The Sense of an Ending

am.’
    ‘Tony, that wasn’t a question. It was a statement.’
    I looked across at her fondly. She knew me better than anyone else in the world. And still wanted to have lunch with me. And let me go on and on about myself. I smiled at her, in a way she also doubtless knew too well.
    ‘One of these days I’ll surprise you,’ I said.
    ‘You do still. You have today.’
    ‘Yes, but I want to surprise you in a way that makes you think better of me rather than worse.’
    ‘I don’t think the worse of you. I don’t even think the worse of the Fruitcake, though admittedly my estimation of her has always been below sea level.’
    Margaret doesn’t do triumphalism; she also knew that she didn’t have to point out that I’d ignored her advice. I think she quite likes being a sympathetic ear, and also quite likes being reminded why she’s glad not to be married to me any more. I don’t mean that in a bitchy sense. I just think it’s the case.
    ‘Can I ask you something?’
    ‘You always do,’ she replied.
    ‘Did you leave me because of me?’
    ‘No,’ she said. ‘I left you because of us.’
    Susie and I get on fine, as I have a tendency to repeat. And that will do as a statement I would happily swear to in a court of law. She’s thirty-three, maybe thirty-four. Yes, thirty-four. We haven’t had any sort of falling-out since I sat in the front row of an oak-panelled municipal room and then did my job as a witness. I remember thinking at the time that I was signing off on her – or, more exactly, signing myself off. Duty done, only child safely seen to the temporary harbour of marriage. Now all you have to do is not get Alzheimer’s and remember to leave her such money as you have. And you could try to do better than your parents by dying when the money will actually be of use to her. That’d be a start.
    If Margaret and I had stayed together, I dare say I would have been allowed to be more of a doting grandfather. It’s not surprising Margaret’s been more use. Susie didn’t want to leave the kids with me because she didn’t think I was capable, despite all the nappies I’d changed and so on. ‘You can take Lucas to watch football when he’s older,’ she once told me. Ah, the rheumy-eyed grandpa on the terraces inducting the lad into the mysteries of soccer: how to loathe people wearing different coloured shirts, how to feign injury, how to blow your snot on to the pitch – See, son, you press hard on one nostril to close it, and explode the green stuff out of the other. How to be vain and overpaid and have your best years behind you before you’ve even understood what life’s about. Oh yes, I look forward to taking Lucas to the football.
    But Susie doesn’t notice that I dislike the game – or dislike what it’s become. She’s practical about emotions, Susie is. Gets that from her mother. So my emotions as they actually are don’t concern her. She prefers to assume that I have certain feelings and operate according to that assumption. At some level, she blames me for the divorce. As in: since it was all her mother’s doing, it was obviously all her father’s fault.
    Does character develop over time? In novels, of course it does: otherwise there wouldn’t be much of a story. But in life? I sometimes wonder. Our attitudes and opinions change, we develop new habits and eccentricities; but that’s something different, more like decoration. Perhaps character resembles intelligence, except that character peaks a little later: between twenty and thirty, say. And after that, we’re just stuck with what we’ve got. We’re on our own. If so, that would explain a lot of lives, wouldn’t it? And also – if this isn’t too grand a word – our tragedy.
    ‘The question of accumulation,’ Adrian had written. You put money on a horse, it wins, and your winnings go on to the next horse in the next race, and so on. Your winnings accumulate. But do your losses? Not at the racetrack – there, you just lose your original stake. But in life? Perhaps here different rules apply. You bet on a relationship, it fails; you go on to the next relationship, it fails too: and maybe what you lose is not two simple minus sums but the multiple of what you staked. That’s what it feels like, anyway. Life isn’t just addition and subtraction. There’s also the accumulation, the multiplication, of loss, of failure.
    Adrian’s fragment also refers to the question of responsibility: whether there’s a