When first, a few hours after he was born, I held him in my arms, I had felt a surge of animal insistence. His eyes were unfocused and rolling; his hands aimlessly waving as though they were sea plants in a pooclass="underline" I hadn’t felt tender, but something like savage, angrily determined that he should live and that nothing bad should happen to him. That wasn’t a memory, but like a stamp on the senses. It had lasted. In the illness of his infancy, I had gone through a similar animal desolation. Soon, when he learned to drive a car, I should be anxious until I heard his key in the lock and saw him safely home.
But otherwise — I didn’t have to control myself, it came by a grace that baffled me — I didn’t want to possess him, I didn’t want to live his life for him or live my own again in him. I was glad, with the specific kind of vanity that Francis Getliffe showed, that he was clever. I got pleasure out of his triumphs, and, when he let me see them, I was irritated by his setbacks. Since there was so little strain between us, he often asked my advice, judging me to be a good professional. He had his share of melancholy, rather more than an adolescent’s melancholy. As a rule, he was more than usually high-spirited. The tone of our temperaments was not all that different. I found his company consoling, and often a support.
I could scarcely believe that I had been so lucky. It seemed inexplicable and, sometimes, in my superstitious nerves, too good to be true. Call no man happy until he is dead. Occasionally I speculated about an event which I should never see: whether my son, far on in his life, would also have something happen to him which was utterly out of character and which made him wonder whether he knew himself at all.
8: Red Capsules
TWO evenings later — Charles was still at home, but returning to school next day — a telegram was brought into the drawing-room, as we were having our first drinks. Margaret opened it, and brought it over to me. It read: Should be grateful if you and Lewis would visit me tonight Austin Davidson.
Austin Davidson was her father. It was like him, even in illness, to sign a telegram in that fashion. It was like him to send her a telegram at alclass="underline" for he, so long the champion of the twenties’ artistic avant garde, had never overcome his distrust of mechanical appliances, and in the sixteen years Margaret and I had been married, he had spoken to me on the telephone precisely once.
“We’d better all go,” said Margaret, responsibility tightening her face. She didn’t return to her chair, and within minutes we were in a taxi, on our way to the house in Regents Park.
Charles knew that house well. As we went through the drawing-room where Margaret had once told me I could be sure of her, I glanced at him — did he look at it with fresh eyes, now he had seen how his other grandfather lived? In the light of the June evening, the Vlaminck, the Boudin, the two Sickerts, gleamed from the walls. Charles passed them by. Maybe he knew them off by heart. The Davidsons were not rich, but there had been, in Austin’s own phrase, “a little money about”. He had bought and sold pictures in his youth: when he became an art critic, he decided that no financial interest was tolerable (Berenson was one of his lifelong hates), and turned his attention to the stock market. People had thought him absent-minded, but since he was forty he hadn’t needed to think about money.
In his study, though it was a warm night, he was sitting by a lighted fire. Margaret knelt by him, and kissed him. “How are you?” she said in a strong maternal voice.
“As you see,” said her father.
What we saw was not old age, although he was in his seventies. It was much more like a youngish man, ravaged and breathless with cardiac illness. Over ten years before he had had a coronary thrombosis: until then he had lived and appeared like a really young man. That had drawn a line across his life. He had ceased even to be interested in pictures. Partly, the enlightenment that he spoke for had been swept aside by fashion: he had been a young friend of the Bloomsbury circle, and their day had gone. But more, for all his stoicism, he couldn’t come to terms with age. He had gradually, for a period of years, got better. He had written a book about his own period, which had made some stir. “It’s not much consolation,” said Austin Davidson, “being applauded just for saying that everything that was intellectually respectable has been swept under the carpet.” Then he had weakened again. He played games invented by himself, whenever Margaret or his other daughter could visit him. Often he played alone. He read a little. “But what do you read in my condition?” he once asked me. “When you’re young, you read to prepare yourself for life. What do you suggest that I prepare myself for?”
There he sat, his mouth half-open. He was, as he had always been, an unusually good-looking man. His face had the beautiful bone structure which had come down to Margaret, the high cheekbones which Charles also inherited. Since he still stumbled out to the garden to catch any ray of sun, his skin remained a Red Indian bronze, which masked some of the signs of illness. But when he looked at us, his eyes, which were opaque chocolate brown, quite different from Margaret’s, had no light in them.
“Are you feeling any worse?” she said, taking his hand.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Well then. You would tell us?”
“I don’t see much point in it. But I probably should.”
There was the faintest echo of his old stark humour: nothing wrapped up, nothing hypocritical. He wouldn’t soften the facts of life, even for his favourite daughter, least of all for her.
“What can we do for you?”
“Nothing, just now.”
“Would you like a game?” she said. No one would have known, even I had to recall, that she was in distress.
“For once, no.”
Charles, who had been standing in the shadows, went close to the fire.
“Anything I can do, Grandpa?” he said, in a casual, easy fashion. He had got used to the sight of mortal sickness.
“No, thank you, Carlo.”
Austin Davidson seemed pleased to bring out the nickname, which had been a private joke between them since Charles was a baby, and which had become his pet name at home. For the first time since we arrived, a conversation started.
“What have you been doing, Carlo?”
“Struggling on,” said Charles with a grin.
There was some talk about the school they had in common. But Austin Davidson, though he had been successful there, professed to hate it. How soon would Charles be going to Cambridge? In two or three years, three years at most, Charles supposed. Ah, now that was different, said Austin Davidson.
He could talk to the boy as he couldn’t to his daughter. He wasn’t talking with paternal feeling: he had little of that. All of a sudden, the cage of illness and mortality had let him out for a few moments. He spoke like one bright young man to another. He had been happier in Cambridge, just before the first war, than ever in his life. That had been the douceur de la vie. He had been one of the most brilliant of young men. He had been an Apostle, a member of the secret intellectual society (Margaret and I had learned this only from the biographies of others, for he had kept the secret until that day, and had not given either of us a hint).
“You won’t want to leave it, Carlo.” Davidson might have been saying that time didn’t exist, that he himself was a young man who didn’t want to leave it.
“I’ll be able to tell you when I get there, shan’t I?” said Charles. Again, all of a sudden, timelessness broke. Davidson’s head slumped on to his chest. None of us could escape the silence. At last Davidson raised his head almost imperceptibly, just enough to indicate that he was addressing me.