Charles Snow - Last Things

Then, when Davidson couldn’t resist a complaint: ‘I suppose it’s too much to expect Carlo to take an intelligent interest–’ I had it. Charles couldn’t pick up the reference: but by now Davidson, always obsessive, had become addicted to our afternoon ritual, first what he called ‘intelligent conversation’ (that is, about the Stock Market), and then his reflections on dying. His interests had narrowed to that. It still seemed to me harrowing that in that clinical room, afternoon following afternoon, we talked about Stock Exchange prices. I had to tell him what he had gained or lost by his last investment. It was purely symbolic: money had not mattered much to him, except as an intellectual game, and nothing could matter less now. Yet there was something triumphant about his interest, as though he had proved that one could be pertinacious to the end.

However, that afternoon, with Charles present, he was deprived. For a time he fell into silence, indrawn. Whether he was wondering if he ought to talk about death in front of Charles, I didn’t know. Probably he didn’t trouble himself. Austin Davidson used to feel, as only a delicate man could feel, that it was invariably wrong to be over-delicate. At any rate, after a while he produced a question.

‘Carlo. If you believed in an afterlife, which by definition is impossible, which of the various alternatives so far proposed for the afterlife would you prefer?’

Davidson’s sepia eyes were shining, as though gratified to be talking again.

‘Meaning what in the way of alternatives?’ Charles was good at catching the tone.

‘Any that you’ve ever heard of.’

Charles considered.

‘They’re all pretty dim,’ he said.

‘Granted. There’s not much to be said for the human imagination.’

‘I suppose there may be something outside this world–’

I thought, Charles wasn’t used to the Edwardian brand of unbelief.

‘That hasn’t any meaning. No, people have always been inventing heavens. All ridiculous. Now you’re asked to name the one you fancy.’

Gazing at the old man, Charles realised that he had to play this game according to the rules.

‘Well then,’ he said. ‘Valhalla.’

Davidson gave a genuine smile.

‘Not so good, Carlo. Just like a regimental mess.’

‘Good stories,’ said Charles.

‘My God. Listening to rather stupid hearties talking about battles for all eternity.’

‘That would be better than listening to harps, wouldn’t it?’

‘I put it about equal. But all that boozing–’

Like nearly all his circle, Davidson had never gone in much for drink. I recalled, years before I met Margaret, being taken by a Cambridge friend to a party in Gordon Square. The hosts – we now knew from the biographies – had been intimates of Davidson’s and brother Apostles. The thinking might have been high, but the entertainment was austere.

‘One would get used to it after the first thousand years, I think.’

They kept up the exchange, Charles doing his share as though this were a natural piece of chit-chat. Whether it cost him an effort, I couldn’t be sure. His face was grave, but so it had to be to match Davidson’s fancy, while Davidson’s spirits, so long as they could go on talking, were lighter than I had felt them for weeks past. After the two of them had exhausted the topic of putative heavens, Davidson didn’t relapse into the dark silence, when it seemed his eyes turned inward, that I had sat through so often in that room. Instead, and this was very rare, for even Margaret he scarcely mentioned when I visited him, he brought a new person into the conversation.

‘Oh that young man, what’s he called, your nephew–’ he said to me, and I supplied the name. ‘Yes. He came in here the other day. He’s been to see me once or twice, don’t you know.’

Yes, I knew.

‘I gather he’s having some sort of trouble with his wife.’

It was an extraordinary place to come and confide, but Pat, I thought, wasn’t above searching for comfort or allies anywhere.

I said that his wife had turned him out.

‘Can’t someone make her be sensible? It’s all remarkably uncivilised.’

His tone was stern and complaining. That was a word of condemnation, one of the very few he ever used. He began to talk about his own friends. They tried to get the maximum of pleasure out of their personal relations. If this meant triangles or more complicated geometrical figures, well then, one accepted that too. Of course jealousy sometimes intruded: but jealousy had to be kept in its place. They believed in pleasure, said Davidson. If you didn’t believe in pleasure, you couldn’t be civilised.

Davidson wasn’t wandering, I hadn’t heard him do so since the first morning in the clinic. Lucidly he returned to his starting point. Muriel was being uncivilised. Of course, Pat might have gone in for a certain amount of old-fashioned adultery. What of it? He wanted to preserve the marriage.

‘I should have thought’, said Davidson, ‘that he was a man of fundamentally decent feeling.’

I should have liked to discover what Charles made of that judgment. He had been listening with absorption to Davidson speaking of his friends: at Charles’ age, though this was his grandfather talking, that period, that coterie, must already have passed into history and have seemed as remote, as preserved in time, as the pre-Raphaelites. Would they have a glamour for Charles? Or would he detest their kind of enlightenment, what Davidson had just called being ‘civilised’, as much as his mother did?

We had stayed in the bedroom – I was used to looking at my watch below Davidson’s eye level in that room – half an hour longer than I set myself. But when I began to move, muttering the ‘Well–’ which begins to set one free, he said he would like us to stay a little longer. He realised we were unlikely to share his opinion, he remarked with a flicker of the old devil, but he was having a mildly diverting afternoon.

IT was getting on for a month later, on an afternoon when Margaret was taking her turn to visit Austin Davidson, that Azik Schiff rang up: would I call round at his house, he wanted (using an idiom known only to Azik) to include me in the picture. High summer in Eaton Square, trees dense with foliage, leaves dark under the bright sun, car bonnets flashing. The major rooms in Azik’s house were on the second floor, a kind of piano nobile , and there in the long drawing-room, standing in front of his Renoir, Azik greeted me. He gave his face-splitting froglike smile, called me ‘my friend’, put his arm round my shoulders and conducted me to a sofa where Rosalind was sitting. Then there was conferring about whether it was too late for tea, or too early for a drink. Both of them, Azik in particular, were making more than their normal fuss of me, trying to wrap me round with warmth.

When we were settled down, welcomes insisted on, Azik put his hands on his thick thighs, and said, like one at home with negotiations: ‘Lewis, my friend, you are not a principal in this matter. But we thought you ought to be informed.’

‘After all, you’re his uncle, aren’t you?’ Rosalind said appeasingly, but as though raising an unnecessary doubt.

I said, I had heard so many rumours, I should be grateful for some facts.

‘Ah, it is the young who have been talking.’

‘Not to me,’ I said.

‘Your son is a fine young man.’

I explained, I hadn’t a clear idea what he had been doing.

‘It makes no difference,’ said Azik. ‘It is all settled. Like that–’ he swept his arm.

‘She’s as obstinate as a pig, she always was,’ said Rosalind.

Azik gave a brisk businesslike account. Nothing had affected Muriel. Not that that was different from what I had expected: I imagined that she had stayed polite and temperate all through. While others had been arguing with her, giving advice, making appeals, she had been quietly working with her solicitor. The Chelsea flat had been sold (‘at a fair price’, said Azik): she had bought a house in Belgravia, and moved into it, along with child and nurse, the day before. The transaction had gone through so fast that Azik assumed that it must have been started months ago.