Last Things (11 page)

He looked round, and slowly from under the sheet drew out a thin hand, on which stood out the veins and freckles of old age. As Charles took it, he said: ‘How are you, grandpa?’

Davidson produced a good imitation – perhaps it was more than that – of his old Mephistophelian smile.

‘Well, Carlo, you wouldn’t want me to tell you a lie, would you?’

Their eyes met. They each had the same kind of cheekbones. Even now, it was easy to see what Davidson had looked like as a young man. But, though I might be imagining it, I thought his face had become puffier these last few weeks; some of the bone structure, handsome until he was old, was being smeared out now.

Charles gave a smile, a smile of recognition, in return.

‘Also,’ said Davidson, ‘you wouldn’t like me to give you an honest answer either, don’t you know?’

Charles gave the same firm smile again, and sat down by the bed, on the side opposite to me. For a while Austin Davidson seemed pleased with his own repartee, or, perhaps more exactly, with the performance he was putting up. Then he began to show signs, which I hadn’t expected, of something like disappointment, as though he were a child who, out of good manners, couldn’t protest at not being given a treat. That was a surprise, for he had, even in illness, displayed a liking for Charles, and had occasionally asked for his company. Not that Davidson had much family sense, few men less: but of his descendants and relatives, Charles, I fancied, appeared most like the young men Davidson had grown up with. Yet now he wished that Charles was out of the way.

Then, when Davidson couldn’t resist a complaint: ‘I suppose it’s too much to expect Carlo to take an intelligent interest–’ I had it. Charles couldn’t pick up the reference: but by now Davidson, always obsessive, had become addicted to our afternoon ritual, first what he called ‘intelligent conversation’ (that is, about the Stock Market), and then his reflections on dying. His interests had narrowed to that. It still seemed to me harrowing that in that clinical room, afternoon following afternoon, we talked about Stock Exchange prices. I had to tell him what he had gained or lost by his last investment. It was purely symbolic: money had not mattered much to him, except as an intellectual game, and nothing could matter less now. Yet there was something triumphant about his interest, as though he had proved that one could be pertinacious to the end.

However, that afternoon, with Charles present, he was deprived. For a time he fell into silence, indrawn. Whether he was wondering if he ought to talk about death in front of Charles, I didn’t know. Probably he didn’t trouble himself. Austin Davidson used to feel, as only a delicate man could feel, that it was invariably wrong to be over-delicate. At any rate, after a while he produced a question.

‘Carlo. If you believed in an afterlife, which by definition is impossible, which of the various alternatives so far proposed for the afterlife would you prefer?’

Davidson’s sepia eyes were shining, as though gratified to be talking again.

‘Meaning what in the way of alternatives?’ Charles was good at catching the tone.

‘Any that you’ve ever heard of.’

Charles considered.

‘They’re all pretty dim,’ he said.

‘Granted. There’s not much to be said for the human imagination.’

‘I suppose there may be something outside this world–’

I thought, Charles wasn’t used to the Edwardian brand of unbelief.

‘That hasn’t any meaning. No, people have always been inventing heavens. All ridiculous. Now you’re asked to name the one you fancy.’

Gazing at the old man, Charles realised that he had to play this game according to the rules.

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Valhalla.’

Davidson gave a genuine smile.

‘Not so good, Carlo. Just like a regimental mess.’

‘Good stories,’ said Charles.

‘My God. Listening to rather stupid hearties talking about battles for all eternity.’

‘That would be better than listening to harps, wouldn’t it?’

‘I put it about equal. But all that boozing–’

Like nearly all his circle, Davidson had never gone in much for drink. I recalled, years before I met Margaret, being taken by a Cambridge friend to a party in Gordon Square. The hosts – we now knew from the biographies – had been intimates of Davidson’s and brother Apostles. The thinking might have been high, but the entertainment was austere.

‘One would get used to it after the first thousand years, I think.’

They kept up the exchange, Charles doing his share as though this were a natural piece of chit-chat. Whether it cost him an effort, I couldn’t be sure. His face was grave, but so it had to be to match Davidson’s fancy, while Davidson’s spirits, so long as they could go on talking, were lighter than I had felt them for weeks past. After the two of them had exhausted the topic of putative heavens, Davidson didn’t relapse into the dark silence, when it seemed his eyes turned inward, that I had sat through so often in that room. Instead, and this was very rare, for even Margaret he scarcely mentioned when I visited him, he brought a new person into the conversation.

‘Oh that young man, what’s he called, your nephew–’ he said to me, and I supplied the name. ‘Yes. He came in here the other day. He’s been to see me once or twice, don’t you know.’

Yes, I knew.

‘I gather he’s having some sort of trouble with his wife.’

It was an extraordinary place to come and confide, but Pat, I thought, wasn’t above searching for comfort or allies anywhere.

I said that his wife had turned him out.

‘Can’t someone make her be sensible? It’s all remarkably uncivilised.’

His tone was stern and complaining. That was a word of condemnation, one of the very few he ever used. He began to talk about his own friends. They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometrical figures, well then, one accepted that too. Of course jealousy sometimes intruded: but jealousy had to be kept in its place. They believed in pleasure, said Davidson. If you didn’t believe in pleasure, you couldn’t be civilised.

Davidson wasn’t wandering, I hadn’t heard him do so since the first morning in the clinic. Lucidly he returned to his starting point. Muriel was being uncivilised. Of course, Pat might have gone in for a certain amount of old-fashioned adultery. What of it? He wanted to preserve the marriage.

‘I should have thought’, said Davidson, ‘that he was a man of fundamentally decent feeling.’

I should have liked to discover what Charles made of that judgment. He had been listening with absorption to Davidson speaking of his friends: at Charles’ age, though this was his grandfather talking, that period, that coterie, must already have passed into history and have seemed as remote, as preserved in time, as the pre-Raphaelites. Would they have a glamour for Charles? Or would he detest their kind of enlightenment, what Davidson had just called being ‘civilised’, as much as his mother did?

We had stayed in the bedroom – I was used to looking at my watch below Davidson’s eye level in that room – half an hour longer than I set myself. But when I began to move, muttering the ‘Well–’ which begins to set one free, he said he would like us to stay a little longer. He realised we were unlikely to share his opinion, he remarked with a flicker of the old devil, but he was having a mildly diverting afternoon.

IT was getting on for a month later, on an afternoon when Margaret was taking her turn to visit Austin Davidson, that Azik Schiff rang up: would I call round at his house, he wanted (using an idiom known only to Azik) to include me in the picture. High summer in Eaton Square, trees dense with foliage, leaves dark under the bright sun, car bonnets flashing. The major rooms in Azik’s house were on the second floor, a kind of
piano nobile
, and there in the long drawing-room, standing in front of his Renoir, Azik greeted me. He gave his face-splitting froglike smile, called me ‘my friend’, put his arm round my shoulders and conducted me to a sofa where Rosalind was sitting. Then there was conferring about whether it was too late for tea, or too early for a drink. Both of them, Azik in particular, were making more than their normal fuss of me, trying to wrap me round with warmth.

When we were settled down, welcomes insisted on, Azik put his hands on his thick thighs, and said, like one at home with negotiations: ‘Lewis, my friend, you are not a principal in this matter. But we thought you ought to be informed.’

‘After all, you’re his uncle, aren’t you?’ Rosalind said appeasingly, but as though raising an unnecessary doubt.

I said, I had heard so many rumours, I should be grateful for some facts.

‘Ah, it is the young who have been talking.’

‘Not to me,’ I said.

‘Your son is a fine young man.’

I explained, I hadn’t a clear idea what he had been doing.

‘It makes no difference,’ said Azik. ‘It is all settled. Like that–’ he swept his arm.

‘She’s as obstinate as a pig, she always was,’ said Rosalind.

Azik gave a brisk businesslike account. Nothing had affected Muriel. Not that that was different from what I had expected: I imagined that she had stayed polite and temperate all through. While others had been arguing with her, giving advice, making appeals, she had been quietly working with her solicitor. The Chelsea flat had been sold (‘at a fair price’, said Azik): she had bought a house in Belgravia, and moved into it, along with child and nurse, the day before. The transaction had gone through so fast that Azik assumed that it must have been started months ago.

‘Remember, my friend, she is well provided for. She is independent with her money. We have no sanctions to use against her. Even if we were sure of our own ground.’

All of a sudden, Rosalind went into a tirade, her face forgetting the gentility of years and her voice its dying fall. She began by being furious with her daughter. After all her, Rosalind’s, care. Not to be able to keep a man. To get into a mess like this. No gratitude. No consideration. Making her look like an idiot. But really she was being as protective, or as outraged at not being able to be so, as when her daughter was a child. Rosalind’s sophistication had dropped clean away – her marriages, her remarkable talent for being able to love where it was advantageous to love, her climb from the suburbs of our native town to Eaton Square, her adventures on the way, all gone.

She had forgotten how she had campaigned to capture Muriel’s father, who, when one came down to earth, had not been much more stable with women than Pat himself. As for Pat, Rosalind felt simple hate. Twister. Gigolo. Expecting to be paid for his precious–. Rosalind’s language, when she was calm, could be slightly suggestive, but now there was no suggestion about it. One comfort, he had got what was coming to him. Then he went whining round. Rosalind began to use words that Azik perhaps had never heard, and that I hadn’t since I was young. Mardy. Mardyarse. How any child of hers, Rosalind shouted, could have been taken in by a drip like that – .

‘She has to make her own mistakes, perhaps,’ said Azik, in a tone soothing but not quite assured, as though this violence in his wife was a novelty with which he hadn’t had much practice.

Rosalind
: Who was she going to pick up next?

Azik
: We have to try and put her in the way of some nice young men.

Rosalind
: We’ve done that, since she was seventeen. And look what happens.

Azik
: We have to go on trying. These young people don’t like being managed. But perhaps there will be a piece of luck.

Rosalind
: She’ll pick another bit of rubbish.

Azik
: We must try. As long as she doesn’t know we’re trying.

The dialogue went on across me, like an argument in the marriage bed, Rosalind accusing, Azik consolatory. It wasn’t the first of these arguments, one felt: perhaps the others, like this, faded away into doldrums, when Azik, still anxious to placate his wife, had time to turn to me.

‘There is something I have already said to Martin,’ he told me. ‘Now I shall say it to you, Lewis, my friend.’

I looked at him.

‘I should be sorry if this business of these young people made any break between your family and ours. I must say, I should be sorry. It will not happen from our side.’

He spoke with great dignity. Uxorious as he was, he spoke as though that was his decision, and Rosalind had to obey. Loyally, making herself simmer down, she said that she and I had known each other for thirty years. On the other hand, I was thinking, I should be surprised if she went out of her way to meet Martin in the future.

Just after I had replied, telling him that I felt the same – I should have had to return politeness for politeness, but it happened to be true – young David ran into the room. He was a handsome boy, thin and active, one of those genetic sports who seemed to have no resemblance to either of his parents, olive-skinned. His father looked at him with doting love, and the boy spoke to both of them as though he expected total affection, and gave it back. He was just at the age when the confidence between all three was still complete, with nothing precarious in it, as though the first adolescent storm or secret would never happen. At his school his record was as good as Charles’ had been at the same age, six years before. In some ways, I thought, this boy was the cleverer. It was a triumph for Rosalind, much disapproved of by persons who regarded her as a kind of Becky Sharp, to produce for Azik when she was well over forty a son like this.

As for me, watching (the bonds between the three of them were so strong there wasn’t really room for an outsider there) the happiness of that not specially Holy Family, I couldn’t have found it in me to begrudge it them. But I was thinking of something else. When they had been talking of Muriel, Rosalind had behaved in what Austin Davidson would have called an uncivilised fashion: in fact he would have thought her strident and coarse, and had no use for her. While Azik had been showing all the compassionate virtues.