Charles Snow - Last Things

I had been in a big room: I was back in one where the voices were close to me, which soothed me because, with what senses I had left, it was familiar: I didn’t ask, I knew I had slept there the night before.

I was awake enough, tranquil enough, to recognise that I was parched with thirst. I asked for a drink, finding it necessary to explain to Margaret (was she still on my right?) that I was intolerably dry. The feel of liquid on a furred clumsy tongue. Then the taste came through. This was lime juice. Delectable. As though I were tasting for the first time. All in order: lime juice present according to plan: reassurance: back where I ought to be.

Someone was lifting my left arm, cloth tightening against the muscle.

‘What are you doing?’ I shouted, reassurance destroyed at a touch, suspicion flaring up.

‘Only a little test.’ A nurse’s voice.

‘What are you testing for?’

Whispers near me. Was one of them Margaret’s?

Mansel: ‘I want to know your blood pressure. Standard form.’

‘Why do you want to know?’

‘Routine.’

In the darkness, one suspicion soothed, faded out, left a nothingness, another suspicion filled it. Did they expect me to have a stroke? What were they doing? Ignorant suspicions, mind not coping, more like a qualm of the body, the helpless body.

‘Everything is all right,’ Margaret was saying quietly.

‘Everything is not all right.’

A patch of silence. They were leaving me alone. Neither Margaret nor Mansel was talking. For an instant, feeling safer, I asked for another drink.

Time was playing tricks, my attention had its lulls, it might have been minutes before a hand was pulling my jacket aside, something cold, glass, metal against the skin.

‘What are you doing now?’ I broke out again.

‘Another test, that’s all.’ Mansel’s voice didn’t alter.

‘I’ve got to know. I’m not going on like this.’

Fingers were fixing apparatus on my chest.

‘What’s gone wrong?’ Again, that didn’t sound like my own voice. ‘I’ve got to know what’s wrong.’

Clicks and whirrs from some machine. My hearing had become preternaturally acute and I could hear Mansel and Margaret whispering together.

‘Shall I tell him?’ Mansel was asking.

‘You’d better. He’s noticed everything–’

There was movement by the side of my bed, and Mansel, instead of Margaret, was speaking clearly into my ear.

‘There’s nothing to worry about now. But your heart stopped.’ The words were spaced out, distinct. They didn’t carry much meaning. I said dully ‘Oh.’

I gathered, whether Mansel told me then or not I was never sure, that it had happened in the middle of the operation.

I asked: ‘How long for?’

‘Between three and a half and three and three-quarter minutes.’ I thought later, not then, that when Mansel told one the truth, he told the truth.

‘We got it going again,’ Mansel’s voice was cheerful. ‘There’s a bit of a cut under your ribs. You’re fine now.’

He was at pains to assure me that the eye operation had been completed. It was time, he said, for him to let my wife talk to me.

Replacing Mansel’s voice was Margaret’s, steady and warm.

‘Now you know.’

I said, ‘Yes, I know.’ I added: ‘I bring you back no news from the other world.’

Margaret went on talking, making plans for a fortnight ahead (‘You’ll be out of here by then, you understand, don’t you?’), saying there would be plenty of time to argue about theology. She sounded calm, ready to laugh: she was concealing from me that she was in a state of shock.

Just as my remark might have concealed my state from her. In fact, it had been quite automatic. It could have seemed – perhaps it did to Margaret – as carefully debonair, as much prepared for, as her father’s greeting to me after his messed-up attempt at suicide. You see God’s own fool. I might have been imitating him. Yet I hadn’t enough control for that. Anything I said slipped out at random, as though Margaret had put sixpence in a juke box and we both had to listen with surprise to what came out.

Later, when I thought about it in something like detachment, it occurred to me how histrionic we all could be. Perhaps we had to be far enough gone. Then, though it might be right outside our ordinary style, we put on an act. For Austin Davidson, who had always enjoyed his own refined brand of histrionics, it came natural to rehearse, to bring off his opening speech. I was about as much unlike Davidson as a man could reasonably be: but I too, though as involuntarily as a ventriloquist’s dummy, had put on an act. Probably we should all have been capable of making gallows jokes, in the strictest sense: we should all, if we were about to be executed in public, have managed to make a show of it. It might have been different if one was being killed in a cellar, with no audience there to watch.

It might have been different. It was different for me, when I had to get through that night. Margaret left me: so did Mansel, and another doctor, one with a strong deep voice. Not that I was left alone: there were nurses in the room, busy and quiet, as I lay there in the hallucinatory darkness, in full surrender to the state which perhaps I had concealed from Margaret. It was one of the simplest of states, just terror.

I had learnt enough about anxiety all through my life. Worse, I had been frightened plenty of times – in London during the war, on air journeys, visits to doctors, or during my illness as a young man. But up to that night I hadn’t known what it was like to be terrified. There was no alleviation, no complexity, nor, what had helped in bad times before, an observer just behind my mind, injecting into unhappiness and fear a kind of taunting irony, mixed up with hope. No, nothing of that. This was a pure state and apart from it I had, all through that night, no existence. All through that night? That wasn’t how I lived it. The night went from moment to moment. There mightn’t be another.

Soon after Mansel’s good night, fingers were cool against my arm again, a susurration, a whisper, the rustle of paper.

‘All right?’ I muttered, trying to ask a casual question, craving for some news.

‘You go to sleep,’ said a nurse’s voice, calm and muted.

Within minutes – I was drugged but not asleep, I couldn’t count the time – fingers on my arm, the same sounds in the dark.

‘What is it?’ I cried.

‘Try to sleep.’

I dozed. But there was something of me left – the will or deeper – which was frightened to give way. Sleep would be a blessing. But sleep was also oblivion. Fingers on my arm once more. Once more I tried to ask. To them I made no sense. To myself I wanted to talk rationally, as though I were interested, not terrified. I couldn’t. Time after time, between sleep and consciousness, the fingers at my arm.

It became like one of those interrogations in which the prisoner is not allowed to rest. I couldn’t understand that they were taking my blood pressure three times an hour.

Once, between the tests, I was aware of my left eye. Staring into the darkness, which wasn’t the darkness of a black night, but, as I recalled from the operation two years before, was reddened, patterned, embossed, I saw a miniature light, like a weak bulb, very near to me, as though it were burning in the eye itself. I was aware of that without giving it a thought: I might have been a man desperately busy, preoccupied with a major and obsessive task, not able or willing to divert himself with something as trivial as the condition of his eye.

It was abject to have no interest – or even, so it seemed, no time, as though every second of the night was precious – for anything but fright. I made an effort to address myself rationally, as I had tried to speak to the nurses. Perhaps I was trying to put on an act to myself as I did to others. Under trial, we all wished to behave differently from how we felt, there was a complementarity which made us less ashamed. Waiting for the nurse’s fingers, I wanted to reason away the terror, exorcising it by words, thinking to myself as I rarely did, in words, using words to stiffen (or blandish or deceive) myself as one might use them on another.