So innocently I asked Francis if he would care to read his obituary. ‘Certainly not,’ Francis had said, outraged. Or perhaps hag-ridden, like a Russian seeing one trying to shake his hand across the threshold, or my mother turning up the ace of spades.
When, as Francis was taking care to avoid any subject which might disquiet me, I recalled that incident, it occurred to me that someone must have written my own obituary. I expected to feel a chill, but none came. It was curious to be waiting for that kind of dread, and then be untouched.
After I had been brusque, cutting out the delicateness, Francis became easier. He said: ‘This mustn’t happen again, you know.’
‘It’s bound to happen again once, isn’t it?’
‘Not like that. I was horrified when Margaret told me. I must say, she was very good.’
She had had the worst of it, Francis was saying. Almost as though I had done it on purpose, it crossed my mind. No, that was quite unfair. Francis, whom acquaintances thought buttoned up and bleak, was speaking with emotion. He had been horrified. I was too careless. Did I give a thought to how much I should be missed?
Though I was to most appearances more spontaneous than Francis I shouldn’t, if our positions were reversed, have told him so simply how much I’d miss him.
I nearly gave another grim answer such as even that seemed a somewhat secondary consideration, but it would have been denying affection. Of the people we had grown up with, we had scarcely, except ourselves, any intimates left. Some had died: others the chances of life had driven away, just as Francis had been parted from his brother-in-law Charles March.
And I, who felt the old affinity with Charles March each time we met, nevertheless had ceased to be close to him, simply because there was no routine of living to bring us together. While Francis and I, during much of our lives, had seen each other every day at meetings. It sounded mechanical, but as you grew older that kind of habit and alliance was a part of intimacy without which it peacefully declined.
Francis’ tone altered, he began to sound at his most practical. He proposed to talk to some of his medical friends in the Royal. This never ought to have happened, he said. It was no use passing it off as a fluke or an accident. There must be a cause. What sort of anaesthetic had they used? This all had to be cleared up in case I was forced some day into another operation. There had to be a bit of decent scientific thinking, he said, with impatience as well as clarity – just as he used to speak, cutting through cotton wool, at committee tables during the war.
That could be coped with. And also, he went on, half-sternly, half-persuasively, it was time I took myself in hand. I had worked hard all my life: it was time I made more of my leisure. ‘I’m damned well going to enjoy my sixties, and so ought you,’ he said. He was leading up to a project that he had mentioned before. The house in Cambridge, full of children, happy-go-lucky, called by young Charles and his friends the Getliffe steading, he couldn’t bear to leave, he would stay there in term-time always. But he and Katherine were hankering after another house, more likely to get some sun in winter, maybe somewhere like Provence. Why shouldn’t we find a place together? They would occupy it perhaps four months a year, and Margaret and I in spring and autumn?
We couldn’t travel far while Margaret’s father was alive, I replied, as I had done previously. No, but that couldn’t be forever. Francis was set on the plan, more set than when he first introduced it. It would be good for his married children and their families. It would be good for ours – Charles, Francis said, would be mysteriously asking to have the house to himself and leaving us to guess whom he was bringing there.
He was so active, so determined to get me into the sunshine, that I was almost persuaded. It might be pleasant as we all became old. But I held on enough not to make the final promise. I wasn’t as hospitable as Francis, nor anything like as fond of movement. Anyway, now the plan had crystallised, I didn’t doubt that he would carry it through, whether I joined in or not. It had started as a scheme largely for my sake: but also Francis, decisive and executive as ever, was carving out a pattern for his old age.
21: Silence of a Son
BEFORE evening, the room was smelling of flowers and whisky. The flowers were due, in the main, to Azik Schiff, who hadn’t come to visit me himself but whose response to physical ailments was to provide a lavish display of horticulture. More flowers than they’d ever seen sent, said the nurses, and my credit rose in consequence. Though I could have done without the hyacinths which, since my nose was sensitive to begin with and had been made more so by blindness, gave me a headache, the only malaise of the day.
As for the whisky, that had been drunk before lunch by Hector Rose and his wife and after tea by Margaret and a visitor who hadn’t been invited, my nephew Pat. When Margaret was sitting beside my chair and she was reading me the morning’s letters, there were footsteps, male footsteps, that I didn’t recognise. But I did recognise a stiffening in Margaret’s voice as she said good afternoon.
‘Hallo, Aunt Meg. Hallo, Uncle Lew. Good to see you up. That’s better, isn’t it, that really is better.’
It was a situation in which, given enough nerve, he was bound to win. Whatever he didn’t have, he had enough nerve. Though he might have been slandering Margaret and her children, she couldn’t raise a quarrel in a hospital bedroom. And he was reckoning that I was quite incapacitated. There he might have been wrong: but as usual in Pat’s presence, I didn’t want to say what a juster man might have said. Margaret stayed silent: and I was reduced to asking Pat how he had heard about me.
‘Well-known invalid, of course.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ve kept it very quiet. On purpose.’
‘Not quiet enough, Uncle Lew.’ Pat’s voice was ebullient and full of cheek.
Margaret had still said nothing, but I listened to the splash of liquid. Presumably he was helping himself to a drink. He said, irrepressible, that he couldn’t reveal his sources – and then gave an account, almost completely accurate, of what had happened since I entered the hospital. Massage of the heart. Margaret being sent for.
‘It must have been terrible for you, Aunt Meg.’
Margaret had to reply.
‘I shouldn’t like to go through it again,’ she said. The curious thing was, his sympathy was genuine.
‘Terrible,’ he said again. Then he couldn’t resist showing that he knew the name of the heart specialist, and even how he had telephoned Margaret on the first night.
That was something I hadn’t been told myself. As before with Pat, just as in the past with Gilbert Cooke, I felt uncomfortably hemmed in, as though I was being watched by a flashy but fairly successful private detective. Actually, I realised later that there was no mystery about Pat’s source of information. There was only one person whom it could have come from. My brother Martin had been asking Margaret for news several times a day. And Martin, who was as discreet as Hector Rose in his least forthcoming moments, who had, when working on the atomic bomb, never let slip a secret even to his wife, on this occasion, as on others, could, and must, have told everything to his son.