Last Things (2 page)

He was not in the least clever. He had that summer failed his examinations, for the second year running, at Cambridge. She had hoped that he might become a doctor, but that was out. Maurice himself accepted it with his usual gentle amusement. He thought he ought to try to be as useful as he could. ‘I don’t know much,’ he had said, talking of the hospital, ‘but I suppose I can look after them a bit.’

In secret, Margaret was distracted. She knew that his friends, as mystified as she was, were beginning to believe that he was one of nature’s innocents or saints. But could you bear your favourite child to be one of nature’s saints?

Meanwhile, I had been reading the postcard from Charles, her son and mine. He was not at all innocent, and he was extremely able. He looked older than his half-brother, though he was still not seventeen. He had had a brilliant career at school, and had decided, independent, on his own, to spend a year abroad before he went to Cambridge. He was writing from Bucharest. ‘Romanian is interesting, but I’d better economise on languages if I’m going to have one or two good enough. People won’t talk Russian here; and when they do aren’t usually very competent. Plum brandy is the curse of Eastern Europe. On the other hand, standards of primness – behind closed doors – markedly and pleasingly low.’ It reminded me of the postcards I used to receive from another bright young scholar, Roy Calvert, a generation before.

‘Well,’ I said, after Margaret had passed over Maurice’s letter, ‘you pay your money and you take your choice.’

I was pretending that I was more detached than she was. She knew better.

For herself; Margaret couldn’t help remembering Charles as an affectionate small boy. Now he was as self-willed as we had been. In the past she had imagined the time when her sons were grown up, and nothing but a comfort. She said, realism deserting her, ‘If only each of them could give the other a little of what he doesn’t have.’

She was harking back to them, reading Maurice’s letter again (would he look after his health?), as we picked our way through the rest of the mail. Five or six days of it. The ordinary professional letters. An invitation from the Lester Inces for the following weekend. A note from the wife of my nephew Pat, married that summer, child expected in January, hoping to see Margaret. Invitations to give lectures. Letter from a paranoid, asking for help against persons persecuting her by means of wireless messages. Two lines on a postcard from old George Passant, sent from Holland. Agenda of a meeting.

That was all. Nothing exciting, I said. That was the last thing we wanted, said Margaret, as we went in to eat at leisure, by ourselves.

We had arrived back on Tuesday. The next Monday morning we were again returning home, this time in a train, autumn fields bland in the sunshine, no shadow over us: in fact, in contented, mocking spirits, amused by the weekend. For we hadn’t been able to resist the Inces’ invitation. Margaret’s sister had been willing to stand in for another week, I was glad of a little grace before I started a new book. More than that, we had been inquisitive. The young took up our attention now, and it was a relaxation to have a look at middle-aged acquaintances.

In fact, it turned out fun to see Lester Ince installed in his second avatar, in his recently established state. It was, as it had unrolled before our eyes those last two days, a remarkable state. He had run off – or she had done the running off – with an American woman who was not merely rich, but, as her friends said, rich-rich. They had raced through their divorces in minimum time, and they had simultaneously been looking for a stately home. They had found it: one of the most famous and stateliest of homes: nothing less than Basset. Basset, where Diana Skidmore used to perform as a great hostess, and where Margaret and I, though nowhere near the smart life, had sometimes been among the guests. But that had been in the fifties, getting on for a decade ago (this was 1964), and Diana had got tired of it. No one seemed to be certain why, but, just as decisively as she once talked to ministers, she announced that she had had enough, and closed the house within a month. She was reported to be living, quite simply, in a London flat, seeing only her oldest friends. Basset had stayed empty for several years.

Then came the Inces. They had heard of it: they inspected it: they bought it. Together with associated farms, tenantry, trout streams, pheasant-shooting and outspread acres. Basset had become more opulent, so the knowing ones said, than ever in its history; Margaret and I had regarded it all, that weekend, with yokel-like incredulity, or perhaps more like American Indians confronted with the twin miracles of Scotch whisky and firearms. In my less stupefied moments, I had been trying to work out how many hundred thousands of pounds they had spent.

Lester Ince as landowner. Lester Ince in a puce smoking jacket, at the head of his table in the great eighteenth-century dining-room, ceiling by Thornhill: Lester pushing the decanter runners round, after the women had left us. Well, one had to admit, there were considerable bonuses. The food in Diana’s time had always been skimpy, and usually dim. Not now. There used not to be enough to drink. Lester Ince, who remained a hearty and a kindly man, had taken care of that.

Still, it seemed a slight difference of emphasis away from the Lester Ince who was a junior fellow of my old college only ten years before. He had written a highly regarded work on the moral complexities in Joseph Conrad: but his utterances, almost as soon as he was elected, had been somewhat unexpected. He had surveyed his colleagues, and decided that he didn’t think much of them. Francis Getliffe was a stuffed shirt. So was my brother Martin. The best college hock Lester firmly described as cat’s pee. The comfortable worldliness of Arthur Brown was even less to his taste. ‘I should like to spill the crap about this joint,’ someone reported him saying in the combination room: at that stage, he had a knack of speaking what he thought of as American demotic.

As a result of this kind of trenchancy, he became identified as one of the academic spokesmen of a new wave. This was protest. This was one of the voices of progressive opinion. Well, there seemed a slight difference of emphasis now.

To a good many, particularly to those who couldn’t help finding leaders and then promptly losing them, the conversation at Basset that weekend might have been disconcerting. This used to be one of the major political houses. A number of ministerial careers had been helped, or alternatively hindered, in Diana Skidmore’s drawing-room. It was possible that policies – though did any of us know how policies were really made, in particular the persons who believed they made them? – had at least been deviated. Basset was not a political house any longer. But, in spite or because of that, it had become far more ideological than it had ever been. Diana’s Tory ministers hadn’t indulged much in ideology: the Inces and their friends were devoted to it. The old incumbents didn’t talk about the Cold War: now, there were meals when the Basset parties talked of nothing else.

That was election autumn, both in America and England. Ince’s wife thought that we were not sufficiently knowledgeable about the merits of Senator Goldwater. He mightn’t have everything, but at least he wasn’t soft on Communism. As for our general election, if the Conservatives didn’t come back, there was a prospect of ‘confiscatory taxation’, a subject on which Lester Ince spoke with poignant feeling.

Once or twice we had a serious argument. Then I grew bored and said that we had better regard some topics as forbidden. Lester Ince was sad; he believed what he said, he believed that, if they listened, people of goodwill would have to agree with him. However, he was not only strong on hostly etiquette, he was good-natured; if the results of his political thinking put us out, then we ought to be excused from hearing them. ‘In that case, Lew,’ he said, with a cheerful full-eyed glint from his older incarnation, ‘you come to my study before you change, and we’ll have a couple of snifters and you can talk about the dear old place.’

He meant the college, for which, though it had treated him well, he still felt a singular dislike. In actual truth, he had altered much less than others thought, less even than he thought himself. Protest? Others had been sitting in the places he wanted. Now he had settled his ample backside in just those places, and it was for others to protest. When young men seemed to be rebelling against social manners, I used to think, it meant that they would, in the end, not rebel against anything else.

In the train, Margaret and I agreed that we each had a soft spot for him. Anyway, it wasn’t every day that one saw an old acquaintance living like a millionaire. As the taxi took us home from Waterloo, we were thinking of persons, acquaintances of his roughneck years, who might profitably be presented with the spectacle of the new-style Basset. The game was still diverting us as we entered the flat.

Beside the telephone, immediately inside the hall, there stood a message on the telephone pad. It read, with the neutrality and unsurprisingness of words on paper:

Mr Davidson
(Margaret’s father)
is seriously ill. Sir Lewis is asked for specially, by himself. Before he goes to the clinic, please call at 22 Addison Road.

As with other announcements that had come without warning, this seemed like something one had known for a long time.

IN Addison Road, Margaret’s sister was staying with some friends. As she kissed me, her expression was grave with the authority of bad news. Silently she led me through the house, down a few steps, into a paved garden. It was not yet half past eleven – I had not been inside my flat for more than minutes – and the sky was pearly with the morning haze. She said: ‘I’m glad you came.’

For a long time, we had not been easy with each other. She had been stern against Margaret’s broken marriage, and put most of the blame on to me. All that was nearly twenty years before, but Helen, who was benign and tender, was also unforgiving: or perhaps, like some who live on the outside uneventful lives, she made dramas which the rest of us wanted to coarsen ourselves against. She was in her early fifties, five years older than her sister: she had had no children, and her face not only kept its youth, like all the others in her family, but did so to a preternatural extent. It was like seeing a girl or very young woman – with, round her eyes, as though traced in wax, the lines of middle age. She dressed very smartly, which that morning, as often, seemed somehow both pathetic and putting-off: but then it didn’t take much to make me more uneasy with her, perhaps because, when I had been to blame, I hadn’t liked being judged.

She was looking at me with eyes, like Margaret’s, acute and beautiful. She hadn’t spoken again: then suddenly, as it were brusquely, said: ‘Father tried to kill himself last night.’

As soon as we read the message, Margaret – distressed that he didn’t want her – had tried to find an explanation: and so had I, on the way here. But, obtusely so it seemed later, neither of us had thought of that.

‘He asked me to tell you. He said it would save unnecessary preambles.’

That sounded like Austin Davidson first-hand. I hadn’t met many men as uncushioned or as naked to life. He despised the pretences that most of us found comforting. He despised them for himself, but also for others, quite regardless of what anyone who loved him might feel. That morning Helen said (she had lavished less care on him than had Margaret), almost in his own tone, ‘He’s never thought highly of other people’s opinion, you know.’

She told me how it had happened. As we all knew, he had been in despair about his illness. Until his sixties, he had lived a young man’s life: then he had a thrombosis, and he had been left with an existence that he wouldn’t come to terms with. A less clear-sighted man might have been more stoical. Austin Davidson, alone in Regent’s Park except for Margaret’s visits, had sunk into what they used to call accidie. A tunnel with no end. There had been remissions – but his heart had weakened more, he could scarcely walk, and at last, at seventy-six, he wouldn’t bear it. Somehow – Helen didn’t know how – he had accumulated a store of barbiturates. On the previous evening, Sunday, about the time that I was drinking pre-dinner ‘snifters’ with Lester Ince, he had sat alone in his house, writing notes to his daughters. Then he had swallowed his drugs, washed them down with one whisky, and stood himself another.

But he had done it wrong. He had taken too much. A few hours later, stupefied by the drug, he had staggered about, violently sick. While vomiting, he had fallen forward, gashing his forehead against the handle of the WC. Near by, he had been discovered at breakfast time, covered with blood but still alive. They had driven him to the –– clinic.

‘Fortunately,’ said Helen, ‘he seems to be surprisingly well. I don’t know whether I ought to say fortunately. He wouldn’t.’

She had destroyed the two notes unopened. He had been at least half-lucid when she talked to him in his hospital room. He had asked, several times, to see me, without Margaret. So Helen had been obliged to give the message.

‘I wish’, I said, ‘that he had asked for her. She minds a great deal.’

‘That’s why he’d rather have you, maybe,’ said Helen.

The midday roads were dense with cars, and it took forty minutes before the taxi reached the clinic. On the way, I had been wondering what I should find, or even more what I should manage, to say. I was fond of Austin Davidson, and I respected that bright, uncluttered mind. But it wasn’t the respect that one might feel for an eminent old man. It was an effort to think of him as my father-in-law. Except when the sheer impact of his illness weighed one down, he seemed much more like a younger friend.

It was the clinic in which, during the war, I had first met Margaret. I thought I remembered, I might be imagining it, the number of my room. At any rate, it was on the same ground floor, at the same side, as the one I was entering now.

In his high bed, flanked by flowers on the tables close by – the ceiling shimmered with subaqueous green reflected from the garden – Austin Davidson looked grotesque. His head, borne up by three pillows, was wrapped in a bandage which covered his right eye and most of his forehead: even at that, there was a bruise under the right cheekbone, and the corner of his mouth was swollen. More than anything, he gave the appearance of having just been patched up after a fight. Among the bandages, one sepia eye stared at me. I heard his voice, dulled but the words quite clear.