‘So long, my boy. I hope you’ve been listening to what I said.’
Yes, I had. I wiped sweat away, but I might have come out of a hot bath. I was ashamed that I couldn’t be steadier: why should my nerves let me down, just because old Porson blustered away? For days past, ever since the first fright left me free, I had listened to everyone without even a superstitious qualm. I hadn’t been putting on a front: I hadn’t needed to. Definitions of death, theological death, the different degrees of uneasiness with which people, my wife, my son, approached me. I had become something of an expert on relative uneasiness. Nothing had plucked a nerve. Then, after all that, after the visits of those closest to me, came Porson. Drunk, of course. Officious, as he had been ever since I first met him. Nothing new. I had been through it all before. But he had frightened me.
There was no denying, I had felt the chill. If I could have understood why, I might have thrown it off. I had no clue at all. The thought of Porson’s cronies, down in the hospital basement, counting my chances – what was so bad about that? (In cold blood afterwards, I doubted if they had been all that wrought up. Porson enjoyed his overheated fancy. They must have had a little excitement, no more.) There was nothing bad, or even remotely unnatural about that. Yet, when Porson told me, it brought back the dread.
Listening to him, I felt it as on the first night. Now he had gone, I was searching inward, testing how strong it was. It was exactly like the days after the first eye operation, when I was worried by each speck or floater in the field of vision, wondering whether the black edge was coming back. The dread. It would be hard to have that as a regular visitation. No, perhaps it was not quite like the first night. Perhaps there was already a spectator behind my mind. It wasn’t only the fright and nothingness.
Still, as I tried to eat the hospital supper, I was waiting, I didn’t know what for, perhaps for the chill again, or some sign that I wasn’t in the clear. I was glad that Martin was due to visit me that night.
When he arrived, though, I was for an instant disappointed. For he had brought his daughter Nina with him, enquiring about me in her fashionable whisper as she kissed me, her face hiding behind her hair. As a rule, I should have welcomed her. More and more she seemed the most agreeable girl in Charles’ circle, the one who was most likely to make a man happy and enjoy her marriage. Nevertheless, in her presence I couldn’t talk directly to my brother. Which was probably, I imagined, why he had brought her. It was a typical quiet tactic of his, meaning that there was nothing good to say about Pat and that Martin wished to evade any discussion. Also, now that Martin at last was compelled to show traces of realism about his son, he was turning to the daughter whom he had so long neglected. He even induced her to tell me about her music: her teachers were certain that she (quite unlike her brother, Martin might have been thinking) would become a good professional.
Martin had seen me once since the operation, enough to satisfy himself, but not alone. Now he was watching me.
‘How are you?’ he said.
‘All right.’
‘Only all right?’
‘A little tired of death-watch beetles.’
‘You’ve given them a first-class opportunity, you know.’ Martin was speaking with a tucked-in smile, but he and I were signalling to each other, and probably Nina didn’t recognise the code. ‘Anyone special?’
‘Old Ronald Porson’s been improving the occasion.’
‘When?’
‘Oh, not long ago.’
Martin nodded. ‘That must have been pleasant for you.’
‘He was telling me about the preparations downstairs for my demise.’
A slight pause. In his misleadingly soft voice, Martin said: ‘It’s high time we began to make modest preparations for his.’
‘He’s inclined to think that he’ll outlast me.’
‘Thoughtful of him.’
‘After all,’ I said, ‘he’d be the first to point out that he very nearly did.’
‘I’m sure he would.’
‘Nothing that rejuvenates an old man more, my father-in-law used to say, than to contemplate the death of someone younger.’
‘Naturally,’ said Martin. Then casually, as though in an afterthought of no interest, he said: ‘By the by, did you want to see that old sod?’ He didn’t explain to his daughter that he meant Porson.
‘No. He gatecrashed.’
‘I imagined so. Well, I’ll see that that doesn’t happen again.’ I looked at my brother, face controlled, eyes dark and hard. I speculated as to whether Nina knew that he was smouldering with anger.
‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I can take him.’
‘I can’t see any reason why you should. I can see several reasons why you shouldn’t.’
That was all. Affectionate goodbyes. I expected that it would be some time before Martin left the hospital. For myself I didn’t abstain from my sleeping pills that night, and wasn’t long awake. Then I woke in the middle of the night, feeling calm. Immediately I waited for the fright to grip me. But it didn’t: at least, not enough to be more than a reminder, the kind of reminder of mortality that came at any age, from youth upwards, and wasn’t the real thing. Testing the black edge, I forced back thoughts of Porson. No, his voice bullied me in a vacuum, I recalled occasions long ago when he had lost a case and still took the offensive against everyone round him, not to himself defeated. I wondered if Martin had discovered who it was that let him in.
25: Outside the Hospital
THE morning that Margaret came to fetch me home, I had been in that bedroom for eleven days. On the afternoon before, she, who knew how institutions gave me more than my normal claustrophobia, and that I didn’t make fine distinctions between prisons and hospitals, they were just places which shut one in, asked how long it felt. I said that often it had seemed no time at all. She wasn’t sure whether I was being perverse. But I had already told her of my relapse during Porson’s visit. Perhaps also perversely, that had given her confidence in my state of mind. She hadn’t quite trusted the complete serenity, the looking back to 28 November as though that eliminated disquiets past, present and to come: now she knew that the serenity could be broken, she trusted it more.
Dressed, wearing my one club-tie, the MCC as though in retrospective homage to Ronald Porson, I said goodbye to the matron, the ward sister, a posse of nurses. I caught sight of myself in the looking glass, grinning cordially like an ageing public man.
Walking downstairs, out to the steps in front of the hospital, I was still wearing a blindfold over the left eye, and hadn’t stereoscopic vision when I looked down at the steps: so that Margaret, taking my arm, had to guide me, and as I probed with my feet I looked infirm. Infirm enough for a photographer, on the hospital steps, to ask if I wanted help: which didn’t prevent him snapping a picture of the descent. When we came into the open air, there were a dozen photographers waiting, shouting like a new estate of the realm, telling us to stand still, move, smile. There was the whirr of a television camera. ‘Look as if you’re happy,’ someone ordered Margaret. ‘Talk to each other!’ Worn down by this contemporary discipline, we muttered away. What we were actually saying, beneath the smiles, was what fiend out of hell had leaked the time. Someone had tipped off the Press. Pat? One of Porson’s ‘chums’?
As we climbed into the car, I looked back at the hospital facade. Nostalgia for a place where I had been through that special night? No, not in the least. It was different from occasions when I was young, and said goodbye to stretches of unhappiness. When I left the local government office, after my last morning as a clerk, I felt, although or because I had been miserable and humiliated there for years, something like an ache, as though regret for a bond that had been snapped. A little later, when I was a young man, and had been sent to the Mediterranean to recover from an illness, I had, driving to the station for the journey home, looked back at the sea (I could remember now the smell of the arbutus after rain). I had been desolate there, afraid that I might not get better: going away, I felt a distress much more painful than that outside the old office, a yearning, as though all I wanted in this life was to remain by the seashore and never be torn away.