The Sleep of Reason

10: An Edge of Darkness

SUMMER, autumn, 1963. It was a placid time for us, more so than for a long time past. My name had gone out of the news: Margaret’s father stayed, by what seemed like one of fate’s perversities, in better health and spirits. The world outside was more placid too. Sometimes we talked of South-East Asia, but without the smell of danger. Even suspicious and experienced men, like Francis Getliffe, were allowing themselves a ration of hope.

We turned inwards to the family — and there Margaret had a little to worry about, nothing dramatic, just a routine worry, as she watched her children’s lives. Maurice had failed in his first year examination: by a concession which in abstract justice should not have been granted, he was being allowed back for his second year. He took it with as little pique as ever. When Charles cursed a piece of work he had brought back for the holidays, Maurice said: “Now you realise that you ought to be stupid, like me.”

Then he had gone off for the whole summer to work as an attendant in a mental hospital. It was not a job many young men would have taken, but he was happy. He had the singular composure which one sometimes meets in the self-abnegating. At night, when we were alone, Margaret often talked about him. Ought he to care so little for himself? Wouldn’t it be better if he had more drive, and yes, a dash of envy? She was worrying, but she felt a twisted joke at her own expense. She had come to admire the selfless virtues: and now with her first-born — whom she loved differently from Charles — she was wishing that, instead of trying to be of some good to the helpless, he would think about his future and buckle down to his books.

Yet, when they were together, he was protective towards her. Just as he was protective towards Vicky, the evening that she and Pat spent with us in the flat. It was late in September, Charles had gone back to school, the two of them came for an early drink and stayed to dinner, Maurice had not yet returned from his hospital.

Pat, who knew well enough that Margaret disapproved of him, began making up to her the moment he came in. I found the spectacle entertaining, partly because I had a soft spot for my nephew, partly because Margaret was not entirely unsusceptible. He entered, put Vicky down in one chair, made Margaret keep her place in another while he took charge of the drinks. It was all brisk, easy and practised: and yet, in the serene evening, the mellow light, there was at once a stir and crackle in the room.

He was a shortish young man, shorter than his father, who was himself inches less tall than Charles or me. He had strong shoulders like his father’s, and similar heavy wrists. His hair curled close to his forehead, he had sharp eyes, a wide melon mouth. No one could have called him handsome, or even impressive. When he made a sidelong remark to Vicky, who didn’t show amusement easily, she was laughing with sheer delight.

I observed them as he bustled round with the whisky and the ice jug. She was elated. As for him, his spirits were usually so high that it would be hard to detect a change. Frequently he called her darling, he said that “we” had been to the theatre last night, that “we” were going to a friend’s studio tomorrow. He was using all the emollients of a love affair. She was looking at no one else in the room: while he was sparking with energy to make Margaret like him.

He was sitting between her and Vicky, and I opposite to them, with my back to the light. Eyes acute, he was searching Margaret’s face to see when he drew a response. Her father? Yes, he seemed a little better, said Margaret. “That’s all you can hope for, isn’t it?” said Pat, quick and surgent. Once, when he was brasher, he would have been asking her to let him call on Austin Davidson: but now Pat not only knew her father’s condition, he knew also that she had been exposed all her life to young painters on the climb. With the same caution, he didn’t refer, or pay attention, to the great Rothko, borrowed from her father, on the wall at their back, which from where I sat beamed swathes of colour into the sunset. Pictures, painting, Pat was shutting away: as he leaned towards her, he was leaving himself out of it. He tried another lead. Maurice? Yes, he knew about the hospital. “I’m sorry he missed the Mays” (he was speaking of the examination). “But still, it doesn’t matter all that much, now does it?”

“It’s a nuisance,” said Margaret.

“Aren’t you being old-fashioned, Aunt Meg?” When I heard him call her that, which no one else ever did, I felt he was getting surer. “You all believe in examinations, like my father, don’t you now?”

“Well, he’s got to get through them — if he’s going to do what he wants.”

“But does he want to? Are you sure he does?”

“Don’t you think he wants to be a doctor?” Margaret was asking a question, a genuine question.

“I don’t know. I’m not sure that he does. But I’ll bet you this, he’ll find something, either that or something else, that he really wants to do.”

He looked eagerly at Margaret, and spoke with authority. “I suppose you realise that all the people my age think he’s rather wonderful? I mean, he’s influenced a lot of us. Not only me. You know what I’m like. But if I’d stayed at Cambridge, and it wasn’t a tragedy for anyone that I didn’t, you know, he would have been one of the better things—”

“I know he’s kind—”

“I mean more than that.”

For the moment at least he had melted her. Next day she would have her doubts: she was too self-critical not to: and yet perhaps the effect wouldn’t wear off. I was thinking, you can’t set out to please unless you want to please. He had his skill in finding the vulnerable place, and yet this wasn’t really skill. He couldn’t help finding the way to give her pleasure. Men like Arnold Shaw would view this activity, and the young man himself, with contempt. In most of the moral senses, men like Arnold were beyond comparison more worthy. Nevertheless, they would be despising something they could never do.

I was thinking also, how old should I guess Pat to be, if I didn’t know? Certainly older than he was, older than Vicky: but he had, apart from his mouth, the kind of lined, small-featured face which stays for years in the indeterminate mid-twenties. He was taking two drinks to our one, but there again his physical temperament was odd. He showed the effect of alcohol when he had finished his first glass — and then drank hard, and didn’t show much more effect, for hours to come. He seemed to live, when quite sober, two drinks over par: with alcohol, he climbed rapidly to four over par, and stayed there.

They were talking about doctoring.

“I’ve always thought I should have enjoyed it,” Margaret was saying to Vicky. “I often envy you.”

“I don’t know about that,” said Vicky.

“Oh, you must.”

“No,” Vicky persisted with her stubborn honesty. “I don’t think I had a vocation. It’s a job—”

“It’s a job where you’re doing some good, though.”

“You don’t feel that so much if you’re dealing with outpatients nine to five,” said Vicky. “I might have enjoyed being a children’s doctor. Because they’re going to get better, most of them.”

“Maurice’s father was just that. Is just that. Did you know?” I put in. It was easier for me to say it than for Margaret.

“Yes, I should have liked it too,” Margaret said.

“But you don’t need to be too disappointed if Maurice doesn’t, isn’t that right?” Pat turned to her again. “You’re sure you haven’t been guiding him, without meaning too?”

He told her that might be why Maurice couldn’t — really couldn’t, for all his sweetness and good will — force himself to work. Did Margaret believe it? Perhaps she would have liked to. And, though Pat was continuing to efface himself, he would have liked to believe it too. For in secret, and sometimes not so much in secret, he put the blame for his own academic disasters down to his father’s fault. If Martin hadn’t wanted him to be a scholarly success–

As we sat at the dinner table, Pat continued to talk comfortingly to Margaret. I didn’t interrupt. As Margaret knew, or would remember when the euphoria had dropped, I couldn’t accept those consoling explanations: but I didn’t propose to break the peace of the evening. As for Vicky, it was the peace of the evening that she was basking in. Pat was doing well. He was being listened to. They didn’t go to many dinner parties with middle-aged couples. It was all unexacting and safe. It was like a foretaste of marriage.

Happily, Vicky put in another word about child-doctoring. It had improved, out of comparison, since before the war. Children’s health was better in all classes. It was lucky to have been born in the 1950s. Then she mentioned that people a mile or so from my father’s house would next week be escorting their children back and forth from school. A boy of eight had disappeared a day or two before, there was a wave of anxiety going round. “I hope they find him,” said Vicky.

Margaret remarked that once, when Maurice was a child, she had been beside herself when he was an hour late. Then Pat broke in and told her another story of Maurice at Cambridge.

While Pat and Margaret talked to each other, Vicky was able to pass some information on to me. Her glance sometimes left me and flicked across the table: she wanted a smile, she gave a smile back: but that didn’t prevent her telling me the news. It was worrying news, and she had to tell me before the evening was over. But she didn’t sound worried, her words were responsible while her face was not. Anyway, she had gathered (not, so far as I could learn, from Leonard Getliffe) that there might shortly be another resolution before the Court. The three academics, Leonard and two others, who had kept away from the vote of confidence, were growing more dissatisfied. At the least, they wanted some definition of the Vice-Chancellor’s powers. No, they were being careful, they were hoping to find a technique that didn’t hurt him — but they meant business.

Did Arnold know? I asked. He was quite oblivious, Vicky said. She tried to warn him, but he behaved as though he didn’t want to know.

Would I make sure to come to the next Court? That was on the day of the congregation in October? Yes, I said, I intended to come.

“You might be able to make him understand,” she said.

“I doubt it.”

“You may have to tell him the truth.”

I swore.

“But you will come? You promise me?”

“Of course I’ll come.”

She was content. After that, we returned to the drawing-room, and were chatting like a family circle when, towards ten o’clock, Maurice came in. He kissed his mother, kissed Vicky, then sank down into an armchair with a tired easygoing sigh. When Margaret asked him, he said that he had been sitting with a schizophrenic patient all afternoon. It took a bit of effort, he said: until this holiday he hadn’t known what schizophrenia could mean. He was wearing a shabby suit, his face — unlined in spite of his fatigue — pallid by the side of Pat’s doggy vigour. Margaret had a plate of sandwiches ready for him, and he began to scoff them. He glanced at Pat, who was by this time at least his customary four drinks over par. “I’m a long way behind, aren’t I?” said Maurice, with his objective smile. Margaret gave him a stiff whisky, which he put down at speed.

“Better,” he said. It surprised some people, but he wasn’t at all ascetic about alcohol. Whether he was ascetic about sex, I couldn’t (it was strange to be so baffled with someone one had watched since infancy) have sworn.

Before long, he and Pat and Vicky were talking together. Any one of them was easy with Margaret or me, didn’t feel, or let us feel, the gap of a generation: but together they were drawn by a gravitational pull. Curiously, their voices got softer, even Pat’s, which could be strident when he was confronting his elders. Was it fancy, or did they and their friends whisper to each other more than we used to do?

Yes, Maurice said to them, he would be going back to Cambridge in a fortnight to “have another bash”. A singular phrase, I thought, for that gentle young man, not one which the professionals in the family would find encouraging. Vicky was giving him some advice about medical examinations. Maurice listened acceptantly and patiently. Soon he switched off: what were they going to do? Well, Vicky said, her holiday would be over in a few days, she’d be returning to the hospital. Pat said that he’d be staying in London: he’d got some sort of job (it sounded as though he had collected a little money too), he’d be able to paint at nights and weekends.

“You’ll be separated again, won’t you?” said Maurice.

“It can’t be helped,” said Vicky.

“How do you manage?”

“Oh, we have to manage,” she said.

“I suppose,” said Maurice, “you get on the phone and tell each other when you’re free.”

He meant — so I thought — that it was Pat who told her when he was free.

“It’s nice when we do see each other,” said Pat, just as evenly as Maurice was speaking.

“I should have thought,” said Maurice, “that it was an awful strain.”

“We’re getting used to it,” she said.

“Are you?”

“Are you worried about me, Maurice?” Vicky asked.

“Yes, I am.” He answered with absolute naturalness.

“Oh, look, I’m pretty tough.”

“I don’t think you ought to rely on that for ever. Either of you.”

He spoke to Pat. “What do you think?”

Pat replied, with no edge in his voice: “Perhaps you’re right.”

At dinner there hadn’t been a word about their plans, partly because Pat was repressing all his own concerns, partly because neither Margaret nor I felt we could intrude. But Maurice hadn’t been so delicate, and no one was upset. It might be a happy love affair, but he had picked up (as, in fact, we had also, in the midst of happiness and peace) that there was something inconclusive in the air. As for their plans, they seemed that night to have none at all. So Maurice, less involved in this world than any of us, told them that it was time they got married.

To me, as I listened to the quiet voices, the odd thing was how they took it. Pat: with no sign of resentment, as though it were a perfectly reasonable conversation about how they were going to get back to Islington when they left the flat. Well, Pat wasn’t touchy. But Vicky? She too wasn’t resentful, or even apprehensive. She seemed to take it as a token of kindness, but not really relevant to her and Pat. She might have been nervous about this intervention, if she hadn’t been so certain that, just because she and Pat were themselves, in due course he would marry her. She had, I thought, a kind of obstinacy which no one outside could budge — obstinacy or else a faith (it was here, and nowhere else, that she showed something like conceit) in her own judgment.

Anyway, the three of them remained on the best of terms, and Maurice and Pat had another drink or two before the end of the evening.

When Maurice had gone back to Cambridge and Margaret and I were alone, she reminded me more than once of that initiative of his. She was proud of how uninhibited he was, particularly when she was worrying about him again. And also she thought he had been right. She was a little ashamed of herself, of course, for having been softened by Pat’s blarney. She was, like Maurice, altogether on Vicky’s side. It would be bad for her if the affair dragged on like this.

So we talked, on pleasant October evenings. There wasn’t much on our minds. I was working hard, but not obsessively. On a Friday night Charles rang up, according to habit, from school. All well. I told him that, the following Wednesday, I had to go to the University Court and Congregation. “Multiplying mummery,” came the deep mocking voice over the wire. Politics too, I said. That’s more like it, said Charles.

The next morning I woke up, drowsy with well-being, looking forward as I came to consciousness to a leisurely weekend alone with Margaret. I was lying on my right, and through a gap in the curtains the misty morning light came in over the Tyburn gardens. As I looked at the gap, I noticed — no, I didn’t notice, it hit me like a jolt in a jet plane 30,000 feet up, the passage up to that instant purring with calm — a veil over the corner of my left eye. A black veil, sharp-edged. I blinked. The veil disappeared: I felt a flood of reassurance. I looked again. The veil was there, covering perhaps a quarter of the eye, not more.

Margaret was sleeping like a child. I got out of bed and went to the window, pulling a little of one curtain back. Outside was a tranquil autumn haze. It was the kind of morning in which, years before, it had been good to be back in England after a holiday abroad. On my left side, the black edge cut out the haze. I blinked. I went on testing one eye, then the other. It was like pressing on a tooth to make sure it is still aching. The veil remained. Now that I was looking out into the full light, there was a penumbra, orange-brown, along its edge, through which I had some sort of swirling half-vision, as through blurred smoked glass. The veil itself was impenetrable. No pain.

I tiptoed out to the bathroom, and looked at myself in the glass. A familiar eye looked back. There wasn’t a mark on it, the iris was bright, the white wasn’t bloodshot. The lines in my face had deepened, that was all.

I went back to bed, trying to steady myself. I was more frightened, or not so much frightened as nervously exposed, than I liked being. Later on, people made excuses for me, told me it wasn’t so unnatural: the eye is close to the central nervous system, and so, they said cheeringly, eye afflictions often have their psychological effects. But I wasn’t thinking of explanations or excuses then. All I wanted was to talk sensibly to Margaret.

She was still sleeping. As a rule, she slept heavily in the early morning, and woke confused. Again I left the bed, found our housekeeper already stirring, and asked for breakfast as soon as she could bring it. Then I sat looking down at my wife. I said, “I’m sorry, but I should like you to wake up now.”

11: Objectivity?

AS I put my hand on her shoulder, she struggled through a dream, through layers of sleep. She managed to say, is anything the matter? I replied that a cup of tea would be arriving soon. She asked the time, and when I told her, said that it was too early. I said that I was just a little worried. What about, she said, still not awake, then suddenly she caught my tone of voice. What about? she said, only to act, slipping out of bed into her dressing gown, watching me, her face wide open.

While she had a cup of tea, smoked her first cigarette, I described my symptoms. Or rather my symptom, for there was only the one. “What can it be?” said Margaret. I was asking her the same thing. For a moment we looked at each other, each suspecting that the other had some guess or secret knowledge. Then we knew that we were equally lost.

She didn’t think of saying that it might pass. We were too much at one for that. Over breakfast she was wondering what advice we could get. Clearly we needed an eye specialist. What about the man whose son was at Charles’ school? No sooner had she thought of the name than she was riffling through the telephone directory. Mansel. Harley Street. No answer there. Home address. She got through, and, listening, I gathered that Mr Mansel was away. At an eye surgeons’ conference in Stockholm. He would be back very late tomorrow, Sunday, night.

“That’s probably time enough,” I said.

She said: “I want to know what you’ve got.”

I argued, with the perverse obstinacy of shock, that he was said to be first rate and that at casual meetings we had both liked him. We could ring him up on Monday morning: that would, I said again, be time enough.

“I want to know,” she said. Couldn’t we find a doctor who might have an idea? The curious thing was, we couldn’t really be said to have a doctor. Since my breakdown as a young man, I had been, apart from bouts of lumbago, abnormally healthy: so had she been, and she hadn’t yet entered the change of life. So far as we had a doctor, it was my old friend Charles March, but he hadn’t visited us professionally for something like ten years.

Still, she would talk to him, she said. Once more I listened to her on the telephone. Dr March was on holiday, was he? Back in a fortnight? He had a locum, of course? Could she have his telephone number?

“No, leave it now,” I said.

She did not mention the name of her first husband. He was an excellent doctor, she had complete faith in him — but no, she couldn’t, she couldn’t disturb, not the peace of the moment, but the insulation of the moment in which we sat together.

But there were other doctors. Later it seemed to us inexplicable — or out of character for either of us, especially her, so active and protective — that we spoke to none of them through that long weekend. She was used to a kind of pointless stoicism which sometimes, in bad trouble, came over me. As a rule, if we expected harsh news, she wanted to find out the worst and get it over: my instinct was to wait, it would come soon enough, other miseries had passed and so might this. That weekend, though, she behaved as I did myself. I was worried enough but, perhaps because I had a physical malaise to preoccupy me, she was worse. For once, she did not want to brave it out and discover our fate.

During the morning, I went into the study and found her there. In a hurry, she put her hand over what she was reading. It was a medical dictionary. I had come for exactly the same purpose. I gave her a smile. It was the sort of grim joke old Gay’s saga men would have enjoyed. She smiled back, but she was having to control her face.

Before lunch we went for a walk in the park. It was a day of absolute calm, the sun warm enough to tinge the skin, the mist still lying in the hollows. The grass smelt as welcoming as on a morning in childhood. Margaret, clutching my arm, was watching me shut and open my left eye.

“How is it?”

“No better,” I said. In fact, it was worse. The veil had spread and now covered between a third and a half of the eye. The orange penumbra flickered dizzily as I tried to gaze into the benign autumn sky. When I closed the eye, I could walk as comfortably as on the afternoon before, the time that Margaret and I had taken a stroll in the same beautiful weather.

It was a long weekend. I couldn’t write or even read: as for looking at television, that became an exercise in calculating whether the veil was creeping further. We talked a good deal, but only about what had happened to us, us together, us alone. Those we were interested in, or responsible for, we didn’t talk about at all. The exchanges of habit, as soothing as a domestic animal one loved, those we had thrown away: not a word about Charles’ next Sunday at home. Some time before the Sunday morning Margaret had made her own diagnosis. I didn’t ask to know it. And yet at moments, as in all strain, time played tricks. We were back on Friday evening, having our drinks after Charles’ telephone call. This hadn’t happened. And then Margaret was watching me as I opened my eye.

On Monday morning, after a drugged and broken night, I woke early. I found Margaret looking at me. With a start I stared at the window. The veil was black: no larger, but like a presence on the nerves. I turned towards her, and said: “Well, we shall soon know.”

“Yes, we shall,” she said, steady by now.

When could I decently ring this man up? She was even prepared to smile at the “decently”: now the time had come, we had something to do.

Over breakfast we decided on nine o’clock. But when I tried his office, I heard that he had been in hospital since six. “Mr Mansel gets on without much sleep,” said his secretary, with proprietorial pride. I could get him there: which, fretted by the delays, in time I did.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t arrive home till late last night. They gave me your message.” The voice was brisk, light, professional. “What’s gone wrong with your eye?”

I told him. “That’s a very clear description,” the voice said with approval, rather as though I were a medical student walking the wards and making a report. I had better see him that morning. He was doing an operation at 9.30. He would be at Harley Street by 11.30. Too early for me?

No, not too early, we thought as the minutes dragged. I couldn’t block out the bad eye enough to read the newspapers. Margaret went through them for me: nothing much: a Kennedy speech: oh yes, the body of that child who was missing, the one in your home town, that’s just been found, poor boy: an old acquaintance called Lord Bridgwater (once Horace Timberlake) had died on Saturday. We were not interested. Margaret sat beside me in silence and held my hand.

Just as, still silent, she held my hand in the taxi on the way to Harley Street. It was only a quarter-of-an-hour’s trip from the north side of the park. We hadn’t been able to discipline ourselves; we arrived at 11.10. No, Mr Mansel wasn’t in yet: empty waiting-room, the smell of magazines, old furniture, the smell of waiting. All Margaret said was that, when he examined me, she wanted to be there.

At last the secretary entered, comely, hygienic, and led us in. Mansel was standing up, greeting me like a young man to an older; the room was sparkling with optical instruments, and Mansel himself was as sharp as an electronic engineer. Although our sons were in the same year at school, he was not more than forty, tall, thin, handsome in an avian fashion. Did he mind my wife staying? Not in the least. He showed her to a chair, me to another beside his desk. He had in front of him a card about me, name, age, address, clearly filled up: he asked a question.

“Should you say your general health was good?”

I hesitated. “I suppose so,” I said with reluctance, as though I were tempting fate.

No illnesses? Latest medical examination? Long ago. “Then we won’t waste any time on that,” he said with impersonal cheerfulness, and chose, out of a set of gadgets, what looked no more complicated than a single lens. Left eye? Firm fingers on my cheek, lens inches away, face close to mine. His eyes, preternaturally large, like a close-up on the screen, peered down: one angle, another, a third.

He took perhaps a minute, maybe less.

“It’s quite straightforward,” he said. “You’ve got a detached retina.”

“Thank God for that,” I heard Margaret say.

“As a matter of fact,” he said coolly, “I could have diagnosed it over the telephone.”

“If you had,” I said, sarcastic with relief, “it would have saved us a bad couple of hours.”

“Why, what did you think it was?”

Margaret and I glanced at each other with something like shame. Ridiculous fears we hadn’t spoken. Fears uninformed. Fears out of the medical dictionary. Brain tumour, and the rest.

Mansel was speaking as though cross with us.

“I understand. It’s easy to imagine things.” Actually, he was cross with himself. He hadn’t been sensitive enough. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He wasn’t only a technician, I thought, he was a good doctor. From her corner by the surgical couch, Margaret broke out: “Mr Rochester.”

“What?” I said.

“He must have had exactly your condition. Don’t you remember?”

The point seemed to me well taken. Mansel found this conversation incomprehensible, and got down to business. He would have to operate, of course. What were the chances? I asked. Quite good. Statistically, I pressed him. Not worse than 75 per cent, not better than 85 per cent, he said with singular confidence. I wasn’t to expect too much: they ought to be able to give me back peripheral vision.

“What does that mean?”

“You won’t be able to read with it. But you’ll have some useful sight.”

If he could have operated on Saturday, he said, in an objective tone, just after the eye went, he might possibly have done better: it was too late now. Still, he had better get me into hospital that afternoon, and perform next morning.

“That’s a little difficult,” I said. To myself, my voice sounded as objective as his. I felt collected, exaggeratedly collected, as though, after the anticlimax, I had to compete on equal terms.

“Why is it difficult?”

I said that I had an engagement on Wednesday which I was anxious to keep. He interrogated me. I explained that I wouldn’t have thought twice about the formal ceremony at the university, but there was a Court meeting which I had given a serious promise to attend. Margaret, her face intent but hard to read, knew that I was referring to Vicky and her father.

“Some promises have to be broken,” said Mansel.

“I’ve got some responsibility this time. Some personal responsibility, you understand.”

“Well, I can’t judge that. But I’ve got to give you medical advice. You ought to have this operation tomorrow. The longer we put it off, the worse the chances are. I’ve got to tell you that.”

He was a strong-willed man. Somehow I had half-memories of the times I had clashed with men like this, both struggling for what I used to think of as the moral initiative.

“I’m not going to be unreasonable,” I said. “But you must be definite about the chances. Is that fair?”

“I’ll be as definite as I can.”

“If we delay three days, what difference will it really make?”

“Some.”

“Would it, say, halve the chances? In that case, of course, it’s off.”

His will was crossed by his professional honesty. He gave a frosty smile.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Well then. Can you put it into figures again? Tomorrow you said it would be an 8o per cent chance. What would it be on Thursday?”

“A little worse.”

“How much worse?” I said.

“Perhaps 10 per cent.”

“Not more than 10 per cent?” I went on, “Less rather than more?”

“Yes,” said Mansel without palaver. “I should say that was true. Less rather than more.”

Then I asked, would he mind if I had a word with my wife alone? With his courtesy which was both professional and youthful, he said that he would be delighted: he was sure she would be the wisest of us all.

We looked into the waiting-room, but there were by now several people in it. So, her fingers interwoven with mine, we walked up and down the pavement outside the house. The mist had lifted, the air was pearly bright.

“Well,” I said, “what do I do?”

“I must say,” said Margaret, “I’d be happier to see you tucked up in hospital.”

“And yet, if you were me, you wouldn’t even hesitate, would you?”

“That’s a bit unkind.”

“No. The idea that you wouldn’t take a tiny bit of risk—”

She understood, without question, that I wasn’t being quixotic, as she might have been. If she had been asked, she might have said that I was showing defiance, taking my revenge for feeling helpless. In both of us as we grew older, there emerged a streak of recklessness which she had always had and which I loved in her. But this wasn’t a time, we took it for granted, to discuss motives. We had both got tired of the paralysis of subjectivism, when every action became about as good or about as bad as any other, provided that you could lucubrate it away.

She knew that if she asked me to go into hospital that night, I should do so. She understood me, and didn’t ask.

We returned to Mansel’s consulting-room. He stood up, polite and active, looking expectantly at Margaret.

“No,” I said. “I’m at your service any time from Thursday morning.”

“Right,” said Mansel, without a blink or sign of disapproval. “You’ll go in some time that afternoon, will you? I’ll deal with you early on Friday.”

12: Monocular Vision

WITH Margaret there to look after me, I arrived at the university robing-room half-an-hour before the morning ceremony. She had fitted me with a patch which shut out my left eye, and when Francis Getliffe saw it — he was already dressed in his cancellarial regalia — he walked across to us, frowning with concern. When Margaret explained what had happened, he said angrily: “You ought never to have come.”

“Francis,” I said, “you know perfectly well why I’ve come.” On the agenda for the Court that afternoon, over which he was to preside, there was an innocent-looking item standing in his son’s name. Shaw still hadn’t picked up the significance, so far as I had heard: but Francis knew, so did the group of young professors, and so did I.

We couldn’t speak any more, the room was bumbling with a kind of Brownian movement of human beings in fancy dress. Scarlet hoods, azure hoods, chef-like hats of French universities: hoods of this university, all invented by Shaw himself, one of which, the DSc, was a peculiarly startling yellow-gold. Soon I was in fancy dress myself, regarding the scene with monocular detachment: I could see perfectly well, as well as with two eyes, but somehow the sheer fact of physical accident kept me in a bubble of my own. People I knew, Shaw, Leonard Getliffe, Geary, did not look quite real. Nor did my old acquaintance, Lord Lufkin, who, since he was to be invested with a hood later in the morning, stood subfusc, among the blur of colours, in a black gown. He was well into his seventies by this time, and had at last been persuaded, or perhaps financially coerced, into retiring. But that hadn’t taken the edge off his public persona. He had taken to going about with someone I saw at his side in this milling, behooded mob; a man of fifty who acted as something like Lufkin’s herald, producing pearls of wisdom from Lufkin’s past, while the master himself stood by in non-participating silence.

That morning we came together in the crush. Untypically, Lufkin kissed Margaret’s cheek. “I’m glad to see your charming bride,” said Lufkin, who disapproved of American business idioms and often used them.

He was not above taking an interest in my misfortunes. Once more we had to explain.

“If they’re going to use the knife on you,” said Lufkin creakingly, “you’d better get the best man in London. I always believe in getting the best man in London.”

“He’s always said that,” said the herald, pink-faced, well-tubbed, plump beside his hero’s bones.

“Who is your man, then?” Lufkin said.

I produced the name of Mansel.

“Never heard of him,” said Lufkin, as though that removed Mansel from the plane of all created things.

After a patch of conversational doldrums, he had another thought.

“I have it,” he said. He turned to the herald. “Go and ring up —” Lufkin gave the name of the President of the Royal College of Surgeons — “and find out how this fellow’s thought of.”

The herald trotted off. The curious thing was, as Margaret and I had discovered, that he was a successful solicitor, and not Lufkin’s solicitor at that. He had appointed himself Lufkin’s handyman, not for money or any other sort of benefit (Lufkin’s patronage had gone by now), but just because he loved it.

Lufkin considered that he had done his duty to me, and passed on. His parting shot, as he gazed at some honorary graduands, was: “I never have believed in giving people degrees they haven’t worked for.”

In which case, one would have thought, he ought not to have been present to receive one himself that morning. Most men would have thought so: but not Lufkin.

The academic procession got into line, a mace-bearer led us, caps dipping, hoods glaring, into the university hall. It might have been any one of two thousand academic processions that year in the English-speaking world, all copied, or not so much copied as refabricated, from processions of corporations of clergymen four hundred years before. It wasn’t really a tradition, it was manmade. Manmade, not woman-made, Margaret used to say: women couldn’t have kept their faces straight long enough to devise colleges and clubs, the enclaves and rituals which men took shelter in.

Anyway, with solemnity this particular ritual pattered on. We climbed up the steps on to the platform, we took off our caps to Francis Getliffe, Francis Getliffe took off his cap to us. We sat down. For a moment or two the order of proceedings was interrupted, for some students had become amused by the patch over my eye and started to cheer. Then Francis Getliffe delivered the invocation: more standing up, sitting down, taking off of caps.

At last the public orator was beginning to make his speech in praise of Lufkin. The orator stood towards the edge of the dais, and Lufkin, standing opposite, did not turn his face towards him. Lufkin just remained there, immutable, with an assessing expression — just as he used to sit at his own table, in the days of his industrial power, surrounded by his court of cherubim and seraphim. He listened now, as he used to listen then, to the story of his virtues and achievements, as though he could, if he felt inclined, point out where certain important features were being omitted. About his virtues, Lufkin’s view of his own character was different from any other person’s: about his achievements, the maddening thing was, he was right. He made his claims for himself, and he sounded like, and perhaps sometimes was, a megalomaniac: yet objectively the claims were a little less than the truth.

Lufkin was duly hooded, the citations fluted on, an orientalist was being celebrated: I was only half-listening, with my eye regarding David Rubin, whose turn was still to come. At each academic pun, a smile crossed his clever sad Disraelian face. One might have thought that he enjoyed this kind of jocularity or that he was intoxicated by the occasion, never having been honoured before. If one did think either of those things, one couldn’t have been more wrong. I had known him for a good many years, and I sometimes thought that I now knew him less than at our first meeting: but I did know one thing about him. He felt, underneath his beautiful courtesy, that his time was being wasted unless it was spent in his own family or with one or two colleagues whom he accepted as his equals. He had been adviser to governments, he had had all the honours in his own profession, he was courted by the smart, and he was so unassuming that they believed they were doing him a favour: it must have seemed, people said, a long way from his Yiddish momma in Brooklyn. Not a bit of it. His skin was like parchment, there were panda-like colorations under his eyes, he had never looked satisfied either with existence or himself. But, satisfied or not, Rubin was one of the aristocrats of this world. He walked among us, he was superlatively polite, and (like Margaret’s forebears) he didn’t give a damn.

Another citation; looking out over the hall, I felt, or imagined, that my sound eye was getting tired. I didn’t observe that a note was being passed up to Lufkin: in fact, during that ceremony no one but Lufkin would have had a note passed to him. I was surprised to be tapped on the arm by my neighbour and be given a piece of paper. On it was written, in a great sprawling hand, the simple inscription: Mansel is all right. L.

Rubin, last on the list, had returned to his seat with his scroll; Francis Getliffe gave the valedictory address, and Margaret led me away. I had begged myself off the mass luncheon, and she and I ate sandwiches in an office. I told her, not that she needed telling, that I should be glad when the Court was over. She knew that I couldn’t rely on my energy that afternoon, that I, who had been to so many committees, was nervous before this one.

Because I was nervous, I arrived in the Court room too early, and sat there alone. I read over the agenda: it was a long time since any agenda had looked so meaningless. Item No. 7 read: Constitution of Disciplinary Committee. It would take a couple of hours to get down to it. Previously I had thought that Leonard Getliffe and his friends had been well-advised, the tactics were good: now the words became hazy and I couldn’t concentrate.

The others clattered in noisily from the luncheon, some of them rosy after their wine. Francis Getliffe took the ornamental chair, looking modestly civilian now that his golden robes were taken off. Arnold Shaw, flushed and bobbish, sat on his right hand. Francis was just going to rap on the table when his son came and whispered to me: “I’m very sorry that you had to come.” Civil of him, I thought without gratitude. Did he know that, if you are in any kind of conflict, the first law is — be present in the flesh?

Francis Getliffe cleared his throat and said that, before we began, he would like to say how sorry the entire Court was to hear of my misfortune, and how they all wished me total success in my operation. Several voices broke in with “my lord chairman”, saying how they wished to support that. I duly thanked them. Down below the words I was cursing them. Just as energy had seeped away, so had good nature. The last thing I could take was either commiseration or kind wishes.

As though at a distance from me, the meeting lumbered into its groove. Lumbered, perhaps, a little more quickly than usual, for Francis, though a stately chairman, was surreptitiously an impatient one. Someone by my side crossed, one by one, five items off. The sixth was Extension to Biology Building, and even Francis could not prevent the minutes ticking the afternoon away. The voices round me didn’t sound as though they could have enough of it. The UGC! Architects! Appeals! Claims of other subjects! Master building plan! Emotions were heated, the voices might have been talking about love or the preservation of peace. Of all the academic meetings I had attended, at least half the talking time, and much more than half the expense of spirit, had been consumed in discussions of building. Whatever would they do when all the buildings were put up? The answer, I thought, though not that afternoon, was simple: they would pull some down and start again.

At length I heard the problem being referred (by an exercise of firmness on Francis’ part) to the Buildings Sub-Committee. Sharply Francis called out “Item No. 7.” I gripped myself: I had to be with them now. It was hard to make the effort.

Focusing on Francis, I was puzzled that he didn’t ask the Vice-Chancellor to leave us. Whether Shaw knew it or not, he was going to be argued over.

Instead Francis gazed down the table.

“Professor Getliffe,” he said to his son, “I think you have something to say on this matter.”

“Yes, my lord chairman,” Leonard said to his father. “My colleagues and I want to suggest that we postpone it. We should like to postpone it until next term.”

“That would give me a chance,” said Shaw briskly, automatically (Good God, I was thinking again, still not reacting, how many months would he have survived in Whitehall?) “to send round a paper on the present arrangements for discipline. And how I propose to make one or two changes.”

“Thank you, Vice-Chancellor,” said Francis, who might have been thinking as I did. “Anyway,” he addressed the room, “I must say, I think there is some merit in Professor Getliffe’s suggestion, if it appeals to the Court. I know this seems an important piece of business to some of us, and it would be a mistake to rush it. I’m anxious that everyone should have the opportunity to give us his views. I believe Sir Lewis is interested, isn’t that so?”

“Yes, I am rather interested.”

“Well then. We hope you’ll be able to attend the Court next term. Completely recovered. Then I shall propose we might set aside the first part of the meeting for this business. We shall very much want to hear your opinion.”

I said, yes, I should try to attend the Court. In temper, in ultimate let-down, I could keep to the official language. Would anyone to whom the official language might as well have been Avar or Estonian, realise that they were considering me, that this was a put-up job between father and son?

Leaving the meeting in time to escape conversation, I got a university car to myself to take me to the Residence. There, among the smell of leather (to me an anxious smell), I sat in a state both harsh-tempered and depressed. The let-down, yes. The wasted effort, yes. The physical discomfort, yes. But this was a state, concealed from others, that I used to know, and didn’t often now. The bizarre thing was, I had got my way. Through the Getliffes’ indulgence I had won Shaw four months’ grace. If I had been at my most competent, I shouldn’t have done better than that. I might easily have done much worse (there would be time, there was still the residue of a planner working within me, to lobby Denis Geary and some of the others). I should never know whether — if the Getliffes hadn’t treated me with pity — I could have made my effort that afternoon at all.

When Margaret saw me enter our bedroom at the Residence, she said, “You’ve been doing too much.” I said, “I’ve been doing nothing at all.” Before I told her the story, she made me lie on the bed: then, reassured, she let me talk. This time I wasn’t using the official language: Margaret was used to me when I wasn’t giving events the benefit of the doubt. She sat beside me, looking down with a curious expression, clear-eyed.

She told me it was six o’clock, nearly time to dress for the dinner that night. Was I going to be able to manage it? I nodded. She didn’t protest: she just remarked that a drink would help, and she would find one. Soon she returned, with Arnold Shaw following her, in his shirt sleeves and carrying a tray, eupeptic, enjoying himself as butler. He poured a large whisky for her, and an even larger one for me. He splashed in soda, spooned the ice. Then, as he picked up the tray, ready to depart, he said to me, with a wise reproving frown: “It was irresponsible of you. To come here today. It was irresponsible, you know.”

The door shut behind him, brisk executive feet pattered down the passage. I took a gulp at my glass, and then I laughed. It was a sour laugh, but it was at least a laugh.

Margaret joined in. “I’ve been wanting to do that for quite some time,” she said. “I’ve been wondering just when you wouldn’t mind.”

Since I couldn’t knot a tie easily one-eyed, she did it for me, and I went down before her into the drawing-room. David Rubin and Francis Getliffe had already arrived, and as I joined them Rubin was saying that sometimes, this autumn, he had felt his intellectual analysis might be wrong. He meant, his analysis of the chances of peace. It had always been blacker than either of ours, more pessimistic than that of anyone we met. Yet he knew as much as we did, and more. He said he was inclined to trust his analysis, not his feelings: said it with a shrug and began to cachinnate. He was not the lightest of company when the cachinnation broke out and he was predicting the worst. Still, he said, sometimes he felt he might be wrong. If so, he went on sarcastically, it wouldn’t be any thanks to people like us. We had, all three of us, done our best, we had spent months and years of our lives, we had tried to find ways of action. It hadn’t affected the situation, said Rubin, by.001 of 1 %. If things did go right, it would be no thanks to us: it would be due to something as random and as incalculable as a change in the weather.

Others came up to us. Francis was being less fatalistic, when David Rubin took me aside. In a corner of the room he indicated my patched eye and said: “This is a nuisance, Lewis.”

It sounded brusque. But it wasn’t so. He looked at me with monkey-sad eyes, incongruous above his immaculate dinner jacket (his colleagues gossiped, why should a man of his morbid pessimism appear to be competing as the Best Dressed Man of the Year?). His eyes were sad, his nerve ends were as fine as Margaret’s. He wasn’t going to harass me with sympathy, or with alternative plans for surgical treatment.

“Yes,” I said, without any bluff.

“These retinas are getting rather common.”

I asked him why.

“Quite simple. We’re all living longer, that’s all. You’ve got to expect bits of the machine to break down.”

He had judged it right, he was being a support.

“You’ve played your luck, you know,” he said.

He went on: he had a check-up every six months. When did I last have a check-up?

I said something about American hypochondria.

“Maybe,” said Rubin, with astringent comradeship. “They’ll find something sooner or later. Let’s see, you’re ten years older than I am. But remember, I did my best work before I was thirty. I bet you, I’ve felt older than you have — I bet you I have done for years.”

But, when we had gone into dinner, the courses clattering in the most lucullan of all Arnold Shaw’s feasts, I sat with Rubin’s brand of consolation wearing off. The amnesia of the first drinks wore off too: going into hospital next day, I had to stop drinking early in the meal, though I didn’t want to. The mechanics of politeness jangled on: I turned from the honorary graduate’s wife on my right to the one on my left and back again: they found me dull: I just wanted the day to end.

There was one diversion, though. Vicky had led the women out, and the rest of us had reseated ourselves at Shaw’s end of the table. Shaw was in excelsis. He had made four distinguished scholars honorary graduates. There was also Lufkin, who had been forced upon him by the engineers, but still he was good enough. Shaw saw them all round him. He was a man of uncomplicated pleasures, and he was content. He was also content because he had given them splendid wine, and drunk a good deal of it himself. Again, Lufkin was an exception. True to his bleak rule, he had drunk one whisky before dinner, another with the meal, and now, while the others were enjoying Shaw’s port, he allowed himself a third. But it was he who dominated the table. He was explaining certain circumstances, to him still astonishing though they had happened a couple of years before, surrounding his retirement.

“I decided it was right to go. Before there was any risk of being a liability to my people. Not that I wasn’t still at my best, or I should have got out long before.” He sat there skull-faced, still youthful-looking for a man in his late seventies. He delivered himself as though indifferent to his audience, completely absorbed in his own drama, projecting it like something of transcendental importance and objective truth.

“What do you imagine happened?” It was the kind of rhetorical question no one could answer, yet by which men as experienced as Rubin and Francis Getliffe were hypnotised.

“Nothing happened.” Lufkin answered himself with stony satisfaction.

He went on: “I made that industry.” It sounded gigantesque: it was quite true. He had possessed supreme technological insight and abnormal will. He had made an industry, not a fortune. He had more than enough money for his needs, but he had nothing to spend it on. By the standards of his industrial colleagues, he was not a rich man. “I made that industry, and everything inside it. I used to tell my people, I am your best friend. And they knew, I was their best friend.”

Heads, hypnotised, were nodding.

“What did they do?” Silence again. Again Lufkin answered himself. “Nothing.” He spoke with greater confidence than ever. “When any of my managers retired, the whole works turned out. When my deputy retired, the whole organisation sent a testimonial. What did they do for me?”

This time he didn’t give an answer. He said: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”

He repeated: “I wasn’t hurt. I was surprised.”

When we joined the women, it was only minutes before Margaret spoke to Vicky and Arnold Shaw and took me off to bed. Alone in our room, I said to her: “Paul Lufkin is lonely.” I was wondering, how used were the others to this singular display of emotion? Horizontal fission, we used to call it. Lufkin sincerely believed that he wasn’t hurt. And yet, even he must realise at least that he felt lost. After great power for forty years, power all gone. After a lifetime of action, nothing to do. Once he had talked of retiring to Monaco. Now, so far as I knew, he lived in Surrey and came to London once a week for the committee of a charity. “Paul Lufkin is lonely,” I said.

“He’s not the only one,” said Margaret.

I asked what she meant.

“Didn’t you realise that Vicky was waiting for a telephone call all night, poor girl?”

In the solipsist bubble in which I had gone through that day, I had scarcely noticed her.

“Did she hear?”

Margaret shook her head.

“That nephew of yours. I’m afraid he’s throwing her over, don’t you think so?”

“It doesn’t look good.” I was sitting on the bed, just having taken off the eyepatch. I was trying to speak about Vicky, but the black edge cut out the light, the orange fringe was giddily swimming, and I let out that complaint only for myself.

13: Homage to Superstition

THE next morning, tea trays on our bed, Margaret sketched out the day’s timetable. There was a train just after one, we could be in London in a couple of hours: that would bring us to the hospital before tea. The less time I had in the dark, the better, I said. I knew that I should have to lie on my back, both eyes blindfolded, to give the retina hours to settle down.

When I had agreed to Margaret’s programme, I said: “In that case, I think I’d like to see my old father this morning.”

For an instant, she was caught open-mouthed, her looks dissolved in blank astonishment. Her own relation with her father had been so responsible. She had sometimes been shocked by mine. She had never seen me in search of a father, either a real one or a surrogate, in all our time together. She gazed at me. She gave a sharp-eyed, intimate smile and said: “You know, it isn’t much more than having a few teeth out, you do know that?”

It sounded like free association gone mad, but her eyes were lit up. To others I seemed more rational than most men; not to her. She had lived with a streak of superstitiousness in me as deep as my mother’s, though more suppressed. She had watched me book in, year after year, at the same New York hotel, because there I had heard of a major piece of luck. She had learned how I dreaded any kind of pleasure on a Tuesday night because one such evening I had enjoyed myself and faced stark horror on the Wednesday morning. Sometimes, in fact, I infected her. She wasn’t sorry, she was relieved, to hear this atavistic desire of mine. It might be a longish operation, Margaret had said: there was a shrinking from unconsciousness which was atavistic too. She, as well as I, wasn’t disinclined to make an act of piety, to make this sort of insurance for which one prays as a child. The fact that it was an incongruous act of piety might have deterred her, she had more sense of the fitness of things, but she took me in my freedom, and didn’t wish it to deter me.

So, by the middle of the morning, she had said our goodbyes, and we were driving out through the backstreets along which, the preceding spring, I had walked with Charles. The cluster of shops, the chapel, the gentle rise. When I was a boy, cars didn’t pass those terraced windows once a day; and even that morning, when the university Daimler stopped outside Aunt Milly’s old house, there were curious eyes from the “entry” opposite.

I led Margaret in by the back way. Passing the window of my father’s room, I stood on tiptoe but could see only darkness. When I went up the steps to the French window, I found the room was empty. We returned along the passage. I rang at the familiar front door (pulling the hand bell, perhaps it was still the same bell, as when I came back one night, late from a school debate, found our own house empty and rang Aunt Milly’s bell: there was my mother pretending to laugh off a setback, lofty in her disappointed pride). The bell jangled. After a time footsteps sounded, and a middle-aged man in his shirt-sleeves opened the door. I had seen him before, but not spoken to him: he was always referred to by my father as Mr Sperry. He was called my father’s “lodger”, though he occupied the entire house except for the single room.

I told him my name and said that I was looking for my father. Mr Sperry chuckled. He was long and thin, with a knobbly Adam’s apple and a bush of hair. He had a kind, perplexed and slightly eccentric face. I thought I remembered hearing that he was a jobbing plumber.

“I expect the old gentleman’s doing his bit of shopping,” he said.

“When do you think he’ll be back?”

Mr Sperry shook his head. “It’s wonderful how he does for himself,” he said. He had the most gentle manners: but it was clear that, though he had occupied the house for ten years, he didn’t know much about my father, and was puzzled by what little he did know. “I can’t tell you when he’ll be home, I’m sure. Would you care to come in?”

I exchanged a glance with Margaret. I said we hadn’t many minutes, there was a train to catch, we’d just hang about outside for a little while. That was true: and yet, kind as Mr Sperry was, he was a stranger, and I didn’t want to sit in childhood’s rooms with him.

Standing outside the car, Margaret and I smoked cigarettes. It would be bad to miss my father now. I kept looking along the road to the library, down the rise to the chapel. Then Margaret said: “I think that’s him, isn’t it?”

I was watching the other direction. She was pointing to a tiny figure who had just turned into sight, by the chapel railings.

She wasn’t certain. Her eyes were perfect: she could make out that small figure as I could not: but she couldn’t be certain because, owing to my father’s singularity, she had met him only twice.

Slowly, with small steps, the figure toddled on. Yes, it was my father. At last I saw him clearly. He was wearing a bowler hat, beneath which silky white hair flowed over his ears: his overcoat was much too long for him, and his trousers, as wide as an old-fashioned Russian’s, billowed over his boots. At each short step, a foot turned outwards at forty-five degrees. He was singing, quite loudly, to himself. He seemed to be looking at nothing in particular. He was only four or five houses away when he noticed us.

“Well, I declare,” he said.

Away from him, how long was it since I had heard that phrase? It was like listening at a college meeting when I was a young man: one heard usages, long since dead, such as this one of my father’s, stretching back three generations. “I declare,” he repeated, gazing not at me but at Margaret, for he kept his appreciative eye for a good-looking woman.

I explained that we had had to attend a university function the day before, and thought we would look him up. It would be easier if he had a telephone, I grumbled.

“Confound it,” said my father, speaking like a national figure who would not dare to have an entry in the directory, “I should never have a minute’s peace. Anyway—” he fumbled over Margaret’s name, which he had forgotten, but went on in triumph — “You tracked me down, didn’t you? Here you are as large as life and twice as natural.”

We followed him in, down the passage again, up the steps to the French window, saying that we would stay just a quarter-of-an-hour. In the dark odorous little room, my father switched on a light. To my mother, who had never seen it in that house or her own, electric light had been one of the symbols of a higher existence: and anyone who thought that proved her unspiritual didn’t know what the spirit was.

He offered to put the kettle on, and make us some tea. No, we didn’t want to drink tea at twelve o’clock in the morning. But he had to give us something. At last, with enormous gratification, he produced from a cupboard a bottle about one-third full of tawny port. “I’ve always liked a drop of port,” he told Margaret, and proceeded to tell her a story about going out with the waits at Christmas “when Lena was alive”, being invited into drawing-rooms and figuring as the hardened drinker of the party. That was one of the daydreams in which I didn’t believe. I looked out into the stone-flagged yard. There was a stump of a plum tree still surviving near his window. As far back as I could remember, that tree had never borne any fruit.

My father was talking with animation to Margaret. So far he hadn’t commented on the patch over my eye. Either he hadn’t noticed, or he thought that it was the kind of idiosyncrasy in which I was likely to indulge. I interrupted him: “As a matter of fact, I’ve got to have a minor operation tomorrow.”

“You’ve ruptured yourself have you?” he said brightly, as though that was the only physical mishap he could imagine happening to anyone. It had happened, apparently, to Mr Sperry.

“No,” I said with a faint irritation, tapping my patch. “I’ve got a detached retina.”

My father had never heard of the condition. In fact, he had only the haziest notion of where the retina was. Margaret, very patient with him, drew a diagram, which he studied with an innocent expression.

“I expect he’ll be all right, won’t he?” he asked simply, as though I wasn’t there.

“Of course he will. You’re not to worry.”

Not, I couldn’t help thinking, that he seemed overwhelmed by anxiety.

“I’ve never had any trouble with my eyes, you know,” he was ruminating. “I’ve got a lot to be thankful for, by gosh I have.” In fact he had kept all his senses into his late eighties. He surveyed me with an air of preternatural wisdom or perhaps of cunning.

“You ought to take care of your eyes, that you ought. I tell people, I must have told you once upon a time, be careful, you’ve only got one pair of eyes. That’s it. You’ve only got one pair of eyes.”

“At this moment,” I said, “I’ve got exactly half of that.”

This was a kind of grim comment in which Martin and I, and young Charles after us, occasionally indulged ourselves. My father was much too amiable a man to make such comments: but whenever he heard them — it had been true in my boyhood, it was just as true now — he appeared to regard them as the height of humour. So he gave out great peals of his surprisingly loud, harmonious laughter.

“Would you believe it?” he asked Margaret. “Would you believe it?” He kept making remarks about me, directed entirely at her, as though I were a vacuum inhabited only by myself. “He’s a big strong fellow, isn’t he? He’ll be all right, won’t he? He’s a young man, isn’t he?” (I was within a week of my fifty-eighth birthday). “I wish I were as young as he is.”

At that reflection, his face, usually so cheerful, became clouded. “I’m not so young as I used to be,” he turned his attention from Margaret to me. “I don’t mind for myself, I poddle along just as well as ever. But people are beginning to say things, you know.”

“What people?”

“I’m afraid they’re beginning to say things at the choir.”

I felt a stab of something like animal concern, much more as though he were my son than the other way about.

“What are they saying?”

“They keep telling me that they’re sure I can manage until Christmas. I don’t like the sound of that, Lewis, I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Do they know how old you are?”

“Oh no. I haven’t told them that.” He regarded me with the most extreme shrewdness. “If anyone asks, I just say I’m a year older than I was this time last year.”

He burst out: “They’re beginning to ask if the walk home isn’t too much for me!”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question, addressed to a very old man for whom the walk meant a couple of hours on winter nights. It wasn’t an unreasonable question: but I hoped that that was all. I said, I was ready to arrange for a car, each time he had to attend the choir. Anything to prevent them getting rid of him. Anything.

“That’s very good of you, Lewis,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to give it up just now.”

His tone, however, was flat: and his expression hadn’t regained its innocent liveliness. My father might be a simple old man, but he had — unlike that fine scholar and man of affairs, Arnold Shaw — a nose for danger.

14: The Dark and the Light

A voice was saying: “You’re waking up now.”

It was a voice I had not heard before, from close beside me. I had awakened into the dark.

“What time is it?” It was myself speaking, but it sounded thick-tongued in the dark.

“Nearly three o’clock.”

“Three o’clock when?”

“Three o’clock in the afternoon, of course. Mr Mansel operated this morning.”

Time had no meaning. A day and a bit since that visit to my father, that had no meaning either.

“I’m very thirsty.”

“You can’t have much. You can have a sip.”

As I became conscious, I was aware of nothing but thirst. I was struggling up to drink, a hand pressed my shoulder. “You mustn’t move.” I felt glass against my lips, a trickle of liquid: no taste, perhaps a dry taste, a tingle in the throat: soda water?

“More.”

“Not yet.”

In the claustrophobic dark, I was just a thirsty organism. I tried to think: they must have dehydrated me pretty thoroughly. Processes, tests, injections, the evening before, that morning, as I lay immobilised, blinded: reduced to hebetude. This was worse, an order of magnitude worse, than any thirst after a drunken night. I didn’t want to imagine the taste of alcohol. I didn’t want to touch alcohol again. Lemon squashes: lime juice: all the soft drinks I had ever known: I wanted them round me as soon as I got out of here, dreaming up a liquid but teetotal elysium.

Through the afternoon I begged sip after sip. In time, though what time I had no idea, the nurse said that my wife had come to see me. I felt Margaret’s hand in mine. Her voice was asking after me.

“I don’t like this much,” I said.

She took it for granted that it wasn’t discomfort I was complaining of. Yesterday’s superstition, today’s animal dependence — those I was grinding against.

“It won’t be long,” she said.

“Too long.”

Her voice sounded richer than when I could see her: she told me Mansel had reported that the operation had gone according to plan. It would have been easier if he could have done it earlier in the week (“obstinate devil,” I said, glad to be angry against someone). It had taken nearly three hours — “One’s playing with millimeters,” he had said, with a technician’s pride. He wouldn’t know whether it had worked or not for about four days.

“Four days.”

“Never mind,” she said.

“That’s easy to say.”

“There isn’t much I can say, is there?” she replied. “Oh, they’re all convinced you’re remarkably well. That’s rather a comfort, isn’t it?”

I didn’t respond.

“At least,” she said, “it is to me.”

Patiently she read to me out of the day’s papers. At last she had to leave me, in the dark.

Yet, though my eyes were shut and blindfold, it wasn’t the familiar dark. It wasn’t like being in a hotel room on a black night, thick curtains drawn. It was more oppressive than that. I seemed to be having a sustained hallucination, as though deep scarlet tapestries, colour glowing, texture embossed and patterned, were pressing on both my eyes. I had to get used to it, until the nightly drug put me to sleep, just as I had to get used to my thoughts.

Early next morning, time was still deranged; when I switched on the bedside radio it was silent. I heard Mansel’s greeting and felt skilled fingers taking off the bandages, unshielding the eye. Five minutes of light. The lens, the large eye peering, the aseptic “It looks all right so far”, the skilled fingers taking the light away again. A few minutes of his shop: it was a relief to get back into someone’s working life. What hours did he keep? Bed about 10.0, up at 5.30, first calls, like this one, between 6.0 and 7.0. Training like a billiards player, he couldn’t afford to take more than one drink a night: three operations that morning, two more after lunch. He enjoyed his job as much as Francis Getliffe enjoyed his: he was as clever with his hands. Nearly all his techniques were new. Thirty years ago, he told me, they couldn’t have done anything for me at all.

That was an interlude in the day. So was Margaret’s visit each afternoon, when she read to me. So was the radio news. Otherwise I lay there immobile, thinking, or not really thinking, so much as given over to a plasma of mental swirls, desires, apprehensions, resentments, sensual reveries, sometimes resolves. It wasn’t often that this plasma broke out into words: occasionally it did, but the mental swirl was nearer to a dream, or a set of dreams. Dreams in which what people called the “unconscious” lived side by side with the drafting of a letter. Once when I was making myself verbalise, I thought — as I had often done — that the idea of the unconscious as “deep” in our minds had done us harm. It was a bad model. It was just as bad a model as that of a “God out there”, out in space, beyond the clouds. We laughed at simple people and their high heavens, existing in our aboriginal three-dimensions: yet, when we turned our minds upon our own minds, we fell into precisely the same trap.

Thoughts swirled on. To anyone else, even to Margaret, I should have tried to make some sort of show of sarcasm. To myself, I hadn’t got the spirit. I didn’t like self-pity in myself or others. There were times, in those days, when I was doing nothing but pity myself. I had known that state before, ill and wretched, as a young man. I had more excuse then. This wasn’t enough excuse for one’s pride to break. Yet I couldn’t pretend.

Margaret asked if I wanted other visitors. None, I said, except her. That was an attempt at a gesture. Yes, I should have to see Charles March: as he was my doctor, I couldn’t keep him out. When he came in on the second morning, I told him, putting on an act, that it was absurd anything so trivial should be such a bore.

In his kind harsh voice (voices came at me out of the dark, some from nurses whom I had never seen) he replied: “I should find it intolerable, don’t you think I should?”

He was closer in sympathy than any of my friends, he could guess how I was handling my depression. As though casually, he set to work to support me by reminding me of the past. He had been thinking only the other day, he said — it gave him a certain malicious pleasure — of the way we had, in terms of money, exchanged places. When we first met, he had been a rich young man and I was penniless. Now he was living on a doctor’s income and I had become distinctly well-to-do.

“It would have seemed very curious, the first time you came to Bryanston Square, wouldn’t it?”

The irony was designed to provoke me. The voice went on: “You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?”

“I suppose so,” I said.

“All those years ago, if you had been told what was going to happen to you, would you have compounded for it?”

“Would you have done, about yourself?”

“I wasn’t as insatiable as you, you know. In most ways, yes.”

I didn’t have to explicate that answer. He hadn’t chosen to compete. His marriage, like mine to Margaret, had been a good one. He had two daughters, but no son. He envied me mine. But he was trying to be therapeutic, he didn’t want to talk about himself.

“You had a formidable power in you when you were young, we all knew that. We were all certain you’d make your name. You can’t say you haven’t, can you? But it must have been surprising when it happened. I know some of it’s been painful, I couldn’t have taken what you’ve had to take. Still, that was what you were made for, wasn’t it?”

I heard the friendly smile, half-sardonic, half-approving.

“You didn’t find your own nature,” he was saying, “altogether easy to cope with, did you?”

“You know I didn’t.”

“You started out subtle and tricky as well as rapacious. You had to make yourself a better man. And the trouble with that sort of effort is that one loses as well as gains. We’re both more decent than we were at twenty, Lewis, but I’m sure we’re nothing like so much fun.”

At that I laughed. That was the primordial Charles March. He might have become more decent, but his tongue hadn’t lost its sadistic edge.

“Still, I’ve told you before,” he went on, “it’s impossible to regret one’s own experience, don’t you agree?”

“I used to agree with you. Which you thought entirely proper, of course.” Just for an instant I had caught the debating tone of our young manhood. Then I said: “But in this I’m beginning to wonder whether you are right.”

He was glad to have revived me a bit, to have led me into an argument: but he was taken aback that I had spoken with feeling, and that my spirits had sunk down again. Quickly he switched from that subject, although he stayed a long while, casting round for other ways of interesting me, before he left.

Claustrophobia was getting hold of me. It had been a nuisance always. The scarlet tapestries pressed upon my eyes, the pillows were built up so that I couldn’t move my head more than a few degrees.

Blindness would be like this. Did one still have such hallucinations? Was it the absolute dark? Of all the private miseries, that was one I was not sure I could endure. None of us knew his limits. Once, when young Charles was conceived, I thought it might be beyond my limit if the genes had gone wrong, if he were born to a suffering one could do nothing about.

I shouldn’t be able to read with my left eye. That was practical. If this could happen to one eye, it could happen to the other. Peripheral vision (Mansel’s voice). Useful vision. A great deal of my life was lived through the eye. How could I get on without reading? Records, people reading to me. It would be gritty. How could I write? I should have to learn to dictate. It would be like learning a new language. Still.

The machine wearing out (Rubin’s voice). People talked about getting old. Did anyone believe it? Ageing men went in for rhetorical flourishes: but were they real? One didn’t live in terms of history, but in existential moments. One woke up as one had done thirty years before. Certainly that was true of me. Men were luckier than women. There was nothing brutal to remind one of time’s arrow. Perhaps men like Rubin, physicists, mathematicians, remembered they had had great concepts in their youth: never again, the power had gone. I had seen athletes in their thirties, finished, talking like old men and meaning it. But for me, day by day, existence hadn’t altered. Memory faltered a little: sometimes I forgot a name. The machine wearing out.

As I pushed one fact away, another swam in. Living in public. Attacks. That year’s attack, people saying that I had stolen other men’s writing. They could have accused me of many things, but, as I had told George Passant, not of that. That I couldn’t have done. You had to make yourself a better man (Charles March’s voice). Yes, but even when I was as he first knew me, when I was “tricky and rapacious”, that I could never have done. Not out of virtue, but out of temperament. It was one of my deficiencies — and sometimes a strength — that I had to stay indifferent to what I didn’t know at first-hand. Yet the accusation hurt. It seemed to hurt more than if it had been true.

In the red-dark: motionless: there came — for instants among the depression or the anger — a sense of freedom. This was as low as I had gone. There was a kind of exhilaration, which I had known just once before in my life, of being at the extreme.

Then the vacuum in my mind began to fill itself again.

Early in the fifth morning, Mansel’s greeting. The clever fingers: the reprieve of light. The lens, the large eye. He was taking longer than usual, examining from above, below, and the right.

Crisply he said: “I’m sorry, sir. We’ve failed. The retina hasn’t stuck.”

It was utterly unanticipated, I had prepared myself for a good deal, not for this. At the same time it sounded — as other announcements of ill-luck had sounded — like news I had known for a long time.

“Well,” I said, “this is remarkably tiresome.”

“That’s putting it mildly,” said Mansel. He spoke in bad temper, blaming himself and me, just as I heard scientists taking it out of their lab assistant after an experiment had gone wrong. He was recalculating. There was an element of chance in these operations. There was an element of human error. He couldn’t trace the fault.

“Anyway, inquests are useless,” he said snappily. He became a doctor, a good doctor, again.

“There’s no reason why you should be uncomfortable any longer,” he said, taking the cover off my good eye. We shall have to look after that one, he remarked, in reassurance. It would have to be inspected regularly, of course. He would ring up my wife, so that she could take me home. I should feel better there. It would do me good to have a drink as soon as I arrived.

“What will happen to this?” I pointed a finger towards the left eye.

“For the present, it will probably be rather like it was before we operated. Then, if we did nothing further — I shall have to talk to you about that, you understand, but not just now — if we did nothing further, it would gradually die on you. That might take some time.”

After he had gone, I sat up in bed and drank a cup of tea. Lying flat, I had been scarcely able to eat a sandwich, and I was hungry. Obviously Mansel wanted to try another operation. It was dark to face the thought of going through all that again. Just to get some minor vision. A little sight was better than no sight. The bad eye would die on me. That might be the right choice. He was a strong-willed man, he wouldn’t have me let it go without a conflict. In my way I was stubborn too. I had to make my own forecasts.

Yet, in the middle of indecision, I got an animal pleasure out of being in the light. My left eye Mansel had bound up again, but the other was free. It was good to see the roofs outside, and a nurse’s face. She had spoken to me each morning, and now I saw her. If I had met her in the street, I should have thought she looked sensible enough, with the map of Ireland written on her. But now her face stood out, embossed, as though I had not seen a face before.

It was she who told me that I had a visitor. I looked at my watch. Still not ten o’clock. I thought Margaret had been in a hurry. But the nurse held the door open, not for her, but for young Charles.

“How are you?” I asked mechanically.

“No, how are you?” he said.

I asked if he had seen Margaret. I was hoping that she had broken the news to him. No, he had come straight from school: he had begged the morning off to visit me.

He sat by the bedside, watching me. I saw his skin, fresh from an adolescent shave. I had to come out with it. I said, more curtly than I intended: “It hasn’t worked.”

His face went stern with trouble.

“What does that mean?”

I answered direct: “I think it means that I shall go blind in that eye. But you’re not to worry—”

“Good God, why aren’t I to worry? What’s your sight going to be—”

I interrupted, and began to talk as reassuringly as Mansel. The good eye was perfectly sound. One could do anything, including play games, with one eye. Nature was sensible to give us two of everything. “We’ve got to take reasonable precautions, obviously, “I went on. “Mansel will have to check that eye, we shall lay on a routine—”

“How often?”

“Once a month, perhaps—”

“Once a week,” said Charles fiercely. I had never seen him so moved on my behalf.

I tried to distract him. Going back to one of the reflections that rankled when I lay in the dark (going back and deliberately domesticating it), I produced the kind of question that normally made him grin. Being accused of something which is untrue — one feels a sense of moral outrage. But being accused of something which is dead true — one also feels a sense of moral outrage. Which is the stronger? I told him a story of Roy Calvert and me, travelling with false passports in the war, masquerading as members of the International Red Cross — and being accused by French officials at the airport of being frauds. Just as in fact we were. I had never felt more affronted in my life, more morally wronged.

Charles gave a faint absent smile, and then his face became stern again. I had a suspicion that he was hiding some trouble of his own. Love, perhaps — or equally possible, some essay that in his professional fashion he thought had been undermarked. In any case, he would have kept his own secrets: but that morning he wanted to conceal the expression on his face. Could he take me home? It was foolish to bring Margaret all this way. He would ring her up while I dressed.

Soon he was leading me through the corridors — the hospital smell threatening, the walls echoing and gaunt. He was supporting me, unnecessarily, on his arm, as he led me through the corridors down to the waiting taxi.

15: Suave Mari Magno

BACK in the flat, with Charles returned to school, I lay on the sofa, not talking much. Now at last I was beginning to feel it. Margaret, unself-regarding, gave me books that might snag my attention and brought in trays when I didn’t want to sit down to meals.

It went on like that for three days. On the morning after I left hospital, Mansel came in and took off the bandages, saying that the operation cut had healed. He also said that I should probably be more visually comfortable if I went on wearing a patch over the eye.

So I lay about in the drawing-room during those days, not able to rouse myself. Occasionally I inched up the patch for an instant, shutting the good eye, puzzled by the impact of light and what I did or did not see.

Exactly four days after Mansel had stood over my hospital bed and clipped out the verdict, I woke. It was half past seven. Out of habit I looked towards the chink of light between the curtains. I had taken off the patch when I went to bed. I closed the good eye and with the left eye open stared towards the chink. I dropped the eyelid, looked again. I did that several times, as if performing an exercise or doing an optical experiment. Then I got up, as I had nearly a fortnight before, pulled one of the curtains aside, shut my good eye again, and looked. Just as I had done nearly a fortnight before, I went back to bed. This time, I didn’t disturb Margaret, but waited for her to wake. At last she did so. Even then I did not speak at once, but waited until she was alert.

I said: “Something odd has happened.”

“What is it now?” Her voice was quick and anxious.

“No, nothing bad.” I went on carefully, as though my words might be quoted or as though I were touching wood: “The eye seems to have cleared itself up. At least, there doesn’t seem to be any black veil this morning.”

She cried out: “What can you see?”

“I can see a bit. Not very well. But anyway I do seem to have a full field of vision.”

It might be temporary, I warned her, trying to warn myself. In fact, for a couple of days past, I had been wondering each time when I squinted past the patch, where the black edge had gone to. Just for the moment, the eye appeared to be behaving something as Mansel had promised me it would, if the operation worked. I could see the shape of the room, Margaret’s face, I could make out the letters in the masthead of The Times, nothing else. Above all, there was no blackness pressing in. That made me hopeful, unrealistically in relation to what the eye could do.

“It would be better than nothing.” Again I was choosing the words.

Margaret also was trying to be cautious. Action was neutral, action didn’t mean false hope: the best thing she could do was telephone Mansel. He could come at half past one, she reported. Margaret and I talked the morning away, waiting until he arrived, spotless as David Rubin, always busy, never in a hurry, sacrificing the solitary sandwich and the half-hour off in his obsessive day.

Lying flat, I assisted (in the French sense) in the familiar routine. The lens, the scrutinising eye. It went on longer than usual, longer than the morning of decision four days before.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Mansel. He broke out: “Look, I am glad! You’re quite right. The retina has got itself back somehow.”

He had spoken simply, like one who was enjoying someone else’s good luck. Then he became professional once more, professional with a problem on his mind.

“You haven’t got much to thank me for. I think you ought to understand that. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. By all the rules that retina ought to be floating about. But there’s a great deal we don’t understand in this business. We’re really only at the beginning. It’s a great deal more hit-and-miss than it ought to be. I hope it will be a bit more scientific before I’ve finished.”

He was preoccupied with the problem, absent-minded as he gave me instructions. Inspections. This might be a fluke, he had better see me within the week. Premonitory symptoms, flashes of light before going to sleep: I must see him at once. His mind still absent upon the physics of the retina, he told me to avoid any risk of knocks on the head — such as in boxing or association football. I said mildly that those risks weren’t in my case so very serious. Mansel had the grace to give a sheepish youthful grin.

“You must think I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. He said it with the detachment of a man who knew that he was a master of his job: and who assumed that I knew it too.

After he had departed, Margaret burst out crying. Her nerves were strong when we were in trouble. Trouble over, she was left with the aftermath. Comforting her, I didn’t feel any aftermath at all. This had been an arrest of life. It was already over. I went for a walk in the park that afternoon, looking with mescalin-sharp pleasure (sometimes shutting my good eye) at the autumn grass. I felt full of energy, eager to escape from the solipsistic bubble in which I had been immersed for those last days. Life goes on, young Charles had told me consolingly after we paid that visit to my father. Had he ever heard of an arrest of life? When would he know one? Anyway, it was time to get back into the flow.

Though I didn’t often write in the evening, I put in a couple of hours’ work before dinner. Later, I was busy with the letters that had stayed unread. Often I became irked by claims upon my time, other people’s dilemmas: not that night. I was back with them again.

As I read, I called out the news to Margaret. Nothing to vex either of us, as it happened. Just the balm of getting back into good nick, as Martin and the other games players used to say. A note from Maurice’s tutor — no, nothing worrying, in fact he seemed to be doing a little better. W— (the tutor) would like a chat about future plans for him, just that. Margaret wasn’t listening to any arrangements of W—’s: she was suffused with a tender, unprotected, abjectly-loving smile. At the most vestigial suggestion of good news — practical good news — about Maurice, she blushed as she did when she was first in love. How did one become a favourite child? Why had I, not Martin, been my own mother’s? Margaret loved young Charles because he was himself and because he was mine. But she took his academic skill for granted, just as she did her own. She could judge his ability with detachment. After all, she came from a family of professionals, where, when one got a first, someone like her father or one of his brothers came up and said, Well, it’s nice for you to know you’re not altogether a fool. Maurice she loved, though, with all her tenacious passion. She loved him in a light of his own. She responded like the simplest mother who had scarcely heard of universities and who was bedazzled to find her child was there. If Maurice could struggle through to any kind of degree she would be so proud.

Yes, of course I would see W—, I was saying. But I wasn’t prepared to go out of London yet awhile. After the past fortnight, I needed to get back into my own particular nick. Four hours’ work from 10 a.m. each morning, no lunch anywhere. Then I was at anyone’s disposal for the rest of the day. W— could call the next time he was in London.

Margaret blushed again. When I took the most prosaic administrative step on Maurice’s behalf, she was over-grateful. She asked if I had got through my pile of letters, and then produced another from her bag. “This is from Vicky,” she said. “I wasn’t to trouble you with it unless you were quite well.”

She went on: “She rang up this afternoon. When you were out on your walk. She’s been ringing up every day.”

As she handed me the letter, she said: “If you’d been free, you know, that girl would have fallen for you.”

“No,” I said, “for once you’re wrong.”

“I’m not jealous.”

“No, you’re not jealous, but you’re wrong.”

Margaret was happy, affectionate and obstinate. In snatches as I went through the letter, I persisted: I should have been the first to know. What Vicky needed was not someone to love (we had seen her taste), but a father to talk to. If a young woman had Arnold Shaw as a father, it wasn’t entirely unnatural that she should need to talk to someone else.

The letter was actually concerned with Arnold. I wasn’t to make any effort until I had had a holiday (Vicky could not resist giving me some medical advice). But afterwards, if I could talk to people at the university before the Lent term Court it might be a precaution. As far as she could gather, feeling hadn’t changed. The last Court meeting had gained time, but hadn’t altered the situation.

“I must say,” I cried, “everything seems preposterously normal!”

At the end of her letter, Vicky wrote that she might be coming to London before Christmas, but she wasn’t sure.

“That means that she’s hoping he will ask her,” said Margaret. “That’s normal, too.”

We looked at the big round handwriting, the oddly stilted, official-sounding phrases. “I wonder what her love letters are like?” said Margaret. Sitting together on the sofa, we discussed whether there was anything we could do for her. Of course there wasn’t. But it was a luxury to show concern. To be just to us both, we each felt some concern. We were fond of her, and respected her. Yet, warming us both that night, there was an element of suave mari magno. We were on the shore, watching the rough sea and someone else being tossed about in the storm. We had been through it ourselves, alone and together. That night we were by ourselves, in our own home, trouble past. It was a luxury to show concern.

Back in the flow, it wasn’t long before I was talking to Francis Getliffe about the university quarrels. It happened in a private room at Brown’s Hotel. We were attending a dinner party, but not a social one. We had been attending that same kind of dinner party for a good many years past. This was a group of eminent scientists, in which I was included because I had worked with them for so long. They had been meeting several times a year to produce ideas on scientific policy. They were entertained, with some lavishness, by a wealthy businessman who was both sweet-natured and a passionate follower of the opposition politicians. The scientists didn’t pay much attention to the lavishness, being most of them abstemious: but they were interested in the politicians, for by that autumn it was certain that there would be an election next year and probable that the opposition would win it. This group of scientists had been men of the left all their lives; and they still hoped that, if that happened, some good things could be done.

There they sat round the table, our host’s good wine going, very slowly, down uncomprehending crops. Constantine, his head splendid and at the same time Pied Piperish: Mounteney, granitic, determined not to be appeased: Francis Getliffe: Walter Luke: my brother Martin: several more: our host and a couple of the opposition front bench. Most of the scientists had international reputations, two were Nobel prize winners, and all except Martin were Fellows of the Royal. At one instant, while Constantine was talking — which didn’t differentiate it from a good many other instants — I had a sense that I had been here before.

I was seeing the haze of faces as in a bad group picture — striking faces most of them — of my old acquaintances. Very old acquaintances: for they had all (and I along with them) been at common purposes for getting on for thirty years. We had, as young men, sat round tables like this, though not such expensive ones, trying to alarm people about Hitler: then preparing ourselves for war: then, when the war came, immersing ourselves in it. That had been, in the domain of action, their apotheosis. They had never been so effective before or since. But they hadn’t given up. Nearly all of them had risked unpopularity. Some, most of all Constantine, had paid a price. Some, like Francis Getliffe, had become respectable, though politically unchanged. The truth was that the youngest at the table was Martin, a year off fifty. Why was the evening such a feat of survival? There was scientific ability about, comparable with theirs, but either the younger professionals didn’t take their public risks, or there was something in the climate which didn’t let such rough-hewn characters emerge.

That night, they didn’t sound in the least like sheer survivals. There were candles lit on the dinner table, but they insisted on the full lights above. One or two, like Francis Getliffe, were talking good political sense. As usual, Mounteney didn’t infer, but impersonally pronounced, that if the politicians and I were eliminated, then some progress might be made. Two of the less cantankerous had brought memoranda with them. The chief politician was listening to everyone: he was as clever as they were, yet when they were at their most positive he didn’t argue, but stowed the ideas away. They thought they were using him: he thought he could use some of them. That made for general harmony. All in all, I decided, it wasn’t a wasted evening.

After the rest had gone, Francis and Martin, not so frugal as their colleagues, stayed with me for a final drink. But Martin, when I mentioned Arnold Shaw, did not take any part in the conversation. He and Francis, though they were sometimes allies, were not friends. There had always been a constraint between them, and now, for a simple reason, it was added to. Francis had come to know of the misery that Vicky was causing his son. Francis also knew that she was infatuated with Pat, whom he thought a layabout. In all that imbroglio, Francis could not help remembering that Pat was Martin’s son: and — with total unfairness from a fair-minded man — he had come to put the blame on Martin and regard him with an extra degree of chill.

As I tentatively brought in the name of Arnold Shaw, I got a response from Francis which surprised me. In his own house in the spring, he had had no patience with me. This night, sitting by the littered table in Brown’s, he answered with care and sympathy. “Of course,” he said, “I still think you overrate the old buffer. You’re putting yourself out too much, I’m certain you are. But that’s your lookout—”

I said that I hadn’t any special illusions about Arnold: but I didn’t want him to be pushed out in a hurry, hustled out by miscellaneous dislike.

“Leonard doesn’t dislike him,” Francis was saying. “He thinks he’s a damned bad Vice-Chancellor, but otherwise he’s rather fond of him.”

He looked at me with a considerate smile, and went on: “I don’t believe you’re going to alter the situation there. It’s gone too deep. But what do you really want?”

I replied, I too accepted that there wouldn’t be peace until Arnold left. The decent course was to make it tolerable for him, to ease him out, with a touch of gratitude, over the next three years.

Francis shrugged. “Nice picture,” he said. But, in a friendly fashion, he continued: “Look, I think the only hope is for him to come to terms with the young Turks. I don’t imagine it will work, mind you, but I’m sure it’s the only hope.” That is, according to Francis, Shaw would have to take the initiative (as anyone fit to be in charge of an institution, he added tartly, would have done long ago). He would have to face Leonard and his colleagues, no holds barred. They were used to harsh argument, they would respect him for it. Couldn’t I pass on the word, that this was worth trying? “You know, if he doesn’t try it,” said Francis, “there’ll be the most God-almighty row.”

Francis was speaking as though he were on my side: yet in principle he wasn’t. And when he disagreed in principle, he wasn’t often as sympathetic as this. It occurred to me that he might be affected by my physical misadventure. Most people when you were incapacitated or ill tended insensibly to write you off. They took care of you in illness, but did less for you in action. Your mana had got less. With a few men, particularly with strong characters like Francis — perhaps by a deliberate effort — the reverse was true. They seemed to behave, or tried to behave, as though your mana had increased.

After we had said good night to Francis, who was staying at the Athenaeum, Martin and I sat in the dark taxi, swerving in the windy dark through empty Mayfair streets. Nothing eventful had happened to him, but we went on talking in my drawing-room, talking the small change of brothers, anxiety-free, while the windows rattled. He had nothing to report about Pat, but for once he spoke of his daughter Nina. Yes, she seemed to have a real talent for music, she might be able to make a living at it. She was a great favourite of mine, pretty, diffident, self-effacing. If the luck had fallen the other way, and Pat had had that gift, Martin would have been triumphant. But he was composed and happy that night, and, though he was an expert in sarcasm, that specific sarcasm didn’t get exchanged.

16: Decision About a Party

NOW I had started moving about again in London, I had to pay a duty visit to Austin Davidson. It was not such an ordeal as it had been, Margaret told me, She, except when I was in hospital, went to him each day. In fact, when we called at tea-time, passing by the picture-hung walls, he was able to meet us at his study door and return to his armchair without help or distress, though he waited to get his breath before he spoke.

In the study, strangely dark, as it always seemed, for a connoisseur of visual art, the only picture I could make out hung above his chair. I thought I had not seen it before: a Moore drawing? The December night was already setting in, the reading lamp beside Davidson lit up nothing but our faces.

He looked at me from under his eyebrows: from the cheekbones, the flesh fell translucently away. His eyes, opaque, sepia, bird-bright, had, however, a glint in them.

“I’m sorry about your catastrophe,” he said.

“It’s all over,” I replied.

“You notice that I used the word catastrophe?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Old men get a remarkable amount of satisfaction out of the physical afflictions of their juniors.” He gave his old caustic grin. “There’s nothing to make an old man feel half his age — as much as hearing that someone twenty years younger has just died.”

It might have been an effort. If so, it was a good one. It had the note of the unsubdued, unregenerate Davidson. Margaret and I were laughing. If most men had said that — certainly if I had — it would have sounded guilty. Not so with him. It sounded (just as his talk about his own suicide had sounded) innocent and pure.

He leant back, brown eyes sparkling. He was delighted that he could entertain us. For the next couple of hours, except when he heard himself gasping, he forgot to be morose. Another friend of his came in, whom Margaret and I had often met, a man about my age called Hardisty. He had been a disciple of the set to which Davidson belonged: he was clever, miscellaneously cultivated, good-looking apart from being as nearly bald as a man can be: he believed that Davidson and his friends had been the new Enlightenment, and that it would be a long time before there was another. He did most of the talking, while Davidson nodded, for they formed a united front. Neither Margaret nor I wanted to be abrasive, so we left them to it, Davidson occasionally making some reflection which gave Hardisty a chance to eat a tea young Charles wouldn’t have thought contemptible. Savoury toast: Chelsea buns: éclairs. Davidson’s housekeeper had provided tea for us all. The rest of us ate nothing, but the tea disappeared, and Hardisty chatted away between mouthfuls, the sort of man who did not put on weight.

Davidson recalled when, just before the 1914 war, he had seen his first Kandinsky. It had been uncivilised of the Russians not to understand that that was a step forward. Yes, said Hardisty, perfectly in tune, art, any art, had its own dynamic, nothing could stop it. You mightn’t like it, you mightn’t understand it, but since the first abstracts were painted nothing could have stopped the art of our time. A little later, he said, just as easily, morals had their own dynamic too. In a few years, for example, we should all regard drugs, or at least most drugs, as we now regarded alcohol. It was much too late for any of us to start on them, he said, brimful of health, but still — Again Davidson nodded. Yes, he said, it was interesting how the taboos had been vanishing in his own lifetime.

“In my young days at Cambridge, don’t you know,” he went on, “homosexuality was a very tender plant.”

Hardisty gave an acquiescent smile. For as long as Margaret and I could remember, he had been living with another man. This partner I had seen only once: I had an idea that he didn’t fit into our sort of company: but the arrangement had been as stable as most marriages. Certainly Hardisty was a happy man.

“By and large, this has been a dreadful century,” Davidson was saying. “But in some ways we have become a bit more civilised.”

He seemed satisfied, either by the reflection or because he had not been too tired by the effort to talk. “Do you know,” he said to his daughter, “I think I’m going to allow myself a drink?”

On the way home, Margaret, just because his spirits had lifted (she had begun to feel justified in not giving way to him that summer) looked youthful and gay: youthful, gay, maternal, as though she had just heard that Maurice had passed an examination.

We kept another social engagement that week, this time at one of Azik Schiff’s theatre parties. As the party joggled for position in front of the Aldwych, the lights were washing on to the streaming pavement, but an attendant, hired by Schiff, was waiting with an umbrella, another attendant, hired by Schiff, was waiting in the foyer to lead us to our place. Our place, to begin with, was a private room which led out of the near-stage box. Waiters were carrying trays loaded with glasses of champagne. On the table were laid out mounds of pâté de foie gras. In the middle of it all stood Schiff, looking like an enormous, good-natured and extremely clever frog. By his side stood his wife Rosalind, looking like a lady of Napoleon’s Empire. Her hair was knotted above her head, her mouth was sly, her eyes full. She was wearing an Empire dress, for which, in her fifties, she didn’t have the bosom. On each of her wrists, thin and freckled, glittered two bracelets, emerald and diamond, ruby and diamond, sapphire and diamond, and (as a modest concession) aquamarine. Jewellery apart, skin-roughening apart, she had not changed much since I first met her. For she was an old acquaintance: she had been Roy Calvert’s wife. But, although immediately after Roy’s death I had written to her for a time, it was not on her initiative that, a few years before this theatre party, we had met again. It was on her second husband’s.

No doubt Azik thought that, in some remote fashion, I might be useful. I didn’t mind that. He had the knack, or the force of nature, to think one might be useful and still have plenty of affection to spare for one on the side. I had a lot of respect for him. He had had a remarkable, and to me in some ways an inexplicable life. In the thirties, when Roy Calvert had been working in the Berlin oriental libraries, Azik also had been in Berlin, a young student, ejected from the university under the Hitler laws. He had escaped to England with a few pounds. Somehow he had completed an English degree, very well. Somehow, when the war came, he escaped internment and fought in the British army, also very well. He finished the war in possession of several decorations, a first class honours degree, and what he had saved out of his pay. He was thirty-three. He then turned his attention to trade, or what seemed to be a complex kind of international barter. Eighteen years later, by the time of this party, he had made a fortune. How large, I wasn’t sure, but certainly larger than the fortunes of Charles March’s family or the other rich Jewish families who had befriended me when I was young.

It seemed like a conjuring trick, out of the power of the rest of us, or like an adventure of Vautrin’s. I once told him that if our positions had been reversed, and I had had to become a refugee in Berlin, I should — if I had been lucky — have kept myself alive by giving English lessons, and I should have gone on giving English lessons till I died. Azik gave an avuncular smile. Obviously he thought rather the same himself.

He was not in the least like my old March friends. They had become indistinguishable, by my generation, from rich upper middle-class gentile families, rather grander Forsytes. Azik was not indistinguishable. To begin with, he went to synagogue, whether he believed or not. He was a devoted Zionist. He would not have considered anglicising his first name. Unlike the Marches, who, in common with their gentile equivalents, had taken to concealing their money, Azik enjoyed displaying his. Why not? He was an abundant man. No one could be less puritanical. So long as he could leave young David — Rosalind, late in life, had given him a son, by this time ten years old — well off, he liked splashing money about as much as making it. Anyway, he created his own rules: he wasn’t made to be genteel: sometimes I thought, when people called him vulgar, that in following his nature he showed better taste than they. As another oddity, he was politically both sophisticated and detached. He made large contributions not only to Israel but to the Labour party: and in private treated us to disquisitions as to what social democratic governments were like and exactly what, if we got one next year, we could expect from ours.

His entertainments were no more understated than the rest of him. He had a passion for the theatre, and he had a passion for trade. So he mixed the two up. Theatre boxes, plus this gigantic running supper: snacks before the play, snacks in the intervals, snacks after the play. Other people went to ambassadors’ parties: ambassadors got used to going to his. There were several present in the private room that night. It was no use being finicky. There was more Strasbourg pâté on view than I remembered seeing. One waded in, and ate and drank. It bore a family resemblance to a party at a Russian dacha, when the constraints had gone, the bear hug was embracing you, the great bass voices were getting louder and the lights appeared to be abnormally bright.

While listening with one ear to a conversation on my left (a Hungarian was asking Azik what effect on world politics Kennedy’s assassination would have — it had happened a fortnight before), I talked to Rosalind. Once she had made up to me because I was Roy Calvert’s closest friend: all that was forgotten. I was one of many guests, but she liked to please. How were my family? Like a businessman, or a businessman’s wife, she had docketed their Christian names. She always read everything about us, she said, with a dying fall. That was more like old times. At close quarters she looked her age: the skin under her eyes was delicately lined. (I heard Azik saying robustly that he didn’t believe single individuals affected world politics. Whatever had been going to occur before Kennedy’s death, would occur, for good or bad.) She was using a scent, faint but languorous, that I didn’t recognise. Even before she married her first rich man, she had always been an expert on scents.

“Unless I get another glass of champagne, I shall just collapse,” she said, with another dying fall. That was still more like old times. Soon she was talking about Azik, with adoration, but her own kind of adoration. Except that the name happened to have changed, she might have been talking about Roy Calvert thirty years before. To an outsider’s eyes, they seemed distinctly different men. A good many women had thought Roy romantic. He had been gifted, but he had had to struggle with a manic-depressive nature, often so melancholy that he detested his own life. He had been, at least potentially, a great scholar. Rosalind had adored him. She had learned something about his profession, and could talk as the wife of a scholar should. When she spoke of him, there was no one else in this world: and there was also, in the midst of the worship, a kind of debunking twinkle, as though she alone could point out that, though he was everything a woman could wish for, he could do with a bit of sense.

On the other hand, Azik was not a romantic figure, except in the eyes of someone like Balzac. It would be stretching a point to suggest that he had an over-delicate or tormented nature. But once again, when Rosalind spoke of him, there was no one else in this world. Once again she had learned something about his profession, and could talk as the wife of an international entrepreneur should. And once again, in the midst of the worship, there was a kind of debunking twinkle, as though she alone could point out that, though he was everything a woman could wish for, he could do with a bit of sense.

It was a great gift of hers, I thought, to fall in love so totally just where it was convenient to fall in love. Though she wasn’t an adventuress, she had done better for herself than any adventuress I had met. Roy had been well-off, at least by our modest academic standards of the time (I had seen his father’s name over a hosiery factory when I walked to school as a boy): Azik was perhaps ten times richer. She had loved each of them in turn. She herself said that night, in the sublime flat phrase of our native town: “No, I can’t say that I’ve got much to complain about.”

In the throng of the party Muriel joined us, Roy Calvert’s daughter, born a few months before he was killed, so that she was over twenty now. I had seen her, intermittently, in the last few years. As a child she promised to get the best out of both her parents’ looks, but by now, though she had a kind of demure attractiveness, that hadn’t happened. Her nose was too long, her eyes too heavy-lidded. Usually those eyes were averted, her whole manner was demure: but when she asked a question, one received a green-eyed sharp stare, perhaps the single physical trait that came from her father. No, there was another: her face one wouldn’t notice much, now she was grown up, but when she walked she had his light-footed upright grace.

Rosalind chatted on about Azik’s exploits. Muriel, eyes sidelong, put in a gentle comment. On the face of it, she thought Rosalind was underrating him. Whether this was Muriel’s way of amusing herself, I didn’t know.

The bells were ringing, we went into our box. Azik’s passion for the theatre was an eclectic one, and we were seeing a play of the Absurd. Within a few minutes I tried, in the darkness of the box, to make out the hands of my wristwatch: how long before the first interval? In time it came. Back into the private room. Back to more champagne, the table restocked, dishes of caviare brought in. But back also to a sight I had had no warning of. One of the diplomats had taken charge of Margaret, I was in another group with Azik — when I saw, in the corner of the room, dinner-jacketed like the rest of us, my nephew Pat. He was talking, head close to head, with Muriel. I put my hand on Azik’s massive arm, and drew him aside. I indicated the couple in the corner, and in an undertone said: “How do you know that young man?”

“It was impossible to fit him into the boxes,” said Azik, misunderstanding me, as though apologising for not doing his best for Pat. “So I asked if he would not mind to join us for our little drink—”

“No,” I said. “I meant, how did you come to know him?”

“I must say,” replied Azik, “I think he presented himself to my wife. Because his father was such a great friend of Calvert.”

He moved his great moon face nearer to mine, with a glance of friendly cunning. Did he have any suspicions about that story? In fact, it was quite untrue. Martin had known Roy Calvert only slightly: they might have walked through the college together, that was about all. Of course, it was conceivable that Pat had picked up a different impression. Family legends grow, he must have heard a good deal about Roy both from me and his father. As for Rosalind, I doubted whether she had known, let alone remembered, many of Roy’s Cambridge friends.

“I did not raise objection,” Azik said. He added, putting a finger to the side of his squashed and spreading nose: “Remember, I am a Jewish papa.”

I told him, I sometimes felt I should have made a pretty good Jewish papa myself. But some of our thoughts were in parallel, and one at right angles.

“Your brother’s is a good family, I should say,” said Azik.

I would have disillusioned him, if it had been necessary. But it wasn’t. He knew as well as I did that the Eliots were not a “good family” in the old continental sense. He knew precisely where we came from. But he meant something different. Azik saw, much more clearly than most Englishmen, what the English society had become. It was tangled, it was shifting its articulations, but in it men like Martin had their place.

I asked Azik whether he had seen much of Pat.

“Ach, he is very young,” said Azik, with monumental good nature and a singular lack of interest. Our thoughts still did not meet. Azik began to speak, quietly but without reticence, about money, Muriel’s money. “I have to be careful, my friend. Mu will have something of her own when she is twenty-one.” Calvert (as Azik always called Roy) had not had much except a big allowance: but what he left had been “tied up” for Mu. “He was a very careful man,” said Azik with a kind of respect. “However, that is chicken feed.” Azik, totally unprudish about money, unlike most of my rich English acquaintances, told me the exact sums. “But Calvert’s father, no, that isn’t such chicken feed.” Rosalind had been bequeathed a life interest in half of it; the rest was in trust for Muriel, and would come to her next year. “Fortunately, she has her head screwed on.”

Before we parted, Azik could not resist explaining to me how different his own dispositions were. “I have made over a capital sum to Rosalind with no strings attached. So she can walk out on me tomorrow if she can’t stand me any longer.” He gave an uxorious chuckle. As for David, well, need anyone ask? Though I did not need to ask, Azik insisted on telling me of a magniloquent settlement.

After another instalment of the Absurd, we returned for the second interval in the private room. This time, seeing that Pat had reappeared and was once more close to Muriel, I went straight to them.

“Hello, Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, treacle-brown eyes wide open and cheeky. “Who’d ever have thought of seeing you here?”

“Daddy would have hated it if you weren’t here, you know that, Sir Lewis,” said Muriel, precisely. She was utterly composed.

I asked them how they liked the play. Muriel smiled, lashes falling close to her cheeks. Pat began: “I suppose we can’t communicate, at least that’s the idea, isn’t it?”

Yes, that was the idea.

He looked at Muriel. “But I can communicate with you sometimes, can’t I?”

“I think,” she said, “I can communicate with Daddy.”

For a moment, I had cursed myself for mentioning the play. It was true that for two acts it had been expressing non-communication: but at the end of the second, as though for once human beings could make themselves clear to one another, there had been a lucid, and in fact a lyrically eloquent description of fellatio. I had been with Pat in company where he would have found this an occasion too hilarious to resist. But no, now he was holding his tongue: was he being protective towards her, or was it too early to frighten her?

I watched her, her eyes meekly cast down. She did not appear to be in need of protection. She was so composed, more than he was. I knew that Rosalind, like other mothers whose own early lives had not been unduly pure, had taken extreme care of her. She hadn’t gone unsupervised, she had had to account for any date with a young man. And yet I should have guessed — though I wouldn’t have trusted any of my guesses about her very far — that she was one of those girls who somehow understand all about the sexual life before they have a chance to live it.

“Uncle Lewis,” said Pat, “are you open on New Year’s Eve this year?”

This time he was really being brash. I had to answer that I had been pretty much occupied that autumn, we hadn’t made up our minds. That was, in literal terms, true. But Margaret and I had got into the habit of asking our families and close friends for New Year’s Eve: neither of us had suggested breaking it. The point was, he was begging for the two of them — as though Vicky, who had been invited the year before, could be dropped, or as though they might all have an amicable time together.

“I think,” put in Muriel, quick, sure-footed, “Daddy said that we’re having dinner with you soon, aren’t we?” (She meant Azik, Rosalind and herself.)

Yes, I said.

“That will be nice.”

Pat looked at me, as though he would have liked to wink. He wasn’t used to anyone as cool as this — who could, so equably, declare his proposition closed.

As Margaret and I were given a lift home in one of the diplomatic cars, acquaintances beside us, we couldn’t have our after-the-play talk. In the lift, going up to our flat, she was silent, and stayed so until she had switched on the drawing-room lights and poured herself a drink. She asked if I wanted one, but her tone was hard. Sitting in the chair the other side of the fireplace, she said: “So that’s the way it is!”

Her face was flushed: the adrenalin was pouring through her: she was in a flaming temper.

“What do you mean?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I haven’t any idea.”

“You have,” she said. “Your nephew. What does he think he’s up to?”

“How should I know?”

“It’s intolerable,” she cried. I was thinking, yes, she was kind, she took to heart what Vicky might go through: but also Margaret was no saint, she was angry because she herself had, at intervals, been taken in by Pat. I was getting provoked, because of the disparity we both knew between Margaret’s kind of temper and my own. I had to make an effort to sound peaceful.

“Look here, I don’t know much about this girl (Muriel), but if it’s any consolation to you, I fancy that she can look after herself—”

“I shouldn’t be surprised,” she said. But she said it with edge and meaning.

We were on the verge of a quarrel. I said: “I don’t understand.”

“I was thinking of her father.” She went on, with exaggerated reasonableness: “Of course he was in a higher class than your nephew Pat. But shouldn’t you have said that there might be some sort of resemblance—?”

“Nonsense.” This was an old argument. With the gap in age between us, she had felt shut out from parts of my youth. At times she was jealous of the friends who had known me when I was a young man. Francis Getliffe and Charles March — with those she was on close terms. George Passant, she had worked to understand. But Roy Calvert, who was dead, whom she could never know, she could not help believe that I had inflated, had given a significance or an aura that he could not conceivably, in her eyes, have possessed.

“Well, Pat does set out to be a miniature Byronic hero, doesn’t he?”

“Roy Calvert,” I said, “had about as much use for Byronic heroes as I have.”

“But still,” she said, “you do admit that he succeeded in bringing misery to everyone, literally everyone, so far as I’ve ever heard, who had any relations with him?”

I sat without speaking.

“I know you claim that he had a sort of insight. But I can’t convince myself that the spiritual life, or the tragic sense, or whatever they like to call it, is a bit like that.”

Like her, I spoke with deliberate carefulness, as though determined either to take the bite out of my voice or not to overstate my case.

“I’m not sure that nowadays I should see him quite in the same way. But of one thing I am perfectly certain. Of all the men and women I’ve ever known, he was the most selfless. He’s the only one, and he suffered for it, who could really throw his own self away.”

Now we were quarrelling. We had learned, early in our marriage, that it was dangerous to quarrel. If I had been like her, there would have been no danger in it. Her temper was hot: the blood rushed: it was soon over. But with me, usually more controlled, temper, once I had lost it, smouldered on.

Margaret, watching me, knew this bitter streak in me and knew it more acceptantly than I did myself.

“If you say that,” she said, “then I’ve got to take it.”

I accused her of making a concession. I said that neither of us wanted the other to make concessions which were not genuine. Between us there couldn’t be that kind of compromise–

“Perhaps it was not quite genuine,” she said with a difficult smile. “But — what am I to do?”

Somewhere, filtering towards my tongue, were words that would make us both angrier. Suddenly, as though by some inexplicable feedback, I said in a mechanical tone: “Pat was sucking up for an invitation to our party. For both of them.”

Margaret gave a shout of laughter, full-throated, happy laughter.

“Oh God,” she cried. “What on earth did you say?”

“Oh, just that we hadn’t decided whether we were going to give one.”

“It must be wonderful to be tactful, mustn’t it?”

Margaret went on laughing. We were certainly going to give a party, she said. After all (her mood had changed, she was still flushed, but now with gaiety), we had a lot to be thankful for, this past year. My eye. Young Charles’ successes. Maurice’s survival. Her father better. Various storms come through. It would be faint-hearted not to give a party. But one thing was sure, she said. He was not going to bring that girl. Was that all right? Yes, I said, caught up by her spirits, that was completely all right. Without a pause between thought and action, she went to the study, brought back a sheet of paper, and, although it was late, began writing down a list, a long list, of names.

17: Evening Before the Party

FOR the next four days, Margaret enjoyed planning the party. It had become a token of thanksgiving. Every evening we sat in the drawing-room and added some more names. The list grew longer; we knew a good many people, most of them in professional London, but widerspread than that. We had changed the date to Christmas Eve. This was partly because there was another New Year’s party, to which we felt inclined to go: but also because we calculated that Pat would be back with his family in Cambridge, and so we could invite the Schiffs. That calculation, however, went wrong. Martin and Irene decided to come for the night, and, together with their children, to have Christmas dinner with us next day. Margaret swore: would anything get rid of that young man? But she was in high spirits, the party occupying her just as it might have done when she was a girl. There weren’t enough refusals, I complained. The senior Getliffes couldn’t come, but Leonard could. Others accepted from out of London. There’s nothing like an operation to make people anxious to see one, I said.

Still, it was agreeable, when Maurice had come down from Cambridge and Charles had returned from school, to have the four of us sitting before dinner, talking about this domestic ritual. Maurice had young men and girls he wanted to invite, some of them lame ducks. Charles had school friends who lived in the London area. Throw them all in, we agreed. The age range of the party would be about sixty years. As we sat there in the evening, the week before Christmas, I thought that in contrast to Maurice’s untouched good looks, Charles already appeared the older. He had just won a scholarship, very young: but sometimes, as on the morning he visited me in hospital, he seemed preoccupied. I noticed that, instead of staying in bed late, as he used to do in the holidays, he got up as early as I did, riffling through the letters. I had been older than that, I thought, when I was first menaced by the post. But he was controlled enough to live a kind of triple life: his emotions were his own, but, as the Christmas nights came nearer, curtains not yet drawn at tea-time, black sky over the park, he sat with us teasing Margaret, dark-eyed, ironic, enjoying the preparations as much as she did.

It was the afternoon of 23rd December, about five o’clock. Margaret had not got back from visiting her father, the boys were out. I was, except for our housekeeper, alone in the flat. I had been reading in the study, the light from the angle-lamp bright across my book. There were piles of papers by the chair, a tray of letters on the room-wide desk, all untidy but findable, at least by the eye of memory; all the grooves of habit there. The telephone rang. I crossed over to the far side of the desk. “This is George.” The strong voice, which had never lost its Suffolk undertone, came out at me. I exclaimed with pleasure: I had not seen him for months. “I’d rather like to have a word,” the voice went on robustly. “I suppose you’re not free, are you?”

I replied that I was quite free: when would he like—? “I can come straight round. I shan’t be many minutes.”

Waiting for him, I fetched the ice and brought in a tray of drinks. I was feeling comfortably pleased. This was a surprise, a good end to the year. I hadn’t seen him for months, I thought again, no, not since the April Court. That hadn’t been my fault, but it was good that he should invite himself. He might come to the party the following night, that would be better still; there was something, not precisely nostalgic but reassuring, in going back right through the years. My brother hadn’t really known me when I was in my teens: but George had, and he was the only one, when I was in the state young Charles was approaching now.

I let him in, and took him to the study. Would he have a drink? I hadn’t seen him in full light, I had my back towards him as I heard a sturdy yes. I splashed in the soda, saying that it was too long since we had had an evening together.

Then I sat down opposite him.

“I ought to explain. This isn’t exactly a social visit,” he said.

I began to smile at the formality, so like occasions long ago when he wished to discuss my career and behaved as if there were some mysterious etiquette that he, alone among humankind, had never been properly taught. I looked into his face as he lifted the glass, ice tinkling. He was staring past me; his eyes were unfocused, which was nothing new. His hair bushed out over his ears, in blond and whitening quiffs, uncut, unbrushed. The lines on his forehead, the lines under his eyes, made him appear not so much old as dilapidated: but no more old or dilapidated than when I had last seen him in our traditional pub.

Over the desk, on his right, the window was uncovered, and I caught a glimpse of his great head reflected against the darkness.

It was all familiar, and I went on smiling.

“Well, what’s the agenda?” I asked.

“Something rather unpleasant has happened,” said George.

“What is it?”

“Of course,” said George, “it must be some absurd mistake.”

“What is it?”

“You know who I mean by my niece and the Pateman girl?”

“Yes. “

“They’ve been asking them questions about that boy who disappeared. The one who was done away with.”

For an instant I was immobilised. I was as incapable of action as when I stood at the bedroom window, blinked my eye, and found the black edge still there. That edge: the noise I had just heard, the words: they were all confused.

Without being able to control my thoughts, I stared at George, wishing him out of my sight. I heard my voice, hard and pitiless. Who were “they”? What had really happened?

George, face open but without emotion, said that detectives had been interviewing them: one was a detective-superintendent. “He seems to have been very civil,” said George. Statements had been taken in the Patemans’ house. The young women had been told that they might be questioned again.

“Of course,” said George, “it’s bound to be a mistake. There’s a ridiculous exaggeration somewhere.”

I looked at him.

“There must be,” I said.

“I’m glad you think that,” said George, almost cheerfully.

From the instant I had heard the news, and been frozen, I had taken the worst for granted. With a certainty I didn’t try even to rationalise. Yet here I was, giving George false hope. When, thirty years before, he had faced me with his own trouble — trouble bad enough, though not as unimaginable as this — I had been maddened by his optimism and had tried to destroy it. Here I was doing the opposite. But it was not out of kindness or comradeship. Even less out of gratitude. I couldn’t find a thought for what he had once done for me. Forebodings from the past, linked with this new fact, at the same time incredible and existential, drove out everything else. I wanted not to see him, I wanted to agree with him and have him go away.

I tried to do my duty.

“I suppose,” I said, “I’ve got to ask, but I know it isn’t necessary, you can’t be touched in any way yourself?”

“Well—” George’s tone was matter-of-fact — “they’ve been in on the fringe of our crowd. If anyone wanted to rake up stories of some of the crowd, or me as far as that goes, it might be awkward—”

“No, no, no. Not in this sort of case.” This time my reassurance was honest, impatient.

“That’s what I thought myself.” He spoke amiably but vaguely; he had once been a good lawyer, but now he seemed to have forgotten all his law. He went on: “I ought to have kept more of an eye on them, I grant you that. But the last two or three years, since my health went wrong, I’ve rather gone to pieces.”

He said it with acquiescence, without remorse: as though “going to pieces” had been a vocation in itself.

“What steps have you taken? About those two. What practical steps?”

I heard my own voice hard again.

“Oh, I’ve put them in touch with solicitors, naturally.”

“What solicitors?”

“Eden & Sharples. I didn’t need to look any further.”

Just for a moment, I was touched. Eden & Sharples was the present name of the firm of solicitors where George had been employed, as managing clerk, all his working life. When he was a young man of brilliant promise, they hadn’t been generous to him. Sometimes I used to think that, had they treated him better, his life might have been different. Yet even now, made to retire early, pensioned off, he still thought of the firm with something like reverence. In this crisis, he turned to them as though they were the only solicitors extant. It was misfits like George — it was as true now as when I first met him — who had most faith in institutions.

“Well then,” I said. “There’s nothing else you can do just now, is there?”

That was a question which was meant to sound like leave-taking. I hadn’t offered him another drink: I wanted him to go.

He leaned forward. His eyes, sadder than his voice, managed to converge on mine. “I should like to do something,” he said. “I should like to ask you something.”

“What is it?”

“I told you, I’ve rather gone to pieces. I can’t look after this business. I’m relying on you.”

“I don’t see what I can do.”

“You can make sure — if things get more serious, which is ridiculous, of course — you can make sure that they get the best advice. From the senior branch of the legal profession.” George brought out that bit of solicitor’s venom, just as he used to do as a rebellious young man. But he was more lucid than he seemed. As so often, he both believed and disbelieved in his own optimism. He was anticipating that they would go to trial.

“I can’t interfere. You’ve got to trust the solicitors—”

Once more, George had become lucid. He could admit to himself how the legal processes worked. He said: “I just want to be certain that we’re doing everything possible. I just want to be certain—” he looked at me with resignation — “that I’m leaving it in good hands.”

I had no choice, and in fact I didn’t want any. I said: “All right, I’ll do what I can.”

“That’s very nice of you,” said George.

I had to give him his second drink. He did not say another word about the investigation. For a few minutes he chatted amicably, made his formal enquiry about Charles, and then announced, with his old hopeful secretive restlessness, that he must be off.

When I had seen him to the lift, I went straight into the bedroom, so as to avoid meeting either of the boys. There I sat, neither reading nor thinking, until Margaret returned. She was taking off her hat as she opened the door. At the sight of me she said: “What’s happened?”

I told her, dry and hard.

“This is dreadful.” Still wearing her coat, she had come and put her arms round me.

“I’m sorry for George,” she said.

“I don’t know who I’m sorry for.”

She was listening to each inflexion. Even she could not totally divine why I was so much upset. George was my oldest friend, but she knew that we met seldom and couldn’t really talk. Even so, even if the relation had been closer, George himself was not in danger or involved. It was all at one remove, startling that it should come so near, perhaps–

“You won’t tell the boys tonight, will you?”

“They’ll read it in the papers—”

“Don’t tell them tonight, though.”

She meant, she didn’t want their spirits quenched before tomorrow’s party.

“You’ll find,” I said, “that they can take it. People can take anything. That’s the worst thing about us. Those two will take it. Maurice will take it because he’s naturally good — and Charles because, like us, he isn’t.”

I had spoken roughly, and she frowned. She frowned out of bafflement and concern. Still she could not divine why I was so much upset. Nor could I. I couldn’t have given a reason, either to her or to myself, why this had struck me like another arrest of life. Not so near the physical roots as the blinded eye — but somehow taking hold of more of my whole self, stopping me dead.

Maybe (I tried to explain it as I lay awake, later that night) a physical shock, one could domesticate, it was part of the run of this existence, it wasn’t removed from Margaret and my son, it was in the nature of things. But George’s announcement didn’t happen to one, it didn’t happen even when one heard it and, at the same instant, foresaw what was to come. Nevertheless, I couldn’t reach, any more than Margaret, what I really felt.

Back in our bedroom — hours before the time I lay awake — Margaret was still asking me to keep the news from the boys, at least for a couple of days. Of course I would, I promised. She searched my face, wondering what that would give away. Then I snapped back to this home of ours, and told her she ought to know me better: didn’t she remember times, nearer the bone than this, when I had been able to pretend?

18: The Christmas Greeting

JUST before nine on Christmas Eve, as we sat round waiting, Charles wanted to arrange a sweepstake on the first guest to arrive. Martin, Irene and Pat had been dining with us: Pat, to whom parties were like native air, was making sure that the hired waiters knew their job. Standing in the drawing-room, decorous, empty, expectant, paintings throwing back the light, Margaret, Irene and Martin were taking their first drinks. As for me, I should have to be on my feet for the next few hours: anyway, it was better not to drink that night.

If Charles’ sweep had been arranged, no one would have won it. The bell rang on the stroke of nine: the first guest entered: it was Herbert Getliffe, whom only I knew and whom most of the others had scarcely heard of. He entered, a little dishevelled, his glance at the same time bold and furtive. He was in his mid-seventies by now, years older than his half-brother Francis. When I first entered his chambers (and found myself exploited until I learned the tricks of one of the trickiest of men), most people prophesied that he would be a judge before he finished. Herbert would have prophesied that himself: it was his ambition. But it hadn’t happened. He had, fairly late in life, got on to the snakes instead of the ladders. He might pour out his emotions, but he was pathologically tight with money. That put him on the final snake. For, although it was hushed up, he had been over-ingenious with his income tax returns. After that, no judgeship. He had carried on with his practice until a few years before. He made more money, and, when his wife died, saved it by living in a tiny Kensington flat and inviting himself out to meals with his friends. They did not mind having him, for, though his ambition had failed him, his ebullience hadn’t. As he grew old, most of us — even while we remembered being done down — became fond of him.

With great confidence, he called my wife Marjorie. He seemed under the impression that she was an American. Breathlessly, with extreme gusto, he told her a story of his daughter, who was living “in a place called Philadelphia”. His style of conversation had become more mysteriously allusive: Margaret, who had met him just once before, looked puzzled. Helpfully he explained: “Pa. USA.”

In the morphology of such a party, four people had come in by ten past nine, and then something like fifty in the next few minutes. Expectancy left the rooms, the noise level climbed. I had to walk round, looking after the strangers. An African friend of Maurice’s, lost among the crowd. As I talked about his work, I saw Douglas Osbaldiston, fresh-faced, still young-looking, standing among a group of young women. There were long tables, laid with food and glasses, in each of the bigger rooms: but within half-an-hour a hundred bodies stood round them, more were coming, one had to push one’s way. I couldn’t spend time with my own friends. Lester Ince, who had been drinking before he arrived, introduced me to his new wife, ornamental, a couturier’s triumph. She was full of enthusiasm for any of Lester’s acquaintances, but he was chiefly occupied with hilarity because I was going about with a glass of tomato juice.

In the crowd, the noise, trying to spot the lonely, I put last night’s news out of mind. Yet once — as though it were unconnected — I was thinking, as I introduced Vicky to Charles March, that Christmas Eve was an unlucky night. Why had we fixed on it? There had been one Christmas Eve, at another party, which even now I couldn’t forgive.

I shook hands with Douglas Osbaldiston in the press. Friendly, kind, competent, he asked about an acquaintance: could he help? Was any night a lucky night for Douglas? He was at the top of the Treasury by now, as had been predictable long before. Some of the young people in these rooms thought about him as the high priest — unassuming, yes, but stuffy and complacent — of what they still called “the Establishment”. Early next morning, as on every morning, he would go to his wife’s bedside. The paralysis had, after six years, crept so far that she could not light a cigarette or turn the pages of a book. He had loved her as much as anyone there would ever love.

In the innermost room, one of the opposition front bench, who had attended the scientists’ dinner, was holding court. No, not holding court, for he was as matey and unassuming as Douglas himself. Standing there, listening to the young, chatting, tucking away names in a computer memory.

In another room Monty Cave, who had in July become a Secretary of State, held his own court. It had needed staff-work by Martin, assisted by Pat — who had been amiable to Vicky but became over-conscientious in his party duties — to keep the front benches apart. Not because the two of them were political opponents, but because they were personal enemies. We didn’t want a battle of practised distaste, even though Monty, who was not a favourite with many, would come off worst.

Gilbert Cooke, plethoric, hot-eyed, like a great ship in sail, burst through to me. He was in search of my son Charles, intent on talking about the old school. But when I saw them together, Charles was politely slipping away. Their school was for Gilbert the most delectable of topics of conversation, but Charles did not share that view, especially if there were comely girls close by. For Charles, whatever letter he was waiting for in the mornings, was on the lookout that night. There was a daughter of Charles March’s, shy and pretty, whom he knew I should have liked him to take out. Instead I kept noticing his head close to that of Naomi Rubin, David Rubin’s youngest, who was working in London and who was years older than Charles. She looked bright, nothing like so pretty as the March girl: but she was listening, and I didn’t doubt that he was dissimulating his age.

There were swirls through the rooms as a few people left or others came in late. Caro, who used to be Roger Quaife’s wife, made an entrance with her new husband. It was surprising that she came, for normally she moved entirely in a smart circle with which Margaret and I had only a flickering acquaintance. Her second husband, unlike Roger, came from an ambience as rich and rarefied as her own — though to some that was concealed under the name of Smith. He was cultivated, much more so than Caro, and, of all those I had talked to that night, he was the only one who could identify our paintings.

We were standing in the dining-room, which had at that stage of the party become the central lobby, so congested that I found it hard to direct Smith’s Hanoverian head to a newly-acquired Chinnery, when I heard scraps of a conversation, loud and alcoholic, nearer the middle of the room.

“That’s all we need to say,” Edgar Hankins was declaiming, in the elegiac tone he used for his literary radio talks. His rubbery, blunt-featured face was running with sweat. “That’s all we need to say. Birth, copulation, and death. That’s all there is.”

He was declaiming to, or at least in the company of, Irene. Once, and it had overlapped the first years of her marriage to Martin, she had been in love with him. All that was long since over. She gave a cheerful malicious yelp (was there, out of past history, just the extra edge?), and replied: “‘He talks to me that never had a son’.”

It was true (aside, someone was complaining about quotations from the best authors) that Hankins, who had married after their love affair, had no children. Hankins, with elevated reiteration, answered: “Birth, copulation and death.”

“If you must have it,” cried Irene triumphantly, “birth, copulation, children and death! That’s a bit nearer.”

Hankins went on with his slogan — as though he had reached one of the drinking stages where the truth is ultimately clear and only needs to be pronounced. As I pushed away, seeing someone alone, I heard Irene’s antiphon.

“Birth, copulation, children and death! If anyone leaves out the children, he doesn’t begin to know what it’s all about.”

Quite late, about a quarter to twelve, when the rooms were beginning to thin, Sammikins, in a dinner jacket with a carnation in his buttonhole, walked in. He asked loudly after his sister Caro, who had already left. Their father had died a couple of years before, and Sammikins had come into the title. So he had had to give up his seat in the Commons, which to him, though to no one else, appeared his proper occupation. He told me — or rather he told the room — that he had lost “a packet” at poker an hour or two before. I hadn’t seen him for months: I thought he looked drawn and that the flesh had fallen in below his cheekbones. When I got him to myself, I asked how he was.

“Just a touch of alcoholic fatigue, dear boy,” he said in his brazen voice. But he was quite sober. Apart from me and some of the very young, he seemed the only person present who had not had a drink that night.

Many people in the swirl were well and happy. Some, I knew, were heartsick. With Douglas, from a cause that couldn’t be cured. Others, like Vicky, who couldn’t restrain herself from begging ten minutes alone with Pat, might some day look on at this kind of party, just as the content now looked at her. Leonard Getliffe had been and gone. There must have been others there, not only among the young, who — without the rest of us knowing — were putting a face on things. It was part of the flux. Just as it was part of the flux that, in the public eye, some were having the luck and some the opposite. Douglas, in spite of his organic grief, had reached the peak in his job. The master politician was confident that, before this time next year, he would have reached the peak in his. An American playwright, who had been modestly drinking in a corner, had just had a spectacular success. And there was another success, the most bizarre of all. Gilbert Cooke, who had been fortunate to be kept in the civil service after the war, had managed to become deputy head of one of the security branches. It couldn’t have been a more esoteric triumph: except to Douglas, one dared not mention the name of the post, much less of its occupant. I had not the slightest conception of how Gilbert had made it. For him, who was not able even to suggest that he had been promoted, it was his crowning glory.

Whereas Herbert Getliffe was not the only one for whom the snakes had been stronger than the ladders. Edgar Hankins’ brand of literary criticism, which had been rooted in the twenties, had gone out of fashion. He could still earn a living, one saw his name each week, he still wrote with elegiac eloquence: but the younger academics sneered at him, and in the weeklies he was being referred to as though he were a dead Georgian poet. There was another turn-up for the book (Sammikins, in another context, had just been blaring out those words), the most unjust of all — as though anything could happen either way. Walter Luke had stepped in for half-an-hour, grizzled, crisp. Yes, he had got honours, but what did they mean? Apart from Leonard Getliffe, he had a greater talent than anyone there. But for years past he had thrown up everything to lead the project on plasma physics. Now, so all the scientists said, it was certain that the problem would not be solved for a generation. Walter Luke knew it, and knew — making jaunty cracks at his own expense — that he had wasted his creative life.

At midnight, as I was saying some goodbyes at the hall door, another guest, the last of all, emerged from the lift. It was Ronald Porson. He hadn’t been invited by me — but he was one of those, living alone in bedsitters in the neighbourhood, whom Maurice and the local parson went to visit. The parson had been at the party, but had left some time before to celebrate Christmas mass. I guessed, from the first sight, that I should need some help with Porson, but Maurice was nowhere near.

He came lurching up. In the passage light there was the gleam of an MCC tie.

“Good evening, Lewis,” he said in a domineering tone. I asked him to come in. As we walked into the dining-room, he said: “I was told you had a champagne party on.”

Not quite, I said. But there was the bar over there –

“I insist,” said Porson, “I was told it was a champagne party.”

As a matter of fact, I said, there were lots of other liquids, but not champagne.

“I insist,” began Porson, and I told him that, if he wanted champagne, I would find a bottle. He had come to pick a quarrel: I didn’t mind his doing so with me, but there were others he might upset. Immediately he refused champagne, and demanded gin.

“I don’t like large parties,” said Porson, looking round the room.

“Can’t be helped,” I replied.

He took a gulp. “You’ve got too many Jews here,” he announced.

“Be careful.”

“Why should I be?”

Martin, who had been watching, whispered, “You may need a strong man or two.” He beckoned Sammikins, and they both stood near. Porson was in his seventies, but he could be violent. None of us, not even the clergyman, knew how he survived. He came from a professional family; he had eked out his bit of capital, but it had gone long since. He had once been convicted of importuning. But all that happened to him made him fight off pity and become either aggressive or patronising or both.

“Who is he?” He pointed to Sammikins.

I said, Mr Porson, Lord Edgeworth.

“Why don’t you do something about it?” Porson asked him.

“What are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you do something about this country? That’s what you’re supposed to sit there for, isn’t it?” Porson put out his underlip. “I’ve got no use for the lot of you.”

“You’d better calm down,” said Sammikins, getting hot-eyed himself.

“Why the hell should I? I had an invitation, didn’t I? I suppose you had an invitation—”

Then Maurice came up, and greeted him amicably. “Hallo, young man,” said Porson.

“I expected you’d be in church,” said Maurice.

“Well, I thought about it—”

“You promised Godfrey” (the parson) “you would, didn’t you?”

“To tell you the bloody truth,” said Porson, “it’s a bit too spike for me.” He began, self-propelled onto another grievance, on what “they” were doing to the Church of England, but Maurice (the other’s rage dripped off him), said he would drive him round, they would still arrive in time for the Christmas greetings. Gentle, unworried, Maurice led him out: although the last I saw, looking through the hall towards the lift, were Porson’s arms raised above his head, as though he were inspired into a final denunciation of the whole house.

About an hour later, the crowd had gone, Pat and the waiters had cleared the glasses from the drawing-room, the windows were open to the cold air. Again in the morphology of parties, there was still the last residue remaining, not only remaining but settling down. Edgar Hankins reposed on cushions on the drawing-room floor: so did the playwright: Margaret and I sat back in our habitual chairs. Martin and Irene, since they were staying with us, remained too. Their daughter had gone to bed, Pat had disappeared, but Charles wanted to look as though the night were just beginning. Also fixtures, unpredictable fixtures, were Gilbert and Betty Cooke.

Martin, cheerful, said to me: “Look, you’re about eighteen drinks behind the rest of us. Won’t you have one now?”

I hadn’t been able to tell him about George Passant’s news. It would have been a relief to do so. But now I was tired, sedated by the to-and-fro of people, not caring: yes, I said, I might as well have a drink. When he brought it to me, it was very strong. That was deliberate, for Martin was a vigilant man.

Someone cried “Happy Christmas!”

From the floor Edgar Hankins, who was far gone, raised a dormouse-like head.

“Not the English greeting,” he muttered, fluffing the words.

“What’s the matter?” said Irene.

“Not Happy Christmas. Insipid modernism. Vulgar. Genteel taste. Merry Christmas — that’s the proper way. Merry Christmas.”

Hankins subsided. Gilbert Cooke, with Charles sitting beside him, could at last indulge his insatiable passion for talking about their school. Charles wanted to hold inquiries about people at the party, but was trapped.

For a few minutes Betty and I were in conversation, quietly, with talk all round us. We were fond of each other, we had been for years. In bad times for us both, we had tried to help each other. Her love affairs had gone wrong: she was diffident but passionate, she hadn’t the nerve to grab. We had thought, certainly I had, that she deserved a better man than Gilbert, or at least a different one. Yet somehow the marriage had worked.

That night, as we whispered, she was watching me with her acute, splendid eyes, the feature which, more in middle age than youth, gave her a touch of beauty.

“You’ve had enough,” she said.

I protested.

“Now, now, now,” she said. “I used to notice one or two things, didn’t I?”

I had to give a smile.

“I’ll get rid of them,” she said, glancing round the room. It was the sort of practical good turn which, even in her bleakest times, she had often done for me.

Next morning I woke up early. Through the window came the sound, very faint, of church bells. I stretched myself, feeling well, with the vague sense, perhaps some shadow of a memory from childhood, of a pleasing day ahead. Then, edging into consciousness, suddenly shutting out all else — as sharp, as absolute as when, a few weeks before, I had awakened in well-being and then seen the veil over my eye — was the brute fact. There was nothing to keep away or soften what George had told me; and what I felt as I listened, I felt waking up that morning, as though the passage of hours hadn’t happened, or couldn’t do its work.