“I want a word with you alone,” he said.
“Do you want us to come back when you’ve finished?” asked Margaret.
“Not unless you’re enjoying my company.” Once again the vestigial echo. “Which I should consider not very likely.”
On their way out Margaret glanced at me and touched my hand. This was something he would not mention in front of Charles. She and I had the same suspicion. I said, as though a matter-of-fact statement were some sort of help, that I would be back at home in time for dinner.
The door closed behind them. I pulled up a chair close to Davidson’s. At once he said: “I’ve had enough.”
Yes, that was it.
“What do you mean?” I said automatically.
“You know what I mean.”
He looked straight at me, opaque eyes unblinking.
“One can always not stand it,” he said. “I’m not going to stand it any longer.”
“You might strike a better patch—”
“Nonsense. Life isn’t bearable on these terms. I can tell you that. After all, I’m the one who’s bearing it.”
“Can’t you bear it a bit longer? You don’t quite know how you’ll feel next month—”
“Nonsense,” he said again. “I ought to have finished it three or four years ago.” He went on: he didn’t have one moment’s pleasure in the day. Not much pain, but discomfort, the drag of the body. Day after day with nothing in them. Boredom (he didn’t say it, but he meant the boredom which is indistinguishable from despair). Boredom without end.
“Well,” he said, “it’s time there was an end.”
He was speaking with more spirit than for months past. He seemed to have the exhilaration of feeling that at last his will was free. He wasn’t any more at the mercy of fate. There was an exhilaration, almost an intoxication, of free will that comes to anyone when the suffering has become too great and one is ready to dispose of oneself: it had suffused me once, when I was a young man and believed that I might be incurably ill. At the very last one was buoyed up by the assertion of the “I”, the unique “I”. It was that precious illusion, which, on a lesser scale, was a consolation, no, more than a consolation, a kind of salvation, to men like my brother Martin when they make a choice injurious (as the world saw it) to themselves.
“You can’t give me one good reason,” he said, “why I shouldn’t do it.”
“You matter to some of us,” I began, but he interrupted me: “This isn’t a suitable occasion to be polite. You know as well as I do that you have to visit a miserable old man. You feel better when you get outside. If I know my daughter, she’ll have put down a couple of stiff whiskies before you get back, just because it’s a relief not to be looking at me.”
“It’s not as simple as that. If you killed yourself, it would hurt her very much.”
“I don’t see why. She knows that my life is intolerable. That ought to be enough.”
“It isn’t enough.”
“I shouldn’t expect her,” said Davidson, “to be worried by someone’s suicide. Surely we all got over that a long while ago.”
“I tell you, it would do more than worry her.”
“I thought we all agreed,” he was arguing now with something like his old enthusiasm, “that the one certain right one has in one’s own life is to get rid of it.”
When he said “we all”, he meant, just as in the past, himself and his friends. I had no taste for argument just then. I said no more than that, as a fact of existence, his suicide would cause a major grief to both his daughters.
“Perhaps I may be excused for thinking,” he said it airily, light-heartedly, “that it really is rather more my concern than theirs.”
Then he added: “In the circumstances, if they don’t like the idea of a suicide in the family, then I should regard them as at best stupid and at worst distinctly selfish.”
“That’s about as untrue of Margaret as of anyone you’ve ever known.”
It was curious to be on the point of quarrelling with a man so sad that he was planning to kill himself. I tried to sound steady: I asked him once again to think it over for a week or two.
“What do you imagine I’ve been doing for the last four years?” This time his smile looked genuinely gay. “No, you’re a sensible man. You’ve got to accept that this is my decision and no one else’s. One’s death is a moderately serious business. The least everyone else can do is to leave one alone.”
We sat in silence, though his head had not sunk down, he did not seem oppressed by the desolating weight that came upon him so often in that room. He said: “You’ll tell Margaret, of course. Oh, and I shall need a little help from one of you. Just to get hold of the necessary materials.”
That came out of the quiet air. He might have been asking for a match. I had to say, what materials?
Davidson took out of his pocket a small bottle, unscrewed the cap, and tipped on to his palm a solitary red capsule.
“That’s seconal. It’s a sleeping drug, don’t you know.”
He explained it as though he were revealing something altogether novel — all the time I had known him, he explained bits of modern living with a childlike freshness, with the kind of Adamic surprise he might have shown in his teens at the sight of his first aeroplane.
He handed the capsule to me. I held it between my fingers, without comment. He said: “My doctor gives me them one at a time. Which may be some evidence that he’s not quite such a fool as he looks.”
“Perhaps.”
“I could save them up, of course. But it would take rather a long time to save enough for the purpose.”
Then he said, in a clear dispassionate tone: “There’s another trouble. I take it that I’m somewhere near a state of senile melancholia. That has certain disadvantages. One of them is that you can’t altogether rely on your own will.”
“I don’t think you are in that state.”
“It’s what I think that counts.” He went on: “So I want you or Margaret to get some adequate supplies. While I still know my own mind. I suppose there’s no difficulty about that?”
“It’s not altogether easy.”
“It can’t be impossible.”
“I don’t know much about drugs—”
“You can soon find out, don’t you know.”
I said that I would make enquiries. Actually, I was dissimulating and playing for time. I twiddled the seconal between my fingers. Half an inch of cylinder with rounded ends: the vermilion sheen: up to now it had seemed a comfortable object. I was more familiar with these things than he was, for Margaret used them as a regular sleeping pill. Perhaps once or twice a month, I, who was the better sleeper, would be restless at night, and she would pass me one across the bed. Calm sleep. Relaxed well-being at breakfast.
Up to now these had been innocent objects. Though there were others — mixed up in my response as for the last few minutes I had listened to Davidson — which I had not chosen to see for many years. Another drug: Sodium amytal. That was the sleeping drug Sheila, my first wife, had taken. Occasionally she also had passed one across to me. She had killed herself with them. Davidson must once have known that. Perhaps he had not remembered, as he talked lucidly about suicide. Or else he might have thought it irrelevant. At all times, he was a concentrated man.
When I told him I would make enquiries, he gave a smile — a youthful smile, of satisfaction, almost of achievement.
“Well then,” he said. “That is all the non-trivial conversation for today.”
But he had no interest in any other kind of conversation. He became withdrawn again, scarcely listening, alone.