Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Old ladies’, Maurice put in, ‘who, if they hadn’t got Godfrey, wouldn’t have anything to live for.’

‘I don’t know about that,’ said Godfrey, awkward as an adolescent.

I couldn’t resist one final question. We had spoken only of one of the eschatological last things, I said. Death. How did he get on with the other three? Judgment, heaven, hell.

Again he looked as though I weren’t playing according to the rules, or hadn’t any justification to recognise a theological term.

Did he place heaven and hell, like the spirit, outside of space and time? And judgment too? Wasn’t that utterly unlike anything that believers had ever conceived up to his day?

His sharp eyes gazed at me with melancholy. Then suddenly the pastiness, the heaviness, the depression did their disappearing trick again, and he smiled.

‘Lewis. I expect you’d prefer me to place them all in your own world, wouldn’t you? I’m not sure that that would be an improvement, you know. But if you like I’ll say that you’ve made your own heaven and hell in your own life. And as for judgment, well, you’re capable of delivering that upon yourself. I hope you show as much mercy as we shall all need in the end.’

When they had departed, I thought that last remark didn’t really fit under his metaphysical arch, but that nevertheless, if he allowed himself an instant’s pride in the midst of his chronic modesty, he had a good sound right to do so.

WHEN Charles March called in for ten minutes later that same evening, I asked him to do a little staff work. Would he, either on his own account or by invoking Mansel, make an arrangement with the nurses? Up to now, they had forced sleeping pills upon me each night. I wanted that stopped. Partly because I had an aversion, curiously puritanical, from any routine drug-taking: I would much rather have a broken night or two than get into the habit of dosing myself to sleep. But also I wasn’t in the least tired, I was serene and content, I didn’t mind lying awake: which in fact I did, luxuriously, looking out one-eyed into the dark bedroom.

Not that it was quite dark, or continuously so. There was a kind of background twilight, contributed perhaps by the street lamps or those in the houses opposite, which defined the shape of the window and chest of drawers close by. Occasionally, a beam from a car’s headlights down below swept across the far wall, and I watched with pleasure, as though I were being reminded of lying in an unfamiliar bedroom long ago, at my Uncle Will’s in Market Harborough, when as a boy I didn’t wish to go to sleep, so long as I could see the walls rosy, then darker, rosy again, as the coal fire flickered and fell.

I was being reminded of something else, what was it, another room, another pattern of light, almost another life. At last I had it. A hotel room in Menton, regular as a metronome the lighthouse beam, moving from wall to wall: in the dark intervals, the sea slithering and slapping on the rocks beneath. Yes, I had been ill and wretched, wondering if I should recover, maddened that I might die quite unfulfilled, longing for the woman whom I later married and did harm to. Yet the recollection, in the hospital bedroom, was happy, pain long since drained out, as though all that persisted was the smell of the flowers and the sharp-edged lighthouse beam.

Other unfamiliar rooms. The hotel bedrooms of a lifetime. Why did I feel, not only serene, but triumphant? The half memories, the flashes, seemed like a conquest. Alone. Not alone. Dense curtained darkness: the sound of breathing from the other bed. Smell of beeswax, pot-pourri, wood smoke. That might have been Palermo. Sound of a sentry’s stamp outside. Travelling as an official. Then unofficial, utter quiet, lights across the canal.

Switch of association. Godfrey Ailwyn had talked of the threshold of death. He hadn’t been inhibited, he hadn’t worried about delicacy or restraint, and that had pleased me. He had set out to argue that I hadn’t been dead. Curious to argue whether, at a point of time, one was or was not dead. That hadn’t seemed ominous, became the opposite of ominous now. As, after the recall of nights abroad, I thought (associations, daydreams, drifting in and out) of some of Godfrey’s words, I didn’t feel less serene but more so. I hadn’t minded him cross-questioning me like a coroner: no, I welcomed it. It was only five nights since I had lain in this room, frozen with dread. Frightened to think back a few hours, to the time they were standing round me and Mansel got to work.

Now – with a change which I hadn’t recognised as it was happening, but which had come to feel delectable and complete – I wasn’t frightened to think back, there was nothing which gave me a greater sense of calm or of something more liberating than calm. 28 November 1965. That morning, round about half past eleven, I might have died. I liked telling myself that. Nothing had ever been so steadying, not at all bizarre or nerve-racking, just steadying: nothing had set me so free.

I did not have to reason this out to myself, certainly not on that contented night, or make it any subtler than it was. It was just a fact of life, an unpredicted but remarkably satisfying fact, one of the best. When, however, I tried to explain it to others (which I didn’t want to for a long time afterwards) I didn’t even satisfy myself. It all sounded either too mysteriously lumbering or else altogether too casual. One difficulty was that, to me as the sole recipient, the emotional tone of the whole thing was very light. I tried to spell it out – it made one’s concerns, even those which before the relevant morning would have weighed one down, appear not so much silly as non-existent.

After all, one might not have had them any more.

Just as in the dread which I had experienced only once, in the hours of 28/29 November, everything disappeared, longings, hopes, fears, ego, everything but the dread itself: so they disappeared in this anti-dread.

Most of us looked upon our lives – not continuously but now and then – as a kind of journey, progress or history. A history, as the cosmogonists might say, from Time T = 0 at birth to T1 = the final date, which it wasn’t given us to know in advance. (Who, at any age, younger than Charles, older than me, would dare to look in the mirror of his future?)

Somehow that progress, journey, history had for me become disconnected or dismissed. As though what fashionable persons were beginning to call the diachronic existence had lost its grip on me.

Yet what I really felt was as simple as a joy. As though I had smelt the lilac, and time travelled back to the age of eleven, reading under the tree at home: as though troubles past or to come had been dissolved, and become one with the moment in which I was watching the cars’ lights move across the bedroom wall.

So, when the priest told me to show myself as much mercy as we should all need in the end, that affected me, but not as it might have done six days before. They were kind words: they were good words: once, though I didn’t share his theology, they would have made me heavy-spirited as I thought about my past. But now I was freer from myself. Yes, I could still think with displeasure about what I had done, and wish that whole episodes or stretches of years might be wiped away. But I wished that, and still felt a kind of joy, with no angst there.

Judgment? Well, thinking with displeasure on what I had done was a kind of judgment. It wasn’t either merciful or the reverse. I didn’t feel obliged to reckon up an account, as though one ought to tick off the plus and minus scores. Once I had told a friend (perhaps the least moral friend I had ever had) that, if I had never lived, nobody would have been a penny the worse. That was altogether too cut and dried for me now. Too historical, in fact: and actually, in terms of history, microscopic history, it was not even true. But on the other hand, when I was recovering from the first operation, and Charles March had said that it was impossible to regret one’s own experience, I had on the moment been doubtful, and later to myself (in this same bedroom) utterly denied it. I did regret, sometimes passionately, sometimes with remorse, but more often with impatience, a good deal of my youth. Right up to the time – I was thirty-four – when Sheila killed herself.