The Sense of an Ending

the word ‘birthday’ but might have been mistaken. I decided that it was time to order food. My path to the bar would take me close by them. I had no actual plan. The three who had come in from the shop were still standing, and they turned slightly as I approached. I addressed a second cheery ‘Evening!’ to the badge man, who responded as before. The gangly bloke was now in front of me and as I was about to make my way past I stopped and looked at him properly. He was about forty, just over six feet, with a pallid skin and thick-lensed glasses. I could sense he was keen to turn his back again. But instead, he did something unexpected. He took off his glasses and looked me full in the face. His eyes were brown and gentle.
    Almost without thinking, I said to him quietly, ‘I’m a friend of Mary’s.’
    I watched as he first began to smile, then panic. He turned away, gave a muted whine, shuffled close to the Indian woman, and took her hand. I carried on to the bar, put half a buttock on a stool and started examining the menu. A moment or two later, I became aware of the black carer beside me.
    ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I hope I didn’t do anything wrong.’
    ‘I’m not sure,’ she replied. ‘It’s not good to startle him. Especially now.’
    ‘I met him once before, with Mary when she came over one afternoon. I’m a friend of hers.’
    She looked at me, as if trying to assess my motives and my truthfulness. ‘Then you’ll understand,’ she said quietly, ‘won’t you?’
    ‘Yes, I do.’
    And the thing was, I did. I didn’t need to talk to the badge man or the male carer. Now I knew.
    I saw it in his face. It’s not often that’s true, is it? At least, not for me. We listen to what people say, we read what they write – that’s our evidence, that’s our corroboration. But if the face contradicts the speaker’s words, we interrogate the face. A shifty look in the eye, a rising blush, the uncontrollable twitch of a face muscle – and then we know. We recognise the hypocrisy or the false claim, and the truth stands evident before us.
    But this was different, simpler. There was no contradiction – I simply saw it in his face. In the eyes, their colour and expression, and in the cheeks, their pallor and underlying structure. Corroboration came from his height, and the way his bones and muscles arranged that height. This was Adrian’s son. I didn’t need a birth certificate or DNA test – I saw it and felt it. And of course the dates matched: he would be about this age now.
    My first reaction was, I admit, solipsistic. I couldn’t avoid remembering what I’d written in the part of my letter addressed to Veronica: ‘It’s just a question of whether you can get pregnant before he discovers you’re a bore.’ I hadn’t even meant it at the time – I was just flailing around, trying to find a way to hurt. In fact, all the time I was going out with Veronica, I found her many things – alluring, mysterious, disapproving – but never boring. And even in my recent dealings with her, though the adjectives might be updated – exasperating, stubborn, haughty, yet still, in a way, alluring – I never found her boring. So it was as false as it was hurtful.
    But that was only the half of it. When I’d been trying to damage them, I’d written: ‘Part of me hopes you have a child, because I’m a great believer in time’s revenge. But revenge must be on the right people, i.e. you two.’ And then: ‘So I don’t wish you that. It would be unjust to inflict on some innocent foetus the prospect of discovering that it was the fruit of your loins, if you’ll excuse the poeticism.’ Remorse, etymologically, is the action of biting again: that’s what the feeling does to you. Imagine the strength of the bite when I reread my words. They seemed like some ancient curse I had forgotten even uttering. Of course I don’t – I didn’t – believe in curses. That’s to say, in words producing events. But the very action of naming something that subsequently happens – of wishing specific evil, and that evil coming to pass – this still has a shiver of the otherworldly about it. The fact that the young me who cursed and the old me who witnessed the curse’s outcome had quite different feelings – this was monstrously irrelevant. If, just before all this started, you had told me that Adrian, instead of killing himself, had counterfactually married Veronica, that they had had a child