Last Things (21 page)

Undergraduate teasing, in the midst of all the energy he was spending upon me.

‘I’ve got a certain amount of faith in him,’ I caught the same tone.

Mansel cachinnated.

‘So you should have.’ This was Maxim. ‘Now I want you to listen to something else. This has been an unusual experience, and that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it? It’s an experience which could do harm to a good many people. You have to be pretty robust to take it in your stride. Robust psychologically – we can look after you physically, you’re absolutely all right there. I should guess you’re a tough specimen all the way round, and Christopher gives you an excellent report. But this is going to call for as much toughness as you can find. You’ve got to put it behind you. Straightaway. Today.’

It was a long time since anyone had spoken to me as paternally as this. I hadn’t yet seen his face, and, as it happened, I never did see it. He might very well be young enough, as Mansel was, to be my son. Yet I felt, not only gratitude so strong as to be uncomfortable, but also acquiescence, or even something like obedience.

‘You’ve got to forget it.’ The voice was even warmer, even more urgent. ‘That’s what I’m really telling you. The only danger is that you’ll let it stay with you. You’ve got to forget it.’

Curiously enough, that was what another strong-natured patient man had told us, at the end of the murder trial eighteen months before. But, after we had listened, my brother had said that that meant living in illusion: it might have been more comfortable, but it would have been wrong. You’ve got to forget it. This time, if I could obey, it presumably would do no harm to anyone, it wouldn’t mean false hope, it wouldn’t be wrong. And yet, as I thanked Maxim, I added that I wasn’t much good at forgetting things.

‘Well, you’ve got to train yourself. This was just an incident. Don’t let it make life dark for you. I’m going to tell you again, you’ve got to forget it.’

I heard him get up from the bedside, and then he and Mansel, at the far end of the room, engaged themselves in a professional argument mixed with backchat. I couldn’t follow much, the two voices, phone and antiphone, light and clear against deep bass, were kept low. But they each seemed to have a taste for facetiousness which wasn’t mine. Somehow I gathered that Maxim was not Bradbury’s baptismal name but had been invented by Mansel, who took great credit for it. As for the argument, that was about me.

‘Nothing secret,’ Bradbury called out, considerate and kind. ‘We’re just wondering when to get you up.’

Though I didn’t appreciate it, they were meeting a dilemma. What was good for the heart was a counter-indication for the eye, and vice versa. For the heart, they would like me sitting up that day: to give the eye the best chance, the longer I lay immobilised, the better.

‘Well, I’ll see how it looks tomorrow,’ I heard Mansel tell him, and Bradbury came nearer the bed to say goodbye.

‘I probably shan’t have to see you again,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased with you. Do remember what I’ve told you.’

The door clicked shut behind them. With that voice still comforting me, I needn’t fight against sleep any more. In a moment, seconds rather than minutes, as though I were going under the anaesthetic again, I was flat out.

When I woke, I first had the sense of well-being that came after deep sleep. Then suddenly, eyes pressed by the darkness, I remembered what had happened. That wasn’t the first time I had wakened happy and then been sickened by the thought of what lay ahead; there had been a good many such times since I was young: but this was the darkest.

My side hurt a little, so little that I should scarcely have noticed. That brought it all back. It had happened once. It could happen again. I was as frightened as I had been in the night. Perhaps more than that.

I tried to steady myself by recalling Bradbury’s words. This was cowardly; it was unrealistic; he said that all was well. If he had been back in the room, I should have been reassured. Totally reassured, effusively grateful once more. But now he had left me, I could see through all the lies: either I had been deceiving myself he hadn’t said those words, or else I could see through his reasons for saying them. They knew that it would happen again. Perhaps that day or the next. He thought I might as well have the rest of my time in peace.

MARGARET was speaking to me and holding my hand. It couldn’t have been many minutes since I awoke, but I had lost all sense of time. In fact, she had arrived about eleven o’clock; Mansel and Bradbury had made their call quite early, not long after eight.

I muttered her name. She kissed me and asked: ‘How is it now?’

‘It’s too much for me.’

Her fingers stiffened in mine, gripped hard. After the other operation, or even after Mansel broke the news the previous evening, she had heard me make some sort of pretence at sarcasm; she had come in expecting it now. She had come in, waiting to break down and confide what she had gone through: the telephone call as she sat in the flat at midday: just – would she come round to the hospital at once. The taxi ride through the miles of streets. Kept waiting at the hospital. No explanation. A long five minutes – so she told me later. (She remembered as little of them afterwards as if she had been drunk.) At last Mansel at the door, looking pallid. Then he said it was all right. Sharp clinical words to hearten her. After that, the operating theatre, where she sat waiting for me to come round.

Now she had come, needing release from all that: to be met by a tone which brought back all her misery, and, instead of giving her comfort, took it away. She had known me harsh and selfish enough in petty sufferings: but that was different from this flatness, this solitude.

At once she was talking protectively, with love. ‘Of course it’s not. Nothing ever is–’

‘I shan’t get over this.’

I wasn’t trying to hurt her, I was alone, I might as well have been talking to myself.

‘You will, you’ve had a bad time, but of course you will. Look, my love, I’ve been talking to them–’

‘I don’t trust them.’

‘You’ve got to. Anyway, you do trust me–’

Silence.

She said urgently: ‘You do trust me?’

At last I answered: ‘No one knows what it’s like.’

‘Don’t you think I do?’

Getting no reply, she broke out, and then subdued herself.

‘Let’s try to be sensible, won’t you? I have talked to those two. I’m telling you the absolute truth, you believe that?’

‘Yes, I believe that.’

‘They’re completely certain that there’s nothing wrong. You’re perfectly healthy. There won’t be any after-effects. I made sure that they weren’t hiding anything. I had to know for my own sake, you understand, don’t you? They’re completely certain.’

‘That must be pleasant for them.’

‘You ought to give them credit, they’re very good doctors.’

‘I’m not much moved by that.’

‘You’re not willing to be moved by anything, are you?’

‘I haven’t time to be.’

She drew in her breath, but didn’t speak. Then, after we had each been quiet, my temper seethed out – with the anger that I had fantasized about discharging on Mansel, but which I couldn’t show to him or anyone else, except to her. For it was only to her – who knew all about the pride, the vanity, the ironies, even the discipline with which I covered up what I didn’t choose for others to see – that I could speak from the pitiful, the abject depth.

‘Why do you expect me to listen to them?’ I shouted. ‘Do you really think they’ve been so clever? They even admit that they haven’t any idea why they nearly put me out yesterday. Why should anyone believe what they say about tomorrow? They won’t have any more idea when I’ve had it for good. You expect me to believe them. Remember it was they who let me in for this.’

‘It’s no use blaming them–’

‘Why isn’t it? It was an absurd risk to take. Just for a minor bit of sight which is about as good as yours when you’re seeing through a fog. Just for that, they’re ready to take the chance of finishing me off.’

‘No, dear.’ After the harsh cries I had made, her voice was low. ‘That isn’t right. Christopher Mansel wasn’t taking a chance. It would all have gone normally – except for once in ten thousand times.’

‘That’s what they’ve told you, is it? How have they got the impertinence to say it? I tell you, they don’t know anything. It was an absurd risk to take. We never ought to have allowed it. I blame myself. You might think back. I didn’t like it at the time. Mansel persuaded me. We ought to have stopped it.’

‘That wouldn’t have been reasonable.’

‘Do you think that what they’ve achieved is specially reasonable? We ought to have stopped it.’

I went on: ‘You ought to have helped me to stop it.’

‘That’s not fair,’ she cried.

‘It’s the fact.’

‘No, it’s not fair. Are you blaming me?’

‘I’m blaming myself more.’

Reproaching me for other times when I had thrown guilt onto her, she was angry as well as wounded. For a time it became a quarrel: until she said, tone not steady: ‘Look here, I didn’t come for this. Whatever are we doing?’

‘Exchanging views.’

She laughed, with what sounded like relief. I had spoken in something near the manner she was used to, when I was ironing an argument away. It came as a surprise to her – and so much so to me that it passed me by. To me, it seemed that we had moved into the doldrums of a quarrel (like Azik and Rosalind that afternoon in Eaton Square), when we had temporarily ceased lashing out, but were waiting for the animus to blow up again. But Margaret, listening to me raging, accepted the anger and the cruelty; sometimes she had seen that in me before; she had not seen me as frightened as this morning, but that too she accepted. And so, she was ready to notice the first change of inner weather, long before I recognised it myself. She was sure that I was, at least for the time being, through the worst. Casually she chatted, mentioning one or two letters that had arrived at home, pouring herself a drink: in fact, she was watchful, prepared to talk me to sleep or alternatively to take the initiative.

She did take the initiative, in a language that no one on earth but she and I could understand: ‘I’ve got a lunch date on Saturday,’ she said. ‘I expect I shall forget it.’

If I didn’t or couldn’t respond, she would drop it. This was an exploration, a tentative.

‘You’d better not,’ I said.

‘It hasn’t been imprinted on my memory.’

At that, I laughed out loud. She knew she was home. For this was a secret code, one of our versions of the exchange about the cattleya, more complicated than that but just as cherished. It went back to a time in the middle of the war, before we were married. On Saturday afternoons I used to go to her bed-sitting-room: there was a particular Saturday afternoon about which we had made a myth. The coal fire. The looking-glass. Lying in bed afterwards, watching the sky darken and firelight on the ceiling. The curious thing was, that apparently historical Saturday afternoon didn’t really exist. There were plenty of others. Once or twice, in the wartime rush, she had forgotten the place for lunch and I had had to follow her to her room. Many times we had enjoyed ourselves there. Yes, there had been a coal fire and a looking-glass. Nevertheless, we each remembered the detail of different Saturdays, and somehow had fused them into one. One that became a symbol for all the pleasure we had had together, and a signal to each other. Often the mood was formalised. ‘What did I tell you about the fire?’ To that there was a ritual reply, also part of the myth. In the hospital that morning, she made the ritual speeches, and I followed suit. Soon she was crying:

‘You’re
much
better.’ That also was part of the drill, but for that special moment it was true.

Resurrection, she was saying, not touching wood at all. Until the middle of the afternoon, she remained by my bedside. When she left me it was I who began to touch wood. She had gone, the reassurance had gone, it seemed strange, almost unnatural, that the vacuum hadn’t filled. Should I soon be terrified again? I threw my thoughts back, not to Margaret, but to last night, as though I wanted to learn whether it would return. No, my moods were unstable, I hadn’t any confidence in them, but I wasn’t frightened. Perversely, I wanted to ask why I wasn’t. Anything I felt or told myself now, I thought, would be part of a mood that wouldn’t last.

Still, the evening – occasionally I enquired about the time – lagged on between sleep and waking. They were taking my blood pressure every three hours, but one nurse told me that would finish next day. During the night I slept heavily, and woke only once, when they took another reading.

I didn’t know where I was, until I understood the darkness in front of my eyes. Then the night before returned, but rather as though I was reading words off a screen, without either fright or relief: with a curious indifference, as though I hadn’t energy to waste.

SPONGE in my hands, warm water on my face, Mansel’s voice, the flurry of early morning.

‘They tell me you’ve slept, sir.’

‘Better, anyway,’ I said, as though it were bad luck to admit it. Eye uncovered, the lights of the room, three dimensions of the commode, standing out like a piece of hardware by Chardin. Mansel’s face close to mine. In a short time, he said: ‘Good. Qualified optimism still permitted.’

After he had blindfolded me once more, his voice sounded as in a prepared speech.

‘Now we have to make a decision, sir.’

My nerves sharpened. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. It’s a choice of two courses, that’s all. You heard me and Maxim discuss it yesterday, didn’t you?’

‘I heard something.’

‘You’re getting on well, you know. The point is, if we’re going to get you generally fit as soon as may be, you probably ought to sit up most of today. Now that may, just possibly, disturb the eye. I’m beginning to think, I may as well tell you, that we’re very likely too finicky about keeping eye patients still. I suspect in a few years it will seem very old-fashioned. But I have to say that some of my colleagues wouldn’t agree. So, if we let you up, one has to warn you, there is – so far as the retina goes – a finite risk.’