The Only Story

THREE

He sometimes asked himself a question about life. Which are truer, the happy memories, or the unhappy ones? He decided, eventually, that the question was unanswerable.

He had kept a little notebook for decades now. In it he wrote down what people said about love. Great novelists, television sages, self-help gurus, people he met in his years of travelling. He assembled the evidence. And then, every couple of years or so, he went through and crossed out all the quotations he no longer believed to be true. Usually, this left him with only two or three temporary truths. Temporary, because the next time round, he would probably cross those out as well, leaving a different two or three now standing.

He had found himself on a train to Bristol the other day. Across the aisle was a woman with the Daily Mail spread out in front of her. He saw the bright headline, accompanied by a large photo. HEADMISTRESS, 49, SANK 8 GLASSES OF WINE, DROPPED CRISPS DOWN HER TOP, AND SAID TO PUPIL, “COME AND GET ’EM.” After such a headline, what need to read the story? And what chance of the reader finding a different moral to the one so fiercely implied? Any more than would have been the case, half a century previously, had the newspaper’s hot moralism been applied to a story which, at the time, hadn’t even made the local Advertiser & Gazette. For the next ten minutes and more he worked on the headline his own case might have elicited. He finally came up with: NEW BALLS, ANYONE? TENNIS CLUB SCANDAL AS HOUSEWIFE, 48, AND LONG-HAIRED STUDENT, 19, EXPELLED OVER RUMPY-PUMPY. As for the text below, it would write itself: ‘There were shock waves behind the lace curtains and laurel hedges of leafy Surrey last week as steamy allegations emerged of…’

Some people, when they grow old, decide to live by the sea. They watch the tides approach and recede, foam bubbling on the beach, further out the breakers, and perhaps, beyond all this, they hear the oceanic waves of time, and in such hinted outer vastness find some consolation for their own minor lives and impending mortality. He preferred a different liquid, with its own movements and its own destination. But he saw nothing eternal in it: just milk turning into cheese. He was suspicious of the grander view of things, and wary of indefinable yearnings. He preferred the daily dealings of reality. And he also admitted that his world, and his life, had slowly shrunk. But he was content with this.

For instance, he thought he probably wouldn’t have sex again before he died. Probably. Possibly. Unless. But on balance, he thought not. Sex involved two people. Two persons, first person and second person: you and I, you and me. But nowadays, the raucousness of the first person within him was stilled. It was as if he viewed, and lived, his life in the third person. Which allowed him to assess it more accurately, he believed.

So, that familiar question of memory. He recognized that memory was unreliable and biased, but in which direction? Towards optimism? That made initial sense. You remembered your past in cheerful terms because this validated your existence. You didn’t have to see your life as any kind of triumph – his own had hardly been that – but you did need to tell yourself that it had been interesting, enjoyable, purposeful. Purposeful? That would be pitching it a bit high. Still, an optimistic memory might make it easier to part from life, might soften the pain of extinction.

But you could equally argue the opposite. If memory is biased towards pessimism, if, retrospectively, all appears blacker and bleaker than it actually was, then this might make life easier to leave behind. If, like dear old Joan, dead now these thirty years and more, you had already been to hell and back in your lifetime, then what fear of actual hell, or, more probably, eternal non-existence? There drifted into his mind words caught on the headcam of a British soldier in Afghanistan – words spoken by another soldier as he executed a wounded prisoner. ‘There you are. Shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt,’ the man had said before pulling the trigger. Impressive to have Shakespeare half-quoted on the modern battlefield, he had thought at the time. Why had that come into his head? Perhaps Joan’s swearing had been the connection. So he considered the upside to feeling that life was just a fucking coil to be shuffled off. And men were just cunts; not women, men. There might also be an evolutionary advantage to a pessimistic memory. You wouldn’t mind making room for others in the food queue; you could see it as a social duty to wander off into the wilderness, or allow yourself to be staked out on some hillside for the greater good.

But that was theory; and here was practicality. As he saw it, one of the last tasks of his life was to remember her correctly. By which he didn’t mean: accurately, day by day, year by year, from beginning to middle to end. The end had been terrible, and far too much middle had overhung the beginning. No, what he meant was this: it was his final duty, to both of them, to remember and hold her as she had been when they were first together. To remember her back to what he still thought of as her innocence: an innocence of soul. Before such innocence became defaced. Yes, that was the word for it: a scribbling-over with the wild graffiti of booze. Also, a losing of the face, and his subsequent inability to see her. To see, to recall what she had been like before he lost her, lost sight of her, before she disappeared into that chintz sofa – ‘Look, Casey Paul, I’m doing my disappearing act!’ Lost sight of the first person – the only person – he had loved.

He had photographs, of course, and they helped. Smiling at him while leaning back against the trunk of a tree in some long-forgotten wood. Windswept on a broad empty beach with a row of shuttered huts in the distance behind her. There was even a picture of her in that tennis dress with the green trim. Photographs were useful, but somehow always confirmed the memory rather than liberating it.

He tried to get his mind to catch her on the wing. To remember her gaiety, her laughter, her subversiveness and her love for him, before everything became occluded. Her dashingness, and her gallant attempt to make happiness when the odds were always against her, always against them. Yes, this was what he was after: Susan happy, Susan optimistic, despite not having much of a clue what the future held. That was a talent, a lucky slice of her character. He himself tended to look at the future and decide from an assessment of probabilities whether optimism or pessimism was the appropriate outlook. He brought life to his temperament; she brought her temperament to life. It was more risky, of course; it brought more joy, but it left you no safety net. Still, he thought, at least they hadn’t been defeated by practicality.

There was all this; and there was also the way she accepted him simply as he was. No, better: she enjoyed him as he was. And she had confidence in him: she looked at him and didn’t doubt him; she thought he would make something of himself, and something of his life. Which in a sense he had done, though not as either of them would have foreseen.

She would say, ‘Let’s pile all the Fancy Boys into the Austin and drive to the sea.’ Or to Chichester Cathedral, or Stonehenge, or a second-hand bookshop, or a wood with a thousand-year-old tree at the centre of it. Or to a horror flick, however much they scared the daylights out of her. Or to a funfair, where they would hurtle round the dodgems, stuff themselves with candyfloss, fail to dislodge coconuts from their holders and be whirled into the air by various devices until all the puff had gone out of them. He didn’t know if he’d done all these things back then, with her; some perhaps later, some even with other people. But it was the kind of remembering he needed, and which brought her back even if she hadn’t actually been there.

No safety net. One image would always recur, whenever he thought of her. He was holding her out of the window by her wrists, unable to pull her in or let her drop, both their lives in agonising stasis until something happened. And what had happened? Well, he had tried to organize people to pile mattresses high enough to break her fall; or, he had got the fire brigade to hold a jumping sheet; or… But they were locked together at the wrist like trapeze artists: he wasn’t just holding her, she was holding him. And in the end his strength gave way, and he let her go. And though her fall was cushioned, it was still very grievous because, as she had once told him, she had heavy bones.

One entry in his notebook was, of course: ‘It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.’ That was there for a few years; then he crossed it out. Then he wrote it in again; then he crossed it out again. Now he had both entries side by side, one clear and true, the other crossed out and false.

When he thought back to life in the Village, he remembered it as being based on a simple system. For each ailment, there was a single remedy. TCP for a sore throat; Dettol for a cut; Disprin for a headache; Vicks for chestiness. And beyond that lay greater matters, but still with unitary solutions. The cure for sex is marriage; the cure for love is marriage; the cure for infidelity is divorce; the cure for unhappiness is work; the cure for extreme unhappiness is drink; the cure for death is a frail belief in the afterlife.

As an adolescent, he had longed for more complication. And life had let him discover it. At times, he felt he had had enough of life’s complications.

A few weeks after his row with Anna, he gave up his rented room and moved back to Henry Road. Somewhere, in some novel he subsequently read, he had come across the sentence: ‘He fell in love like a man committing suicide.’ It wasn’t quite like that, but there was a sense in which he had no choice. He couldn’t live with Susan; he couldn’t establish a separate life away from her; therefore he went back to live with her. Courage or cowardice? Or mere inevitability?

At least by now he was familar with the patterned patternlessness of the life he was submitting to again. His reappearance was greeted not with happiness or relief, but with a blithe lack of surprise. Because such a return was always going to happen. Because young men must be allowed their delinquencies, but shouldn’t be congratulated when they returned to a place they should never have left. He noted this discrepant reaction, but didn’t resent it; on the scale of things to be resented, it didn’t really signify.

And so – for how long? another four, five years? – they continued under the same roof, with good days and bad weeks, swallowed rage, occasional outbursts and increasing social isolation. All this no longer made him feel interesting; instead, he felt a failure and an outcast. He never got close to another woman in this time. After a year or two, Eric could no longer stand the atmosphere, and moved out. The top two rooms were rented to nurses. Well, he couldn’t get policemen.

But there was one discovery made during these years which surprised him, and which made his future life, when it came, easier. The office manager announced herself pregnant; they advertised for a stand-in, but could find no one suitable; he suggested himself for the job. It scarcely occupied the whole day, and he continued handling some legal aid cases. But he found the routine of admin, diary-keeping, mail, billings – even the banalities of maintaining the coffee machine and water cooler – gave him quiet satisfaction. In part, no doubt, because he often arrived from Henry Road in a state unfit for much more than low-level administration. But he also took unanticipated pleasure in running things. And his colleagues were straightforwardly grateful to him for making their lives easier. The contrast with Henry Road was blatant. When had Susan last thanked him for making her life less arduous than it would have been?

The office manager, with many explanations about the thrilling surprise of maternal love, announced that she wouldn’t be returning. He took the job full-time; and, years later, this practical ability proved his means of escape. He managed offices for law firms, for charities, for NGOs, and so was able to travel, and move on when he needed to. He worked in Africa, and in North and South America. The routine satisfied a part of him he didn’t know existed. He remembered how, back at the Village tennis club, he’d been shocked at the way some of the older members played. They were certainly competent, but inexpressive and uninventive, as if merely following the instructions of some long-dead coach. Well, that had been them, then. Now he could run an office – wherever, whenever – like any grooved old hacker. He kept his satisfactions to himself. And over the years he had also learned to see the point of money: what it could – and couldn’t – do.

There was another thing. It was a job below his qualifications. Not that he didn’t take it seriously; he did. But since, professionally, he had now lowered his expectations, he found that he was rarely disappointed.

He had a duty to see back to how she had been, and to rescue her. But this wasn’t just about her. He had a duty to himself. To see back and… rescue himself? From what? From ‘the subsequent wreckage of his life’? No, that was stupidly melodramatic. His life had not been wrecked. His heart, yes, his heart had been cauterized. But he had found a way to live, and continued with that life, which had brought him to here. And from here, he had a duty to see himself as he had once been. Strange how, when you are young, you owe no duty to the future; but when you are old, you owe a duty to the past. To the one thing you can’t change.

He remembered, at school, being guided by masters through books and plays in which there was often a Conflict between Love and Duty. In those old stories, innocent but passionate love would run up against the duty owed to family, church, king, state. Some protagonists won, some lost, some did both at the same time; usually, tragedy ensued. No doubt in religious, patriarchal, hierarchical societies, such conflicts continued and still gave themes to writers. But in the Village? No church-going for his family. Not much of a hierarchical social structure, unless you counted the tennis and golf club committees, with their power to expel. Not much patriarchy, either – not with his mother around. As for family duty: he had felt no obligation to placate his parents. Indeed, nowadays the onus had shifted, and it was the parents’ job to accept whatever ‘life choices’ their child might make. Like running off to a Greek island with Pedro the hairdresser, or bringing home that gymslip-mother-to-be.

Yet this liberation from the old dogmas brought its own complexities. The sense of obligation became internalised. Love was a Duty in and of itself. You had a Duty to Love, the more so now that it was your central belief system. And Love brought many Duties with it. So, even when apparently weightless, Love could weigh heavily, and bind heavily, and its Duties could cause disasters as great as in the old days.

Another thing he had come to understand. He had imagined that, in the modern world, time and place were no longer relevant to stories of love. Looking back, he saw that they had played a greater part in his story than he ever realized. He had given in to the old, continuing, ineradicable delusion: that lovers somehow stand outside of time.

Now he was getting off the point. Susan and himself, all those years ago. There was her shame to deal with. But there was also, he knew, his shame.

An entry from his notebook which had survived several inspections: ‘In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’ He had liked this remark since first discovering it. Because for him it opened out into a wider thought: that love itself is never absurd, and neither are any of its participants. Despite all the stern orthodoxies of feeling and behaviour that a society may seek to impose, love slips past them. You sometimes saw, in the farmyard, improbable forms of attachment – the goose in love with the donkey, the kitten playing safely between the paws of the chained-up mastiff. And in the human farmyard, there existed forms of attachment which were just as unlikely; and yet never, to their participants, absurd.

One permanent effect of his exposure to the Macleod household had been a distaste for angry men. No, not distaste, disgust. Anger as an expression of authority, an expression of masculinity, anger as a prelude to physical violence: he hated it all. There was a hideous false virtue to anger: look at me, angry, look how I boil over because I am so filled with emotion, look how I am really alive (unlike all those cold fish over there), look how I am going to prove it by grabbing your hair and smashing your face into a door. And now look what you made me do! I’m angry about that too!

It seemed to him that anger was never just anger. Love was, usually, in itself, just love, even if it impelled some to behave in ways which made you suspect there was no love present any more, and perhaps never had been. But anger, especially the sort which coated itself in self-righteousness (and perhaps all anger did) was so often an expression of something else: boredom, contempt, superiority, failure, hatred. Or even something apparently trivial, like a chafing dependence on female practicality.

Even so, and to his considerable surprise, he had finally stopped hating Macleod. True, the man was long dead – though it was perfectly possible, indeed reasonable, to hate the dead; and at one stage he imagined he would live with his hatred until the day he himself died. But it hadn’t worked out that way.

He wasn’t sure about the chronology of it all. At some point, Macleod had retired, but continued to live on in that large house, attended by a cook–housekeeper to whom he behaved with elaborate, antiquated politeness. Once a week he would go to the golf club and hit a stationary ball as if it were a personal enemy. He would garden furiously, smoke furiously, turn on the goggle-box and drink along to it until he could still just get himself to bed. Often the thieving Mrs Dyer would find the blank-screened set still buzzing when she arrived.

Then, one winter morning, while he was planting out cabbages, Macleod had fallen to the hard ground and wasn’t discovered for hours; the stroke had done its worst. Half-paralysed, but fully silenced, he now depended on regular visits from a nurse, monthly ones from his daughters, more erratic ones from Susan. Maurice, his old pal from Reynolds News, would drop by from time to time, and, in knowing contravention of medical advice, would pull out a half-bottle of whisky and pour some of it down Macleod’s throat while the familiar eyes blinked back at him. By the time the housekeeper found him dead on the floor with the bedsheets wrapped round him, Susan had long since handed power of attorney to Martha and Clara. The house, with many unwanted contents, was sold to a dubious local who might have been fronting for a property developer.

Somewhere in this sequence, he had stopped hating Macleod. He didn’t forgive him – he didn’t consider forgiveness the opposite of hatred – but he acknowledged that his seething antipathy and night-time rages had become somehow irrelevant. On the other hand, he didn’t feel pity for Macleod, despite all the humiliations and infirmities visited upon him. These he regarded as inevitabilities; indeed, he nowadays regarded most things that happened as inevitabilities.

The question of responsibility? That seemed a matter for outsiders: only those with a sufficient lack of evidence and knowledge could confidently apportion blame. He was, even at this distance, still far too involved to do so himself. And he had also reached a stage in life where he had started pursuing counterfactuals. What if this had happened rather than that? It was idle but involving (and perhaps held the question of responsibility at bay). For instance, what if he hadn’t been nineteen, with time on his hands and – while hardly aware of it – desperate for love when he had arrived at the tennis club? What if Susan, from religious or moral scruple, had discouraged his interest, and taught him nothing more than tactical astuteness when playing mixed doubles? What if Macleod had continued to hold a sexual interest in his wife? None of this might have happened. But given that it had, then if you wanted to attribute fault, you were straight away into pre-history, which now, in two of their three cases, had become inaccessible.

Those charged first few months had reordered his present and determined his future, even up to now. But what if, for instance, he and Susan hadn’t been attracted to one another? What if one of their many cover stories had been true? He was a young man who drove her because she needed new glasses. He was a friend of one or both of the daughters. He was a kind of protégé of Gordon’s. Now, in his state of slowly acquired calmness, he found he could easily imagine things other than they had been; the facts and feelings quite different.

Curious, he pursued this untaken path. For instance, he started helping Old Man Macleod with the gardening. As well as playing tennis with Susan, he took up golf, had lessons at the club and would often partner Gordon – as he’d been asked to call him – round the local eighteen holes when the dew still sparkled on the fairways. There was something about his presence which relaxed Old Man Macleod: that gruffness was only a mask, and Paul was able to help him relax a bit more on the tee; he even taught him (after flipping through an American golf manual) how to love that little dimpled ball rather than hate it. He – Casey Paul, as more than Susan now called him – discovered that he rather liked a drink: gin with Joan, beer with Gordon, an occasional glass of sherry with Susan; though all agreed that at a certain point enough was enough and one more was too many. And then – why not pursue this alternative life to, if not a logical, at least a conventional conclusion – what if he and one of the Macleod daughters became (as their parents would have put it) ‘sweet on one another’? Martha or Clara? Obviously Clara, who took more character traits from Susan. But this was counter-factual, and so he chose Martha.

The immediate consequence was that the Macleods did indeed come round to have sherry with his parents – an occasion he and Martha had been dreading, but which actually passed off quite well. The two couples were never going to make a harmonious bridge four, but there was nothing like fixing a date with the vicar of St Michael’s for everyone to overlook incompatibilities. And – since this counterfactual had now got way out of hand – he decided to decorate the wedding day with the most extravagantly beautiful weather, even unto a double rainbow. Then, on a whim, he chose to award himself the sister he never had. To stir things up a bit for his parents, he made her a lesbian. Oh, and she brought her baby along to the ceremony. The only baby in the western world who didn’t cry at an inappropriate moment during a wedding. Why not?

He shook his head to clear this strange vision that had come upon him. There were two ways of looking at life; or two extremes of viewpoint, anyway, with a continuum between them. One proposed that every human action necessarily carried with it the obliteration of every other action which might have been performed instead; life therefore consisted of a succession of small and large choices, expressions of free will, so that the individual was like the captain of some paddle steamer chugging down the mighty Mississippi of life. The other proposed that it was all inevitability, that pre-history ruled, that a human life was no more than a bump on a log which was itself being propelled down the mighty Mississippi, tugged and bullied, smacked and wheedled, by currents and eddies and hazards over which no control was possible. Paul thought it did not have to be one or the other. He thought a life – his own, of course – could be lived first under the dispensation of inevitability, and later under the dispensation of free will. But he also realized that retrospective reorderings of life are always likely to be self-serving.

On further thought, he decided that the unlikeliest part of his counterfactual was that Martha would ever have considered him a potential husband.

Did he feel regret at what he always thought of as his ‘handing back’ of Susan? No: the proper word for that might be guilt; or its sharper colleague, remorse. But there was also an inevitability to it, which lent the action a different moral colouring. He found that he simply couldn’t go on. He couldn’t save her, and so he had to save himself. It was as simple as that.

No, of course it wasn’t; it was much more complicated. He could have gone on, both fooling and torturing himself. He could have gone on, calming her down and reassuring her even when her mind and memory ran in three-minute loops, from fresh surprise at his presence, even though he’d been sitting in the same chair for two hours, via rebuke for his non-existent absence, through to alarm and panic, which he would quieten with soft talk and gentle memories that she would pretend to agree with even though she’d long ago drunk those memories clean out of her head. No, he could have gone on, acting as an emotional home help, watching over her progressive disintegration. But he would have had to be a masochist. And by that time he had made the most terrifying discovery of his life, one which probably cast a shadow over all his subsequent relationships: the realization that love, even the most ardent and the most sincere, can, given the correct assault, curdle into a mixture of pity and anger. His love had gone, had been driven out, month by month, year by year. But what shocked him was that the emotions which replaced it were just as violent as the love which had previously stood in his heart. And so his life and his heart were just as agitated as before, except that she was no longer able to assuage his heart. And that, finally, was when he had to hand her back.

He wrote a joint letter to Martha and Clara. He didn’t go into emotional detail. He merely explained that he was obliged to travel on business for an extended period – perhaps several years – and would obviously not be able to take Susan with him. He would be leaving in three months, which he hoped would be enough time for them to make the appropriate arrangements. If, at some future point, it became necessary to put her into some kind of residential care, he would do what he could to help; though at present he was not in a position to contribute.

And most of this was true.

There was one visit he was obliged to make before going abroad. Was he dreading it or looking forward to it? Both, probably. It was five o’clock by the time he rang the bell, answered this time not by a counterpoint of yapping but by a single, distant bark. When Joan opened the door, there was a placid, elderly golden retriever beside her. She looked so foggy-eyed that it might as well have been a guide dog, he thought.

It was winter; Joan wore a tracksuit with a few cigarette burns on the bosom, and a pair of Russian house socks in which she padded along as softly as her dog. The sitting room mixed woodsmoke with cigarette smoke. The chairs were the same, but older; their occupants were the same, but older. The retriever, which answered to the name of Sibyl, panted from the journey to the front door and back.

‘The yappers all died on me,’ Joan said. ‘Don’t ever have dogs, Paul. They die on you, and then there comes a point when you don’t know whether to get one last one or not. One for the road. So here we are, Sibyl and me. Either I’ll die and break her heart or she’ll die and break mine. Not much of a choice, is it? The gin’s over there. Help yourself.’

He did so, choosing the least filthy of the tumblers.

‘So how are you keeping, Joan?’

‘As you can see. Pretty much the same, except older, drunker, lonelier. How about you?’

‘I’m thirty. I’m going abroad for a few years. Work. I’ve handed Susan back.’

‘Like a parcel? It’s a bit fucking late, isn’t it? Taking her back to the shop and asking for a refund?’

‘It’s not like that.’ He realized he might have some difficulty explaining to one drunk woman why he was leaving another.

‘So how exactly is it?’

‘It’s like this. I tried to save her, I failed. I tried to stop her drinking, I failed. I don’t blame her, it’s way beyond that. And I remember what you told me back then – that she was more likely to get hurt than me. But I can’t take it any more. I can’t face another ten days of it, let alone another ten years. So Martha’s going to look after her. Clara refused, which surprised me. I said that… if they needed to put her into a home at some point, I might be able to help. In the future. If I do well and make some money.’

‘You’ve certainly got it all worked out.’

‘It’s self-protection, Joan. I couldn’t take any more.’

‘Girlfriend?’ she asked, lighting another cigarette.

‘I’m not that heartless.’

‘Well, finding another woman can bring an exceptional clarity of mind to a man all of a sudden. Remembering my own distant experiences of cock and cunt.’

‘I’m sorry it didn’t work out for you, Joan.’

‘Your sympathy is about half a century too late, young man.’

‘I mean it,’ he said.

‘And how do you think Martha will cope? Better than you? Worse? About the same?’

‘I’ve no idea. And in a way I don’t care. I don’t care, otherwise I’ll be dragged back into it all.’

‘It’s not a question of getting dragged back. You’re still in it.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘You’re still in it. You’ll always be in it. No, not literally. But in your heart. Nothing ever ends, not if it’s gone that deep. You’ll always be walking wounded. That’s the only choice, after a while. Walking wounded, or dead. Don’t you agree?’

He looked across, but she wasn’t addressing him. She was addressing Sibyl, and patting her soft head. He didn’t know what to say, because he didn’t know if he believed her or not.

‘Do you still cheat at the crossword?’

‘You cheeky little bugger. But that’s nothing new, is it?’

He smiled at her. He’d always liked Joan.

‘And shut the door on your way out. I don’t like to get up too many times in the course of a day.’

He knew not to do anything like embrace her, so merely nodded, smiled and started to leave.

‘Send a wreath when the time comes,’ she called after him.

He didn’t know if she meant for her, or for Susan. Maybe even for Sibyl. Did dogs get wreaths? Another thing he didn’t know.

What he didn’t – or couldn’t – tell Joan was his terrifying discovery that love, by some ruthless, almost chemical process, could resolve itself into pity and anger. The anger wasn’t at Susan, but at whatever it was that had obliterated her. But even so, anger. And anger in a man caused him disgust. So now, along with pity and anger, he had self-disgust to deal with as well. And this was part of his shame.

He worked in a number of countries. He was in his thirties, then forties, perfectly presentable (as his mother would have put it), as well as solvent and not obviously mad. This was enough for him to find the sexual companionship, the social life, the daily warmth he needed – until he moved on to the next job, the next country, the next social circle, the next few years of being agreeable to and with new people, some of whom he might see in later years, some not. It was what he wanted; more to the point, it was all he felt able to sustain.

To some, his way of life might have sounded selfish, even parasitical. But he also took thought for others. He tried not to mislead, to exaggerate what was emotionally available. He didn’t linger by jewellers’ windows or go simperingly silent at photos of babies; nor did he claim he was looking to settle down, either with this person or indeed in this country. And – though it was a trait he didn’t immediately identify – he was generally attracted to women who were… how to put it? Sturdy, independent and not obviously fucked-up. Women who had their own lives, who might enjoy his solid but passing presence as much as he did theirs. Women who wouldn’t get too hurt when he moved on, and who wouldn’t inflict too much pain if they were the first to jump.

He thought of this psychological pattern, this emotional strategy, as being honest and considerate, as well as necessary. He neither pretended nor offered more than he could deliver. Though of course, when he laid it all out like this, he saw that some might regard it as pure egotism. He also couldn’t decide if his policy of moving on – from place to place, woman to woman – was courageous in admitting his own limitations, or cowardly in accepting them.

Nor did his new theory of living always work. Some women gave him thoughtful presents – and that scared him. Others, over the years, had called him a typical Englishman, a tightass, a cold fish; also, heartless and manipulative – though he believed his was the least manipulative approach to relationships that he knew. Still, it made some women cross with him. And on the rare occasions when he had tried to explain his life, his pre-history and the long-term state of his heart, the accusations sometimes became more pointed, and he was treated as if he had some infectious disease to which he should have admitted between the first and second dates.

But that was the nature of relationships: there always seemed to be an imbalance of one sort or another. And it was fine to plan an emotional strategy, but another thing when the ground opened up in front of you, and your defending troops toppled into a ravine which hadn’t been marked on the map until a few seconds previously. And so there had been Maria, that gentle, calm Spanish woman who suddenly began making suicide threats, who wanted this, who wanted that. But he hadn’t offered to be the father of her children – or anybody else’s; nor did he intend to convert to Catholicism, even if that would have pleased her supposedly dying mother.

And then – since misunderstanding is democratically distributed – there had been Kimberly, from Nashville, who had so instantly fulfilled all his unwritten requirements – from laughing him into bed on the second date to embodying the very spirit of free-hearted independence – that instead of quietly congratulating himself on his luck he had as near as dammit fallen smack into love with her. And at first she had rebuffed him with references to personal space and to ‘keeping things light’. Yet this only made him the more desperate for her to move into his house that very afternoon, and he’d done stuff with flowers way beyond what he normally did, and found himself gazing at racks of diamond rings, and even dreaming of that perfect hideaway – perhaps an old trapper’s shack (with full modern comforts, of course) up some tree-shadowed lane. He had offered marriage, and she had replied, ‘Paul, it doesn’t work like that.’ When, in his delirium, she had patted his arm and said the kind of stuff he’d said to Maria, he heard himself accusing her of being selfish and manipulative and a cold fish and a typical American woman – whatever he meant by that, as she was the first American woman he’d dated. So she ditched him by fax, and he got punitively drunk to the point of sudden rationality, when he fell into silly laughter, and a sense of the absurdity of all human dealings, and felt a sudden call for the monastic life, while also entertaining fantasies of Kimberly dressed as a nun and them having joyfully blasphemous sex, whereupon he booked two tickets for an early-morning flight to Mexico, but naturally overslept and the message on his answering machine when he woke was not from Kimberly but from the airline company telling him of his missed flight. Somehow he had got into work that day and gave a comic account of his misfortunes, which made his colleagues laugh, and made himself laugh, so that this lighter, distorted fiction swiftly took over from what had actually happened. And in later years he had silently thanked Kimberly for being smarter than he was – emotionally smarter. He had imagined that he’d learnt a lot of emotional lessons from being with Susan. But maybe they were only emotional lessons about being with her.

He kept up with his men-friends when home on leave, or between jobs, over drinks or dinners which felt like sudden jerks of fast-forwarding. Some of them had turned into unremitting furrow-dwellers, and these were the ones who reminisced most sentimentally about the old days. Some were now on to second wives and stepchildren. One had turned gay, after all these years, having suddenly started noticing the napes of young men’s necks. For a few, time brought no alteration. Bernard, red-faced and white-bearded, would give him a nudge, a head-toss and an overloud ‘Look at the arse on that,’ as a woman walked past their restaurant table. Bernard had been saying the same at twenty-five, though back then with an inaccurate American accent. Perhaps it was useful still to be reminded that some men mistook boorishness for honesty. Just as others mistook primness for virtue.

These intermittent friends were of different vintages: of the Fancy Boys, only Eric remained in his life. They were companionable for the necessary hours, and alcohol dissolved any distance between them. But in the way of things – or rather, in his way of things – he tended to remember mainly the phrases that either presumed or grated.

‘Still in the game, eh, Paul?’

‘Footloose and fancy-free?’

‘Not found Miss Right yet? Or should I say Señorita Rita?’

‘Do you think you’ll ever settle down?’

‘A pity you haven’t had kids. You’d have made a good father.’

‘Never too late. Never say die, old chum.’

‘Yes, but don’t forget: sperm degrades as we knock on.’

‘Don’t you long for that little cottage with a blazing log fire and grandchildren on the knee?’

‘He can’t have grandchildren without having children first.’

‘You’d be amazed what medical science can do nowadays.’

His occasional reappearances made some pleased with how their lives had turned out, and others, if not envious, a little restless. Then, in his fifties, he came home, moved to Somerset, and invested some of his savings.

‘What gave you the idea of cheese?’

‘Bad dreams for the rest of your life, old chum.’

‘Maybe there’s a little dairymaid involved?’

‘And look at the arse on that.’

‘Well, at least we’ll be seeing more of you now.’

But there was no dairymaid involved; and strangely, he didn’t end up seeing more of his intermittent friends. Somerset could turn out to be as distant as Valparaiso or Tennessee, if you wanted things that way. And perhaps he chose to remember their heavy joshing because it helped keep them at bay just as he had kept his women friends at bay. Though now some were keeping themselves at bay, having reached the age when illness arrives. There were emails about prostate cancer, and back operations, and that little bit of heart trouble which maybe wasn’t such good news. Vitamin pills and statins were consumed, while the World Service kept them company in their sleeplessness. And soon, no doubt, the funeral years would begin.

He remembered a friend he’d had, a lifetime back, at law college. Alan something. They hadn’t kept up, for one reason or another. Alan had spent seven years training to be a vet, but on qualifying had immediately switched to the law.

One day, he’d asked his friend why he’d thrown up his first career so abruptly. Had he suddenly decided he didn’t like animals? Was it the prospective hours? No, said Alan, none of that. He’d always thought it would be a good, purposeful job, helping to cure sick farmstock, bringing them either to safe birth or pain-free death, working outdoors, meeting all sorts of people. And it would have been all that, he knew. But what had finally put him off was a kind of squeamishness. He explained that if you spent several hours of the day with your arm up the backside of a cow, you couldn’t help breathing in the animal’s noxious exhalations. And that once they were inside you, they would inevitably seek to come back out again.

That was as far as Alan had gone. But he had naturally imagined Alan in bed with a girlfriend, and all going well between them, until some catastrophic build-up of cow gas hurtles from him, and the girl jumps from the bed, rushes for her clothes and is never seen again. Or perhaps this hadn’t happened, but Alan couldn’t bear to think of how it might be, if he was with someone he loved.

What had become of Alan? He had no idea. But Alan’s story had stayed with him ever since. Because once you had been through certain things, their presence inside you never really disappeared. The cow gas would out, in one direction or another. Then you just had to live with the consequences until it dispersed. And yes, it had caused more than one girlfriend to run for her clothes, not just Anna. And no, at those times, he had not been much of a stoic.

In his youth, hot with pride at his love for Susan, he had been competitive, as all young men are. My cock is bigger than yours; my heart is bigger than yours. Young bucks boasting of their girlfriends’ attributes. Whereas his boast had been: look how much more transgressive my relationship is than yours. And then, as well: look at the strength of my feelings for her, and hers for me. Which was what counted, obviously, because the strength of feeling governed the degree of happiness, didn’t it? That had seemed blindingly logical to him at the time.

It used to be said that the Bhutanese were the happiest people on earth. In Bhutan there was little materialism, but a strong sense of kinship, society and religion. Whereas he lived in the materialistic West, where there was little religion and a weaker sense of both society and family. Did this give him an advantage, or a disadvantage?

More recently, the happiest people on earth were said to be the Danes. Not because of their supposed hedonism, but because of the modesty of their expressed hopes. Instead of aiming for the stars and the moon, their ambition was only to reach the next street lamp and, being pleased when they did so, were the happier for it. He remembered again that woman, somebody’s girlfriend, who said that she had lowered her expectations because this made you less likely to be disappointed. And therefore more happy? Was this what it was like to be Danish?

As for whether strength of feeling correlated to degree of happiness, his own experience now led him to doubt it. You might as well say, the more you ate, the better your digestion; or, the faster you drove, the quicker you got there. Not if you drove into a brick wall. He remembered that time, out in his Morris Minor with Susan, when the accelerator cable had broken, or jammed, or whatever. They were certainly roaring away up that hill, until he had the wit to disengage the clutch. He’d been doing two things at the same time: panicking and thinking clearly. That’s how his life had been, back then. Nowadays, he always thought clearly; but occasionally, he found he missed the panic.

And here was another factor, whether you were Bhutanese, Danish or British. If the statistics of happiness depend on personal reporting, how can we be sure that anyone is as happy as they claim to be? What if they aren’t telling the truth? No, we have to assume that they are, or at least that the testing system allows for lying. So the real question lay beneath: assuming that those canvassed by anthropologists and sociologists are reliable witnesses, then surely ‘being happy’ is the same as ‘reporting yourself happy’? Whereupon any subsequent objective analysis – of brain activity, for instance – becomes irrelevant. To say sincerely that you are happy is to be happy. At which point, the question disappears.

And if that was so, then perhaps the argument could be extended. For example, to say that you had once been happy, and to believe what you were saying, was the same as actually to have been happy. Could that be true? No, that was surely specious. On the other hand, the emotional record was not like a history book; its truths were constantly changing, and true even when incompatible.

For instance, he had noticed during his life one difference between the sexes in the reporting of relationships. When a couple broke up, the woman was more likely to say, ‘It was all fine until x happened.’ The x being a change of circumstances or location, the arrival of an extra child, or, all too often, some routine – or not so routine – infidelity. Whereas the man was more likely to say, ‘I’m afraid it was all wrong from the start.’ And he would be referring to a mutual incompatibility, or a marriage made under duress, or an unrevealed secret on one or both sides, which had later emerged. So she was saying ‘We were happy until,’ while he was saying, ‘We were never really happy.’ And when he had first noticed this discrepancy, he had tried to work out which of them was more likely to be telling the truth; but now, at the other end of his life, he accepted that both were doing so. ‘In love, everything is both true and false; it’s the one subject on which it’s impossible to say anything absurd.’

When he bought a half-share in the Frogworth Valley Artisanal Cheese Company, he had imagined himself as a kind of owner–manager. Co-owner–co-manager. He had a desk and a chair and a rather decrepit computer terminal; he also had his own white coat, though was rarely required to put it on. Hillary ran the office. He had imagined himself running Hillary; but she didn’t need running. He offered to help out and muck in; though mainly he watched things happen around him, and smiled. When Hillary went on holiday, he was allowed to take over her desk.

Where he proved most useful to the company (which only consisted of five people) was stall-holding at farmers’ markets. It wasn’t easy to find someone regular, and Barry, who’d done it for years, was growing unreliable. He was happy to stand in when required. Driving to one of the nearby towns, setting up the stall, laying out the cheeses, their captions, the tasting plates, the plastic cup of toothpicks. He wore a tweed cap and a leather apron, but knew he hardly passed for Somerset born-and-bred. Behind him was a plastic backdrop bearing a colour photograph of happy goats. The other stall-holders were friendly; he would swap two fivers for a tenner, two tenners for a twenty. He explained to customers the age of the cheeses and their characteristics: this one rolled in ash, this in chives, this in crushed chillis. He enjoyed doing all this. It gave him the level of social interaction he required nowadays: cheerful, mutually sustaining, with no question of intimacy – even if he did sometimes flirt lightly with Betty of Betty’s Best Home-Made Pies. It passed the time. Ah, that phrase. A sudden memory of Susan talking about Joan. ‘We’re all just looking for a place of safety. And if you don’t find one, then you have to learn how to pass the time.’ Back then, it had sounded like a counsel of despair; now, it struck him as normal, and emotionally practical.

Despite having no expectation of, nor desire for, some final relationship – or perhaps because of this – he often found himself drawn to all those public displays of wantingness. The personal ads, the ‘soulmates’ columns, the TV dating shows, and those newspaper features where couples go for a meal, mark one another out of ten, report on or confess to inept chopstick behaviour, and then answer (or not) the question of whether they had kissed. ‘A quick hug’ or ‘Only on the cheek’ were frequent responses. Some blokes would answer smugly, ‘A gentleman never tells.’ It was meant to sound sophisticated, but showed far too much class deference: ‘gentlemen’, in his experience, were as boastful as any other males. Still, he followed all these brave, tentative forays of the heart with a mixture of tenderness and scepticism. He hoped it might work out for them, even as he doubted that it would.

‘A gentleman never tells.’ Well, it might occasionally be true. For instance, Uncle Humphrey, stinking of booze and cigars, coming into Susan’s bedroom to demonstrate ‘a party kiss’, and then demanding one (or more) on an annual basis. He doubted Uncle Humph had ‘told’. But this hardly made him a ‘gentleman’ – quite the opposite. Uncle Humph, whose lechery had resulted in Susan not believing in the afterlife. Had his behaviour affected her in other ways? Impossible to tell, at this distance. And so he dismissed that long-dead uncle from his mind.

He preferred to remember Joan. He wished he’d known her as a bounding tennis champion, then as a girl who went off the rails, then as a kept woman. Was the man who kept her, and then dismissed her, a ‘gentleman’? Susan had withheld his name, and there was no finding it now.

He smiled at the thought of Joan. He remembered the yappers, and Sibyl, the elderly golden retriever. Which of them had died first, Joan or Sibyl? She’d asked him to send flowers. Though for whom, was never made clear. Whenever he’d been tempted to get a dog, he heard Joan’s warning voice about them dying on you. So he never got a dog. Nor was he ever tempted to do crosswords or drink gin.

‘Little man, you’ve had a busy day.’

This is the greeting she often sings at you, when you visit her on home leaves.

Except when it is:

Martha, to your continuing surprise, never objects to your visits, and never asks you for money. She looks after her mother herself, with an occasional nurse in attendance. You get the impression that Martha’s husband is doing well in… whatever he does. She told you once, which means you can no longer ask.

Susan’s mind has slipped a little more each time you see her. Short-term memory disappeared a while ago, and long-term memory is a shifting, blurry palimpsest from which clear but unconnected phrases will occasionally be picked out by her fading brain. What often rises to the surface are songs and catchphrases from decades previously.

Some advertising jingle for a breakfast cereal – from her own childhood? from that of her children? In your house, you had Weetabix.

She has long ago ceased to drink; indeed, she has forgotten that she was ever a drinker. She seems to know that you are, or were, something in her life, but not that she once loved you, and you loved her in return. Her brain is ragged, but her mood is strangely stable. The panic and pandemonium have drained out of her. She is alarmed by neither your arrival nor your departure. Her manner is satirical at times, disapproving at others, but always a little superior, as if you aren’t a person of much consequence. You find all this agonising, and try to resist the temptation to believe that you deserve what you are getting.

‘He’s a dirty stop-out, that one,’ she will confide to the nurse in a stage whisper. ‘I could tell you things about him that would make your hair stand on end.’

The nurse looks at you, so you shrug and smile, as if to say, ‘What can you do, it’s so sad, isn’t it?’ while realizing that even now you are betraying her, even in this new and last extremity of hers. Because she could, of course, tell the nurse a thing or two about you, and the nurse’s hair might well stand on end.

You remember her saying that she wasn’t afraid of death, and that her only regret would be over not knowing what happened afterwards. But now she has very little past and – literally – no thought for the future. She has only a ghostplay on some frayed screen of memory, which she takes to be the present.

‘You’re a played-out generation.’

‘Got to eat a peck of dirt before you die.’

‘Clap hands, here comes… Sunny Jim.’

‘One of the worst criminals in the world.’

‘Where’ve you been all my life?’

At least, you think, there is something of her still left among these shreds and patches.

Yes, you remember teaching her that one. So at least she hasn’t turned into an entirely different person. You’ve heard about that happening: pillars of the church screaming obscenities, sweet old ladies turning into Nazis, and so on. But this is faint comfort. Perhaps, if she became unrecognizable and slipped completely out of character, it would all be less painful to deal with.

Once – and naturally in front of the nurse – she dredges up a football song which can only have come from you:

But the nurse has, of course, heard far worse in her years of caring for the elderly and demented, so she merely cocks an eyebrow at you and asks,

‘Chelsea supporter?’

What makes it unbearable, what makes you so exhausted and depressed after twenty minutes in her presence that you want to run outside and howl, is this: though she can’t name you, never asks you any questions or answers any of yours, she still, at one level, registers your presence and responds to it. She doesn’t know who the fuck you are, or what you do, or even your fucking name, but at the same time, she recognizes you, and judges you morally and finds you wanting. It is this which urges you to run out of the house and howl; and this which makes you realize that, perhaps at some similar unconscious level, in some remote part of your brain, you still love her. And because this awareness is unwelcome, it makes you want to howl the more.

And while he was tormenting himself, here was a question he would often arrive at when his mind followed a particular trail of memory. Handing back Susan had been an act of self-protection on his part. There was no doubt about that; and no doubt in his mind that he had to do it. But beyond this, was it an act of courage, or of cowardice?

And if he couldn’t decide, perhaps the answer was: both.

But she had marked his life in so many ways, some for the better, some the worse. She had made him more generous and open to others; though also more suspicious and enclosed. She had taught him the virtue of impulsiveness; but also its dangers. So he had ended up with a cautious generosity and a careful impulsiveness. His pattern of life for twenty years and more had been a demonstration of how to be impulsive and careful at the same time. And his generosity to others also came, like a pack of bacon, with a ‘use by’ date on it.

He always remembered what she had said to him after they left Joan’s house that day. Like most young men, especially those first in love, he had viewed life – and love – in terms of winners and losers. He, obviously, was a winner; Joan, he assumed, had been a loser, or, more likely, not even a competitor. Susan had put him right. Susan had pointed out that everyone has their love story. Even if it was a fiasco, even if it fizzled out, never got going, had all been in the mind to begin with: that didn’t make it any the less real. And it was the only story.

At the time, he had been sobered by her words, and Joan’s story had made him think of her quite differently. Then, over the years, as his life developed, as caution and carefulness began to predominate, he realized that he, no less than Joan, had had his love story, and perhaps there wasn’t another one to come. So now he better understood how couples clung to their own story – each, often, to a separate part of it – long after it had gone cold on them, even to the point where they were not sure they could bear one another. Bad love still contained the remnant, the memory, of good love – somewhere, deep down, where neither of them any longer wanted to dig.

He found himself often wondering about other people’s love stories; and sometimes, because he was a calm and unintimidating presence, they would confide in him. Mostly, it was women who did so, but that was unsurprising; men – himself a prime example – were both more covert and less eloquent. And even when he guessed that the love stories of the misled and the forsaken had become a little less authentic with each retelling – that such tales were the equivalent of Winston Churchill in an Aylesbury backstreet, all rouged and made up for the Pathé News camera – even if this was the case, he was still moved. Indeed, he was more moved by the lives of the bereft and the unchosen than he was by stories of success in love.

On the one hand, there were the furrow-dwellers, tunnelling deeper into the earth, and who, understandably, were not communicative about their inner selves. And at the other extreme were those who would tell you their entire lives, their only story, either in a series of outpourings, or in a single episode. Where had he been that time? He could see the beachfront bar with its silly cocktails, feel the warm night breeze, hear the thudding backbeat from tinny loudspeakers. He was at ease with the world, watching other people’s lives develop. No, that was too grand a way of putting it: he was observing the young get cheerfully drunk and turn their minds to sex, romance, and something more. But though he was indulgent – even sentimental – about the young, and protective of their hopes, there was one scene he was superstitious about, and preferred not to witness: the moment when they flung away their lives because it just felt so right – when, for instance, a smiling waiter delivered a mound of mango sorbet with an engagement ring glittering in its domed apex, and a bright-eyed proposer fell to bended knee in the sand… The fear of such a scene would often lead him to an early night.

So he was sitting at the bar, halfway through his third and theoretically final cigarette of the evening, when a man in beach shorts and flip-flops climbed on to the stool beside him.

‘Mind if I bum one?’

‘Be my guest.’ He passed across the pack, then some hotel book-matches with a palm tree on the cover.

‘Smokers, we’re a dying breed, right?’

The fellow was probably in his forties, as lightly drunk as he was, English, genial, unpushy. None of that fake bonhomie you sometimes encountered, the assumption that you must have more in common than you did. And so they sat there quietly, smoking away, and maybe the lack of false small talk encouraged the man to turn and announce in a level, meditative tone,

‘She said she wanted to rest on my shoulder as lightly as a bird. I thought that sounded poetic. Also, bloody brilliant, just what a fellow needs. Never went for clingy.’

The man paused. Paul was always happy to supply a prompt.

‘But it didn’t work out?’

‘Two problems.’ The fellow inhaled, then blew the smoke into the scented air. ‘Number one, birds fly away, don’t they? That’s in their nature, as a bird, isn’t it? And number two, before they do, they always shit on your shoulder.’

And with that he stubbed out his cigarette, nodded, and walked off down the beach towards the gentle tide.

It came into his head, in one of those whimsical, sentimental moods he always sought to guard against, to try and make one of Susan’s famous upside-down cakes. Over the years, he had become a competent baker, and so imagined that he could work out what had gone wrong. Too much fruit, too little baking powder, too much flour – that was his best guess.

The mixture certainly looked surly and unpromising in the tin. But when he opened the oven door, it had surprisingly risen to its correct height, the fruit looked evenly distributed, and it smelt like… cake. He let it cool, then cut himself a small slice. It tasted fine. Eating it failed to set off any specific memories, for which he was grateful. He was also grateful that he wasn’t able to repeat someone else’s mistakes, only his own.

He cut himself another slice and then, suddenly suspicious of his own motives, threw the rest in the bin. He turned on Wimbledon and watched as two tall, baseball-capped men hit aces past one another for game after game. He chewed his cake and wondered idly what might happen if he went back to the Village and presented himself at the tennis club. Applied for membership. Asked to play in, even at his advanced age. The bad boy returned: the Village’s own John McEnroe. No, that was another sentimentality. Doubtless there would be no one left who remembered him. Or, more likely, all he would find would be a neat little housing estate. No, he would never go back. He was deeply incurious about whether his parents’ house, or the Macleods’, or Joan’s, were still standing. Those places would hold no emotions for him at this distance. That’s what he told himself, anyway.

Towards the end of Wimbledon fortnight, the broadcasters showed more doubles matches: men’s, women’s, mixed. Naturally, he was most interested in the mixed. ‘The most vulnerable spot is always down the middle, Casey Paul.’ Not any more: the players were so fit, so quick and solid on the volley, and their rackets had sweet spots the size of their heads. Another change was the lack of chivalry, certainly at this level. As he remembered it, back in the day, male players would hit as hard as possible against the opposing man, but when rallying with a woman would hold back on the power, and rely more on a change of angle or depth; maybe throw in a slice or a drop shot. It was a bit more than chivalry, in fact: it was simply boring to watch a man outhitting and overpowering a woman.

He hadn’t played tennis for years; decades, indeed. When he lived in the States, a temporary friend had introduced him to golf. At first this felt an ironic surprise; but it was absurd to hold a prejudice against a game just because Gordon Macleod had once played it. He came to know the joy of a perfect contact between club and ball, the shame of a shank, and to appreciate the strategic intricacies of tee to green. Nevertheless, as he took aim down a fairway, his head properly filled with the coach’s advice about taking the club back, use of the hips and legs, and the importance of the follow-through, he did occasionally hear, as if in a whisper, the sweet, laughing opinion of Susan Macleod that it was plain unsporting to hit a stationary ball.

Gordon Macleod: whom he had once wanted to kill, even if Joan had told him there hadn’t been a local murder since the Villagers wore woad. An exemplar of the kind of Englishman he most loathed. Patronising, patriarchal, manneredly precise. Not to mention violent and controlling. He remembered how it had seemed to him that Macleod was somehow preventing him from growing up: not by doing anything, simply by existing. ‘And how many Fancy Boys are you providing yourself with this weekend?’ Bravely, Susan had responded, ‘I think it’s just Ian and Eric this weekend. Unless the others turn up as well.’ Gordon Macleod’s words had been like fire; he’d laughed at them, as Susan had done, but they had scorched his skin.

And then there was that other occasion when words were spoken which had echoed down his life. That furious, squat man in his dressing gown, his eyes invisible in the gloom, bullying down on him as he gripped the banister in panic.

‘Whatski? Whatski, my fine and feathered friend?’

At the time, he had blushed, feeling his skin burn. But beyond this, he thought the fellow must simply be mad. That’s to say, mad enough to have somehow listened in to his and Susan’s private conversations. Unless he’d hidden a tape recorder beneath his wife’s bed. And the thought of that had made him blush all over again.

It had taken him years to realize that this had not been crazy malevolence, but something quite unintended, which nevertheless held a powerful and destructive resonance. Gordon Macleod, roused from his bed by the sound of his wife’s lover, had merely, in that moment, and probably with no ulterior motive, fallen back on the private language he had shared with Susan. Shared? More than that – created. And which Susan had then brought into her relationship with him. Unthinkingly. You say ‘darling’, you say ‘my love’, you say ‘kiss me hardly’, you say ‘whatski?’, you say ‘my fine and feathered friend’, because those are the words which come to you at that moment. With no ulterior motive on her part either. And now he wondered if any of her turns of phrase, which had so beguiled him, had been her own. Perhaps only ‘We’re a played-out generation’, because it seemed unlikely that Gordon Macleod, in all his self-importance, believed that he and men of his age were played out.

He remembered a public service advertisement from the time when the government, grudgingly, had acknowledged the existence of AIDS. There were two versions of the ad, he seemed to remember: a photo of a woman in bed with about half a dozen men, and one of a man in bed with about half a dozen women, all side by side like sardines. The text pointed out that every time you went to bed with someone new, you also went to bed with everyone he or she had previously gone to bed with. The government had been talking about sexually transmitted disease. But it was the same with words: they too could be sexually transmitted.

And actions as well, for that matter. Except that – strangely, fortunately – actions had never caused a problem. He had never found himself thinking, Oh, when you did that with your hand or arm or leg or tongue, you must also have done it with x and y and z. Such thoughts and images had never bothered him, and he was grateful, because he could easily imagine how ghostly antecedents in your head could drive you mad. But ever since Gordon Macleod’s sneer had first made sense to him, he had become conscious – at times, absurdly so – of what must have been going on, verbally, since the day Adam or Eve or whoever it might have been first took another lover.

Once, he had mentioned this discovery to a girlfriend: lightly, almost frivolously, as if it were natural and inevitable and therefore interesting. A day or two later, in bed, she had teasingly called him ‘my fine and feathered friend’.

‘No!’ he had shouted, instantly retreating to his side of the mattress, ‘You’re not allowed to call me that!’

She had been shocked by his vehemence. And he had shocked himself. But he was protecting a phrase which had always been uniquely between Susan and himself. Except that, earlier, it had been a phrase uniquely between the newly married Mr Gordon Macleod and his hopeful, puzzled wife.

So, for a while – say, twenty years or more – he had found himself morbidly sensitive to lovers’ language. This was ridiculous, of course. He saw rationally that there was only a limited vocabulary available, and it shouldn’t matter when the same words were recycled, when nightly, across the globe, billions asserted the uniqueness of their love with secondhand phrases. Except that sometimes it did. Which meant that here, as elsewhere, pre-history ruled.

He imagined the Village tennis courts replaced by a spread of the finest modern boxes, or perhaps a more lucrative clump of low-rise flats. He wondered if anyone, anywhere, had ever looked at a housing development and thought: Why don’t we knock them all down and build a nice tennis club, one with the latest all-weather courts? Or maybe – yes, why don’t we go further and lay some proper old-fashioned grass courts, for tennis as it once used to be? But no one would ever do, or even think, that, would they? Things, once gone, can’t be put back; he knew that now. A punch, once delivered, can’t be withdrawn. Words, once spoken, can’t be unsaid. We may go on as if nothing has been lost, nothing done, nothing said; we may claim to forget it all; but our innermost core doesn’t forget, because we have been changed for ever.

Here was a paradox. When he had been with Susan, they had scarcely discussed their love, analysed it, sought to understand its shape, its colour, its weight and its boundaries. It was simply there, an inevitable fact, an unshakeable given. But it was also the case that neither of them had the words, the experience, the mental equipment to discuss it. Later, in his thirties and forties, he had gradually acquired emotional lucidity. But in these later relationships of his, he had felt less deeply, and there was less to discuss, so his potential articulacy was rarely required.

He had read, some years before, that a common psychological trope in men’s attitude to women was the ‘rescue fantasy’. Perhaps it stirred in them memories of fairy tales in which valiant knights came across pretty maidens locked in towers by wicked guardians. Or those classical myths in which other maidens – usually naked – were chained to rocks for the sole purpose of being rescued by dauntless warriors. Who usually discovered a convenient sea serpent or dragon which had to be eliminated first. In modern, less mythical times, it appeared that the woman about whom men most had rescue fantasies was Marilyn Monroe. He had viewed this sociological datum with a degree of scepticism. Odd how rescuing her seemed inevitably to involve sleeping with her. Some rescue that would prove. Whereas in fact, as it seemed to him, the most effective way to rescue Marilyn Monroe would have been not to sleep with her.

He didn’t think that, as a nineteen-year-old, he had been suffering from a rescue fantasy with Susan. On the contrary, he suffered from a rescue reality. And unlike maidens in towers or chained to rocks, who attracted a whole swirl of knights looking for chivalric action, and unlike Marilyn Monroe, whom every Western man dreamed of liberating (if only to lock her up in a tower of his own making), in the case of Susan Macleod, there was not a great queue of knights, cinemagoers and Fancy Boys squabbling for the right to rescue her from her husband. He had believed he could save her; further, that only he could save her. That was no fantasy; it was practicality and brute necessity.

At this distance, he realized, he no longer had a memory of Susan’s body. Of course, he remembered her face, and her eyes and her mouth and her elegant ears, and what she looked like in her tennis dress; there were photographs to confirm all this. But a sexual memory of her body: that had gone. He couldn’t remember her breasts, their shape, their fall, their firmness or otherwise. He couldn’t remember her legs, what form they took, and how she parted them and what she did with them when they made love. He couldn’t remember her undressing. It was as if she’d undressed as women did on the beach, with lots of prim ingenuity beneath a capacious towel, but emerging in a nightdress rather than a swimming costume. Had they always made love with the lights out? He couldn’t remember. Perhaps he’d closed his eyes a lot.

She had a corset, that he remembered; well, doubtless several. Which had – whatever they were called – straps for holding up her stockings. Suspenders, that was it. How many per leg? Two, three? But he knew she only ever attached the front one. This private eccentricity came back to him now. As for what her bras had been like… At nineteen, he didn’t have the slightest underwear fetishism, any more than she took an erotic interest in his vests and pants. He couldn’t even remember what his pants had looked like at that age. He’d had a period of wearing string vests, which for some reason he had imagined to be cool.

She had no coquetry about her, that was certain. No flirty bits of flesh showing. How did they kiss? He couldn’t even remember that. Whereas, with later, lesser attachments, there were astonishing moments of sexual freeze-frame still in his head. Maybe, as you got better at sex, the sex became more memorable. Or maybe, the deeper your feelings, the less the particulars of sex mattered. No, neither of these were true. He was just trying to find a theory to explain an oddity.

He remembered when she had told him, just like that, how many times they had made love. A hundred and fifty-three, or some such number. Back then, it had thrown him into all sorts of pondering. Should he have been counting too? Was it a lapse in love that he wasn’t, or hadn’t? And so on. Now, he thought: a hundred and fifty-three, the number of times he had come up to that point. But what about her? How many orgasms had she had? Indeed, did she ever have one? There was pleasure and intimacy, surely; but orgasm? At the time he couldn’t tell, nor did he ask; nor know how to ask. To put it more truthfully, he had never thought of asking. And now it was too late.

He tried to imagine why she might have decided to count. To begin with, as a matter of pride and attentiveness, in bed with only the second lover of her life, and that after a long drought. But then he remembered the anguished whisper of her question, ‘You won’t leave me just yet, will you, Casey Paul?’ So maybe counting had turned from a matter of acclaim to one of anxiety and dismay: the fear that he might leave her, the fear that she might never have another lover. Was that it? He gave up. He stopped examining the past, chasing down what Joan had memorably called ‘my own distant experiences of cock and cunt’.

One evening, glass in hand, he was idly following the televised highlights of the Brazilian Grand Prix. He wasn’t much interested in the bland plutocracy of Formula One; but he did like to watch young men taking risks. In that respect, the race was gratifying. Heavy rain had made the track dangerous; pools of standing water sent even former world champions aquaplaning smack into the barriers; the race was stopped twice, and frequently brought under the control of the safety car. Everyone drove cautiously, except for nineteen-year-old Max Verstappen of the Red Bull team. He overtook his way from almost last place to third, making moves his elders and supposed betters declined to dare. The commentators, astonished by this display of skill and guts, sought explanation. And one of them provided it: ‘They say your risk profile doesn’t stabilise until you’re about twenty-five.’

This statement made him attend even more closely. Yes, he thought: a treacherous circuit, visibility reduced by spray to almost zero, others trepidatious while you felt invulnerable, going flat out thanks to a risk profile as yet unstabilised. Yes, he remembered that all too well. It was called being nineteen. And some would crash and some wouldn’t. Verstappen hadn’t. So far, anyway: though he had another six years to go before neurophysiology rendered him entirely sensible.

But if Verstappen was showing youthful fearlessness rather than true courage, did the same age disclaimer apply in reverse: to cowardice? He’d certainly been under twenty-five when he committed an act of cowardice which had haunted him all his life. He and Eric were staying at the Macleods’, and had gone off to a funfair in a hilly park. They were walking down from the top, side by side, chatting, and failed to notice a group of youths coming up towards them. As they drew level, one leaned into Eric with his shoulder, spinning him round; another tripped him, and a third went in with his boot. He took all this in with a kind of heightened peripheral vision – how long before Eric was on the ground? a second? two? – and had instantly, instinctively run away. He kept saying to himself, ‘Find a policeman, find a policeman,’ but even as he did so, he knew that wasn’t the reason he was running. He was afraid of getting beaten up himself. The rational part of him knew that policemen were a rare sight at funfairs. So he ran to the bottom of the hill on this futile, pretend quest, without actually asking anyone where he might find help. Then he walked back up, nauseous at what he might find. Eric was on his feet, blood on his face, feeling his ribs. He could no longer remember what had been said – whether he offered his fake excuse – and they drove back to the Macleod house. Susan bandaged Eric, with liberal use of Dettol, and insisted he stay until the bruising had gone down and the cuts mended. Which Eric had done. Neither then nor later had Eric rebuked him for cowardice, or asked why he’d disappeared.

You could get through a life, if you were careful, and lucky, without having your courage much tested – or rather, your cowardice revealed. That time Macleod had attacked him in the book room he’d certainly run for it, after throwing one ineffective punch in reply to Macleod’s three. And when he’d scuttled out of the back door, he hadn’t been trying to find a policeman, either. He had made the probably correct calculation that Macleod was drunk enough and angry enough to go on attempting to hit him until he succeeded. Despite being younger, and reasonably fit, he hadn’t fancied his chances at close quarters. It wasn’t like facing an under-12, under-6-stone schoolboy of equal timorousness.

And then again, more recently. ‘Recently’ in the sense of ‘fifteen or twenty years ago’. That was how the mind, and time, worked nowadays. He’d been back in England for only a few years. He’d visited Susan a couple of times, bringing no visible pleasure or benefit to either of them. One evening, the phone rang. It was Martha Macleod, now – for a long time – Mrs Something-or-Other.

‘My mother has been temporarily sectioned,’ was her opening line.

‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘She’s in…’ and cited the mental health department of a local hospital. He knew its reputation. A doctor friend, with professional dryness, had once told him, ‘You have to be really mad to get in there.’

‘Yes.’

‘It’s a terrible place. It’s like Bedlam. Lots of people screaming. Either that or they’re zombified with tranquillizers.’

‘Yes.’ He didn’t ask which category Susan was in.

‘Would you go and see her? And see the place?’

He thought: this is the first time in a quarter of a century that Martha has asked anything of me. Disapproval at first; quiet superiority thereafter; though she had always been polite to him. She must be at the end of her tether, he thought. Well, he had been there in his time too; and knew how elastic the end of a tether could be. So he considered her request.

‘Maybe.’ He was going up to town in a couple of days, as it happened. But he wasn’t going to tell her that.

‘I think it would do her good to see you. In the place she’s in.’

‘Yes.’

He’d left it like that. After he put the phone down, he thought: I looked after her for years. I tried my best. I failed. I handed her over to you. So it’s your turn now.

But he didn’t believe his own bitter logic. It was like saying, ‘Find a policeman, find a policeman.’ The truth was, he couldn’t face it: he couldn’t face seeing her, the remnant of her, whether screaming or zombified, among the screaming and zombified. He tried to think of his decision as an act of necessary self-protection; also, protection of the picture he had of her in his head. But he knew the truth. He was scared of going there.

As he grew older, his life turned into an agreeable routine, with enough human contact to sustain and divert, but not disturb, him. He knew the contentment of feeling less. His emotional life was recast as a social life. He was on nodding and smiling terms with many, as he stood in his leather apron and tweed cap in front of a colour photograph of happy goats. He prized stoicism and calm, which he had achieved less through some exercise of philosophy, more from a slow growth within him; a growth like coral, which in most weathers was strong enough to keep out the ocean breakers. Except when it wasn’t.

So his life consisted mainly of observation and memory. It was not a bad mix. He viewed with distaste those men in their sixties and seventies who carried on behaving as if they were in their thirties: a whirl of younger women, exotic travel and dangerous sports. Fat tycoons on yachts with hairy arms round thin models. Not to mention respectable husbands who, in a turmoil of existential anguish and Viagra, left their wives of several decades. There was a German expression for this fear, one of those concertina words the language specialized in, which translated as ‘the panic at the shutting of the doors’. He himself felt untroubled by that shutting; though he saw no reason to hurry it up.

He knew what they said of him locally: Oh, he likes to keep himself to himself. The phrase was descriptive, not judgemental. It was a principle of life the English still respected. And it wasn’t just about privacy, about an Englishman’s home – even a pebbledash semi – being his castle. It was about something more: about the self, and where you kept it, and who, if anyone, was allowed to fully see it.

He knew that no one can truly hold their life in balance, not even when in calm contemplation of it. He knew there was always a pull, sometimes amounting to an oscillation, between complacency on one side and regret on the other. He tried to favour regret, as being the less damaging.

But he certainly never regretted his love for Susan. What he did regret was that he had been too young, too ignorant, too absolutist, too confident of what he imagined love’s nature and workings to be. Would it have been better – in the sense of less catastrophic – for him, for her, for them both, if they had indeed had some ‘French’ relationship? The older woman teaching the younger man the arts of love, and then, concealing an elegant tear, passing him out into the world – the world of younger, more marriageable women? Perhaps. But neither he nor Susan had been sophisticated enough for that. He had never known sophistication of the emotional life: anyway, to him it sounded like a contradiction in terms. So he didn’t regret that either.

He remembered his own early attempts to define love, back in the Village, alone in his bed. Love, he had ventured, was like the vast and sudden uncreasing of a lifelong frown. Hmm: love as the end of a migraine. No, worse: love as Botox. His other comparison: love feeling as if the lungs of the soul had suddenly been inflated with pure oxygen. Love as barely legal drug use? Did he have any idea what he’d been talking about? Some years later, as it happened, he’d been with a group of friends when an excited junior doctor joined them, having just ‘liberated’ a cyclinder of nitrous oxide from the hospital where he worked. They were each given a balloon, which they inflated from the cylinder then held tightly by the neck. Emptying their lungs as much as they could, they put the balloon to their lips, and released into themselves the roar and lift of a sudden, rushing, eye-blinking high. But no, it hadn’t reminded him at all of love.

Still, were the professionals any better? He took his little notebook from the desk drawer. He hadn’t written anything new in it for a long time. At one point, frustrated by how few good definitions of love he could find, he started copying down at the back all the bad definitions. Love is this, love is that, love means this, love means that. Even quite well-known formulations said little more than, in effect: it’s a soft toy, it’s a puppy dog, it’s a whoopee cushion. Love means never having to say you’re sorry (on the contrary, it frequently means doing just precisely that). Then there were all those love lines from all those love songs, with the swooning delusions of lyricist, singer, band. Even the bittersweet ones and the cynical ones – always true to you, darling, in my fashion – struck him as the mere counterfactuals of sentimentality. Yes, it was this bad for us, buddy, but it needn’t be this bad for you: such was the song’s implicit promise. So you can listen with sympathetic complacency.

Here was an entry – a serious one – which he hadn’t crossed out in years. He couldn’t remember where it came from. He never recorded the writer or the source: he didn’t want to be bullied by reputation; truth should stand by itself, clear and unsupported. This one went: ‘In my opinion, every love, happy or unhappy, is a real disaster once you give yourself over to it entirely.’ Yes, that deserved to stay. He liked the proper inclusivity of ‘happy or unhappy’. But the key was: ‘Once you give yourself over to it entirely.’ Despite appearances, this wasn’t pessimistic, nor was it bittersweet. This was a truth about love spoken by someone in the full vortex of it, and which seemed to enclose all of life’s sadness. He remembered again the friend who, long ago, had told him that the secret of marriage was ‘to dip in and out of it’. Yes, he could see that this might keep you safe. But safety had nothing to do with love.

The sadness of life. That was another conundrum he would occasionally ponder. Which was the correct – or the more correct – formulation: ‘Life is beautiful but sad’, or ‘Life is sad but beautiful’? One or the other was obviously true; but he could never decide which.

Yes, love had been a complete disaster for him. And for Susan. And for Joan. And – back before his time – it might well have been so for Macleod as well.

He skimmed through a few crossed-out entries, then slid the notebook back in the drawer. Perhaps he had always been wasting his time. Perhaps love could never be captured in a definition; it could only ever be captured in a story.

Then there was the case of Eric. Of all his friends, Eric had truly been a man of good intentions, and therefore had always ascribed good intentions to others. Hence the lack of rebuke after he’d received a kicking at the fair. In his early thirties, working in a local planning department, and with a decent little house in Perivale, Eric had become involved with a younger American woman. Ashley said she loved him; a love which expressed itself as wanting to be with him all the time and never wanting to meet his friends. And Ashley wouldn’t sleep with him, no, not now anyway, but certainly later. Ashley had her faith, you see, and Eric, having been religious himself in his youth, could understand and appreciate that. Ashley wasn’t a member of an established church, because look at all the harm established churches had caused; Eric could see that too. Ashley said that if he loved her, and agreed with her contempt for worldly possessions, then he would surely join her in such beliefs. And so Eric, temporarily cut off from his friends, put his little house up for sale, planning to give the proceeds to some cockamamie sect in Baltimore, after which the couple would move there and be married by some cockamamie religious theorist, or shaman, or sham, whereupon Eric, in exchange for his Perivale house, would be granted squatter’s rights in perpetuity in his new wife’s body. Fortunately, almost at the last minute, some survival instinct asserted itself, and he had cancelled his instructions to the estate agent, whereupon Ashley vanished from his life for ever.

It had been a real disaster for Eric. He had lost his belief in the good intentions of others, and with it the ability fully to give himself over to love. If only he’d been inoculated with Susan’s suspicion of missionaries. But that hadn’t been part of Eric’s pre-history.

It was odd how the long-dead Gordon Macleod still nagged at him. More than Susan did, in truth. She was now resolved in his mind, and would remain so, even if she would also continue to cause him pain. Whereas Macleod was unresolved. So he would find himself imagining what it was like in Macleod’s head during those last, mute years, goggling at the wife who had left him, at the housekeeper and nurse whose presence irritated him, at his old pal Maurice who said, ‘Down the hatch, chum,’ then poured whisky straight from the bottle until it soaked his pyjamas.

So, there was Macleod lying on his back, day after day, knowing that this was not going to end well. Macleod was thinking back over his life. Macleod was remembering when he had first set eyes on Susan, at some dance or tea party, peopled with girls who on the whole wanted to have fun, and men who on the whole were not in respectably reserved occupations. And she was dancing with these spivs and black-marketeers – that’s what his envy turned them all into. Even the honest ones were just fancy boys and fancy men. But she went for none of them. Instead she chose that twerp with the goofy grin who could really dance – about the only thing he could do – yet whose flat feet or heart flutter had kept him out of uniform. What was his bloody name? Gerald. Gerald. And then the two of them had danced while he, Gordon, looked on. Then the twerp had died of leukaemia – they’d have done better to send him up in a bomber and let him do a hand’s turn before he pegged it, in Gordon’s view.

Susan was of course upset – inconsolable, they said – but he, Gordon, had stepped in and declared that he was the sort of chap she could rely on, both during the war and after. She had struck him as not exactly flighty, but a bit – what? irresponsible? No, that wasn’t quite right. She eluded him, and she laughed at some of the things he said – and not just the jokes, either – and such improbable, indeed impertinent reactions had made him fall smack in love with her. He told her that it didn’t matter how she felt now, because he was confident that she would come to love him in time, and she had replied, ‘I’ll do my very best.’ Then they’d just thrown themselves into it, as many did during the war. At the altar, he had turned to her and asked, ‘Where’ve you been all my life?’ But it hadn’t worked. The being together hadn’t worked, the sex hadn’t worked, except for successful impregnation; but otherwise, it led to no intimacy. So, their love was a disaster. But that of course was no reason not to stay married, back in those days. Because one could still be fond, couldn’t one? And there were the girls. He had long craved a son, but Susan hadn’t wanted any more after Martha and Clara. So that was the end of that part of their life. Separate beds to begin with; then, as she complained about his snoring, separate rooms. But one continued to be fond; if increasingly exasperated.

So he ventriloquised Gordon Macleod, in a way he could never have done while he still hated him. Was he getting anywhere nearer the truth?

He remembered another angry man: the furious driver with red, hairy ears, hooting and shouting at him on the Village’s zebra crossing. And in reply he had sneered, ‘You’ll be dead before I am.’ At the time he believed that the function of the old was to envy the young. So, now that his turn had come, did he envy the young? He didn’t think so. Did he disapprove of them, was he shocked by them? Sometimes, but that was only fair: what they deserved, what he deserved. He had shocked his mother with the cover of Private Eye. Now he was himself shocked when some YouTube thread took him to a woman singing of love gone wrong: her title, and refrain, was ‘Bloody Mother-Fucking Asshole’. He had shocked his parents with his sexual behaviour. Now he was shocked when sex was so often portrayed as mindless, heartless, thoughtless shagging. But why the surprise? Each generation assumes that it has got sex just about right; each patronises the previous generation but feels queasy about the succeeding one. This was normal.

As for the wider question of age, and mortality; no, he didn’t think he felt a panic at the shutting of the doors. But maybe he hadn’t yet heard their hinges creak loudly enough.

Occasionally, people would ask him, either slyly or sympathetically, why he had never married; others assumed or implied that he must have been, back there, back then. He would deploy an English reticence and an array of demurrals, so the enquiries rarely came to anything. Susan had predicted that one day he would have an act of his own, and she had been proved right. His act, which had developed without his really noticing, was that of someone who had never – not really, not truly – ever been in love.

There was nothing between a very long answer and a very short one: this was the problem. The long answer – in an abbreviated form – would involve, of course, his own pre-history. His parents, their characters and interaction; his view of other marriages; the damage he’d seen families do; his escape from his own into the Macleod household, and the brief illusion that he’d fallen into some magical world; then a second disillusionment. Once bitten, twice shy; twice bitten, for ever shy. So he had come to believe that such a way of life was not for him; and had never subsequently found anyone to change his mind. Although it was true that he had proposed to Susan in the cafeteria of the Royal Festival Hall, and later to Kimberly in Nashville. This would require a parenthesis or two of explication.

The long answer was too time-consuming to give. The short answer was too painful. It went like this. It was a question of what heartbreak is, and how exactly the heart breaks, and what is left of it afterwards.

When he remembered his parents, he often visualised them in some old television play from the black-and-white days. Sitting in high-backed armchairs on either side of an open fire. His father with a pipe in one hand, flattening a newspaper with the other; his mother with a dangerous inch of ash at the end of her cigarette, but always finding the ashtray a few seconds before it would drop on to her knitting. Then his memory would cut to her in that pink dressing gown, picking him up late at night, and flicking her lit cigarette disdainfully out on to the Macleods’ driveway. And then the suppressed resentment on both sides, as they made their silent way home.

He imagined his parents discussing their only child. Did they wonder ‘where they had gone wrong’? Or merely ‘where he had gone wrong’? Or how ‘he’d been led astray’? He imagined his mother saying, ‘I could throttle that woman.’ He imagined his father being more philosophical and forgiving. ‘There was nothing wrong with The Lad, or how we brought him up. It’s just that his risk profile hadn’t stabilised yet. That’s what David Coulthard would say.’ Of course, his parents had died long before Max Verstappen’s exploits at the Brazilian Grand Prix; and his father took no interest in motor sport. But perhaps he might have found some parallel form of exoneration.

And he, in turn, now felt retrospective gratitude for the very safety and dullness he had been railing against when he first met Susan. His experience of life had left him with the belief that getting through the first sixteen years or so was fundamentally a question of damage limitation. And they had helped him do that. So there was a kind of posthumous reconciliation, even if one based on a certain rewriting of his parents; more understanding, and with it, belated grief.

Damage limitation. He found himself wondering if he had always misconstrued that indelible image which had pursued him down his life: of being at an upstairs window, holding on to Susan by the wrists. Perhaps what had happened was not that he had lost strength and let her fall. Perhaps the truth was that she had pulled him out with her weight. And he had fallen too. And been grievously damaged in the process.

I went to see her before she died. This was not long ago – at least, as time goes in a life. She didn’t know that anyone was there, let alone that it might be me. I sat in the chair provided. Playing through the scene beforehand, I had hoped that in some way she might recognize me, and that she would look peaceful. These hopes were as much for me as for her; I realized that.

Faces don’t change much, not even in extremity. But she didn’t look peaceful, even though she was asleep, or unconscious, whichever. Her forehead was pulled into a frown, and her bottom jaw pushed out a little. I knew these ways her face worked; I’d seen them many times, when she was in obstinate denial of something, denying it to herself even more than to me. She was breathing through her nose, occasionally giving a small snore. Her mouth was clamped tight. I found myself wondering if she still had the same dental plate all these decades on.

A nurse had brushed her hair, which fell straight down on both sides of her face. Almost instinctively, I reached out a hand, planning to uncover for the last time one of her elegant ears. But my hand stopped, seemingly of its own volition. I withdrew it, not knowing if my motive was concern for her privacy, or fastidiousness; fear of sentimentality, or fear of sudden pain. Probably the last.

‘Susan,’ I said quietly.

She didn’t react, except to continue with her frown, and the obstinate jut of her jaw. Well, that was fair enough. I hadn’t come with, or for, any message, let alone for any forgiveness. From love’s absolutism to love’s absolution? No: I don’t believe in the cosy narratives of life some find necessary, just as I choke on comforting words like redemption and closure. Death is the only closure I believe in; and the wound will stay open until that final shutting of the doors. As for redemption, it’s far too neat, a moviemaker’s bromide; and beyond that, it feels like something grand, which human beings are too imperfect to deserve, much less bestow upon themselves.

I wondered if I should kiss her goodbye. Another moviemaker’s bromide. And, no doubt, in that film, she would stir slightly in response, her frown lines uncrease, and her jaw relax. And then I would indeed lift back her hair, and whisper into her delicately helixed ear a final ‘Goodbye, Susan.’ At which she would stir slightly, and offer the trace of a smile. Then, with the tears unwiped from my cheeks, I would rise slowly and leave her.

None of this happened. I looked at her profile, and thought back to some moments from my own private cinema. Susan in her green-piped tennis dress, feeding her racket into its press; Susan smiling on an empty beach; Susan crashing the gears of the Austin and laughing. But after a few minutes of this, my mind began to wander. I couldn’t keep it on love and loss, on fun and grief. I found myself wondering how much petrol was left in the car, and how soon I would have to find a garage; then about how sales of cheese rolled in ash were suffering a dip; and then about what was on television that evening. I didn’t feel guilty about any of this; indeed, I think I am now probably done with guilt. But the rest of my life, such as it was, and subsequently would be, was calling me back. So I stood up and looked at Susan one last time; no tear came to my eye. On my way out I stopped at reception and asked where the nearest petrol station might be. The man was very helpful.