Levels of Life by Julian Barnes Page B

just as friends, but also as corroborators. The chief witness to what has been your life is now silenced, and retrospective doubt is inevitable. So you need them to tell you, however glancingly, however unintendingly, that what you once were – the two of you – was seen. Not just known from within but seen from without: witnessed, corroborated, and remembered with an accuracy of which you are yourself currently incapable.
     
    Though I remember, sharply, last things. The last book she read. The last play (and film, and concert, and opera, and art exhibition) that we went to together. The last wine she drank, the last clothes she bought. The last weekend away. The last bed we slept in that wasn’t ours. The last this, the last that. The last piece of my writing that made her laugh. The last words she wrote herself; the last time she signed her name. The last piece of music I played her when she came home. Her last complete sentence. Her last spoken word.
     
    In 1960, an American friend of ours, then a young writer in London, found herself, after lunch at the Travellers’ Club, sharing a taxi home with Ivy Compton-Burnett. At first Compton-Burnett talked to our friend, in a normal conversational tone, about the club, their host, the food, and so on. Then, with a marginal shift of the head, but absolutely no shift of tone, she started talking to Margaret Jourdain, her companion of thirty years. The fact that Jourdain, far from being in the cab with them, had been dead since 1951 made no difference. That was who she wanted to talk to, and did so for the rest of the journey back to South Kensington.
    This strikes me as quite normal. We are not surprised when children have imaginary friends. Why be surprised when adults have them too? Except that these friends are real as well.
    Bonnard used to paint his model/mistress/wife Marthe as a young woman naked in the bath. He painted her like this when she was no longer young. He continued to paint her like this after she was dead. An art critic, reviewing a Bonnard show in London some ten or fifteen years ago, called this ‘morbid’. Even at the time it struck me as the opposite, and entirely normal.
    Ivy Compton-Burnett missed Margaret Jourdain with ‘palpable, angry vehemence’. To one friend she wrote, ‘I wish you had met her, and so met more of me.’ After being made a Dame of the British Empire, she wrote: ‘The one I miss most, Margaret Jourdain, has now been dead sixteen years, and I still have to tell her things … I am not fully a Dame, as she does not know about it.’ This is true, and defines the lostness of the griefstruck. You constantly report things, so that the loved one ‘knows’. You may be aware that you are fooling yourself (though, if aware, are at the same time not fooling yourself), yet you continue. And everything you do, or might achieve thereafter, is thinner, weaker, matters less. There is no echo coming back; no texture, no resonance, no depth of field.
     
    As a former lexicographer, I am a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist. English always has been in a state of flux; there was no golden age when words and meanings matched, and the language stood firm and grand like mortarless walls: words are born, live, decay and die – it’s just the linguistic universe doing its stuff. However, as a writer, and as a normally prejudiced English-speaking citizen, I can growl and moan with the best of them: for example, when people think ‘decimate’ means ‘massacre’, or weaken the usefully separate meaning of ‘disinterested’. Nowadays, as with ‘to pass’ and ‘losing one’s wife to cancer’, I bridle at the misuse of the adjective ‘uxorious’. If we don’t look out, it will come to describe ‘a man who has many wives’, or even (that dubious phrase) ‘a lover of women’. It doesn’t mean this. It describes – and always will, whatever future dictionaries may permit – a man who loves his wife. A man like Odilon Redon,