It wasn’t that night but later, when I recalled that I behaved in the same manner, ludicrously the same manner, once before. At the time that I was sending my letter of admission to the Bar and a cheque for two hundred pounds (to me, at nineteen, most of the money that I possessed). Then, just as today, the resolve was formed. Everyone I knew was advising me against, but nevertheless, as with Charles, my will was strong and I went through with the risk. But only after nights of hesitations, anxieties, withdrawals: only after a night when I had boasted of the gamble, talking to my friends rather in the vein of Hotspur having a few stiff words with reluctant troops. I explained how the letter – which committed me – had been sent off that day. Then, at midnight, after the celebration, I had returned to my bed-sitting-room and found the letter waiting there, the sight of it reproaching me, telling me there was still time to back out.
Then I had been nineteen. Now I was sixty. That had been, in Charles’ phrase, the beginning of one of my lines (the first letter went off at last, and I duly read for the Bar). Tonight was the end of that line. Delaying a little less than I had done at nineteen, a few hours less, I went out into the empty moonlit street to post the letter.
15: Waking Up to Well-being
MARGARET, glad about the outcome, more glad because the quarrel had dissolved, believed with Francis Getliffe that I should be cross with myself. I might have believed that also: certainly I was incredulous, as though I were observing astonishing reactions in some Amazonian Indian when I found how equable I was. True, I had my jags of resentment. As I opened the paper one morning and saw the job had been filled – it had gone to Lord Luke of Salcombe, which added a touch of irony – I pointed to the announcement and said to Margaret: ‘Now look what you’ve done.’ On the moment, I was blaming her, it was the kind of gibe which wasn’t all a gibe: but I shouldn’t have made it if I hadn’t been serene underneath.
It would be a singular apotheosis for Walter Luke, making speeches from the dispatch box in the Lords. Only a few years before he had been denouncing politicians and administrators with fervent impartiality. Stuffed shirts! Those blasted uncles! Out of inquisitiveness and perhaps fellow feeling, I went along to hear his first ministerial speech. Walter’s cubical head looming over the box: the rich West-Country intonation that he had never lost. As for the speech itself, it was competent, neither good nor bad. His civil servants had put in all the safeguards and qualifications which used to evoke his considerable powers of abuse. Walter uttered them now with every appearance of solidarity, as though they were great truths. But, then, so should I have had to utter them.
That afternoon, walking past Palace Yard in one of the first autumn fogs, I was again mystified that I should be so serene. Work was going well, but there I wasn’t at the mercy of my moods; it would have gone as well if I had been cursing myself. Margaret and I were entertaining more than we usually did, catching up with friends and acquaintances, the Marches, the Roses, the Getliffes, Muriel, Vicky Shaw and her father. That was agreeable: but it wasn’t the origin of my present state.
The secret lay – though I should never have predicted it – in the sheer fact of saying no, in what Charles called my abdication. Certainly I had seen others, among them my brother Martin, gain a gratification out of giving up ‘the world’ – in Martin’s case, when he was very much in it and with the prizes dangling in front of him; he had become content, or even euphoric, out of great expectations denied. But that wasn’t so with me. This job of Walter Luke’s – orating in the fog-touched chamber – hadn’t been part of my own expectations. No, the satisfaction came, if I understood it at all, from one’s own will. In most of the events of a lifetime, the will didn’t play a part. We were tossed about in the stream, corks bobbing manfully, shouting confidently that they could go upstream if they felt inclined. Somehow, though, the corks, explaining that it would be foolish to go upstream, went on being carried the opposite way.
Very rarely one was able to exercise one’s will. Even then it might be an illusion, but it was an illusion that brought something like joy. It could happen when one was taking a risk or remaking a life. Sometimes I speculated whether people at the point of suicide felt this kind of triumph of the will. I should have liked to think that Sheila went out like that. What did Austin Davidson feel as he swallowed his pills and took what he believed to be his last drink?
Earlier, it would have been easy to ask him. No one would have been less embarrassed than Davidson, and he would have given an account of classical lucidity. During one of my visits that November, I began telling him of my experience, in the hope that I might lead on to his own. But I hadn’t realised, nor had Margaret, seeing him so often, how much further away he had slipped. When I told him that I had been offered the job, he said, eyes vacantly staring: ‘Did they give you a book?’
I wanted to leave it, but he insisted. I said, no, since I had refused, I didn’t get anything: and then, slowly, sickeningly slowly to one who had been so clever, I tried to explain. Government. Ministers. Politics.
He strained to comprehend, cheeks flushed. He managed to say: ‘No serious man has anything to do with politics.’
With relief at getting a little communication, I said that was a good apostolic pre-1914 sentiment. Then I hurried on, abandoning any attempt to try a new question. I went back to the familiar conversational forms. Those he could still understand, and, for some of the time (it was the longest of hours), take part in.
As soon as I returned home, I asked Margaret – what had been her impression of him earlier that week? Much as he usually was, she replied: not taking much interest, but he hadn’t done for months. I told her that I thought I saw – I might be imagining it – a difference. If I’d seen him for the first time that afternoon, I shouldn’t have given him long to go.
‘Of course it may just be a bad day,’ I said. ‘But I think you ought to be prepared.’
She nodded. ‘Yes, I am.’
Prepared, perhaps, both for loss and for relief. The strain of the long illness told on her more than on me, because it was she who loved him. If you loved – instead of being fond of – someone taking a long time to die, there were times when you wanted the release. What had been my mother’s phrase for it? A happy release. One of those hypocritical labels which half-revealed a truth. Then, when the release came, you felt the loss more, because it was mixed with guilt. As with so many consequences of love, what you lost on the swings you lost also on the roundabouts.
Meanwhile, I believed that I knew a way to give him pleasure. I had tried it once before – any more often, and he would have been suspicious. He was physically capable of reading, so the doctors said, and yet he refused even to glance at a newspaper. Still, one had to allow for remote chances. It meant a certain amount of contrivance, and a visit to my stockbroker.
Late the following week – I had seen him in the interval – I entered the familiar, the too familiar, hospital room, catching the smell of chrysanthemums and chemicals, with underneath the last echo of cigarette smoke and faeces. From the bed Davidson muttered, but it was not until I was facing him that he looked at me. Instead of sitting at the end of the bed, I carried a chair round to his left-hand side. It was becoming forlorn to expect that he would begin a conversation. I had to start straight off: ‘You’ve not lost your touch, you know.’
‘What are you talking about?’ he said in a dull tone.