Charles Snow - Last Things

SPONGE in my hands, warm water on my face, Mansel’s voice, the flurry of early morning.

‘They tell me you’ve slept, sir.’

‘Better, anyway,’ I said, as though it were bad luck to admit it. Eye uncovered, the lights of the room, three dimensions of the commode, standing out like a piece of hardware by Chardin. Mansel’s face close to mine. In a short time, he said: ‘Good. Qualified optimism still permitted.’

After he had blindfolded me once more, his voice sounded as in a prepared speech.

‘Now we have to make a decision, sir.’

My nerves sharpened. ‘What’s the matter?’

‘Nothing. It’s a choice of two courses, that’s all. You heard me and Maxim discuss it yesterday, didn’t you?’

‘I heard something.’

‘You’re getting on well, you know. The point is, if we’re going to get you generally fit as soon as may be, you probably ought to sit up most of today. Now that may, just possibly, disturb the eye. I’m beginning to think, I may as well tell you, that we’re very likely too finicky about keeping eye patients still. I suspect in a few years it will seem very old-fashioned. But I have to say that some of my colleagues wouldn’t agree. So, if we let you up, one has to warn you, there is – so far as the retina goes – a finite risk.’

I was beginning to speak, but Mansel stopped me.

‘I’m not going to let you make the choice. Though I fancy I know which it would be. No, I don’t think there is any reasonable doubt. Your general health is much more important than a margin of risk to the retina. Which I don’t want you to get depressed about. With a little good fortune, we ought to keep that in order too.’

He could see my face.

‘And it will be distinctly good for your morale, won’t it?’

Mansel gave an amiable, clinical chuckle. ‘Though it’s stood up pretty well, I give you that.’ He didn’t know it all, but he knew something. I was thinking, perhaps not even Margaret knew it all.

After he had given instructions that the nurses were to get me up during the morning, he was saying goodbye. Then he had another thought.

‘I wanted to ask you. Which is the hardest to put up with? Having to lie still. Or having to live in the dark.’

‘You needn’t have asked,’ I said. ‘Having to live in the dark is about a hundred times worse.’

‘I thought so. I have had patients who got frantic at being fixed in one position. But you manage to put up with that, don’t you? Good morning, sir.’

When Charles March arrived, I was already sitting up in an armchair. They had told me that he had visited the hospital twice in the last twenty-four hours, being not only an old friend but also my doctor. Each time he came, I had been asleep. Now I apologised, saying that I hadn’t been entirely responsible for my actions. Charles replied that he had dimly realised that that was the case.

I suspected that he was gazing straight into my face. How much did it tell him? There weren’t many more observant men. He said, in a matter-of-fact doctor-like fashion, that he was glad they had got me up. Mansel, in the middle of his professional circuit, had found time to telephone Charles twice about my condition, and had also written him a longish letter.

‘If either of us were as efficient as that young man,’ I said, ‘we might have got somewhere.’

It was not long after, and we were still chatting, not yet intimately, that I heard Margaret’s footsteps on the floor outside. As she came in, she exclaimed in surprise, and approaching my chair, asked how I was, said in the same breath that they must be satisfied with me to let me out of bed. Then went on: ‘How is he, Charles?’

‘I think he looks pretty good, don’t you agree?’

For some time neither of them enquired, even by implication, about my state of mind: in fact, I soon believed that they were shying off it. Margaret had seen enough the day before; and Charles, who had once known me as well as any of my friends, was being cautious. We talked about our children and relatives; it was casually, in the midst of the conversation, that she remarked: ‘What are you going to do with yourself all day, sitting there?’

‘Exactly what I should do lying there.’ Blindly I moved a hand in what I thought to be the direction of the bed. ‘It’s even a slight improvement, you know.’

‘Of course it is.’ Margaret sounded quick, affirmative, like one correcting a piece of her own tactlessness.

Then I said: ‘No. There’s going to be a difference.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I’m not going to sit here all day doing nothing. I’d like you to get some people in. If I can’t see them, I might as well hear them.’

‘So you shall.’ But Margaret, busy with practical arrangements, saying that she would pass the word round by tomorrow, promising that she would send in some bottles of Scotch, was nevertheless puzzled as well as pleased. So was Charles: for they both knew that this was quite unlike me, that in illness – as in my first operation – I wanted to hide like a sick animal, seeing no one except my family, and them only out of duty. I couldn’t have enlightened them. It was one of the occasions when one seemed to be performing like a sleep-walker. If I had been forced to give an explanation, I should probably have said – very lamely – that I realised, as on the day before, that this mood, or any other mood, wouldn’t last, but that I wished to commit myself to it. Perhaps I could fight off regressions, the return to that night, the sense of – nothing, once I had announced that I intended to have people round me.

Later Charles told me that that was very near his own interpretation. He thought that I was trying to hold on to something concrete, so as to ward off the depressive swing. With Margaret it was different. Of the three of us, she alone thought that I was stabler than I myself believed, and that she could see – unperceived, or even denied, by me – not only a new resolve, but underneath it a singular, sharp but indefinable change.

If she had been beside me in a waking spell that night, she mightn’t have been astonished at what I felt. First I spoke out loud, to see if there were a nurse in the room. Then I realised that the blood-pressure watch had been called off, they were leaving me alone. That didn’t frighten me or even remind me. On the contrary, I was immediately taken over by a benign and strangely innocent happiness. I didn’t for an instant understand it. It was different in kind from any happiness that I had known, utterly different from the serenity, the half-complacent satisfaction, in which I had gone about after refusing the government job. Perhaps the nearest approach would be nights when I had wakened and recalled a piece of work that had gone well. But that wasn’t very near – this didn’t have an element of memory or self-concern. It was as innocent as nights when I woke up as a child and enjoyed the sound of a lashing storm outside. It was so benign that I did not want to go to sleep again.

After Mansel had examined me next morning, he was ruminating on what he called ‘morale’. Mine was still keeping up, he thought, with his usual inspectorial honesty. A doctor never really knew how a patient would react to extreme situations.

‘You’re very modest, Christopher,’ I said.

‘No, sir. Just open-minded, I hope.’

Both of us ought to be interested in my morale, he said. I spent some time at it, I remarked, but Mansel was not amused. Tomorrow, he said, there might be another minor decision for us to take.

Taking me at my word, Margaret had telephoned the previous afternoon to say that I could expect some visitors. The first, in the middle of the morning, was Francis Getliffe. His tread sounded heavy, as it used to sound up my staircase in college, for so spare a man. I greeted him by name before he reached me, and he responded as though I had performed a conjuring trick.