El sentido de un final

I remember things in no particular order: steam rising from a wet sink, a river rushing nonsensically upstream, bathwater long gone cold behind a locked door. We live in time, but I've never felt I understood it. My life, such as it is, has been ordinary. A career, a marriage, a calm divorce. But it all began at school, where there were three of us, and then he made the fourth. His name was Adrian Finn. He was tall, serious, and more intelligent than the rest of us put together. We were book-hungry and sex-hungry, affecting to wear our watches with the face on the inner wrist, a secret time. Adrian was different. When our history master, Old Joe Hunt, asked for a characterization of Henry VIII's reign, a classmate offered, “There was unrest, sir.” Adrian, when pressed, suggested that of any historical event, all one can truly say is that “something happened.”

We were pretentious, of course. We argued about philosophy and the origins of the First World War. When a boy named Robson hanged himself after getting his girlfriend pregnant, we analyzed it coolly, judging his suicide note, “Sorry, Mum,” to be a missed opportunity. We concluded his act was unphilosophical, while Adrian quoted Camus: “Suicide was the only true philosophical question.” In our final history lesson, Hunt asked us to define history. I offered the glib line, “History is the lies of the victors.” Adrian, characteristically, had a more precise formulation. “‘History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.'” We all promised to stay friends for life.

At university, I found a girlfriend, Veronica Ford. She had mid-brown hair, blue-framed spectacles, and a quick, withholding smile. Our relationship was one of charged restraint, of what I called infra-sex. One weekend, I visited her family in Kent. Her father was a large, red-faced man who drove a Humber Super Snipe and treated me with jovial contempt. Her brother, Jack, was coolly superior. But her mother, Sarah, was different. As she fried eggs in a slapdash way, she paused and told me, “Don't let Veronica get away with too much.” I remember the fizz of water as she tossed the hot pan into the sink. The weekend was an exercise in social humiliation, and I left feeling I had failed some unspoken test. Veronica and I eventually broke up. Not long after, a letter arrived from Adrian. He was writing, he said, to ask my permission to go out with her.

I sent back a flippant postcard, pretending it was all fine by me, old bean. But later, stewing in jealousy and wounded pride, I wrote them a letter. A vicious, terrible letter, wishing them a lifetime of bitterness and regret, suggesting Veronica was damaged and advising Adrian to ask her mother about it. I never heard from him again. A year later, while I was traveling in America, I learned that he had killed himself. He had cut his wrists in the bath, leaving behind a philosophical note for the coroner about the duty of a thinking person to renounce the gift of life if they so choose. His death was neat, logical, and exemplary. The rest of us - Colin, Alex, and I - drifted apart. I married a woman named Margaret, had a daughter, Susie, divorced, and settled into a peaceable retirement. I survived.

Decades later, a letter arrived from a solicitor. Sarah Ford, Veronica's mother, had died and left me five hundred pounds and two documents. The first was a letter from her, apologizing for how her family had treated me. The second, I was told, was Adrian's diary. But Veronica, the executor, was refusing to hand it over. This refusal reignited the past. After a campaign of persistent, polite emails, she sent me a single photocopied page from the diary. It was a series of numbered paragraphs, a logical puzzle about accumulation and responsibility, containing a formula with several integers, including an ‘a' for Adrian and another for Anthony. It ended with an incomplete sentence: “So, for instance, if Tony…”

Our first meeting in forty years was on the Millennium Bridge. “You've lost your hair,” she said. She was tense, shabby, and told me she had burned the diary. But she handed me an envelope. Inside was not the diary, but a photocopy of the hideous letter I had written all those years ago. The words scalded me. I felt a shame that curdled into a deep, immovable remorse. My life, which I had curated as average and harmless, was built upon this act of casual cruelty. I had tried to destroy the first and last love of my friend's life, and this had been my final communication with him.

I apologized to Veronica, but she replied with her familiar refrain: “You just don't get it. You never did, and you never will.” Still, something had shifted. I met her again, and she drove me to a quiet suburban street, where we watched a small group of adults with learning difficulties walk past, shepherded by a carer. I didn't understand the significance. My pursuit of an explanation felt like a final purpose, and it led me to a local pub where I saw them again. I approached one of them, a tall, gangly man with gentle brown eyes. I saw it in his face, in the bone structure and the pallor of his skin. This was Adrian's son.

The weight of my curse fell upon me. I had wished them a child as an instrument of time's revenge, and here was the result. Adrian, I now reasoned, hadn't been a philosopher-king refusing an existential gift; he had been a coward, like Robson, afraid of the pram in the hall. I wrote a final, heartfelt apology to Veronica, explaining that I finally understood. Her reply was the same cold dismissal. It was only when I returned to the pub and spoke to a care worker that the final piece of the past clicked into place.

The young man's name was Adrian. But he was not Veronica's son. He was her brother. He was the son of Adrian Finn and Sarah Ford, Veronica's mother. The five hundred pounds was blood money, an act of atonement from a guilty mother. My letter had urged Adrian to speak to Sarah about Veronica's “damage,” and in doing so, I had set in motion a chain of events I could never have foreseen. The integers in the diary were clear now: Adrian, Anthony, Sarah, Veronica, and a baby. There is the accumulation of life, and then there is the accumulation of damage. There is responsibility. And beyond these, there is unrest. There is great unrest.