'Yes,' said Cedric. All of us.'
'Not just a nurse,' said Ellen. 'Not a stranger'
Jack was thinking that if he had stuck it out, then he would have been there when his father called for him; but he said: I'm glad it is a nurse. I don't think there is very much left of him.'
Ann arrived. What Jack saw first was a decided, neat little face, and that she wore a green jacket and trousers that were not jeans but 'good' as her aunt Ellen used the word. Ellen always had 'good' clothes that lasted a long time. Ann's style was not, for instance, like Jack's daughter', who wore rags and rubbish and cast — offs and who looked enchanting, like princesses in disguise. She kissed her father, because he was waiting for her to do this. She stood examining them with care. Her father could be seen in her during that leisurely, unembarrassed examination: it was both her right and her duty to do this. Now Jack saw that she was small, with a white skin that looked greenish where it was shaded, and hair as pale as her father's had been. Her eyes, like her father's, were green.
She said: 'Is he still alive?'
The voice was her father's, and it took her aunt and her uncle back, back — she did not know the reason for their strained, reluctant smiles as they gazed at her.
They were suffering that diminution, that assault on individuality which is the worst of families: some invisible dealer had shuffled noses, hands, shoulders, hair and reassembled them to make — little Ann, for instance. The dealer made out of parts a unit that the owner would feed, maintain, wash, medicate for a lifetime, thinking of it as ‘mine’, except at moments like these, when knowledge was forced home that everyone was put together out of stock.
'Well,' said Ann, 'you all look dismal enough. Why do you?'
She went into the bedroom, leaving the door open. Jack understood that Ann had principles about attitudes towards death: like his own daughters.
The three crowded into the room.
Ann sat on the bed, high up near the pillow, in a way that hid the old man's face from them. She was leaning forward, the nurse — whom Ann had ignored — ready to intervene.
'Grandad'' she said. 'Grandad! It's me!'
Silence. Then it came home to them that she had called up Lazarus. They heard the old man's voice, quite as they remembered it: 'It's you, is it? It is little Ann?'
'Yes, Grandad, it's Ann.'
They crowded forward, to see over her shoulder. They saw their father, smiling normally. He looked like a tired old man, that was all. His eyes, surrounded by the puffy bruises, had light in them.
‘Who are these people?' he asked. ‘Who are all these tall people?'
The three retreated, leaving the door open.
Silence from the bedroom, then singing. Ann was singing is a small clear voice: All things bright and beautiful.'
Jack looked at Cedric. Ellen looked at Cedric. He deprecated: 'Yes, I am afraid that she is. That's the bond, you see.'
'Oh,' said Ellen, 'I see, that explains it.'
The singing went on:
All things bright and beautiful,
All creatures great and small
All things wise and wonderful,
The Lord God made them all.
The singing went on, verse after verse like a lullaby.
'She came to stay with him,' said Cedric. ‘At Easter, I think it was. She slept here, on the floor.'
Jack said: 'My girls are religious. But not my son of course.'
They looked blankly sympathetic: it occurred to Jack that his son's fame was after all circumscribed to a pretty small circle.
‘He takes after me,' said Jack.
‘Ah,' said Cedric.
‘A lot of them are religious,' said Ellen, brisk.
'It's the kind of religion that sticks in one's craw,' said Jack.
‘Simple faith and Celtic crosses.'
‘I agree,' said Cedric' Pretty low-level stuff.'
'Does,' the level matter?' asked Ellen. 'Surely c'est le premier pas quicoute?'
At which Jack looked at his sister in a disbelief that was meant to be noticed. Cedric, however, did not seem surprised: of course, he saw Ellen more often. He said mildly: 'I don't agree. One wouldn't mind if they went on to something a bit more elevated. It's this servants' hall village green mother's meeting sort of thing. Your spend a fortune trying to educate them decently and then it ends up in... My eldest was a Jesus freak for a few months, for example. After Winchester, Balliol, the lot.'
What is a Jesus freak?' inquired Ellen.
What is sounds like.'
Normally Jack would have cut out emotionally and mentally at the words 'servants' hall', but he was still with them. He said: What gets me is that they spout it all out, so pat and pretty, you know, and you get the feeling it might be anything, anything they had picked up or lay to hand — pour epater les bourgeois, you know.'
At this he had to think that the other two must be thinking, but were too polite to say, that his own socialism, a degree or two off full communism when he was in his teens, had had no deeper cause. This unspoken comment brought the conversation to a stop.
The singing had stopped too. It was getting dark.
'Well, ' said Ellen, 'I tell you what I'm going to do, I am going to have a bath and then dinner and then a good night's sleep. I think Ann is meeting Father's requirements better than we could.'
'Yes,' said Cedric.
He went to the door, and communicated this news to his daughter, who said she would be fine, she would be super, she would stay with her grandad, and if she got tired she could sleep on the floor.
Over the dinner table at the hotel, it was a reunion of people who had not met for a long time. They drank some wine and they were sentimental.
But the little time of warmth died with the coffee, served in the hall, which let in draughts from the street every time somebody came in.
Jack said: 'I'll turn in, I didn't sleep last night.' 'Nor I.' 'Nor I.'
They nodded at each other; to kiss would have been exaggerated. Jack went upstairs, while Cedric and Ellen went to telephone their families.
In the bedroom he stood by the window and watched how the light filled the lime outside. Breaths of tree-air came to his face. He was full of variegated emotions, none, he was afraid, to do with his father: they were about his brother and his sister, his childhood, that past of his which everything that happened to him these days seemed to evoke, seemed to present to him, sharp, clear, and for the most part painfuclass="underline" he did not feel he could sleep, he was over-stimulated. He would lie on his bed for a rest. Waking much later, to a silence that said the night had deepened all around him, with the heaviness of everybody's sleeping, he started up into a welter of feeling that he could not face, and so burrowed back into sleep again, there to be met by — but it was hard to say what.
Terror was not the word. Nor fear. Yet there were no other words that he knew for the state he found himself in. It was more like a state of acute attention, as if his whole being — memory, body, present and past chemistries — had been assaulted by a warning, so that he had to attend to it. He was standing, as it were, at the alert, listening to something which said: Time is passing, be quick, listen, attend.
It was the knowledge of passing time that was associated with the terror, so that he found himself standing upright in the dark room, crying out: 'Oh, no, no, I understand, I am sorry, I...' He was whimpering like a puppy. The dark was solid around him, and he didn't know where he was. He believed himself to be in a grave, and he rushed to the window, throwing it open as if he were heaving a weight off himself. The window was hard to open. At last he forced it, leaning out to let the tree-air come to his face, but it was not air that came in, but a stench, and this smell was confirmation of a failure which had taken place long ago, in some choice of his, that he had now forgotten. The feeling of urgency woke him: he was lying on his bed. Now he really did shoot into the centre of the room, while the smell that had been the air of the dream was fading around him. He was terrified. But that was not the word... he feared that the terror that the terror would fade, he would forget what he had dreamed; the knowledge that there was something that had to be done, done soon, would fade, and he would forget even that he had dreamed.