Porson turned back with his glass, winked again, this time perhaps less involuntarily, and sat down in the other chair. He was wearing his Old Etonian tie, which he – unlike my former colleague Gilbert Cooke – used only on special occasions. The rest of his appearance was more dilapidated than his normal, and in that respect the standard was very high. Cuffs frayed, buttons off waistcoat, shoes dirty, hair straggling, face puffed out with broken veins. Yet, though he was now seventy-two or three, he did not look his age, as though the battered ruleless life had acted – as it had done also with George Passant, in both cases much to the disapproval of more proper persons – as a kind of preservative and given them an air, among the ruins of their physique, of something like happiness and youth.
Actually Porson had, ever since I first knew him, moved from one catastrophe to another, with a seemingly inevitable and unrelieved decline such as didn’t happen to many men. To begin with, he was making a living at the Bar. That soon dropped away, owing to drink, his tendency to patronise everyone he met becoming more aggressive and overpowering the more he failed, and perhaps – for those were less tolerant days – to rumours about his sexual habits. Then he ran through his money and you could trace his progress as his address in London changed. The first I remembered was that of a modestly opulent flat off Portland Place. After that Pimlico, Fulham Road, Earls Court, Notting Hill Gate, stations of descent. At the present time, so far as I knew, he was living in a bed-sitting-room in Godfrey Ailwyn’s parish, and the priest and I both guessed he kept alive on national assistance. How he paid for his drink I didn’t understand, although it was a long time since I had seen him quite sober. As he grew older, his picking-up became more rampant, and he had spent one term in gaol for importuning. Ailwyn reported that there had been other narrow squeaks.
None of this, none of it at all, prevented him from looking to the future with the expectation of a child wondering what would turn up on his birthday. The last time I had met him, he had been saying, using exactly the same phrase as my mother might have used, very strange for one like Porson brought up in embassies, that there was still time for his ship to come home.
‘How did you get in?’
‘I’ve got one or two chums downstairs.’ He winked again, and put a finger to the side of his nose, rather like Azik Schiff parodying himself. Then, suddenly angry, he burst out: ‘Good chaps. Better than the crowd you waste your time with.’
‘I dare say.’ I was used to his temper. It was like handling a more-than-usually unpredictable bathroom geyser.
‘Good chums. I’ve always said, you can get anywhere if you’ve got good chums.’
Now he was swinging between the maudlin and the accusatory.
‘You can’t deny, I’ve always got anywhere I wanted, haven’t I?’
In a sense it was true. He had been seen in places where none of the rest of us could ever have had the entrée. Some people could explain it only by assuming a kind of homosexual trade union or information network. Ailwyn had once suggested that he had escaped worse trouble because of a contact in the local CID. Not that that had prevented Ronald Porson, when he found himself in more conventional circles, from denouncing ‘Jews and Pansies’ as the source of national degeneration. With those he trusted, though, he tended to concentrate on the racial element.
‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I?’ he accosted me, hands on knees. ‘Do you know why?’
After I had failed to reply, he said, accusatory again: ‘My boy, I’m here to give you a bit of advice.’
‘Are you?’
‘You haven’t always taken my advice. You might have done better for yourself if you had.’
‘It’s a bit late now,’ I began, but firmly he interrupted me. ‘It’ll be too late unless you listen to me for once. I’m going to give you a bit of advice. You’d better take it. You’re not to enter this hospital again.’
‘It’s a perfectly good hospital.’
‘It’s the best hospital in London,’ he shouted, getting angrier as he agreed with me. ‘But, damn your soul, it’s not the best for you.’
‘I’ve got no grumbles–’
‘I tell you, damn you, it’s not the best for you. I know.’
‘How can you know?’
‘It’s no use talking to people who only believe in what they can blasted well touch and see.’ For an instant he was raging about ESP. Then he said, calming himself down, with a look of patient condescension: ‘Well, let’s try something that you understand. I suppose you admit that you nearly passed out last Friday. As near as damn it. Or a bloody sight nearer. You admit that, don’t you?’
‘Of course I do.’
‘You haven’t got any option.’ He spoke indulgently, contemptuously. ‘And what would have been the use of your blasted reputation then?’
I wanted to stop listening, but his face came nearer, bullying, insistent. The left side was convulsed by a seismic twitch.
‘It’s no use making any bones about it. You know as well as I do. You did pass out last Friday. You’ve taken that in, haven’t you?’
I nodded.
‘You’re the luckiest man I know. You won’t have the same luck next time.’
Again I was trying to put him off, but he overbore me: ‘You mustn’t come into this hospital again, you understand?’
He added: ‘I know you mustn’t. I know.’
‘I’ll try not to.’
He stared full-eyed at me, triumphant. He was certain he had made an impression.
‘Of course, my boy, I’m thinking of you. You ought to think of some of the chaps here. In the hospital. What the hell do you fancy they were doing last Friday?’
He paused, and went on.
‘I’ll tell you. They were peeing their pants. They were afraid it would get into the papers. If I’d been in your place, the papers mightn’t have got hold of it. Somehow they know your name.’
(I thought later that that had been a minor mystery to Porson for thirty years. But at the time this was a reflection I hadn’t the nerve to make. He had frightened me. To begin with, it had been a frisson, the kind of shiver which my mother called ‘someone walking across her grave’. Now it was worse than that.)
‘It wouldn’t have been good for the place’, Porson said, ‘if you’d gone out feet first.’
‘Well, I didn’t.’
‘They weren’t to know that, were they? I’ll tell you something else. They didn’t breathe easy until a long time after you’d been brought back. They’ve told me that themselves. You were all settled down and comfortable and having a good night’s rest before they felt sure there wasn’t going to be a funeral after all.’
‘I hope they stood themselves a drink.’
‘I’ve done that, my boy. They know you’re an old friend.’
Later on, I had another reflection, that I had never discovered who ‘they’ were. Certainly males. Certainly not doctors. I guessed, but never knew for sure, that they must have been porters or medical orderlies. At the time, feeling the sweat prickling at my temples, I had just one concern, which was to get him out of the room.
‘Good,’ I said. ‘You go and stand them another one for me.’ I told him where to find my wallet, and soon he was duly pocketing a five-pound note. But even then, enjoying the conversation, he wasn’t eager to go. Pressed, I had to invent and whisper another pretext, of the kind that Ronald Porson couldn’t resist. A visitor was coming soon – no one knew, my wife didn’t know – I couldn’t tell even him the name, he’d understand. With a look, both confidential and jeering, of ultimate complicity, Porson weaved towards the door, saying at the threshold: