normal brain, and the emotional make-up that allows the child, the girl, the woman to lead any sort of life. May you be ordinary, as the poet once wished the new-born baby.

My life continued. I recommended books to the sick, the recovering, the dying. I read a book or two myself. I put out my recycling. I wrote to Mr Gunnell and asked him not to pursue the matter of the diary. One late afternoon, on a whim, I drove round the North Circular, did some shopping and had supper at the William IV. I was asked if I’d been away on holiday. In the shop I said yes, in the pub I said no. The answers hardly seemed of consequence. Not much did. I thought of the things that had happened to me over the years, and of how little I had made happen.

At first I assumed it was an old email, mistakenly re-sent. But my heading had been left there: ‘Apology’. Below, my message was undeleted. Her reply went: ‘You still don’t get it. You never did, and you never will. So stop even trying.’

I left the exchange in my inbox and occasionally reread it. If I hadn’t decided on cremation and a scattering, I could have used the phrase as an epitaph on a chunk of stone or marble: ‘Tony Webster – He Never Got It’. But that would be too melodramatic, even self-pitying. How about ‘He’s On His Own Now’? That would be better, truer. Or maybe I’ll stick with: ‘Every Day is Sunday’.

Occasionally, I would drive over to the shop and the pub again. They were places where I always felt a sense of calm, odd as that may sound; also, a sense of purpose, perhaps the last proper purpose of my life. As before, I never thought I was wasting my time. This was what my time might as well be for. And both were friendly places – at least, friendlier than their equivalents where I lived. I had no plan: so what else is new? I hadn’t had a ‘plan’ for years. And my revival of feeling – if that’s what it had been – towards Veronica could scarcely be counted as a plan. More of a brief, morbid impulse, an appendix to a short history of humiliation.

One day, I said to the barman, ‘Do you think you could do me thin chips for a change?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You know, like in France – the thin ones.’