The Sense of an Ending

those familiar memory-loops. That’s what, to my consternation, I found happening to me now. I began to remember, with no particular order or sense of significance, long-buried details of that distant weekend with the Ford family. My attic room had a view across roofs to a wood; from below I could hear a clock striking the hour precisely five minutes late. Mrs Ford flipped the broken, cooked egg into the waste bin with an expression of concern – for it, not me. Her husband tried to get me to drink brandy after dinner, and when I refused, asked if I were a man or a mouse. Brother Jack addressed Mrs Ford as ‘the Mother’, as in ‘When does the Mother think there might be fodder for the starving troops?’ And on the second night, Veronica did more than just come upstairs with me. She said, ‘I’m going to walk Tony to his room,’ and took my hand in front of the family. Brother Jack said, ‘And what does the Mother think of that?’ But the Mother only smiled. My goodnights to the family that evening were hasty as I could feel an erection coming on. We walked slowly up to my bedroom, where Veronica backed me against the door, kissed me on the mouth and said into my ear, ‘Sleep the sleep of the wicked.’ And approximately forty seconds later, I now remember, I was wanking into the little washbasin and sluicing my sperm down the house’s pipework.
    On a whim, I Googled Chislehurst. And discovered that there’d never been a St Michael’s church in the town. So Mr Ford’s guided tour as he drove us along must have been fanciful – some private joke, or way of stringing me along. I doubt very much there’d been a Café Royal either. Then I went on Google Earth, swooping and zooming around the town. But the house I was looking for didn’t seem to exist any more.
    The other night, I allowed myself another drink, turned on my computer, and called up the only Veronica in my address book. I suggested we meet again. I apologised for anything I might have done to make things awkward on the previous occasion. I promised that I didn’t want to talk about her mother’s will. This was true, too; though it wasn’t until I wrote that sentence that I realised I had barely given Adrian or his diary a thought for quite a few days.
    ‘Is this about closing the circle?’ came her reply.
    ‘I don’t know,’ I wrote back. ‘But it can’t do any harm, can it?’
    She didn’t answer that question, but at the time I didn’t notice or mind.
    I don’t know why, but part of me thought she’d suggest meeting on the bridge again. Either that, or somewhere snug and promisingly personal: a forgotten pub, a quiet lunchroom, even the bar at the Charing Cross Hotel. She chose the brasserie on the third floor of John Lewis in Oxford Street.
    Actually, this had its convenient side: I needed a few metres of cord for restringing a blind, some kettle descaler, and a set of those patches you iron on the inside of trousers when the knee splits. It’s hard to find this stuff locally any more: where I live, most of those useful little shops have long been turned into cafés or estate agents.
    On the train up to town, there was a girl sitting opposite me, plugged into earphones, eyes closed, impervious to the world outside, moving her head to music only she could hear. And suddenly, a complete memory came to me: of Veronica dancing. Yes, she didn’t dance – that’s what I said – but there’d been one evening in my room when she got all mischievous and started pulling out my pop records.
    ‘Put one on and let me see you dance,’ she said.
    I shook my head. ‘Takes two to tango.’
    ‘OK, you show me and I’ll join in.’
    So I stacked the autochanger spindle with 45s, moved across to her, did a skeleton-loosening shrug, half-closed my eyes, as if respecting her privacy, and went for it. Basic male display behaviour of the period, determinedly individualistic while actually dependent on a strict imitation of prevailing norms: the head-jerking and the foot-prancing, the shoulder-twisting and the pelvis-jabbing, with the bonus of ecstatically raised arms and occasional grunting noises. After a bit, I opened my eyes, expecting her to be still sitting on the floor and laughing at me. But there she was, leaping about in a way that made me suspect she’d been to ballet classes, her hair all over her face and her calves tense and full of strut. I watched her for a bit, unsure if she was sending me up or genuinely grooving