The last thing I expected was a reply the next morning. This time she hadn’t deleted my subject heading. Her reply read: ‘If you need to ask the question, then the answer is no. V.’
It perhaps says something of my state of mind that I found this response normal, indeed encouraging.
It perhaps says something else that my reaction was to ring up Margaret and tell her of the exchange. There was a silence, then my ex-wife said quietly, ‘Tony, you’re on your own now.’
You can put it another way, of course; you always can. So, for example, there is the question of contempt, and our response to it. Brother Jack gives me a supercilious wink, and forty years later I use what charm I have – no, let’s not exaggerate: I use a certain false politeness – to get information out of him. And then, instantly, I betray him. My contempt in exchange for your contempt. Even if, as I now admit, what he actually felt towards me back then might have been just an amused lack of interest. Here comes my sister’s latest – well, there was one before him, and there’ll doubtless be another along soon. No need to examine this passing specimen too closely. But I –
I
– felt it as contempt at the time, remembered it as such, and delivered the feeling back.
And maybe with Veronica I was trying to do something more: not return her contempt, but overcome it. You can see the attraction of this. Because rereading that letter of mine, feeling its harshness and aggression, came as a profound and intimate shock. If she hadn’t felt contempt for me before, she’d have been bound to after Adrian showed her my words. And bound also to carry that resentment down the years, and use it to justify withholding, even destroying, Adrian’s diary.
I was saying, confidently, how the chief characteristic of remorse is that nothing can be done about it: that the time has passed for apology or amends. But what if I’m wrong? What if by some means remorse can be made to flow backwards, can be transmuted into simple guilt, then apologised for, and then forgiven? What if you can prove you weren’t the bad guy she took you for, and she is willing to accept your proof?
Or perhaps my motive came from a totally opposite direction, and wasn’t about the past but the future. Like most people, I have superstitions attached to the taking of a journey. We may know that flying is statistically safer than walking to the corner shop. Even so, before going away I do things like pay bills, clear off correspondence, phone someone close.
‘Susie, I’m off tomorrow.’
‘Yes, I know, Dad. You told me.’
‘Did I?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, just to say goodbye.’
‘Sorry, Dad, the kids were making a noise. What was that?’
‘Oh, nothing, give them my love.’
You’re doing it for yourself, of course. You’re wanting to leave that final memory, and make it a pleasant one. You want to be well thought of – in case your plane turns out to be the one that’s less safe than walking to the corner shop.
And if this is how we behave before a five-night winter break in Mallorca, then why should there not be a broader process at work towards the end of life, as that final journey – the motorised trundle through the crematorium’s curtains – approaches? Don’t think ill of me, remember me well. Tell people you were fond of me, that you loved me, that I wasn’t a bad guy. Even if, perhaps, none of this was the case.
I opened an old photo album and looked at the picture she’d asked me to take in Trafalgar Square. ‘One with your friends.’ Alex and Colin are putting on rather exaggerated this-is-for-the-historical-record faces, Adrian looks normally serious, while Veronica – as I had never before noticed – is turning slightly in towards him. Not looking up at him, but equally not looking at the camera. In other words, not looking at me. I’d got jealous that day. I’d wanted to introduce her to my friends, wanted her to like them, and them to like her, though of course not more than any of them liked me. Which might have been a juvenile, as well as an unrealistic, expectation. So when she kept asking Adrian questions, I got petulant; and when, later, in the hotel bar, Adrian had slagged off Brother Jack and his chums, I felt better immediately.
I briefly considered tracking down Alex and Colin. I imagined asking for their memories and their corroboration. But they were hardly central to the story; I didn’t expect their memories to be better than mine. And what if their corroboration proved the opposite of helpful? Actually, Tony, I suppose it won’t do any harm to speak the truth after all these years, but Adrian was always very cutting about you behind your back. Oh, how interesting. Yes, we both noticed that. He said you weren’t either as nice or as clever as you thought you were. I see; anything else? Yes, he said the way you made it obvious that you considered yourself his closest friend – closer, anyway, than the two of us – was absurd and incomprehensible. Right, is that all? Not quite: anyone could see that what’s-her-name was stringing you along until something better turned up. Didn’t you notice the way she was flirting with Adrian that day we all met? The two of us were pretty shocked by it. She practically had her tongue in his ear.
No, they wouldn’t be any help. And Mrs Ford was dead. And Brother Jack was off the scene. The only possible witness, the only corroborator, was Veronica.
I said I wanted to get under her skin, didn’t I? It’s an odd expression, and one that always makes me think of Margaret’s way of roasting a chicken. She’d gently loosen the skin from the breast and thighs, then slip butter and herbs underneath. Tarragon, probably. Perhaps some garlic as well, I’m not sure. I’ve never tried it myself, then or since; my fingers are too clumsy, and I imagine them ripping the skin.
Margaret told me of a French way of doing this which is even fancier. They put slices of black truffle under the skin – and do you know what they call it? Chicken in Half-Mourning. I suppose the recipe dates from the time people used to wear nothing but black for a few months, grey for another few months, and only slowly return to the colours of life. Full-, Half-, Quarter-Mourning. I don’t know if those were the terms, but I know the gradations of dress were fully tabulated. Nowadays, how long do people wear mourning? Half a day in most cases – just long enough for the funeral or cremation and the drinks afterwards.
Sorry, that’s a bit off the track. I wanted to get under her skin, that’s what I said, didn’t I? Did I mean what I thought I meant by it, or something else? ‘I’ve Got You Under My Skin’ – that’s a love song, isn’t it?
I don’t want to blame Margaret at all. Not in the slightest. But, to put it simply, if I was on my own, then who did I have? I hesitated for a few days before sending Veronica a new email. In it, I asked about her parents. Was her father still alive? Had her mother’s end been gentle? I added that, though I’d met them only once, I had good memories. Well, that was fifty per cent true. I didn’t really understand why I asked these questions. I suppose I wanted to do something normal, or at least pretend that something was normal even if it wasn’t. When you’re young – when I was young – you want your emotions to be like the ones you read about in books. You want them to overturn your life, create and define a new reality. Later, I think, you want them to do something milder, something more practical: you want them to support your life as it is and has become. You want them to tell you that things are OK. And is there anything wrong with that?
Veronica’s reply was a surprise and a relief. She didn’t treat my questions as impertinent. It was almost as if she was pleased to be asked. Her father had been dead some thirty-five years and more. His drinking had got worse and worse; oesophageal cancer was the result. I paused at that, feeling guilty that my first words to Veronica on the Wobbly Bridge had been flippant ones about bald alcoholics.
After his death, her mother had sold the house in Chislehurst and moved up to London. She did art classes, started smoking, and took in lodgers, even though she’d been left well provided for. She had remained in good health until a year or so ago, when her memory began to fail. A small stroke was suspected. Then she started putting the tea in the fridge and the eggs in the breadbin, that sort of thing. Once she nearly set the house on fire by leaving a cigarette burning. She remained cheerful throughout, until she suddenly went downhill. The last months had been a struggle, and no, her end had not been gentle, though it had been a mercy.
I reread this email several times. I was looking for traps, ambiguities, implied insults. There were none – unless straightforwardness itself can be a trap. It was an ordinary, sad story – all too familiar – and simply told.
When you start forgetting things – I don’t mean Alzheimer’s, just the predictable consequence of ageing – there are different ways to react. You can sit there and try to force your memory into giving up the name of that acquaintance, flower, train station, astronaut … Or you admit failure and take practical steps with reference books and the internet. Or you can just let it go – forget about remembering – and then sometimes you find that the mislaid fact surfaces an hour or a day later, often in those long waking nights that age imposes. Well, we all learn this, those of us who forget things.
But we also learn something else: that the brain doesn’t like being typecast. Just when you think everything is a matter of decrease, of subtraction and division, your brain, your memory, may surprise you. As if it’s saying: Don’t imagine you can rely on some comforting process of gradual decline – life’s
much
more complicated than that. And so the brain will throw you scraps from time to time, even disengage those familiar memory-loops. That’s what, to my consternation, I found happening to me now. I began to remember, with no particular order or sense of significance, long-buried details of that distant weekend with the Ford family. My attic room had a view across roofs to a wood; from below I could hear a clock striking the hour precisely five minutes late. Mrs Ford flipped the broken, cooked egg into the waste bin with an expression of concern – for it, not me. Her husband tried to get me to drink brandy after dinner, and when I refused, asked if I were a man or a mouse. Brother Jack addressed Mrs Ford as ‘the Mother’, as in ‘When does the Mother think there might be fodder for the starving troops?’ And on the second night, Veronica did more than just come upstairs with me. She said, ‘I’m going to walk Tony to his room,’ and took my hand in front of the family. Brother Jack said, ‘And what does the Mother think of that?’ But the Mother only smiled. My goodnights to the family that evening were hasty as I could feel an erection coming on. We walked slowly up to my bedroom, where Veronica backed me against the door, kissed me on the mouth and said into my ear, ‘Sleep the sleep of the wicked.’ And approximately forty seconds later, I now remember, I was wanking into the little washbasin and sluicing my sperm down the house’s pipework.
On a whim, I Googled Chislehurst. And discovered that there’d never been a St Michael’s church in the town. So Mr Ford’s guided tour as he drove us along must have been fanciful – some private joke, or way of stringing me along. I doubt very much there’d been a Café Royal either. Then I went on Google Earth, swooping and zooming around the town. But the house I was looking for didn’t seem to exist any more.
The other night, I allowed myself another drink, turned on my computer, and called up the only Veronica in my address book. I suggested we meet again. I apologised for anything I might have done to make things awkward on the previous occasion. I promised that I didn’t want to talk about her mother’s will. This was true, too; though it wasn’t until I wrote that sentence that I realised I had barely given Adrian or his diary a thought for quite a few days.
‘Is this about closing the circle?’ came her reply.
‘I don’t know,’ I wrote back. ‘But it can’t do any harm, can it?’
She didn’t answer that question, but at the time I didn’t notice or mind.
I don’t know why, but part of me thought she’d suggest meeting on the bridge again. Either that, or somewhere snug and promisingly personal: a forgotten pub, a quiet lunchroom, even the bar at the Charing Cross Hotel. She chose the brasserie on the third floor of John Lewis in Oxford Street.
Actually, this had its convenient side: I needed a few metres of cord for restringing a blind, some kettle descaler, and a set of those patches you iron on the inside of trousers when the knee splits. It’s hard to find this stuff locally any more: where I live, most of those useful little shops have long been turned into cafés or estate agents.
On the train up to town, there was a girl sitting opposite me, plugged into earphones, eyes closed, impervious to the world outside, moving her head to music only she could hear. And suddenly, a complete memory came to me: of Veronica dancing. Yes, she didn’t dance – that’s what I said – but there’d been one evening in my room when she got all mischievous and started pulling out my pop records.
‘Put one on and let me see you dance,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘Takes two to tango.’
‘OK, you show me and I’ll join in.’
So I stacked the autochanger spindle with 45s, moved across to her, did a skeleton-loosening shrug, half-closed my eyes, as if respecting her privacy, and went for it. Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms: the head-jerking and the foot-prancing, the shoulder-twisting and the pelvis-jabbing, with the bonus of ecstatically raised arms and occasional grunting noises. After a bit, I opened my eyes, expecting her to be still sitting on the floor and laughing at me. But there she was, leaping about in a way that made me suspect she’d been to ballet classes, her hair all over her face and her calves tense and full of strut. I watched her for a bit, unsure if she was sending me up or genuinely grooving along to the Moody Blues. Actually, I didn’t care – I was enjoying myself and feeling a small victory. This went on for a while; then I moved closer to her as Ned Miller’s ‘From a Jack to a King’ gave way to Bob Lind singing ‘Elusive Butterfly’. But she didn’t notice and, twirling, bumped into me, nearly losing her balance. I caught her and held her.