Last Things (18 page)

Then I had been nineteen. Now I was sixty. That had been, in Charles’ phrase, the beginning of one of my lines (the first letter went off at last, and I duly read for the Bar). Tonight was the end of that line. Delaying a little less than I had done at nineteen, a few hours less, I went out into the empty moonlit street to post the letter.

MARGARET, glad about the outcome, more glad because the quarrel had dissolved, believed with Francis Getliffe that I should be cross with myself. I might have believed that also: certainly I was incredulous, as though I were observing astonishing reactions in some Amazonian Indian when I found how equable I was. True, I had my jags of resentment. As I opened the paper one morning and saw the job had been filled – it had gone to Lord Luke of Salcombe, which added a touch of irony – I pointed to the announcement and said to Margaret: ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ On the moment, I was blaming her, it was the kind of gibe which wasn’t all a gibe: but I shouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been serene underneath.

It would be a singular apotheosis for Walter Luke, making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords. Only a few years before he had been denouncing politicians and administrators with fervent impartiality. Stuffed shirts! Those blasted uncles! Out of inquisitiveness and perhaps fellow feeling, I went along to hear his first ministerial speech. Walter’s cubical head looming over the box: the rich West-Country intonation that he had never lost. As for the speech itself, it was competent, neither good nor bad. His civil servants had put in all the safeguards and qualifications which used to evoke his considerable powers of abuse. Walter uttered them now with every appearance of solidarity, as though they were great truths. But, then, so should I have had to utter them.

That afternoon, walking past Palace Yard in one of the first autumn fogs, I was again mystified that I should be so serene. Work was going well, but there I wasn’t at the mercy of my moods; it would have gone as well if I had been cursing myself. Margaret and I were entertaining more than we usually did, catching up with friends and acquaintances, the Marches, the Roses, the Getliffes, Muriel, Vicky Shaw and her father. That was agreeable: but it wasn’t the origin of my present state.

The secret lay – though I should never have predicted it – in the sheer fact of saying no, in what Charles called my abdication. Certainly I had seen others, among them my brother Martin, gain a gratification out of giving up ‘the world’ – in Martin’s case, when he was very much in it and with the prizes dangling in front of him; he had become content, or even euphoric, out of great expectations denied. But that wasn’t so with me. This job of Walter Luke’s – orating in the fog-touched chamber – hadn’t been part of my own expectations. No, the satisfaction came, if I understood it at all, from one’s own will. In most of the events of a lifetime, the will didn’t play a part. We were tossed about in the stream, corks bobbing manfully, shouting confidently that they could go upstream if they felt inclined. Somehow, though, the corks, explaining that it would be foolish to go upstream, went on being carried the opposite way.

Very rarely one was able to exercise one’s will. Even then it might be an illusion, but it was an illusion that brought something like joy. It could happen when one was taking a risk or remaking a life. Sometimes I speculated whether people at the point of suicide felt this kind of triumph of the will. I should have liked to think that Sheila went out like that. What did Austin Davidson feel as he swallowed his pills and took what he believed to be his last drink?

Earlier, it would have been easy to ask him. No one would have been less embarrassed than Davidson, and he would have given an account of classical lucidity. During one of my visits that November, I began telling him of my experience, in the hope that I might lead on to his own. But I hadn’t realised, nor had Margaret, seeing him so often, how much further away he had slipped. When I told him that I had been offered the job, he said, eyes vacantly staring: ‘Did they give you a book?’

I wanted to leave it, but he insisted. I said, no, since I had refused, I didn’t get anything: and then, slowly, sickeningly slowly to one who had been so clever, I tried to explain. Government. Ministers. Politics.

He strained to comprehend, cheeks flushed. He managed to say: ‘No serious man has anything to do with politics.’

With relief at getting a little communication, I said that was a good apostolic pre-1914 sentiment. Then I hurried on, abandoning any attempt to try a new question. I went back to the familiar conversational forms. Those he could still understand, and, for some of the time (it was the longest of hours), take part in.

As soon as I returned home, I asked Margaret – what had been her impression of him earlier that week? Much as he usually was, she replied: not taking much interest, but he hadn’t done for months. I told her that I thought I saw – I might be imagining it – a difference. If I’d seen him for the first time that afternoon, I shouldn’t have given him long to go.

‘Of course it may just be a bad day,’ I said. ‘But I think you ought to be prepared.’

She nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’

Prepared, perhaps, both for loss and for relief. The strain of the long illness told on her more than on me, because it was she who loved him. If you loved – instead of being fond of – someone taking a long time to die, there were times when you wanted the release. What had been my mother’s phrase for it? A happy release. One of those hypocritical labels which half-revealed a truth. Then, when the release came, you felt the loss more, because it was mixed with guilt. As with so many consequences of love, what you lost on the swings you lost also on the roundabouts.

Meanwhile, I believed that I knew a way to give him pleasure. I had tried it once before – any more often, and he would have been suspicious. He was physically capable of reading, so the doctors said, and yet he refused even to glance at a newspaper. Still, one had to allow for remote chances. It meant a certain amount of contrivance, and a visit to my stockbroker.

Late the following week – I had seen him in the interval – I entered the familiar, the too familiar, hospital room, catching the smell of chrysanthemums and chemicals, with underneath the last echo of cigarette smoke and faeces. From the bed Davidson muttered, but it was not until I was facing him that he looked at me. Instead of sitting at the end of the bed, I carried a chair round to his left-hand side. It was becoming forlorn to expect that he would begin a conversation. I had to start straight off: ‘You’ve not lost your touch, you know.’

‘What are you talking about?’ he said in a dull tone.

‘I was telling you, you haven’t lost your touch. You’ve made me quite a bit of money.’

The bird-brown eyes flickered. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘You did some listening to financial pundits in your time, didn’t you? Well, you’re not the only one.’

He gave the sketch of a smile.

‘Do you remember telling me about a year ago’ – actually it was slightly longer, soon after he was taken into the clinic – ‘that you guessed that it was time to go into metals? Particularly nickel. And you produced some rules about the right kind of share. I tell you, I did some listening. And took some action.’

‘Unwise. You forgot the first rule of investment. Never act on tips from an enthusiastic amateur.’ He was shaking his head, but there was colour in his voice.

‘You’re about as much an amateur as the late lamented Dr W G Grace.’

This esoteric remark, to begin to understand which one had to be born (
a
) in England, (
b
) not later than 1920, made him laugh. Not for long, but audibly, sharply.

‘So I took some action. I thought you might as well know the exact score – here’s a letter from my broker. Would you like to read it–?’

‘No, you read.’

The letter said – ‘The purchase of Claymor Nickel has turned out very profitable for you. We bought on Oct. 14, 1964, 3000 shares, which then stood at 21/6. The price this morning is 47/9. This shows a gross gain of just under £4000. If you wish to sell, there will as you know be a capital gains tax of 30%, but the net profit will still be £2600 approximately. However, in our opinion the price is likely to rise still higher.’

I broke off: ‘I said, you haven’t lost your touch, have you?’

‘One can’t help being right occasionally, don’t you know.’ But he was very pleased, so pleased that he went on talking, though he had to stop for breath. ‘Anyway, I’ve not made you poorer, which is more than one can say of most advice. That is, unless you’ve taken some other tips from me which have probably been disastrous–’

‘Not one.’

‘I must admit, it’s agreeable to be some trivial use to you. Even when one’s finishing up in this damned bedroom. It’s not unpleasant to be some trivial use–’

‘I don’t call it trivial–’

Davidson lifted his head a few inches from the pillows. His expression was lively and contented. In a tone in which one could hear some of his old authority, which in fact was curiously minatory, he said: ‘Now you ought to get out of that holding. Tomorrow. They may go higher. But remember, tops and bottoms are made for fools. That was the old Rothschild maxim, and they didn’t do too badly out of it.’

‘Right,’ I said obediently.

‘There’s another point. I should consider that your unit of investment was too large. £3000 – that was it, wasn’t it? – is far too much for this kind of risk. It came off this time, but it won’t always, you follow. You’ve heard the units that I use myself–’

‘I had more faith in you.’

‘You oughtn’t to have that much faith in anyone–’

I had not heard him take so much part in the duologue for many months. His manner, despite the heavy breathing, stayed minatory and on the attack: but that meant he was enjoying himself or at least self-forgetful. He even asked me to pour him a small whisky, although it was not yet four in the afternoon. It might have been a device to make me stay, for he insisted – suddenly reminding me of Charles as a child, importuning me to talk to him before he went to sleep – that I pour another for myself.

When at last I was outside the clinic, standing in the Marylebone Road looking for a taxi, I felt a little more than the usual emancipation. The afternoon had been easy: of course it was good to be out: slivers of rain shone, as though they were frozen, past the nearest street lamp, and then bounced from the glistening pavement. I felt some of that zest – disgraceful and yet not to be denied – which came from being well in the presence of someone who couldn’t be well again. The lift in one’s step, which ought for decency’s sake to be a reproach, just wasn’t: it was good to breathe the dank autumnal air. It was not unpleasant, even, to stand in the rain waiting for a taxi. For an instant, a surreptitious thought occurred to me: it was rather a pity that I hadn’t, in cold fact, bought shares on the old man’s judgment. Either those or any others. The trouble was, I believed too much in his maxim about enthusiastic amateurs. If I hadn’t, if I had trusted him, I should have been a good deal better off.

That visit took place on a Monday. It was not on the following morning, but on the Wednesday that I woke up early, so early that the window was quite dark. I lay there, comfortable, not sure whether I should go to sleep again or not. It was pleasant to think of the day ahead, lying relaxed and well. Perhaps I dozed off. Light was coming through the curtains. As in a sleep-start, I jerked into consciousness. There was a blackout over the far corner of my left eye.

I knew what that meant, too well. I went to the windows, pulled a curtain, looked out over the Tyburn garden to a clear early morning sky. Trying to cheat the truth, I blinked the eye and opened it again. Yes, for an instant the blackout seemed dissolved. Comfort. Then it surged back again. A clear black edge. Against the lightening sky, a little smoky film beyond the edge.

I couldn’t cheat myself any longer. I knew what that meant, too well. The retina had come loose once more. Perhaps the veil didn’t spread so far as the other time. But I was complaining, Good God, this is rough, could I face going through all that again?

Margaret was still quiet in her morning sleep. There was no point in waking her. Minutes didn’t matter, and I could tell her soon enough.

BEFORE breakfast, Margaret rang up Mansel, the ophthalmologist who had operated on me before. We had learned his timetable by now, since he had been inspecting my eyes each month or so. He would call in, Margaret told me, about eleven, on his way from the hospital to Harley Street.

As we sat waiting, I said to Margaret: ‘He’ll want to have another shot.’

‘Let’s see what he says.’

‘I’m quite sure he’ll want to.’ I added: ‘But I’m not so sure that I can bear it.’

I wasn’t thinking of the operation, in itself that didn’t matter, but of the days afterwards, lying still, blinded, helpless in the dark. Though I had managed to control it, I had always had more than my share of claustrophobia. As I grew older, it got more oppressive, not less; and lying blinded for days brought on something like claustrophobia squared. The previous time had been pretty near my limit: or so it seemed looking back, even more than when I was going through it.

Margaret wanted to distract me. She said how this would have been more than a nuisance if I had been in government.

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t take that job,’ she said.

‘If I had taken it, this mightn’t have happened,’ I replied.

Oh come, Margaret said, glad to have found an argument, that was taking psychosomatic thinking altogether too far. But I didn’t respond for long.

When Mansel arrived, he was as usual brisk and elegant, busy and unhurried.

‘I’m sorry to hear about this, sir,’ he said to me.

We had come to know each other well, but it was a curious intimacy, in which he, almost young enough to be my son, insisted on calling me Sir, while I insisted on calling him by his Christian name. I admired him as a superb professional, and he listened to my observations as possibly useful to his clinical stock-in-trade.