Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

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 both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. There was practically a QED at the end. Adrian had asked the coroner to make his argument public, and the official had obliged.

Eventually, I asked, ‘How did he do it?’

‘He cut his wrists in the bath.’

‘Christ. That’s sort of… Greek, isn’t it? Or was that hemlock?’

‘More the exemplary Roman, I’d say. Opening the vein. And he knew how to do it. You have to cut diagonally. If you cut straight across, you can lose consciousness and the wound closes up and you’ve bogged it.’

‘Perhaps you just drown instead.’

‘Even so – second prize,’ said Alex. ‘Adrian would have wanted first.’ He was right: first-class degree, first-class suicide.

He’d killed himself in a flat he shared with two fellow postgraduates. The others had gone away for the weekend, so Adrian had plenty of time to prepare. He’d written his letter to the coroner, pinned a notice to the bathroom door reading ‘DO NOT ENTER – CALL POLICE – ADRIAN’, run a bath, locked the door, cut his wrists in the hot water, bled to death. He was found a day and a half later.

Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News . ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’. They probably kept that headline permanently set up in type. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed’. I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian’s was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law’s view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide’s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian’s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.

Adrian had apologised to the police for inconveniencing them, and thanked the coroner for making his last words public. He also asked to be cremated, and for his ashes to be scattered, since the swift destruction of the body was also a philosopher’s active choice, and preferable to the supine waiting for natural decomposition in the ground.

‘Did you go? To the funeral?’

‘Not invited. Nor was Colin. Family only, and all that.’

‘What do we think?’

‘Well, it’s the family’s right, I suppose.’

‘No, not about that. About his reasons.’

Alex took a sip of his beer. ‘I couldn’t decide whether it’s fucking impressive or a fucking terrible waste.’

‘And did you? Decide?’

‘Well, it could be both.’

‘What I can’t work out,’ I said, ‘is if it’s something complete in itself – I don’t mean self-regarding but, you know, just involving Adrian – or something that contains an implicit criticism of everyone else. Of us.’ I looked at Alex.

‘Well, it could be both.’

‘Stop saying that.’

‘I wonder what his philosophy tutors thought. Whether they felt in any way responsible. It was his brain they trained, after all.’

‘When did you last see him?’

‘About three months before he died. Right where you’re sitting. That’s why I suggested it.’

‘So he was going down to Chislehurst. How did he seem?’

‘Cheerful. Happy. Like himself, only more so. As we said goodbye, he told me he was in love.’

The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica.

‘What did he say about her?’

‘Nothing. You know how he was.’

‘Did he tell you I wrote him a letter telling him where to shove it?’

‘No, but it doesn’t surprise me.’

‘What, that I wrote it, or that he didn’t tell you?’

‘Well, it could be both.’

I half-punched Alex, just enough to spill his beer.

At home, with barely enough time to think over what I’d heard, I had to fend off my mother’s questions.

‘What did you find out?’

I told her a little of the how.

‘It must have been very unpleasant for the poor policemen. The things they have to do. Did he have girl trouble?’