I remember, in no particular order:
– a shiny inner wrist;
– steam rising from a wet sink as a hot frying pan is laughingly tossed into it;
– gouts of sperm circling a plughole, before being sluiced down the full length of a tall house;
– a river rushing nonsensically upstream, its wave and wash lit by half a dozen chasing torchbeams;
– another river, broad and grey, the direction of its flow disguised by a stiff wind exciting the surface;
– bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door.
This last isn’t something I actually saw, but what you end up remembering isn’t always the same as what you have witnessed.
We live in time – it holds us and moulds us – but I’ve never felt I understood it very well. And I’m not referring to theories about how it bends and doubles back, or may exist elsewhere in parallel versions. No, I mean ordinary, everyday time, which clocks and watches assure us passes regularly: tick-tock, click-clock. Is there anything more plausible than a second hand? And yet it takes only the smallest pleasure or pain to teach us time’s malleability. Some emotions speed it up, others slow it down; occasionally, it seems to go missing – until the eventual point when it really does go missing, never to return. I’m not very interested in my schooldays, and don’t feel any nostalgia for them. But school is where it all began, so I need to return briefly to a few incidents that have grown into anecdotes, to some approximate memories which time has deformed into certainty. If I can’t be sure of the actual events any more, I can at least be true to the impressions those facts left. That’s the best I can manage.
There were three of us, and he now made the fourth. We hadn’t expected to add to our tight number: cliques and pairings had happened long before, and we were already beginning to imagine our escape from school into life. His name was Adrian Finn, a tall, shy boy who initially kept his eyes down and his mind to himself. For the first day or two, we took little notice of him: at our school there was no welcoming ceremony, let alone its opposite, the punitive induction. We just registered his presence and waited.
The masters were more interested in him than we were. They had to work out his intelligence and sense of discipline, calculate how well he’d previously been taught, and if he might prove ‘scholarship material’. On the third morning of that autumn term, we had a history class with Old Joe Hunt, wryly affable in his three-piece suit, a teacher whose system of control depended on maintaining sufficient but not excessive boredom.
‘Now, you’ll remember that I asked you to do some preliminary reading about the reign of Henry VIII.’ Colin, Alex and I squinted at one another, hoping that the question wouldn’t be flicked, like an angler’s fly, to land on one of our heads. ‘Who might like to offer a characterisation of the age?’ He drew his own conclusion from our averted eyes. ‘Well, Marshall, perhaps. How would you describe Henry VIII’s reign?’
Our relief was greater than our curiosity, because Marshall was a cautious know-nothing who lacked the inventiveness of true ignorance. He searched for possible hidden complexities in the question before eventually locating a response.
‘There was unrest, sir.’
An outbreak of barely controlled smirking; Hunt himself almost smiled.
‘Would you, perhaps, care to elaborate?’
Marshall nodded slow assent, thought a little longer, and decided it was no time for caution. ‘I’d say there was great unrest, sir.’
‘Finn, then. Are you up in this period?’
The new boy was sitting a row ahead and to my left. He had shown no evident reaction to Marshall’s idiocies.
‘Not really, sir, I’m afraid. But there is one line of thought according to which all you can truly say of any historical event – even the outbreak of the First World War, for example – is that “something happened”.’
‘Is there, indeed? Well, that would put me out of a job, wouldn’t it?’ After some sycophantic laughter, Old Joe Hunt pardoned our holiday idleness and filled us in on the polygamous royal butcher.
At the next break, I sought out Finn. ‘I’m Tony Webster.’ He looked at me warily. ‘Great line to Hunt.’ He seemed not to know what I was referring to. ‘About something happening.’
‘Oh. Yes. I was rather disappointed he didn’t take it up.’
That wasn’t what he was supposed to say.
Another detail I remember: the three of us, as a symbol of our bond, used to wear our watches with the face on the inside of the wrist. It was an affectation, of course, but perhaps something more. It made time feel like a personal, even a secret, thing. We expected Adrian to note the gesture, and follow suit; but he didn’t.
Later that day – or perhaps another day – we had a double English period with Phil Dixon, a young master just down from Cambridge. He liked to use contemporary texts, and would throw out sudden challenges. ‘“Birth, and Copulation, and Death” – that’s what T. S. Eliot says it’s all about. Any comments?’ He once compared a Shakespearean hero to Kirk Douglas in Spartacus. And I remember how, when we were discussing Ted Hughes’s poetry, he put his head at a donnish slant and murmured, ‘Of course, we’re all wondering what will happen when he runs out of animals.’ Sometimes, he addressed us as ‘Gentlemen’. Naturally, we adored him.
That afternoon, he handed out a poem with no title, date or author’s name, gave us ten minutes to study it, then asked for our responses.
‘Shall we start with you, Finn? Put simply, what would you say this poem is about?’
Adrian looked up from his desk. ‘Eros and Thanatos, sir.’
‘Hmm. Go on.’
‘Sex and death,’ Finn continued, as if it might not just be the thickies in the back row who didn’t understand Greek. ‘Or love and death, if you prefer. The erotic principle, in any case, coming into conflict with the death principle. And what ensues from that conflict. Sir.’
I was probably looking more impressed than Dixon thought healthy.
‘Webster, enlighten us further.’
‘I just thought it was a poem about a barn owl, sir.’
This was one of the differences between the three of us and our new friend. We were essentially taking the piss, except when we were serious. He was essentially serious, except when he was taking the piss. It took us a while to work this out.
Adrian allowed himself to be absorbed into our group, without acknowledging that it was something he sought. Perhaps he didn’t. Nor did he alter his views to accord with ours. At morning prayers he could be heard joining in the responses while Alex and I merely mimed the words, and Colin preferred the satirical ploy of the pseudo-zealot’s enthusiastic bellow. The three of us considered school sports a crypto-fascist plan for repressing our sex-drive; Adrian joined the fencing club and did the high jump. We were belligerently tone-deaf; he came to school with his clarinet. When Colin denounced the family, I mocked the political system, and Alex made philosophical objections to the perceived nature of reality, Adrian kept his counsel – at first, anyway. He gave the impression that he believed in things. We did too – it was just that we wanted to believe in our own things, rather than what had been decided for us. Hence what we thought of as our cleansing scepticism.
The school was in central London, and each day we travelled up to it from our separate boroughs, passing from one system of control to another. Back then, things were plainer: less money, no electronic devices, little fashion tyranny, no girlfriends. There was nothing to distract us from our human and filial duty which was to study, pass exams, use those qualifications to find a job, and then put together a way of life unthreateningly fuller than that of our parents, who would approve, while privately comparing it to their own earlier lives, which had been simpler, and therefore superior. None of this, of course, was ever stated: the genteel social Darwinism of the English middle classes always remained implicit.
‘Fucking bastards, parents,’ Colin complained one Monday lunchtime. ‘You think they’re OK when you’re little, then you realise they’re just like…’
‘Henry VIII, Col?’ Adrian suggested. We were beginning to get used to his sense of irony; also to the fact that it might be turned against us as well. When teasing, or calling us to seriousness, he would address me as Anthony; Alex would become Alexander, and the unlengthenable Colin shortened to Col.
‘Wouldn’t mind if my dad had half a dozen wives.’
‘And was incredibly rich.’
‘And painted by Holbein.’
‘And told the Pope to sod off.’
‘Any particular reason why they’re FBs?’ Alex asked Colin.
‘I wanted us to go to the funfair. They said they had to spend the weekend gardening.’
Right: fucking bastards. Except to Adrian, who listened to our denunciations, but rarely joined in. And yet, it seemed to us, he had more cause than most. His mother had walked out years before, leaving his dad to cope with Adrian and his sister. This was long before the term ‘single-parent family’ came into use; back then it was ‘a broken home’, and Adrian was the only person we knew who came from one. This ought to have given him a whole storetank of existential rage, but somehow it didn’t; he said he loved his mother and respected his father. Privately, the three of us examined his case and came up with a theory: that the key to a happy family life was for there not to be a family – or at least, not one living together. Having made this analysis, we envied Adrian the more.
In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives – and time itself – would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.
In the meantime, we were book-hungry, sex-hungry, meritocratic, anarchistic. All political and social systems appeared to us corrupt, yet we declined to consider an alternative other than hedonistic chaos. Adrian, however, pushed us to believe in the application of thought to life, in the notion that principles should guide actions. Previously, Alex had been regarded as the philosopher among us. He had read stuff the other two hadn’t, and might, for instance, suddenly declare, ‘Whereof we cannot speak, thereof must we remain silent.’ Colin and I would consider this idea in silence for a while, then grin and carry on talking. But now Adrian’s arrival dislodged Alex from his position – or rather, gave us another choice of philosopher. If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche. I had read George Orwell and Aldous Huxley; Colin had read Baudelaire and Dostoevsky. This is only a slight caricature.
Yes, of course we were pretentious – what else is youth for? We used terms like ‘Weltanschauung’ and ‘Sturm und Drang’, enjoyed saying ‘That’s philosophically self-evident’, and assured one another that the imagination’s first duty was to be transgressive. Our parents saw things differently, picturing their children as innocents suddenly exposed to noxious influence. So Colin’s mother referred to me as his ‘dark angel’; my father blamed Alex when he found me reading The Communist Manifesto; Colin was fingered by Alex’s parents when they caught him with a hard-boiled American crime novel. And so on. It was the same with sex. Our parents thought we might be corrupted by one another into becoming whatever it was they most feared: an incorrigible masturbator, a winsome homosexual, a recklessly impregnatory libertine. On our behalf they dreaded the closeness of adolescent friendship, the predatory behaviour of strangers on trains, the lure of the wrong kind of girl. How far their anxieties outran our experience.
One afternoon Old Joe Hunt, as if picking up Adrian’s earlier challenge, asked us to debate the origins of the First World War: specifically, the responsibility of Archduke Franz Ferdinand’s assassin for starting the whole thing off. Back then, we were most of us absolutists. We liked Yes v No, Praise v Blame, Guilt v Innocence – or, in Marshall’s case, Unrest v Great Unrest. We liked a game that ended in a win and loss, not a draw. And so for some, the Serbian gunman, whose name is long gone from my memory, had one hundred per cent individual responsibility: take him out of the equation, and the war would never have happened. Others preferred the one hundred per cent responsibility of historical forces, which had placed the antagonistic nations on an inevitable collision course: ‘Europe was a powder keg waiting to blow’, and so on. The more anarchic, like Colin, argued that everything was down to chance, that the world existed in a state of perpetual chaos, and only some primitive storytelling instinct, itself doubtless a hangover from religion, retrospectively imposed meaning on what might or might not have happened.
Hunt gave a brief nod to Colin’s attempt to undermine everything, as if morbid disbelief was a natural by-product of adolescence, something to be grown out of. Masters and parents used to remind us irritatingly that they too had once been young, and so could speak with authority. It’s just a phase, they would insist. You’ll grow out of it; life will teach you reality and realism. But back then we declined to acknowledge that they had ever been anything like us, and we knew that we grasped life – and truth, and morality, and art – far more clearly than our compromised elders.
‘Finn, you’ve been quiet. You started this ball rolling. You are, as it were, our Serbian gunman.’ Hunt paused to let the allusion take effect. ‘Would you care to give us the benefit of your thoughts?’
‘I don’t know, sir.’
‘What don’t you know?’
‘Well, in one sense, I can’t know what it is that I don’t know. That’s philosophically self-evident.’ He left one of those slight pauses in which we again wondered if he was engaged in subtle mockery or a high seriousness beyond the rest of us. ‘Indeed, isn’t the whole business of ascribing responsibility a kind of cop-out? We want to blame an individual so that everyone else is exculpated. Or we blame a historical process as a way of exonerating individuals. Or it’s all anarchic chaos, with the same consequence. It seems to me that there is – was – a chain of individual responsibilities, all of which were necessary, but not so long a chain that everybody can simply blame everyone else. But of course, my desire to ascribe responsibility might be more a reflection of my own cast of mind than a fair analysis of what happened. That’s one of the central problems of history, isn’t it, sir? The question of subjective versus objective interpretation, the fact that we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us.’
There was a silence. And no, he wasn’t taking the piss, not in the slightest.
Old Joe Hunt looked at his watch and smiled. ‘Finn, I retire in five years. And I shall be happy to give you a reference if you care to take over.’ And he wasn’t taking the piss either.
At assembly one morning, the headmaster, in the sombre voice he kept for expulsions and catastrophic sporting defeats, announced that he was the bearer of grievous news, namely that Robson of the Science Sixth had passed away during the weekend. Over a susurrus of awed mutterings, he told us that Robson had been cut down in the flower of youth, that his demise was a loss to the whole school, and that we would all be symbolically present at the funeral. Everything, in fact, except what we wanted to know: how, and why, and if it turned out to be murder, by whom.
‘Eros and Thanatos,’ Adrian commented before the day’s first lesson. ‘Thanatos wins again.’
‘Robson wasn’t exactly Eros-and-Thanatos material,’ Alex told him. Colin and I nodded agreement. We knew because he’d been in our class for a couple of years: a steady, unimaginative boy, gravely uninterested in the arts, who had trundled along without offending anyone. Now he had offended us by making a name for himself with an early death. The flower of youth, indeed: the Robson we had known was vegetable matter.
There was no mention of disease, a bicycling accident or a gas explosion, and a few days later rumour (aka Brown of the Maths Sixth) supplied what the authorities couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Robson had got his girlfriend pregnant, hanged himself in the attic, and not been found for two days.
‘I’d never have thought he knew how to hang himself.’
‘He was in the Science Sixth.’
‘But you need a special sort of slip knot.’
‘That’s only in films. And proper executions. You can do it with an ordinary knot. Just takes longer to suffocate you.’
‘What do we think his girlfriend’s like?’
We considered the options known to us: prim virgin (now ex-virgin), tarty shopgirl, experienced older woman, VD-riddled whore. We discussed this until Adrian redirected our interests.
‘Camus said that suicide was the only true philosophical question.’
‘Apart from ethics and politics and aesthetics and the nature of reality and all the other stuff.’ There was an edge to Alex’s riposte.
‘The only true one. The fundamental one on which all others depend.’
After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant. But in all other respects we judged that Robson had let us – and serious thinking – down. His action had been unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic: in other words, wrong. As for his suicide note, which according to rumour (Brown again) read ‘Sorry, Mum’, we felt that it had missed a powerful educative opportunity.
Perhaps we wouldn’t have been so hard on Robson if it hadn’t been for one central, unshiftable fact: Robson was our age, he was in our terms unexceptional, and yet he had not only conspired to find a girlfriend but also, incontestably, to have had sex with her. Fucking bastard! Why him and not us? Why had none of us even had the experience of failing to get a girlfriend? At least the humiliation of that would have added to our general wisdom, given us something to negatively boast about (‘Actually, “pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole” were her exact words’). We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.
This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there were other sorts of literature – theoretical, self-referential, lachrymosely autobiographical – but they were just dry wanks. Real literature was about psychological, emotional and social truth as demonstrated by the actions and reflections of its protagonists; the novel was about character developed over time. That’s what Phil Dixon had told us anyway. And the only person – apart from Robson – whose life so far contained anything remotely novel-worthy was Adrian.
‘Why did your mum leave your dad?’
‘I’m not sure.’
‘Did your mum have another bloke?’
‘Was your father a cuckold?’
‘Did your dad have a mistress?’
‘I don’t know. They said I’d understand when I was older.’
‘That’s what they always promise. How about explaining it now, that’s what I say.’ Except that I never had said this. And our house, as far as I could tell, contained no mysteries, to my shame and disappointment.
‘Maybe your mum has a young lover?’
‘How would I know. We never meet there. She always comes up to London.’
This was hopeless. In a novel, Adrian wouldn’t just have accepted things as they were put to him. What was the point of having a situation worthy of fiction if the protagonist didn’t behave as he would have done in a book? Adrian should have gone snooping, or saved up his pocket money and employed a private detective; perhaps all four of us should have gone off on a Quest to Discover the Truth. Or would that have been less like literature and too much like a kids’ story?
In our final history lesson of the year, Old Joe Hunt, who had guided his lethargic pupils through Tudors and Stuarts, Victorians and Edwardians, the Rise of Empire and its Subsequent Decline, invited us to look back over all those centuries and attempt to draw conclusions.
‘We could start, perhaps, with the seemingly simple question, What is History? Any thoughts, Webster?’
‘History is the lies of the victors,’ I replied, a little too quickly.
‘Yes, I was rather afraid you’d say that. Well, as long as you remember that it is also the self-delusions of the defeated. Simpson?’
Colin was more prepared than me. ‘History is a raw onion sandwich, sir.’
‘For what reason?’
‘It just repeats, sir. It burps. We’ve seen it again and again this year. Same old story, same old oscillation between tyranny and rebellion, war and peace, prosperity and impoverishment.’
‘Rather a lot for a sandwich to contain, wouldn’t you say?’
We laughed far more than was required, with an end-of-term hysteria.
‘Finn?’
‘“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” ’
‘Is it, indeed? Where did you find that?’
‘Lagrange, sir. Patrick Lagrange. He’s French.’
‘So one might have guessed. Would you care to give us an example?’
‘Robson’s suicide, sir.’
There was a perceptible intake of breath and some reckless head-turning. But Hunt, like the other masters, allowed Adrian special status. When the rest of us tried provocation, it was dismissed as puerile cynicism – something else we would grow out of. Adrian’s provocations were somehow welcomed as awkward searchings after truth.
‘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.
Veronica wasn’t very different from other girls of the time. They were physically comfortable with you, took your arm in public, kissed you until the colour rose, and might consciously press their breasts against you as long as there were about five layers of clothing between flesh and flesh. They would be perfectly aware of what was going on in your trousers without ever mentioning it. And that was all, for quite a while. Some girls allowed more: you heard of those who went in for mutual masturbation, others who permitted ‘full sex’, as it was known. You couldn’t appreciate the gravity of that ‘full’ unless you’d had a lot of the half-empty kind. And then, as the relationship continued, there were certain implicit trade-offs, some based on whim, others on promise and commitment – up to what the poet called ‘a wrangle for a ring’.
Subsequent generations might be inclined to put all this down to religion or prudery. But the girls – or women – with whom I had what might be called infra-sex (yes, it wasn’t only Veronica) were at ease with their bodies. And, if certain criteria obtained, with mine. I don’t mean to suggest, by the way, that infra-sex was unexciting, or even, except in the obvious way, frustrating. Besides, these girls were allowing far more than their mothers had, and I was getting far more than my father had done. At least, so I presumed. And anything was better than nothing. Except that, in the meantime, Colin and Alex had fixed themselves up with girlfriends who didn’t have any exclusion-zone policies – or so their hints implied. But then, no one told the whole truth about sex. And in that respect, nothing has changed.
I wasn’t exactly a virgin, just in case you were wondering. Between school and university I had a couple of instructive episodes, whose excitements were greater than the mark they left. So what happened subsequently made me feel all the odder: the more you liked a girl, and the better matched you were, the less your chance of sex, it seemed. Unless, of course – and this is a thought I didn’t articulate until later – something in me was attracted to women who said no. But can such a perverse instinct exist?
‘Why not?’ you would ask, as a restraining hand was clamped to your wrist.
‘It doesn’t feel right.’
This was an exchange heard in front of many a breathy gas fire, counterpointed by many a whistling kettle. And there was no arguing against ‘feelings’, because women were experts in them, men coarse beginners. So ‘It doesn’t feel right’ had far more persuasive force and irrefutability than any appeal to church doctrine or a mother’s advice. You may say, But wasn’t this the Sixties? Yes, but only for some people, only in certain parts of the country.
My bookshelves were more successful with Veronica than my record collection. In those days, paperbacks came in their traditional liveries: orange Penguins for fiction, blue Pelicans for non-fiction. To have more blue than orange on your shelf was proof of seriousness. And overall, I had enough of the right titles: Richard Hoggart, Steven Runciman, Huizinga, Eysenck, Empson… plus Bishop John Robinson’s Honest to God next to my Larry cartoon books. Veronica paid me the compliment of assuming I’d read them all, and didn’t suspect that the most worn titles had been bought second-hand.
Her own shelves held a lot of poetry, in volume and pamphlet form: Eliot, Auden, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes. There were Left Book Club editions of Orwell and Koestler, some calf-bound nineteenth-century novels, a couple of childhood Arthur Rackhams, and her comfort book, I Capture the Castle. I didn’t for a moment doubt that she had read them all, or that they were the right books to own. Further, they seemed to be an organic continuation of her mind and personality, whereas mine struck me as functionally separate, straining to describe a character I hoped to grow into. This disparity threw me into a slight panic, and as I looked along her poetry shelf I fell back on a line of Phil Dixon’s.
‘Of course, everyone’s wondering what Ted Hughes will do when he runs out of animals.’
‘Are they?’
‘So I’ve been told,’ I said feebly. In Dixon’s mouth, the line had seemed witty and sophisticated; in mine, merely facetious.
‘Poets don’t run out of material the way novelists do,’ she instructed me. ‘Because they don’t depend on material in the same way. And you’re treating him like a sort of zoologist, aren’t you? But even zoologists don’t tire of animals, do they?’
She was looking at me with one eyebrow raised above the frame of her glasses. She was five months older than me and sometimes made it feel like five years.
‘It was just something my English master said.’
‘Well, now you’re at university we must get you to think for yourself, mustn’t we?’
There was something about the ‘we’ that made me suspect I hadn’t got everything wrong. She was just trying to improve me – and who was I to object to that? One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.
I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies of her splayed beneath me or arched above me. Daily intimacy made me proud of knowing about make-up, clothes policy, the feminine razor, and the mystery and consequences of a woman’s periods. I found myself envying this regular reminder of something so wholly female and defining, so connected to the great cycle of nature. I may have put it as badly as this when I tried to explain the feeling.
‘You’re just romanticising what you haven’t got. The only point of it is to tell you you’re not pregnant.’
Given our relationship, this struck me as a bit cheeky.
‘Well, I hope we’re not living in Nazareth.’
There followed one of those pauses when couples tacitly agree not to discuss something. And what was there to discuss? Only, perhaps, the unwritten terms of the trade-off. From my point of view, the fact that we weren’t having sex exonerated me from thinking about the relationship other than as a close complicity with a woman who, as her part of the bargain, wasn’t going to ask the man where the relationship was heading. At least, that’s what I thought the deal was. But I was wrong about most things, then as now. For instance, why did I assume she was a virgin? I never asked her, and she never told me. I assumed she was because she wouldn’t sleep with me: and where is the logic in that?
One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status. On the train down from Charing Cross, I worried that my suitcase – the only one I owned – was so large it made me look like a potential burglar. At the station, Veronica introduced me to her father, who opened the boot of his car, took the suitcase from my hand, and laughed.
‘Looks like you’re planning to move in, young man.’
He was large, fleshy and red-faced; he struck me as gross. Was that beer on his breath? At this time of day? How could this man have fathered such an elfin daughter?
He drove his Humber Super Snipe with a sighing impatience at the folly of others. I sat in the back, alone. Occasionally, he would point things out, presumably to me, though I couldn’t tell if I was meant to reply. ‘St Michael’s, brick and flint, much improved by Victorian restorers.’ ‘Our very own Café Royal – voilà!’ ‘Note the distinguished off-licence with period half-timbering on your right.’ I looked at Veronica’s profile for a clue, but received none.
They lived in a detached, red-brick, tile-hung house with a strip of gravel in front of it. Mr Ford opened the front door and shouted to no one in particular,
‘The boy’s come for a month.’
I noticed the heavy shine on the dark furniture, and the heavy shine on the leaves of an extravagant pot plant. Veronica’s father seized my case as if responding to the distant laws of hospitality and, farcically exaggerating its weight, carried it up to an attic room and threw it on the bed. He pointed to a small plumbed-in basin.
‘Pee in there in the night if you want to.’
I nodded in reply. I couldn’t tell if he was being all matily male, or treating me as lower-class scum.
Veronica’s brother, Jack, was easier to read: one of those healthy, sporting young men who laughed at most things and teased his younger sister. He behaved towards me as if I were an object of mild curiosity, and by no means the first to be exhibited for his appreciation. Veronica’s mother ignored all the by-play around her, asked me about my studies, and disappeared into the kitchen a lot. I suppose she must have been in her early forties, though of course she appeared to me deep into middle age, as did her husband. She didn’t look much like Veronica: a broader face, hair tied off her high forehead with a ribbon, a bit more than average height. She had a somewhat artistic air, though precisely how this expressed itself – colourful scarves, a distrait manner, the humming of opera arias, or all three – I couldn’t at this distance testify.
I was so ill at ease that I spent the entire weekend constipated: this is my principal factual memory. The rest consists of impressions and half-memories which may therefore be self-serving: for instance, how Veronica, despite having invited me down, seemed at first to withdraw into her family and join in their examination of me – though whether this was the cause, or the consequence, of my insecurity, I can’t from here determine. Over supper that Friday there was some questioning of my social and intellectual credentials; I felt as if I were before a court of inquiry. Afterwards we watched the TV news and awkwardly discussed world affairs until bedtime. Had we been in a novel, there might have been some sneaking between floors for a hot cuddle after the paterfamilias had locked up for the night. But we weren’t; Veronica didn’t even kiss me goodnight that first evening, or make some excuse about towels, and seeing I had everything I needed. Perhaps she feared her brother’s mockery. So I undressed, washed, peed aggressively in the basin, got into my pyjamas and lay awake for a long time.
When I came down for breakfast, only Mrs Ford was around. The others had gone for a walk, Veronica having assured everyone that I would want to sleep in. I can’t have disguised my reaction to this very well, as I could sense Mrs Ford examining me while she made bacon and eggs, frying things in a slapdash way and breaking one of the yolks. I wasn’t experienced at talking to girlfriends’ mothers.
‘Have you lived here long?’ I eventually asked, though I already knew the answer.
She paused, poured herself a cup of tea, broke another egg into the pan, leant back against a dresser stacked with plates, and said,
‘Don’t let Veronica get away with too much.’
I didn’t know how to reply. Should I be offended at this interference in our relationship, or fall into confessional mode and ‘discuss’ Veronica? So I said, a little primly,
‘What do you mean, Mrs Ford?’
She looked at me, smiled in an unpatronising way, shook her head slightly, and said, ‘We’ve lived here ten years.’
So in the end I was almost as much at sea with her as with the rest of them, though at least she appeared to like me. She eased another egg on to my plate, despite my not asking for it or wanting it. The remnants of the broken one were still in the pan; she flipped them casually into the swing-bin, then half-threw the hot frying pan into the wet sink. Water fizzed and steam rose at the impact, and she laughed, as if she had enjoyed causing this small havoc.
When Veronica and the menfolk returned, I was expecting further examination, perhaps even some trick or game; instead there were polite enquiries after my sleep and comfort. This ought to have made me feel accepted, but it seemed more as if they had grown tired of me, and the weekend was now just something to be got through. Perhaps this was mere paranoia. But on the plus side, Veronica became more openly affectionate; over tea she was happy to put her hand on my arm and fiddle with my hair. At one point, she turned to her brother and said,
‘He’ll do, won’t he?’
Jack winked at me; I didn’t wink back. Instead, part of me felt like stealing some towels, or walking mud into the carpet.
Still, things were mostly almost normal. That evening, Veronica walked me upstairs and kissed me goodnight properly. For Sunday lunch there was a joint of roast lamb with enormous sprigs of rosemary sticking out of it like bits of Christmas tree. Since my parents had taught me manners, I said how delicious it was. Then I caught Jack winking at his father, as if to say: What a creep. But Mr Ford chortled, ‘Hear, hear, motion seconded,’ while Mrs Ford thanked me.
When I came downstairs to say goodbye, Mr Ford seized my suitcase and said to his wife, ‘I trust you’ve counted the spoons, darling?’ She didn’t bother to answer, just smiled at me, almost as if we had a secret. Brother Jack didn’t show up to say farewell; Veronica and her father got into the front of the car; I sat in the back again. Mrs Ford was leaning against the porch, sunlight falling on a wisteria climbing the house above her head. As Mr Ford put the car into gear and spun the wheels on the gravel, I waved goodbye, and she responded, though not the way people normally do, with a raised palm, but with a sort of horizontal gesture at waist level. I rather wished I’d talked to her more.
To stop Mr Ford pointing out the wonders of Chislehurst a second time, I said to Veronica, ‘I like your mum.’
‘Sounds like you’ve got a rival, Vron,’ said Mr Ford, with a theatrical intake of breath. ‘Come to think of it, sounds like I have too. Pistols at dawn, young feller-me-lad?’
My train was late, slowed by the usual Sunday engineering work. I got home in the early evening. I remember that I had a bloody good long shit.
A week or so later, Veronica came up to town so I could introduce her to my gang from school. It proved an aimless day of which no one wanted to take charge. We went round the Tate, then walked up to Buckingham Palace and into Hyde Park, heading for Speakers’ Corner. But there weren’t any speakers in action, so we wandered along Oxford Street looking at the shops, and ended up in Trafalgar Square among the lions. Anyone would have thought we were tourists.
At first I was watching to see how my friends reacted to Veronica, but soon became more interested in what she thought of them. She laughed at Colin’s jokes more easily than at mine, which annoyed me, and asked Alex how his father made his money (marine insurance, he told her, to my surprise). She seemed happy to keep Adrian for last. I’d told her he was at Cambridge, and she tried out various names on him. At a couple of them he nodded and said,
‘Yes, I know the sort of people they are.’
This sounded pretty rude to me, but Veronica didn’t take offence. Instead, she mentioned colleges and dons and tea shops in a way that made me feel left out.
‘How come you know so much about the place?’ I asked.
‘That’s where Jack is.’
‘Jack?’
‘My brother – you remember?’
‘Let me see… Was he the one who was younger than your father?’
I thought that wasn’t bad, but she didn’t even smile.
‘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.
Yes, you can say it again: You poor sap. And did you still think her a virgin when she was rolling a condom on to your cock? In a strange way, you know, I did. I thought it might be one of those intuitive female skills I inevitably lacked. Well, perhaps it was.
‘You’ve got to hold on to it as you pull out,’ she whispered (did she think I was a virgin, perhaps?). Then I got up and walked to the bathroom, the filled condom occasionally slapping against the inside of my thighs. As I disposed of it I came to a decision and a conclusion: No, it went, no.
‘You selfish bastard,’ she said, the next time we met.
‘Yes, well, there it is.’
‘That practically makes it rape.’
‘I don’t think anything at all makes it that.’
‘Well, you might have had the decency to tell me beforehand.’
‘I didn’t know beforehand.’
‘Oh, so it was that bad?’
‘No, it was good. It’s just…’
‘Just what?’
‘You were always asking me to think about our relationship and so now perhaps I have. I did.’
‘Bravo. It must have been hard.’
I thought: And I haven’t even seen her breasts, in all this time. Felt them, but not seen them. Also, she’s completely wrong about Dvořák and Tchaikovsky. What’s more, I’ll be able to play my LP of Un Homme et Une Femme as often as I like. Openly.
‘Sorry?’
‘Jesus, Tony, you can’t even concentrate now. My brother was right about you.’
I knew I was meant to ask what Brother Jack had said, but I didn’t want to give her the pleasure. As I remained silent, she went on,
‘And don’t say that thing.’
Life seemed even more of a guessing game than usual.
‘What thing?’
‘About us still being able to be friends.’
‘Is that what I’m meant to say?’
‘You’re meant to say what you think, what you feel, for Christ’s sake, what you mean.’
‘All right. In that case I won’t say it – what I’m meant to say. Because I don’t think we can still be friends.’
‘Well done,’ she said sarcastically. ‘Well done.’
‘But let me ask you a question then. Did you sleep with me to get me back?’
‘I don’t have to answer your questions any more.’
‘In which case, why wouldn’t you sleep with me when we were going out together?’
No answer.
‘Because you didn’t need to?’
‘Perhaps I didn’t want to.’
‘Perhaps you didn’t want to because you didn’t need to.’
‘Well, you can believe what it suits you to believe.’
The next day, I took a milk jug she’d given me down to the Oxfam shop. I hoped she’d see it in the window. But when I stopped to check, there was something else on show instead: a small coloured lithograph of Chislehurst I’d given her for Christmas.
At least we were studying different subjects, and Bristol was a large enough city for us only occasionally to half-run into one another. The times we did, I would be hit by a sense of what I can only call pre-guilt: the expectation that she was going to say or do something that would make me feel properly guilty. But she never deigned to speak to me, so this apprehension gradually wore off. And I told myself I didn’t have anything to feel guilty about: we were both near-adults, responsible for our own actions, who had freely entered into a relationship which hadn’t worked out. No one had got pregnant, no one had got killed.
In the second week of the summer vacation a letter arrived with a Chislehurst postmark. I inspected the unfamiliar handwriting – looping and slightly careless – on the envelope. A female hand: her mother, no doubt. Another burst of pre-guilt: perhaps Veronica had suffered a nervous collapse, become wasted and even more waiflike. Or perhaps she had peritonitis and was asking for me from her hospital bed. Or perhaps… but even I could tell these were self-important fantasies. The letter was indeed from Veronica’s mother; it was brief and, to my surprise, not in the least accusatory. She was sorry to hear we had broken up, and sure I would find someone more suitable. But she didn’t appear to mean this in the sense that I was a scoundrel who deserved someone of equally low moral character. Rather, she implied the opposite: that I was well out of things, and she hoped the best for me. I wish I’d kept that letter, because it would have been proof, corroboration. Instead, the only evidence comes from my memory – of a carefree, rather dashing woman who broke an egg, cooked me another, and told me not to take any shit from her daughter.
I went back to Bristol for my final year. The girl of normal height who wore heels was less interested than I’d imagined, and so I concentrated on work. I doubted I had the right kind of brain for a first, but was determined to get a 2:1. On Friday nights, I allowed myself the break of an evening at the pub. One time, a girl I’d been chatting to came back with me and stayed the night. It was all pleasantly exciting and effective, but neither of us contacted the other afterwards. I thought about this less at the time than I do now. I expect such recreational behaviour will strike later generations as quite unremarkable, both for nowadays and for back then: after all, wasn’t ‘back then’ the Sixties? Yes it was, but as I said, it depended on where – and who – you were. If you’ll excuse a brief history lesson: most people didn’t experience ‘the Sixties’ until the Seventies. Which meant, logically, that most people in the Sixties were still experiencing the Fifties – or, in my case, bits of both decades side by side. Which made things rather confusing.
Logic: yes, where is logic? Where is it, for instance, in the next moment of my story? About halfway through my final year, I got a letter from Adrian. This had become an increasingly rare occurrence, as both of us were working hard for finals. He was of course expected to get a first. And then what? Postgraduate work, presumably, followed by academe, or some job in the public sphere where his brain and sense of responsibility would be put to good use. Someone once told me that the civil service (or at least, its higher echelons) was a fascinating place to work because you were always having to make moral decisions. Perhaps that would have suited Adrian. I certainly didn’t see him as a worldly person, or an adventurous one – except intellectually, of course. He wasn’t the sort who would get his name or face into the newspapers.
You can probably guess that I’m putting off telling you the next bit. All right: Adrian said he was writing to ask my permission to go out with Veronica.
Yes, why her, and why then; furthermore, why ask? Actually, to be true to my own memory, as far as that’s ever possible (and I didn’t keep this letter either), what he said was that he and Veronica were already going out together, a state of affairs that would doubtless come to my attention sooner or later; and so it seemed better that I heard about it from him. Also, that while this news might come as a surprise, he hoped that I could understand and accept it, because if I couldn’t, then he owed it to our friendship to reconsider his actions and decisions. And finally, that Veronica had agreed he should write this letter – indeed, it had been partly her suggestion.
As you can imagine, I enjoyed the bit about his moral scruples – implying that if I thought some venerable code of chivalry or, better still, some modern principle of ethics had been infringed, then he would, naturally and logically, stop fucking her. Assuming that she wasn’t stringing him along as she had done me. I also liked the hypocrisy of a letter whose point was not just to tell me something I might not have found out anyway (or not for quite a while), but to let me know how she, Veronica, had traded up: to my cleverest friend, and, what’s more, a Cambridge chap like Brother Jack. Also, to warn me that she would be hanging around if I planned on seeing Adrian – which had the desired effect of making me plan not to see Adrian. Pretty good for a day’s work, or a night’s. Again, I must stress that this is my reading now of what happened then. Or rather, my memory now of my reading then of what was happening at the time.
But I think I have an instinct for survival, for self-preservation. Perhaps this is what Veronica called cowardice and I called being peaceable. Anyway, something warned me not to get involved – at least, not now. I took the nearest postcard to hand – one of the Clifton Suspension Bridge – and wrote words like: ‘Being in receipt of your epistle of the 21st, the undersigned begs to present his compliments and wishes to record that everything is jolly fine by me, old bean.’ Silly, but unambiguous; and it would do for the moment. I would pretend – especially to myself – that I didn’t mind in the slightest. I would study hard, put my emotions on hold, not take anyone home from the pub, masturbate as and when required, and make sure I got the degree I deserved. I did all that (and yes, I got a 2:1).
I stayed on for a few weeks after finishing my exams, fell in with a different group, drank systematically, smoked a bit of dope, and thought about very little. Apart from imagining what Veronica might have said to Adrian about me (‘He took my virginity and then immediately dumped me. So really, the whole thing felt like rape, do you see?’). I imagined her buttering him up – I’d witnessed the start of that – and flattering him, playing on his expectations. As I said, Adrian was not a worldly person, for all his academic success. Hence the priggish tone of his letter, which for a while I used to reread with self-pitying frequency. When, at last, I replied to it properly, I didn’t use any of that silly ‘epistle’ language. As far as I remember, I told him pretty much what I thought of their joint moral scruples. I also advised him to be prudent, because in my opinion Veronica had suffered damage a long way back. Then I wished him good luck, burnt his letter in an empty grate (melodramatic, I agree, but I plead youth as a mitigating circumstance), and decided that the two of them were now out of my life for ever.
What did I mean by ‘damage’? It was only a guess; I didn’t have any real evidence. But whenever I looked back on that unhappy weekend, I realised that it hadn’t been just a matter of a rather naïve young man finding himself ill at ease among a posher and more socially skilled family. That was going on too, of course. But I could sense a complicity between Veronica and her heavy-footed, heavy-handed father, who treated me as substandard. Also between Veronica and Brother Jack, whose life and deportment she clearly regarded as nonpareil: he was the appointed judge when she asked publicly of me – and the question gets more condescending with each repetition – ‘He’ll do, won’t he?’ On the other hand, I saw no complicity at all with her mother, who doubtless recognised her for what she was. How did Mrs Ford have the initial chance to warn me against her daughter? Because that morning – the first morning after my arrival – Veronica had told everyone I wanted a lie-in, and gone off with her father and brother. No such exchange between us justified that invention. I never had lie-ins. I don’t even have them now.
When I wrote to Adrian, I wasn’t at all clear myself what I meant by ‘damage’. And most of a lifetime later, I am only slightly clearer. My mother-in-law (who happily is not part of this story) didn’t think much of me but was at least candid about it, as she was about most things. She once observed – when there was yet another case of child abuse filling the papers and television news reports – ‘I reckon we were all abused.’ Am I suggesting that Veronica was the victim of what they nowadays call ‘inappropriate behaviour’: beery leering from her father at bathtime or bedtime, something more than a sibling cuddle with her brother? How could I know? Was there some primal moment of loss, some withdrawal of love when it was most needed, some overheard exchange from which the child concluded that…? Again, I cannot know. I have no evidence, anecdotal or documentary. But I remember what Old Joe Hunt said when arguing with Adrian: that mental states can be inferred from actions. That’s in history – Henry VIII and all that. Whereas in the private life, I think the converse is true: that you can infer past actions from current mental states.
I certainly believe we all suffer damage, one way or another. How could we not, except in a world of perfect parents, siblings, neighbours, companions? And then there is the question, on which so much depends, of how we react to the damage: whether we admit it or repress it, and how this affects our dealings with others. Some admit the damage, and try to mitigate it; some spend their lives trying to help others who are damaged; and then there are those whose main concern is to avoid further damage to themselves, at whatever cost. And those are the ones who are ruthless, and the ones to be careful of.
You might think this is rubbish – preachy, self-justificatory rubbish. You might think that I behaved towards Veronica like a typically callow male, and that all my ‘conclusions’ are reversible. For instance, ‘After we broke up, she slept with me’ flips easily into ‘After she slept with me, I broke up with her.’ You might also decide that the Fords were a normal middle-class English family on whom I was chippily foisting bogus theories of damage; and that Mrs Ford, instead of being tactfully concerned on my behalf, was displaying an indecent jealousy of her own daughter. You might even ask me to apply my ‘theory’ to myself and explain what damage I had suffered a long way back and what its consequences might be: for instance, how it might affect my reliability and truthfulness. I’m not sure I could answer this, to be honest.
I didn’t expect any reply from Adrian, nor did I get one. And now the prospect of seeing Colin and Alex by themselves became less appealing. Having been three, then four, how was it possible to go back to being three again? If the others wanted to make up their own party, fine, go ahead. I needed to get on with my life. So I did.
Some of my contemporaries did VSO, departing to Africa, where they taught schoolkids and built mud walls; I wasn’t so high-minded. Also, back then you somehow assumed that a decent degree would ensure a decent job, sooner or later. ‘Ti-yi-yi-yime is on my side, yes it is,’ I used to yodel, duetting with Mick Jagger as I gyrated alone in my student room. So, leaving others to train as doctors and lawyers and sit the civil-service exams, I took myself off to the States and roamed around for six months. I waited on tables, painted fences, did gardening, and delivered cars across several states. In those years before mobile phones, email and Skype, travellers depended on the rudimentary communications system known as the postcard. Other methods – the long-distance phone call, the telegram – were marked ‘For Emergency Use Only’. So my parents waved me off into the unknown, and their news bulletins about me would have been restricted to ‘Yes, he’s arrived safely’, and ‘Last time we heard he was in Oregon’, and ‘We expect him back in a few weeks’. I’m not saying this was necessarily better, let alone more character-forming; just that in my case it probably helped not to have my parents a button’s touch away, spilling out anxieties and long-range weather forecasts, warning me against floods, epidemics and psychos who preyed on backpackers.
I met a girl while I was out there: Annie. She was American, travelling round like me. We hooked up, as she put it, and spent three months together. She wore plaid shirts, had grey-green eyes and a friendly manner; we became lovers easily and quickly; I couldn’t believe my luck. Nor could I believe how simple it was: to be friends and bed-companions, to laugh and drink and smoke a little dope together, to see a bit of the world side by side – and then to separate without recrimination or blame. Easy come, easy go, she said, and meant it. Later, looking back, I wondered if something in me wasn’t shocked by this very easiness, and didn’t require more complication as proof of… what? Depth, seriousness? Although, God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness. Much later, I also found myself debating whether ‘Easy come, easy go’ wasn’t a way of asking a question, and looking for a particular answer I wasn’t able to supply. Still, that’s all by the by. Annie was part of my story, but not of this story.
My parents thought of getting in touch when it happened, but had no idea where I was. In a true emergency – presence required at a mother’s deathbed – I imagine the Foreign Office would have contacted the Embassy in Washington, who would have informed the American authorities, who would have asked police forces across the country to look out for a cheerful, sunburnt Englishman who was a little more self-assured than he had been on his arrival in the country. Nowadays all it takes is a text message.
When I got home, my mother gave me a stiff-armed, face-powdered hug, sent me off for a bath, and cooked me what was still referred to as my ‘favourite dinner’, and which I accepted as such, not having updated her for a while on my taste buds. Afterwards, she handed me the very few letters that had arrived in my absence.
‘You’d better open those two first.’
The top one contained a brief note from Alex. ‘Dear Tony,’ it read, ‘Adrian died. He killed himself. I rang your mother, who says she doesn’t know where you are. Alex.’
‘Shit,’ I said, swearing for the first time in front of my parents.
‘Sorry about that, lad.’ My father’s comment didn’t seem exactly up to the mark. I looked at him and found myself wondering if baldness was inherited – would be inherited.
After one of those communal pauses which every family does differently, my mother asked, ‘Do you think it was because he was too clever?’
‘I haven’t got the statistics linking intelligence to suicide,’ I replied.
‘Yes, Tony, but you know what I mean.’
‘No, actually, I don’t at all.’
‘Well, put it like this: you’re a clever boy, but not so clever as you’d do anything like that.’
I gazed at her without thinking. Wrongly encouraged, she went on,
‘But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.’
To avoid engaging with this line of theory, I opened Alex’s second letter. He said that Adrian had done it very efficiently, and left a full account of his reasons. ‘Let’s meet and talk. Bar at the Charing X Hotel? Phone me. Alex.’
I unpacked, readjusted, reported on my travels, familiarised myself again with the routines and smells, the small pleasures and large dullnesses of home. But my mind kept returning to all those fervently innocent discussions we’d gone in for when Robson hanged himself in the attic, back before our lives began. It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person’s right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature). None of these categories had applied in the case of Robson’s squalidly mediocre action.
Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. There was practically a QED at the end. Adrian had asked the coroner to make his argument public, and the official had obliged.
Eventually, I asked, ‘How did he do it?’
‘He cut his wrists in the bath.’
‘Christ. That’s sort of… Greek, isn’t it? Or was that hemlock?’
‘More the exemplary Roman, I’d say. Opening the vein. And he knew how to do it. You have to cut diagonally. If you cut straight across, you can lose consciousness and the wound closes up and you’ve bogged it.’
‘Perhaps you just drown instead.’
‘Even so – second prize,’ said Alex. ‘Adrian would have wanted first.’ He was right: first-class degree, first-class suicide.
He’d killed himself in a flat he shared with two fellow postgraduates. The others had gone away for the weekend, so Adrian had plenty of time to prepare. He’d written his letter to the coroner, pinned a notice to the bathroom door reading ‘DO NOT ENTER – CALL POLICE – ADRIAN’, run a bath, locked the door, cut his wrists in the hot water, bled to death. He was found a day and a half later.
Alex showed me a clipping from the Cambridge Evening News. ‘Tragic Death of “Promising” Young Man’. They probably kept that headline permanently set up in type. The verdict of the coroner’s inquest had been that Adrian Finn (22) had killed himself ‘while the balance of his mind was disturbed’. I remember how angry that conventional phrase made me: I would have sworn on oath that Adrian’s was the one mind which would never lose its balance. But in the law’s view, if you killed yourself you were by definition mad, at least at the time you were committing the act. The law, and society, and religion all said it was impossible to be sane, healthy, and kill yourself. Perhaps those authorities feared that the suicide’s reasoning might impugn the nature and value of life as organised by the state which paid the coroner? And then, since you had been declared temporarily mad, your reasons for killing yourself were also assumed to be mad. So I doubt anyone paid much attention to Adrian’s argument, with its references to philosophers ancient and modern, about the superiority of the intervening act over the unworthy passivity of merely letting life happen to you.
Adrian had apologised to the police for inconveniencing them, and thanked the coroner for making his last words public. He also asked to be cremated, and for his ashes to be scattered, since the swift destruction of the body was also a philosopher’s active choice, and preferable to the supine waiting for natural decomposition in the ground.
‘Did you go? To the funeral?’
‘Not invited. Nor was Colin. Family only, and all that.’
‘What do we think?’
‘Well, it’s the family’s right, I suppose.’
‘No, not about that. About his reasons.’
Alex took a sip of his beer. ‘I couldn’t decide whether it’s fucking impressive or a fucking terrible waste.’
‘And did you? Decide?’
‘Well, it could be both.’
‘What I can’t work out,’ I said, ‘is if it’s something complete in itself – I don’t mean self-regarding but, you know, just involving Adrian – or something that contains an implicit criticism of everyone else. Of us.’ I looked at Alex.
‘Well, it could be both.’
‘Stop saying that.’
‘I wonder what his philosophy tutors thought. Whether they felt in any way responsible. It was his brain they trained, after all.’
‘When did you last see him?’
‘About three months before he died. Right where you’re sitting. That’s why I suggested it.’
‘So he was going down to Chislehurst. How did he seem?’
‘Cheerful. Happy. Like himself, only more so. As we said goodbye, he told me he was in love.’
The bitch, I thought. If there was one woman in the entire world a man could fall in love with and still think life worth refusing, it was Veronica.
‘What did he say about her?’
‘Nothing. You know how he was.’
‘Did he tell you I wrote him a letter telling him where to shove it?’
‘No, but it doesn’t surprise me.’
‘What, that I wrote it, or that he didn’t tell you?’
‘Well, it could be both.’
I half-punched Alex, just enough to spill his beer.
At home, with barely enough time to think over what I’d heard, I had to fend off my mother’s questions.
‘What did you find out?’
I told her a little of the how.
‘It must have been very unpleasant for the poor policemen. The things they have to do. Did he have girl trouble?’
Part of me wanted to say: Of course – he was going out with Veronica. Instead, I merely replied, ‘Alex said he was happy the last time they met.’
‘So why did he do it?’
I gave her the short version of the short version, leaving out the names of the relevant philosophers. I tried to explain about refusing an unsought gift, about action versus passivity. My mother nodded away as she took all this in.
‘You see, I was right.’
‘How’s that, Ma?’
‘He was too clever. If you’re that clever you can argue yourself into anything. You just leave common sense behind. It’s his brain unhinged him, that’s why he did it.’
‘Yes, Ma.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say? You mean you agree?’
Not replying was the only way to keep my temper.
I spent the next few days trying to think round all the angles and corners of Adrian’s death. While I could hardly have expected a farewell letter myself, I was disappointed for Colin and Alex. And how was I to think about Veronica now? Adrian loved her, yet he had killed himself: how was that explicable? For most of us, the first experience of love, even if it doesn’t work out – perhaps especially when it doesn’t work out – promises that here is the thing that validates, that vindicates life. And though subsequent years might alter this view, until some of us give up on it altogether, when love first strikes, there’s nothing like it, is there? Agreed?
But Adrian didn’t agree. Perhaps if it had been a different woman… or perhaps not – Alex had testified to Adrian’s exalted state the last time they’d met. Had something terrible happened in the intervening months? But if so, Adrian would surely have indicated it. He was the truth-seeker and philosopher among us: if those were his stated reasons, those were his true reasons.
With Veronica, I moved from blaming her for having failed to save Adrian to pitying her: there she was, having triumphantly traded up, and look what had happened. Should I express my condolences? But she would think me hypocritical. If I were to get in touch with her, either she wouldn’t reply, or she’d somehow twist things so that I’d end up not being able to think straight.
I did, eventually, find myself thinking straight. That’s to say, understanding Adrian’s reasons, respecting them, and admiring him. He had a better mind and a more rigorous temperament than me; he thought logically, and then acted on the conclusion of logical thought. Whereas most of us, I suspect, do the opposite: we make an instinctive decision, then build up an infrastructure of reasoning to justify it. And call the result common sense. Did I think Adrian’s action an implied criticism of the rest of us? No. Or at least, I’m sure he didn’t intend it as such. Adrian might attract people, but he never behaved as if he wanted disciples; he believed in us all thinking for ourselves. Might he have ‘enjoyed life’, as most of us do, or try to, had he lived? Perhaps; or he might have suffered guilt and remorse at having failed to match his actions to his arguments.
And none of the above alters the fact that it was still, as Alex put it, a fucking terrible waste.
A year on, Colin and Alex suggested a reunion. On the anniversary of Adrian’s death, the three of us met for drinks at the Charing Cross Hotel, then went for an Indian meal. We tried to invoke and celebrate our friend. We remembered him telling Old Joe Hunt he was out of a job, and instructing Phil Dixon about Eros and Thanatos. We were already turning our past into anecdote. We recalled cheering the announcement that Adrian had won a scholarship to Cambridge. We realised that though he had been to all our homes, none of us had been to his; and that we didn’t know – had we ever asked? – what his father did. We toasted him in wine at the hotel bar and in beer at the end of dinner. Outside, we slapped one another around the shoulders and swore to repeat the commemoration annually. But our lives were already going in different directions, and the shared memory of Adrian was not enough to hold us together. Perhaps the lack of mystery about his death meant that his case was more easily closed. We would remember him all our lives, of course. But his death was exemplary rather than ‘tragic’ – as the Cambridge newspaper had routinely insisted – and so he retreated from us rather quickly, slotted into time and history.
By now I’d left home, and started work as a trainee in arts administration. Then I met Margaret; we married, and three years later Susie was born. We bought a small house with a large mortgage; I commuted up to London every day. My traineeship turned into a long career. Life went by. Some Englishman once said that marriage is a long dull meal with the pudding served first. I think that’s far too cynical. I enjoyed my marriage, but was perhaps too quiet – too peaceable – for my own good. After a dozen years Margaret took up with a fellow who ran a restaurant. I didn’t much like him – or his food, for that matter – but then I wouldn’t, would I? Custody of Susie was shared. Happily, she didn’t seem too affected by the break-up; and, as I now realise, I never applied to her my theory of damage.
After the divorce, I had a few affairs, but nothing serious. I would always tell Margaret about any new girlfriend. At the time, it seemed a natural thing to do. Now, I sometimes wonder if it was an attempt to make her jealous; or, perhaps, an act of self-protection, a way of preventing the new relationship from becoming too serious. Also, in my more emptied life, I came up with various ideas which I termed ‘projects’, perhaps to make them sound feasible. None of them came to anything. Well, that’s no matter; or any part of my story.
Susie grew up, and people started calling her Susan. When she was twenty-four, I walked her up the aisle of a register office. Ken is a doctor; they have two kids now, a boy and a girl. The photos of them I carry in my wallet always show them younger than they are. That’s normal, I suppose, not to say ‘philosophically self-evident’. But you find yourself repeating, ‘They grow up so quickly, don’t they?’ when all you really mean is: time goes faster for me nowadays.
Margaret’s second husband turned out to be not quite peaceable enough: he took off with someone who looked rather like her, but was that crucial ten years younger. She and I remain on good terms; we meet at family events and sometimes have lunch. Once, after a glass or two, she became sentimental and suggested we might get back together. Odder things have happened, was the way she put it. No doubt they have, but by now I was used to my own routines, and fond of my solitude. Or maybe I’m just not odd enough to do something like that. Once or twice we’ve talked of sharing a holiday, but I think we each expected the other to plan it and book the tickets and hotels. So that never happened.
I’m retired now. I have my flat with my possessions. I keep up with a few drinking pals, and have some women friends – platonic, of course. (And they’re not part of the story either.) I’m a member of the local history society, though less excited than some about what metal detectors unearth. A while ago, I volunteered to run the library at the local hospital; I go round the wards delivering, collecting, recommending. It gets me out, and it’s good to do something useful; also, I meet some new people. Sick people, of course; dying people as well. But at least I shall know my way around the hospital when my turn comes.
And that’s a life, isn’t it? Some achievements and some disappointments. It’s been interesting to me, though I wouldn’t complain or be amazed if others found it less so. Maybe, in a way, Adrian knew what he was doing. Not that I would have missed my own life for anything, you understand.
I survived. ‘He survived to tell the tale’ – that’s what people say, don’t they? History isn’t the lies of the victors, as I once glibly assured Old Joe Hunt; I know that now. It’s more the memories of the survivors, most of whom are neither victorious nor defeated.