Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

‘You see, it’s not that difficult.’

‘Oh, I never thought it was difficult,’ she replied. ‘Good. Yes. Thank you,’ she said formally, then went and sat down. ‘You carry on if you want to. I’ve had enough.’

Still, she had danced.

I did my errands in the haberdashery, kitchen and curtain departments, then went to the brasserie. I was ten minutes early but of course Veronica was already there, head down, reading, confident that I would find her. As I put my bags down, she looked up and half-smiled. I thought: you don’t look so wild and whiskery after all.

‘I’m still bald,’

I said. She held on to a quarter-smile.

‘What are you reading?’

She turned the cover of her paperback towards me. Something by Stefan Zweig.

‘So you’ve finally got to the end of the alphabet. Can’t be anyone left after him.’ Why was I suddenly nervous? I was talking like a twenty-year-old again. Also, I hadn’t read any Stefan Zweig.

‘I’m having the pasta,’ she said.

Well, at least it wasn’t a put-down.

While I inspected the menu, she carried on reading. The table looked out over a criss-cross of escalators. People going up, people going down; everyone buying something.

‘On the train up I was remembering when you danced. In my room. In Bristol.’

I expected her to contradict me, or take some indecipherable offence. But she only said, ‘I wonder why you remembered that.’ And with this moment of corroboration, I began to feel a return of confidence. She was more smartly dressed this time; her hair was under control and seemed less grey. She somehow managed to look – to my eye – both twentyish and sixtyish at the same time.

‘So,’ I said, ‘how’ve the last forty years been treating you?’

She looked at me. ‘You first.’

I told her the story of my life. The version I tell myself, the account that stands up. She asked about ‘those two friends of yours I once met’, without, it seemed, being able to name them. I said how I’d lost touch with Colin and Alex. Then I told her about Margaret and Susie and grand-parenthood, while batting away Margaret’s whisper in my head of ‘How’s the Fruitcake?’ I talked of my working life, and retirement, and keeping busy, and the winter breaks I took – this year I was thinking of St Petersburg in the snow for a change… I tried to sound content with my life but not complacent. I was in the middle of describing my grandchildren when she looked up, drank her coffee in one draught, put some money on the table and stood up. I started to reach for my own stuff when she said,

‘No, you stay and finish yours.’

I was determined not to do anything which might cause offence, so I sat down again.

‘Well, your turn next,’ I said. Meaning: her life.

‘Turn for what?’ she asked, but was gone before I could reply.

Yes, I knew what she’d done. She’d managed to spend an hour in my company without divulging a single fact, let alone secret, about herself. Where she lived and how, whether she lived with anyone, or had children. On her wedding finger she wore a red glass ring, which was as enigmatic as the rest of her. But I didn’t mind; indeed, I found myself reacting as if I’d been on a first date with someone and escaped without doing anything catastrophic. But of course it wasn’t at all like that. After a first date you don’t sit on a train and find your head flooded with the forgotten truth about your shared sex life forty years previously. How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren’t having ‘full sex’, all the elements of it – the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust – were there anyway. And how part of me hadn’t minded not ‘going the whole way’, didn’t mind the bouts of apocalyptic wanking after I’d seen her home, didn’t mind sleeping in my single bed, alone except for my memories and a swiftly returning erection. This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong thing, fear of an overwhelming closeness I couldn’t handle.

The next week was very quiet. I restrung my blind, descaled the kettle, mended the split in an old pair of jeans. Susie didn’t call. Margaret, I knew, would be silent unless and until I got in touch with her. And then what would she expect? Apology, grovelling? No, she wasn’t punitive; she’d always accept a rueful grin on my part as acknowledgement of her greater wisdom. But that might not be the case this time. In fact, I might not be seeing Margaret for a while. Part of me felt distantly, quietly bad about her. At first I couldn’t make any sense of this: she was the one who had told me I was now on my own. But then I had a memory from a long way back, from the early years of our marriage. Some chap at work gave a party and invited me along; Margaret didn’t want to come. I flirted with a girl and she flirted back. Well, a bit more than flirting – though still way below even infra-sex – but I put a lid on it as soon as I sobered up. Yet it left me feeling excitement and guilt in equal proportions. And now, I realised, I was feeling something similar again. It took me some time to get this straight. Eventually I said to myself: Right, so you’re feeling guilt towards your ex-wife, who divorced you twenty years ago, and excitement towards an old girlfriend you haven’t seen in forty years. Who said there were no surprises left in life?

I didn’t want to press Veronica. I thought I’d wait for her to get in touch this time. I checked my inbox rather too assiduously. Of course, I wasn’t expecting a great effusion, but hoped, perhaps, for a polite message that it had been nice to see me properly after all these years.

Well, perhaps it hadn’t been. Perhaps she’d gone on a trip. Perhaps her server was down. Who said that thing about the eternal hopefulness of the human heart? You know how you read those stories from time to time about what the papers like to call ‘late-flowering love’? Usually about some old codger and codgeress in a retirement home? Both widowed, grinning through their dentures while holding arthritic hands? Often, they still talk what seems the inappropriate language of young love. ‘As soon as I set eyes on him/her, I knew he/she was the one for me’ – that sort of line. Part of me is always touched and wants to cheer; but another part is wary and baffled. Why go through that stuff all over again? Don’t you know the rule: once bitten, twice bitten? But now, I found myself in revolt against my own… what? Conventionality, lack of imagination, expectation of disappointment? Also, I thought, I still have my own teeth.

That night a group of us went to Minsterworth in quest of the Severn Bore. Veronica had been alongside me. My brain must have erased it from the record, but now I knew it for a fact. She was there with me. We sat on a damp blanket on a damp riverside holding hands; she had brought a flask of hot chocolate. Innocent days. Moonlight caught the breaking wave as it approached. The others whooped at its arrival, and whooped off after it, chasing into the night with a scatter of intersecting torchbeams. Alone, she and I talked about how impossible things sometimes happened, things you wouldn’t believe unless you’d witnessed them for yourself. Our mood was thoughtful, sombre even, rather than ecstatic.

At least, that’s how I remember it now. Though if you were to put me in a court of law, I doubt I’d stand up to cross-examination very well. ‘And yet you claim this memory was suppressed for forty years?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And only surfaced just recently?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Are you able to account for why it surfaced?’ ‘Not really.’ ‘Then let me put it to you, Mr Webster, that this supposed incident is an entire figment of your imagination, constructed to justify some romantic attachment which you appear to have been nurturing towards my client, a presumption which, the court should know, my client finds utterly repugnant.’ ‘Yes, perhaps. But -’ ‘But what, Mr Webster?’ ‘But we don’t love many people in this life. One, two, three? And sometimes we don’t recognise the fact until it’s too late. Except that it isn’t necessarily too late. Did you read that story about late-flowering love in an old people’s home in Barnstaple?’ ‘Oh please, Mr Webster, spare us your sentimental lucubrations. This is a court of law, which deals with fact. What exactly are the facts in the case?’