He has been lying there, awake, for two hours, thinking.
It still seems incredible to him that he is actually going to die. That this is just going to stop. This. Him. It still seems like something that happens to other people — and of course friends and acquaintances are already falling. People he has known for decades. A fair few are dead already. He has attended their funerals. The numbers are starting to thin out. And still he finds it hard to understand — to properly understand — that he will die as well. That this experience is finite. That one day it will end. That ten years from now, quite probably, he just won’t be here.
There is something very strange about trying to imagine the world without him. The strangeness, he thinks, still lying there, is to do with the fact that the only world he knows is the one he perceives himself — and that world will die with him. That world — that subjective experience of the world — which for him is the world — will not in fact outlast him. It is the ending of that stream of perception that seems so strange. So unimaginable. He is staring at the enormous walnut wardrobe that stands on the far wall of the room, and he is aware, in an unusual way, of that stream of perception, of perceiving things. Of the pleasure of perceiving things. Of seeing the light from the window pass through slits in the heavy drapes and in dust-filled shafts find the surface of the wardrobe, the deep, time-darkened varnish.
Of hearing footsteps on the gravel outside.
—
The footsteps are Claudia’s. Claudia, the Romanian daily. His wife, Joanna, must have phoned from England and told her he was there.
‘Buongiorno, Claudia,’ he says, appearing downstairs in his dressing gown and slippers.
He has lost weight, a lot of weight, since she last saw him in the early part of the summer. Then he looked over-inflated, with a high, unhealthy colour. He doesn’t look healthier now, particularly. He seems shrunken, diminished. ‘Buongiorno, Signor Parson,’ she says. She is preparing herself for work. They speak Italian to each other — Claudia knows no English. Her Italian isn’t perfect either. It is worse than his. She arrived a few years ago, to join her son, who installs kitchens for IKEA in Bologna. ‘I am sorry,’ she says. ‘I don’t know you are here.’
‘Did Joanna call you?’ he asks.
‘Signora Parson, yes. I am sorry,’ she says again.
‘There’s nothing to be sorry about,’ he tells her. ‘Thank you for coming in. I’m sorry I didn’t call you to let you know I was here.’
‘Is okay,’ she says.
‘I’m not sure how long I’m going to be here,’ he says. They are in the kitchen and he starts to make his coffee, spooning it into the machine. ‘Just a week or two, I think.’
It is unusual for someone to be here at this time, first week of December. Christmas, sometimes, they are here. Not so much any more. In the old days, quite often. When Simon was little, and Joanna’s mother was still alive. In the old days. No Claudia then. An Italian lady, they used to have. And she had had to stop working. Some medical issue. What was her name? They stayed in touch for a while. Did they visit her in hospital in Ferrara or somewhere? He might have a memory of that, or he might be mixing it up with something else. Anyway, he has no idea what’s happened to her now. All these people you know in a lifetime. What happens to them all?
He is pouring some muesli into a huge mug, pouring skimmed milk over it. The skimmed milk still seems more like water than milk to him.
Claudia is asking what she should start with.
‘Maybe upstairs?’ he suggests, wanting to be left in peace in the kitchen for a while.
He sits at the table, eating muesli, hearing her heavy feet making the old steps squeak as she marches upstairs with her things.
How old is she? he wonders. Not young. Her son must be thirty. A handsome man. He has met him a few times — he picks her up, occasionally, in his IKEA van.
—
When he has finished his muesli, he settles in the wing chair in the sitting room — an old one, in need of restuffing — tapping at his iPad. It was a present from Cordelia, while he was in hospital after the heart op. He has always been a technophile, what is now known as an ‘early adopter’ — he was the first among his friends, in about 1979, to own a video, a VHS player. He learned how to use the iPad in a day or two.
He taps at it.
Tap.
Tap.
Emails. Not many. Not as many as there used to be. He has had to stop doing most of the things he used to do — his post-retirement portfolio of interests. Down to nothing now, nearly. There is an email from Cordelia, which always pleases him. She talks about this and that. Asks how he is feeling. She says that Simon — her son, his grandson — has had a poem published in some magazine. Just a university magazine probably, though she doesn’t say so — she wants to make it sound as impressive as possible. Simon is in his first year at Oxford. She has attached the poem to the email and he looks at it while Claudia stomps about overhead, making the little glass pieces of the chandelier tinkle. (The chandelier was there when they bought the house — very valuable, they were assured.) The poem seems to be inspired by the famous miniature of Sultan Mehmet II in which he is shown smelling a flower.
The portrait shows this — his eyes fixed elsewhere
,
Mehmet the Conqueror holds a rose
To the Turkic scimitar of his nose
.
The engrossing necessities of money and war
,
The wise politician’s precautionary
Fratricides, the apt play of power —
All proper activities in his sphere
,
And he excelled at them all. So why the flower?
A nod, perhaps, to something less worldly;
Not beauty, I think, whatever that is
,
Not love, not ‘nature’
,
Not Allah, by that or any other name —
Just a moment’s immersion in the texture
Of existence, the eternal passing of time
.
Not terrible, he thinks. Some nice phrases. The engrossing necessities of money and war. Yes, that was nice. (He still misses them, after nearly ten years, those engrossing necessities, waiting for him at the end of the Tube journey to Whitehall, still feels that without them he is not properly living.) Yes, it was a nice way of putting it. And then there was…Where was it? Yes –
Just a moment’s immersion in the texture
Of existence
The words had made him think of the way he spent a minute or two, earlier that morning, staring at the wardrobe upstairs. The sense he had had then of losing himself in the act of perception. A moment’s immersion in the texture of existence — the texture of it. Yes. Well done, Simon. He will write him an email, he thinks. He will praise the poem — not too much, just enough to encourage him, and with qualifications. Cordelia has a tendency to praise her son unqualifiedly, which isn’t healthy. Simon is, it has to be said, just a little odd. He was there, in Argenta, that spring, with a friend. They were travelling around Europe and had stayed for a day or two. The friend — what was his name? — had been a lively fellow. Fun to have about the place. Simon, as usual, solemn and withdrawn. Less so towards the end. They had had some nice talks, the three of them, about serious subjects — literature, history, the state of Europe.