What did I mean by ‘damage’? It was only a guess; I didn’t have any real evidence. But whenever I looked back on that unhappy weekend, I realised that it hadn’t been just a matter of a rather naive young man finding himself ill at ease among a posher and more socially skilled family. That was going on too, of course. But I could sense a complicity between Veronica and her heavy-footed, heavy-handed father, who treated me as substandard. Also between Veronica and Brother Jack, whose life and deportment she clearly regarded as nonpareil: he was the appointed judge when she asked publicly of me—and the question gets more condescending with each repetition —‘He’ll do, won’t he?’ On the other hand, I saw no complicity at all with her mother, who doubtless recognised her for what she was. How did Mrs Ford have the initial chance to warn me against her daughter? Because that morning—the first morning after my arrival—Veronica had told everyone I wanted a lie-in, and gone off with her father and brother. No such exchange between us justified that invention. I never had lie-ins. I don’t even have them now.
When I wrote to Adrian, I wasn’t at all clear myself what I meant by ‘damage’. And most of a lifetime later, I am only slightly clearer. My mother-in-law (who happily is not part of this story) didn’t think much of me but was at least candid about it, as she was about most things. She once observed—when there was yet another case of child abuse filling the papers and television news reports—‘I reckon we were all abused.’ Am I suggesting that Veronica was the victim of what they nowadays call ‘inappropriate behaviour’: beery leering from her father at bathtime or bedtime, something more than a sibling cuddle with her brother? How could I know? Was there some primal moment of loss, some withdrawal of love when it was most needed, some overheard exchange from which the child concluded that…? Again, I cannot know. I have no evidence, anecdotal or documentary. But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history—Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
You might think this is rubbish—preachy, self-justificatory rubbish. You might think that I behaved towards Veronica like a typically callow male, and that all my ‘conclusions’ are reversible. For instance, ‘After we broke up, she slept with me’ flips easily into ‘After she slept with me, I broke up with her.’ You might also decide that the Fords were a normal middle-class English family on whom I was chippily foisting bogus theories of damage; and that Mrs Ford, instead of being tactfully concerned on my behalf, was displaying an indecent jealousy of her own daughter. You might even ask me to apply my ‘theory’ to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this, to be honest.
I didn’t expect any reply from Adrian, nor did I get one. And now the prospect of seeing Colin and Alex by themselves became less appealing. Having been three, then four, how was it possible to go back to being three again? If the others wanted to make up their own party, fine, go ahead. I needed to get on with my life. So I did.
Some of my contemporaries did VSO, departing to Africa, where they taught schoolkids and built mud walls; I wasn’t so high-minded. Also, back then you somehow assumed that a decent degree would ensure a decent job, sooner or later. ‘Ti-
I met a girl while I was out there: Annie. She was American, travelling round like me. We hooked up, as she put it, and spent three months together. She wore plaid shirts, had grey-green eyes and a friendly manner; we became lovers easily and quickly; I couldn’t believe my luck. Nor could I believe how simple it was: to be friends and bed-companions, to laugh and drink and smoke a little dope together, to see a bit of the world side by side—and then to separate without recrimination or blame. Easy come, easy go, she said, and meant it. Later, looking back, I wondered if something in me wasn’t shocked by this very easiness, and didn’t require more complication as proof of… what? Depth, seriousness? Although, God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness. Much later, I also found myself debating whether ‘Easy come, easy go’ wasn’t a way of asking a question, and looking for a particular answer I wasn’t able to supply. Still, that’s all by the by. Annie was part of my story, but not of this story.
My parents thought of getting in touch when it happened, but had no idea where I was. In a true emergency—presence required at a mother’s deathbed—I imagine the Foreign Office would have contacted the Embassy in Washington, who would have informed the American authorities, who would have asked police forces across the country to look out for a cheerful, sunburnt Englishman who was a little more self-assured than he had been on his arrival in the country. Nowadays all it takes is a text message.
When I got home, my mother gave me a stiff-armed, face-powdered hug, sent me off for a bath, and cooked me what was still referred to as my ‘favourite dinner’, and which I accepted as such, not having updated her for a while on my taste buds. Afterwards, she handed me the very few letters that had arrived in my absence.
‘You’d better open those two first.’
The top one contained a brief note from Alex. ‘Dear Tony,’ it read, ‘Adrian died. He killed himself. I rang your mother, who says she doesn’t know where you are. Alex.’
‘Shit,’ I said, swearing for the first time in front of my parents.
‘Sorry about that, lad.’ My father’s comment didn’t seem exactly up to the mark. I looked at him and found myself wondering if baldness was inherited—would be inherited.
After one of those communal pauses which every family does differently, my mother asked, ‘Do you think it was because he was too clever?’
‘I haven’t got the statistics linking intelligence to suicide,’ I replied.
‘Yes, Tony, but you know what I mean.’
‘No, actually, I don’t at all.’
‘Well, put it like this: you’re a clever boy, but not so clever as you’d do anything like that.’
I gazed at her without thinking. Wrongly encouraged, she went on,
‘But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.’
To avoid engaging with this line of theory, I opened Alex’s second letter. He said that Adrian had done it very efficiently, and left a full account of his reasons. ‘Let’s meet and talk. Bar at the Charing X Hotel? Phone me. Alex.’
I unpacked, readjusted, reported on my travels, familiarised myself again with the routines and smells, the small pleasures and large dullnesses of home. But my mind kept returning to all those fervently innocent discussions we’d gone in for when Robson hanged himself in the attic, back before our lives began. It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person’s right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature). None of these categories had applied in the case of Robson’s squalidly mediocre action.
Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine
