Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

I could only reply that I think – I theorise – that something – something else – happens to the memory over time. For years you survive with the same loops, the same facts and the same emotions. I press a button marked Adrian or Veronica, the tape runs, the usual stuff spools out. The events reconfirm the emotions – resentment, a sense of injustice, relief – and vice versa. There seems no way of accessing anything else; the case is closed. Which is why you seek corroboration, even if it turns out to be contradiction. But what if, even at a late stage, your emotions relating to those long-ago events and people change? That ugly letter of mine provoked remorse in me. Veronica’s account of her parents’ deaths – yes, even her father’s – had touched me more than I would have thought possible. I felt a new sympathy for them – and her. Then, not long afterwards, I began remembering forgotten things. I don’t know if there’s a scientific explanation for this – to do with new affective states reopening blocked-off neural pathways. All I can say is that it happened, and that it astonished me.

So, anyway – and regardless of the barrister in my head – I emailed Veronica and suggested meeting again. Apologised for having done so much of the talking. Wanted to hear more about her life and her family. Had to come up to London at some point in the next few weeks. Did she fancy the same time, the same place?

How did people in the old days bear it when letters took so long to arrive? I suppose three weeks waiting for the postman then must equate to three days waiting for an email. How long can three days feel? Long enough for a full sense of reward. Veronica hadn’t even deleted my heading – ‘Hello again?’ – which now struck me as rather winsome. But she can’t have taken offence, because she was giving me a rendezvous, a week hence, at five in the afternoon, at an unfamiliar Tube station in north London.

I found this thrilling. Who wouldn’t? True, it hardly said, ‘Bring overnight clothes and passport,’ but you get to a time when life’s variations seem pitifully limited. Again, my first instinct was to phone Margaret; then I thought better of it. Anyway, Margaret doesn’t like surprises. She was – is – someone who likes to plan things. Before we had Susie she used to monitor her fertility cycle and suggest when it might be most propitious to make love. Which either set me in a state of hot anticipation, or – conversely, indeed usually – had the opposite effect. Margaret would never give you a mysterious rendezvous up a distant Underground line. Rather, she would meet you beneath the station clock at Paddington for a specific purpose. Not that this wasn’t how I wanted to live my life at the time, you must understand.

I spent a week trying to liberate new memories of Veronica, but nothing emerged. Maybe I was trying too hard, pressing on my brain. So instead I replayed what I had, the long-familiar images and the recent arrivals. I held them up to the light, turning them in my fingers, trying to see if they now meant something different. I began re-examining my younger self, as far as it’s possible to do so. Of course I’d been crass and naïve – we all are; but I knew not to exaggerate these characteristics, because that’s just a way of praising yourself for what you have become. I tried to be objective. The version of my relationship with Veronica, the one that I’d carried down the years, was the one I’d needed at the time. The young heart betrayed, the young body toyed with, the young social being condescended to. What had Old Joe Hunt answered when I knowingly claimed that history was the lies of the victors? ‘As long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated.’ Do we remember that enough when it comes to our private lives?

The time-deniers say: forty’s nothing, at fifty you’re in your prime, sixty’s the new forty, and so on. I know this much: that there is objective time, but also subjective time, the kind you wear on the inside of your wrist, next to where the pulse lies. And this personal time, which is the true time, is measured in your relationship to memory. So when this strange thing happened – when these new memories suddenly came upon me – it was as if, for that moment, time had been placed in reverse. As if, for that moment, the river ran upstream.

Of course, I was far too early, so I got off the train one stop before and sat on a bench reading a free newspaper. Or at least, staring at it. Then I took a train to the next station, where an escalator delivered me to a ticket hall in a part of London unknown to me. As I came through the barrier I saw a particular shape and way of standing. Immediately, she turned and walked off. I followed her past a bus stop into a side street where she unlocked a car. I got into the passenger seat and looked across. She was already starting the engine.

‘That’s funny. I’ve got a Polo too.’

She didn’t reply. I shouldn’t have been surprised. From my knowledge and memory of her, outdated though it was, car-talk was never going to be Veronica’s thing. It wasn’t mine either – though I knew better than to explain that.

It was a hot afternoon still. I opened my window. She glanced beyond me, frowning. I closed the window. Oh well, I said to myself.

‘I was thinking the other day about when we watched the Severn Bore.’

She didn’t reply.

‘Do you remember that?’ She shook her head. ‘Really not? There was a gang of us, up at Minsterworth. There was a moon -’

‘Driving,’ she said.

‘Fine.’ If that was how she wanted it. After all, it was her expedition. I looked out of the window instead. Convenience stores, cheap restaurants, a betting shop, people queuing at a cash machine, women with bits of flesh spurting from between the joins of their clothes, a slew of litter, a shouting lunatic, an obese mother with three obese children, faces from all races: an all-purpose high street, normal London.

After a few minutes, we got to a posher bit: detached houses, front gardens, a hill. Veronica turned off and parked. I thought: OK, it’s your game – I’ll wait for the rules, whatever they might be. But part of me also thought: Fuck it, I’m not going to stop being myself just because you’re back in your Wobbly Bridge state of mind.

‘How’s Brother Jack?’ I asked cheerily. She could hardly answer ‘Driving’ to that question.

‘Jack’s Jack,’ she replied, not looking at me.

Well, that ’s philosophically self-evident, as we used to say, back in the days of Adrian.

‘Do you remember -’

‘Waiting,’ she interrupted.

Very well, I thought. First meeting, then driving, now waiting. What comes next? Shopping, cooking, eating and drinking, snogging, wanking and fucking? I very much doubt it. But as we sat side by side, a bald man and a whiskery woman, I realised what I should have spotted at once. Of the two of us, Veronica was much the more nervous. And whereas I was nervous about her, she clearly wasn’t nervous about me. I was like some minor, necessary irritant. But why was I necessary?

I sat and waited. I rather wished I hadn’t left that free newspaper on the train. I wondered why I hadn’t driven here myself. Probably because I didn’t know what the parking restrictions would be like. I wanted a drink of water. I also wanted to pee. I lowered the window. This time, Veronica didn’t object.

‘Look.’

I looked. A small group of people were coming along the pavement towards my side of the car. I counted five of them. In front was a man who, despite the heat, was wearing layers of heavy tweed, including a waistcoat and a kind of deerstalker helmet. His jacket and hat were covered with metal badges, thirty or forty of them at a guess, some glinting in the sun; there was a watch-chain slung between his waistcoat pockets. His expression was jolly: he looked like someone with an obscure function at a circus or fairground. Behind him came two men: the first had a black moustache and a kind of rolling gait; the second was small and malformed, with one shoulder much higher than the other – he paused to spit briefly into a front garden. And behind them was a tall, goofy fellow with glasses, holding the hand of a plump, Indianish woman.