From the Phillipses I later heard about the drunken telephone calls Alan had made to the manor at about the time — or perhaps a little before — he had telephoned me. The first three or four had been taken. But then — perhaps Alan had pushed his luck too far, had begun to make the telephone calls at odd hours, perhaps had said things he hadn’t said to me — my landlord had become alarmed. Alan’s disturbance, so manifest, had given my landlord fresh glimpses of his own acedia again, his own hell. To fear that kind of illness was, in effect, to start being ill again. And for a while my landlord had had a relapse.
Alan’s telephone calls had been refused; Mr. Phillips had ordered Alan not to telephone again. Alan had been forbidden to come to the house. All Mr. Phillips’s protective feelings towards his employer, the sick man, were awakened; the prohibition on Alan’s visits was lifted only when Mr. Phillips was sure that Alan had stopped drinking.
But the man who had reappeared in the manor was ravaged. That old lady’s face was the face of a man beyond cure. And though he refused the glass of wine I offered (quite innocently, not knowing at the time his recent history), though he refused, while insisting (with beautiful courtesy, almost as though he were my host) that I should have a glass myself, his apparent cure was — as with some other bad diseases — only a remission, enabling him, perhaps cruelly, perhaps in a spirit of reconciliation, to look at the world he was leaving and to say his good-byes.
He said good-bye. He never came back. I heard him once or twice on the radio — as bubbling as ever. If only he could have lived there, at that pitch, in something like a radio-studio atmosphere, something of that artificial social arrangement, instead of having to go home and be alone. And then one day I heard — some days after the event — that he had taken some pills one night after a bout of hard drinking and died. It was a theatrical kind of death. Theater would not have been far from Alan’s mind that evening. It might so easily have gone the other way. Somebody might have telephoned, or he might have telephoned somebody, gone to a party in brilliant clothes, been witty or flattering or outrageous, would have ridden over the theatrical moment of suicide. But his solitude would almost certainly have brought him there again.
The news was kept from my landlord. Mr. Phillips thought it would be bad for him to be told. But somehow my landlord found out. For him it was one person less in his shrinking world; another person not to be mentioned again.
Of Alan’s books and “notes” there was of course almost nothing. Out of his love for the life of the mind, and the artist’s eye and hand, he had flattered very many people. And it was this flattery that was his odd memorial for a week or so. A number of people who wrote about Alan after his death wrote with that part of their personalities that had almost been created by Alan’s flattery. Their obituaries were curiously self-regarding; as much as to Alan — who came out in these notices as an eccentric, an anachronism, someone from “before the deluge” (the words were actually used in one piece) — these people paid tribute to themselves for having known and befriended Alan, for having spotted his talent and sensibility, having been singled out by him for his confidences, his confessions of sadness. No one spoke of his flattery. And more than one person, it turned out, had been telephoned by Alan in distress just a few days before he had died.
Mr. Phillips, mentioning Alan’s death, permitted himself a look of sadness, a twinge of regret. But then almost immediately his face clouded with the irritability which I thought of as his usual public expression. This irritability was like Bray’s peaked cap; it enabled Mr. Phillips to express many things. He could wear his irritability dead straight; or he could wear it mockingly or self-mockingly. He could use it to express authority, or to be an aggrieved worker; or it could be the irritability of a man protecting his good fortune, not wishing to exult.
Now his irritability bridged his human response to the death of Alan and his professional pride as a male nurse and as protector of the manor. He had spotted Alan immediately, he said. He had spotted Alan’s depressive nature. He had been right to forbid Alan the house. The drunkenness would simply not have done. Its effect on my landlord would have been calamitous; and then Alan could so easily have done in the manor what he had done at home. Think of the trouble, the confusion, the further effect on my landlord, holding on to the remnants of his own lucidity and health.
That was how he, Alan, was remembered at the place which he thought of as his special retreat. “I telephone Phillips and have him meet me at the station.” That was how (in one mood) Alan thought or wanted to think of his time and position at the manor. It was half a social idea, half a literary idea: the being met “at the station,” with all its old-fashioned country-house-weekend suggestions; the use of the name Phillips without the “mister”—though Alan called Mr. Phillips Stanley or Stan and Mr. Phillips called him Alan.
MR. PHILLIPS’S old father said to me, “So your friend Alan died. Nice man. I hardly knew him. I saw him a few times. He was always very pleasant.”
He, old Mr. Phillips, the small, neat man, had been walking in the grounds with his tall pronged staff (the sign that he had come to the grounds to walk and not to work). He was carefully dressed, in his very pale colors — no pattern in the fabric of his tie, jacket, or shirt, this absence of pattern together with the broad lapels, collars, and ties of the period adding to the pallor of the clothes, suggesting chalk below the tints, the way the chalk of the downs modified the color of young grass or corn and in dry weather whitened a plowed field.
The old man said, “Whenever I hear of something like this I think of my cousin. He died when he was eight. In 1911, coronation year.”
We were standing outside my cottage, below the beeches. The old man slightly lifted his face. He was smiling; his eyes were watering. I knew the expression. The smile wasn’t a smile, the tears were not tears. It was just what happened to his face whenever he began to talk about his childhood or early life.
But he couldn’t tell me about his cousin just then. We were both distracted by a great squawking noise. The noise was made by a flock of rooks circling overhead. Big black beaks, big black flapping wings. I had never seen them here before. I had got used to starlings arriving suddenly in screeching flocks, settling like black leaves on trees. But rooks in this number I hadn’t seen. They flew around slowly, squawking, as if assessing us. In my first year, on one of my early, exploratory walks, I had seen two or three downs away, on a wooded hill on the other side of Jack’s cottage, spread-eagled husks of these birds nailed to a fence by Jack’s very old and bent father-in-law.
Old Mr. Phillips said, “They’ve lost their nests right through the valley. They lost their nests when the elms died. They’re prospecting. They need tall trees. They’ll choose the beeches. You know what they say about rooks. They bring money to a house. Money is coming to somebody in the manor. Who do you think it’s going to be? Of course it’s an old wise tale.” “Old wise tale”—it was what he said; and the idiom, as he spoke it, with its irony and tolerance, sounded original rather than a corruption. “If you think they’re birds of death you can’t stand the noise. If you think it’s money, you don’t mind.”