Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Shall I talk to him tonight?’

‘It can wait until he comes in tomorrow morning.’

When Margaret had rung off, I lay in bed, not thinking of Mansel’s bulletin, but contentedly preoccupied with a problem that gave me a certain pleasure. Whoever had leaked that news? It couldn’t be the doctors. It couldn’t be my family. Someone in the hospital? Just possibly. Someone whom Margaret had talked to, trying to enlist visitors for me? Possibly.

No, the answer was too easy. There was one person who stood out, beautifully probable. Motive, opportunity, the lot. I would have bet heavily on my nephew Pat. He had his contacts with the young journalists. Once or twice before, our doings had been speculated about knowledgeably in the gossip columns. Pat was not above receiving a pound or two as a linkman. There was not much which Pat was above.

The next morning, as Mansel said good morning, I told him about the rumour and said that I wanted him to correct it.

‘Right, sir. There are one or two things first, though.’

After he had examined the left eye, he said: ‘Promising.’ He paused, like a minister answering a supplementary question, wanting to give satisfaction, so long as it wasn’t the final commitment: ‘I think I can say we shall be unlucky if anything goes wrong this time.’

Quick fingers, and the eye was shut into darkness again.

‘That’ll do, I think.’ Mansel was gazing at me as though he had made an excellent joke.

‘What about the other eye?’ I said.

‘You can have that, if you like.’ He gave a short allocution. What I had said the day before was what he expected most patients to say. He had already decided to leave the good eye unblinded. It was more convenient to have me in hospital for a few more days: I should stand it better if I had an eye to see with. The advantages of blinding both eyes probably wasn’t worth the psychological wear and tear. ‘I’m pretty well convinced’, said Mansel, ‘that we’ve got to learn to do these operations and leave you one working eye right from the start.’

I said that I should like to stand him a drink, but in his profession, at 6.45 in the morning, that didn’t seem quite appropriate. I said also that, if he would leave me one eye, he could go through the entire eye operation again. Without any frills or additions, however.

Mansel was scrutinising me.

‘You could face it again, could you?’

‘If it’s not going to happen, one can face anything.’

He seemed to make another entry in his mental notebook – behaviour of patient, after being allowed vision .

‘Well, sir, what about this statement? That’s really your department, not mine, you know.’ It was true, he was not so brisk, masterful and masterly when he sat down and started to compose.

Ballpoint pen tapping his teeth, he stayed motionless, like Henry James in search of the exact, the perfect, the unique word. After a substantial interval, at least fifteen minutes, he said, with unhabitual diffidence, with a touch of pride: ‘How will this do?’

He read out the name of the hospital, and then–

Sir Lewis Eliot entered this hospital on 27 November, and next day an operation was performed for a retinal detachment in the left eye. As a result there are good prospects that the eye will be restored to useful vision. During the course of the operation, Sir Lewis underwent a cardiac arrest. This was treated in a routine manner. In all respects, Sir Lewis’ progress and condition are excellent.

‘Well, Christopher,’ I said, ‘no one could call you a sensational writer.’

‘I think that says all that’s necessary.’

‘Cardiac arrest, that’s what you call it, is it?’

I hadn’t heard the phrase before. Though, by a coincidence, when my eye first went wrong, two years earlier, I had been reminded of an older phrase, ‘arrest of life’. Perhaps that was too melodramatic for a black veil over half an eye. This time, it didn’t seem so.

‘After all,’ I remarked absently to Mansel, ‘one doesn’t have too many.’

‘Too many what?’

‘Arrests of life.’

‘Cardiac arrests is what we say. No, of course not, most people only have one.’ Unfussed, he went off to telephone the bulletin to the Press Association, while I got up, self-propelled again, and, being able to see, was also able to eat. It was a luxury to sit, free from the solipsistic darkness, and just gaze out of the window – though, even as the sky lightened, it was still a leaden morning, and bedroom lamps were being switched on, high up in the houses opposite.

Mansel had told the nurses not to let me move, except from bed to chair. But the telephone was fixed close by, and I rang Margaret up, telling her to bring reading-matter. That wasn’t specially urgent, it was good enough to enjoy looking at things. But this presumably soon ceased to be a treat. Thirty years ago, I was remembering, an eminent writer had given me some unsolicited advice. Just look at an orange, she said. Go on looking at it. For hours. Then put down what you see. In the hospital room there was, as it happened, an orange. I looked at it. I thought that I should soon have enough of – what had she called it? The physiognomic charm of phenomena.

It was a relief when the telephone rang. The porter in the entrance hall, announcing that Mr Eliot was down below. ‘We’ve been told to send up the names of visitors from now on, sir.’ Mr Eliot? It could be one of three. When I heard quick steps far down the corridor, my ear was still attuned. That was Charles.

He came across the room and, in silence, shook my hand. Then he sat down, still without speaking. It was unlike him, or both of us together, to be so silent. There was a constraint between us right from the beginning.

With my unobscured eye, I was gazing at him. He gazed back at me. He said: ‘I didn’t expect–’

‘What?’

‘That they’d let you see.’

‘New technique,’ I said, glad to have a topic to start us talking. I explained why Mansel had unblinded me.

‘It must be an improvement.’

‘Enormous.’

We were talking like strangers, impersonally impressed by a medical advance: no, more concentrated upon eye surgery, more eager not to deviate from it, than if we had been strangers.

Another pause, as though we had forgotten the trick of talking, at which people thought we were both so easy.

At last I said: ‘This has been a curious experience.’

‘I suppose so.’ Then quickly: ‘You’re looking pretty well.’

‘I think I’m probably very well. Never better in my life, I dare say. It seems an odd way of achieving it.’

Charles gave a tight smile, but he wasn’t responding to the kind of sarcasm, or grim facetiousness, with which he and I, and Martin also, liked to greet our various fatalities. Was I making claims on him that he couldn’t meet? The last time my eye had gone wrong, and it seemed that I was going to lose its sight, he had been fierce with concern. Then he had been two years younger. Now, in so many ways a man, he spoke, or didn’t speak, as though his concern was knotted up, inexpressible, or so tangled that he couldn’t let it out.

It was strange, it was more than strange, it was disappointing and painful, that he should be self-conscious as I had scarcely seen him. At this time of all times. I thought later that perhaps we knew too much: too much to be easy, that is, not enough to come out on the other side. He had plenty of insight, but he wasn’t trusting it, as the constraint got hold of us, nor was I mine.

A father’s death. What did one feel? What was one supposed to feel? Sheer loss, pious and organic, a part of oneself cut away – that would have been the proper answer in my childhood: but a lot of sons knew that it wasn’t so clean and comfortable as that. When I was growing up, the answer would have changed. Now it meant oneself at last established, final freedom, the Oedipal load removed: and a lot of sons still knew that it wasn’t so clean and unambiguous as that. As Charles was growing up, all the Oedipal inheritance had passed into the conventional wisdom, at least for those educated like him: and, like most conventional wisdom, it was half believed and half thrown away.