Last Things (22 page)

I was beginning to speak, but Mansel stopped me.

‘I’m not going to let you make the choice. Though I fancy I know which it would be. No, I don’t think there is any reasonable doubt. Your general health is much more important than a margin of risk to the retina. Which I don’t want you to get depressed about. With a little good fortune, we ought to keep that in order too.’

He could see my face.

‘And it will be distinctly good for your morale, won’t it?’

Mansel gave an amiable, clinical chuckle. ‘Though it’s stood up pretty well, I give you that.’ He didn’t know it all, but he knew something. I was thinking, perhaps not even Margaret knew it all.

After he had given instructions that the nurses were to get me up during the morning, he was saying goodbye. Then he had another thought.

‘I wanted to ask you. Which is the hardest to put up with? Having to lie still. Or having to live in the dark.’

‘You needn’t have asked,’ I said. ‘Having to live in the dark is about a hundred times worse.’

‘I thought so. I have had patients who got frantic at being fixed in one position. But you manage to put up with that, don’t you? Good morning, sir.’

When Charles March arrived, I was already sitting up in an armchair. They had told me that he had visited the hospital twice in the last twenty-four hours, being not only an old friend but also my doctor. Each time he came, I had been asleep. Now I apologised, saying that I hadn’t been entirely responsible for my actions. Charles replied that he had dimly realised that that was the case.

I suspected that he was gazing straight into my face. How much did it tell him? There weren’t many more observant men. He said, in a matter-of-fact doctor-like fashion, that he was glad they had got me up. Mansel, in the middle of his professional circuit, had found time to telephone Charles twice about my condition, and had also written him a longish letter.

‘If either of us were as efficient as that young man,’ I said, ‘we might have got somewhere.’

It was not long after, and we were still chatting, not yet intimately, that I heard Margaret’s footsteps on the floor outside. As she came in, she exclaimed in surprise, and approaching my chair, asked how I was, said in the same breath that they must be satisfied with me to let me out of bed. Then went on: ‘How is he, Charles?’

‘I think he looks pretty good, don’t you agree?’

For some time neither of them enquired, even by implication, about my state of mind: in fact, I soon believed that they were shying off it. Margaret had seen enough the day before; and Charles, who had once known me as well as any of my friends, was being cautious. We talked about our children and relatives; it was casually, in the midst of the conversation, that she remarked: ‘What are you going to do with yourself all day, sitting there?’

‘Exactly what I should do lying there.’ Blindly I moved a hand in what I thought to be the direction of the bed. ‘It’s even a slight improvement, you know.’

‘Of course it is.’ Margaret sounded quick, affirmative, like one correcting a piece of her own tactlessness.

Then I said: ‘No. There’s going to be a difference.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not going to sit here all day doing nothing. I’d like you to get some people in. If I can’t see them, I might as well hear them.’

‘So you shall.’ But Margaret, busy with practical arrangements, saying that she would pass the word round by tomorrow, promising that she would send in some bottles of Scotch, was nevertheless puzzled as well as pleased. So was Charles: for they both knew that this was quite unlike me, that in illness – as in my first operation – I wanted to hide like a sick animal, seeing no one except my family, and them only out of duty. I couldn’t have enlightened them. It was one of the occasions when one seemed to be performing like a sleep-walker. If I had been forced to give an explanation, I should probably have said – very lamely – that I realised, as on the day before, that this mood, or any other mood, wouldn’t last, but that I wished to commit myself to it. Perhaps I could fight off regressions, the return to that night, the sense of – nothing, once I had announced that I intended to have people round me.

Later Charles told me that that was very near his own interpretation. He thought that I was trying to hold on to something concrete, so as to ward off the depressive swing. With Margaret it was different. Of the three of us, she alone thought that I was stabler than I myself believed, and that she could see – unperceived, or even denied, by me – not only a new resolve, but underneath it a singular, sharp but indefinable change.

If she had been beside me in a waking spell that night, she mightn’t have been astonished at what I felt. First I spoke out loud, to see if there were a nurse in the room. Then I realised that the blood-pressure watch had been called off, they were leaving me alone. That didn’t frighten me or even remind me. On the contrary, I was immediately taken over by a benign and strangely innocent happiness. I didn’t for an instant understand it. It was different in kind from any happiness that I had known, utterly different from the serenity, the half-complacent satisfaction, in which I had gone about after refusing the government job. Perhaps the nearest approach would be nights when I had wakened and recalled a piece of work that had gone well. But that wasn’t very near – this didn’t have an element of memory or self-concern. It was as innocent as nights when I woke up as a child and enjoyed the sound of a lashing storm outside. It was so benign that I did not want to go to sleep again.

After Mansel had examined me next morning, he was ruminating on what he called ‘morale’. Mine was still keeping up, he thought, with his usual inspectorial honesty. A doctor never really knew how a patient would react to extreme situations.

‘You’re very modest, Christopher,’ I said.

‘No, sir. Just open-minded, I hope.’

Both of us ought to be interested in my morale, he said. I spent some time at it, I remarked, but Mansel was not amused. Tomorrow, he said, there might be another minor decision for us to take.

Taking me at my word, Margaret had telephoned the previous afternoon to say that I could expect some visitors. The first, in the middle of the morning, was Francis Getliffe. His tread sounded heavy, as it used to sound up my staircase in college, for so spare a man. I greeted him by name before he reached me, and he responded as though I had performed a conjuring trick.

‘One’s ears get rather sharp,’ I said.

‘You’re putting up with it better than I could.’

‘Nonsense. Little you know.’

‘Yes, you are. You can cope with it, can’t you?’ His tone was affectionate but hesitant. Perhaps, I thought (for I hadn’t seen him with anyone incapacitated before), he was one of those inhibited when they had to speak to the blind or deaf. I said that it was tiresome not being able to see him.

‘I bet it must be.’ But that was an absent-minded reply; he was thinking of something else. As he talked, still hesitantly, I realised that Margaret must have told him the whole case history. Not that he referred to it straight out: he was skirting round it, trying not to touch a nerve, wanting to take care of me. He felt safer when he was on neutral ground, such as politics. The world was looking blacker. We agreed, in all the time we had known each other, there had been only three periods of hope – outside our own private lives, that is. The twenties: curiously enough, wartime: and then the five or six years just past. But that last had been a false hope, we admitted it now.

‘If anyone’, said Francis, ‘can show me one single encouraging sign anywhere in the world this year, I’d be very grateful.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Things had gone worse than expectations, even realistic or minimum expectations. As Einstein in old age had said, there seemed a weird inevitability about it all. Very little that Francis and I had done together had been useful.

‘This country is steadier than most. But I can’t imagine what will have happened before we’re ten years older. I’m not sure that I want to.’

It was all sensible: yet was he just talking to play out time? I broke out: ‘Forty-eight hours ago, I should have been quite sure that I didn’t want to.’

He said something, embarrassed, kind, but I went on: ‘It would have seemed quite remarkably irrelevant. It rather restricts one’s interests, you know, when you’re told you might have been dead.’

‘Do you mind talking about it?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘I couldn’t if I were you.’

Strangely – as I had been realising while the earlier conversation went on, impersonal and strained – that was the fact. What I had said, which wouldn’t have troubled Charles March or my brother, risked making him more awkward still. It was a deliberate risk. Francis, who was a brave man, physically as well as morally, was less hardened than most of us. His courage was a courage of the nerves.

While he had been talking, so diffidently, I had recalled an incident of the fairly recent past. At that time it was not unusual, if one moved in the official world, to be asked to prepare an advance obituary notice of an acquaintance – all ready for
The Times
. I had done several. One day, it must have been three or four years before, someone announced himself on the telephone as a member of the paper’s staff. Agitation. He had found that by some oversight, on which he elaborated with distress, there was no obituary of Francis Getliffe. How could this be? ‘It would be terrible,’ said the anxious voice, ‘I shouldn’t like to be caught short about a man like Getliffe.’

While I was reflecting on that peculiar expression, I was being pressed to produce an obituary – in forty-eight hours? at latest by the end of the week? Francis was in robust health when last seen, I said, but the voice said, ‘We can’t take any risks.’ So I agreed and set to work. Most of it was easy, since I knew Francis’ career as well as my own, but I wasn’t familiar with his early childhood. His father had married twice, and I had heard almost nothing about his second wife, Francis’ mother. So I had to ring up Cambridge. Francis was out, but his wife Katherine answered the phone. When I told her the object of the exercise, she broke into a cheerful scream, and then, no more worried than I was myself, gave businesslike answers. She would pass the good news on to Francis, she said. She had listened to some of his colleagues fretting, in case their obituary should be written by an enemy.

I had met Francis in London shortly afterwards. Without a second thought, I told him the piece was written and presumably safe in the
Times
files. I asked him if he would like to read a copy. Without a second thought – taking it for granted that he would like what I had written, and also taking it for granted that he would behave like an old-style rationalist. For in that respect Francis often behaved like a doctrinaire unbeliever of an earlier century than ours; like, for example, old Winslow, who refused to set foot in college chapel except for magisterial elections, and then only after making written protests. Francis likewise did not go into chapel even for memorial services; his children had not been baptised and, when he was introduced into the Lords, instead of taking the oath he affirmed. Whereas men like my brother Martin, who believed as little as Francis, would go through the forms without fuss, saying, as Martin did, that if he had been a Roman he would have put a pinch of salt on the altar and not felt that he was straining his conscience.

So innocently I asked Francis if he would care to read his obituary. ‘Certainly not,’ Francis had said, outraged. Or perhaps hag-ridden, like a Russian seeing one trying to shake his hand across the threshold, or my mother turning up the ace of spades.

When, as Francis was taking care to avoid any subject which might disquiet me, I recalled that incident, it occurred to me that someone must have written my own obituary. I expected to feel a chill, but none came. It was curious to be waiting for that kind of dread, and then be untouched.

After I had been brusque, cutting out the delicateness, Francis became easier. He said: ‘This mustn’t happen again, you know.’

‘It’s bound to happen again once, isn’t it?’

‘Not like that. I was horrified when Margaret told me. I must say, she was very good.’

She had had the worst of it, Francis was saying. Almost as though I had done it on purpose, it crossed my mind. No, that was quite unfair. Francis, whom acquaintances thought buttoned up and bleak, was speaking with emotion. He had been horrified. I was too careless. Did I give a thought to how much I should be missed?

Though I was to most appearances more spontaneous than Francis I shouldn’t, if our positions were reversed, have told him so simply how much I’d miss him.

I nearly gave another grim answer such as even that seemed a somewhat secondary consideration, but it would have been denying affection. Of the people we had grown up with, we had scarcely, except ourselves, any intimates left. Some had died: others the chances of life had driven away, just as Francis had been parted from his brother-in-law Charles March.

And I, who felt the old affinity with Charles March each time we met, nevertheless had ceased to be close to him, simply because there was no routine of living to bring us together. While Francis and I, during much of our lives, had seen each other every day at meetings. It sounded mechanical, but as you grew older that kind of habit and alliance was a part of intimacy without which it peacefully declined.

Francis’ tone altered, he began to sound at his most practical. He proposed to talk to some of his medical friends in the Royal. This never ought to have happened, he said. It was no use passing it off as a fluke or an accident. There must be a cause. What sort of anaesthetic had they used? This all had to be cleared up in case I was forced some day into another operation. There had to be a bit of decent scientific thinking, he said, with impatience as well as clarity – just as he used to speak, cutting through cotton wool, at committee tables during the war.

That could be coped with. And also, he went on, half-sternly, half-persuasively, it was time I took myself in hand. I had worked hard all my life: it was time I made more of my leisure. ‘I’m damned well going to enjoy my sixties, and so ought you,’ he said. He was leading up to a project that he had mentioned before. The house in Cambridge, full of children, happy-go-lucky, called by young Charles and his friends the Getliffe steading, he couldn’t bear to leave, he would stay there in term-time always. But he and Katherine were hankering after another house, more likely to get some sun in winter, maybe somewhere like Provence. Why shouldn’t we find a place together? They would occupy it perhaps four months a year, and Margaret and I in spring and autumn?