The Sense of an Ending Read Free

Robson had been cut down in the flower of youth, that his demise was a loss to the whole school, and that we would all be symbolically present at the funeral. Everything, in fact, except what we wanted to know: how, and why, and if it turned out to be murder, by whom.
    ‘Eros and Thanatos,’ Adrian commented before the day’s first lesson. ‘Thanatos wins again.’
    ‘Robson wasn’t exactly Eros-and-Thanatos material,’ Alex told him. Colin and I nodded agreement. We knew because he’d been in our class for a couple of years: a steady, unimaginative boy, gravely uninterested in the arts, who had trundled along without offending anyone. Now he had offended us by making a name for himself with an early death. The flower of youth, indeed: the Robson we had known was vegetable matter.
    There was no mention of disease, a bicycling accident or a gas explosion, and a few days later rumour (aka Brown of the Maths Sixth) supplied what the authorities couldn’t, or wouldn’t. Robson had got his girlfriend pregnant, hanged himself in the attic, and not been found for two days.
    ‘I’d never have thought he knew how to hang himself.’
    ‘He was in the Science Sixth.’
    ‘But you need a special sort of slip knot.’
    ‘That’s only in films. And proper executions. You can do it with an ordinary knot. Just takes longer to suffocate you.’
    ‘What do we think his girlfriend’s like?’
    We considered the options known to us: prim virgin (now ex-virgin), tarty shopgirl, experienced older woman, VD-riddled whore. We discussed this until Adrian redirected our interests.
    ‘Camus said that suicide was the only true philosophical question.’
    ‘Apart from ethics and politics and aesthetics and the nature of reality and all the other stuff.’ There was an edge to Alex’s riposte.
    ‘The only
true
one. The fundamental one on which all others depend.’
    After a long analysis of Robson’s suicide, we concluded that it could only be considered philosophical in an arithmetical sense of the term: he, being about to cause an increase of one in the human population, had decided it was his ethical duty to keep the planet’s numbers constant. But in all other respects we judged that Robson had let us – and serious thinking – down. His action had been unphilosophical, self-indulgent and inartistic: in other words, wrong. As for his suicide note, which according to rumour (Brown again) read ‘Sorry, Mum’, we felt that it had missed a powerful educative opportunity.
    Perhaps we wouldn’t have been so hard on Robson if it hadn’t been for one central, unshiftable fact: Robson was our age, he was in our terms unexceptional, and yet he had not only conspired to find a girlfriend but also, incontestably, to have had sex with her. Fucking bastard! Why him and not us? Why had none of us even had the experience of
failing
to get a girlfriend? At least the humiliation of that would have added to our general wisdom, given us something to negatively boast about (‘Actually, “pustular berk with the charisma of a plimsole” were her exact words’). We knew from our reading of great literature that Love involved Suffering, and would happily have got in some practice at Suffering if there was an implicit, perhaps even logical, promise that Love might be on its way.
    This was another of our fears: that Life wouldn’t turn out to be like Literature. Look at our parents – were they the stuff of Literature? At best, they might aspire to the condition of onlookers and bystanders, part of a social backdrop against which real, true, important things could happen. Like what? The things Literature was all about: love, sex, morality, friendship, happiness, suffering, betrayal, adultery, good and evil, heroes and villains, guilt and innocence, ambition, power, justice, revolution, war, fathers and sons, mothers and daughters, the individual against society, success and failure, murder, suicide, death, God. And barn owls. Of course, there