Last Things (23 page)

We couldn’t travel far while Margaret’s father was alive, I replied, as I had done previously. No, but that couldn’t be forever. Francis was set on the plan, more set than when he first introduced it. It would be good for his married children and their families. It would be good for ours – Charles, Francis said, would be mysteriously asking to have the house to himself and leaving us to guess whom he was bringing there.

He was so active, so determined to get me into the sunshine, that I was almost persuaded. It might be pleasant as we all became old. But I held on enough not to make the final promise. I wasn’t as hospitable as Francis, nor anything like as fond of movement. Anyway, now the plan had crystallised, I didn’t doubt that he would carry it through, whether I joined in or not. It had started as a scheme largely for my sake: but also Francis, decisive and executive as ever, was carving out a pattern for his old age.

BEFORE evening, the room was smelling of flowers and whisky. The flowers were due, in the main, to Azik Schiff, who hadn’t come to visit me himself but whose response to physical ailments was to provide a lavish display of horticulture. More flowers than they’d ever seen sent, said the nurses, and my credit rose in consequence. Though I could have done without the hyacinths which, since my nose was sensitive to begin with and had been made more so by blindness, gave me a headache, the only malaise of the day.

As for the whisky, that had been drunk before lunch by Hector Rose and his wife and after tea by Margaret and a visitor who hadn’t been invited, my nephew Pat. When Margaret was sitting beside my chair and she was reading me the morning’s letters, there were footsteps, male footsteps, that I didn’t recognise. But I did recognise a stiffening in Margaret’s voice as she said good afternoon.

‘Hallo, Aunt Meg. Hallo, Uncle Lew. Good to see you up. That’s better, isn’t it, that really is better.’

It was a situation in which, given enough nerve, he was bound to win. Whatever he didn’t have, he had enough nerve. Though he might have been slandering Margaret and her children, she couldn’t raise a quarrel in a hospital bedroom. And he was reckoning that I was quite incapacitated. There he might have been wrong: but as usual in Pat’s presence, I didn’t want to say what a juster man might have said. Margaret stayed silent: and I was reduced to asking Pat how he had heard about me.

‘Well-known invalid, of course.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ve kept it very quiet. On purpose.’

‘Not quiet enough, Uncle Lew.’ Pat’s voice was ebullient and full of cheek.

Margaret had still said nothing, but I listened to the splash of liquid. Presumably he was helping himself to a drink. He said, irrepressible, that he couldn’t reveal his sources – and then gave an account, almost completely accurate, of what had happened since I entered the hospital. Massage of the heart. Margaret being sent for.

‘It must have been terrible for you, Aunt Meg.’

Margaret had to reply.

‘I shouldn’t like to go through it again,’ she said. The curious thing was, his sympathy was genuine.

‘Terrible,’ he said again. Then he couldn’t resist showing that he knew the name of the heart specialist, and even how he had telephoned Margaret on the first night.

That was something I hadn’t been told myself. As before with Pat, just as in the past with Gilbert Cooke, I felt uncomfortably hemmed in, as though I was being watched by a flashy but fairly successful private detective. Actually, I realised later that there was no mystery about Pat’s source of information. There was only one person whom it could have come from. My brother Martin had been asking Margaret for news several times a day. And Martin, who was as discreet as Hector Rose in his least forthcoming moments, who had, when working on the atomic bomb, never let slip a secret even to his wife, on this occasion, as on others, could, and must, have told everything to his son.

Pat might be said to have outstayed his welcome, if there had been any welcome. Talking cheerfully, the bounce and sparkle not diminishing, he stayed until Margaret herself had to leave. But there had been, aided by alcohol, some truce of amicability in the room. Margaret had taken another drink, and Pat several more. It was I who was left out: for to me, who wasn’t yet drinking, there might be amicability in the room, but there was also an increasing smell of whisky.

Later that night, when I had been put back to bed, the telephone rang on the bedside table. Gropingly, my hand got hold of the receiver. It was Margaret.

‘I don’t want to worry you, but I think you’d better know. It’s not serious, but it’s rather irritating.’

Normally, I should have demanded the news at once. But in the calm in which I was existing, as yet inexplicable to me but nevertheless very happy, I wasn’t in a hurry. I asked if it were anything to do with Charles, and Margaret said no. I said: ‘You needn’t mind about worrying me, you know.’

‘Well,’ came her voice, ‘there’s an item in one of the later editions. I think I’d better read it, hadn’t I?’

‘Go ahead.’

The item, Margaret told me, occurred in a new-style gossip column, copied from New York. It read something to the effect that I had been undergoing optical surgery, and that there had been complications which had caused ‘grave concern’.

When she rang up to break the news, Margaret assumed that this would enrage and worry me. She had seen me and others close to me secretive about their health. One of the first lessons you learned in any sort of professional life was that you should never be ill. It reduced your
mana
. When I was a young man, and just attracting some work at the Bar, I had been told that I was seriously ill. I had gone to extreme lengths to conceal it: if I had died, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – and if, as it turned out, I didn’t, well then I had been right.

Nowadays I was removed from the official life: but even to a writer it did harm – an impalpable superstitious discreditable harm – if people heard that your death was near. You were already on the way to being dispensed with. The way they talked about you – ‘did you know, poor old X seems to be finished’ – was dismissive rather than cruel, though there was a twist of gloating there, showing through their self-congratulation that they were still right in the middle of the mortal scene.

So Margaret anticipated that this bit of news would harass me – and, before I went into hospital, she would have been right. Now it didn’t. I said: ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’

‘We’d better do something, hadn’t we?’

I was reflecting. The lessons I had learned seemed very distant; but still they had been learned, and one might as well not throw them away.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose we’d better be prudent. I’ll make Christopher Mansel send out a bulletin.’

‘Shall I talk to him tonight?’

‘It can wait until he comes in tomorrow morning.’

When Margaret had rung off, I lay in bed, not thinking of Mansel’s bulletin, but contentedly preoccupied with a problem that gave me a certain pleasure. Whoever had leaked that news? It couldn’t be the doctors. It couldn’t be my family. Someone in the hospital? Just possibly. Someone whom Margaret had talked to, trying to enlist visitors for me? Possibly.

No, the answer was too easy. There was one person who stood out, beautifully probable. Motive, opportunity, the lot. I would have bet heavily on my nephew Pat. He had his contacts with the young journalists. Once or twice before, our doings had been speculated about knowledgeably in the gossip columns. Pat was not above receiving a pound or two as a linkman. There was not much which Pat was above.

The next morning, as Mansel said good morning, I told him about the rumour and said that I wanted him to correct it.

‘Right, sir. There are one or two things first, though.’

After he had examined the left eye, he said: ‘Promising.’ He paused, like a minister answering a supplementary question, wanting to give satisfaction, so long as it wasn’t the final commitment: ‘I think I can say we shall be unlucky if anything goes wrong this time.’

Quick fingers, and the eye was shut into darkness again.

‘That’ll do, I think.’ Mansel was gazing at me as though he had made an excellent joke.

‘What about the other eye?’ I said.

‘You can have that, if you like.’ He gave a short allocution. What I had said the day before was what he expected most patients to say. He had already decided to leave the good eye unblinded. It was more convenient to have me in hospital for a few more days: I should stand it better if I had an eye to see with. The advantages of blinding both eyes probably wasn’t worth the psychological wear and tear. ‘I’m pretty well convinced’, said Mansel, ‘that we’ve got to learn to do these operations and leave you one working eye right from the start.’

I said that I should like to stand him a drink, but in his profession, at 6.45 in the morning, that didn’t seem quite appropriate. I said also that, if he would leave me one eye, he could go through the entire eye operation again. Without any frills or additions, however.

Mansel was scrutinising me.

‘You could face it again, could you?’

‘If it’s not going to happen, one can face anything.’

He seemed to make another entry in his mental notebook –
behaviour of patient, after being allowed vision
.

‘Well, sir, what about this statement? That’s really your department, not mine, you know.’ It was true, he was not so brisk, masterful and masterly when he sat down and started to compose.

Ballpoint pen tapping his teeth, he stayed motionless, like Henry James in search of the exact, the perfect, the unique word. After a substantial interval, at least fifteen minutes, he said, with unhabitual diffidence, with a touch of pride: ‘How will this do?’

He read out the name of the hospital, and then–

Sir Lewis Eliot entered this hospital on 27 November, and next day an operation was performed for a retinal detachment in the left eye. As a result there are good prospects that the eye will be restored to useful vision. During the course of the operation, Sir Lewis underwent a cardiac arrest. This was treated in a routine manner. In all respects, Sir Lewis’ progress and condition are excellent.

‘Well, Christopher,’ I said, ‘no one could call you a sensational writer.’

‘I think that says all that’s necessary.’

‘Cardiac arrest, that’s what you call it, is it?’

I hadn’t heard the phrase before. Though, by a coincidence, when my eye first went wrong, two years earlier, I had been reminded of an older phrase, ‘arrest of life’. Perhaps that was too melodramatic for a black veil over half an eye. This time, it didn’t seem so.

‘After all,’ I remarked absently to Mansel, ‘one doesn’t have too many.’

‘Too many what?’

‘Arrests of life.’

‘Cardiac arrests is what we say. No, of course not, most people only have one.’ Unfussed, he went off to telephone the bulletin to the Press Association, while I got up, self-propelled again, and, being able to see, was also able to eat. It was a luxury to sit, free from the solipsistic darkness, and just gaze out of the window – though, even as the sky lightened, it was still a leaden morning, and bedroom lamps were being switched on, high up in the houses opposite.

Mansel had told the nurses not to let me move, except from bed to chair. But the telephone was fixed close by, and I rang Margaret up, telling her to bring reading-matter. That wasn’t specially urgent, it was good enough to enjoy looking at things. But this presumably soon ceased to be a treat. Thirty years ago, I was remembering, an eminent writer had given me some unsolicited advice. Just look at an orange, she said. Go on looking at it. For hours. Then put down what you see. In the hospital room there was, as it happened, an orange. I looked at it. I thought that I should soon have enough of – what had she called it? The physiognomic charm of phenomena.

It was a relief when the telephone rang. The porter in the entrance hall, announcing that Mr Eliot was down below. ‘We’ve been told to send up the names of visitors from now on, sir.’ Mr Eliot? It could be one of three. When I heard quick steps far down the corridor, my ear was still attuned. That was Charles.

He came across the room and, in silence, shook my hand. Then he sat down, still without speaking. It was unlike him, or both of us together, to be so silent. There was a constraint between us right from the beginning.

With my unobscured eye, I was gazing at him. He gazed back at me. He said: ‘I didn’t expect–’

‘What?’

‘That they’d let you see.’

‘New technique,’ I said, glad to have a topic to start us talking. I explained why Mansel had unblinded me.

‘It must be an improvement.’

‘Enormous.’

We were talking like strangers, impersonally impressed by a medical advance: no, more concentrated upon eye surgery, more eager not to deviate from it, than if we had been strangers.

Another pause, as though we had forgotten the trick of talking, at which people thought we were both so easy.

At last I said: ‘This has been a curious experience.’

‘I suppose so.’ Then quickly: ‘You’re looking pretty well.’

‘I think I’m probably very well. Never better in my life, I dare say. It seems an odd way of achieving it.’

Charles gave a tight smile, but he wasn’t responding to the kind of sarcasm, or grim facetiousness, with which he and I, and Martin also, liked to greet our various fatalities. Was I making claims on him that he couldn’t meet? The last time my eye had gone wrong, and it seemed that I was going to lose its sight, he had been fierce with concern. Then he had been two years younger. Now, in so many ways a man, he spoke, or didn’t speak, as though his concern was knotted up, inexpressible, or so tangled that he couldn’t let it out.

It was strange, it was more than strange, it was disappointing and painful, that he should be self-conscious as I had scarcely seen him. At this time of all times. I thought later that perhaps we knew too much: too much to be easy, that is, not enough to come out on the other side. He had plenty of insight, but he wasn’t trusting it, as the constraint got hold of us, nor was I mine.