Then there was George’s older brother, my great-uncle, Rupert Rawlinson: Major, formerly Colonel Rawlinson; “Ratty” Rawlinson, as he was apparently known to his intimates—“Uncle Ratty” as he was known to my mother. It was in some lesser-known campaign of the Great War — Macedonia? Mesopotamia? — that his military career, likewise seemingly destined for stardom, took its calamitous turn. The wrong decision at the wrong time, an order given or not given that should not or should have been given. An inglorious, unglorifiable blunder. Result: court martial, demotion, ignominy.
My great-uncle did his best to outlive this disgrace, at least in the strictly numerical sense, since he died aged eighty-one and was still lingering on shortly before I was born. Yet according to my mother — and I am repeating now what she told me, brazenly enough, when her own death-warrant had effectively been signed — it was craven fear of oblivion, the desire to cheat death by the vain quest for distinction, that was the root of the matter, as much with Ratty as with George.
You would have thought that two brothers following the not unrelated trades of soldier and surgeon would not have been so affected. Both would have had fairly naked experience of mortality. But this, my mother claimed, was just the point. They chose professions that brought them close to death, in the empty hope that this would guard them against it. My great-uncle, who was no coward by a soldier’s standards and seems to have suffered, on that fateful day, an excess of valour over sense, hoped that his officer’s sword and his shining record in the Sudan and elsewhere would confer on him both renown and a kind of personal invulnerability. Likewise, George, as he audaciously probed what some have held to be the very seat of the Soul, might have felt himself privileged above ordinary beings, and might have foreseen his fame outlasting his forceps.
With Rupert, she insisted, the real trouble only began one snowy morning in the winter of 1920, when, a sound but dishonoured sixty-five, he took a nasty tumble down the front steps, cracking his head badly on the way, and for a day or so lay in a parlous condition.
“The man panicked, sweetie. He went to pieces. He thought his hour had come, with his shame still fresh upon him.”
How she could have been so sure of this, I don’t know. She was only nine at the time. But then I was only nine when my father—
In any case, it was this incident, in her view, that exposed the true tenor of the man and turned him for the rest of his life into an incurable and exasperating eccentric. The immediate “panic” had taken a specific form. In the midst of his fever and ill-founded terror, Rupert was apparently heard repeatedly to remonstrate that his younger brother was not to come near him, was not going to poke about in his skull with his fiendish instruments. George not only did come near him but, with little more than a cursory examination and no recourse to incision, pronounced that Rupert was making a big fuss about nothing and would recover in a day or so. The second humiliation of Uncle Ratty’s life.
My great-uncle was revenged, of course, when George took his own irremediable tumble only three years later. But, not satisfied with this, Rupert, as the senior member of the family and chief possessor of its fortunes, proceeded to play a vindictive, teasing game with my grandfather and his children (my mother and her brother, James), taunting them in their reduced circumstances with the meanness of his hand-outs and his own obstructive longevity.
But by this time, it seems, he was no longer entirely in possession of his faculties. That knock on the head, perhaps — just to spite his brother — had had its effect after all. He now devoted his time to perfecting in himself the caricature of a cranky, retired army officer, exaggerating or inventing past honours, while time softened his disgrace; and, when this didn’t work, looking for borrowed glory in the family archives. In his last years, this antiquarian urge (I admit it: the spirit of Uncle Ratty lives in me, as it lived even, for a while, in Sam) took an all-consuming form. Namely to prove that since his name, Rawlinson, denoted “son of Rawling,” in turn a palpable corruption of “son of Rawley” or “Ralegh,” his lineage might be traced, with much labour and subterfuge, to the great Elizabethan worthy himself, he of the pointed beard, muddied cloak and imperishable fame …
And then, going back a generation on my grandmother’s side, there was the Devon branch of the family — the right region for Sir Walter if the wrong name — who had made and lost their fortune in local copper and tin, neither of which seemed to have been as steady a bet as plastic.…
And then (did Uncle Ratty feel moved to pause here, I wonder? Did he peruse the Notebooks? But what did he want with another scandal and a lot of wordy mumbo-jumbo, and another non-Rawlinson?) there was Matthew Pearce — my mother’s great-grandfather — of Burlford.
All this she told me in the early stages of her illness — not, if I have given that impression, on that final, gilded evening. By then she could not have said anything more, because she had lost the mechanism of speech. Those last visits were to a silent, staring woman, her throat and neck packed around with all kinds of surgical junk, so that she could still breathe, and all verbal communication restricted to what she could write with a marker-pen on a special, wipe-clean clipboard. I think the sudden bout of disclosures, if it expressed in her peculiar way her own readiness to accept death, was also a recognition of the anticipated fact: that before loss of life would come loss of voice; that if she had things to say, she had better speak away. Though when silence struck, I could not help wondering — I still wonder — whether she had quite got round to saying all she intended.
I blamed her, silently, and she knew this, for the timing of her death, coming so soon, or at least announcing itself so soon, after Ruth’s. Perhaps Ruth’s death had immunized me, so that I could face the distress of my mother’s with a sort of foggy, battered steadiness. But then she was seventy-eight. And, of course, this worked the other way round. I was witnessing in my mother the sort of horrors that Ruth had — avoided. My mother’s unrebelling submission to them was a kind of declaration that she was made of tougher stuff than Ruth, as she was made of tougher stuff than my father. (Oh, she was tough, all right.) And I could not help thinking that her merciless appraisal of her family, her parables on mortal dread and the vanity of ambition, were her indirect way of delivering, at last, her jealous judgement on her daughter-in-law.
Why did she have to do it? To die then? To be so cruel? To block, to steal, Ruth’s afterlight? But then it struck me that perhaps all of this could be turned round yet another way again, and that, amazing as it was to conceive, there might have been in the cruelty a shred of unbelievable kindness: she was using her death to shake me out of my stupor of grief. (“Buck up, darling, it’s not the end of the world.”) There was a moment when my grasp of this possibility must have shown in my eyes; and her eyes had glittered back: you see, I am really a mother, after all, not such a selfish bitch — I give myself up for my son.…
It was an irony that went unmentioned that death came for her in the form of cancer of the throat, of the larynx. A punishment for having already, in one sense, forsaken her voice? You cannot help these thoughts. But I do not think she was cowed by superstition, any more than she was cowed by death.
Her voice! Her singing! Her ringing soprano. It is significant that in her lecture on the lure of fame she did not cite her own once budding musical career. But then she had abandoned it long ago: the point was made. And in any case, in her opinion, her singing voice was just a “gift,” she owed it no special duty; and the reason she always gave for her early dedication to it was simple economic necessity in the face of Uncle Ratty’s stinginess: “You have to use what you’ve got, darling — but only when you need to.” Was it her fault that some possessive music mistress had “discovered” her? Or that her ailing father, who had once thought of himself as a “gifted” surgeon, took some solace in his final days from his daughter’s accomplishment (the tableau is perfect: the humbled dissector of the brain; that ineffable virtuosity)?