Last Things (24 page)

A father’s death. What did one feel? What was one supposed to feel? Sheer loss, pious and organic, a part of oneself cut away – that would have been the proper answer in my childhood: but a lot of sons knew that it wasn’t so clean and comfortable as that. When I was growing up, the answer would have changed. Now it meant oneself at last established, final freedom, the Oedipal load removed: and a lot of sons still knew that it wasn’t so clean and unambiguous as that. As Charles was growing up, all the Oedipal inheritance had passed into the conventional wisdom, at least for those educated like him: and, like most conventional wisdom, it was half believed and half thrown away.

Probably Charles and his friends weren’t so impressed by it as by the introspective masters: Dostoevsky meant more to them than the psychoanalysis did. Not surprisingly to me, for at twenty, older than they were and having lived rougher, I also had been overwhelmed. I had met, as they had, the difficult questions.
Who has not wished his father dead?

That hadn’t meant much to me since, from a very early age, I could scarcely be said to have a relation with my father. From fourteen or so onwards, I was the senior partner, so far as we had a partnership, and he regarded me with mild and bantering stupefaction. Perhaps I had suffered more than I knew because he was unavailing. His bankruptcy in my childhood left some sort of wound. It was also possible that as a child I knew more than I realised about his furtive chases after women. I had a memory, which might not have been genuine but was very sharp, of standing at the age of seven or eight outside a rubber shop – with my father blinking across the counter, which mysteriously gave me goose-flesh as though it were a threat or warning. Still, all that was searching back with hindsight. During the short part of our lives which we had lived together, we impinged on each other as little as father and son, or even two members of the same family, ever could.

It was not like that with me and Charles. Partly because our temperaments were too much the same weight, and, though we were in many respects different, in the end we wanted the same things. And there was a complication, simply because I had lived some of my life in public. That meant that Charles couldn’t escape me and that, without special guilt on either side, I got in his way.

That night when he returned home from his travels, I had said in effect that I was leaving him an awkward legacy. He had replied, more harshly than seemed called for, that he wouldn’t be worried over. In fact, on the specific point I had been wrong. He didn’t mind in the least that, when I died, some of the conflicts and enmities would live on and he would sometimes pay for them. That he not only didn’t mind but welcomed. For, though he couldn’t endure my protecting him, he was cheerful and fighting-happy at the chance of his protecting me. And if he had to do it posthumously, well, he was at least as tenacious as I was. It was not the penalties that he wanted to escape, but the advantages. He had seen and heard my name too often. There were times when I seemed omnipresent. Anyone of strong nature – from my end, it was a somewhat bitter irony – would have preferred to be born obscure. Yet perhaps I was making it too easy for myself. Perhaps – if he had never heard my name outside the family – we should still have faced each other in the hospital bedroom with the same silences. Perhaps it was ourselves that we couldn’t escape. He might still have expected me to claim more than I did. I should have still felt ill-used, for I believed that I had been unpossessive, had claimed little or nothing, and wanted us to exist side by side.

Was that true? Was that all? My relation with Charles was utterly unlike mine with my own father. That was certain. But, as we sat in that room, the familiar sardonic exchanges not there to bring us together or smooth the minutes away, I felt a shiver – more than that, a menace and a remorse – from the past. For Charles was behaving now very much, nerve of the same nerve, as I had behaved when I sat by my mother at her deathbed.

It was more than forty years before. Instead of a smell evoking the past, the past evoked a smell: in my hygienic flower-lined room, I smelt brandy, eau de Cologne, the warm redolence of the invalid’s bedroom. Then I had sat with the tight constrained feeling, full of dread, which overcame me when she called out for my love. For I couldn’t give it her, at least in the terms she claimed.

‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she had cried, demanding more for me than I did for myself. ‘That’s all I wanted.’

I did my best (I was about the same age as Charles was now) to console her. Yet, whenever I felt remorse, I had to recall one thing – whatever I did, I hadn’t brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women; she was vain, but she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I that if one’s heart is invaded by another (that was how I used to think, when my taste was more florid, and I didn’t mind the sound of rhetoric), then one will either assist the invasion or repel it. I repelled it, longing that I might do otherwise. And she knew.

I had been as proud as my mother, and in some ways as vain. Some of that pride and vanity was exorcised by now: for I had lived much longer than she did, and age, though it didn’t kill vanity, took the edge of it away. Like her, I sometimes couldn’t deceive myself about the truth. Charles was behaving as I had done. Was it also true that, against my will and anything that I desired, without knowing it I was affecting him as she had me? Had the remorse come back, through all those years, and made me learn what it had been like for her, and what it was now like for me?

Charles’ tone changed, as he said: ‘There is something I wanted to tell you.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Maurice and Godfrey (Maurice’s parson friend) will be coming in later today.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘Yes, but you mustn’t put your foot in it, you know.’ His eyes had taken on a piercing glint: there was a joke at my expense. Suddenly he had switched – and I with him, seeing that expression – to our most companionable.

‘What are you accusing me of now?’

‘You might forget that old Godfrey has a professional interest in you, don’t you think?’

‘Aren’t I usually fairly polite?’

‘Fairly.’

‘Well then. I don’t propose to stop being polite, just because the man is an Anglo-Catholic priest.’

‘So long’, Charles’ smile was matey and taunting, ‘as you don’t forget that he
is
an Anglo-Catholic priest.’

I taunted him back: ‘My memory is in excellent order, you’ll be glad to know.’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘Come on, what do you want me to say to the man?’

‘It’s what I don’t want you to say that counts.’

‘And that is?’

‘Look here, it isn’t everyone who’s done a Lazarus, is it?’

‘Granted,’ I said.

‘It’s therefore reasonable to suppose that a priest will have a special interest in you, don’t you realise? After all, we expect him to have some concern about life after death, don’t we?’

‘Granted again.’

‘Well then, you’d better not say much about first-hand knowledge, had you? I should have thought this wasn’t precisely the occasion.’

We had each known what this duologue meant, all along. About his friends’ susceptibilities, or his acquaintances’ as well, Charles could be sensitive and far-sighted. But also he had constructed a legend about me as a blunt unrestrained Johnsonian figure, in contrast to his own subtlety. It was the kind of legend that grows up in various kinds of intimacy. In almost exactly the same way, Roy Calvert used to pretend to be on tenterhooks waiting for some gigantesque piece of tactlessness from me: on the basis that, just as William the Silent got his nickname through being silent on one occasion, so I had been shatteringly tactless once. With both of them – often Charles acted towards me as Roy Calvert used to – they liked rubbing the legend in. And Charles in particular used this device to make amends. It took the heat out of either affection or constraint or the complex of the two, and gave us the comfort we both liked.

AS Charles had prepared me, Maurice and Father Ailwyn duly arrived later that day, round half past four, when I had finished drinking tea. The quixotic pair came through the door, Maurice so thin that he looked taller than he was, Father Ailwyn the reverse. Since all my family called Ailwyn by his Christian name, I had to do the same, although I knew him only slightly. He gave a shy, fat-cheeked smile, small eyes sharp and uncertain behind his glasses, cassock billowing round thick-soled boots. While they were settling down in their chairs, he was abnormally diffident, not able to make any kind of chat, nor even to reply to ours. Maurice had told me that he was quite as inept when he visited the old and lonely: a stuttering awkward hulk of a fat man, grateful when Maurice, who might be self-effacing but was never shy, acted as a lubricant. Yet, they said, Godfrey Ailwyn was the most devoted of parish priests, and the desolate liked him, even if he couldn’t talk much, just because he never missed a visit and patiently sat with them.

With the excessive heartiness that the diffident induced, I asked if he would have some tea.

‘No, thank you. I’m not much good at tea.’

His tone was hesitating, but upper-class – not professional, not high bourgeois. Even my old acquaintance, Lord Boscastle, arbiter of origins, might have performed the extraordinary feat of ‘knowing who he was’ – which meant that his family could be found in reference books.

‘I’m pretty sure’, said Maurice, ‘that Godfrey would like a drink. Wouldn’t you now, Godfrey?’

The doleful plump countenance lightened.

‘If it isn’t any trouble–’

‘Of course it isn’t.’ Maurice, used to looking after the other man, was already standing by the bottles, pouring out a formidable whisky. ‘That’s all right, isn’t it?’

Maurice, taking the glass round, explained to me, as though he were an interpreter, that Godfrey had had a busy day, mass in the morning, parish calls, a couple of young delinquents at the vicarage –

‘It must be a tough life,’ I said.

Godfrey smiled tentatively, took a swig at his drink and then, all of a sudden, asked me, with such abruptness that it sounded rough: ‘You don’t remember anything about it, do you?’

For an instant I was taken by surprise, as though I hadn’t heard the question right, or didn’t understand it. I hadn’t expected him to take the initiative.

‘Maurice says you didn’t remember anything about it. When you came to.’

‘I wasn’t exactly at my most lucid, of course.’

‘But you didn’t remember anything?’

‘I was more concerned with what was happening there and then.’

‘You still don’t remember anything?’

I was ready to persevere with evasion, but he was not giving me much room to manoeuvre.

‘Would you expect me to?’ I asked.

‘It was like waking from a very deep sleep, was it?’

‘I think one might say that.’

Father Ailwyn gave a sharp-eyed glance in Maurice’s direction, as though they were sharing a joke, and then turned to me with an open, slumbrous smile, the kind of smile which transformed depressive faces such as his.

‘Please don’t be afraid of worrying me,’ he said, and added: ‘Lewis, I am interested, you know.’

‘Godfrey said on the way here that he wished he wasn’t a clergyman.’ Maurice was also smiling. ‘He didn’t want to put you off.’

I should have something to report to young Charles when next I saw him, I was thinking.

‘I’m not going to be prissy with you,’ said Godfrey. ‘All I’m asking you is to return the compliment.’

I had come off worst and gave an apologetic smile.

‘Eschatology is rather a concern of ours, you see. But most believers wouldn’t think that you were interfering with their eschatology. They’d be pretty certain to say, and here I don’t mind admitting that they sometimes take an easy way out, that you hadn’t really been dead.’

Instead of being inarticulate, or so shy as to be embarrassing to others, he had begun to talk as though he were in practice.

‘I don’t think I’ve ever claimed that, have I?’ I said.

‘I should have thought that, by inference, you had. And most believers would tell you that it’s very difficult to define the threshold of death, and that you hadn’t crossed it.’

‘I can accept that–’

‘They would tell you that the brain has to die as well as the heart stopping before the body is truly dead. And until the body is truly dead, then the soul can’t leave it.’

I still didn’t want to argue, but I respected him now and had to be straightforward.

‘That I can’t accept. Those are just words–’

‘They don’t mean much more to me than they do to you.’

Again Godfrey’s face was one moonlike smile. ‘It’s a very primitive model, of course it is. At the time of the early church, a man’s spirit was supposed to hover over the body for three days, and didn’t depart until the decomposition set in.’

Yes, I said, I’d read that once, in a commentary on the Gospel according to Saint John. It was the priest’s turn to look surprised. He had expected me to be entirely ignorant about the Christian faith, just as I had expected him to be unsophisticated about everything else. In fact, he was at least as far from unsophisticated as Laurence Knight, my first wife’s father, another clergyman, in one of his more convoluted phases.

Godfrey Ailwyn had also one of those minds which were naturally rococo and which moved from flourish to invention and back again, with spiralling whirls and envelopes of thought – quite different from the clear straight cutting-edge mentalities of, say, Francis Getliffe or Austin Davidson in his prime. Quite different, but neither better nor worse, just different: one of the most creative minds I ever met was similar in kind to Father Ailwyn’s, and belonged to a scientist called Constantine.

What did Ailwyn believe about death, the spirit or eternal life? I pressed him, for he had brushed away the surface civilities, and I was genuinely curious to know. Though he was willing to spin beautiful metaphysical structures, I wasn’t sure that I understood him. Certainly he believed, so far as he believed at all, in something very different from what he called the ‘metaphors’ in which he spoke to his parishioners. The body, the memory, this our mortal life – if I didn’t misinterpret him – existed in space and time, and all came to an end with death. The spirit existed outside space and time, and so to talk of a beginning, or an end, or an after-life – they were only ‘metaphors’, which we had to use because our minds were primitive.