‘Yes, Ma.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say? You mean you agree?’
Not replying was the only way to keep my temper.
I spent the next few days trying to think round all the angles and corners of Adrian’s death. While I could hardly have expected a farewell letter myself, I was disappointed for Colin and Alex. And how was I to think about Veronica now? Adrian loved her, yet he had killed himself: how was that explicable? For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out – perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out – promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there’s nothing like it, is there? Agreed?
But Adrian didn’t agree. Perhaps if it had been a different woman … or perhaps not – Alex had testified to Adrian’s exalted state the last time they’d met. Had something terrible happened in the intervening months? But if so, Adrian would surely have indicated it. He was the truth-seeker and philosopher among us: if those were his stated reasons, those were his true reasons.
With Veronica, I moved from blaming her for having failed to save Adrian to pitying her: there she was, having triumphantly traded up, and look what had happened. Should I express my condolences? But she would think me hypocritical. If I were to get in touch with her, either she wouldn’t reply, or she’d somehow twist things so that I’d end up not being able to think straight.
I did, eventually, find myself thinking straight. That’s to say, understanding Adrian’s reasons, respecting them, and admiring him. He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied criticism of the rest of us? No. Or at least, I’m sure he didn’t intend it as such. Adrian might attract people, but he never behaved as if he wanted disciples; he believed in us all thinking for ourselves. Might he have ‘enjoyed life’, as most of us do, or try to, had he lived? Perhaps; or he might have suffered guilt and remorse at having failed to match his actions to his arguments.
And none of the above alters the fact that it was still, as Alex put it, a fucking terrible waste.
A year on, Colin and Alex suggested a reunion. On the anniversary of Adrian’s death, the three of us met for drinks at the Charing Cross Hotel, then went for an Indian meal. We tried to invoke and celebrate our friend. We remembered him telling Old Joe Hunt he was out of a job, and instructing Phil Dixon about Eros and Thanatos. We were already turning our past into anecdote. We recalled cheering the announcement that Adrian had won a scholarship to Cambridge. We realised that though he had been to all our homes, none of us had been to his; and that we didn’t know – had we ever asked? – what his father did. We toasted him in wine at the hotel bar and in beer at the end of dinner. Outside, we slapped one another around the shoulders and swore to repeat the commemoration annually. But our lives were already going in different directions, and the shared memory of Adrian was not enough to hold us together. Perhaps the lack of mystery about his death meant that his case was more easily closed. We would remember him all our lives, of course. But his death was exemplary rather than ‘tragic’ – as the Cambridge newspaper had routinely insisted – and so he retreated from us rather quickly, slotted into time and history.
By now I’d left home, and started work as a trainee in arts administration. Then I met Margaret; we married, and three years later Susie was born. We bought a small house with a large mortgage; I commuted up to London every day. My traineeship turned into a long career. Life went by. Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first. I think that’s far too cynical. I enjoyed my marriage, but was perhaps too quiet – too peaceable – for my own good. After a dozen years Margaret took up with a fellow who ran a restaurant. I didn’t much like him – or his food, for that matter – but then I wouldn’t, would I? Custody of Susie was shared. Happily, she didn’t seem too affected by the break-up; and, as I now realise, I never applied to her my theory of damage.
After the divorce, I had a few affairs, but nothing serious. I would always tell Margaret about any new girlfriend. At the time, it seemed a natural thing to do. Now, I sometimes wonder if it was an attempt to make her jealous; or, perhaps, an act of self-protection, a way of preventing the new relationship from becoming too serious. Also, in my more emptied life, I came up with various ideas which I termed ‘projects’, perhaps to make them sound feasible. None of them came to anything. Well, that’s no matter; or any part of my story.
Susie grew up, and people started calling her Susan. When she was twenty-four, I walked her up the aisle of a register office. Ken is a doctor; they have two kids now, a boy and a girl. The photos of them I carry in my wallet always show them younger than they are. That’s normal, I suppose, not to say ‘philosophically self-evident’. But you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
Margaret’s second husband turned out to be not quite peaceable enough: he took off with someone who looked rather like her, but was that crucial ten years younger. She and I remain on good terms; we meet at family events and sometimes have lunch. Once, after a glass or two, she became sentimental and suggested we might get back together. Odder things have happened, was the way she put it. No doubt they have, but by now I was used to my own routines, and fond of my solitude. Or maybe I’m just not odd enough to do something like that. Once or twice we’ve talked of sharing a holiday, but I think we each expected the other to plan it and book the tickets and hotels. So that never happened.
I’m retired now. I have my flat with my possessions. I keep up with a few drinking pals, and have some women friends – platonic, of course. (And they’re not part of the story either.) I’m a member of the local history society, though less excited than some about what metal detectors unearth. A while ago, I volunteered to run the library at the local hospital; I go round the wards delivering, collecting, recommending. It gets me out, and it’s good to do something useful; also, I meet some new people. Sick people, of course; dying people as well. But at least I shall know my way around the hospital when my turn comes.
And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It’s been interesting to me, though I wouldn’t complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.
I survived. ‘He survived to tell the tale’ – that’s what people say, don’t they? History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.
Later on in life, you expect a bit of rest, don’t you? You think you deserve it. I did, anyway. But then you begin to understand that the reward of merit is not life’s business.
Also, when you are young, you think you can predict the likely pains and bleaknesses that age might bring. You imagine yourself being lonely, divorced, widowed; children growing away from you, friends dying. You imagine the loss of status, the loss of desire – and desirability. You may go further and consider your own approaching death, which, despite what company you may muster, can only be faced alone. But all this is looking ahead. What you fail to do is look ahead, and then imagine yourself looking back from that future point. Learning the new emotions that time brings. Discovering, for example, that as the witnesses to your life diminish, there is less corroboration, and therefore less certainty, as to what you are or have been. Even if you have assiduously kept records – in words, sound, pictures – you may find that you have attended to the wrong kind of record-keeping. What was the line Adrian used to quote? ‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.’
I still read a lot of history, and of course I’ve followed all the official history that’s happened in my own lifetime – the fall of Communism, Mrs Thatcher, 9/11, global warming – with the normal mixture of fear, anxiety and cautious optimism. But I’ve never felt the same about it – I’ve never quite trusted it – as I do events in Greece and Rome, or the British Empire, or the Russian Revolution. Perhaps I just feel safer with the history that’s been more or less agreed upon. Or perhaps it’s that same paradox again: the history that happens underneath our noses ought to be the clearest, and yet it’s the most deliquescent. We live in time, it bounds us and defines us, and time is supposed to measure history, isn’t it? But if we can’t understand time, can’t grasp its mysteries of pace and progress, what chance do we have with history – even our own small, personal, largely undocumented piece of it?
When we’re young, everyone over the age of thirty looks middle-aged, everyone over fifty antique. And time, as it goes by, confirms that we weren’t that wrong. Those little age differentials, so crucial and so gross when we are young, erode. We end up all belonging to the same category, that of the non-young. I’ve never much minded this myself.
But there are exceptions to the rule. For some people, the time differentials established in youth never really disappear: the elder remains the elder, even when both are dribbling greybeards. For some people, a gap of, say, five months means that one will perversely always think of himself – herself – as wiser and more knowledgeable than the other, whatever the evidence to the contrary. Or perhaps I should say
because
of the evidence to the contrary.
Because
it is perfectly clear to any objective observer that the balance has shifted to the marginally younger person, the other one maintains the assumption of superiority all the more rigorously. All the more neurotically.
I still play a lot of Dvořák, by the way. Not the symphonies so much; nowadays I prefer the string quartets. But Tchaikovsky has gone the way of those geniuses who fascinate in youth, retain a residual power in middle age, but later seem, if not embarrassing, somehow less relevant. Not that I’m saying she was right. There’s nothing wrong with being a genius who can fascinate the young. Rather, there’s something wrong with the young who can’t be fascinated by a genius. Incidentally, I don’t think the soundtrack to
Un Homme et Une Femme
is a work of genius. I didn’t even think so back then. On the other hand, I occasionally remember Ted Hughes and smile at the fact that, actually, he never did run out of animals.
I get on well with Susie. Well enough, anyway. But the younger generation no longer feels the need, or even the obligation, to keep in touch. At least, not ‘keep in touch’ as in ‘seeing’. An email will do for Dad – pity he hasn’t learnt to text. Yes, he’s retired now, still fossicking around with those mysterious ‘projects’ of his, doubt he’ll ever finish anything, but at least it keeps the brain active, better than golf, and yes, we were planning to drop over there last week until something came up. I do hope he doesn’t get Alzheimer’s, that’s my greatest worry really, because, well, Mum’s hardly going to have him back, is she? No: I exaggerate, I misrepresent. Susie doesn’t feel like that, I’m sure. Living alone has its moments of self-pity and paranoia. Susie and I get on fine.
A friend of ours – I still say that instinctively, though Margaret and I have been divorced for longer than we were married – had a son in a punk rock band. I asked if she’d heard any of their songs. She mentioned one called ‘Every Day is Sunday’. I remember laughing with relief that the same old adolescent boredom goes on from generation to generation. Also that the same sardonic wit is used to escape from it. ‘Every day is Sunday’ – the words took me back to my own years of stagnancy, and that terrible waiting for life to begin. I asked our friend what the group’s other songs were. No, she replied, that’s their song, their only song. How does it go then? I asked. What do you mean? Well, what’s the next line? You don’t get it, do you? she said. That
is
the song. They just repeat the line, again and again, until the song chooses to end. I remember smiling. ‘Every day is Sunday’ – that wouldn’t make a bad epitaph, would it?
It was one of those long white envelopes with my name and address shown in a window. I don’t know about you, but I’m never in a hurry to open them. Once, such letters meant another painful stage in my divorce – maybe that’s why I’m wary of them. Nowadays, they might contain some tax voucher for the few, pitifully low-yielding shares I bought when I retired, or an extra request from that charity I already support by standing order. So I forgot about it until later in the day, when I was gathering up all the discarded paper in the flat – even down to the last envelope – for recycling. It turned out to contain a letter from a firm of solicitors I’d never heard of, Messrs Coyle, Innes & Black. A certain Eleanor Marriott was writing ‘
In the matter of the estate of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased)
’. It took me a while to get there.
We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient – it’s not useful – to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.