The Sense of an Ending

on.
    They say time finds you out, don’t they? Maybe time had found out Brother Jack and punished him for his lack of seriousness. And now I began to elaborate a different life for Veronica’s brother, one in which his student years glowed in his memory as filled with happiness and hope – indeed, as the one period when his life had briefly achieved that sense of harmony we all aspire to. I imagined Jack, after graduation, being nepotistically placed into one of those large multinational companies. I imagined him doing well enough to begin with and then, almost imperceptibly, not so well. A clubbable fellow with decent manners, but lacking the edge required in a changing world. Those cheery sign-offs, in letter and conversation, came after a while to appear not sophisticated but inept. And though he wasn’t exactly given the push, the suggestion of early retirement combined with occasional bits of ad hoc work was clear enough. He could be a kind of roving honorary consul, a backup for the local man in big cities, a troubleshooter in smaller ones. So he remade his life, and found some plausible way to present himself as a success. ‘View of Sydney Habour Bridge, almost.’ I imagined him taking his laptop to café terraces with Wi-Fi, because frankly that felt less depressing than working from the room of a hotel with fewer stars than he’d been previously used to.
    I’ve no idea if this is how big firms work, but I’d found a way of thinking about Brother Jack which brought no discomfort. I’d even managed to dislodge him from that mansion overlooking the golf course. Not that I would go so far as to feel sorry for him. And – this was the point – not that I owed him anything either.
    ‘Dear Veronica,’ I began. ‘Your brother has very kindly given me your email address …’
    It strikes me that this may be one of the differences between youth and age: when we are young, we invent different futures for ourselves; when we are old, we invent different pasts for others.
    Her father drove a Humber Super Snipe. Cars don’t have names like that any more, do they? I drive a Volkswagen Polo. But Humber Super Snipe – those were words that eased off the tongue as smoothly as ‘the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost’. Humber Super Snipe. Armstrong Siddeley Sapphire. Jowett Javelin. Jensen Interceptor. Even Wolseley Farina and Hillman Minx.
    Don’t get me wrong. I’m not interested in cars, old or new. I’m vaguely curious why you might name a large saloon after such a small game bird as the snipe, and whether a Minx had a tempestuous female nature. Still, I’m not curious enough to find out. At this stage I prefer not to know.
    But I’ve been turning over in my mind the question of nostalgia, and whether I suffer from it. I certainly don’t get soggy at the memory of some childhood knick-knack; nor do I want to deceive myself sentimentally about something that wasn’t even true at the time – love of the old school, and so on. But if nostalgia means the powerful recollection of strong emotions – and a regret that such feelings are no longer present in our lives – then I plead guilty. I’m nostalgic for my early time with Margaret, for Susie’s birth and first years, for that road trip with Annie. And if we’re talking about strong feelings that will never come again, I suppose it’s possible to be nostalgic about remembered pain as well as remembered pleasure. And that opens up the field, doesn’t it? It also leads straight to the matter of Miss Veronica Ford.
    ‘Blood money?’
    I looked at the words and couldn’t make sense of them. She’d erased my message and its heading, not signed her reply, and just answered with a phrase. I had to call up my sent email and read it through again to work out that grammatically her two words could only be a reply to my asking why her mother had left me five hundred pounds. But it didn’t make any sense beyond this. No blood had been spilt. My pride had been hurt, that was true. But Veronica was hardly suggesting that her mother was offering money in exchange for the pain her daughter had caused me, was she? Or was she?
    At the same time, it made sense that Veronica didn’t give me a simple answer, didn’t do or say what I hoped or expected. In this she was at least consistent with my memory of her. Of course, at times I’d been tempted to set her down as the woman of mystery, as opposed to the woman of clarity I married in Margaret. True, I