The Sense of an Ending

‘You’re joking.’

‘Then let it go. Unless you have, as they say, issues from your past that you need to confront in order to be able to move on. But that’s hardly you, is it, Tony?’

‘No, I don’t think so,’ I answered, rather carefully. Because part of me was wondering if, psychobabble apart, there might not be some truth in it. There was a silence. Our plates were cleared. Margaret didn’t have any problem reading me.

‘It’s quite touching that you’re so stubborn. I suppose it’s one way of not losing the plot when we get to our age.’

‘I don’t think I’d have reacted differently twenty years ago.’

‘Possibly not.’ She made a sign for the bill. ‘But let me tell you a story about Caroline. No, you don’t know her. She’s a friend from after we separated. She had a husband, two small kids and an au pair she wasn’t sure about. She didn’t have any dreadful suspicions or anything. The girl was polite most of the time, the children didn’t complain. It was just that Caroline felt she didn’t really know who she was leaving them with. So she asked a friend—a female friend—no, not me—if she had any advice. “Go through her stuff,” said the friend. “What?” “Well, you’re obviously wound up about it. Wait till it’s her evening off, have a look through her room, read her letters. That’s what I’d do.” So the next time the au pair was off, Caroline went through her stuff. And found the girl’s diary. Which she read. And which was full of denunciations, like “I’m working for a real cow” and “The husband’s OK— caught him looking at my bum—but the wife’s a silly bitch.” And “Does she know what she’s doing to those poor kids?” There was some really, really tough stuff.’

‘So what happened?’ I asked. ‘Did she fire the au pair?’

‘Tony,’ my ex-wife replied, ‘that’s not the point of the story.’

I nodded. Margaret checked the bill, running the corner of her credit card down the items.

Two other things she said over the years: that there were some women who aren’t at all mysterious, but are only made so by men’s inability to understand them. And that, in her view, fruitcakes ought to be shut up in tins with the Queen’s head on them. I must have told her that detail of my Bristol life as well.

A week or so passed, and Brother Jack’s name was there in my inbox again. ‘Here’s Veronica’s email, but don’t let on you got it from me. Hell to pay and all that. Remember the 3 wise monkeys—see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil. That’s my motto, anyway. Blue skies, view of Sydney Harbour Bridge, almost. Ah, here comes my rickshaw. Regards, John F.’

I was surprised. I’d expected him to be unhelpful. But what did I know of him or his life? Only what I’d extrapolated from memories of a bad weekend long before. I’d always assumed that birth and education had given him an advantage over me that he’d effortlessly maintained until the present day. I remembered Adrian saying that he’d read about Jack in some undergraduate magazine but didn’t expect to meet him (but nor had he expected to go out with Veronica). And then he’d added, in a different, harsher tone, ‘I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious.’ I never knew—because stupidly I never asked—what that had been based on.

They say time finds you out, don’t they? Maybe time had found out Brother Jack and punished him for his lack of seriousness. And now I began to elaborate a different life for Veronica’s brother, one in which his student years glowed in his memory as filled with happiness and hope—indeed, as the one period when his life had briefly achieved that sense of harmony we all aspire to. I imagined Jack, after graduation, being nepotistically placed into one of those large multinational companies. I imagined him doing well enough to begin with and then, almost imperceptibly, not so well. A clubbable fellow with decent manners, but lacking the edge required in a changing world. Those cheery sign-offs, in letter and conversation, came after a while to appear not sophisticated but inept. And though he wasn’t exactly given the push, the suggestion of early retirement combined with occasional bits of ad hoc work was clear enough. He could be a kind of roving honorary consul, a backup for the local man in big cities, a troubleshooter in smaller ones. So he remade his life, and found some plausible way to present himself as a success. ‘View of Sydney Habour Bridge, almost.’ I imagined him taking his laptop to cafe terraces with Wi-Fi, because frankly that felt less depressing than working from the room of a hotel with fewer stars than he’d been previously used to.

I’ve no idea if this is how big firms work, but I’d found a way of thinking about Brother Jack which brought no discomfort. I’d even managed to dislodge him from that mansion overlooking the golf course. Not that I would go so far as to feel sorry for him. And—this was the point—not that I owed him anything either.

‘Dear Veronica,’ I began. ‘Your brother has very kindly given me your email address…’

It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.

Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe. Cars don’t have names like that any more, do they? I drive a Volkswagen Polo. But Humber Super Snipe—those were words that eased off the tongue as smoothly as ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. Humber Super Snipe. Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire. Jowett Javelin. Jensen Interceptor. Even Wolseley Farina and Hillman Minx.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested in cars, old or new. I’m vaguely curious why you might name a large saloon after such a small game bird as the snipe, and whether a Minx had a tempestuous female nature. Still, I’m not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.

But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knick-knack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time—love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions—and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives—then I plead guilty. I’m nostalgic for my early time with Margaret, for Susie’s birth and first years, for that road trip with Annie. And if we’re talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it’s possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn’t it? It also leads straight to the matter of Miss Veronica Ford.

‘Blood money?’

I looked at the words and couldn’t make sense of them. She’d erased my message and its heading, not signed her reply, and just answered with a phrase. I had to call up my sent email and read it through again to work out that grammatically her two words could only be a reply to my asking why her mother had left me five hundred pounds. But it didn’t make any sense beyond this. No blood had been spilt. My pride had been hurt, that was true. But Veronica was hardly suggesting that her mother was offering money in exchange for the pain her daughter had caused me, was she? Or was she?

At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn’t give me a simple answer, didn’t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her. Of course, at times I’d been tempted to set her down as the woman of mystery, as opposed to the woman of clarity I married in Margaret. True, I hadn’t known where I was with her, couldn’t read her heart or her mind or her motivation. But an enigma is a puzzle you want to solve. I didn’t want to solve Veronica, certainly not at this late date. She’d been a bloody difficult young woman forty years ago, and—on the evidence of this two-word, two-finger response—didn’t seem to have mellowed with age. That’s what I told myself firmly.

Though why should we expect age to mellow us? If it isn’t life’s business to reward merit, why should it be life’s business to give us warm, comfortable feelings towards its end? What possible evolutionary purpose could nostalgia serve?

I had a friend who trained as a lawyer, then became disenchanted and never practised. He told me that the one benefit of those wasted years was that he no longer feared either the law or lawyers. And something like that happens more generally, doesn’t it? The more you learn, the less you fear. ‘Learn’ not in the sense of academic study, but in the practical understanding of life.

Perhaps all I’m really saying is that, having gone out with Veronica all those years ago, I wasn’t afraid of her now. And so I began my email campaign. I was determined to be polite, unoffendable, persistent, boring, friendly: in other words, to lie. Of course, it only takes a microsecond to delete an email, but then it doesn’t take much