Lessons

by Ian McEwan

How easy it was to drift through an unchosen life, in a succession of reactions to events. He had never made an important decision.

‘Don’t put that one on me, Dad. The truth. I have friends who’ve told me all about their shit childhoods with horrible parents. Then I meet them and they’re sweet as anything. I don’t then go thinking my friends are self-deluding liars.

But there was that essence everyone forgets when a love recedes into the past – how it was, how it felt and tasted to be together through seconds, minutes and days, before everything that was taken for granted was discarded then overwritten by the tale of how it all ended, and then by the shaming inadequacies of memory.

There was one emollient nostrum he liked: things will never be as good as we hoped or as bad as we feared.