Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

So I phoned Mrs Marriott again, and asked for the contact details of Mrs Ford’s other child, John, known as Jack. I called Margaret and asked for a lunch date. And I made an appointment with my own solicitor. No, that’s putting it far too grandly. I’m sure Brother Jack would have someone he refers to as ‘my solicitor’. In my case it’s the local chap who drew up my will; he has a small office above a florist’s and seems perfectly efficient. I also like him because he made no attempt to use my Christian name or suggest I use his. So I think of him only as T. J. Gunnell, and don’t even speculate on what his initials might stand for. Do you know something I dread? Being an old person in hospital and having nurses I’ve never met calling me Anthony or, worse, Tony. Let me just pop this in your arm, Tony. Have some more of this gruel, Tony. Have you done a motion, Tony? Of course, by the time this happens, over-familiarity from the nursing staff may be way down my list of anxieties; but even so.

I did a slightly odd thing when I first met Margaret. I wrote Veronica out of my life story. I pretended that Annie had been my first proper girlfriend. I know most men exaggerate the amount of girls and sex they’ve had; I did the opposite. I drew a line and started afresh. Margaret was a little puzzled that I’d been so slow off the mark – not in losing my virginity, but in having a serious relationship; but also, I thought at the time, a little charmed. She said something about shyness being attractive in a man.

The odder part was that it was easy to give this version of my history because that’s what I’d been telling myself anyway. I viewed my time with Veronica as a failure – her contempt, my humiliation – and expunged it from the record. I had kept no letters, and only a single photograph, which I hadn’t looked at in ages.

But after a year or two of marriage, when I felt better about myself, and fully confident in our relationship, I told Margaret the truth. She listened, asked pertinent questions, and she understood. She asked to see the photo – the one taken in Trafalgar Square – examined it, nodded, made no comment. That was fine. I had no right to expect anything, let alone words of praise for my former girlfriend. Which, in any case, I didn’t want. I just wanted to clear off the past, and have Margaret forgive my peculiar lie about it. Which she did.

Mr Gunnell is a calm, gaunt man who doesn’t mind silence. After all, it costs his clients just as much as speech.

‘Mr Webster.’

‘Mr Gunnell.’

And so we mistered one another for the next forty-five minutes, in which he gave me the professional advice I was paying for. He told me that going to the police and trying to persuade them to lay a charge of theft against a woman of mature years who had recently lost her mother would, in his view, be foolish. I liked that. Not the advice, but the way he expressed it. ‘Foolish’: much better than ‘inadvisable’ or ‘inappropriate’. He also urged me not to badger Mrs Marriott.

‘Don’t solicitors like to be badgered, Mr Gunnell?’

‘Let’s say it’s different if the badgerer is the client. But in the present case the Ford family is paying the bills. And you’d be surprised how letters can slip to the bottom of a file.’

I looked around the cream-painted office with its potted plants, shelves of legal authority, inoffensive print of an English landscape and, yes, its filing cabinets. I looked back to Mr Gunnell.

‘In other words, don’t let her start thinking I’m some kind of loony.’

‘Oh, she’d never think that, Mr Webster. And “loony” is hardly legal terminology.’

‘What might you say instead?’

‘We might settle for “vexatious”. That’s quite strong enough.’

‘Right. And on another point. How long does it take to wind up an estate?’

‘If it’s fairly straightforward… eighteen months, two years.’

Two years! I wasn’t waiting that long for the diary.

‘Well, you deal with the main business first, but there are always things that drag on. Lost share certificates. Agreeing figures with the Revenue. And letters sometimes get mislaid.’

‘Or slip to the bottom of a file.’

‘That too, Mr Webster.’

‘Have you any other advice?’

‘I’d be careful with the word “stealing”. It might polarise matters unnecessarily.’

‘But isn’t that what she’s done? Remind me of the legal tag when something is blindingly obvious.’

‘ Res ipsa loquitur ?’

‘That’s the one.’

Mr Gunnell paused. ‘Well, criminal work doesn’t often cross my desk, but the key phrase when it comes to theft is, as I remember, “an intention permanently to deprive” the owner of the thing stolen. Do you have any clue as to Miss Ford’s intention, or her wider state of mind?’

I laughed. Having a clue as to Veronica’s state of mind had been one of my problems forty years ago. So I probably laughed in quite the wrong way; and Mr Gunnell is not an imperceptive man.

‘I don’t wish to pry, Mr Webster, but could there be something in the past, perhaps, between you and Miss Ford, which might become relevant, were it eventually to come to civil or indeed criminal proceedings?’

Something between me and Miss Ford? A particular image suddenly came into my mind as I gazed at the backs of what I assumed to be family photographs.

‘You’ve made things much clearer, Mr Gunnell. I’ll put a first-class stamp on when I pay your bill.’

He smiled. ‘Actually, it’s a thing we do notice. In certain cases.’

Mrs Marriott was able, two weeks later, to provide me with an email address for Mr John Ford. Miss Veronica Ford had declined to allow her contact details to be passed on. And Mr John Ford was clearly being cautious himself: no phone number, no postal address.

I remembered Brother Jack sitting back on a sofa, careless and confident. Veronica had just ruffled my hair and was asking, ‘He’ll do, won’t he?’ And Jack had winked at me. I hadn’t winked back.

I was formal in my email. I offered my condolences. I pretended to happier memories of Chislehurst than was the case. I explained the situation and asked Jack to use what influence he had to persuade his sister to hand over the second ‘document’, which I understood to be the diary of my old schoolfriend Adrian Finn.

About ten days later Brother Jack turned up in my inbox. There was a long preamble about travelling, and semi-retirement, and the humidity of Singapore, and Wi-Fi and cybercafés. And then: ‘Anyway, enough chit-chat. Regret I am not my sister’s keeper – never have been, just between ourselves. Stopped trying to change her mind years ago. And frankly, my putting in a good word for you could easily have the opposite effect. Not that I don’t wish you well on this particular sticky wicket. Ah – here comes my rickshaw – must dash. Regards, John Ford.’

Why did I feel there was something unconvincing about all this? Why did I immediately picture him sitting quietly at home – in some plush mansion backing on to a golf course in Surrey – laughing at me? His server was aol.com, which didn’t tell me anything. I looked at his email’s timing, which was plausible for both Singapore and Surrey. Why did I imagine Brother Jack had seen me coming and was having a bit of fun? Perhaps because in this country shadings of class resist time longer than differentials in age. The Fords had been posher than the Websters back then, and they were jolly well going to stay that way. Or was this mere paranoia on my part?

Nothing to be done, of course, but email back politely and ask if he could let me have Veronica’s contact details.

When people say, ‘She’s a good-looking woman,’ they usually mean, ‘She used to be a good-looking woman.’ But when I say that about Margaret, I mean it. She thinks – she knows – that she’s changed, and she has; though less to me than to anybody else. Naturally, I can’t speak for the restaurant manager. But I’d put it like this: she sees only what’s gone, I see only what’s stayed the same. Her hair is no longer halfway down her back or pulled up in a French pleat; nowadays it is cut close to her skull and the grey is allowed to show. Those peasanty frocks she used to wear have given way to cardigans and well-cut trousers. Some of the freckles I once loved are now closer to liver spots. But it’s still the eyes we look at, isn’t it? That’s where we found the other person, and find them still. The same eyes that were in the same head when we first met, slept together, married, honeymooned, joint-mortgaged, shopped, cooked and holidayed, loved one another and had a child together. And were the same when we separated.