that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism.’ Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering. Of course I don’t—I didn’t—believe in curses. That’s to say, in words producing events. But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens—of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass—this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. The fact that the young me who cursed and the old me who witnessed the curse’s outcome had quite different feelings—this was monstrously irrelevant. If, just before all this started, you had told me that Adrian, instead of killing himself, had counterfactually married Veronica, that they had had a child together, then perhaps others, and then grandchildren, I would have answered: That’s fine, each to their own life; you went your way and I went mine, no hard feelings. And now these idle cliches ran up against the unshiftable truth of what had happened. Time’s revenge on the innocent foetus. I thought of that poor, damaged man turning away from me in the shop and pressing his face into rolls of kitchen towel and jumbo packs of quilted toilet tissue so as to avoid my presence. Well, his instinct had been a true one: I was a man against whom backs should be turned. If life did reward merit, then I deserved shunning.
Only a few days previously I’d been entertaining a dim fantasy about Veronica, all the while admitting that I knew nothing of her life in the forty and more years since I’d last seen her. Now I had some answers to the questions I hadn’t asked. She had become pregnant by Adrian, and—who knows?—perhaps the trauma of his suicide had affected the child in her womb. She had given birth to a son who had at some stage been diagnosed as… what? As not being able to function independently in society; as needing constant support, emotional and financial. I wondered when that diagnosis had been made. Was it soon after birth, or had there been a lulling pause of a few years, during which Veronica could take comfort in what had been saved from the wreckage? But afterwards—how long had she sacrificed her life for him, perhaps taking some crappy part-time job while he was at a special-needs school? And then, presumably, he had got bigger and harder to manage, and eventually the terrible struggle became too much, and she allowed him to be taken into care. Imagine what that must have felt like; imagine the loss, the sense of failure, the guilt. And here was I, complaining to myself when my daughter occasionally forgot to send me an email. I also remembered the ungrateful thoughts I’d had since first meeting Veronica again on the Wobbly Bridge. I thought she looked a bit shabby and unkempt; I thought she was difficult, unfriendly, charmless. In fact, I was lucky she gave me the time of day. And I’d expected her to hand over Adrian’s diary? In her place, I’d probably have burnt it too, as I now believed she had done.
There was no one I could tell this to—not for a long while. As Margaret said, I was on my own—and so I should be. Not least because I had a swathe of my past to re-evaluate, with nothing but remorse for company. And after rethinking Veronica’s life and character, I would have to go back into my past and deal with Adrian. My philosopher friend, who gazed on life and decided that any responsible, thinking individual should have the right to reject this gift that had never been asked for—and whose noble gesture re-emphasised with each passing decade the compromise and littleness that most lives consist of. ‘Most lives’: my life.
So this image of him—this living, dead rebuke to me and the rest of my existence—was now overturned. ‘First-class degree, first-class suicide,’ Alex and I had agreed. What sort of Adrian did I have instead? One who had got his girlfriend pregnant, been unable to face the consequences, and had ‘taken the easy way out’, as they used to put it. Not that there can be anything easy about it, this final assertion of individuality against the great generality that oppresses it. But now I had to recalibrate Adrian, change him from a Camus-quoting repudiator for whom suicide was the only true philosophical question, into… what? No more than a version of Robson, who ‘wasn’t exactly Eros-and-Thanatos material’, as Alex had put it, when that hitherto unremarkable member of the Science Sixth had left this world with a parting ‘Sorry, Mum’.
At the time, the four of us had speculated on what Robson’s girl must have been like—from prim virgin to clap-riddled whore. None of us had thought about the child, or the future. Now, for the first time, I wondered what had happened to Robson’s girl, and to their child. The mother would be about my age, and quite probably still alive, while the child would be nearing fifty. Did it still believe that ‘Dad’ had died in an accident? Perhaps it had been sent for adoption, and grew up thinking itself unwanted. But nowadays adoptees have the right to trace their birth mothers. I imagined this happening, and the awkward, poignant reunion it might have led to. I found myself wanting, even at this distance, to apologise to Robson’s girl for the idle way we had discussed her, without reckoning her pain and shame. Part of me wanted to get in touch and ask her to excuse our faults of long ago—even though she had been quite unaware of them at the time.
But thinking about Robson, and Robson’s girl, was just a way of avoiding what was now the truth about Adrian. Robson had been fifteen, sixteen? Still living at home, with parents who no doubt weren’t exactly liberals. And if his girl had been under sixteen, there might have been a rape charge too. So there was really no comparison. Adrian had grown up, had left home, and was far more intelligent than poor Robson. Besides, back then, if you got a girl pregnant, and if she didn’t want to have an abortion, you married her: those were the rules. Yet Adrian couldn’t even face this conventional solution. ‘Do you think it was because he was too clever?’ my mother had irritatingly asked. No, nothing to do with cleverness; and even less with moral courage. He didn’t grandly refuse an existential gift; he was afraid of the pram in the hall.
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.
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
