Charles Snow - Last Things

Once again apparatus was being fixed to my chest, the chill of glass, the whirr of a machine. Then, for some time, I could hear no one in the room. Out of a kind of bravado, I called out.

‘Yes, sir,’ came a chirping, quiet voice, a nurse’s that I hadn’t heard before. ‘Do you want anything?’

‘No, as a matter of fact, I don’t,’ I had to say.

I couldn’t talk to her: I remained with suspiciousness keeping me just one side of the edge of sleep. It took Mansel’s greeting to startle me full awake.

‘Here we are again, sir!’

I could distinguish other footsteps besides his.

‘I want to introduce a friend of mine–’ Mansel again – ‘Dr Bradbury. Actually he was here last night, but you were slightly too full of dope to talk to him. He’s a heart specialist, as a matter of fact. That’s because it’s easier than coping with eyes, isn’t it, Maxim?’

As soon as I heard Maxim reply, I recognised the voice. It had been present among the commotion – all mixed up by the shock disentanglable now – of the night before. It was very deep (they were exchanging gibes about which line brought in the easy money), as deep as my brother’s or Charles’, but without the bite that lurked at the back of theirs. This was just deep and warm.

A hand gripped mine, and a chair scraped on the floor beside the bed.

‘The news is good.’ Slow, gentle, warm, emphatic. ‘The first thing is, I want you to believe me. The news is good.’

I felt excessively grateful, so grateful that my reply was gruff.

‘Well, what is it?’

‘Your heart is as sound today as it was yesterday morning. We’ve looked at it as thoroughly as we know how, and we shouldn’t be able to detect that anything had happened. I couldn’t tell you this unless I was sure.’

Mansel (quietly): ‘I can guarantee that.’

‘I need hardly say’, I remarked, ‘that I hope you’re right.’

‘We are right, you know.’ Deep, gentle voice. ‘I expect you want to ask, then why did it happen? The honest answer is, we haven’t the slightest idea. It was simply a freak.’

‘A freak which might have been mildly conclusive,’ I said.

‘Yes, it might. I have to tell you again, we haven’t the slightest idea why it happened. All we know is that it did. After you’d been on the operating table for an hour and a half. I’m not sure whether Christopher has told you–’

Mansel: ‘No, not much.’

‘Well, I think you ought to know. Christopher tried to start the heart again by external massage. That didn’t work. Then he decided – and he was perfectly right – that he hadn’t much time to spare, so he did it from inside. Fortunately, although he’s an eye-man, he’s quite a competent surgeon.’

Undergraduate teasing, in the midst of all the energy he was spending upon me.

‘I’ve got a certain amount of faith in him,’ I caught the same tone.

Mansel cachinnated.

‘So you should have.’ This was Maxim. ‘Now I want you to listen to something else. This has been an unusual experience, and that’s rather an understatement, isn’t it? It’s an experience which could do harm to a good many people. You have to be pretty robust to take it in your stride. Robust psychologically – we can look after you physically, you’re absolutely all right there. I should guess you’re a tough specimen all the way round, and Christopher gives you an excellent report. But this is going to call for as much toughness as you can find. You’ve got to put it behind you. Straightaway. Today.’

It was a long time since anyone had spoken to me as paternally as this. I hadn’t yet seen his face, and, as it happened, I never did see it. He might very well be young enough, as Mansel was, to be my son. Yet I felt, not only gratitude so strong as to be uncomfortable, but also acquiescence, or even something like obedience.

‘You’ve got to forget it.’ The voice was even warmer, even more urgent. ‘That’s what I’m really telling you. The only danger is that you’ll let it stay with you. You’ve got to forget it.’

Curiously enough, that was what another strong-natured patient man had told us, at the end of the murder trial eighteen months before. But, after we had listened, my brother had said that that meant living in illusion: it might have been more comfortable, but it would have been wrong. You’ve got to forget it. This time, if I could obey, it presumably would do no harm to anyone, it wouldn’t mean false hope, it wouldn’t be wrong. And yet, as I thanked Maxim, I added that I wasn’t much good at forgetting things.

‘Well, you’ve got to train yourself. This was just an incident. Don’t let it make life dark for you. I’m going to tell you again, you’ve got to forget it.’

I heard him get up from the bedside, and then he and Mansel, at the far end of the room, engaged themselves in a professional argument mixed with backchat. I couldn’t follow much, the two voices, phone and antiphone, light and clear against deep bass, were kept low. But they each seemed to have a taste for facetiousness which wasn’t mine. Somehow I gathered that Maxim was not Bradbury’s baptismal name but had been invented by Mansel, who took great credit for it. As for the argument, that was about me.

‘Nothing secret,’ Bradbury called out, considerate and kind. ‘We’re just wondering when to get you up.’

Though I didn’t appreciate it, they were meeting a dilemma. What was good for the heart was a counter-indication for the eye, and vice versa. For the heart, they would like me sitting up that day: to give the eye the best chance, the longer I lay immobilised, the better.

‘Well, I’ll see how it looks tomorrow,’ I heard Mansel tell him, and Bradbury came nearer the bed to say goodbye.

‘I probably shan’t have to see you again,’ he said. ‘I’m very pleased with you. Do remember what I’ve told you.’

The door clicked shut behind them. With that voice still comforting me, I needn’t fight against sleep any more. In a moment, seconds rather than minutes, as though I were going under the anaesthetic again, I was flat out.

When I woke, I first had the sense of well-being that came after deep sleep. Then suddenly, eyes pressed by the darkness, I remembered what had happened. That wasn’t the first time I had wakened happy and then been sickened by the thought of what lay ahead; there had been a good many such times since I was young: but this was the darkest.

My side hurt a little, so little that I should scarcely have noticed. That brought it all back. It had happened once. It could happen again. I was as frightened as I had been in the night. Perhaps more than that.

I tried to steady myself by recalling Bradbury’s words. This was cowardly; it was unrealistic; he said that all was well. If he had been back in the room, I should have been reassured. Totally reassured, effusively grateful once more. But now he had left me, I could see through all the lies: either I had been deceiving myself he hadn’t said those words, or else I could see through his reasons for saying them. They knew that it would happen again. Perhaps that day or the next. He thought I might as well have the rest of my time in peace.

MARGARET was speaking to me and holding my hand. It couldn’t have been many minutes since I awoke, but I had lost all sense of time. In fact, she had arrived about eleven o’clock; Mansel and Bradbury had made their call quite early, not long after eight.

I muttered her name. She kissed me and asked: ‘How is it now?’

‘It’s too much for me.’

Her fingers stiffened in mine, gripped hard. After the other operation, or even after Mansel broke the news the previous evening, she had heard me make some sort of pretence at sarcasm; she had come in expecting it now. She had come in, waiting to break down and confide what she had gone through: the telephone call as she sat in the flat at midday: just – would she come round to the hospital at once. The taxi ride through the miles of streets. Kept waiting at the hospital. No explanation. A long five minutes – so she told me later. (She remembered as little of them afterwards as if she had been drunk.) At last Mansel at the door, looking pallid. Then he said it was all right. Sharp clinical words to hearten her. After that, the operating theatre, where she sat waiting for me to come round.