He added: ‘I told Margaret that.’
Yes, he had told her. But he wasn’t aware of – and wouldn’t have been concerned with – her response, to which I had listened as we lay awake in the middle of the night. It wasn’t the cool, such as Davidson, who felt most passionately about death. Margaret, whose appetite for living was so strong, had to pay a corresponding price. She wouldn’t have talked, as more protected people might, of any of those figures which, by pretending to face the truth, in fact make it easier to bear. The swallow coming out of darkness into the lighted hall, and then out into the darkness again. That was too pretty for her. So were all the phrases about silence and the dark. Whatever they tried to say, was too near to say like that.
She struggled against it, even while she was searching for the C major of this life. The C major? In sexual love? In the love of children? She knew, as a cool and innocent man like Davidson never could have done, that you could hear the sound and still not have dismissed the final intimation. And, by a curious irony, having a father like Davidson had made that intimation sharper: made it sharper now.
That was why, lying awake in the night repeating to me his acerb remarks about his fiasco, she wasn’t reconciled. She was torn with tenderness, painful tenderness, mixed up with what was nothing else but anger. It was a combination which she sometimes showed towards her own children, when they might be doing themselves harm. Now she couldn’t prevent it breaking out, after her father tried to commit suicide, and then talked to her as though it had been an interesting event.
In the dark, she kept asking what she could do for him, knowing that there was nothing. At moments she was furious. With all the grip of her imagination, she was re-enacting and rewitnessing the scene of Sunday evening. The capsules marshalled on Davidson’s desk (he was a pernicketily tidy man): the swallows of whisky: the last drink, as though it was a modest celebration or perhaps one for the road. It might have been a harmless domestic spectacle. Capsules such as we saw every day. An old man taking a drink. But, just as in the trial I had had to attend earlier that year, objects could lose their innocence. For Margaret the capsules and the whisky glass weren’t neutral bits of matter any more.
They were reminders, they were more than that, they were emblems. Emblems of what? Perhaps, I thought, as I tried to soothe her, of what the non-religious never understand in the religious. Margaret, though she didn’t believe, was by temperament religious. Which meant, not as a paradox but as a condition, that she clung – more strongly than her father could have conceived possible – to the senses’ life, the species’ life. So, when that was thrown away or disregarded, she felt horror: it might be superstitious, she couldn’t justify it, but that was what those emblems stood for.
Her father, however, settled her in his own mind by saying again, as though that were the perfect formulation, that she was prudish about suicide. After a time during which neither he nor I spoke, and he was looking inward, he said, quite brightly: ‘Most of you are prudish about death. You’re prudish about death.’
He meant Margaret’s friends and mine, the people whom, before his illness, he used to meet at our house. They were a different generation from his, most of them younger than I was (within a month I should be fifty-nine).
‘You’re much more prudish than we were on that fairly relevant subject. Of course you’re much less prudish about sex. It’s a curious thought, but I suspect that when people give up being prudish about sex they become remarkably so about everything else.’ (I had heard this before: in his lively days, he used to say that our friends dared not talk about money, ambition, aspiration, or even ordinary emotion.) ‘Certainly about death. You people try to pretend it doesn’t exist. I’ve never been able to bear the nineteenth century’ – the old Bloomsbury hatred darted punctually out – ‘but at least they weren’t afraid to talk about death.’
‘It’s the only thing in one’s whole life that is a hundred per cent certain.’
‘It’s the only thing one is bound to do by oneself.’
Later, after he had died – which didn’t happen for over a year – I was not sure whether he had really produced those two sayings that afternoon. The difficulty was, I had so many conversations with him in the clinic bedroom; they were repetitive by their nature, and because Davidson was such a concentrated man. Talk about the Stock Exchange: then his thoughts about dying and death. That was the pattern which did not vary for weeks to come, and so the days might have become conflated in my memory. It often seemed to me that the other themes of his life had been dismissed by now, and there was only one, the last one, which he wanted to restate. You have to die on your own. And yet, he had never said that. I was inventing words for him. Perhaps I was inventing a theme that was, not his, but mine.
I hadn’t felt intimations of my death as deeply as Margaret. But, like all of us, intermittently since I was a young man, as often as a young man as when I was ageing, I had imagined it. What would it be like? There were the words we had all read or uttered. You die alone. On mourra seul. The solitude. I thought I could imagine it and know it, as one does being frightened, appalled or desirous.
There it was. It wasn’t to be evaded. Perhaps that was why I invented words for Davidson which he didn’t utter. And read into him feelings which I couldn’t be certain that he knew.
But certainly he said one thing, and did another, which I was able to fix precisely onto that afternoon.
‘Nearly all my friends are dead by now,’ he said. ‘Most of them had moderately unpleasant deaths.’
I was thinking, of those who had mattered to me, Sheila and Roy Calvert had died, though not naturally. Many of my acquaintances were reaching the age band where the statistics began to raise their voice. Looking at us all, one couldn’t prophesy about any single casualty, but that some of us would die one way or the other – within ten, fifteen years – one could predict with the certainty of a statistician. Only a fortnight before, while Margaret and I were still abroad, I had heard that Denis Geary, that robust schoolfellow of mine who had been a support to us a few months before, had gone out for a walk and been found dead.
‘Of course,’ said Davidson, ‘there’s only been one myth that’s ever really counted. I mean, the afterlife.’
‘It’s a pity one can’t believe in it,’ he said.
‘Yes.’ (Not then, but afterwards, I remembered kneeling by Sheila’s bed after her funeral, half-crazed for some sign of her, not even a word, just the shadow of a ghost.)
‘It’s a pity it’s meaningless. I don’t know why, but one doesn’t exactly approve of being annihilated. Though when it’s happened, nothing could matter less.’
One wouldn’t ask for much, Davidson was saying, just the chance to linger round, unobserved, and watch what was going on. It was a pity to miss all that was going to happen.
That was one of the few signs of sentimentality I had seen him show. Soon he was remarking sternly, as though reproving me for a relapse into weakness, that it was not respectable to talk about an afterlife. There wasn’t any meaning in it: there couldn’t be. It was the supreme wish-fulfilment. ‘Which, by the way,’ he said, brightening up, ‘has done the wretched human race a great deal more harm than good.’ He went on, still half-reproving me, telling me to think of the horrors that had been perpetrated in the name of the afterlife. Torturing bodies to save souls. Slaughter to get one’s place in heaven. ‘If people would only accept that this is the only life there is, they might be a shade more civilised.’