‘So, for instance, if Tony …’ These words had a local, textual meaning, specific to forty years ago; and I might at some point discover that they contained, or led to, a rebuke, a criticism from my old clear-seeing, self-seeing friend. But for the moment I heard them with a wider reference – to the whole of my life. ‘So, for instance, if Tony …’ And in this register the words were practically complete in themselves and didn’t need an explanatory main clause to follow. Yes indeed, if Tony had seen more clearly, acted more decisively, held to truer moral values, settled less easily for a passive peaceableness which he first called happiness and later contentment. If Tony hadn’t been fearful, hadn’t counted on the approval of others for his own self-approval … and so on, through a succession of hypotheticals leading to the final one: so, for instance, if Tony hadn’t been Tony.
But Tony was and is Tony, a man who found comfort in his own doggedness. Letters to insurance companies, emails to Veronica. If you’re going to bugger me about, then I’m going to bugger you about back. I carried on sending her emails more or less every other day, and now in a variety of tones, from jokey exhortations to ‘Do the right thing, girl!’, to questions about Adrian’s broken-off sentence, to half-sincere enquiries about her own life. I wanted her to feel that I might be waiting whenever she clicked on her inbox; and I wanted her to know that even if she instantly deleted my messages, I would be aware that this was what she was doing, and not surprised, let alone hurt. And that I was there, waiting. ‘
Ti-yi-yi-yime
is on my side, yes it is …’ I didn’t feel I was harassing her; I was just after what was mine. And then, one morning, I got a result.
‘I’m coming up to town tomorrow, I’ll meet you at 3 in the middle of the Wobbly Bridge.’
I’d never expected that. I thought everything would be done at arm’s length, her methods being solicitors and silence. Maybe she’d had a change of mind. Or maybe I’d got under her skin. I’d been trying to, after all.
The Wobbly Bridge is the new footbridge across the Thames, linking St Paul’s to Tate Modern. When it first opened, it used to shake a bit – either from the wind or the mass of people tramping across it, or both – and the British commentariat duly mocked the architects and engineers for not knowing what they were doing. I thought it beautiful. I also liked the way it wobbled. It seemed to me that we ought occasionally to be reminded of instability beneath our feet. Then they fixed it and it stopped wobbling, but the name stuck – at least for the time being. I wondered about Veronica’s choice of location. Also if she’d keep me waiting, and from which side she’d arrive.
But she was there already. I recognised her from a distance, her height and stance being instantly familiar. Odd how the image of someone’s posture always remains with you. And in her case – how can I put it? Can you stand impatiently? I don’t mean she was hopping from one foot to the other; but an evident tenseness suggested she didn’t want to be there.
I checked my watch. I was exactly on time. We looked at one another.
‘You’ve lost your hair,’ she said.
‘It happens. At least it shows I’m not an alcoholic.’
‘I didn’t say you were. We’ll sit on one of those benches.’
She headed off without waiting for an answer. She was walking swiftly, and I would have had to run a few steps to get alongside her. I didn’t want to give her this pleasure, so followed a few paces behind to an empty bench facing the Thames. I couldn’t tell which way the tide was running, as a whippy crosswind stirred the water’s surface. Above, the sky was grey. There were few tourists; a rollerblader rattled past behind us.
‘Why do people think you’re an alcoholic?’
‘They don’t.’
‘Then why did you bring it up?’
‘I didn’t bring it up. You said I’d lost my hair. And it happens to be a fact that if you’re a very heavy drinker, something in the booze stops your hair falling out.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Well, can you think of a bald alcoholic?’
‘I’ve got better things to do with my time.’
I glanced at her and thought: You haven’t changed, but I have. And yet, oddly, these conversational tactics made me almost nostalgic. Almost. At the same time, I thought: You look a bit whiskery. She was wearing a utilitarian tweed skirt and a rather shabby blue mackintosh; her hair, even allowing for the breeze off the river, seemed unkempt. It was the same length as forty years earlier, but heavily streaked with grey. Or rather, it was grey streaked with the original brown. Margaret used to say that women often made the mistake of keeping their hair in the style they adopted when they were at their most attractive. They hung on long after it became inappropriate, all because they were afraid of the big cut. This certainly seemed to be the case with Veronica. Or maybe she just didn’t care.
‘So?’ she said.
‘So?’ I repeated.
‘You asked to meet.’
‘Did I?’
‘You mean you didn’t?’
‘If you say I did, I must have.’
‘Well, is it yes or no?’ she asked, getting to her feet and standing, yes, impatiently.
I deliberately didn’t react. I didn’t suggest she sit down, nor did I stand up myself. She could leave if she wanted – and she would, so there was no point trying to hold her back. She was gazing out over the water. She had three moles on the side of her neck – did I remember them or not? Each, now, had a long whisker growing out of it, and the light caught these filaments of hair.
Very well then, no small talk, no history, no nostalgia. To business.
‘Are you going to let me have Adrian’s diary?’
‘I can’t,’ she replied, without looking at me.
‘Why not?’
‘I burnt it.’
First theft, then arson, I thought, with a spurt of anger. But I told myself to keep treating her like an insurance company. So, as neutrally as possible, I merely asked,
‘For what reason?’
Her cheek twitched, but I couldn’t tell if it was a smile or a wince.
‘People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries.’
‘Your mother must have read it. And so must you, to decide which page to send me.’ No answer. Try another tack. ‘By the way, how did that sentence continue? You know the one: “So, for instance, if Tony …”?’
A shrug and a frown. ‘People shouldn’t read other people’s diaries,’ she repeated. ‘But you can read this if you like.’
She pulled an envelope from her raincoat pocket, handed it to me, turned, and walked off.
When I got home, I checked through my sent emails and, of course, I’d never asked for a meeting. Well, not in so many words, anyway.
I remembered my initial reaction to seeing the phrase ‘blood money’ on my screen. I’d said to myself: But nobody got killed. I’d just been thinking about Veronica and me. I hadn’t considered Adrian.
Another thing I realised: there was a mistake, or a statistical anomaly, in Margaret’s theory of clear-edged versus mysterious women; or rather, in the second part of it, about men being attracted to either one sort or the other. I’d been attracted to both Veronica and Margaret.
I remember a period in late adolescence when my mind would make itself drunk with images of adventurousness. This is how it will be when I grow up. I shall go there, do this, discover that, love her, and then her and her and her. I shall live as people in novels live and have lived. Which ones I was not sure, only that passion and danger, ecstasy and despair (but then more ecstasy) would be in attendance. However … who said that thing about ‘the littleness of life that art exaggerates’? There was a moment in my late twenties when I admitted that my adventurousness had long since petered out. I would never do those things adolescence had dreamt about. Instead, I mowed my lawn, I took holidays, I had my life.
But time … how time first grounds us and then confounds us. We thought we were being mature when we were only being safe. We imagined we were being responsible but were only being cowardly. What we called realism turned out to be a way of avoiding things rather than facing them. Time … give us enough time and our best-supported decisions will seem wobbly, our certainties whimsical.
I didn’t open the envelope Veronica gave me for a day and a half. I waited because I knew she would expect me not to wait, to have my thumb at the flap before she was out of sight. But I knew the envelope was hardly likely to contain what I wanted: for instance, the key to a left-luggage locker where I would find Adrian’s diary. At the same time, I wasn’t convinced by her prim line about not reading other people’s diaries. I thought her quite capable of arson to punish me for ancient wrongs and failings, but not in defence of some hastily erected principle of correct behaviour.
It puzzled me that she had suggested a meeting. Why not use Royal Mail and so avoid an encounter which she clearly found distasteful? Why this face-to-face? Because she was curious to set eyes on me again after all these years, even if it made her shudder? I rather doubted it. I ran through the ten minutes or so we had spent in one another’s company – the location, the change of location, the anxiety to be gone from both, what was said and what was unsaid. Eventually, I came up with a theory. If she didn’t need the meeting for what she had done – which was give me the envelope – then she needed it for what she had said. Which was that she had burnt Adrian’s diary. And why did she have to put that into words by the grey Thamesside? Because it was deniable. She didn’t want the corroboration of the printed-out email. If she could falsely assert that I was the one who had asked for a meeting, it wouldn’t be a stretch for her to deny that she had ever admitted arson.
Having arrived at this tentative explanation, I waited until the evening, had my supper, poured an extra glass of wine, and sat down with the envelope. It didn’t have my name on it: perhaps more evidence of deniability? Of course I didn’t give it to him. Nor did I even meet him. He’s just an email pest, a fantasist, a bald cyberstalker.
I could tell, from the band of grey shading to black round the edge of the first page, that here was another photocopy. What was it with her? Did she never deal in authentic documents? Then I noticed the date at the top, and the handwriting: my own, as it used to be, all those years ago. ‘Dear Adrian,’ the letter began. I read it through, got to my feet, took my glass of wine, poured it rather splashily back into the bottle, and made myself a very large whisky.
How often do we tell our own life story? How often do we adjust, embellish, make sly cuts? And the longer life goes on, the fewer are those around to challenge our account, to remind us that our life is not our life, merely the story we have told about our life. Told to others, but – mainly – to ourselves.
Dear Adrian – or rather, Dear Adrian and Veronica (hello, Bitch, and welcome to this letter),
Well you certainly deserve one another and I wish you much joy. I hope you get so involved that the mutual damage will be permanent. I hope you regret the day I introduced you. And I hope that when you break up, as you inevitably will – I give you six months, which your shared pride will extend to a year, all the better for fucking you up, says I – you are left with a lifetime of bitterness that will poison your subsequent relationships. Part of me hopes you’ll have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge, yea unto the next generation and the next. See Great Art. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two (and you’re not great art, just a cartoonist’s doodle). 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. So keep rolling the Durex on to his spindly cock, Veronica. Or perhaps you haven’t let him go that far yet?
Still, enough of the courtesies. I have just a few precise things to say to each of you.
Adrian: you already know she’s a cockteaser, of course – though I expect you told yourself she was engaged in a Struggle With Her Principles, which you as a philosopher would employ your grey cells to help her overcome. If she hasn’t let you Go All The Way yet, I suggest you break up with her, and she’ll be round your place with sodden knickers and a three-pack, eager to give it away. But cockteasing is also a metaphor: she is someone who will manipulate your inner self while holding hers back from you. I leave a precise diagnosis to the headshrinkers – which might vary according to the day of the week – and merely note her inability to imagine anyone else’s feelings or emotional life. Even her own mother warned me against her. If I were you, I’d check things out with Mum – ask her about damage a long way back. Of course, you’ll have to do this behind Veronica’s back, because boy is that girl a control freak. Oh, and she’s also a snob, as you must be aware, who only took up with you because you were soon to have BA Cantab after your name. Remember how much you despised Brother Jack and his posh friends? Is that who you want to run with now? But don’t forget: give her time, and she’ll look down on you just as she looks down on me.
Veronica: interesting, that joint letter. Your malice mixed with his priggishness. Quite a marriage of talents. Like your sense of social superiority versus his sense of intellectual superiority. But don’t think you can outsmart Adrian as you (for a time) outsmarted me. I can see your tactics – isolate him, cut him off from his old friends, make him dependent on you, etc., etc. That might work in the short term. But in the long? It’s just a question of whether you can get pregnant before he discovers you’re a bore. And even if you do nail him down, you can look forward to a lifetime of having your logic corrected, to breakfast-table pedantry and stifled yawns at your airs and graces. I can’t do anything to you now, but time can. Time will tell. It always does.