Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

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.

I was asked to confirm my address and provide a photocopy of my passport. I was informed that I had been left five hundred pounds and two ‘documents’. I found this very puzzling. For a start, to get a bequest from someone whose Christian name I had either never known or else forgotten. And five hundred pounds seemed a very specific sum. Bigger than nothing, not as big as something. Perhaps it would make sense if I knew when Mrs Ford had made her will. Though if it had been a long time ago, the equivalent sum now would be quite a bit larger, and make even less sense.