The Sense of an Ending

to open them. Once, such letters meant another painful stage in my divorce – maybe that’s why I’m wary of them. Nowadays, they might contain some tax voucher for the few, pitifully low-yielding shares I bought when I retired, or an extra request from that charity I already support by standing order. So I forgot about it until later in the day, when I was gathering up all the discarded paper in the flat – even down to the last envelope – for recycling. It turned out to contain a letter from a firm of solicitors I’d never heard of, Messrs Coyle, Innes & Black. A certain Eleanor Marriott was writing ‘ In the matter of the estate of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased) ’. It took me a while to get there.
    We live with such easy assumptions, don’t we? For instance, that memory equals events plus time. But it’s all much odder than this. Who was it said that memory is what we thought we’d forgotten? And it ought to be obvious to us that time doesn’t act as a fixative, rather as a solvent. But it’s not convenient – it’s not useful – to believe this; it doesn’t help us get on with our lives; so we ignore it.
    I was asked to confirm my address and provide a photocopy of my passport. I was informed that I had been left five hundred pounds and two ‘documents’. I found this very puzzling. For a start, to get a bequest from someone whose Christian name I had either never known or else forgotten. And five hundred pounds seemed a very specific sum. Bigger than nothing, not as big as something. Perhaps it would make sense if I knew when Mrs Ford had made her will. Though if it had been a long time ago, the equivalent sum now would be quite a bit larger, and make even less sense.
    I confirmed my existence, authenticity and location, attaching photocopied corroboration. I asked if I might be told the date of the will. Then, one evening I sat down and tried to resurrect that humiliating weekend in Chislehurst some forty years previously. I searched for any moment, incident or remark which might have seemed worthy of acknowledgement or reward. But my memory has increasingly become a mechanism which reiterates apparently truthful data with little variation. I stared into the past, I waited, I tried to trick my memory into a different course. But it was no good. I was someone who had gone out with the daughter of Mrs Sarah Ford (deceased) for a period of about a year, who had been patronised by her husband, loftily scrutinised by her son, and manipulated by her daughter. Painful for me at the time, but hardly requiring the subsequent maternal apology of five hundred pounds.
    And anyway, that pain hasn’t lasted. As I mentioned, I have a certain instinct for self-preservation. I successfully put Veronica out of my mind, out of my history. So when time delivered me all too quickly into middle age, and I began looking back over how my life had unfolded, and considering the paths untaken, those lulling, undermining what-ifs, I never found myself imagining – not even for worse, let alone for better – how things would have been with Veronica. Annie yes, Veronica no. And I never regretted my years with Margaret, even if we did divorce. Try as I could – which wasn’t very hard – I rarely ended up fantasising a markedly different life from the one that has been mine. I don’t think this is complacency; it’s more likely a lack of imagination, or ambition, or something. I suppose the truth is that, yes, I’m not odd enough not to have done the things I’ve ended up doing with my life.
*
    I didn’t read the solicitor’s letter immediately. Instead, I looked at the enclosure, a long, creamy envelope with my name on it. Handwriting I had seen only once in my life before, but nonetheless familiar. Anthony Webster Esq. – the way the ascenders and descenders finished with a little curlicue took me back to someone I had known for a mere weekend. Someone whose handwriting, in its confidence rather than shape, suggested a woman perhaps ‘odd enough’ to do things I hadn’t. But what they might have been, I couldn’t know or guess. There was an inch of Sellotape on the front of the envelope, centre top. I was expecting it to run down the back and add an extra seal, but it had been cut off along the envelope’s top edge. Presumably the letter had once been attached to something else.
    Finally, I opened it and read. ‘Dear Tony, I think it right you should have the attached. Adrian always spoke warmly of you,