Last Things (26 page)

Yet, as I lay in bed, it wasn’t the remorse – the tainted patches, the days, the years – that became mixed with this present moment. Instead, other moments, dredged up from the past, flickered into this one. Moments which might originally have been miserable or joyous – they were all content-giving by now. Lying awake as a child, hearing my father and some choral friends singing down below; walking with Sheila on a freezing winter night; sitting tired and ill by the sea, wondering how I could cope with the next term at the Bar; triumph after an examination result, drinking, chucking glasses into the fireplace.

I was vulnerable to memories, I wanted to be, some I was forcing back to mind. They were what remained, not the judgments or the regrets. Again I thought of Charles March in that same conversation two years before, saying, as I listened with eyes blacked out: ‘You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?’

An interesting life. Did anyone think – to himself – of his own life like that? That was the kind of summing-up that a biographer or historian might make: but it didn’t have any meaning to oneself, to one’s own life as lived. Zest, action growing out of flatness, boredom growing out of zest, achievement growing out of boredom, reverie – joy – anxiety – action. Could anyone sum that up for himself or make an integral as an onlooker might? True, I had once heard an old clergyman, in his rooms in college, tell me that he had had ‘a disappointing life’. He had said it angrily, in a whisky-thickened voice. It had been impressive, though not precisely moving, when he said it: on the spot, he was sincere, he meant what he said. But he had a reason for bursting out: he was explaining to himself (and incidentally to me) why he proposed not to do a good turn to another man. I did not believe that even he thought continuously of his life in terms like that. He enjoyed his bits of power in the college: he enjoyed moving from his sessions with the whisky bottle to his prophecies of catastrophe. Certainly a biographer – in the unlikely event of his ever having one – could have summarised his existence in his own phrase. It was objectively true. I doubted if it seemed so to himself for hours together. Even as he was speaking to me, his vitality was still active and hostile, he still was capable of dreaming that, by a miracle, his deserts might even now be given him.

Like most of us, he occasionally thought of his life as a progress or a history. Then he could dispose of it by his ferocious summing-up. That was on the cosmogonists’ model which had occurred to me before: from
T
= o, the big bang, the birth of Despard-Smith, to
T
= 79, the end of things, the death of Despard-Smith. A history. A disappointing history. But that wasn’t the way in which he, or the rest of us, thought most frequently to himself about his life. There was another cosmogonists’ model which, it seemed to me, was much closer to one’s own life as lived. Continuous creation. A slice disappeared, was replaced again. Something was lost, something new came in. All the time it looked to oneself as though there was not much change, nor deterioration, nor journey towards an end. Didn’t each of our lives, to ourselves as we lived them, seem, much more often than not, like a process of continuous creation?

So, when Austin Davidson in his last illness dismissed the themes which had preoccupied him for a lifetime (except for his game of gambling: ‘If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,’ he once said, ‘I should still want to hear the latest Stock Exchange quotations’), he found others which filled their place: and the days of solitariness, though they might be, and often were, bitter, had their own kind of creation. Even studying his ankles, watching in detail the changes in his physical state, was a fresh awakening of interest, petty if you like, but in its fashion a revival. That was as true for him as it was for my mother, also talking of her ankles in her last illness. Yes, that was a singular outburst of the process of continuous creation. Themes of a lifetime wore themselves out: but we weren’t left empty, the resolution wasn’t as tidy as that, somehow the psychic heart went on pumping, giving one a new or transformed lease of existence – perhaps restricted, but more concentrated because of that.

Before the operational experience and in the bedroom since, I had been discovering this for myself. In fact, it was something each of us had to discover for himself: you couldn’t reach it by empathy, it was too unfamiliar, and perhaps too disconcerting, for that. Not long ago, in full health, I dismissed the third and slightest of the themes – different from Davidson’s – which had preoccupied me, the concern, partly voyeuristic, partly conscientious, for political things. That dismissal was final, I didn’t doubt it: but now I could imagine, not playing the chess game of politics in any shape or form, but – if a cause or even a whim impelled me – raising my voice with a freedom which I hadn’t known before.

Something similar was true of the second theme, which was the kinds of love. Sexual love, parental love (so different that we confused ourselves by giving them the same name), they had never let me go: and often my public behaviour had seemed to me like the performance of a stranger. A pretty good performance, since on the level of action I had some of my temperament under control. Well, those kinds of love – I thought of the last talks with Margaret and my son – were creating within themselves something new, in part unforeseeable by me. Not in marriage, perhaps defying fate we should both think that: but certainly in my relation with my son. I hadn’t any foreknowledge of what we should be saying to each other in ten years’ time, if I lived so long. That wasn’t distressing, but curiously exciting, the more so since that date of 28 November. It was as though I were quite young again, having to learn, with the sense, on the whole a pleasurable sense, of surprise ahead, what a human relation was like.

Third and last, myself alone. My own solitude, different from Austin Davidson or anyone else’s. In so much we are all alike: but in one’s solitude one is unique. I had been confronted by mine, since the operation, more than in all my life before. In a fashion that had astonished me. And given me a sense of change, and also a kind of perplexed delight, for which I had been totally unprepared. Somehow that was a delight too, as though I had suddenly seen a horizon wide open in front of my eyes.

A clock was striking somewhere outside the hospital. I didn’t count the strokes, but there might have been twelve. I was sleepy by now, and turned onto my side. As often immediately before sleep, faces came, as if from a vague distance, into the field of vision under the closed lids: one came very clear and actual, nearly a dream, not yet a dream. It was a face which hadn’t any waking significance for me, the matey comedian’s face of a barrister acquaintance, Ted Benskin.

NEXT day (for by this time the Press had done its work and so, I guessed, had gossip) I was dividing potential visitors into sheep and goats, those I wanted to see and those I didn’t. Among the goats, to be kept out with firmness, were those whose motives for inspecting me didn’t need much examination – such as Whitman, my back-bencher acquaintance, who was presumably anxious to see that I was safely incapacitated, or Edgar Hankins, looking for a last personal anecdote to put into one of his elegiac post-mortems.

On the other hand, Rosalind was to be welcomed and, a somewhat more surprising enquirer, Lester Ince. Rosalind entered during the morning, bearing more flowers from her husband and, after she had kissed me and sat down, spreading her own aura of Chanel.

‘Well, old thing. You don’t look too bad.’ She had never given up either the slang of her youth or the indomitable flatness of our native town.

How was she? She couldn’t grumble. And Azik? He was on one of his business trips. Still, there were compensations. What did she mean? She usually got a present when he went abroad. With lids modestly downcast, with a smile that might have been either furtive or salacious, she held out the second finger of her right hand. On it gleamed a splendid emerald.

‘What do you think that cost?’ she said, and explained, again modestly: ‘I had to know for the sake of the insurance.’

‘A good many thousand.’

‘Fifteen,’ said Rosalind, with simple triumph.

What about her daughter? No, Rosalind didn’t see much of her. The divorce would soon be through. Was Muriel intending to marry again? ‘She never tells me anything,’ Rosalind replied, hurt, aggrieved. She recaptured some of her spirit when she switched to young David. ‘He’s a different kettle of fish. He tells me everything.’

‘He won’t always, you know.’ Rosalind might be as hard as they came, a child of this world, or, in her own language, as tough as old boots; but there (as she had done already with her daughter) she could suffer as much as the rest of us.

‘Perhaps he won’t. But he’s lovely now.’

Rosalind continued, as usual not frightened of the obvious. We were all getting older. It would be nice when she was an old lady to have a handsome young man to take her out. David would be twenty-one in nine years’ time. ‘And you know as well as I do’, said Rosalind, ‘what that will make me.’

There were few square inches of Rosalind, except for her hair, which had been left to nature unassisted. Couturiers, jewellers, cosmetic-makers had worked for their money, and Azik had duly paid; yet she minded less than many people about growing old.

She also didn’t appear to mind overmuch about my misadventures. She had known me so long, she took my continued existence for granted. So far as she showed an interest, she was inclined to blame Margaret, whom she had never liked, for neglecting me.

‘You’ll have to look after yourself that’s all,’ she said. If I wanted any advice, there was always the ‘old boy’ (one of her appellations for Azik). After which, she said a brisk goodbye and departed like a small and elegant warship succeeded by a wash of scent.

That was still lingering on the air when, a couple of hours later, Lester Ince came in.

‘Who’s your girlfriend?’ he said, sniffing, a leer on his cheerful pasty face. ‘That’s not Margaret’s.’

Lester was one of those men who, solidly masculine, nevertheless were knowledgeable about all the appurtenances of femininity. It made other men more irritated with him, particularly as he seemed – incomprehensibly to them – to have his successes, including his present wife. I had been mildly surprised when I heard that he wanted to visit me. I was a good deal more surprised when he said that he had been thinking about me and had something to propose. He wasn’t really a friend: he didn’t object to me as vigorously as he did to Francis or my brother, but that wasn’t specially high praise. Perhaps he would have been just as concerned if any acquaintance had run into physical trouble. Anyway, his proposal was down to earth. He was offering me Basset for my convalescence.

Although I hadn’t the most fugitive intention of accepting (all I wanted was to be left undisturbed at home), I was touched, as one was by a bit of practical good nature: touched enough to pretend that I couldn’t make up my mind. Of course, one had to be more apolaustic than I was to be fit for Basset. That was a view which Lester sternly repudiated. Compared with many others, he reproved me, it wasn’t a
big house
: as the owner of Chatsworth might point out that his establishment was diminutive by the side of Blenheim.

My second line of defence was that we couldn’t help getting in their way. Lester bluffly answered that they would be leaving after Christmas anyway; they weren’t prepared to endure another English winter. I was reflecting, when I first met Lester he was living with his first wife and family in a dilapidated house in Bateman Street: if I knew anything about Cambridge temperatures, the conjugal bedroom wouldn’t get about fifty degrees most of the year, and Lester had found it satisfactory for his purposes. Now, however, he behaved like a frailer plant. He had recently acquired a place in the Bahamas. It would be very good for them, he assured me earnestly. Not only to escape the winter rigours, but because there was a danger in living in a house like Basset. They didn’t want to become like
birds in a gilded cage
. And they proposed to avoid that danger, I tried to ask without expression, by having their own beach in the Bahamas? Lester gazed at me, also without expression.

After I had promised to give my answer about Basset when I got out of hospital, he explained that there was another great advantage about the new regime. He could rely on getting each winter free for work; he could sit there in the sun and wouldn’t be disturbed. It was time he made a start on another book. It was going to be a long-term project. Several years, he didn’t believe in premature publication. Subject? Nathaniel Hawthorne and the New England moral climate.

When at teatime I told Margaret about that conversation, we looked at each other deadpan. He was the kind of visitor who ought to be encouraged, she said. No strain. Offhanded benevolence. But he used to be a humorist. Was all this a piece of misguided humour? If it were, I said, he deserved his fun. No, Margaret decided, she couldn’t remember, even in his unregenerate days, Lester being humorous about himself.

About six o’clock she left, and I was feeling peaceful. No more visitors that day, except my brother Martin after dinner. I went back to a novel I had been reading, a Simenon, and I put Lester’s moral discrimination out of my thoughts.

In a few minutes, a knock on the door. A peremptory double knock. Before I had said ‘come in’, Ronald Porson lurched into the room.

‘How in God’s name did you get in?’ I cried, with something less than grace. I didn’t want to be disturbed: I was irritated, I had given instructions that only those whose names were cleared should be sent up.

Porson gave one of his involuntary winks, right eyelid dropping down towards his cheek: the left side of his face twitched in sympathy. As a result, just as when first I met him, back in the early thirties, he produced an effect which was conspiratorial, friendly, and remarkably
louche
. As usual, he was smelling of liquor and his speech was slurred.