Last Things (3 page)

‘You see God’s own fool.’

I felt certain that he had prepared that opening, determined to get it out.

‘Never mind.’

‘If one’s got to the point’ – he was speaking very slowly, with pauses for breath and also to hold his train of thought – ‘of doing oneself in – the least one can do – is to make a go of it.’

‘Lots of people don’t make a go of it, you know.’ To my own astonishment, at least in retrospect, for it was quite spontaneous, I found myself teasing him: dropping into a kind of irony, as he did so often, putting himself at a distance from the present moment. The visible side of Davidson’s face showed something like the vestige of a grin, as I reminded him of German officers during the war. Beck took two shots at himself, and then had to get someone to finish him off. Poor old Stülpnagel had blinded himself, but without the desired result. ‘You would expect them to be better at it than you, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t.’

‘Too much fuss. Not enough to show for it.’

He was drowsy, but he did not seem miserable. To an extent, he had always liked an audience. And also, was there even now a stirring of, yes, relief? Had he wanted to persist – it didn’t matter how much he denied it?

‘Tell them. No more visitors today. Margaret can come tomorrow. If she wants.’

‘Of course she will.’ Margaret was his favourite daughter; but he had never appeared to realise that his detachment could cause her pain.

‘She’s prudish about suicide.’ His voice became louder and much more clear. ‘I simply can’t understand her.’

After a moment:

‘Extraordinary thing to be prudish about.’

Then he began to ramble, or the words thickened so that it was hard to follow him.
Sources
of supply
. That might mean the way he got hold of his drugs. Some people wouldn’t act as sources of supply. Prudish. Glad to say, others weren’t like Margaret–

It might have been strange to hear him, even in confusion, engaged in a kind of argument, scoring a dialectical triumph over Margaret. But it didn’t seem so. I was easier with him than she was: easier with him than with my own father, at least on the plane where Davidson and I were able to talk. Not that Davidson managed to be any cooler than my father. In fact, in his simple fashion, without trying, he had been as self-sufficient and as stoical as Davidson would have liked to be.

There had been nothing histrionic about my father’s death, which had happened a few months before. None of us had been present. He was in his late eighties, but he hadn’t thought to inform us that he was failing. On the last evening, in his own small room, he had asked his lodger, who was almost a stranger, to sit with him. ‘I think I am going to die tonight,’ so the lodger had reported him saying. He was right. It wasn’t given to Austin Davidson to die as quietly as that.

Even in stupor Davidson kept making gallant attempts to carry on the argument. Then I thought he had fallen asleep.

Out of semi-consciousness he made another effort.

‘I’m always glad to see you, Eliot.’

It sounded like a regression to the time when he first met me, before I married Margaret, when he was going about in his vigorous offhand prime. But, as I went away, I wondered if it hadn’t been a further regression, back to the pride, arrogance and brightness of his youth, when he and his friends felt themselves the lucky of this world, but, with manners different from ours, did not think of calling each other by their Christian names.

THE next time I saw him was on the Wednesday, since Margaret and I decided to share the visits, each going on alternate days. It was a tauntingly mellow September afternoon, like those on which one looked out of classroom windows at the start of a new school year.

Half-sitting in his bed, pillows propping him (that was to be his standard condition, to reduce the strain on his heart), Austin Davidson had been spruced up, though underneath the neat diagonal bandage across his eye there loomed another deep purple bruise which on Monday had been obscured. His hair, thick and silver grey, had been trimmed, the quiff respectfully preserved. Someone had shaved him, and he smelt fresh. He was wide awake, greeting me with a monocular, sharp, almost impatient gaze.

‘I should like some intelligent conversation,’ he said.

To understand that, one needed to have learned his private language. Since he first became ill, he seemed to have lost interest in, or at least be unwilling to talk about, the connoisseurship which had been the passion of his life. He wouldn’t read his own art criticism or anyone else’s. He chose not to look at pictures, not even his own collection, as though, now the physical springs of his existence had failed him, so his senses, including the sense that meant most to him, were no use any more.

Instead, he fell back on his last resource, which was something like a game. But it was a peculiar sort of game, to some of his acquaintances unsuitable, or even fatuous, for a ‘pure soul’ like Davidson. For it consisted of taking an obsessive day-by-day interest in the Stock Exchange. In fact, it was an interest that had given him pleasure all his life. Like all his circle, he had heard Keynes, with his usual impregnable confidence, telling them that, given half-an-hour’s concentrated attention to the market each morning, no man of modest intelligence could avoid making money. Unlike others of his circle, Davidson believed what he was told. Certainly he was a pure soul, but he enjoyed using his wits, and playing any kind of mental game. This also turned out to be a singularly lucrative one. He had been left a few thousand pounds before the First World War. No one knew how much he was worth in his old age; on that he was reticent, quite uncharacteristically so, as about nothing else in his life. He had made over sizeable blocks of investments to his daughters, but he had never given me the most oblique indication of how much he kept for himself.

So ‘intelligent conversation’ meant, in that bedroom at the clinic, an exchange about the day’s quotations. He became almost high-spirited, no, something more like playful. It was a reminder of his best years, when he seemed so much less burdened than the rest of us.

Listening to him, I had to discipline myself to take my part. In any circumstances, let alone these, I didn’t serve as an adequate foil. I could act as a kind of secretary, telephoning his stockbroker from the bedroom, so that Davidson could overhear. He wasn’t satisfied with academic discussions: that would have been like playing bridge for counters. But I discovered that his gambles were modest, not more than £500 at a time.

Apart from my secretarial duties, I wasn’t a good partner. I didn’t know enough. I assumed that, until he died, I should have to try to memorise the financial papers more devotedly than I had ever thought of doing.

Though he spun it out, and I followed as well as I could, that day’s effort dwindled away. Pauses. Then a long silence. His eye had ceased to look at me, as though he were turning inward.

After the silence, his voice came back: ‘I shan’t get out of here. Of course.’

He wasn’t asking for false hope. He made it impossible to give.

I asked: ‘Are you sure?’

‘Of course.’

Another pause.

‘They won’t let me. People always interfere with you.’ He was speaking without inflection or expression.

‘The one thing they can’t interfere with is your death. Not in the long run. You have to die on your own. That’s all there is to it, you know.’

He added: ‘I told Margaret that.’

Yes, he had told her. But he wasn’t aware of – and wouldn’t have been concerned with – her response, to which I had listened as we lay awake in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the cool, such as Davidson, who felt most passionately about death. Margaret, whose appetite for living was so strong, had to pay a corresponding price. She wouldn’t have talked, as more protected people might, of any of those figures which, by pretending to face the truth, in fact make it easier to bear. The swallow coming out of darkness into the lighted hall, and then out into the darkness again. That was too pretty for her. So were all the phrases about silence and the dark. Whatever they tried to say, was too near to say like that.

She struggled against it, even while she was searching for the C major of this life. The C major? In sexual love? In the love of children? She knew, as a cool and innocent man like Davidson never could have done, that you could hear the sound and still not have dismissed the final intimation. And, by a curious irony, having a father like Davidson had made that intimation sharper: made it sharper now.

That was why, lying awake in the night repeating to me his acerb remarks about his fiasco, she wasn’t reconciled. She was torn with tenderness, painful tenderness, mixed up with what was nothing else but anger. It was a combination which she sometimes showed towards her own children, when they might be doing themselves harm. Now she couldn’t prevent it breaking out, after her father tried to commit suicide, and then talked to her as though it had been an interesting event.

In the dark, she kept asking what she could do for him, knowing that there was nothing. At moments she was furious. With all the grip of her imagination, she was re-enacting and rewitnessing the scene of Sunday evening. The capsules marshalled on Davidson’s desk (he was a pernicketily tidy man): the swallows of whisky: the last drink, as though it was a modest celebration or perhaps one for the road. It might have been a harmless domestic spectacle. Capsules such as we saw every day. An old man taking a drink. But, just as in the trial I had had to attend earlier that year, objects could lose their innocence. For Margaret the capsules and the whisky glass weren’t neutral bits of matter any more.

They were reminders, they were more than that, they were emblems. Emblems of what? Perhaps, I thought, as I tried to soothe her, of what the non-religious never understand in the religious. Margaret, though she didn’t believe, was by temperament religious. Which meant, not as a paradox but as a condition, that she clung – more strongly than her father could have conceived possible – to the senses’ life, the species’ life. So, when that was thrown away or disregarded, she felt horror: it might be superstitious, she couldn’t justify it, but that was what those emblems stood for.

Her father, however, settled her in his own mind by saying again, as though that were the perfect formulation, that she was prudish about suicide. After a time during which neither he nor I spoke, and he was looking inward, he said, quite brightly: ‘Most of you are prudish about death. You’re prudish about death.’

He meant Margaret’s friends and mine, the people whom, before his illness, he used to meet at our house. They were a different generation from his, most of them younger than I was (within a month I should be fifty-nine).

‘You’re much more prudish than we were on that fairly relevant subject. Of course you’re much less prudish about sex. It’s a curious thought, but I suspect that when people give up being prudish about sex they become remarkably so about everything else.’ (I had heard this before: in his lively days, he used to say that our friends dared not talk about money, ambition, aspiration, or even ordinary emotion.) ‘Certainly about death. You people try to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ve never been able to bear the nineteenth century’ – the old Bloomsbury hatred darted punctually out – ‘but at least they weren’t afraid to talk about death.’

‘It’s the only thing in one’s whole life that is a hundred per cent certain.’

‘It’s the only thing one is bound to do by oneself.’

Later, after he had died – which didn’t happen for over a year – I was not sure whether he had really produced those two sayings that afternoon. The difficulty was, I had so many conversations with him in the clinic bedroom; they were repetitive by their nature, and because Davidson was such a concentrated man. Talk about the Stock Exchange: then his thoughts about dying and death. That was the pattern which did not vary for weeks to come, and so the days might have become conflated in my memory. It often seemed to me that the other themes of his life had been dismissed by now, and there was only one, the last one, which he wanted to restate.
You have to die on your own
. And yet, he had never said that. I was inventing words for him. Perhaps I was inventing a theme that was, not his, but mine.

I hadn’t felt intimations of my death as deeply as Margaret. But, like all of us, intermittently since I was a young man, as often as a young man as when I was ageing, I had imagined it. What would it be like? There were the words we had all read or uttered. You die alone.
On mourra seul
. The solitude. I thought I could imagine it and know it, as one does being frightened, appalled or desirous.

There it was. It wasn’t to be evaded. Perhaps that was why I invented words for Davidson which he didn’t utter. And read into him feelings which I couldn’t be certain that he knew.

But certainly he said one thing, and did another, which I was able to fix precisely onto that afternoon.

‘Nearly all my friends are dead by now,’ he said. ‘Most of them had moderately unpleasant deaths.’

I was thinking, of those who had mattered to me, Sheila and Roy Calvert had died, though not naturally. Many of my acquaintances were reaching the age band where the statistics began to raise their voice. Looking at us all, one couldn’t prophesy about any single casualty, but that some of us would die one way or the other – within ten, fifteen years – one could predict with the certainty of a statistician. Only a fortnight before, while Margaret and I were still abroad, I had heard that Denis Geary, that robust schoolfellow of mine who had been a support to us a few months before, had gone out for a walk and been found dead.

‘Of course,’ said Davidson, ‘there’s only been one myth that’s ever really counted. I mean, the afterlife.’

‘It’s a pity one can’t believe in it,’ he said.

‘Yes.’ (Not then, but afterwards, I remembered kneeling by Sheila’s bed after her funeral, half-crazed for some sign of her, not even a word, just the shadow of a ghost.)