Other unfamiliar rooms. The hotel bedrooms of a lifetime. Why did I feel, not only serene, but triumphant? The half memories, the flashes, seemed like a conquest. Alone. Not alone. Dense curtained darkness: the sound of breathing from the other bed. Smell of beeswax, pot-pourri, wood smoke. That might have been Palermo. Sound of a sentry’s stamp outside. Travelling as an official. Then unofficial, utter quiet, lights across the canal.
Switch of association. Godfrey Ailwyn had talked of the threshold of death. He hadn’t been inhibited, he hadn’t worried about delicacy or restraint, and that had pleased me. He had set out to argue that I hadn’t been dead. Curious to argue whether, at a point of time, one was or was not dead. That hadn’t seemed ominous, became the opposite of ominous now. As, after the recall of nights abroad, I thought (associations, daydreams, drifting in and out) of some of Godfrey’s words, I didn’t feel less serene but more so. I hadn’t minded him cross-questioning me like a coroner: no, I welcomed it. It was only five nights since I had lain in this room, frozen with dread. Frightened to think back a few hours, to the time they were standing round me and Mansel got to work.
Now – with a change which I hadn’t recognised as it was happening, but which had come to feel delectable and complete – I wasn’t frightened to think back, there was nothing which gave me a greater sense of calm or of something more liberating than calm. 28 November 1965. That morning, round about half past eleven, I might have died. I liked telling myself that. Nothing had ever been so steadying, not at all bizarre or nerve-racking, just steadying: nothing had set me so free.
I did not have to reason this out to myself, certainly not on that contented night, or make it any subtler than it was. It was just a fact of life, an unpredicted but remarkably satisfying fact, one of the best. When, however, I tried to explain it to others (which I didn’t want to for a long time afterwards) I didn’t even satisfy myself. It all sounded either too mysteriously lumbering or else altogether too casual. One difficulty was that, to me as the sole recipient, the emotional tone of the whole thing was very light. I tried to spell it out – it made one’s concerns, even those which before the relevant morning would have weighed one down, appear not so much silly as non-existent.
After all, one might not have had them any more.
Just as in the dread which I had experienced only once, in the hours of 28/29 November, everything disappeared, longings, hopes, fears, ego, everything but the dread itself: so they disappeared in this anti-dread.
Most of us looked upon our lives – not continuously but now and then – as a kind of journey, progress or history. A history, as the cosmogonists might say, from Time T = 0 at birth to T1 = the final date, which it wasn’t given us to know in advance. (Who, at any age, younger than Charles, older than me, would dare to look in the mirror of his future?)
Somehow that progress, journey, history had for me become disconnected or dismissed. As though what fashionable persons were beginning to call the diachronic existence had lost its grip on me.
Yet what I really felt was as simple as a joy. As though I had smelt the lilac, and time travelled back to the age of eleven, reading under the tree at home: as though troubles past or to come had been dissolved, and become one with the moment in which I was watching the cars’ lights move across the bedroom wall.
So, when the priest told me to show myself as much mercy as we should all need in the end, that affected me, but not as it might have done six days before. They were kind words: they were good words: once, though I didn’t share his theology, they would have made me heavy-spirited as I thought about my past. But now I was freer from myself. Yes, I could still think with displeasure about what I had done, and wish that whole episodes or stretches of years might be wiped away. But I wished that, and still felt a kind of joy, with no angst there.
Judgment? Well, thinking with displeasure on what I had done was a kind of judgment. It wasn’t either merciful or the reverse. I didn’t feel obliged to reckon up an account, as though one ought to tick off the plus and minus scores. Once I had told a friend (perhaps the least moral friend I had ever had) that, if I had never lived, nobody would have been a penny the worse. That was altogether too cut and dried for me now. Too historical, in fact: and actually, in terms of history, microscopic history, it was not even true. But on the other hand, when I was recovering from the first operation, and Charles March had said that it was impossible to regret one’s own experience, I had on the moment been doubtful, and later to myself (in this same bedroom) utterly denied it. I did regret, sometimes passionately, sometimes with remorse, but more often with impatience, a good deal of my youth. Right up to the time – I was thirty-four – when Sheila killed herself.
I didn’t take more of the blame than I had to. It wouldn’t have been true, it would have been over dramatic and, curiously enough, over-vain, to imagine that I could have altered all or many of my actions. I had struggled too hard, and with too much self-concentration: but it would have been impossible not to struggle hard. Nevertheless, in a sense, in a sense which was real although one could explicate it half away, I had been a bad son, a bad friend, a bad husband. To my mother I could, without being a different person, have given more. Yes, I had been very young: but I was already old enough to distrust one’s own withdrawals, and to know that one’s own needs – including self-protection and the assertion of one’s loneliness – could be cruel. And, what took more recognition, could be disciplined.
I had been a bad friend to George Passant – not in later years, when there was nothing to be done except be there, when all he wanted was to spend a night or two in what he thought of as a normal world – not then, but almost as soon as I ceased to be an intimate and left the town for London. It was then that I had blinkered myself. I ought to have known how the great dreams were being acted out, how all the hopes of the son of the morning were driving him where such hopes had driven other leaders before him. I ought to have used my own realism to break up the group or his inner paradise. Perhaps no one could have done that, for George was a powerful character and had, of course, the additional power of his own desires. But I was tougher-minded than he was, and there was a chance, perhaps one chance in ten, that I could have shifted him.
As for being a bad husband to Sheila, it was simply that I shouldn’t have been her husband at all. There I had committed the opposite wrong to what I had done (or rather not done) to George Passant. Instead of absenting myself as from him – or earlier from my mother, I had summoned up every particle of intensity, energy and will. She, lost and splintered as she was, had to take me in the end. After that, I couldn’t find a way, there was no way, to make up for it. Now I had seen in my son Charles the same capacity for intense focusing of the whole self, regardless of anyone and anything, regardless in his case of his normal sense or detached kindness. Regardless in mine of the tenderness that I felt for Sheila, independent of love, and lasting longer.
That I couldn’t forget. When Austin Davidson played with speculations about the after-life, I had a reason, stronger than all others, for wishing that I could, even in the most ghostly fashion, believe in it: a reason so mawkish and sentimental that I couldn’t admit it, and yet so demanding that once, when Davidson and young Charles were bantering away, I couldn’t listen. Instead, I wanted to hear – it was as mawkish as that – a voice from the shades saying (clipped and gnomic as so much that Sheila had said in life): ‘Never mind. It’s all right. You should know, it’s all right.’