Julian Barnes - The Sense of an Ending

‘What has that to do with the matter?’

‘It’s a historical event, sir, if a minor one. But recent. So it ought to be easily understood as history. We know that he’s dead, we know that he had a girlfriend, we know that she’s pregnant – or was. What else do we have? A single piece of documentation, a suicide note reading “Sorry, Mum” – at least, according to Brown. Does that note still exist? Was it destroyed? Did Robson have any other motives or reasons beyond the obvious ones? What was his state of mind? Can we be sure the child was his? We can’t know, sir, not even this soon afterwards. So how might anyone write Robson’s story in fifty years’ time, when his parents are dead and his girlfriend has disappeared and doesn’t want to remember him anyway? You see the problem, sir?’

We all looked at Hunt, wondering if Adrian had pushed it too far this time. That single word ‘pregnant’ seemed to hover like chalk-dust. And as for the audacious suggestion of alternative paternity, of Robson the Schoolboy Cuckold… After a while, the master replied.

‘I see the problem, Finn. But I think you underestimate history. And for that matter historians. Let us assume for the sake of argument that poor Robson were to prove of historical interest. Historians have always been faced with the lack of direct evidence for things. That’s what they’re used to. And don’t forget that in the present case there would have been an inquest, and therefore a coroner’s report. Robson may well have kept a diary, or written letters, made phone calls whose contents are remembered. His parents would have replied to the letters of condolence they received. And fifty years from now, given the current life expectancy, quite a few of his schoolfellows would still be available for interview. The problem might be less daunting than you imagine.’

‘But nothing can make up for the absence of Robson’s testimony, sir.’

‘In one way, no. But equally, historians need to treat a participant’s own explanation of events with a certain scepticism. It is often the statement made with an eye to the future that is the most suspect.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘And mental states may often be inferred from actions. The tyrant rarely sends a handwritten note requesting the elimination of an enemy.’

‘If you say so, sir.’

‘Well, I do.’

Was this their exact exchange? Almost certainly not. Still, it is my best memory of their exchange.

We finished school, promised lifelong friendship, and went our separate ways. Adrian, to nobody’s surprise, won a scholarship to Cambridge. I read history at Bristol; Colin went to Sussex, and Alex into his father’s business. We wrote letters to one another, as people – even the young – did in those days. But we had little experience of the form, so an arch self-consciousness often preceded any urgency of content. To start a letter, ‘Being in receipt of your epistle of the 17th inst’ seemed, for some while, quite witty.

We swore to meet every time the three of us at university came home for the vacation; yet it didn’t always work out. And writing to one another seemed to have recalibrated the dynamics of our relationship. The original three wrote less often and less enthusiastically to one another than we did to Adrian. We wanted his attention, his approval; we courted him, and told him our best stories first; we each thought we were – and deserved to be – closest to him. And though we were making new friends ourselves, we were somehow persuaded that Adrian wasn’t: that we three were still his nearest intimates, that he depended on us. Was this just to disguise the fact that we were dependent on him?

And then life took over, and time speeded up. In other words, I found a girlfriend. Of course, I’d met a few girls before, but either their self-assurance made me feel gauche, or their nervousness compounded my own. There was, apparently, some secret masculine code, handed down from suave twenty-year-olds to tremulous eighteen-year-olds, which, once mastered, enabled you to ‘pick up’ girls and, in certain circumstances, ‘get off’ with them. But I never learnt or understood it, and probably still don’t. My ‘technique’ consisted in not having a technique; others, no doubt rightly, considered it ineptitude. Even the supposedly simple trail of like-a-drink-fancy-a-dance-walk-you-home-how-about-a-coffee? involved a bravado I was incapable of. I just hung around and tried to make interesting remarks while expecting to mess things up. I remember feeling sad through drink at a party in my first term, and when a passing girl asked sympathetically if I was OK, I found myself replying, ‘I think I’m a manic depressive,’ because at the time it felt more characterful than ‘I’m feeling a bit sad.’ When she replied, ‘Not another,’ and moved swiftly on, I realised that, far from making myself stand out from the cheery crowd, I had attempted the world’s worst pick-up line.

My girlfriend was called Veronica Mary Elizabeth Ford, information (by which I mean her middle names) it took me two months to extract. She was reading Spanish, she liked poetry, and her father was a civil servant. About five foot two with rounded, muscular calves, mid-brown hair to her shoulders, blue-grey eyes behind blue-framed spectacles, and a quick yet withholding smile. I thought she was nice. Well, I probably would have found any girl who didn’t shy away from me nice. I didn’t try telling her I felt sad because I didn’t. She owned a Black Box record player to my Dansette, and had better musical taste: that’s to say, she despised Dvořák and Tchaikovsky, whom I adored, and owned some choral and lieder LPs. She looked through my record collection with an occasional flickering smile and a more frequent frown. The fact that I’d hidden both the 1812 Overture and the soundtrack to Un Homme et Une Femme didn’t spare me. There was enough dubious material even before she reached my extensive pop section: Elvis, the Beatles, the Stones (not that anyone could object to them, surely), but also the Hollies, the Animals, the Moody Blues and a two-disc boxed set of Donovan called (in lower case) a gift from a flower to a garden .

‘You like this stuff?’ she asked neutrally.

‘Good to dance to,’ I replied, a little defensively.

‘Do you dance to it? Here? In your room? By yourself?’

‘No, not really.’ Though of course I did.

‘I don’t dance,’ she said, part anthropologist, part layer-down of rules for any relationship we might have, were we to go out together.

I’d better explain what the concept of ‘going out’ with someone meant back then, because time has changed it. I was talking recently to a woman friend whose daughter had come to her in a state of distress. She was in her second term at university, and had been sleeping with a boy who had – openly, and to her knowledge – been sleeping with several other girls at the same time. What he was doing was auditioning them all before deciding which to ‘go out’ with. The daughter was upset, not so much by the system – though she half-perceived its injustice – as by the fact that she hadn’t been the one finally chosen.

This made me feel like a survivor from some antique, bypassed culture whose members were still using carved turnips as a form of monetary exchange. Back in ‘my day’ – though I didn’t claim ownership of it at the time, still less do I now – this is what used to happen: you met a girl, you were attracted to her, you tried to ingratiate yourself, you would invite her to a couple of social events – for instance, the pub – then ask her out on her own, then again, and after a goodnight kiss of variable heat, you were somehow, officially, ‘going out’ with her. Only when you were semi-publicly committed did you discover what her sexual policy might be. And sometimes this meant her body would be as tightly guarded as a fisheries exclusion zone.