None of that now, though this had been the worst time of the three. I regarded the hospital with neutrality; it might have been any other red-brick nineteenth-century building. As one grew older, perhaps the nervous rackings of one’s youth died down. Or perhaps, and with good reason, one wasn’t so frightened of the future. After all one had had some practice contemplating futures and then living them.
It was pleasant, anxiety-free, to be going home.
Part Three
Ends and Beginnings
26: Dispensation
LYING in bed in the hospital, set free by the talisman of 28 November, I hadn’t so much as wondered how long this state would last. If I had even wanted to wonder so, it would have been a false freedom. And whatever it was (it might make nonsense of a good deal that I expected or imagined), it was not false. Fortuitous, if you like, but not false.
It transferred itself easily enough into my everyday life, as soon as I got back. In a fashion which would have seemed curiously unfair, if they had known about it, to those who thought that all along I had been luckier than I deserved. For the bad times got dulled, shrugged off as though if 28 November had gone the other way they wouldn’t have existed. But, by a paradoxical kind of grace, the reverse didn’t apply, the dispensation wasn’t symmetricaclass="underline" on the contrary, the good times became sharper. Shortly after I left hospital, I published a book which I liked and which fell, not exactly flat, but jaggedly. If that had happened in early November, it would have cost me some bad days. As it was, though I didn’t pretend to be indifferent (changes in mood are not so complete as that), I had put it behind me almost as soon as it occurred. Shortly afterwards – and this was just as surprising – I found myself revelling, without any barricade of sarcasm or touching wood, in a bit of praise.
There had been a time when I used to declare, with a kind of defiance: you had to enjoy your joys, and suffer your sufferings. As I knew well enough, I had more talent for the latter. I had managed to subjugate the depressive streak in action, and conceal it from others and sometimes myself, but it was there half-hidden: it wasn’t entirely an accident that I could guess when Roy Calvert was going to swing from the manic into its other phase. With me, what for Roy was manic showed itself only as a kind of high spirits or an excessive sense of expectation: most of the time, I had to watch, as better and robuster characters had to watch, for the alternate phase. Now the balance had been tilted, and I felt myself closer than I had ever been before to people whom I had once in secret thought thick-skinned and prosaic: people who weren’t menaced by melancholy and who were better than I was at enjoying themselves.
It was a singular dispensation to overtake one at sixty, faintly comic, humbling and yet comforting.
When Margaret’s father had died, which he did in his sleep in the January of 1966, two months after my operation, she and I were alone together as in the first days of marriage. More alone, for then she had been looking after Maurice in his infancy. Just as when we returned to the flat the previous autumn, it was both a treat and strange to be there by ourselves. We spun time out, lengthening the moments, making the most of them. Work was over for me now by the early afternoon: after that, we were alone and free. I had got rid of any duties outside the home. We had time to ourselves, as we had not had when we were first married. We were able to look at each other, not as though it were the first time (when one sees nothing but one’s own excitement), but as though we were on holiday, waking up fresh in a hotel.
In another case, it was as fresh when I walked with my son on spring evenings in the park. I was listening to him, not as though he had changed, but as though something had changed between us. Not that I was less interested in him, or in his friends. Actually, I had become more so, but in a different fashion. I was less engaged in competing with them, or proving to Charles that they were wrong. My brother Martin had once said, after his renunciation: ‘People matter: relations between them don’t matter much.’ Whether he ever thought of that, in his troubles with his own son, I didn’t know: if so it must have seemed a black joke against himself. But it was somewhere near the way (so I thought, and didn’t have a superstitious tremor) in which I was now taking pleasure in Charles’ company. I was interested in him and the rest of them, excited, stimulated by their energies and hopes: it was like being given a slice of life to watch and to draw refreshment from, so long as one could keep from taking part oneself.
It didn’t seem like an ageing man’s interest in the flow of life, or Francis Getliffe’s patriarchal delight in his children and grandchildren and those of his friends, the delight of life going on. It didn’t even seem so much like a bit of continuous creation, in which through being engrossed in other lives one was making a new start for oneself. It might, I thought casually, have been all of those things: but if it were I didn’t care. I felt closer than that, through being given a privileged position, having those energies under my eyes: it was much more like being engaged with my own friends at the same age, except that I – with my anxieties, perturbations, desires and will – had been satisfactorily (and for my own liberation) removed.
It was at the end of the Easter vacation, when Charles had returned from another of his trips, that he got into the habit of asking me out for an evening walk. He was home only for a week; each day about half past five, active, springy on his feet, he looked at me with eyebrows raised, and we went into the park for what became our ritual promenade. Out by the Albion Gate: across the grass, under the thickening trees, along the path to the Serpentine, by the side of the Row to the Achilles statue, back along the eastern verge towards Marble Arch. It might have been two old clubmen going through their evening routine, I told him after the second trip: Charles grinned companionably, and next day started precisely the same course.
His conversation, however, was not much like an old clubman’s. He was relaxed, because I was the right distance from him: the right distance, that is, for him to talk and me to listen. I took in more about his friends than I had done before, and believed more, now that I wasn’t conducting a dialectic with him. Yes, they were more serious than I had let myself admit. Their politics (his less than the others) might be utopian, but they were their own. They were probably no better or no worse thought out than ours had been, but they came from a different ground.
The results could be curiously different. Charles and his circle were more genuinely international than any of us had been. The minor nationalisms seemed to have vanished quite. They were not even involved in Europe, though most of them had travelled all over it. It was the poor world that captured their imagination: the Grand Tour had to be uncomfortable and also squalid nowadays, said Charles with a sarcastic smile. That was what he had been conducting in Asia before he was seventeen, and this present vacation he had been rounding it off in Africa.
They weren’t specially illusioned. They didn’t imagine an Elysium existing here and now upon this earth, as young men and women of their kind in the 1930s sometimes imagined Russia or less often the United States. It was true, dark world-views didn’t touch them much. They might bear – in that year 1966 and later – people like Francis Getliffe and me saying that objectively the world looked grimmer than at any time in our lives. They might analyse and understand the reasons which made us say so. But they didn’t in the end believe it. They were alive for anything that was going to happen. That was bound to be so: you live in your own time.