Last Things (28 page)

Walking downstairs, out to the steps in front of the hospital, I was still wearing a blindfold over the left eye, and hadn’t stereoscopic vision when I looked down at the steps: so that Margaret, taking my arm, had to guide me, and as I probed with my feet I looked infirm. Infirm enough for a photographer, on the hospital steps, to ask if I wanted help: which didn’t prevent him snapping a picture of the descent. When we came into the open air, there were a dozen photographers waiting, shouting like a new estate of the realm, telling us to stand still, move, smile. There was the whirr of a television camera. ‘Look as if you’re happy,’ someone ordered Margaret. ‘Talk to each other!’ Worn down by this contemporary discipline, we muttered away. What we were actually saying, beneath the smiles, was what fiend out of hell had leaked the time. Someone had tipped off the Press. Pat? One of Porson’s ‘chums’?

As we climbed into the car, I looked back at the hospital facade. Nostalgia for a place where I had been through that special night? No, not in the least. It was different from occasions when I was young, and said goodbye to stretches of unhappiness. When I left the local government office, after my last morning as a clerk, I felt, although or because I had been miserable and humiliated there for years, something like an ache, as though regret for a bond that had been snapped. A little later, when I was a young man, and had been sent to the Mediterranean to recover from an illness, I had, driving to the station for the journey home, looked back at the sea (I could remember now the smell of the arbutus after rain). I had been desolate there, afraid that I might not get better: going away, I felt a distress much more painful than that outside the old office, a yearning, as though all I wanted in this life was to remain by the seashore and never be torn away.

None of that now, though this had been the worst time of the three. I regarded the hospital with neutrality; it might have been any other red-brick nineteenth-century building. As one grew older, perhaps the nervous rackings of one’s youth died down. Or perhaps, and with good reason, one wasn’t so frightened of the future. After all one had had some practice contemplating futures and then living them.

It was pleasant, anxiety-free, to be going home.

Ends and Beginnings

LYING in bed in the hospital, set free by the talisman of 28 November, I hadn’t so much as wondered how long this state would last. If I had even wanted to wonder so, it would have been a false freedom. And whatever it was (it might make nonsense of a good deal that I expected or imagined), it was not false. Fortuitous, if you like, but not false.

It transferred itself easily enough into my everyday life, as soon as I got back. In a fashion which would have seemed curiously unfair, if they had known about it, to those who thought that all along I had been luckier than I deserved. For the bad times got dulled, shrugged off as though if 28 November had gone the other way they wouldn’t have existed. But, by a paradoxical kind of grace, the reverse didn’t apply, the dispensation wasn’t symmetrical: on the contrary, the good times became sharper. Shortly after I left hospital, I published a book which I liked and which fell, not exactly flat, but jaggedly. If that had happened in early November, it would have cost me some bad days. As it was, though I didn’t pretend to be indifferent (changes in mood are not so complete as that), I had put it behind me almost as soon as it occurred. Shortly afterwards – and this was just as surprising – I found myself revelling, without any barricade of sarcasm or touching wood, in a bit of praise.

There had been a time when I used to declare, with a kind of defiance: you had to enjoy your joys, and suffer your sufferings. As I knew well enough, I had more talent for the latter. I had managed to subjugate the depressive streak in action, and conceal it from others and sometimes myself, but it was there half-hidden: it wasn’t entirely an accident that I could guess when Roy Calvert was going to swing from the manic into its other phase. With me, what for Roy was manic showed itself only as a kind of high spirits or an excessive sense of expectation: most of the time, I had to watch, as better and robuster characters had to watch, for the alternate phase. Now the balance had been tilted, and I felt myself closer than I had ever been before to people whom I had once in secret thought thick-skinned and prosaic: people who weren’t menaced by melancholy and who were better than I was at enjoying themselves.

It was a singular dispensation to overtake one at sixty, faintly comic, humbling and yet comforting.

When Margaret’s father had died, which he did in his sleep in the January of 1966, two months after my operation, she and I were alone together as in the first days of marriage. More alone, for then she had been looking after Maurice in his infancy. Just as when we returned to the flat the previous autumn, it was both a treat and strange to be there by ourselves. We spun time out, lengthening the moments, making the most of them. Work was over for me now by the early afternoon: after that, we were alone and free. I had got rid of any duties outside the home. We had time to ourselves, as we had not had when we were first married. We were able to look at each other, not as though it were the first time (when one sees nothing but one’s own excitement), but as though we were on holiday, waking up fresh in a hotel.

In another case, it was as fresh when I walked with my son on spring evenings in the park. I was listening to him, not as though he had changed, but as though something had changed between us. Not that I was less interested in him, or in his friends. Actually, I had become more so, but in a different fashion. I was less engaged in competing with them, or proving to Charles that they were wrong. My brother Martin had once said, after his renunciation: ‘People matter: relations between them don’t matter much.’ Whether he ever thought of that, in his troubles with his own son, I didn’t know: if so it must have seemed a black joke against himself. But it was somewhere near the way (so I thought, and didn’t have a superstitious tremor) in which I was now taking pleasure in Charles’ company. I was interested in him and the rest of them, excited, stimulated by their energies and hopes: it was like being given a slice of life to watch and to draw refreshment from, so long as one could keep from taking part oneself.

It didn’t seem like an ageing man’s interest in the flow of life, or Francis Getliffe’s patriarchal delight in his children and grandchildren and those of his friends, the delight of life going on. It didn’t even seem so much like a bit of continuous creation, in which through being engrossed in other lives one was making a new start for oneself. It might, I thought casually, have been all of those things: but if it were I didn’t care. I felt closer than that, through being given a privileged position, having those energies under my eyes: it was much more like being engaged with my own friends at the same age, except that I – with my anxieties, perturbations, desires and will – had been satisfactorily (and for my own liberation) removed.

It was at the end of the Easter vacation, when Charles had returned from another of his trips, that he got into the habit of asking me out for an evening walk. He was home only for a week; each day about half past five, active, springy on his feet, he looked at me with eyebrows raised, and we went into the park for what became our ritual promenade. Out by the Albion Gate: across the grass, under the thickening trees, along the path to the Serpentine, by the side of the Row to the Achilles statue, back along the eastern verge towards Marble Arch. It might have been two old clubmen going through their evening routine, I told him after the second trip: Charles grinned companionably, and next day started precisely the same course.

His conversation, however, was not much like an old clubman’s. He was relaxed, because I was the right distance from him: the right distance, that is, for him to talk and me to listen. I took in more about his friends than I had done before, and believed more, now that I wasn’t conducting a dialectic with him. Yes, they were more serious than I had let myself admit. Their politics (his less than the others) might be utopian, but they were their own. They were probably no better or no worse thought out than ours had been, but they came from a different ground.

The results could be curiously different. Charles and his circle were more genuinely international than any of us had been. The minor nationalisms seemed to have vanished quite. They were not even involved in Europe, though most of them had travelled all over it. It was the poor world that captured their imagination: the Grand Tour had to be uncomfortable and also squalid nowadays, said Charles with a sarcastic smile. That was what he had been conducting in Asia before he was seventeen, and this present vacation he had been rounding it off in Africa.

They weren’t specially illusioned. They didn’t imagine an Elysium existing here and now upon this earth, as young men and women of their kind in the 1930s sometimes imagined Russia or less often the United States. It was true, dark world-views didn’t touch them much. They might bear – in that year 1966 and later – people like Francis Getliffe and me saying that objectively the world looked grimmer than at any time in our lives. They might analyse and understand the reasons which made us say so. But they didn’t in the end believe it. They were alive for anything that was going to happen. That was bound to be so: you live in your own time.

Listening to Charles those evenings, I thought that, not only did his friends’ opinions have more to them than I had been willing to grant, but so had he. He seemed more of a sport – that is, less like me or Martin, less like anyone on Margaret’s side – than I had believed. The family patterns didn’t fit. He wasn’t so easy to domesticate. There were contradictions in him that I hadn’t seen before.

This was striking home all through that week: on one of the last evenings, I could not help but see it clear. We had just crossed the bridge over the water: it was a dense and humid April night, but with no clouds in the darkening sky; Charles suddenly began to press me about, of all subjects, the works of Tolkien. I turned towards him, ready to say something sharp, such as that he ought to know that I had no taste for fancy. His eyes left mine, looked straight ahead.

I met his profile, dolichocephalic, straight-nosed, hair curling close to his head. On the moment he looked unfamiliar, not at all how I imagined him to look. Curious: feature by feature, of course, the genes had played their part, the hair was Martin’s, the profile Austin Davidson’s: but the result was strange. So strange that I might have been gazing at a young man I didn’t recognise, much less understand. The sharp repartee dropped away, I said that naturally I would give this favourite of his a try.

Curious, I was thinking again. He was in many respects more concentrated and practical than I had been at his age, or maybe was now: almost certainly, when he wanted something, he was more ruthless. Yet, if I had no taste for fancy, he had enough for two: whimsies, fantasies, they hadn’t been left behind in childhood. With him they co-existed, and would continue to co-exist with adult desires and adult fulfilments: he was one of those, or would become one, who had the gift of being able to feel guilty with Dostoevsky, innocent with hobbits, passionately insistent with a new girlfriend, all on the same day.

Good, he was saying affectionately, as I promised to read the book.

As we walked on, other contradictions of his became as clear. He had proved his own kind of courage. Whether he had set out to prove it to himself, no one knew: but the fact was, none of my contemporaries, not even those as adventurous as the young Francis Getliffe, would at sixteen have contemplated setting out on solitary expeditions such as his. As for me, it would have seemed about as plausible – for reasons of pennilessness in addition to physical timidity – as trying to round the Horn. Of course, most of Charles’ friends travelled further than we did: but he was the one who had made it into a trial of nerve. Not nerve, just patience, he explained with a straight face. All calculated and singularly deliberate, as though he had reverted to one of those nineteenth-century Englishmen with private means, scholarly tastes, and inordinate self-will.

And yet, he was nervous, more so than most of us, in another old-fashioned, even a primitive sense. When he had arrived back safe after his second trip and had produced some understatements which were not so modest as they sounded, I asked him how much I should have to pay him to sleep (
a
) in a haunted house, (
b
) in a graveyard. Again straight-faced, he said: ‘As for (
a
), more than you could afford. For (
b
), no offers accepted. And I suppose you’d do either for half a bottle of Scotch. Or less. Wouldn’t you?’

He was being, as usual, truthful about himself. He was capable of getting frightened by ghost stories. There were still occasions, after he had been reading, when he carefully forgot to turn off his bedroom lamp.

Walking by his side – lights were coming on in St George’s Hospital – I mentioned, as though by free association, the name of Gordon Bestwick. This was a friend of his, whom I had met, but only casually, at Christmas time. Charles, protective about any of his circle, wasn’t easy about Gordon’s health, and had been suggesting that I should go to Cambridge next term, and meet him again, to see what my opinion was.

‘Why did you think of him?’ said Charles, clear-voiced.

‘Oh, it just occurred to me that he might be more rational than you are.’

Charles chuckled.

‘I’ve told you, he’s a bit like you. He’s
our
Bazarov, you know.’

That was a complicated private reference. Charles must have picked up from Francis Getliffe or more probably his wife, the impression that I made on the Marches when they first befriended me. A poor young man: positive: impatient with the anxieties of the rich. Making them feel overdelicate, overnurtured, frail by the side of a new force. In fact, their impression was in most respects fallacious. My character seemed to them more all-of-a piece and stronger just because I was poor and driven on: in the long run, much of the frailty was not on their side but mine. Still, they called me after Turgenev’s hero and for a while made a similar legend about me. And that was what Charles and his circle were duplicating in their reception of Gordon Bestwick.