The Sense of an Ending

along to the Moody Blues. Actually, I didn’t care – I was enjoying myself and feeling a small victory. This went on for a while; then I moved closer to her as Ned Miller’s ‘From a Jack to a King’ gave way to Bob Lind singing ‘Elusive Butterfly’. But she didn’t notice and, twirling, bumped into me, nearly losing her balance. I caught her and held her.
    ‘You see, it’s not that difficult.’
    ‘Oh, I never thought it was difficult,’ she replied. ‘Good. Yes. Thank you,’ she said formally, then went and sat down. ‘You carry on if you want to. I’ve had enough.’
    Still, she had danced.
    I did my errands in the haberdashery, kitchen and curtain departments, then went to the brasserie. I was ten minutes early but of course Veronica was already there, head down, reading, confident that I would find her. As I put my bags down, she looked up and half-smiled. I thought: you don’t look so wild and whiskery after all.
    ‘I’m still bald,’
    I said. She held on to a quarter-smile.
    ‘What are you reading?’
    She turned the cover of her paperback towards me. Something by Stefan Zweig.
    ‘So you’ve finally got to the end of the alphabet. Can’t be anyone left after him.’ Why was I suddenly nervous? I was talking like a twenty-year-old again. Also, I hadn’t read any Stefan Zweig.
    ‘I’m having the pasta,’ she said.
    Well, at least it wasn’t a put-down.
    While I inspected the menu, she carried on reading. The table looked out over a criss-cross of escalators. People going up, people going down; everyone buying something.
    ‘On the train up I was remembering when you danced. In my room. In Bristol.’
    I expected her to contradict me, or take some indecipherable offence. But she only said, ‘I wonder why you remembered that.’ And with this moment of corroboration, I began to feel a return of confidence. She was more smartly dressed this time; her hair was under control and seemed less grey. She somehow managed to look – to my eye – both twentyish and sixtyish at the same time.
    ‘So,’ I said, ‘how’ve the last forty years been treating you?’
    She looked at me. ‘You first.’
    I told her the story of my life. The version I tell myself, the account that stands up. She asked about ‘those two friends of yours I once met’, without, it seemed, being able to name them. I said how I’d lost touch with Colin and Alex. Then I told her about Margaret and Susie and grand-parenthood, while batting away Margaret’s whisper in my head of ‘How’s the Fruitcake?’ I talked of my working life, and retirement, and keeping busy, and the winter breaks I took – this year I was thinking of St Petersburg in the snow for a change … I tried to sound content with my life but not complacent. I was in the middle of describing my grandchildren when she looked up, drank her coffee in one draught, put some money on the table and stood up. I started to reach for my own stuff when she said,
    ‘No, you stay and finish yours.’
    I was determined not to do anything which might cause offence, so I sat down again.
    ‘Well, your turn next,’ I said. Meaning: her life.
    ‘Turn for what?’ she asked, but was gone before I could reply.
    Yes, I knew what she’d done. She’d managed to spend an hour in my company without divulging a single fact, let alone secret, about herself. Where she lived and how, whether she lived with anyone, or had children. On her wedding finger she wore a red glass ring, which was as enigmatic as the rest of her. But I didn’t mind; indeed, I found myself reacting as if I’d been on a first date with someone and escaped without doing anything catastrophic. But of course it wasn’t at all like that. After a first date you don’t sit on a train and find your head flooded with the forgotten truth about your shared sex life forty years previously. How attracted to one another we had been; how light she felt on my lap; how exciting it always was; how, even though we weren’t having ‘full sex’, all the elements of it – the lust, the tenderness, the candour, the trust – were there anyway. And how part of me hadn’t minded not ‘going the whole way’, didn’t mind the bouts of apocalyptic wanking after I’d seen her home, didn’t mind sleeping in my single bed, alone except for my memories and a swiftly returning erection. This acceptance of less than others had was also due to fear, of course: fear of pregnancy, fear of saying or doing the wrong