Charles Snow - Last Things

That could be coped with. And also, he went on, half-sternly, half-persuasively, it was time I took myself in hand. I had worked hard all my life: it was time I made more of my leisure. ‘I’m damned well going to enjoy my sixties, and so ought you,’ he said. He was leading up to a project that he had mentioned before. The house in Cambridge, full of children, happy-go-lucky, called by young Charles and his friends the Getliffe steading, he couldn’t bear to leave, he would stay there in term-time always. But he and Katherine were hankering after another house, more likely to get some sun in winter, maybe somewhere like Provence. Why shouldn’t we find a place together? They would occupy it perhaps four months a year, and Margaret and I in spring and autumn?

We couldn’t travel far while Margaret’s father was alive, I replied, as I had done previously. No, but that couldn’t be forever. Francis was set on the plan, more set than when he first introduced it. It would be good for his married children and their families. It would be good for ours – Charles, Francis said, would be mysteriously asking to have the house to himself and leaving us to guess whom he was bringing there.

He was so active, so determined to get me into the sunshine, that I was almost persuaded. It might be pleasant as we all became old. But I held on enough not to make the final promise. I wasn’t as hospitable as Francis, nor anything like as fond of movement. Anyway, now the plan had crystallised, I didn’t doubt that he would carry it through, whether I joined in or not. It had started as a scheme largely for my sake: but also Francis, decisive and executive as ever, was carving out a pattern for his old age.

BEFORE evening, the room was smelling of flowers and whisky. The flowers were due, in the main, to Azik Schiff, who hadn’t come to visit me himself but whose response to physical ailments was to provide a lavish display of horticulture. More flowers than they’d ever seen sent, said the nurses, and my credit rose in consequence. Though I could have done without the hyacinths which, since my nose was sensitive to begin with and had been made more so by blindness, gave me a headache, the only malaise of the day.

As for the whisky, that had been drunk before lunch by Hector Rose and his wife and after tea by Margaret and a visitor who hadn’t been invited, my nephew Pat. When Margaret was sitting beside my chair and she was reading me the morning’s letters, there were footsteps, male footsteps, that I didn’t recognise. But I did recognise a stiffening in Margaret’s voice as she said good afternoon.

‘Hallo, Aunt Meg. Hallo, Uncle Lew. Good to see you up. That’s better, isn’t it, that really is better.’

It was a situation in which, given enough nerve, he was bound to win. Whatever he didn’t have, he had enough nerve. Though he might have been slandering Margaret and her children, she couldn’t raise a quarrel in a hospital bedroom. And he was reckoning that I was quite incapacitated. There he might have been wrong: but as usual in Pat’s presence, I didn’t want to say what a juster man might have said. Margaret stayed silent: and I was reduced to asking Pat how he had heard about me.

‘Well-known invalid, of course.’

‘No,’ I said, ‘we’ve kept it very quiet. On purpose.’

‘Not quiet enough, Uncle Lew.’ Pat’s voice was ebullient and full of cheek.

Margaret had still said nothing, but I listened to the splash of liquid. Presumably he was helping himself to a drink. He said, irrepressible, that he couldn’t reveal his sources – and then gave an account, almost completely accurate, of what had happened since I entered the hospital. Massage of the heart. Margaret being sent for.

‘It must have been terrible for you, Aunt Meg.’

Margaret had to reply.

‘I shouldn’t like to go through it again,’ she said. The curious thing was, his sympathy was genuine.

‘Terrible,’ he said again. Then he couldn’t resist showing that he knew the name of the heart specialist, and even how he had telephoned Margaret on the first night.

That was something I hadn’t been told myself. As before with Pat, just as in the past with Gilbert Cooke, I felt uncomfortably hemmed in, as though I was being watched by a flashy but fairly successful private detective. Actually, I realised later that there was no mystery about Pat’s source of information. There was only one person whom it could have come from. My brother Martin had been asking Margaret for news several times a day. And Martin, who was as discreet as Hector Rose in his least forthcoming moments, who had, when working on the atomic bomb, never let slip a secret even to his wife, on this occasion, as on others, could, and must, have told everything to his son.

Pat might be said to have outstayed his welcome, if there had been any welcome. Talking cheerfully, the bounce and sparkle not diminishing, he stayed until Margaret herself had to leave. But there had been, aided by alcohol, some truce of amicability in the room. Margaret had taken another drink, and Pat several more. It was I who was left out: for to me, who wasn’t yet drinking, there might be amicability in the room, but there was also an increasing smell of whisky.

Later that night, when I had been put back to bed, the telephone rang on the bedside table. Gropingly, my hand got hold of the receiver. It was Margaret.

‘I don’t want to worry you, but I think you’d better know. It’s not serious, but it’s rather irritating.’

Normally, I should have demanded the news at once. But in the calm in which I was existing, as yet inexplicable to me but nevertheless very happy, I wasn’t in a hurry. I asked if it were anything to do with Charles, and Margaret said no. I said: ‘You needn’t mind about worrying me, you know.’

‘Well,’ came her voice, ‘there’s an item in one of the later editions. I think I’d better read it, hadn’t I?’

‘Go ahead.’

The item, Margaret told me, occurred in a new-style gossip column, copied from New York. It read something to the effect that I had been undergoing optical surgery, and that there had been complications which had caused ‘grave concern’.

When she rang up to break the news, Margaret assumed that this would enrage and worry me. She had seen me and others close to me secretive about their health. One of the first lessons you learned in any sort of professional life was that you should never be ill. It reduced your mana . When I was a young man, and just attracting some work at the Bar, I had been told that I was seriously ill. I had gone to extreme lengths to conceal it: if I had died, it wouldn’t have mattered anyway – and if, as it turned out, I didn’t, well then I had been right.

Nowadays I was removed from the official life: but even to a writer it did harm – an impalpable superstitious discreditable harm – if people heard that your death was near. You were already on the way to being dispensed with. The way they talked about you – ‘did you know, poor old X seems to be finished’ – was dismissive rather than cruel, though there was a twist of gloating there, showing through their self-congratulation that they were still right in the middle of the mortal scene.

So Margaret anticipated that this bit of news would harass me – and, before I went into hospital, she would have been right. Now it didn’t. I said: ‘Oh, that doesn’t matter.’

‘We’d better do something, hadn’t we?’

I was reflecting. The lessons I had learned seemed very distant; but still they had been learned, and one might as well not throw them away.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose we’d better be prudent. I’ll make Christopher Mansel send out a bulletin.’