Charles Snow - Last Things

‘One’s ears get rather sharp,’ I said.

‘You’re putting up with it better than I could.’

‘Nonsense. Little you know.’

‘Yes, you are. You can cope with it, can’t you?’ His tone was affectionate but hesitant. Perhaps, I thought (for I hadn’t seen him with anyone incapacitated before), he was one of those inhibited when they had to speak to the blind or deaf. I said that it was tiresome not being able to see him.

‘I bet it must be.’ But that was an absent-minded reply; he was thinking of something else. As he talked, still hesitantly, I realised that Margaret must have told him the whole case history. Not that he referred to it straight out: he was skirting round it, trying not to touch a nerve, wanting to take care of me. He felt safer when he was on neutral ground, such as politics. The world was looking blacker. We agreed, in all the time we had known each other, there had been only three periods of hope – outside our own private lives, that is. The twenties: curiously enough, wartime: and then the five or six years just past. But that last had been a false hope, we admitted it now.

‘If anyone’, said Francis, ‘can show me one single encouraging sign anywhere in the world this year, I’d be very grateful.’

‘Yes,’ I said. Things had gone worse than expectations, even realistic or minimum expectations. As Einstein in old age had said, there seemed a weird inevitability about it all. Very little that Francis and I had done together had been useful.

‘This country is steadier than most. But I can’t imagine what will have happened before we’re ten years older. I’m not sure that I want to.’

It was all sensible: yet was he just talking to play out time? I broke out: ‘Forty-eight hours ago, I should have been quite sure that I didn’t want to.’

He said something, embarrassed, kind, but I went on: ‘It would have seemed quite remarkably irrelevant. It rather restricts one’s interests, you know, when you’re told you might have been dead.’

‘Do you mind talking about it?’

‘Not in the slightest.’

‘I couldn’t if I were you.’

Strangely – as I had been realising while the earlier conversation went on, impersonal and strained – that was the fact. What I had said, which wouldn’t have troubled Charles March or my brother, risked making him more awkward still. It was a deliberate risk. Francis, who was a brave man, physically as well as morally, was less hardened than most of us. His courage was a courage of the nerves.

While he had been talking, so diffidently, I had recalled an incident of the fairly recent past. At that time it was not unusual, if one moved in the official world, to be asked to prepare an advance obituary notice of an acquaintance – all ready for The Times . I had done several. One day, it must have been three or four years before, someone announced himself on the telephone as a member of the paper’s staff. Agitation. He had found that by some oversight, on which he elaborated with distress, there was no obituary of Francis Getliffe. How could this be? ‘It would be terrible,’ said the anxious voice, ‘I shouldn’t like to be caught short about a man like Getliffe.’

While I was reflecting on that peculiar expression, I was being pressed to produce an obituary – in forty-eight hours? at latest by the end of the week? Francis was in robust health when last seen, I said, but the voice said, ‘We can’t take any risks.’ So I agreed and set to work. Most of it was easy, since I knew Francis’ career as well as my own, but I wasn’t familiar with his early childhood. His father had married twice, and I had heard almost nothing about his second wife, Francis’ mother. So I had to ring up Cambridge. Francis was out, but his wife Katherine answered the phone. When I told her the object of the exercise, she broke into a cheerful scream, and then, no more worried than I was myself, gave businesslike answers. She would pass the good news on to Francis, she said. She had listened to some of his colleagues fretting, in case their obituary should be written by an enemy.

I had met Francis in London shortly afterwards. Without a second thought, I told him the piece was written and presumably safe in the Times files. I asked him if he would like to read a copy. Without a second thought – taking it for granted that he would like what I had written, and also taking it for granted that he would behave like an old-style rationalist. For in that respect Francis often behaved like a doctrinaire unbeliever of an earlier century than ours; like, for example, old Winslow, who refused to set foot in college chapel except for magisterial elections, and then only after making written protests. Francis likewise did not go into chapel even for memorial services; his children had not been baptised and, when he was introduced into the Lords, instead of taking the oath he affirmed. Whereas men like my brother Martin, who believed as little as Francis, would go through the forms without fuss, saying, as Martin did, that if he had been a Roman he would have put a pinch of salt on the altar and not felt that he was straining his conscience.

So innocently I asked Francis if he would care to read his obituary. ‘Certainly not,’ Francis had said, outraged. Or perhaps hag-ridden, like a Russian seeing one trying to shake his hand across the threshold, or my mother turning up the ace of spades.

When, as Francis was taking care to avoid any subject which might disquiet me, I recalled that incident, it occurred to me that someone must have written my own obituary. I expected to feel a chill, but none came. It was curious to be waiting for that kind of dread, and then be untouched.

After I had been brusque, cutting out the delicateness, Francis became easier. He said: ‘This mustn’t happen again, you know.’

‘It’s bound to happen again once, isn’t it?’

‘Not like that. I was horrified when Margaret told me. I must say, she was very good.’

She had had the worst of it, Francis was saying. Almost as though I had done it on purpose, it crossed my mind. No, that was quite unfair. Francis, whom acquaintances thought buttoned up and bleak, was speaking with emotion. He had been horrified. I was too careless. Did I give a thought to how much I should be missed?

Though I was to most appearances more spontaneous than Francis I shouldn’t, if our positions were reversed, have told him so simply how much I’d miss him.

I nearly gave another grim answer such as even that seemed a somewhat secondary consideration, but it would have been denying affection. Of the people we had grown up with, we had scarcely, except ourselves, any intimates left. Some had died: others the chances of life had driven away, just as Francis had been parted from his brother-in-law Charles March.

And I, who felt the old affinity with Charles March each time we met, nevertheless had ceased to be close to him, simply because there was no routine of living to bring us together. While Francis and I, during much of our lives, had seen each other every day at meetings. It sounded mechanical, but as you grew older that kind of habit and alliance was a part of intimacy without which it peacefully declined.

Francis’ tone altered, he began to sound at his most practical. He proposed to talk to some of his medical friends in the Royal. This never ought to have happened, he said. It was no use passing it off as a fluke or an accident. There must be a cause. What sort of anaesthetic had they used? This all had to be cleared up in case I was forced some day into another operation. There had to be a bit of decent scientific thinking, he said, with impatience as well as clarity – just as he used to speak, cutting through cotton wool, at committee tables during the war.