Last Things (20 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘What is it?’ I cried.

‘Try to sleep.’

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

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

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

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

What was I frightened of?

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

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

What was I frightened of?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘Here we are again, sir!’

I could distinguish other footsteps besides his.

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

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

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

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

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

‘Well, what is it?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mansel: ‘No, not much.’

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