Part Two
Arrest of life, Last but one
17: Nothing
IN the dark, a hand was pressing on mine. A voice. The dark was close, closer than consciousness. What was that hand?
A voice. ‘Darling.’
The sound came from far away, then suddenly, like a face in a dream, dived on me. How much did I understand?
‘All’s well.’ It might have been a long time after. Perhaps the words were being repeated. Until – consciousness lapping in like a tide, coming in, sucking back, leaving a patch still aware – I spoke as though recognising Margaret’s voice.
‘Why are you here?’
‘I just dropped in.’
‘Is it evening?’
‘No, no. It isn’t teatime yet.’
That was her voice. That was all I knew.
Was there a memory, something else to hold on to?
‘Didn’t you say you’d come in the evening?’
‘Never mind. I thought I’d like to see you earlier.’ Utterly soothed, like a jealous man getting total reassurance or a drunk hearing a grievance argued away. That was her hand, pressing down on mine. I began to say that I was thirsty. Other voices. Coolness of glass against my lips. A sip. No taste.
‘You were going to give me lime juice.’ I held on to another memory.
‘I’m sorry,’ that must be a nurse, ‘it isn’t here.’
‘Why isn’t it here?’
Unsoothed again, a tongue of consciousness lapping further in. Darkness. Suspicion.
I was aware – not gradually, it happened in an instant – of pain, or heavy discomfort, in my left side, as though they had put a plaster there.
‘What’s happening?’ I said to Margaret. I could hear my voice like someone else’s, thick, alarmed, angry.
Voices in the room. Too many voices in the room. My right ankle was hurting, with my other foot I could feel a bandage on it. Margaret was saying ‘Everything’s all right,’ but other voices were sounding all round, and I cried out: ‘This isn’t my room.’
‘The operation’s over.’ That was Mansel, cool and light. ‘It’s gone perfectly well.’
‘Where am I?’
Mansel again. ‘We’re just going to take you back.’
Once more I was soothed: it seemed reasonable, like the logic of a dream. I didn’t notice motion – ramps, lifts, corridors didn’t exist; I must have returned to somewhere near the conscious threshold. It might have been one of those drunken nights when one steps out of a party and finds oneself, without surprise, in one’s own bed miles away.
I had been in a big room: I was back in one where the voices were close to me, which soothed me because, with what senses I had left, it was familiar: I didn’t ask, I knew I had slept there the night before.
I was awake enough, tranquil enough, to recognise that I was parched with thirst. I asked for a drink, finding it necessary to explain to Margaret (was she still on my right?) that I was intolerably dry. The feel of liquid on a furred clumsy tongue. Then the taste came through. This was lime juice. Delectable. As though I were tasting for the first time. All in order: lime juice present according to plan: reassurance: back where I ought to be.
Someone was lifting my left arm, cloth tightening against the muscle.
‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, reassurance destroyed at a touch, suspicion flaring up.
‘Only a little test.’ A nurse’s voice.
‘What are you testing for?’
Whispers near me. Was one of them Margaret’s?
Manseclass="underline" ‘I want to know your blood pressure. Standard form.’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘Routine.’
In the darkness, one suspicion soothed, faded out, left a nothingness, another suspicion filled it. Did they expect me to have a stroke? What were they doing? Ignorant suspicions, mind not coping, more like a qualm of the body, the helpless body.
‘Everything is all right,’ Margaret was saying quietly.
‘Everything is not all right.’
A patch of silence. They were leaving me alone. Neither Margaret nor Mansel was talking. For an instant, feeling safer, I asked for another drink.
Time was playing tricks, my attention had its lulls, it might have been minutes before a hand was pulling my jacket aside, something cold, glass, metal against the skin.
‘What are you doing now?’ I broke out again.
‘Another test, that’s all.’ Mansel’s voice didn’t alter.
‘I’ve got to know. I’m not going on like this.’
Fingers were fixing apparatus on my chest.
‘What’s gone wrong?’ Again, that didn’t sound like my own voice. ‘I’ve got to know what’s wrong.’
Clicks and whirrs from some machine. My hearing had become preternaturally acute and I could hear Mansel and Margaret whispering together.
‘Shall I tell him?’ Mansel was asking.
‘You’d better. He’s noticed everything–’
There was movement by the side of my bed, and Mansel, instead of Margaret, was speaking clearly into my ear.
‘There’s nothing to worry about now. But your heart stopped.’ The words were spaced out, distinct. They didn’t carry much meaning. I said dully ‘Oh.’
I gathered, whether Mansel told me then or not I was never sure, that it had happened in the middle of the operation.
I asked: ‘How long for?’
‘Between three and a half and three and three-quarter minutes.’ I thought later, not then, that when Mansel told one the truth, he told the truth.
‘We got it going again,’ Mansel’s voice was cheerful. ‘There’s a bit of a cut under your ribs. You’re fine now.’
He was at pains to assure me that the eye operation had been completed. It was time, he said, for him to let my wife talk to me.
Replacing Mansel’s voice was Margaret’s, steady and warm.
‘Now you know.’
I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ I added: ‘I bring you back no news from the other world.’
Margaret went on talking, making plans for a fortnight ahead (‘You’ll be out of here by then, you understand, don’t you?’), saying there would be plenty of time to argue about theology. She sounded calm, ready to laugh: she was concealing from me that she was in a state of shock.
Just as my remark might have concealed my state from her. In fact, it had been quite automatic. It could have seemed – perhaps it did to Margaret – as carefully debonair, as much prepared for, as her father’s greeting to me after his messed-up attempt at suicide. You see God’s own fool. I might have been imitating him. Yet I hadn’t enough control for that. Anything I said slipped out at random, as though Margaret had put sixpence in a juke box and we both had to listen with surprise to what came out.
Later, when I thought about it in something like detachment, it occurred to me how histrionic we all could be. Perhaps we had to be far enough gone. Then, though it might be right outside our ordinary style, we put on an act. For Austin Davidson, who had always enjoyed his own refined brand of histrionics, it came natural to rehearse, to bring off his opening speech. I was about as much unlike Davidson as a man could reasonably be: but I too, though as involuntarily as a ventriloquist’s dummy, had put on an act. Probably we should all have been capable of making gallows jokes, in the strictest sense: we should all, if we were about to be executed in public, have managed to make a show of it. It might have been different if one was being killed in a cellar, with no audience there to watch.