The Sense of an Ending

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