The Sense of an Ending

raised above the frame of her glasses. She was five months older than me and sometimes made it feel like five years.
    ‘It was just something my English master said.’
    ‘Well, now you’re at university we must get you to think for yourself, mustn’t we?’
    There was something about the ‘we’ that made me suspect I hadn’t got everything wrong. She was just trying to improve me – and who was I to object to that? One of the first things she asked me was why I wore my watch on the inside of my wrist. I couldn’t justify it, so I turned the face round, and put time on the outside, as normal, grown-up people did.
    I settled into a contented routine of working, spending my free time with Veronica and, back in my student room, wanking explosively to fantasies of her splayed beneath me or arched above me. Daily intimacy made me proud of knowing about make-up, clothes policy, the feminine razor, and the mystery and consequences of a woman’s periods. I found myself envying this regular reminder of something so wholly female and defining, so connected to the great cycle of nature. I may have put it as badly as this when I tried to explain the feeling.
    ‘You’re just romanticising what you haven’t got. The only point of it is to tell you you’re not pregnant.’
    Given our relationship, this struck me as a bit cheeky.
    ‘Well, I hope we’re not living in Nazareth.’
    There followed one of those pauses when couples tacitly agree not to discuss something. And what was there to discuss? Only, perhaps, the unwritten terms of the trade-off. From my point of view, the fact that we weren’t having sex exonerated me from thinking about the relationship other than as a close complicity with a woman who, as her part of the bargain, wasn’t going to ask the man where the relationship was heading. At least, that’s what I thought the deal was. But I was wrong about most things, then as now. For instance, why did I assume she was a virgin? I never asked her, and she never told me. I assumed she was because she wouldn’t sleep with me: and where is the logic in that?
    One weekend in the vacation, I was invited to meet her family. They lived in Kent, out on the Orpington line, in one of those suburbs which had stopped concreting over nature at the very last minute, and ever since smugly claimed rural status. On the train down from Charing Cross, I worried that my suitcase – the only one I owned – was so large it made me look like a potential burglar. At the station, Veronica introduced me to her father, who opened the boot of his car, took the suitcase from my hand, and laughed.
    ‘Looks like you’re planning to move in, young man.’
    He was large, fleshy and red-faced; he struck me as gross. Was that beer on his breath? At this time of day? How could this man have fathered such an elfin daughter?
    He drove his Humber Super Snipe with a sighing impatience at the folly of others. I sat in the back, alone. Occasionally, he would point things out, presumably to me, though I couldn’t tell if I was meant to reply. ‘St Michael’s, brick and flint, much improved by Victorian restorers.’ ‘Our very own Café Royal –
voilà!
’ ‘Note the distinguished off-licence with period half-timbering on your right.’ I looked at Veronica’s profile for a clue, but received none.
    They lived in a detached, red-brick, tile-hung house with a strip of gravel in front of it. Mr Ford opened the front door and shouted to no one in particular,
    ‘The boy’s come for a month.’
    I noticed the heavy shine on the dark furniture, and the heavy shine on the leaves of an extravagant pot plant. Veronica’s father seized my case as if responding to the distant laws of hospitality and, farcically exaggerating its weight, carried it up to an attic room and threw it on the bed. He pointed to a small plumbed-in basin.
    ‘Pee in there in the night if you want to.’
    I nodded in reply. I couldn’t tell if he was being all matily male, or treating me as lower-class scum.
    Veronica’s brother, Jack, was easier to read: one of those healthy, sporting young men who laughed at most things and teased his younger sister. He behaved towards me as if I were an object of mild curiosity, and by no means the first to be exhibited for his appreciation. Veronica’s mother ignored all the by-play around her, asked me about my studies, and disappeared into the kitchen a lot. I suppose she must have been in her early forties, though of course