Julian Barnes: The Sense of an Ending

‘What’s Jack reading?’ I asked, trying to make up ground.

‘Moral sciences,’ she replied. ‘Like Adrian.’

I know what Adrian’s bloody reading, thank you very much, I wanted to say. Instead I sulked for a while, and talked to Colin about films.

Towards the end of the afternoon we took photos; she asked for ‘one with your friends’. The three of them shuffled politely into line, whereupon she rearranged them: Adrian and Colin, the two tallest, on either side of her, with Alex beyond Colin. The resulting print made her look even slighter than she did in the flesh. Many years later, when I came to examine this photo again, looking for answers, I wondered about the fact that she never wore heels of any height. I’d read somewhere that if you want to make people pay attention to what you’re saying, you don’t raise your voice but lower it: this is what really commands attention. Perhaps hers was a similar kind of trick with height. Though whether she went in for tricks is a question I still haven’t resolved. When I was going out with her, it always seemed that her actions were instinctive. But then I was resistant to the whole idea that women were or could be manipulative. This may tell you more about me than it does about her. And even if I were to decide, at this late stage, that she was and always had been calculating, I’m not sure it would help matters. By which I mean: help me.

We walked her to Charing Cross and waved her off to Chislehurst in a mock-heroic way, as if she were travelling to Samarkand. Then we sat in the bar of the station hotel, drinking beer and feeling very grown up.

‘Nice girl,’ said Colin.

‘Very nice,’ added Alex.

‘That’s philosophically self-evident!’ I almost shouted. Well, I was a little overexcited. I turned to Adrian. ‘Any advance on “very nice”?’

‘You don’t actually need me to congratulate you, do you, Anthony?’

‘Yes, why the fuck shouldn’t I?’

‘Then of course I do.’

But his attitude seemed to criticise my neediness and the other two for pandering to it. I felt slightly panicked; I didn’t want the day to unravel. Though looking back, it was not the day, but the four of us, that were beginning to unravel.

‘So, have you come across Brother Jack at Cambridge?’

‘I haven’t met him, no, and don’t expect to. He’s in his final year. But I’ve heard of him, read about him in a magazine article. And about the people he goes around with, yes.’

He clearly wanted to leave it at that, but I wouldn’t let him.

‘And so what do you think of him?’

Adrian paused. He took a sip of beer, and then said with sudden vehemence, ‘I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it.’

In another mood, I might have taken this as a strike against the three of us. Instead, I felt a throb of vindication.

Veronica and I continued going out together, all through our second year. One evening, perhaps a little drunk, she let me put my hand down her knickers. I felt extravagant pride as I scuffled around. She wouldn’t let me put my finger inside her, but wordlessly, over the next days, we developed a way to pleasure. We would be on the floor, kissing. I would take off my watch, roll up my left sleeve, put my hand into her knickers and gradually shuffle them down her thighs a little; then I would place my hand flat on the floor, and she would rub herself against my trapped wrist until she came. For a few weeks this made me feel masterful, but back in my room my wanking was sometimes edged with resentment. And what kind of a trade-off had I got myself into now? A better, or a worse one? I discovered something else I couldn’t understand: I was, presumably, meant to feel closer to her, but didn’t.

‘So, do you ever think about where our relationship is heading?’

She said it just like that, out of the blue. She had come round for tea, bringing slices of fruitcake.

‘Do you?’

‘I asked first.’

I thought – and it may not have been a gallant reaction – is this why you started letting me put my hand down your pants?

‘Does it have to head somewhere?’

‘Isn’t that what relationships do?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t been in enough of them.’

‘Look, Tony,’ she said. ‘I don’t stagnate.’

I thought about this for a while, or tried to. But instead kept seeing an image of stagnant water, with thick scum and hovering mosquitoes. I realised I wasn’t much good at discussing this sort of stuff.

‘So you think we’re stagnating?’

She did that eyebrow-above-the-spectacle-frame tic that I no longer found quite so cute. I went on,

‘Isn’t there something between stagnation and heading somewhere?’

‘Like?’

‘Like having a nice time. Enjoy the day and all that?’ But just saying this made me wonder if I was enjoying the day any longer. I also thought: What does she want me to say?

‘And do you think we’re suited?’

‘You keep asking me questions as if you know the answer to them. Or as if you know the answer you want. So why don’t you tell me what it is and I’ll tell you whether it’s mine as well?’

‘You’re quite cowardly, aren’t you, Tony?’

‘I think it’s more that I’m… peaceable.’

‘Well, I wouldn’t want to disturb your self-image.’

We finished our tea. I wrapped up the two remaining slices of cake and put them in a tin. Veronica kissed me nearer the corner of my lips than the centre, and then left. In my mind, this was the beginning of the end of our relationship. Or have I just remembered it this way to make it seem so, and to apportion blame? If asked in a court of law what happened and what was said, I could only attest to the words ‘heading’, ‘stagnating’ and ‘peaceable’. I’d never thought of myself as peaceable – or its opposite – until then. I would also swear to the truth of the biscuit tin; it was burgundy red, with the Queen’s smiling profile on it.

I don’t want to give the impression that all I did at Bristol was work and see Veronica. But few other memories come back to me. One that does – one single, distinct event – was the night I witnessed the Severn Bore. The local paper used to print a timetable, indicating where best to catch it and when. But the first occasion I tried, the water didn’t seem to be obeying its instructions. Then, one evening at Minsterworth, a group of us waited on the river bank until after midnight and were eventually rewarded. For an hour or two we observed the river flowing gently down to the sea as all good rivers do. The moon’s intermittent lighting was assisted by the occasional explorations of a few powerful torches. Then there was a whisper, and a craning of necks, and all thoughts of damp and cold vanished as the river simply seemed to change its mind, and a wave, two or three feet high, was heading towards us, the water breaking across its whole width, from bank to bank. This heaving swell came level with us, surged past, and curved off into the distance; some of my mates gave chase, shouting and cursing and falling over as it outpaced them; I stayed on the bank by myself. I don’t think I can properly convey the effect that moment had on me. It wasn’t like a tornado or an earthquake (not that I’d witnessed either) – nature being violent and destructive, putting us in our place. It was more unsettling because it looked and felt quietly wrong, as if some small lever of the universe had been pressed, and here, just for these minutes, nature was reversed, and time with it. And to see this phenomenon after dark made it the more mysterious, the more other-worldly.

After we broke up, she slept with me.

Yes, I know. I expect you’re thinking: The poor sap, how did he not see that coming? But I didn’t. I thought we were over, and I thought there was another girl (a normal-sized girl who wore high heels to parties) I was interested in. I didn’t see it coming at any point: when Veronica and I bumped into each other at the pub (she didn’t like pubs), when she asked me to walk her home, when she stopped halfway there and we kissed, when we got to her room and I turned the light on and she turned it off again, when she took her knickers off and passed me a pack of Durex Fetherlite, or even when she took one from my fumbling hand and put it on me, or during the rest of the swift business.