Last Things

17: Nothing

IN the dark, a hand was pressing on mine. A voice. The dark was close, closer than consciousness. What was that hand?

A voice. ‘Darling.’

The sound came from far away, then suddenly, like a face in a dream, dived on me. How much did I understand?

‘All’s well.’ It might have been a long time after. Perhaps the words were being repeated. Until – consciousness lapping in like a tide, coming in, sucking back, leaving a patch still aware – I spoke as though recognising Margaret’s voice.

‘Why are you here?’

‘I just dropped in.’

‘Is it evening?’

‘No, no. It isn’t teatime yet.’

That was her voice. That was all I knew.

Was there a memory, something else to hold on to?

‘Didn’t you say you’d come in the evening?’

‘Never mind. I thought I’d like to see you earlier.’ Utterly soothed, like a jealous man getting total reassurance or a drunk hearing a grievance argued away. That was her hand, pressing down on mine. I began to say that I was thirsty. Other voices. Coolness of glass against my lips. A sip. No taste.

‘You were going to give me lime juice.’ I held on to another memory.

‘I’m sorry,’ that must be a nurse, ‘it isn’t here.’

‘Why isn’t it here?’

Unsoothed again, a tongue of consciousness lapping further in. Darkness. Suspicion.

I was aware – not gradually, it happened in an instant – of pain, or heavy discomfort, in my left side, as though they had put a plaster there.

‘What’s happening?’ I said to Margaret. I could hear my voice like someone else’s, thick, alarmed, angry.

Voices in the room. Too many voices in the room. My right ankle was hurting, with my other foot I could feel a bandage on it. Margaret was saying ‘Everything’s all right,’ but other voices were sounding all round, and I cried out: ‘This isn’t my room.’

‘The operation’s over.’ That was Mansel, cool and light. ‘It’s gone perfectly well.’

‘Where am I?’

Mansel again. ‘We’re just going to take you back.’

Once more I was soothed: it seemed reasonable, like the logic of a dream. I didn’t notice motion – ramps, lifts, corridors didn’t exist; I must have returned to somewhere near the conscious threshold. It might have been one of those drunken nights when one steps out of a party and finds oneself, without surprise, in one’s own bed miles away.

I had been in a big room: I was back in one where the voices were close to me, which soothed me because, with what senses I had left, it was familiar: I didn’t ask, I knew I had slept there the night before.

I was awake enough, tranquil enough, to recognise that I was parched with thirst. I asked for a drink, finding it necessary to explain to Margaret (was she still on my right?) that I was intolerably dry. The feel of liquid on a furred clumsy tongue. Then the taste came through. This was lime juice. Delectable. As though I were tasting for the first time. All in order: lime juice present according to plan: reassurance: back where I ought to be.

Someone was lifting my left arm, cloth tightening against the muscle.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, reassurance destroyed at a touch, suspicion flaring up.

‘Only a little test.’ A nurse’s voice.

‘What are you testing for?’

Whispers near me. Was one of them Margaret’s?

Mansel: ‘I want to know your blood pressure. Standard form.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Routine.’

In the darkness, one suspicion soothed, faded out, left a nothingness, another suspicion filled it. Did they expect me to have a stroke? What were they doing? Ignorant suspicions, mind not coping, more like a qualm of the body, the helpless body.

‘Everything is all right,’ Margaret was saying quietly.

‘Everything is not all right.’

A patch of silence. They were leaving me alone. Neither Margaret nor Mansel was talking. For an instant, feeling safer, I asked for another drink.

Time was playing tricks, my attention had its lulls, it might have been minutes before a hand was pulling my jacket aside, something cold, glass, metal against the skin.

‘What are you doing now?’ I broke out again.

‘Another test, that’s all.’ Mansel’s voice didn’t alter.

‘I’ve got to know. I’m not going on like this.’

Fingers were fixing apparatus on my chest.

‘What’s gone wrong?’ Again, that didn’t sound like my own voice. ‘I’ve got to know what’s wrong.’

Clicks and whirrs from some machine. My hearing had become preternaturally acute and I could hear Mansel and Margaret whispering together.

‘Shall I tell him?’ Mansel was asking.

‘You’d better. He’s noticed everything–’

There was movement by the side of my bed, and Mansel, instead of Margaret, was speaking clearly into my ear.

‘There’s nothing to worry about now. But your heart stopped.’ The words were spaced out, distinct. They didn’t carry much meaning. I said dully ‘Oh.’

I gathered, whether Mansel told me then or not I was never sure, that it had happened in the middle of the operation.

I asked: ‘How long for?’

‘Between three and a half and three and three-quarter minutes.’ I thought later, not then, that when Mansel told one the truth, he told the truth.

‘We got it going again,’ Mansel’s voice was cheerful. ‘There’s a bit of a cut under your ribs. You’re fine now.’

He was at pains to assure me that the eye operation had been completed. It was time, he said, for him to let my wife talk to me.

Replacing Mansel’s voice was Margaret’s, steady and warm.

‘Now you know.’

I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ I added: ‘I bring you back no news from the other world.’

Margaret went on talking, making plans for a fortnight ahead (‘You’ll be out of here by then, you understand, don’t you?’), saying there would be plenty of time to argue about theology. She sounded calm, ready to laugh: she was concealing from me that she was in a state of shock.

Just as my remark might have concealed my state from her. In fact, it had been quite automatic. It could have seemed – perhaps it did to Margaret – as carefully debonair, as much prepared for, as her father’s greeting to me after his messed-up attempt at suicide. You see God’s own fool. I might have been imitating him. Yet I hadn’t enough control for that. Anything I said slipped out at random, as though Margaret had put sixpence in a juke box and we both had to listen with surprise to what came out.

Later, when I thought about it in something like detachment, it occurred to me how histrionic we all could be. Perhaps we had to be far enough gone. Then, though it might be right outside our ordinary style, we put on an act. For Austin Davidson, who had always enjoyed his own refined brand of histrionics, it came natural to rehearse, to bring off his opening speech. I was about as much unlike Davidson as a man could reasonably be: but I too, though as involuntarily as a ventriloquist’s dummy, had put on an act. Probably we should all have been capable of making gallows jokes, in the strictest sense: we should all, if we were about to be executed in public, have managed to make a show of it. It might have been different if one was being killed in a cellar, with no audience there to watch.

It might have been different. It was different for me, when I had to get through that night. Margaret left me: so did Mansel, and another doctor, one with a strong deep voice. Not that I was left alone: there were nurses in the room, busy and quiet, as I lay there in the hallucinatory darkness, in full surrender to the state which perhaps I had concealed from Margaret. It was one of the simplest of states, just terror.

I had learnt enough about anxiety all through my life. Worse, I had been frightened plenty of times – in London during the war, on air journeys, visits to doctors, or during my illness as a young man. But up to that night I hadn’t known what it was like to be terrified. There was no alleviation, no complexity, nor, what had helped in bad times before, an observer just behind my mind, injecting into unhappiness and fear a kind of taunting irony, mixed up with hope. No, nothing of that. This was a pure state and apart from it I had, all through that night, no existence. All through that night? That wasn’t how I lived it. The night went from moment to moment. There mightn’t be another.

Soon after Mansel’s good night, fingers were cool against my arm again, a susurration, a whisper, the rustle of paper.

‘All right?’ I muttered, trying to ask a casual question, craving for some news.

‘You go to sleep,’ said a nurse’s voice, calm and muted.

Within minutes – I was drugged but not asleep, I couldn’t count the time – fingers on my arm, the same sounds in the dark.

‘What is it?’ I cried.

‘Try to sleep.’

I dozed. But there was something of me left – the will or deeper – which was frightened to give way. Sleep would be a blessing. But sleep was also oblivion. Fingers on my arm once more. Once more I tried to ask. To them I made no sense. To myself I wanted to talk rationally, as though I were interested, not terrified. I couldn’t. Time after time, between sleep and consciousness, the fingers at my arm.

It became like one of those interrogations in which the prisoner is not allowed to rest. I couldn’t understand that they were taking my blood pressure three times an hour.

Once, between the tests, I was aware of my left eye. Staring into the darkness, which wasn’t the darkness of a black night, but, as I recalled from the operation two years before, was reddened, patterned, embossed, I saw a miniature light, like a weak bulb, very near to me, as though it were burning in the eye itself. I was aware of that without giving it a thought: I might have been a man desperately busy, preoccupied with a major and obsessive task, not able or willing to divert himself with something as trivial as the condition of his eye.

It was abject to have no interest – or even, so it seemed, no time, as though every second of the night was precious – for anything but fright. I made an effort to address myself rationally, as I had tried to speak to the nurses. Perhaps I was trying to put on an act to myself as I did to others. Under trial, we all wished to behave differently from how we felt, there was a complementarity which made us less ashamed. Waiting for the nurse’s fingers, I wanted to reason away the terror, exorcising it by words, thinking to myself as I rarely did, in words, using words to stiffen (or blandish or deceive) myself as one might use them on another.

What was I frightened of?

Death? Death is nothing. Literally nothing. I ought to know that by now.

Dying? Nothing was easier than dying. Not always maybe. But if it happened as it had that morning, nothing was easier. If I went out now, it would be as easy.

What was I frightened of?

Not that night, but afterwards, when I was remembering dread, not existing in it, I might have given an answer. At least I knew what didn’t matter, what hadn’t drifted for an instant through my mind. Listening by the side of Austin Davidson’s bed, I had heard him say that what chilled him was to realise that he would never hear the end of any story that had interested him: nor even be present as a spectator, or the most tenuous shadow of a ghost. Yes, he was being honest. But one could feel that at any time in one’s life, thinking about death. Davidson knew he would die soon, but still he wasn’t in the presence of annihilation. If he had been, he would have been lonelier, less lofty, than that. I could answer only for myself: yet there I would have answered for him too. One had no interest left, except in the absolute loneliness. Questions that had once been fascinating – they had no meaning. Politics, the world, what would men think about one’s work: that was a blank. Friends, wife, son, all the future: that was as dead a blank.

Sometimes, in health, as I couldn’t help recalling after a visit to Austin Davidson, I had imagined what dying would be like. You die alone. I thought that I had imagined it as real. Nonsense, I had fooled and flattered myself. It was so much less takable, near to, identical with, the fright of the flesh itself. Had it been like this for my old father? He had asked for his lodger’s company: his lodger held his hand: he must have been quite alone.

What was I frightened of? When I was remembering it, not living it, I might have said, of nothing. Of being nothing. On the one side, there was what I called ‘I’. On the other, there was nothing. That was all. That was what it reduced to. In the abyss between the two was dread.

Yet maybe, when I was remembering, I, like Austin Davidson, made it more delicate than the truth.

Beside the bed, a voice I hadn’t heard before. Without noticing, I had been the other side of the sleep threshold. This was a different nurse, a different voice, they were coming in shifts. Whispered figures, but louder whispers, almost enough to catch. Out of the dark, I recalled the other figures, Mansel’s figures, the only ones that anyone had told me. Three and a half minutes, three and three-quarters. Trying to think. Another of the night’s cold sweats. The grue down the spine. I could have read or heard – or had my memory gone? – that three minutes was enough to damage the brain. The sweat formed at the temples, dripped down. I had to try. What did I remember? My telephone number. Births and deaths of Russian writers – Turgenev 1815–83. Dostoevsky 1821–81. Tolstoy 1828–1910. They came clicking to mind, just as they always did. Poetry. I began the first lines of Paradise Lost, then stuck. That was nothing new, I was calming myself. It was young Charles who had the photographic memory. Characters in Little Dorrit – Clennam, Mrs Finching, Merdle, Casby, Tite Barnacle – they came out quick enough. What about problems? The old proof of the prime-number theorem, that once made me wish I had gone on with mathematics. Yes, I could work through that. There didn’t seem (it was the only reassurance through the night) any damage yet awhile.

The small light in my left eye had gone out. I was in the red-dark. Sometimes, nearer sleep, the tapestries took themselves away and the darkness deepened. The previous time that I had been in that condition, I had thought that blindness would be like this, and I wasn’t sure that I could endure it. Now I wasn’t thinking of blindness. That was a speculation one made when one could afford to, like Davidson’s regret about what he was going to miss. Thoughts became simpler as they narrowed: there wasn’t room for luxury, even the luxury of being anxious. Only one dread was left, the final one.

Fingers at my arm, jolts into half-waking: like a night in the prison cell it went on. Once I asked the time. Someone told me, half past two.

18: ‘You’ve Got to Forget It’

A NURSE was giving me a sponge, waking me, asking if I would like to freshen myself. Mr Mansel was on his way, she said. Then his crisp, light-toned voice.

‘Good morning, sir. I hope you’ve had a good night.’

‘Not exactly, Christopher. Rather like being in a sleeper on the old Lehigh Valley–’

During the night I had had reveries about blaming him, about letting all the fright and anger loose. Yet I found myself replying in his own aseptic fashion.

He said, professionally cheerful: ‘Sorry about that. We thought you might sleep through it.’

‘If they’d have let me alone for one single damned hour, perhaps I could–’

‘That was just a precaution.’ Mansel told me what they had been doing. ‘We wanted to see that everything was working. Which it is.’

‘I suppose that’s some consolation.’ Nevertheless, while he was talking I felt safe.

‘I think it should be, sir. Now let’s have a look at the eye.’ The clever fingers took off the pads, and I blinked into the bright, solid, consoling room. Outside the window, the sky was black, before dawn on a winter morning. If I could stay in the light, perhaps the night would be behind me.

Mansel’s face, smelling of shaving-soap, was only inches away. His eye, magnified by the lens, was searching into mine. After a minute or so, he said: ‘It’s early days yet, of course. I don’t want to raise false hopes, but it may have gone better than last time.’

‘That’s a somewhat minor bonus in the circumstances, don’t you think?’

‘Not at all,’ Mansel answered. ‘We’ve had a bit of unexpected trouble, of course we have. That’s all the more reason why we want to get the eye right at the end of it.’

Quickly, carefully, he put me back into the dark. I wished to say that his professional concern was not shared by me. I had meant to tell him – I had composed the speeches at one stage of the night – that, if I could get out of this hospital alive, it didn’t matter a curse what happened to the eye. We never ought to have risked the operation. A tiny gain if all went well. If all didn’t go well – that I could tell them about as I lay there that night, side strapped up under my heart, nurses keeping watch. I had been against this operation from the first, and he had overruled me. Anger got mixed up with fright, was better than fright, I had meant to project the anger on to Mansel. Yet I did nothing of the sort. The principal of complementarity seemed to work whenever I had an audience, and I behaved like a decent patient. Though once again in the dark, respite over, the night’s thoughts came flooding back.

Mansel’s voice was amiably exhorting me to have a cup of tea and some breakfast. I said, making the most of a minuscule complaint, that it was nearly impossible to eat lying rigid. Mansel was attentive: I was blinded, but perhaps my face still told him something. ‘We may be able to make things easier for you soon,’ he said. Meanwhile people would be coming in shortly to perform another test. In a couple of hours Mansel himself would return, together with a colleague.

What did that mean? I was as suspicious as in the afternoon before. If only they would tell me all the facts – that was what all sophisticated people cried out in their medical crises. Later, I wondered how much one could really take. How much should I have been encouraged if they had let me know each blood-pressure reading all through the night?

Once again apparatus was being fixed to my chest, the chill of glass, the whirr of a machine. Then, for some time, I could hear no one in the room. Out of a kind of bravado, I called out.

‘Yes, sir,’ came a chirping, quiet voice, a nurse’s that I hadn’t heard before. ‘Do you want anything?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,’ I had to say.

I couldn’t talk to her: I remained with suspiciousness keeping me just one side of the edge of sleep. It took Mansel’s greeting to startle me full awake.

‘Here we are again, sir!’

I could distinguish other footsteps besides his.

‘I want to introduce a friend of mine–’ Mansel again – ‘Dr Bradbury. Actually he was here last night, but you were slightly too full of dope to talk to him. He’s a heart specialist, as a matter of fact. That’s because it’s easier than coping with eyes, isn’t it, Maxim?’

As soon as I heard Maxim reply, I recognised the voice. It had been present among the commotion – all mixed up by the shock disentanglable now – of the night before. It was very deep (they were exchanging gibes about which line brought in the easy money), as deep as my brother’s or Charles’, but without the bite that lurked at the back of theirs. This was just deep and warm.

A hand gripped mine, and a chair scraped on the floor beside the bed.

‘The news is good.’ Slow, gentle, warm, emphatic. ‘The first thing is, I want you to believe me. The news is good.’

I felt excessively grateful, so grateful that my reply was gruff.

‘Well, what is it?’

‘Your heart is as sound today as it was yesterday morning. We’ve looked at it as thoroughly as we know how, and we shouldn’t be able to detect that anything had happened. I couldn’t tell you this unless I was sure.’

Mansel (quietly): ‘I can guarantee that.’

‘I need hardly say’, I remarked, ‘that I hope you’re right.’

‘We are right, you know.’ Deep, gentle voice. ‘I expect you want to ask, then why did it happen? The honest answer is, we haven’t the slightest idea. It was simply a freak.’

‘A freak which might have been mildly conclusive,’ I said.

‘Yes, it might. I have to tell you again, we haven’t the slightest idea why it happened. All we know is that it did. After you’d been on the operating table for an hour and a half. I’m not sure whether Christopher has told you–’

Mansel: ‘No, not much.’

‘Well, I think you ought to know. Christopher tried to start the heart again by external massage. That didn’t work. Then he decided – and he was perfectly right – that he hadn’t much time to spare, so he did it from inside. Fortunately, although he’s an eye-man, he’s quite a competent surgeon.’

Undergraduate teasing, in the midst of all the energy he was spending upon me.

‘I’ve got a certain amount of faith in him,’ I caught the same tone.

Mansel cachinnated.

‘So you should have.’ This was Maxim. ‘Now I want you to listen to something else. This has been an unusual experience, and that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it? It’s an experience which could do harm to a good many people. You have to be pretty robust to take it in your stride. Robust psychologically – we can look after you physically, you’re absolutely all right there. I should guess you’re a tough specimen all the way round, and Christopher gives you an excellent report. But this is going to call for as much toughness as you can find. You’ve got to put it behind you. Straightaway. Today.’

It was a long time since anyone had spoken to me as paternally as this. I hadn’t yet seen his face, and, as it happened, I never did see it. He might very well be young enough, as Mansel was, to be my son. Yet I felt, not only gratitude so strong as to be uncomfortable, but also acquiescence, or even something like obedience.

‘You’ve got to forget it.’ The voice was even warmer, even more urgent. ‘That’s what I’m really telling you. The only danger is that you’ll let it stay with you. You’ve got to forget it.’

Curiously enough, that was what another strong-natured patient man had told us, at the end of the murder trial eighteen months before. But, after we had listened, my brother had said that that meant living in illusion: it might have been more comfortable, but it would have been wrong. You’ve got to forget it. This time, if I could obey, it presumably would do no harm to anyone, it wouldn’t mean false hope, it wouldn’t be wrong. And yet, as I thanked Maxim, I added that I wasn’t much good at forgetting things.

‘Well, you’ve got to train yourself. This was just an incident. Don’t let it make life dark for you. I’m going to tell you again, you’ve got to forget it.’

I heard him get up from the bedside, and then he and Mansel, at the far end of the room, engaged themselves in a professional argument mixed with backchat. I couldn’t follow much, the two voices, phone and antiphone, light and clear against deep bass, were kept low. But they each seemed to have a taste for facetiousness which wasn’t mine. Somehow I gathered that Maxim was not Bradbury’s baptismal name but had been invented by Mansel, who took great credit for it. As for the argument, that was about me.

‘Nothing secret,’ Bradbury called out, considerate and kind. ‘We’re just wondering when to get you up.’

Though I didn’t appreciate it, they were meeting a dilemma. What was good for the heart was a counter-indication for the eye, and vice versa. For the heart, they would like me sitting up that day: to give the eye the best chance, the longer I lay immobilised, the better.

‘Well, I’ll see how it looks tomorrow,’ I heard Mansel tell him, and Bradbury came nearer the bed to say goodbye.

‘I probably shan’t have to see you again,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased with you. Do remember what I’ve told you.’

The door clicked shut behind them. With that voice still comforting me, I needn’t fight against sleep any more. In a moment, seconds rather than minutes, as though I were going under the anaesthetic again, I was flat out.

When I woke, I first had the sense of well-being that came after deep sleep. Then suddenly, eyes pressed by the darkness, I remembered what had happened. That wasn’t the first time I had wakened happy and then been sickened by the thought of what lay ahead; there had been a good many such times since I was young: but this was the darkest.

My side hurt a little, so little that I should scarcely have noticed. That brought it all back. It had happened once. It could happen again. I was as frightened as I had been in the night. Perhaps more than that.

I tried to steady myself by recalling Bradbury’s words. This was cowardly; it was unrealistic; he said that all was well. If he had been back in the room, I should have been reassured. Totally reassured, effusively grateful once more. But now he had left me, I could see through all the lies: either I had been deceiving myself he hadn’t said those words, or else I could see through his reasons for saying them. They knew that it would happen again. Perhaps that day or the next. He thought I might as well have the rest of my time in peace.

19: Private Language

MARGARET was speaking to me and holding my hand. It couldn’t have been many minutes since I awoke, but I had lost all sense of time. In fact, she had arrived about eleven o’clock; Mansel and Bradbury had made their call quite early, not long after eight.

I muttered her name. She kissed me and asked: ‘How is it now?’

‘It’s too much for me.’

Her fingers stiffened in mine, gripped hard. After the other operation, or even after Mansel broke the news the previous evening, she had heard me make some sort of pretence at sarcasm; she had come in expecting it now. She had come in, waiting to break down and confide what she had gone through: the telephone call as she sat in the flat at midday: just – would she come round to the hospital at once. The taxi ride through the miles of streets. Kept waiting at the hospital. No explanation. A long five minutes – so she told me later. (She remembered as little of them afterwards as if she had been drunk.) At last Mansel at the door, looking pallid. Then he said it was all right. Sharp clinical words to hearten her. After that, the operating theatre, where she sat waiting for me to come round.

Now she had come, needing release from all that: to be met by a tone which brought back all her misery, and, instead of giving her comfort, took it away. She had known me harsh and selfish enough in petty sufferings: but that was different from this flatness, this solitude.

At once she was talking protectively, with love. ‘Of course it’s not. Nothing ever is–’

‘I shan’t get over this.’

I wasn’t trying to hurt her, I was alone, I might as well have been talking to myself.

‘You will, you’ve had a bad time, but of course you will. Look, my love, I’ve been talking to them–’

‘I don’t trust them.’

‘You’ve got to. Anyway, you do trust me–’

Silence.

She said urgently: ‘You do trust me?’

At last I answered: ‘No one knows what it’s like.’

‘Don’t you think I do?’

Getting no reply, she broke out, and then subdued herself.

‘Let’s try to be sensible, won’t you? I have talked to those two. I’m telling you the absolute truth, you believe that?’

‘Yes, I believe that.’

‘They’re completely certain that there’s nothing wrong. You’re perfectly healthy. There won’t be any after-effects. I made sure that they weren’t hiding anything. I had to know for my own sake, you understand, don’t you? They’re completely certain.’

‘That must be pleasant for them.’

‘You ought to give them credit, they’re very good doctors.’

‘I’m not much moved by that.’

‘You’re not willing to be moved by anything, are you?’

‘I haven’t time to be.’

She drew in her breath, but didn’t speak. Then, after we had each been quiet, my temper seethed out – with the anger that I had fantasized about discharging on Mansel, but which I couldn’t show to him or anyone else, except to her. For it was only to her – who knew all about the pride, the vanity, the ironies, even the discipline with which I covered up what I didn’t choose for others to see – that I could speak from the pitiful, the abject depth.

‘Why do you expect me to listen to them?’ I shouted. ‘Do you really think they’ve been so clever? They even admit that they haven’t any idea why they nearly put me out yesterday. Why should anyone believe what they say about tomorrow? They won’t have any more idea when I’ve had it for good. You expect me to believe them. Remember it was they who let me in for this.’

‘It’s no use blaming them–’

‘Why isn’t it? It was an absurd risk to take. Just for a minor bit of sight which is about as good as yours when you’re seeing through a fog. Just for that, they’re ready to take the chance of finishing me off.’

‘No, dear.’ After the harsh cries I had made, her voice was low. ‘That isn’t right. Christopher Mansel wasn’t taking a chance. It would all have gone normally – except for once in ten thousand times.’

‘That’s what they’ve told you, is it? How have they got the impertinence to say it? I tell you, they don’t know anything. It was an absurd risk to take. We never ought to have allowed it. I blame myself. You might think back. I didn’t like it at the time. Mansel persuaded me. We ought to have stopped it.’

‘That wouldn’t have been reasonable.’

‘Do you think that what they’ve achieved is specially reasonable? We ought to have stopped it.’

I went on: ‘You ought to have helped me to stop it.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she cried.

‘It’s the fact.’

‘No, it’s not fair. Are you blaming me?’

‘I’m blaming myself more.’

Reproaching me for other times when I had thrown guilt onto her, she was angry as well as wounded. For a time it became a quarrel: until she said, tone not steady: ‘Look here, I didn’t come for this. Whatever are we doing?’

‘Exchanging views.’

She laughed, with what sounded like relief. I had spoken in something near the manner she was used to, when I was ironing an argument away. It came as a surprise to her – and so much so to me that it passed me by. To me, it seemed that we had moved into the doldrums of a quarrel (like Azik and Rosalind that afternoon in Eaton Square), when we had temporarily ceased lashing out, but were waiting for the animus to blow up again. But Margaret, listening to me raging, accepted the anger and the cruelty; sometimes she had seen that in me before; she had not seen me as frightened as this morning, but that too she accepted. And so, she was ready to notice the first change of inner weather, long before I recognised it myself. She was sure that I was, at least for the time being, through the worst. Casually she chatted, mentioning one or two letters that had arrived at home, pouring herself a drink: in fact, she was watchful, prepared to talk me to sleep or alternatively to take the initiative.

She did take the initiative, in a language that no one on earth but she and I could understand: ‘I’ve got a lunch date on Saturday,’ she said. ‘I expect I shall forget it.’

If I didn’t or couldn’t respond, she would drop it. This was an exploration, a tentative.

‘You’d better not,’ I said.

‘It hasn’t been imprinted on my memory.’

At that, I laughed out loud. She knew she was home. For this was a secret code, one of our versions of the exchange about the cattleya, more complicated than that but just as cherished. It went back to a time in the middle of the war, before we were married. On Saturday afternoons I used to go to her bed-sitting-room: there was a particular Saturday afternoon about which we had made a myth. The coal fire. The looking-glass. Lying in bed afterwards, watching the sky darken and firelight on the ceiling. The curious thing was, that apparently historical Saturday afternoon didn’t really exist. There were plenty of others. Once or twice, in the wartime rush, she had forgotten the place for lunch and I had had to follow her to her room. Many times we had enjoyed ourselves there. Yes, there had been a coal fire and a looking-glass. Nevertheless, we each remembered the detail of different Saturdays, and somehow had fused them into one. One that became a symbol for all the pleasure we had had together, and a signal to each other. Often the mood was formalised. ‘What did I tell you about the fire?’ To that there was a ritual reply, also part of the myth. In the hospital that morning, she made the ritual speeches, and I followed suit. Soon she was crying:

‘You’re much better.’ That also was part of the drill, but for that special moment it was true.

Resurrection, she was saying, not touching wood at all. Until the middle of the afternoon, she remained by my bedside. When she left me it was I who began to touch wood. She had gone, the reassurance had gone, it seemed strange, almost unnatural, that the vacuum hadn’t filled. Should I soon be terrified again? I threw my thoughts back, not to Margaret, but to last night, as though I wanted to learn whether it would return. No, my moods were unstable, I hadn’t any confidence in them, but I wasn’t frightened. Perversely, I wanted to ask why I wasn’t. Anything I felt or told myself now, I thought, would be part of a mood that wouldn’t last.

Still, the evening – occasionally I enquired about the time – lagged on between sleep and waking. They were taking my blood pressure every three hours, but one nurse told me that would finish next day. During the night I slept heavily, and woke only once, when they took another reading.

I didn’t know where I was, until I understood the darkness in front of my eyes. Then the night before returned, but rather as though I was reading words off a screen, without either fright or relief: with a curious indifference, as though I hadn’t energy to waste.

20: Obituary

SPONGE in my hands, warm water on my face, Mansel’s voice, the flurry of early morning.

‘They tell me you’ve slept, sir.’

‘Better, anyway,’ I said, as though it were bad luck to admit it. Eye uncovered, the lights of the room, three dimensions of the commode, standing out like a piece of hardware by Chardin. Mansel’s face close to mine. In a short time, he said: ‘Good. Qualified optimism still permitted.’

After he had blindfolded me once more, his voice sounded as in a prepared speech.

‘Now we have to make a decision, sir.’

My nerves sharpened. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. It’s a choice of two courses, that’s all. You heard me and Maxim discuss it yesterday, didn’t you?’

‘I heard something.’

‘You’re getting on well, you know. The point is, if we’re going to get you generally fit as soon as may be, you probably ought to sit up most of today. Now that may, just possibly, disturb the eye. I’m beginning to think, I may as well tell you, that we’re very likely too finicky about keeping eye patients still. I suspect in a few years it will seem very old-fashioned. But I have to say that some of my colleagues wouldn’t agree. So, if we let you up, one has to warn you, there is – so far as the retina goes – a finite risk.’

I was beginning to speak, but Mansel stopped me.

‘I’m not going to let you make the choice. Though I fancy I know which it would be. No, I don’t think there is any reasonable doubt. Your general health is much more important than a margin of risk to the retina. Which I don’t want you to get depressed about. With a little good fortune, we ought to keep that in order too.’

He could see my face.

‘And it will be distinctly good for your morale, won’t it?’

Mansel gave an amiable, clinical chuckle. ‘Though it’s stood up pretty well, I give you that.’ He didn’t know it all, but he knew something. I was thinking, perhaps not even Margaret knew it all.

After he had given instructions that the nurses were to get me up during the morning, he was saying goodbye. Then he had another thought.

‘I wanted to ask you. Which is the hardest to put up with? Having to lie still. Or having to live in the dark.’

‘You needn’t have asked,’ I said. ‘Having to live in the dark is about a hundred times worse.’

‘I thought so. I have had patients who got frantic at being fixed in one position. But you manage to put up with that, don’t you? Good morning, sir.’

When Charles March arrived, I was already sitting up in an armchair. They had told me that he had visited the hospital twice in the last twenty-four hours, being not only an old friend but also my doctor. Each time he came, I had been asleep. Now I apologised, saying that I hadn’t been entirely responsible for my actions. Charles replied that he had dimly realised that that was the case.

I suspected that he was gazing straight into my face. How much did it tell him? There weren’t many more observant men. He said, in a matter-of-fact doctor-like fashion, that he was glad they had got me up. Mansel, in the middle of his professional circuit, had found time to telephone Charles twice about my condition, and had also written him a longish letter.

‘If either of us were as efficient as that young man,’ I said, ‘we might have got somewhere.’

It was not long after, and we were still chatting, not yet intimately, that I heard Margaret’s footsteps on the floor outside. As she came in, she exclaimed in surprise, and approaching my chair, asked how I was, said in the same breath that they must be satisfied with me to let me out of bed. Then went on: ‘How is he, Charles?’

‘I think he looks pretty good, don’t you agree?’

For some time neither of them enquired, even by implication, about my state of mind: in fact, I soon believed that they were shying off it. Margaret had seen enough the day before; and Charles, who had once known me as well as any of my friends, was being cautious. We talked about our children and relatives; it was casually, in the midst of the conversation, that she remarked: ‘What are you going to do with yourself all day, sitting there?’

‘Exactly what I should do lying there.’ Blindly I moved a hand in what I thought to be the direction of the bed. ‘It’s even a slight improvement, you know.’

‘Of course it is.’ Margaret sounded quick, affirmative, like one correcting a piece of her own tactlessness.

Then I said: ‘No. There’s going to be a difference.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not going to sit here all day doing nothing. I’d like you to get some people in. If I can’t see them, I might as well hear them.’

‘So you shall.’ But Margaret, busy with practical arrangements, saying that she would pass the word round by tomorrow, promising that she would send in some bottles of Scotch, was nevertheless puzzled as well as pleased. So was Charles: for they both knew that this was quite unlike me, that in illness – as in my first operation – I wanted to hide like a sick animal, seeing no one except my family, and them only out of duty. I couldn’t have enlightened them. It was one of the occasions when one seemed to be performing like a sleep-walker. If I had been forced to give an explanation, I should probably have said – very lamely – that I realised, as on the day before, that this mood, or any other mood, wouldn’t last, but that I wished to commit myself to it. Perhaps I could fight off regressions, the return to that night, the sense of – nothing, once I had announced that I intended to have people round me.

Later Charles told me that that was very near his own interpretation. He thought that I was trying to hold on to something concrete, so as to ward off the depressive swing. With Margaret it was different. Of the three of us, she alone thought that I was stabler than I myself believed, and that she could see – unperceived, or even denied, by me – not only a new resolve, but underneath it a singular, sharp but indefinable change.

If she had been beside me in a waking spell that night, she mightn’t have been astonished at what I felt. First I spoke out loud, to see if there were a nurse in the room. Then I realised that the blood-pressure watch had been called off, they were leaving me alone. That didn’t frighten me or even remind me. On the contrary, I was immediately taken over by a benign and strangely innocent happiness. I didn’t for an instant understand it. It was different in kind from any happiness that I had known, utterly different from the serenity, the half-complacent satisfaction, in which I had gone about after refusing the government job. Perhaps the nearest approach would be nights when I had wakened and recalled a piece of work that had gone well. But that wasn’t very near – this didn’t have an element of memory or self-concern. It was as innocent as nights when I woke up as a child and enjoyed the sound of a lashing storm outside. It was so benign that I did not want to go to sleep again.

After Mansel had examined me next morning, he was ruminating on what he called ‘morale’. Mine was still keeping up, he thought, with his usual inspectorial honesty. A doctor never really knew how a patient would react to extreme situations.

‘You’re very modest, Christopher,’ I said.

‘No, sir. Just open-minded, I hope.’

Both of us ought to be interested in my morale, he said. I spent some time at it, I remarked, but Mansel was not amused. Tomorrow, he said, there might be another minor decision for us to take.

Taking me at my word, Margaret had telephoned the previous afternoon to say that I could expect some visitors. The first, in the middle of the morning, was Francis Getliffe. His tread sounded heavy, as it used to sound up my staircase in college, for so spare a man. I greeted him by name before he reached me, and he responded as though I had performed a conjuring trick.

‘One’s ears get rather sharp,’ I said.

‘You’re putting up with it better than I could.’

‘Nonsense. Little you know.’

‘Yes, you are. You can cope with it, can’t you?’ His tone was affectionate but hesitant. Perhaps, I thought (for I hadn’t seen him with anyone incapacitated before), he was one of those inhibited when they had to speak to the blind or deaf. I said that it was tiresome not being able to see him.

‘I bet it must be.’ But that was an absent-minded reply; he was thinking of something else. As he talked, still hesitantly, I realised that Margaret must have told him the whole case history. Not that he referred to it straight out: he was skirting round it, trying not to touch a nerve, wanting to take care of me. He felt safer when he was on neutral ground, such as politics. The world was looking blacker. We agreed, in all the time we had known each other, there had been only three periods of hope – outside our own private lives, that is. The twenties: curiously enough, wartime: and then the five or six years just past. But that last had been a false hope, we admitted it now.

‘If anyone’, said Francis, ‘can show me one single encouraging sign anywhere in the world this year, I’d be very grateful.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Things had gone worse than expectations, even realistic or minimum expectations. As Einstein in old age had said, there seemed a weird inevitability about it all. Very little that Francis and I had done together had been useful.

‘This country is steadier than most. But I can’t imagine what will have happened before we’re ten years older. I’m not sure that I want to.’

It was all sensible: yet was he just talking to play out time? I broke out: ‘Forty-eight hours ago, I should have been quite sure that I didn’t want to.’

He said something, embarrassed, kind, but I went on: ‘It would have seemed quite remarkably irrelevant. It rather restricts one’s interests, you know, when you’re told you might have been dead.’

‘Do you mind talking about it?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘I couldn’t if I were you.’

Strangely – as I had been realising while the earlier conversation went on, impersonal and strained – that was the fact. What I had said, which wouldn’t have troubled Charles March or my brother, risked making him more awkward still. It was a deliberate risk. Francis, who was a brave man, physically as well as morally, was less hardened than most of us. His courage was a courage of the nerves.

While he had been talking, so diffidently, I had recalled an incident of the fairly recent past. At that time it was not unusual, if one moved in the official world, to be asked to prepare an advance obituary notice of an acquaintance – all ready for The Times. I had done several. One day, it must have been three or four years before, someone announced himself on the telephone as a member of the paper’s staff. Agitation. He had found that by some oversight, on which he elaborated with distress, there was no obituary of Francis Getliffe. How could this be? ‘It would be terrible,’ said the anxious voice, ‘I shouldn’t like to be caught short about a man like Getliffe.’

While I was reflecting on that peculiar expression, I was being pressed to produce an obituary – in forty-eight hours? at latest by the end of the week? Francis was in robust health when last seen, I said, but the voice said, ‘We can’t take any risks.’ So I agreed and set to work. Most of it was easy, since I knew Francis’ career as well as my own, but I wasn’t familiar with his early childhood. His father had married twice, and I had heard almost nothing about his second wife, Francis’ mother. So I had to ring up Cambridge. Francis was out, but his wife Katherine answered the phone. When I told her the object of the exercise, she broke into a cheerful scream, and then, no more worried than I was myself, gave businesslike answers. She would pass the good news on to Francis, she said. She had listened to some of his colleagues fretting, in case their obituary should be written by an enemy.

I had met Francis in London shortly afterwards. Without a second thought, I told him the piece was written and presumably safe in the Times files. I asked him if he would like to read a copy. Without a second thought – taking it for granted that he would like what I had written, and also taking it for granted that he would behave like an old-style rationalist. For in that respect Francis often behaved like a doctrinaire unbeliever of an earlier century than ours; like, for example, old Winslow, who refused to set foot in college chapel except for magisterial elections, and then only after making written protests. Francis likewise did not go into chapel even for memorial services; his children had not been baptised and, when he was introduced into the Lords, instead of taking the oath he affirmed. Whereas men like my brother Martin, who believed as little as Francis, would go through the forms without fuss, saying, as Martin did, that if he had been a Roman he would have put a pinch of salt on the altar and not felt that he was straining his conscience.

So innocently I asked Francis if he would care to read his obituary. ‘Certainly not,’ Francis had said, outraged. Or perhaps hag-ridden, like a Russian seeing one trying to shake his hand across the threshold, or my mother turning up the ace of spades.

When, as Francis was taking care to avoid any subject which might disquiet me, I recalled that incident, it occurred to me that someone must have written my own obituary. I expected to feel a chill, but none came. It was curious to be waiting for that kind of dread, and then be untouched.

After I had been brusque, cutting out the delicateness, Francis became easier. He said: ‘This mustn’t happen again, you know.’

‘It’s bound to happen again once, isn’t it?’

‘Not like that. I was horrified when Margaret told me. I must say, she was very good.’

She had had the worst of it, Francis was saying. Almost as though I had done it on purpose, it crossed my mind. No, that was quite unfair. Francis, whom acquaintances thought buttoned up and bleak, was speaking with emotion. He had been horrified. I was too careless. Did I give a thought to how much I should be missed?

Though I was to most appearances more spontaneous than Francis I shouldn’t, if our positions were reversed, have told him so simply how much I’d miss him.

I nearly gave another grim answer such as even that seemed a somewhat secondary consideration, but it would have been denying affection. Of the people we had grown up with, we had scarcely, except ourselves, any intimates left. Some had died: others the chances of life had driven away, just as Francis had been parted from his brother-in-law Charles March.

And I, who felt the old affinity with Charles March each time we met, nevertheless had ceased to be close to him, simply because there was no routine of living to bring us together. While Francis and I, during much of our lives, had seen each other every day at meetings. It sounded mechanical, but as you grew older that kind of habit and alliance was a part of intimacy without which it peacefully declined.

Francis’ tone altered, he began to sound at his most practical. He proposed to talk to some of his medical friends in the Royal. This never ought to have happened, he said. It was no use passing it off as a fluke or an accident. There must be a cause. What sort of anaesthetic had they used? This all had to be cleared up in case I was forced some day into another operation. There had to be a bit of decent scientific thinking, he said, with impatience as well as clarity – just as he used to speak, cutting through cotton wool, at committee tables during the war.

That could be coped with. And also, he went on, half-sternly, half-persuasively, it was time I took myself in hand. I had worked hard all my life: it was time I made more of my leisure. ‘I’m damned well going to enjoy my sixties, and so ought you,’ he said. He was leading up to a project that he had mentioned before. The house in Cambridge, full of children, happy-go-lucky, called by young Charles and his friends the Getliffe steading, he couldn’t bear to leave, he would stay there in term-time always. But he and Katherine were hankering after another house, more likely to get some sun in winter, maybe somewhere like Provence. Why shouldn’t we find a place together? They would occupy it perhaps four months a year, and Margaret and I in spring and autumn?

We couldn’t travel far while Margaret’s father was alive, I replied, as I had done previously. No, but that couldn’t be forever. Francis was set on the plan, more set than when he first introduced it. It would be good for his married children and their families. It would be good for ours – Charles, Francis said, would be mysteriously asking to have the house to himself and leaving us to guess whom he was bringing there.

He was so active, so determined to get me into the sunshine, that I was almost persuaded. It might be pleasant as we all became old. But I held on enough not to make the final promise. I wasn’t as hospitable as Francis, nor anything like as fond of movement. Anyway, now the plan had crystallised, I didn’t doubt that he would carry it through, whether I joined in or not. It had started as a scheme largely for my sake: but also Francis, decisive and executive as ever, was carving out a pattern for his old age.

21: Silence of a Son

BEFORE evening, the room was smelling of flowers and whisky. The flowers were due, in the main, to Azik Schiff, who hadn’t come to visit me himself but whose response to physical ailments was to provide a lavish display of horticulture. More flowers than they’d ever seen sent, said the nurses, and my credit rose in consequence. Though I could have done without the hyacinths which, since my nose was sensitive to begin with and had been made more so by blindness, gave me a headache, the only malaise of the day.

As for the whisky, that had been drunk before lunch by Hector Rose and his wife and after tea by Margaret and a visitor who hadn’t been invited, my nephew Pat. When Margaret was sitting beside my chair and she was reading me the morning’s letters, there were footsteps, male footsteps, that I didn’t recognise. But I did recognise a stiffening in Margaret’s voice as she said good afternoon.

‘Hallo, Aunt Meg. Hallo, Uncle Lew. Good to see you up. That’s better, isn’t it, that really is better.’

It was a situation in which, given enough nerve, he was bound to win. Whatever he didn’t have, he had enough nerve. Though he might have been slandering Margaret and her children, she couldn’t raise a quarrel in a hospital bedroom. And he was reckoning that I was quite incapacitated. There he might have been wrong: but as usual in Pat’s presence, I didn’t want to say what a juster man might have said. Margaret stayed silent: and I was reduced to asking Pat how he had heard about me.

‘Well-known invalid, of course.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ve kept it very quiet. On purpose.’

‘Not quiet enough, Uncle Lew.’ Pat’s voice was ebullient and full of cheek.

Margaret had still said nothing, but I listened to the splash of liquid. Presumably he was helping himself to a drink. He said, irrepressible, that he couldn’t reveal his sources – and then gave an account, almost completely accurate, of what had happened since I entered the hospital. Massage of the heart. Margaret being sent for.

‘It must have been terrible for you, Aunt Meg.’

Margaret had to reply.

‘I shouldn’t like to go through it again,’ she said. The curious thing was, his sympathy was genuine.

‘Terrible,’ he said again. Then he couldn’t resist showing that he knew the name of the heart specialist, and even how he had telephoned Margaret on the first night.

That was something I hadn’t been told myself. As before with Pat, just as in the past with Gilbert Cooke, I felt uncomfortably hemmed in, as though I was being watched by a flashy but fairly successful private detective. Actually, I realised later that there was no mystery about Pat’s source of information. There was only one person whom it could have come from. My brother Martin had been asking Margaret for news several times a day. And Martin, who was as discreet as Hector Rose in his least forthcoming moments, who had, when working on the atomic bomb, never let slip a secret even to his wife, on this occasion, as on others, could, and must, have told everything to his son.

Pat might be said to have outstayed his welcome, if there had been any welcome. Talking cheerfully, the bounce and sparkle not diminishing, he stayed until Margaret herself had to leave. But there had been, aided by alcohol, some truce of amicability in the room. Margaret had taken another drink, and Pat several more. It was I who was left out: for to me, who wasn’t yet drinking, there might be amicability in the room, but there was also an increasing smell of whisky.

Later that night, when I had been put back to bed, the telephone rang on the bedside table. Gropingly, my hand got hold of the receiver. It was Margaret.

‘I don’t want to worry you, but I think you’d better know. It’s not serious, but it’s rather irritating.’

Normally, I should have demanded the news at once. But in the calm in which I was existing, as yet inexplicable to me but nevertheless very happy, I wasn’t in a hurry. I asked if it were anything to do with Charles, and Margaret said no. I said: ‘You needn’t mind about worrying me, you know.’

‘Well,’ came her voice, ‘there’s an item in one of the later editions. I think I’d better read it, hadn’t I?’

‘Go ahead.’

The item, Margaret told me, occurred in a new-style gossip column, copied from New York. It read something to the effect that I had been undergoing optical surgery, and that there had been complications which had caused ‘grave concern’.

When she rang up to break the news, Margaret assumed that this would enrage and worry me. She had seen me and others close to me secretive about their health. One of the first lessons you learned in any sort of professional life was that you should never be ill. It reduced your mana. When I was a young man, and just attracting some work at the Bar, I had been told that I was seriously ill. I had gone to extreme lengths to conceal it: if I had died, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – and if, as it turned out, I didn’t, well then I had been right.

Nowadays I was removed from the official life: but even to a writer it did harm – an impalpable superstitious discreditable harm – if people heard that your death was near. You were already on the way to being dispensed with. The way they talked about you – ‘did you know, poor old X seems to be finished’ – was dismissive rather than cruel, though there was a twist of gloating there, showing through their self-congratulation that they were still right in the middle of the mortal scene.

So Margaret anticipated that this bit of news would harass me – and, before I went into hospital, she would have been right. Now it didn’t. I said: ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’

‘We’d better do something, hadn’t we?’

I was reflecting. The lessons I had learned seemed very distant; but still they had been learned, and one might as well not throw them away.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose we’d better be prudent. I’ll make Christopher Mansel send out a bulletin.’

‘Shall I talk to him tonight?’

‘It can wait until he comes in tomorrow morning.’

When Margaret had rung off, I lay in bed, not thinking of Mansel’s bulletin, but contentedly preoccupied with a problem that gave me a certain pleasure. Whoever had leaked that news? It couldn’t be the doctors. It couldn’t be my family. Someone in the hospital? Just possibly. Someone whom Margaret had talked to, trying to enlist visitors for me? Possibly.

No, the answer was too easy. There was one person who stood out, beautifully probable. Motive, opportunity, the lot. I would have bet heavily on my nephew Pat. He had his contacts with the young journalists. Once or twice before, our doings had been speculated about knowledgeably in the gossip columns. Pat was not above receiving a pound or two as a linkman. There was not much which Pat was above.

The next morning, as Mansel said good morning, I told him about the rumour and said that I wanted him to correct it.

‘Right, sir. There are one or two things first, though.’

After he had examined the left eye, he said: ‘Promising.’ He paused, like a minister answering a supplementary question, wanting to give satisfaction, so long as it wasn’t the final commitment: ‘I think I can say we shall be unlucky if anything goes wrong this time.’

Quick fingers, and the eye was shut into darkness again.

‘That’ll do, I think.’ Mansel was gazing at me as though he had made an excellent joke.

‘What about the other eye?’ I said.

‘You can have that, if you like.’ He gave a short allocution. What I had said the day before was what he expected most patients to say. He had already decided to leave the good eye unblinded. It was more convenient to have me in hospital for a few more days: I should stand it better if I had an eye to see with. The advantages of blinding both eyes probably wasn’t worth the psychological wear and tear. ‘I’m pretty well convinced’, said Mansel, ‘that we’ve got to learn to do these operations and leave you one working eye right from the start.’

I said that I should like to stand him a drink, but in his profession, at 6.45 in the morning, that didn’t seem quite appropriate. I said also that, if he would leave me one eye, he could go through the entire eye operation again. Without any frills or additions, however.

Mansel was scrutinising me.

‘You could face it again, could you?’

‘If it’s not going to happen, one can face anything.’

He seemed to make another entry in his mental notebook – behaviour of patient, after being allowed vision.

‘Well, sir, what about this statement? That’s really your department, not mine, you know.’ It was true, he was not so brisk, masterful and masterly when he sat down and started to compose.

Ballpoint pen tapping his teeth, he stayed motionless, like Henry James in search of the exact, the perfect, the unique word. After a substantial interval, at least fifteen minutes, he said, with unhabitual diffidence, with a touch of pride: ‘How will this do?’

He read out the name of the hospital, and then–

Sir Lewis Eliot entered this hospital on 27 November, and next day an operation was performed for a retinal detachment in the left eye. As a result there are good prospects that the eye will be restored to useful vision. During the course of the operation, Sir Lewis underwent a cardiac arrest. This was treated in a routine manner. In all respects, Sir Lewis’ progress and condition are excellent.

‘Well, Christopher,’ I said, ‘no one could call you a sensational writer.’

‘I think that says all that’s necessary.’

‘Cardiac arrest, that’s what you call it, is it?’

I hadn’t heard the phrase before. Though, by a coincidence, when my eye first went wrong, two years earlier, I had been reminded of an older phrase, ‘arrest of life’. Perhaps that was too melodramatic for a black veil over half an eye. This time, it didn’t seem so.

‘After all,’ I remarked absently to Mansel, ‘one doesn’t have too many.’

‘Too many what?’

‘Arrests of life.’

‘Cardiac arrests is what we say. No, of course not, most people only have one.’ Unfussed, he went off to telephone the bulletin to the Press Association, while I got up, self-propelled again, and, being able to see, was also able to eat. It was a luxury to sit, free from the solipsistic darkness, and just gaze out of the window – though, even as the sky lightened, it was still a leaden morning, and bedroom lamps were being switched on, high up in the houses opposite.

Mansel had told the nurses not to let me move, except from bed to chair. But the telephone was fixed close by, and I rang Margaret up, telling her to bring reading-matter. That wasn’t specially urgent, it was good enough to enjoy looking at things. But this presumably soon ceased to be a treat. Thirty years ago, I was remembering, an eminent writer had given me some unsolicited advice. Just look at an orange, she said. Go on looking at it. For hours. Then put down what you see. In the hospital room there was, as it happened, an orange. I looked at it. I thought that I should soon have enough of – what had she called it? The physiognomic charm of phenomena.

It was a relief when the telephone rang. The porter in the entrance hall, announcing that Mr Eliot was down below. ‘We’ve been told to send up the names of visitors from now on, sir.’ Mr Eliot? It could be one of three. When I heard quick steps far down the corridor, my ear was still attuned. That was Charles.

He came across the room and, in silence, shook my hand. Then he sat down, still without speaking. It was unlike him, or both of us together, to be so silent. There was a constraint between us right from the beginning.

With my unobscured eye, I was gazing at him. He gazed back at me. He said: ‘I didn’t expect–’

‘What?’

‘That they’d let you see.’

‘New technique,’ I said, glad to have a topic to start us talking. I explained why Mansel had unblinded me.

‘It must be an improvement.’

‘Enormous.’

We were talking like strangers, impersonally impressed by a medical advance: no, more concentrated upon eye surgery, more eager not to deviate from it, than if we had been strangers.

Another pause, as though we had forgotten the trick of talking, at which people thought we were both so easy.

At last I said: ‘This has been a curious experience.’

‘I suppose so.’ Then quickly: ‘You’re looking pretty well.’

‘I think I’m probably very well. Never better in my life, I dare say. It seems an odd way of achieving it.’

Charles gave a tight smile, but he wasn’t responding to the kind of sarcasm, or grim facetiousness, with which he and I, and Martin also, liked to greet our various fatalities. Was I making claims on him that he couldn’t meet? The last time my eye had gone wrong, and it seemed that I was going to lose its sight, he had been fierce with concern. Then he had been two years younger. Now, in so many ways a man, he spoke, or didn’t speak, as though his concern was knotted up, inexpressible, or so tangled that he couldn’t let it out.

It was strange, it was more than strange, it was disappointing and painful, that he should be self-conscious as I had scarcely seen him. At this time of all times. I thought later that perhaps we knew too much: too much to be easy, that is, not enough to come out on the other side. He had plenty of insight, but he wasn’t trusting it, as the constraint got hold of us, nor was I mine.

A father’s death. What did one feel? What was one supposed to feel? Sheer loss, pious and organic, a part of oneself cut away – that would have been the proper answer in my childhood: but a lot of sons knew that it wasn’t so clean and comfortable as that. When I was growing up, the answer would have changed. Now it meant oneself at last established, final freedom, the Oedipal load removed: and a lot of sons still knew that it wasn’t so clean and unambiguous as that. As Charles was growing up, all the Oedipal inheritance had passed into the conventional wisdom, at least for those educated like him: and, like most conventional wisdom, it was half believed and half thrown away.

Probably Charles and his friends weren’t so impressed by it as by the introspective masters: Dostoevsky meant more to them than the psychoanalysis did. Not surprisingly to me, for at twenty, older than they were and having lived rougher, I also had been overwhelmed. I had met, as they had, the difficult questions. Who has not wished his father dead?

That hadn’t meant much to me since, from a very early age, I could scarcely be said to have a relation with my father. From fourteen or so onwards, I was the senior partner, so far as we had a partnership, and he regarded me with mild and bantering stupefaction. Perhaps I had suffered more than I knew because he was unavailing. His bankruptcy in my childhood left some sort of wound. It was also possible that as a child I knew more than I realised about his furtive chases after women. I had a memory, which might not have been genuine but was very sharp, of standing at the age of seven or eight outside a rubber shop – with my father blinking across the counter, which mysteriously gave me goose-flesh as though it were a threat or warning. Still, all that was searching back with hindsight. During the short part of our lives which we had lived together, we impinged on each other as little as father and son, or even two members of the same family, ever could.

It was not like that with me and Charles. Partly because our temperaments were too much the same weight, and, though we were in many respects different, in the end we wanted the same things. And there was a complication, simply because I had lived some of my life in public. That meant that Charles couldn’t escape me and that, without special guilt on either side, I got in his way.

That night when he returned home from his travels, I had said in effect that I was leaving him an awkward legacy. He had replied, more harshly than seemed called for, that he wouldn’t be worried over. In fact, on the specific point I had been wrong. He didn’t mind in the least that, when I died, some of the conflicts and enmities would live on and he would sometimes pay for them. That he not only didn’t mind but welcomed. For, though he couldn’t endure my protecting him, he was cheerful and fighting-happy at the chance of his protecting me. And if he had to do it posthumously, well, he was at least as tenacious as I was. It was not the penalties that he wanted to escape, but the advantages. He had seen and heard my name too often. There were times when I seemed omnipresent. Anyone of strong nature – from my end, it was a somewhat bitter irony – would have preferred to be born obscure. Yet perhaps I was making it too easy for myself. Perhaps – if he had never heard my name outside the family – we should still have faced each other in the hospital bedroom with the same silences. Perhaps it was ourselves that we couldn’t escape. He might still have expected me to claim more than I did. I should have still felt ill-used, for I believed that I had been unpossessive, had claimed little or nothing, and wanted us to exist side by side.

Was that true? Was that all? My relation with Charles was utterly unlike mine with my own father. That was certain. But, as we sat in that room, the familiar sardonic exchanges not there to bring us together or smooth the minutes away, I felt a shiver – more than that, a menace and a remorse – from the past. For Charles was behaving now very much, nerve of the same nerve, as I had behaved when I sat by my mother at her deathbed.

It was more than forty years before. Instead of a smell evoking the past, the past evoked a smell: in my hygienic flower-lined room, I smelt brandy, eau de Cologne, the warm redolence of the invalid’s bedroom. Then I had sat with the tight constrained feeling, full of dread, which overcame me when she called out for my love. For I couldn’t give it her, at least in the terms she claimed.

‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she had cried, demanding more for me than I did for myself. ‘That’s all I wanted.’

I did my best (I was about the same age as Charles was now) to console her. Yet, whenever I felt remorse, I had to recall one thing – whatever I did, I hadn’t brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women; she was vain, but she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I that if one’s heart is invaded by another (that was how I used to think, when my taste was more florid, and I didn’t mind the sound of rhetoric), then one will either assist the invasion or repel it. I repelled it, longing that I might do otherwise. And she knew.

I had been as proud as my mother, and in some ways as vain. Some of that pride and vanity was exorcised by now: for I had lived much longer than she did, and age, though it didn’t kill vanity, took the edge of it away. Like her, I sometimes couldn’t deceive myself about the truth. Charles was behaving as I had done. Was it also true that, against my will and anything that I desired, without knowing it I was affecting him as she had me? Had the remorse come back, through all those years, and made me learn what it had been like for her, and what it was now like for me?

Charles’ tone changed, as he said: ‘There is something I wanted to tell you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Maurice and Godfrey (Maurice’s parson friend) will be coming in later today.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Yes, but you mustn’t put your foot in it, you know.’ His eyes had taken on a piercing glint: there was a joke at my expense. Suddenly he had switched – and I with him, seeing that expression – to our most companionable.

‘What are you accusing me of now?’

‘You might forget that old Godfrey has a professional interest in you, don’t you think?’

‘Aren’t I usually fairly polite?’

‘Fairly.’

‘Well then. I don’t propose to stop being polite, just because the man is an Anglo-Catholic priest.’

‘So long’, Charles’ smile was matey and taunting, ‘as you don’t forget that he is an Anglo-Catholic priest.’

I taunted him back: ‘My memory is in excellent order, you’ll be glad to know.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Come on, what do you want me to say to the man?’

‘It’s what I don’t want you to say that counts.’

‘And that is?’

‘Look here, it isn’t everyone who’s done a Lazarus, is it?’

‘Granted,’ I said.

‘It’s therefore reasonable to suppose that a priest will have a special interest in you, don’t you realise? After all, we expect him to have some concern about life after death, don’t we?’

‘Granted again.’

‘Well then, you’d better not say much about first-hand knowledge, had you? I should have thought this wasn’t precisely the occasion.’

We had each known what this duologue meant, all along. About his friends’ susceptibilities, or his acquaintances’ as well, Charles could be sensitive and far-sighted. But also he had constructed a legend about me as a blunt unrestrained Johnsonian figure, in contrast to his own subtlety. It was the kind of legend that grows up in various kinds of intimacy. In almost exactly the same way, Roy Calvert used to pretend to be on tenterhooks waiting for some gigantesque piece of tactlessness from me: on the basis that, just as William the Silent got his nickname through being silent on one occasion, so I had been shatteringly tactless once. With both of them – often Charles acted towards me as Roy Calvert used to – they liked rubbing the legend in. And Charles in particular used this device to make amends. It took the heat out of either affection or constraint or the complex of the two, and gave us the comfort we both liked.

22: The Four Things

AS Charles had prepared me, Maurice and Father Ailwyn duly arrived later that day, round half past four, when I had finished drinking tea. The quixotic pair came through the door, Maurice so thin that he looked taller than he was, Father Ailwyn the reverse. Since all my family called Ailwyn by his Christian name, I had to do the same, although I knew him only slightly. He gave a shy, fat-cheeked smile, small eyes sharp and uncertain behind his glasses, cassock billowing round thick-soled boots. While they were settling down in their chairs, he was abnormally diffident, not able to make any kind of chat, nor even to reply to ours. Maurice had told me that he was quite as inept when he visited the old and lonely: a stuttering awkward hulk of a fat man, grateful when Maurice, who might be self-effacing but was never shy, acted as a lubricant. Yet, they said, Godfrey Ailwyn was the most devoted of parish priests, and the desolate liked him, even if he couldn’t talk much, just because he never missed a visit and patiently sat with them.

With the excessive heartiness that the diffident induced, I asked if he would have some tea.

‘No, thank you. I’m not much good at tea.’

His tone was hesitating, but upper-class – not professional, not high bourgeois. Even my old acquaintance, Lord Boscastle, arbiter of origins, might have performed the extraordinary feat of ‘knowing who he was’ – which meant that his family could be found in reference books.

‘I’m pretty sure’, said Maurice, ‘that Godfrey would like a drink. Wouldn’t you now, Godfrey?’

The doleful plump countenance lightened.

‘If it isn’t any trouble–’

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Maurice, used to looking after the other man, was already standing by the bottles, pouring out a formidable whisky. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

Maurice, taking the glass round, explained to me, as though he were an interpreter, that Godfrey had had a busy day, mass in the morning, parish calls, a couple of young delinquents at the vicarage –

‘It must be a tough life,’ I said.

Godfrey smiled tentatively, took a swig at his drink and then, all of a sudden, asked me, with such abruptness that it sounded rough: ‘You don’t remember anything about it, do you?’

For an instant I was taken by surprise, as though I hadn’t heard the question right, or didn’t understand it. I hadn’t expected him to take the initiative.

‘Maurice says you didn’t remember anything about it. When you came to.’

‘I wasn’t exactly at my most lucid, of course.’

‘But you didn’t remember anything?’

‘I was more concerned with what was happening there and then.’

‘You still don’t remember anything?’

I was ready to persevere with evasion, but he was not giving me much room to manoeuvre.

‘Would you expect me to?’ I asked.

‘It was like waking from a very deep sleep, was it?’

‘I think one might say that.’

Father Ailwyn gave a sharp-eyed glance in Maurice’s direction, as though they were sharing a joke, and then turned to me with an open, slumbrous smile, the kind of smile which transformed depressive faces such as his.

‘Please don’t be afraid of worrying me,’ he said, and added: ‘Lewis, I am interested, you know.’

‘Godfrey said on the way here that he wished he wasn’t a clergyman.’ Maurice was also smiling. ‘He didn’t want to put you off.’

I should have something to report to young Charles when next I saw him, I was thinking.

‘I’m not going to be prissy with you,’ said Godfrey. ‘All I’m asking you is to return the compliment.’

I had come off worst and gave an apologetic smile.

‘Eschatology is rather a concern of ours, you see. But most believers wouldn’t think that you were interfering with their eschatology. They’d be pretty certain to say, and here I don’t mind admitting that they sometimes take an easy way out, that you hadn’t really been dead.’

Instead of being inarticulate, or so shy as to be embarrassing to others, he had begun to talk as though he were in practice.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that, have I?’ I said.

‘I should have thought that, by inference, you had. And most believers would tell you that it’s very difficult to define the threshold of death, and that you hadn’t crossed it.’

‘I can accept that–’

‘They would tell you that the brain has to die as well as the heart stopping before the body is truly dead. And until the body is truly dead, then the soul can’t leave it.’

I still didn’t want to argue, but I respected him now and had to be straightforward.

‘That I can’t accept. Those are just words–’

‘They don’t mean much more to me than they do to you.’

Again Godfrey’s face was one moonlike smile. ‘It’s a very primitive model, of course it is. At the time of the early church, a man’s spirit was supposed to hover over the body for three days, and didn’t depart until the decomposition set in.’

Yes, I said, I’d read that once, in a commentary on the Gospel according to Saint John. It was the priest’s turn to look surprised. He had expected me to be entirely ignorant about the Christian faith, just as I had expected him to be unsophisticated about everything else. In fact, he was at least as far from unsophisticated as Laurence Knight, my first wife’s father, another clergyman, in one of his more convoluted phases.

Godfrey Ailwyn had also one of those minds which were naturally rococo and which moved from flourish to invention and back again, with spiralling whirls and envelopes of thought – quite different from the clear straight cutting-edge mentalities of, say, Francis Getliffe or Austin Davidson in his prime. Quite different, but neither better nor worse, just different: one of the most creative minds I ever met was similar in kind to Father Ailwyn’s, and belonged to a scientist called Constantine.

What did Ailwyn believe about death, the spirit or eternal life? I pressed him, for he had brushed away the surface civilities, and I was genuinely curious to know. Though he was willing to spin beautiful metaphysical structures, I wasn’t sure that I understood him. Certainly he believed, so far as he believed at all, in something very different from what he called the ‘metaphors’ in which he spoke to his parishioners. The body, the memory, this our mortal life – if I didn’t misinterpret him – existed in space and time, and all came to an end with death. The spirit existed outside space and time, and so to talk of a beginning, or an end, or an after-life – they were only ‘metaphors’, which we had to use because our minds were primitive.

It was about memory alone that I could engage with him. He would have liked to believe (for once, he wasn’t intellectually cool) that some part of memory – ‘some subliminal part, if you like’ – was attached to the spirit and so didn’t have to perish. That was why, with more hope than expectation, he had wanted to cross-question me.

On the terms we had now reached (they weren’t those of affection and, though I was interested in him, he wasn’t in me, except as an imparter of information: but still, we had come to terms of trust) it would have been false of me to give him any agreement. No, I said, I was sure that memory was a function of the body: damage the brain, and there was no memory left. When the brain came to its end, so did memory. It was inconceivable that any part of it could outlive the body. If the spirit existed outside space and time (though I couldn’t fix any meaning to his phrase), memory couldn’t. And what possible kind of spiritual existence could that be?

‘By definition,’ said Godfrey Ailwyn, ‘we can’t imagine it. Because we’re limited by our own categories. Sometimes we seem to have intuitions. Perhaps that does suggest that some kind of remembrance isn’t as limited as we are.’

No, whatever it suggested, it couldn’t be that, I said. He was a very honest man, but he wouldn’t give up that toehold of hope. Did I deny the mystical experience, he asked me. No, of course I didn’t deny the experience, I said. But that was different from accepting the interpretation that he might put upon it.

As we went on talking, Maurice, unassuming, bright-faced, poured Godfrey another drink. In time, I came to wonder whether, though Godfrey’s mind was elaborate, his temperament wasn’t quite simple. So that in a sense, detached from his intellect, he wasn’t so far after all from the people he preached to or tried to console, stumbling with his tongue at a sickbed, in a fashion that seemed preposterous when one heard him talk his own language as he had done that afternoon.

Soon they would have to leave, he said, his expression once more owlish and sad. He had to take an evening service. Would be get many people, I asked. Five or six, old ladies, old friends of his.

‘Old ladies’, Maurice put in, ‘who, if they hadn’t got Godfrey, wouldn’t have anything to live for.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Godfrey, awkward as an adolescent.

I couldn’t resist one final question. We had spoken only of one of the eschatological last things, I said. Death. How did he get on with the other three? Judgment, heaven, hell.

Again he looked as though I weren’t playing according to the rules, or hadn’t any justification to recognise a theological term.

Did he place heaven and hell, like the spirit, outside of space and time? And judgment too? Wasn’t that utterly unlike anything that believers had ever conceived up to his day?

His sharp eyes gazed at me with melancholy. Then suddenly the pastiness, the heaviness, the depression did their disappearing trick again, and he smiled.

‘Lewis. I expect you’d prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that that would be an improvement, you know. But if you like I’ll say that you’ve made your own heaven and hell in your own life. And as for judgment, well, you’re capable of delivering that upon yourself. I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.’

When they had departed, I thought that last remark didn’t really fit under his metaphysical arch, but that nevertheless, if he allowed himself an instant’s pride in the midst of his chronic modesty, he had a good sound right to do so.

23: Lying Awake

WHEN Charles March called in for ten minutes later that same evening, I asked him to do a little staff work. Would he, either on his own account or by invoking Mansel, make an arrangement with the nurses? Up to now, they had forced sleeping pills upon me each night. I wanted that stopped. Partly because I had an aversion, curiously puritanical, from any routine drug-taking: I would much rather have a broken night or two than get into the habit of dosing myself to sleep. But also I wasn’t in the least tired, I was serene and content, I didn’t mind lying awake: which in fact I did, luxuriously, looking out one-eyed into the dark bedroom.

Not that it was quite dark, or continuously so. There was a kind of background twilight, contributed perhaps by the street lamps or those in the houses opposite, which defined the shape of the window and chest of drawers close by. Occasionally, a beam from a car’s headlights down below swept across the far wall, and I watched with pleasure, as though I were being reminded of lying in an unfamiliar bedroom long ago, at my Uncle Will’s in Market Harborough, when as a boy I didn’t wish to go to sleep, so long as I could see the walls rosy, then darker, rosy again, as the coal fire flickered and fell.

I was being reminded of something else, what was it, another room, another pattern of light, almost another life. At last I had it. A hotel room in Menton, regular as a metronome the lighthouse beam, moving from wall to wall: in the dark intervals, the sea slithering and slapping on the rocks beneath. Yes, I had been ill and wretched, wondering if I should recover, maddened that I might die quite unfulfilled, longing for the woman whom I later married and did harm to. Yet the recollection, in the hospital bedroom, was happy, pain long since drained out, as though all that persisted was the smell of the flowers and the sharp-edged lighthouse beam.

Other unfamiliar rooms. The hotel bedrooms of a lifetime. Why did I feel, not only serene, but triumphant? The half memories, the flashes, seemed like a conquest. Alone. Not alone. Dense curtained darkness: the sound of breathing from the other bed. Smell of beeswax, pot-pourri, wood smoke. That might have been Palermo. Sound of a sentry’s stamp outside. Travelling as an official. Then unofficial, utter quiet, lights across the canal.

Switch of association. Godfrey Ailwyn had talked of the threshold of death. He hadn’t been inhibited, he hadn’t worried about delicacy or restraint, and that had pleased me. He had set out to argue that I hadn’t been dead. Curious to argue whether, at a point of time, one was or was not dead. That hadn’t seemed ominous, became the opposite of ominous now. As, after the recall of nights abroad, I thought (associations, daydreams, drifting in and out) of some of Godfrey’s words, I didn’t feel less serene but more so. I hadn’t minded him cross-questioning me like a coroner: no, I welcomed it. It was only five nights since I had lain in this room, frozen with dread. Frightened to think back a few hours, to the time they were standing round me and Mansel got to work.

Now – with a change which I hadn’t recognised as it was happening, but which had come to feel delectable and complete – I wasn’t frightened to think back, there was nothing which gave me a greater sense of calm or of something more liberating than calm. 28 November 1965. That morning, round about half past eleven, I might have died. I liked telling myself that. Nothing had ever been so steadying, not at all bizarre or nerve-racking, just steadying: nothing had set me so free.

I did not have to reason this out to myself, certainly not on that contented night, or make it any subtler than it was. It was just a fact of life, an unpredicted but remarkably satisfying fact, one of the best. When, however, I tried to explain it to others (which I didn’t want to for a long time afterwards) I didn’t even satisfy myself. It all sounded either too mysteriously lumbering or else altogether too casual. One difficulty was that, to me as the sole recipient, the emotional tone of the whole thing was very light. I tried to spell it out – it made one’s concerns, even those which before the relevant morning would have weighed one down, appear not so much silly as non-existent.

After all, one might not have had them any more.

Just as in the dread which I had experienced only once, in the hours of 28/29 November, everything disappeared, longings, hopes, fears, ego, everything but the dread itself: so they disappeared in this anti-dread.

Most of us looked upon our lives – not continuously but now and then – as a kind of journey, progress or history. A history, as the cosmogonists might say, from Time T = 0 at birth to T1 = the final date, which it wasn’t given us to know in advance. (Who, at any age, younger than Charles, older than me, would dare to look in the mirror of his future?)

Somehow that progress, journey, history had for me become disconnected or dismissed. As though what fashionable persons were beginning to call the diachronic existence had lost its grip on me.

Yet what I really felt was as simple as a joy. As though I had smelt the lilac, and time travelled back to the age of eleven, reading under the tree at home: as though troubles past or to come had been dissolved, and become one with the moment in which I was watching the cars’ lights move across the bedroom wall.

So, when the priest told me to show myself as much mercy as we should all need in the end, that affected me, but not as it might have done six days before. They were kind words: they were good words: once, though I didn’t share his theology, they would have made me heavy-spirited as I thought about my past. But now I was freer from myself. Yes, I could still think with displeasure about what I had done, and wish that whole episodes or stretches of years might be wiped away. But I wished that, and still felt a kind of joy, with no angst there.

Judgment? Well, thinking with displeasure on what I had done was a kind of judgment. It wasn’t either merciful or the reverse. I didn’t feel obliged to reckon up an account, as though one ought to tick off the plus and minus scores. Once I had told a friend (perhaps the least moral friend I had ever had) that, if I had never lived, nobody would have been a penny the worse. That was altogether too cut and dried for me now. Too historical, in fact: and actually, in terms of history, microscopic history, it was not even true. But on the other hand, when I was recovering from the first operation, and Charles March had said that it was impossible to regret one’s own experience, I had on the moment been doubtful, and later to myself (in this same bedroom) utterly denied it. I did regret, sometimes passionately, sometimes with remorse, but more often with impatience, a good deal of my youth. Right up to the time – I was thirty-four – when Sheila killed herself.

I didn’t take more of the blame than I had to. It wouldn’t have been true, it would have been over dramatic and, curiously enough, over-vain, to imagine that I could have altered all or many of my actions. I had struggled too hard, and with too much self-concentration: but it would have been impossible not to struggle hard. Nevertheless, in a sense, in a sense which was real although one could explicate it half away, I had been a bad son, a bad friend, a bad husband. To my mother I could, without being a different person, have given more. Yes, I had been very young: but I was already old enough to distrust one’s own withdrawals, and to know that one’s own needs – including self-protection and the assertion of one’s loneliness – could be cruel. And, what took more recognition, could be disciplined.

I had been a bad friend to George Passant – not in later years, when there was nothing to be done except be there, when all he wanted was to spend a night or two in what he thought of as a normal world – not then, but almost as soon as I ceased to be an intimate and left the town for London. It was then that I had blinkered myself. I ought to have known how the great dreams were being acted out, how all the hopes of the son of the morning were driving him where such hopes had driven other leaders before him. I ought to have used my own realism to break up the group or his inner paradise. Perhaps no one could have done that, for George was a powerful character and had, of course, the additional power of his own desires. But I was tougher-minded than he was, and there was a chance, perhaps one chance in ten, that I could have shifted him.

As for being a bad husband to Sheila, it was simply that I shouldn’t have been her husband at all. There I had committed the opposite wrong to what I had done (or rather not done) to George Passant. Instead of absenting myself as from him – or earlier from my mother, I had summoned up every particle of intensity, energy and will. She, lost and splintered as she was, had to take me in the end. After that, I couldn’t find a way, there was no way, to make up for it. Now I had seen in my son Charles the same capacity for intense focusing of the whole self, regardless of anyone and anything, regardless in his case of his normal sense or detached kindness. Regardless in mine of the tenderness that I felt for Sheila, independent of love, and lasting longer.

That I couldn’t forget. When Austin Davidson played with speculations about the after-life, I had a reason, stronger than all others, for wishing that I could, even in the most ghostly fashion, believe in it: a reason so mawkish and sentimental that I couldn’t admit it, and yet so demanding that once, when Davidson and young Charles were bantering away, I couldn’t listen. Instead, I wanted to hear – it was as mawkish as that – a voice from the shades saying (clipped and gnomic as so much that Sheila had said in life): ‘Never mind. It’s all right. You should know, it’s all right.’

If I had been given the option, I should have chosen to eliminate the first half of my life, and try again. No one could judge that but myself. Francis Getliffe, who had known me continuously for longer than anyone else, would have been – in the priest’s terms – too merciful. He had seen me do bad things, but he hadn’t seen those hidden things: and, even if he had, he would still have been too merciful.

For the second half of my life, Margaret had known me as no one else had. At times she had seen me at my worst. But there I should – compared with the remoter past – have given myself the benefit of the doubt. And I thought that she would too. She would have said – so I believed – that I had made an effort to reshape a life. It wasn’t easy or specially successful, she might have added to herself: for Margaret was not often taken in, either about herself or me, nor so willing to be satisfied as Francis. But she would have given me the benefit of the doubt, even if she had known me from the beginning. She had a higher sense of what life ought to be than I had: but also she could accept more when it went wrong.

Yet, as I lay in bed, it wasn’t the remorse – the tainted patches, the days, the years – that became mixed with this present moment. Instead, other moments, dredged up from the past, flickered into this one. Moments which might originally have been miserable or joyous – they were all content-giving by now. Lying awake as a child, hearing my father and some choral friends singing down below; walking with Sheila on a freezing winter night; sitting tired and ill by the sea, wondering how I could cope with the next term at the Bar; triumph after an examination result, drinking, chucking glasses into the fireplace.

I was vulnerable to memories, I wanted to be, some I was forcing back to mind. They were what remained, not the judgments or the regrets. Again I thought of Charles March in that same conversation two years before, saying, as I listened with eyes blacked out: ‘You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?’

An interesting life. Did anyone think – to himself – of his own life like that? That was the kind of summing-up that a biographer or historian might make: but it didn’t have any meaning to oneself, to one’s own life as lived. Zest, action growing out of flatness, boredom growing out of zest, achievement growing out of boredom, reverie – joy – anxiety – action. Could anyone sum that up for himself or make an integral as an onlooker might? True, I had once heard an old clergyman, in his rooms in college, tell me that he had had ‘a disappointing life’. He had said it angrily, in a whisky-thickened voice. It had been impressive, though not precisely moving, when he said it: on the spot, he was sincere, he meant what he said. But he had a reason for bursting out: he was explaining to himself (and incidentally to me) why he proposed not to do a good turn to another man. I did not believe that even he thought continuously of his life in terms like that. He enjoyed his bits of power in the college: he enjoyed moving from his sessions with the whisky bottle to his prophecies of catastrophe. Certainly a biographer – in the unlikely event of his ever having one – could have summarised his existence in his own phrase. It was objectively true. I doubted if it seemed so to himself for hours together. Even as he was speaking to me, his vitality was still active and hostile, he still was capable of dreaming that, by a miracle, his deserts might even now be given him.

Like most of us, he occasionally thought of his life as a progress or a history. Then he could dispose of it by his ferocious summing-up. That was on the cosmogonists’ model which had occurred to me before: from T = o, the big bang, the birth of Despard-Smith, to T = 79, the end of things, the death of Despard-Smith. A history. A disappointing history. But that wasn’t the way in which he, or the rest of us, thought most frequently to himself about his life. There was another cosmogonists’ model which, it seemed to me, was much closer to one’s own life as lived. Continuous creation. A slice disappeared, was replaced again. Something was lost, something new came in. All the time it looked to oneself as though there was not much change, nor deterioration, nor journey towards an end. Didn’t each of our lives, to ourselves as we lived them, seem, much more often than not, like a process of continuous creation?

So, when Austin Davidson in his last illness dismissed the themes which had preoccupied him for a lifetime (except for his game of gambling: ‘If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,’ he once said, ‘I should still want to hear the latest Stock Exchange quotations’), he found others which filled their place: and the days of solitariness, though they might be, and often were, bitter, had their own kind of creation. Even studying his ankles, watching in detail the changes in his physical state, was a fresh awakening of interest, petty if you like, but in its fashion a revival. That was as true for him as it was for my mother, also talking of her ankles in her last illness. Yes, that was a singular outburst of the process of continuous creation. Themes of a lifetime wore themselves out: but we weren’t left empty, the resolution wasn’t as tidy as that, somehow the psychic heart went on pumping, giving one a new or transformed lease of existence – perhaps restricted, but more concentrated because of that.

Before the operational experience and in the bedroom since, I had been discovering this for myself. In fact, it was something each of us had to discover for himself: you couldn’t reach it by empathy, it was too unfamiliar, and perhaps too disconcerting, for that. Not long ago, in full health, I dismissed the third and slightest of the themes – different from Davidson’s – which had preoccupied me, the concern, partly voyeuristic, partly conscientious, for political things. That dismissal was final, I didn’t doubt it: but now I could imagine, not playing the chess game of politics in any shape or form, but – if a cause or even a whim impelled me – raising my voice with a freedom which I hadn’t known before.

Something similar was true of the second theme, which was the kinds of love. Sexual love, parental love (so different that we confused ourselves by giving them the same name), they had never let me go: and often my public behaviour had seemed to me like the performance of a stranger. A pretty good performance, since on the level of action I had some of my temperament under control. Well, those kinds of love – I thought of the last talks with Margaret and my son – were creating within themselves something new, in part unforeseeable by me. Not in marriage, perhaps defying fate we should both think that: but certainly in my relation with my son. I hadn’t any foreknowledge of what we should be saying to each other in ten years’ time, if I lived so long. That wasn’t distressing, but curiously exciting, the more so since that date of 28 November. It was as though I were quite young again, having to learn, with the sense, on the whole a pleasurable sense, of surprise ahead, what a human relation was like.

Third and last, myself alone. My own solitude, different from Austin Davidson or anyone else’s. In so much we are all alike: but in one’s solitude one is unique. I had been confronted by mine, since the operation, more than in all my life before. In a fashion that had astonished me. And given me a sense of change, and also a kind of perplexed delight, for which I had been totally unprepared. Somehow that was a delight too, as though I had suddenly seen a horizon wide open in front of my eyes.

A clock was striking somewhere outside the hospital. I didn’t count the strokes, but there might have been twelve. I was sleepy by now, and turned onto my side. As often immediately before sleep, faces came, as if from a vague distance, into the field of vision under the closed lids: one came very clear and actual, nearly a dream, not yet a dream. It was a face which hadn’t any waking significance for me, the matey comedian’s face of a barrister acquaintance, Ted Benskin.

24: An Undefeated Visitor

NEXT day (for by this time the Press had done its work and so, I guessed, had gossip) I was dividing potential visitors into sheep and goats, those I wanted to see and those I didn’t. Among the goats, to be kept out with firmness, were those whose motives for inspecting me didn’t need much examination – such as Whitman, my back-bencher acquaintance, who was presumably anxious to see that I was safely incapacitated, or Edgar Hankins, looking for a last personal anecdote to put into one of his elegiac post-mortems.

On the other hand, Rosalind was to be welcomed and, a somewhat more surprising enquirer, Lester Ince. Rosalind entered during the morning, bearing more flowers from her husband and, after she had kissed me and sat down, spreading her own aura of Chanel.

‘Well, old thing. You don’t look too bad.’ She had never given up either the slang of her youth or the indomitable flatness of our native town.

How was she? She couldn’t grumble. And Azik? He was on one of his business trips. Still, there were compensations. What did she mean? She usually got a present when he went abroad. With lids modestly downcast, with a smile that might have been either furtive or salacious, she held out the second finger of her right hand. On it gleamed a splendid emerald.

‘What do you think that cost?’ she said, and explained, again modestly: ‘I had to know for the sake of the insurance.’

‘A good many thousand.’

‘Fifteen,’ said Rosalind, with simple triumph.

What about her daughter? No, Rosalind didn’t see much of her. The divorce would soon be through. Was Muriel intending to marry again? ‘She never tells me anything,’ Rosalind replied, hurt, aggrieved. She recaptured some of her spirit when she switched to young David. ‘He’s a different kettle of fish. He tells me everything.’

‘He won’t always, you know.’ Rosalind might be as hard as they came, a child of this world, or, in her own language, as tough as old boots; but there (as she had done already with her daughter) she could suffer as much as the rest of us.

‘Perhaps he won’t. But he’s lovely now.’

Rosalind continued, as usual not frightened of the obvious. We were all getting older. It would be nice when she was an old lady to have a handsome young man to take her out. David would be twenty-one in nine years’ time. ‘And you know as well as I do’, said Rosalind, ‘what that will make me.’

There were few square inches of Rosalind, except for her hair, which had been left to nature unassisted. Couturiers, jewellers, cosmetic-makers had worked for their money, and Azik had duly paid; yet she minded less than many people about growing old.

She also didn’t appear to mind overmuch about my misadventures. She had known me so long, she took my continued existence for granted. So far as she showed an interest, she was inclined to blame Margaret, whom she had never liked, for neglecting me.

‘You’ll have to look after yourself that’s all,’ she said. If I wanted any advice, there was always the ‘old boy’ (one of her appellations for Azik). After which, she said a brisk goodbye and departed like a small and elegant warship succeeded by a wash of scent.

That was still lingering on the air when, a couple of hours later, Lester Ince came in.

‘Who’s your girlfriend?’ he said, sniffing, a leer on his cheerful pasty face. ‘That’s not Margaret’s.’

Lester was one of those men who, solidly masculine, nevertheless were knowledgeable about all the appurtenances of femininity. It made other men more irritated with him, particularly as he seemed – incomprehensibly to them – to have his successes, including his present wife. I had been mildly surprised when I heard that he wanted to visit me. I was a good deal more surprised when he said that he had been thinking about me and had something to propose. He wasn’t really a friend: he didn’t object to me as vigorously as he did to Francis or my brother, but that wasn’t specially high praise. Perhaps he would have been just as concerned if any acquaintance had run into physical trouble. Anyway, his proposal was down to earth. He was offering me Basset for my convalescence.

Although I hadn’t the most fugitive intention of accepting (all I wanted was to be left undisturbed at home), I was touched, as one was by a bit of practical good nature: touched enough to pretend that I couldn’t make up my mind. Of course, one had to be more apolaustic than I was to be fit for Basset. That was a view which Lester sternly repudiated. Compared with many others, he reproved me, it wasn’t a big house: as the owner of Chatsworth might point out that his establishment was diminutive by the side of Blenheim.

My second line of defence was that we couldn’t help getting in their way. Lester bluffly answered that they would be leaving after Christmas anyway; they weren’t prepared to endure another English winter. I was reflecting, when I first met Lester he was living with his first wife and family in a dilapidated house in Bateman Street: if I knew anything about Cambridge temperatures, the conjugal bedroom wouldn’t get about fifty degrees most of the year, and Lester had found it satisfactory for his purposes. Now, however, he behaved like a frailer plant. He had recently acquired a place in the Bahamas. It would be very good for them, he assured me earnestly. Not only to escape the winter rigours, but because there was a danger in living in a house like Basset. They didn’t want to become like birds in a gilded cage. And they proposed to avoid that danger, I tried to ask without expression, by having their own beach in the Bahamas? Lester gazed at me, also without expression.

After I had promised to give my answer about Basset when I got out of hospital, he explained that there was another great advantage about the new regime. He could rely on getting each winter free for work; he could sit there in the sun and wouldn’t be disturbed. It was time he made a start on another book. It was going to be a long-term project. Several years, he didn’t believe in premature publication. Subject? Nathaniel Hawthorne and the New England moral climate.

When at teatime I told Margaret about that conversation, we looked at each other deadpan. He was the kind of visitor who ought to be encouraged, she said. No strain. Offhanded benevolence. But he used to be a humorist. Was all this a piece of misguided humour? If it were, I said, he deserved his fun. No, Margaret decided, she couldn’t remember, even in his unregenerate days, Lester being humorous about himself.

About six o’clock she left, and I was feeling peaceful. No more visitors that day, except my brother Martin after dinner. I went back to a novel I had been reading, a Simenon, and I put Lester’s moral discrimination out of my thoughts.

In a few minutes, a knock on the door. A peremptory double knock. Before I had said ‘come in’, Ronald Porson lurched into the room.

‘How in God’s name did you get in?’ I cried, with something less than grace. I didn’t want to be disturbed: I was irritated, I had given instructions that only those whose names were cleared should be sent up.

Porson gave one of his involuntary winks, right eyelid dropping down towards his cheek: the left side of his face twitched in sympathy. As a result, just as when first I met him, back in the early thirties, he produced an effect which was conspiratorial, friendly, and remarkably louche. As usual, he was smelling of liquor and his speech was slurred.

‘I suppose I can help myself, can’t I?’ He had already caught sight of the bottle on the chest of drawers.

‘Yes, do,’ I said without enthusiasm, and repeated: ‘How did you get in?’

Porson turned back with his glass, winked again, this time perhaps less involuntarily, and sat down in the other chair. He was wearing his Old Etonian tie, which he – unlike my former colleague Gilbert Cooke – used only on special occasions. The rest of his appearance was more dilapidated than his normal, and in that respect the standard was very high. Cuffs frayed, buttons off waistcoat, shoes dirty, hair straggling, face puffed out with broken veins. Yet, though he was now seventy-two or three, he did not look his age, as though the battered ruleless life had acted – as it had done also with George Passant, in both cases much to the disapproval of more proper persons – as a kind of preservative and given them an air, among the ruins of their physique, of something like happiness and youth.

Actually Porson had, ever since I first knew him, moved from one catastrophe to another, with a seemingly inevitable and unrelieved decline such as didn’t happen to many men. To begin with, he was making a living at the Bar. That soon dropped away, owing to drink, his tendency to patronise everyone he met becoming more aggressive and overpowering the more he failed, and perhaps – for those were less tolerant days – to rumours about his sexual habits. Then he ran through his money and you could trace his progress as his address in London changed. The first I remembered was that of a modestly opulent flat off Portland Place. After that Pimlico, Fulham Road, Earls Court, Notting Hill Gate, stations of descent. At the present time, so far as I knew, he was living in a bed-sitting-room in Godfrey Ailwyn’s parish, and the priest and I both guessed he kept alive on national assistance. How he paid for his drink I didn’t understand, although it was a long time since I had seen him quite sober. As he grew older, his picking-up became more rampant, and he had spent one term in gaol for importuning. Ailwyn reported that there had been other narrow squeaks.

None of this, none of it at all, prevented him from looking to the future with the expectation of a child wondering what would turn up on his birthday. The last time I had met him, he had been saying, using exactly the same phrase as my mother might have used, very strange for one like Porson brought up in embassies, that there was still time for his ship to come home.

‘How did you get in?’

‘I’ve got one or two chums downstairs.’ He winked again, and put a finger to the side of his nose, rather like Azik Schiff parodying himself. Then, suddenly angry, he burst out: ‘Good chaps. Better than the crowd you waste your time with.’

‘I dare say.’ I was used to his temper. It was like handling a more-than-usually unpredictable bathroom geyser.

‘Good chums. I’ve always said, you can get anywhere if you’ve got good chums.’

Now he was swinging between the maudlin and the accusatory.

‘You can’t deny, I’ve always got anywhere I wanted, haven’t I?’

In a sense it was true. He had been seen in places where none of the rest of us could ever have had the entrée. Some people could explain it only by assuming a kind of homosexual trade union or information network. Ailwyn had once suggested that he had escaped worse trouble because of a contact in the local CID. Not that that had prevented Ronald Porson, when he found himself in more conventional circles, from denouncing ‘Jews and Pansies’ as the source of national degeneration. With those he trusted, though, he tended to concentrate on the racial element.

‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I?’ he accosted me, hands on knees. ‘Do you know why?’

After I had failed to reply, he said, accusatory again: ‘My boy, I’m here to give you a bit of advice.’

‘Are you?’

‘You haven’t always taken my advice. You might have done better for yourself if you had.’

‘It’s a bit late now,’ I began, but firmly he interrupted me. ‘It’ll be too late unless you listen to me for once. I’m going to give you a bit of advice. You’d better take it. You’re not to enter this hospital again.’

‘It’s a perfectly good hospital.’

‘It’s the best hospital in London,’ he shouted, getting angrier as he agreed with me. ‘But, damn your soul, it’s not the best for you.’

‘I’ve got no grumbles–’

‘I tell you, damn you, it’s not the best for you. I know.’

‘How can you know?’

‘It’s no use talking to people who only believe in what they can blasted well touch and see.’ For an instant he was raging about ESP. Then he said, calming himself down, with a look of patient condescension: ‘Well, let’s try something that you understand. I suppose you admit that you nearly passed out last Friday. As near as damn it. Or a bloody sight nearer. You admit that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘You haven’t got any option.’ He spoke indulgently, contemptuously. ‘And what would have been the use of your blasted reputation then?’

I wanted to stop listening, but his face came nearer, bullying, insistent. The left side was convulsed by a seismic twitch.

‘It’s no use making any bones about it. You know as well as I do. You did pass out last Friday. You’ve taken that in, haven’t you?’

I nodded.

‘You’re the luckiest man I know. You won’t have the same luck next time.’

Again I was trying to put him off, but he overbore me: ‘You mustn’t come into this hospital again, you understand?’

He added: ‘I know you mustn’t. I know.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

He stared full-eyed at me, triumphant. He was certain he had made an impression.

‘Of course, my boy, I’m thinking of you. You ought to think of some of the chaps here. In the hospital. What the hell do you fancy they were doing last Friday?’

He paused, and went on.

‘I’ll tell you. They were peeing their pants. They were afraid it would get into the papers. If I’d been in your place, the papers mightn’t have got hold of it. Somehow they know your name.’

(I thought later that that had been a minor mystery to Porson for thirty years. But at the time this was a reflection I hadn’t the nerve to make. He had frightened me. To begin with, it had been a frisson, the kind of shiver which my mother called ‘someone walking across her grave’. Now it was worse than that.)

‘It wouldn’t have been good for the place’, Porson said, ‘if you’d gone out feet first.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

‘They weren’t to know that, were they? I’ll tell you something else. They didn’t breathe easy until a long time after you’d been brought back. They’ve told me that themselves. You were all settled down and comfortable and having a good night’s rest before they felt sure there wasn’t going to be a funeral after all.’

‘I hope they stood themselves a drink.’

‘I’ve done that, my boy. They know you’re an old friend.’

Later on, I had another reflection, that I had never discovered who ‘they’ were. Certainly males. Certainly not doctors. I guessed, but never knew for sure, that they must have been porters or medical orderlies. At the time, feeling the sweat prickling at my temples, I had just one concern, which was to get him out of the room.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘You go and stand them another one for me.’ I told him where to find my wallet, and soon he was duly pocketing a five-pound note. But even then, enjoying the conversation, he wasn’t eager to go. Pressed, I had to invent and whisper another pretext, of the kind that Ronald Porson couldn’t resist. A visitor was coming soon – no one knew, my wife didn’t know – I couldn’t tell even him the name, he’d understand. With a look, both confidential and jeering, of ultimate complicity, Porson weaved towards the door, saying at the threshold:

‘So long, my boy. I hope you’ve been listening to what I said.’

Yes, I had. I wiped sweat away, but I might have come out of a hot bath. I was ashamed that I couldn’t be steadier: why should my nerves let me down, just because old Porson blustered away? For days past, ever since the first fright left me free, I had listened to everyone without even a superstitious qualm. I hadn’t been putting on a front: I hadn’t needed to. Definitions of death, theological death, the different degrees of uneasiness with which people, my wife, my son, approached me. I had become something of an expert on relative uneasiness. Nothing had plucked a nerve. Then, after all that, after the visits of those closest to me, came Porson. Drunk, of course. Officious, as he had been ever since I first met him. Nothing new. I had been through it all before. But he had frightened me.

There was no denying, I had felt the chill. If I could have understood why, I might have thrown it off. I had no clue at all. The thought of Porson’s cronies, down in the hospital basement, counting my chances – what was so bad about that? (In cold blood afterwards, I doubted if they had been all that wrought up. Porson enjoyed his overheated fancy. They must have had a little excitement, no more.) There was nothing bad, or even remotely unnatural about that. Yet, when Porson told me, it brought back the dread.

Listening to him, I felt it as on the first night. Now he had gone, I was searching inward, testing how strong it was. It was exactly like the days after the first eye operation, when I was worried by each speck or floater in the field of vision, wondering whether the black edge was coming back. The dread. It would be hard to have that as a regular visitation. No, perhaps it was not quite like the first night. Perhaps there was already a spectator behind my mind. It wasn’t only the fright and nothingness.

Still, as I tried to eat the hospital supper, I was waiting, I didn’t know what for, perhaps for the chill again, or some sign that I wasn’t in the clear. I was glad that Martin was due to visit me that night.

When he arrived, though, I was for an instant disappointed. For he had brought his daughter Nina with him, enquiring about me in her fashionable whisper as she kissed me, her face hiding behind her hair. As a rule, I should have welcomed her. More and more she seemed the most agreeable girl in Charles’ circle, the one who was most likely to make a man happy and enjoy her marriage. Nevertheless, in her presence I couldn’t talk directly to my brother. Which was probably, I imagined, why he had brought her. It was a typical quiet tactic of his, meaning that there was nothing good to say about Pat and that Martin wished to evade any discussion. Also, now that Martin at last was compelled to show traces of realism about his son, he was turning to the daughter whom he had so long neglected. He even induced her to tell me about her music: her teachers were certain that she (quite unlike her brother, Martin might have been thinking) would become a good professional.

Martin had seen me once since the operation, enough to satisfy himself, but not alone. Now he was watching me.

‘How are you?’ he said.

‘All right.’

‘Only all right?’

‘A little tired of death-watch beetles.’

‘You’ve given them a first-class opportunity, you know.’ Martin was speaking with a tucked-in smile, but he and I were signalling to each other, and probably Nina didn’t recognise the code. ‘Anyone special?’

‘Old Ronald Porson’s been improving the occasion.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, not long ago.’

Martin nodded. ‘That must have been pleasant for you.’

‘He was telling me about the preparations downstairs for my demise.’

A slight pause. In his misleadingly soft voice, Martin said: ‘It’s high time we began to make modest preparations for his.’

‘He’s inclined to think that he’ll outlast me.’

‘Thoughtful of him.’

‘After all,’ I said, ‘he’d be the first to point out that he very nearly did.’

‘I’m sure he would.’

‘Nothing that rejuvenates an old man more, my father-in-law used to say, than to contemplate the death of someone younger.’

‘Naturally,’ said Martin. Then casually, as though in an afterthought of no interest, he said: ‘By the by, did you want to see that old sod?’ He didn’t explain to his daughter that he meant Porson.

‘No. He gatecrashed.’

‘I imagined so. Well, I’ll see that that doesn’t happen again.’ I looked at my brother, face controlled, eyes dark and hard. I speculated as to whether Nina knew that he was smouldering with anger.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I can take him.’

‘I can’t see any reason why you should. I can see several reasons why you shouldn’t.’

That was all. Affectionate goodbyes. I expected that it would be some time before Martin left the hospital. For myself I didn’t abstain from my sleeping pills that night, and wasn’t long awake. Then I woke in the middle of the night, feeling calm. Immediately I waited for the fright to grip me. But it didn’t: at least, not enough to be more than a reminder, the kind of reminder of mortality that came at any age, from youth upwards, and wasn’t the real thing. Testing the black edge, I forced back thoughts of Porson. No, his voice bullied me in a vacuum, I recalled occasions long ago when he had lost a case and still took the offensive against everyone round him, not to himself defeated. I wondered if Martin had discovered who it was that let him in.

25: Outside the Hospital

THE morning that Margaret came to fetch me home, I had been in that bedroom for eleven days. On the afternoon before, she, who knew how institutions gave me more than my normal claustrophobia, and that I didn’t make fine distinctions between prisons and hospitals, they were just places which shut one in, asked how long it felt. I said that often it had seemed no time at all. She wasn’t sure whether I was being perverse. But I had already told her of my relapse during Porson’s visit. Perhaps also perversely, that had given her confidence in my state of mind. She hadn’t quite trusted the complete serenity, the looking back to 28 November as though that eliminated disquiets past, present and to come: now she knew that the serenity could be broken, she trusted it more.

Dressed, wearing my one club-tie, the MCC as though in retrospective homage to Ronald Porson, I said goodbye to the matron, the ward sister, a posse of nurses. I caught sight of myself in the looking glass, grinning cordially like an ageing public man.

Walking downstairs, out to the steps in front of the hospital, I was still wearing a blindfold over the left eye, and hadn’t stereoscopic vision when I looked down at the steps: so that Margaret, taking my arm, had to guide me, and as I probed with my feet I looked infirm. Infirm enough for a photographer, on the hospital steps, to ask if I wanted help: which didn’t prevent him snapping a picture of the descent. When we came into the open air, there were a dozen photographers waiting, shouting like a new estate of the realm, telling us to stand still, move, smile. There was the whirr of a television camera. ‘Look as if you’re happy,’ someone ordered Margaret. ‘Talk to each other!’ Worn down by this contemporary discipline, we muttered away. What we were actually saying, beneath the smiles, was what fiend out of hell had leaked the time. Someone had tipped off the Press. Pat? One of Porson’s ‘chums’?

As we climbed into the car, I looked back at the hospital facade. Nostalgia for a place where I had been through that special night? No, not in the least. It was different from occasions when I was young, and said goodbye to stretches of unhappiness. When I left the local government office, after my last morning as a clerk, I felt, although or because I had been miserable and humiliated there for years, something like an ache, as though regret for a bond that had been snapped. A little later, when I was a young man, and had been sent to the Mediterranean to recover from an illness, I had, driving to the station for the journey home, looked back at the sea (I could remember now the smell of the arbutus after rain). I had been desolate there, afraid that I might not get better: going away, I felt a distress much more painful than that outside the old office, a yearning, as though all I wanted in this life was to remain by the seashore and never be torn away.

None of that now, though this had been the worst time of the three. I regarded the hospital with neutrality; it might have been any other red-brick nineteenth-century building. As one grew older, perhaps the nervous rackings of one’s youth died down. Or perhaps, and with good reason, one wasn’t so frightened of the future. After all one had had some practice contemplating futures and then living them.

It was pleasant, anxiety-free, to be going home.