‘You see God’s own fool.’
I felt certain that he had prepared that opening, determined to get it out.
‘Never mind.’
‘If one’s got to the point’ – he was speaking very slowly, with pauses for breath and also to hold his train of thought – ‘of doing oneself in – the least one can do – is to make a go of it.’
‘Lots of people don’t make a go of it, you know.’ To my own astonishment, at least in retrospect, for it was quite spontaneous, I found myself teasing him: dropping into a kind of irony, as he did so often, putting himself at a distance from the present moment. The visible side of Davidson’s face showed something like the vestige of a grin, as I reminded him of German officers during the war. Beck took two shots at himself, and then had to get someone to finish him off. Poor old Stülpnagel had blinded himself, but without the desired result. ‘You would expect them to be better at it than you, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t.’
‘Too much fuss. Not enough to show for it.’
He was drowsy, but he did not seem miserable. To an extent, he had always liked an audience. And also, was there even now a stirring of, yes, relief? Had he wanted to persist – it didn’t matter how much he denied it?
‘Tell them. No more visitors today. Margaret can come tomorrow. If she wants.’
‘Of course she will.’ Margaret was his favourite daughter; but he had never appeared to realise that his detachment could cause her pain.
‘She’s prudish about suicide.’ His voice became louder and much more clear. ‘I simply can’t understand her.’
After a moment:
‘Extraordinary thing to be prudish about.’
Then he began to ramble, or the words thickened so that it was hard to follow him. Sources of supply. That might mean the way he got hold of his drugs. Some people wouldn’t act as sources of supply. Prudish. Glad to say, others weren’t like Margaret–
It might have been strange to hear him, even in confusion, engaged in a kind of argument, scoring a dialectical triumph over Margaret. But it didn’t seem so. I was easier with him than she was: easier with him than with my own father, at least on the plane where Davidson and I were able to talk. Not that Davidson managed to be any cooler than my father. In fact, in his simple fashion, without trying, he had been as self-sufficient and as stoical as Davidson would have liked to be.
There had been nothing histrionic about my father’s death, which had happened a few months before. None of us had been present. He was in his late eighties, but he hadn’t thought to inform us that he was failing. On the last evening, in his own small room, he had asked his lodger, who was almost a stranger, to sit with him. ‘I think I am going to die tonight,’ so the lodger had reported him saying. He was right. It wasn’t given to Austin Davidson to die as quietly as that.
Even in stupor Davidson kept making gallant attempts to carry on the argument. Then I thought he had fallen asleep.
Out of semi-consciousness he made another effort.
‘I’m always glad to see you, Eliot.’
It sounded like a regression to the time when he first met me, before I married Margaret, when he was going about in his vigorous offhand prime. But, as I went away, I wondered if it hadn’t been a further regression, back to the pride, arrogance and brightness of his youth, when he and his friends felt themselves the lucky of this world, but, with manners different from ours, did not think of calling each other by their Christian names.
3: A Theme Restated
THE next time I saw him was on the Wednesday, since Margaret and I decided to share the visits, each going on alternate days. It was a tauntingly mellow September afternoon, like those on which one looked out of classroom windows at the start of a new school year.
Half-sitting in his bed, pillows propping him (that was to be his standard condition, to reduce the strain on his heart), Austin Davidson had been spruced up, though underneath the neat diagonal bandage across his eye there loomed another deep purple bruise which on Monday had been obscured. His hair, thick and silver grey, had been trimmed, the quiff respectfully preserved. Someone had shaved him, and he smelt fresh. He was wide awake, greeting me with a monocular, sharp, almost impatient gaze.
‘I should like some intelligent conversation,’ he said.
To understand that, one needed to have learned his private language. Since he first became ill, he seemed to have lost interest in, or at least be unwilling to talk about, the connoisseurship which had been the passion of his life. He wouldn’t read his own art criticism or anyone else’s. He chose not to look at pictures, not even his own collection, as though, now the physical springs of his existence had failed him, so his senses, including the sense that meant most to him, were no use any more.
Instead, he fell back on his last resource, which was something like a game. But it was a peculiar sort of game, to some of his acquaintances unsuitable, or even fatuous, for a ‘pure soul’ like Davidson. For it consisted of taking an obsessive day-by-day interest in the Stock Exchange. In fact, it was an interest that had given him pleasure all his life. Like all his circle, he had heard Keynes, with his usual impregnable confidence, telling them that, given half-an-hour’s concentrated attention to the market each morning, no man of modest intelligence could avoid making money. Unlike others of his circle, Davidson believed what he was told. Certainly he was a pure soul, but he enjoyed using his wits, and playing any kind of mental game. This also turned out to be a singularly lucrative one. He had been left a few thousand pounds before the First World War. No one knew how much he was worth in his old age; on that he was reticent, quite uncharacteristically so, as about nothing else in his life. He had made over sizeable blocks of investments to his daughters, but he had never given me the most oblique indication of how much he kept for himself.
So ‘intelligent conversation’ meant, in that bedroom at the clinic, an exchange about the day’s quotations. He became almost high-spirited, no, something more like playful. It was a reminder of his best years, when he seemed so much less burdened than the rest of us.
Listening to him, I had to discipline myself to take my part. In any circumstances, let alone these, I didn’t serve as an adequate foil. I could act as a kind of secretary, telephoning his stockbroker from the bedroom, so that Davidson could overhear. He wasn’t satisfied with academic discussions: that would have been like playing bridge for counters. But I discovered that his gambles were modest, not more than £500 at a time.
Apart from my secretarial duties, I wasn’t a good partner. I didn’t know enough. I assumed that, until he died, I should have to try to memorise the financial papers more devotedly than I had ever thought of doing.
Though he spun it out, and I followed as well as I could, that day’s effort dwindled away. Pauses. Then a long silence. His eye had ceased to look at me, as though he were turning inward.
After the silence, his voice came back: ‘I shan’t get out of here. Of course.’
He wasn’t asking for false hope. He made it impossible to give.
I asked: ‘Are you sure?’
‘Of course.’
Another pause.
‘They won’t let me. People always interfere with you.’ He was speaking without inflection or expression.
‘The one thing they can’t interfere with is your death. Not in the long run. You have to die on your own. That’s all there is to it, you know.’