That was election autumn, both in America and England. Ince’s wife thought that we were not sufficiently knowledgeable about the merits of Senator Goldwater. He mightn’t have everything, but at least he wasn’t soft on Communism. As for our general election, if the Conservatives didn’t come back, there was a prospect of ‘confiscatory taxation’, a subject on which Lester Ince spoke with poignant feeling.
Once or twice we had a serious argument. Then I grew bored and said that we had better regard some topics as forbidden. Lester Ince was sad; he believed what he said, he believed that, if they listened, people of goodwill would have to agree with him. However, he was not only strong on hostly etiquette, he was good-natured; if the results of his political thinking put us out, then we ought to be excused from hearing them. ‘In that case, Lew,’ he said, with a cheerful full-eyed glint from his older incarnation, ‘you come to my study before you change, and we’ll have a couple of snifters and you can talk about the dear old place.’
He meant the college, for which, though it had treated him well, he still felt a singular dislike. In actual truth, he had altered much less than others thought, less even than he thought himself. Protest? Others had been sitting in the places he wanted. Now he had settled his ample backside in just those places, and it was for others to protest. When young men seemed to be rebelling against social manners, I used to think, it meant that they would, in the end, not rebel against anything else.
In the train, Margaret and I agreed that we each had a soft spot for him. Anyway, it wasn’t every day that one saw an old acquaintance living like a millionaire. As the taxi took us home from Waterloo, we were thinking of persons, acquaintances of his roughneck years, who might profitably be presented with the spectacle of the new-style Basset. The game was still diverting us as we entered the flat.
Beside the telephone, immediately inside the hall, there stood a message on the telephone pad. It read, with the neutrality and unsurprisingness of words on paper:
Mr Davidson (Margaret’s father) is seriously ill. Sir Lewis is asked for specially, by himself. Before he goes to the clinic, please call at 22 Addison Road.
As with other announcements that had come without warning, this seemed like something one had known for a long time.
2: God’s Own Fool
IN Addison Road, Margaret’s sister was staying with some friends. As she kissed me, her expression was grave with the authority of bad news. Silently she led me through the house, down a few steps, into a paved garden. It was not yet half past eleven – I had not been inside my flat for more than minutes – and the sky was pearly with the morning haze. She said: ‘I’m glad you came.’
For a long time, we had not been easy with each other. She had been stern against Margaret’s broken marriage, and put most of the blame on to me. All that was nearly twenty years before, but Helen, who was benign and tender, was also unforgiving: or perhaps, like some who live on the outside uneventful lives, she made dramas which the rest of us wanted to coarsen ourselves against. She was in her early fifties, five years older than her sister: she had had no children, and her face not only kept its youth, like all the others in her family, but did so to a preternatural extent. It was like seeing a girl or very young woman – with, round her eyes, as though traced in wax, the lines of middle age. She dressed very smartly, which that morning, as often, seemed somehow both pathetic and putting-off: but then it didn’t take much to make me more uneasy with her, perhaps because, when I had been to blame, I hadn’t liked being judged.
She was looking at me with eyes, like Margaret’s, acute and beautiful. She hadn’t spoken again: then suddenly, as it were brusquely, said: ‘Father tried to kill himself last night.’
As soon as we read the message, Margaret – distressed that he didn’t want her – had tried to find an explanation: and so had I, on the way here. But, obtusely so it seemed later, neither of us had thought of that.
‘He asked me to tell you. He said it would save unnecessary preambles.’
That sounded like Austin Davidson first-hand. I hadn’t met many men as uncushioned or as naked to life. He despised the pretences that most of us found comforting. He despised them for himself, but also for others, quite regardless of what anyone who loved him might feel. That morning Helen said (she had lavished less care on him than had Margaret), almost in his own tone, ‘He’s never thought highly of other people’s opinion, you know.’
She told me how it had happened. As we all knew, he had been in despair about his illness. Until his sixties, he had lived a young man’s life: then he had a thrombosis, and he had been left with an existence that he wouldn’t come to terms with. A less clear-sighted man might have been more stoical. Austin Davidson, alone in Regent’s Park except for Margaret’s visits, had sunk into what they used to call accidie. A tunnel with no end. There had been remissions – but his heart had weakened more, he could scarcely walk, and at last, at seventy-six, he wouldn’t bear it. Somehow – Helen didn’t know how – he had accumulated a store of barbiturates. On the previous evening, Sunday, about the time that I was drinking pre-dinner ‘snifters’ with Lester Ince, he had sat alone in his house, writing notes to his daughters. Then he had swallowed his drugs, washed them down with one whisky, and stood himself another.
But he had done it wrong. He had taken too much. A few hours later, stupefied by the drug, he had staggered about, violently sick. While vomiting, he had fallen forward, gashing his forehead against the handle of the WC. Near by, he had been discovered at breakfast time, covered with blood but still alive. They had driven him to the –– clinic.
‘Fortunately,’ said Helen, ‘he seems to be surprisingly well. I don’t know whether I ought to say fortunately. He wouldn’t.’
She had destroyed the two notes unopened. He had been at least half-lucid when she talked to him in his hospital room. He had asked, several times, to see me, without Margaret. So Helen had been obliged to give the message.
‘I wish’, I said, ‘that he had asked for her. She minds a great deal.’
‘That’s why he’d rather have you, maybe,’ said Helen.
The midday roads were dense with cars, and it took forty minutes before the taxi reached the clinic. On the way, I had been wondering what I should find, or even more what I should manage, to say. I was fond of Austin Davidson, and I respected that bright, uncluttered mind. But it wasn’t the respect that one might feel for an eminent old man. It was an effort to think of him as my father-in-law. Except when the sheer impact of his illness weighed one down, he seemed much more like a younger friend.
It was the clinic in which, during the war, I had first met Margaret. I thought I remembered, I might be imagining it, the number of my room. At any rate, it was on the same ground floor, at the same side, as the one I was entering now.
In his high bed, flanked by flowers on the tables close by – the ceiling shimmered with subaqueous green reflected from the garden – Austin Davidson looked grotesque. His head, borne up by three pillows, was wrapped in a bandage which covered his right eye and most of his forehead: even at that, there was a bruise under the right cheekbone, and the corner of his mouth was swollen. More than anything, he gave the appearance of having just been patched up after a fight. Among the bandages, one sepia eye stared at me. I heard his voice, dulled but the words quite clear.