The Sense of an Ending by Julian Barnes Read Free Book Online Page B

and meant it. Later, looking back, I wondered if something in me wasn’t shocked by this very easiness, and didn’t require more complication as proof of … what? Depth, seriousness? Although, God knows you can have complication and difficulty without any compensating depth or seriousness. Much later, I also found myself debating whether ‘Easy come, easy go’ wasn’t a way of asking a question, and looking for a particular answer I wasn’t able to supply. Still, that’s all by the by. Annie was part of my story, but not of this story.
    My parents thought of getting in touch when it happened, but had no idea where I was. In a true emergency – presence required at a mother’s deathbed – I imagine the Foreign Office would have contacted the Embassy in Washington, who would have informed the American authorities, who would have asked police forces across the country to look out for a cheerful, sunburnt Englishman who was a little more self-assured than he had been on his arrival in the country. Nowadays all it takes is a text message.
    When I got home, my mother gave me a stiff-armed, face-powdered hug, sent me off for a bath, and cooked me what was still referred to as my ‘favourite dinner’, and which I accepted as such, not having updated her for a while on my taste buds. Afterwards, she handed me the very few letters that had arrived in my absence.
    ‘You’d better open those two first.’
    The top one contained a brief note from Alex. ‘Dear Tony,’ it read, ‘Adrian died. He killed himself. I rang your mother, who says she doesn’t know where you are. Alex.’
    ‘Shit,’ I said, swearing for the first time in front of my parents.
    ‘Sorry about that, lad.’ My father’s comment didn’t seem exactly up to the mark. I looked at him and found myself wondering if baldness was inherited – would be inherited.
    After one of those communal pauses which every family does differently, my mother asked, ‘Do you think it was because he was too clever?’
    ‘I haven’t got the statistics linking intelligence to suicide,’ I replied.
    ‘Yes, Tony, but you know what I mean.’
    ‘No, actually, I don’t at all.’
    ‘Well, put it like this: you’re a clever boy, but not so clever as you’d do anything like that.’
    I gazed at her without thinking. Wrongly encouraged, she went on,
    ‘But if you’re very clever, I think there’s something that can unhinge you if you’re not careful.’
    To avoid engaging with this line of theory, I opened Alex’s second letter. He said that Adrian had done it very efficiently, and left a full account of his reasons. ‘Let’s meet and talk. Bar at the Charing X Hotel? Phone me. Alex.’
    I unpacked, readjusted, reported on my travels, familiarised myself again with the routines and smells, the small pleasures and large dullnesses of home. But my mind kept returning to all those fervently innocent discussions we’d gone in for when Robson hanged himself in the attic, back before our lives began. It had seemed to us philosophically self-evident that suicide was every free person’s right: a logical act when faced with terminal illness or senility; a heroic one when faced with torture or the avoidable deaths of others; a glamorous one in the fury of disappointed love (see: Great Literature). None of these categories had applied in the case of Robson’s squalidly mediocre action.
    Nor did any of them apply to Adrian. In the letter he left for the coroner he had explained his reasoning: that life is a gift bestowed without anyone asking for it; that the thinking person has a philosophical duty to examine both the nature of life and the conditions it comes with; and that if this person decides to renounce the gift no one asks for, it is a moral and human duty to act on the consequences of that decision. There was practically a QED at the end. Adrian had asked the coroner to make his argument public, and the official had obliged.
    Eventually, I asked, ‘How did he