Charles Snow - Last Things

After I had promised to give my answer about Basset when I got out of hospital, he explained that there was another great advantage about the new regime. He could rely on getting each winter free for work; he could sit there in the sun and wouldn’t be disturbed. It was time he made a start on another book. It was going to be a long-term project. Several years, he didn’t believe in premature publication. Subject? Nathaniel Hawthorne and the New England moral climate.

When at teatime I told Margaret about that conversation, we looked at each other deadpan. He was the kind of visitor who ought to be encouraged, she said. No strain. Offhanded benevolence. But he used to be a humorist. Was all this a piece of misguided humour? If it were, I said, he deserved his fun. No, Margaret decided, she couldn’t remember, even in his unregenerate days, Lester being humorous about himself.

About six o’clock she left, and I was feeling peaceful. No more visitors that day, except my brother Martin after dinner. I went back to a novel I had been reading, a Simenon, and I put Lester’s moral discrimination out of my thoughts.

In a few minutes, a knock on the door. A peremptory double knock. Before I had said ‘come in’, Ronald Porson lurched into the room.

‘How in God’s name did you get in?’ I cried, with something less than grace. I didn’t want to be disturbed: I was irritated, I had given instructions that only those whose names were cleared should be sent up.

Porson gave one of his involuntary winks, right eyelid dropping down towards his cheek: the left side of his face twitched in sympathy. As a result, just as when first I met him, back in the early thirties, he produced an effect which was conspiratorial, friendly, and remarkably louche . As usual, he was smelling of liquor and his speech was slurred.

‘I suppose I can help myself, can’t I?’ He had already caught sight of the bottle on the chest of drawers.

‘Yes, do,’ I said without enthusiasm, and repeated: ‘How did you get in?’

Porson turned back with his glass, winked again, this time perhaps less involuntarily, and sat down in the other chair. He was wearing his Old Etonian tie, which he – unlike my former colleague Gilbert Cooke – used only on special occasions. The rest of his appearance was more dilapidated than his normal, and in that respect the standard was very high. Cuffs frayed, buttons off waistcoat, shoes dirty, hair straggling, face puffed out with broken veins. Yet, though he was now seventy-two or three, he did not look his age, as though the battered ruleless life had acted – as it had done also with George Passant, in both cases much to the disapproval of more proper persons – as a kind of preservative and given them an air, among the ruins of their physique, of something like happiness and youth.

Actually Porson had, ever since I first knew him, moved from one catastrophe to another, with a seemingly inevitable and unrelieved decline such as didn’t happen to many men. To begin with, he was making a living at the Bar. That soon dropped away, owing to drink, his tendency to patronise everyone he met becoming more aggressive and overpowering the more he failed, and perhaps – for those were less tolerant days – to rumours about his sexual habits. Then he ran through his money and you could trace his progress as his address in London changed. The first I remembered was that of a modestly opulent flat off Portland Place. After that Pimlico, Fulham Road, Earls Court, Notting Hill Gate, stations of descent. At the present time, so far as I knew, he was living in a bed-sitting-room in Godfrey Ailwyn’s parish, and the priest and I both guessed he kept alive on national assistance. How he paid for his drink I didn’t understand, although it was a long time since I had seen him quite sober. As he grew older, his picking-up became more rampant, and he had spent one term in gaol for importuning. Ailwyn reported that there had been other narrow squeaks.

None of this, none of it at all, prevented him from looking to the future with the expectation of a child wondering what would turn up on his birthday. The last time I had met him, he had been saying, using exactly the same phrase as my mother might have used, very strange for one like Porson brought up in embassies, that there was still time for his ship to come home.

‘How did you get in?’

‘I’ve got one or two chums downstairs.’ He winked again, and put a finger to the side of his nose, rather like Azik Schiff parodying himself. Then, suddenly angry, he burst out: ‘Good chaps. Better than the crowd you waste your time with.’

‘I dare say.’ I was used to his temper. It was like handling a more-than-usually unpredictable bathroom geyser.

‘Good chums. I’ve always said, you can get anywhere if you’ve got good chums.’

Now he was swinging between the maudlin and the accusatory.

‘You can’t deny, I’ve always got anywhere I wanted, haven’t I?’

In a sense it was true. He had been seen in places where none of the rest of us could ever have had the entrée. Some people could explain it only by assuming a kind of homosexual trade union or information network. Ailwyn had once suggested that he had escaped worse trouble because of a contact in the local CID. Not that that had prevented Ronald Porson, when he found himself in more conventional circles, from denouncing ‘Jews and Pansies’ as the source of national degeneration. With those he trusted, though, he tended to concentrate on the racial element.

‘Well, I’m here, aren’t I?’ he accosted me, hands on knees. ‘Do you know why?’

After I had failed to reply, he said, accusatory again: ‘My boy, I’m here to give you a bit of advice.’

‘Are you?’

‘You haven’t always taken my advice. You might have done better for yourself if you had.’

‘It’s a bit late now,’ I began, but firmly he interrupted me. ‘It’ll be too late unless you listen to me for once. I’m going to give you a bit of advice. You’d better take it. You’re not to enter this hospital again .’

‘It’s a perfectly good hospital.’

‘It’s the best hospital in London,’ he shouted, getting angrier as he agreed with me. ‘But, damn your soul, it’s not the best for you.’

‘I’ve got no grumbles–’

‘I tell you, damn you, it’s not the best for you. I know.’

‘How can you know?’

‘It’s no use talking to people who only believe in what they can blasted well touch and see.’ For an instant he was raging about ESP. Then he said, calming himself down, with a look of patient condescension: ‘Well, let’s try something that you understand. I suppose you admit that you nearly passed out last Friday. As near as damn it. Or a bloody sight nearer. You admit that, don’t you?’

‘Of course I do.’

‘You haven’t got any option.’ He spoke indulgently, contemptuously. ‘And what would have been the use of your blasted reputation then?’

I wanted to stop listening, but his face came nearer, bullying, insistent. The left side was convulsed by a seismic twitch.

‘It’s no use making any bones about it. You know as well as I do. You did pass out last Friday. You’ve taken that in, haven’t you?’

I nodded.

‘You’re the luckiest man I know. You won’t have the same luck next time.’

Again I was trying to put him off, but he overbore me: ‘You mustn’t come into this hospital again, you understand?’

He added: ‘I know you mustn’t. I know.’

‘I’ll try not to.’

He stared full-eyed at me, triumphant. He was certain he had made an impression.

‘Of course, my boy, I’m thinking of you. You ought to think of some of the chaps here. In the hospital. What the hell do you fancy they were doing last Friday?’