The Sense of an Ending

waste it. That’s logical, isn’t it? Though how you use the saved-up hours … well, that’s another thing you probably wouldn’t have predicted in youth. For instance, I spend a lot of time clearing things up – and I’m not even a messy person. But it’s one of the modest satisfactions of age. I aim for tidiness; I recycle; I clean and decorate my flat to keep up its value. I’ve made my will; and my dealings with my daughter, son-in-law, grandchildren and ex-wife are, if less than perfect, at least settled. Or so I’ve persuaded myself. I’ve achieved a state of peaceableness, even peacefulness. Because I get on with things. I don’t like mess, and I don’t like leaving a mess. I’ve opted for cremation, if you want to know.
    So I phoned Mrs Marriott again, and asked for the contact details of Mrs Ford’s other child, John, known as Jack. I called Margaret and asked for a lunch date. And I made an appointment with my own solicitor. No, that’s putting it far too grandly. I’m sure Brother Jack would have someone he refers to as ‘my solicitor’. In my case it’s the local chap who drew up my will; he has a small office above a florist’s and seems perfectly efficient. I also like him because he made no attempt to use my Christian name or suggest I use his. So I think of him only as T. J. Gunnell, and don’t even speculate on what his initials might stand for. Do you know something I dread? Being an old person in hospital and having nurses I’ve never met calling me Anthony or, worse, Tony. Let me just pop this in your arm, Tony. Have some more of this gruel, Tony. Have you done a motion, Tony? Of course, by the time this happens, over-familiarity from the nursing staff may be way down my list of anxieties; but even so.
    I did a slightly odd thing when I first met Margaret. I wrote Veronica out of my life story. I pretended that Annie had been my first proper girlfriend. I know most men exaggerate the amount of girls and sex they’ve had; I did the opposite. I drew a line and started afresh. Margaret was a little puzzled that I’d been so slow off the mark – not in losing my virginity, but in having a serious relationship; but also, I thought at the time, a little charmed. She said something about shyness being attractive in a man.
    The odder part was that it was easy to give this version of my history because that’s what I’d been telling myself anyway. I viewed my time with Veronica as a failure – her contempt, my humiliation – and expunged it from the record. I had kept no letters, and only a single photograph, which I hadn’t looked at in ages.
    But after a year or two of marriage, when I felt better about myself, and fully confident in our relationship, I told Margaret the truth. She listened, asked pertinent questions, and she understood. She asked to see the photo – the one taken in Trafalgar Square – examined it, nodded, made no comment. That was fine. I had no right to expect anything, let alone words of praise for my former girlfriend. Which, in any case, I didn’t want. I just wanted to clear off the past, and have Margaret forgive my peculiar lie about it. Which she did.
    Mr Gunnell is a calm, gaunt man who doesn’t mind silence. After all, it costs his clients just as much as speech.
    ‘Mr Webster.’
    ‘Mr Gunnell.’
    And so we mistered one another for the next forty-five minutes, in which he gave me the professional advice I was paying for. He told me that going to the police and trying to persuade them to lay a charge of theft against a woman of mature years who had recently lost her mother would, in his view, be foolish. I liked that. Not the advice, but the way he expressed it. ‘Foolish’: much better than ‘inadvisable’ or ‘inappropriate’. He also urged me not to badger Mrs Marriott.
    ‘Don’t solicitors like to be badgered, Mr Gunnell?’
    ‘Let’s say it’s different if the badgerer is the client. But in the present case the Ford family is paying the bills. And you’d be surprised how letters can slip to the bottom of a file.’
    I looked around the cream-painted office with its potted plants, shelves of legal authority, inoffensive print of an English landscape and, yes, its filing cabinets. I looked back to Mr Gunnell.
    ‘In other words, don’t let her start thinking I’m some kind of loony.’
    ‘Oh, she’d never think that, Mr Webster. And “loony” is hardly legal terminology.’
    ‘What might you say instead?’
    ‘We