Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

I now became a regular at the pub as well as the shop. I didn’t join the book club or participate in quiz night, but regularly sat at a small table by the window and worked my way through the menu. What was I hoping for? Probably to get into conversation at some point with the young care worker I’d seen escorting the quintet that first afternoon; or even, perhaps, with the badge man, who seemed the most affable and approachable. I was patient without any sense of being so; I no longer counted the hours; and then, one early evening, I saw all five of them approaching, shepherded by the same woman. Somehow, I wasn’t even surprised. The two regulars came into the pub; the other three went into the shop with the minder.

I got up, leaving my biro and newspaper on the table as signs that I would return. At the shop’s entrance I picked up a yellow plastic basket and wandered slowly round. At the end of an aisle the three of them were clustered in front of a choice of washing-up liquids, gravely debating which to buy. The space was narrow, and I said a loud ‘Excuse me’ as I approached. The gangly fellow with glasses immediately pressed himself, face inwards, against shelves of kitchen stuff, and all three fell silent. As I passed, the badge man looked me in the face. ‘Evening,’ I said with a smile. He carried on looking, then bowed from the neck. I left it at that and returned to the pub.

A few minutes later the three of them joined the two drinkers. The care woman went to the bar and ordered. I was struck by the fact that while they’d been boisterous and childlike in the street, they were shy and whispering in the shop and pub. Soft drinks were carried across to the newcomers. I thought I heard the word ‘birthday’ but might have been mistaken. I decided that it was time to order food. My path to the bar would take me close by them. I had no actual plan. The three who had come in from the shop were still standing, and they turned slightly as I approached. I addressed a second cheery ‘Evening!’ to the badge man, who responded as before. The gangly bloke was now in front of me and as I was about to make my way past I stopped and looked at him properly. He was about forty, just over six feet, with a pallid skin and thick-lensed glasses. I could sense he was keen to turn his back again. But instead, he did something unexpected. He took off his glasses and looked me full in the face. His eyes were brown and gentle.

Almost without thinking, I said to him quietly, ‘I’m a friend of Mary’s.’

I watched as he first began to smile, then panic. He turned away, gave a muted whine, shuffled close to the Indian woman, and took her hand. I carried on to the bar, put half a buttock on a stool and started examining the menu. A moment or two later, I became aware of the black carer beside me.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope I didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘It’s not good to startle him. Especially now.’

‘I met him once before, with Mary when she came over one afternoon. I’m a friend of hers.’

She looked at me, as if trying to assess my motives and my truthfulness. ‘Then you’ll understand,’ she said quietly, ‘won’t you?’

‘Yes, I do.’

And the thing was, I did. I didn’t need to talk to the badge man or the male carer. Now I knew.

I saw it in his face. It’s not often that’s true, is it? At least, not for me. We listen to what people say, we read what they write – that’s our evidence, that’s our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker’s words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle – and then we know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us.

But this was different, simpler. There was no contradiction – I simply saw it in his face. In the eyes, their colour and expression, and in the cheeks, their pallor and underlying structure. Corroboration came from his height, and the way his bones and muscles arranged that height. This was Adrian’s son. I didn’t need a birth certificate or DNA test – I saw it and felt it. And of course the dates matched: he would be about this age now.

My first reaction was, I admit, solipsistic. I couldn’t avoid remembering what I’d written in the part of my letter addressed to Veronica: ‘It’s just a question of whether you can get pregnant before he discovers you’re a bore.’ I hadn’t even meant it at the time – I was just flailing around, trying to find a way to hurt. In fact, all the time I was going out with Veronica, I found her many things – alluring, mysterious, disapproving – but never boring. And even in my recent dealings with her, though the adjectives might be updated – exasperating, stubborn, haughty, yet still, in a way, alluring – I never found her boring. So it was as false as it was hurtful.

But that was only the half of it. When I’d been trying to damage them, I’d written: ‘Part of me hopes you have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two.’ And then: ‘So I don’t wish you that. It would be unjust to inflict on some innocent foetus the prospect of discovering that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism.’ Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering. Of course I don’t – I didn’t – believe in curses. That’s to say, in words producing events. But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens – of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass – this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. The fact that the young me who cursed and the old me who witnessed the curse’s outcome had quite different feelings – this was monstrously irrelevant. If, just before all this started, you had told me that Adrian, instead of killing himself, had counterfactually married Veronica, that they had had a child together, then perhaps others, and then grandchildren, I would have answered: That’s fine, each to their own life; you went your way and I went mine, no hard feelings. And now these idle clichés ran up against the unshiftable truth of what had happened. Time’s revenge on the innocent foetus. I thought of that poor, damaged man turning away from me in the shop and pressing his face into rolls of kitchen towel and jumbo packs of quilted toilet tissue so as to avoid my presence. Well, his instinct had been a true one: I was a man against whom backs should be turned. If life did reward merit, then I deserved shunning.

Only a few days previously I’d been entertaining a dim fantasy about Veronica, all the while admitting that I knew nothing of her life in the forty and more years since I’d last seen her. Now I had some answers to the questions I hadn’t asked. She had become pregnant by Adrian, and – who knows? – perhaps the trauma of his suicide had affected the child in her womb. She had given birth to a son who had at some stage been diagnosed as… what? As not being able to function independently in society; as needing constant support, emotional and financial. I wondered when that diagnosis had been made. Was it soon after birth, or had there been a lulling pause of a few years, during which Veronica could take comfort in what had been saved from the wreckage? But afterwards – how long had she sacrificed her life for him, perhaps taking some crappy part-time job while he was at a special-needs school? And then, presumably, he had got bigger and harder to manage, and eventually the terrible struggle became too much, and she allowed him to be taken into care. Imagine what that must have felt like; imagine the loss, the sense of failure, the guilt. And here was I, complaining to myself when my daughter occasionally forgot to send me an email. I also remembered the ungrateful thoughts I’d had since first meeting Veronica again on the Wobbly Bridge. I thought she looked a bit shabby and unkempt; I thought she was difficult, unfriendly, charmless. In fact, I was lucky she gave me the time of day. And I’d expected her to hand over Adrian’s diary? In her place, I’d probably have burnt it too, as I now believed she had done.