If I had been given the option, I should have chosen to eliminate the first half of my life, and try again. No one could judge that but myself. Francis Getliffe, who had known me continuously for longer than anyone else, would have been – in the priest’s terms – too merciful. He had seen me do bad things, but he hadn’t seen those hidden things: and, even if he had, he would still have been too merciful.
For the second half of my life, Margaret had known me as no one else had. At times she had seen me at my worst. But there I should – compared with the remoter past – have given myself the benefit of the doubt. And I thought that she would too. She would have said – so I believed – that I had made an effort to reshape a life. It wasn’t easy or specially successful, she might have added to herself: for Margaret was not often taken in, either about herself or me, nor so willing to be satisfied as Francis. But she would have given me the benefit of the doubt, even if she had known me from the beginning. She had a higher sense of what life ought to be than I had: but also she could accept more when it went wrong.
Yet, as I lay in bed, it wasn’t the remorse – the tainted patches, the days, the years – that became mixed with this present moment. Instead, other moments, dredged up from the past, flickered into this one. Moments which might originally have been miserable or joyous – they were all content-giving by now. Lying awake as a child, hearing my father and some choral friends singing down below; walking with Sheila on a freezing winter night; sitting tired and ill by the sea, wondering how I could cope with the next term at the Bar; triumph after an examination result, drinking, chucking glasses into the fireplace.
I was vulnerable to memories, I wanted to be, some I was forcing back to mind. They were what remained, not the judgments or the regrets. Again I thought of Charles March in that same conversation two years before, saying, as I listened with eyes blacked out: ‘You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?’
An interesting life. Did anyone think – to himself – of his own life like that? That was the kind of summing-up that a biographer or historian might make: but it didn’t have any meaning to oneself, to one’s own life as lived. Zest, action growing out of flatness, boredom growing out of zest, achievement growing out of boredom, reverie – joy – anxiety – action. Could anyone sum that up for himself or make an integral as an onlooker might? True, I had once heard an old clergyman, in his rooms in college, tell me that he had had ‘a disappointing life’. He had said it angrily, in a whisky-thickened voice. It had been impressive, though not precisely moving, when he said it: on the spot, he was sincere, he meant what he said. But he had a reason for bursting out: he was explaining to himself (and incidentally to me) why he proposed not to do a good turn to another man. I did not believe that even he thought continuously of his life in terms like that. He enjoyed his bits of power in the college: he enjoyed moving from his sessions with the whisky bottle to his prophecies of catastrophe. Certainly a biographer – in the unlikely event of his ever having one – could have summarised his existence in his own phrase. It was objectively true. I doubted if it seemed so to himself for hours together. Even as he was speaking to me, his vitality was still active and hostile, he still was capable of dreaming that, by a miracle, his deserts might even now be given him.
Like most of us, he occasionally thought of his life as a progress or a history. Then he could dispose of it by his ferocious summing-up. That was on the cosmogonists’ model which had occurred to me before: from T = o, the big bang, the birth of Despard-Smith, to T = 79, the end of things, the death of Despard-Smith. A history. A disappointing history. But that wasn’t the way in which he, or the rest of us, thought most frequently to himself about his life. There was another cosmogonists’ model which, it seemed to me, was much closer to one’s own life as lived. Continuous creation. A slice disappeared, was replaced again. Something was lost, something new came in. All the time it looked to oneself as though there was not much change, nor deterioration, nor journey towards an end. Didn’t each of our lives, to ourselves as we lived them, seem, much more often than not, like a process of continuous creation?
So, when Austin Davidson in his last illness dismissed the themes which had preoccupied him for a lifetime (except for his game of gambling: ‘If I knew I was going to die tomorrow,’ he once said, ‘I should still want to hear the latest Stock Exchange quotations’), he found others which filled their place: and the days of solitariness, though they might be, and often were, bitter, had their own kind of creation. Even studying his ankles, watching in detail the changes in his physical state, was a fresh awakening of interest, petty if you like, but in its fashion a revival. That was as true for him as it was for my mother, also talking of her ankles in her last illness. Yes, that was a singular outburst of the process of continuous creation. Themes of a lifetime wore themselves out: but we weren’t left empty, the resolution wasn’t as tidy as that, somehow the psychic heart went on pumping, giving one a new or transformed lease of existence – perhaps restricted, but more concentrated because of that.
Before the operational experience and in the bedroom since, I had been discovering this for myself. In fact, it was something each of us had to discover for himself: you couldn’t reach it by empathy, it was too unfamiliar, and perhaps too disconcerting, for that. Not long ago, in full health, I dismissed the third and slightest of the themes – different from Davidson’s – which had preoccupied me, the concern, partly voyeuristic, partly conscientious, for political things. That dismissal was final, I didn’t doubt it: but now I could imagine, not playing the chess game of politics in any shape or form, but – if a cause or even a whim impelled me – raising my voice with a freedom which I hadn’t known before.
Something similar was true of the second theme, which was the kinds of love. Sexual love, parental love (so different that we confused ourselves by giving them the same name), they had never let me go: and often my public behaviour had seemed to me like the performance of a stranger. A pretty good performance, since on the level of action I had some of my temperament under control. Well, those kinds of love – I thought of the last talks with Margaret and my son – were creating within themselves something new, in part unforeseeable by me. Not in marriage, perhaps defying fate we should both think that: but certainly in my relation with my son. I hadn’t any foreknowledge of what we should be saying to each other in ten years’ time, if I lived so long. That wasn’t distressing, but curiously exciting, the more so since that date of 28 November. It was as though I were quite young again, having to learn, with the sense, on the whole a pleasurable sense, of surprise ahead, what a human relation was like.
Third and last, myself alone. My own solitude, different from Austin Davidson or anyone else’s. In so much we are all alike: but in one’s solitude one is unique. I had been confronted by mine, since the operation, more than in all my life before. In a fashion that had astonished me. And given me a sense of change, and also a kind of perplexed delight, for which I had been totally unprepared. Somehow that was a delight too, as though I had suddenly seen a horizon wide open in front of my eyes.
A clock was striking somewhere outside the hospital. I didn’t count the strokes, but there might have been twelve. I was sleepy by now, and turned onto my side. As often immediately before sleep, faces came, as if from a vague distance, into the field of vision under the closed lids: one came very clear and actual, nearly a dream, not yet a dream. It was a face which hadn’t any waking significance for me, the matey comedian’s face of a barrister acquaintance, Ted Benskin.