Charles Snow - Last Things

He paused, and went on.

‘I’ll tell you. They were peeing their pants. They were afraid it would get into the papers. If I’d been in your place, the papers mightn’t have got hold of it. Somehow they know your name.’

(I thought later that that had been a minor mystery to Porson for thirty years. But at the time this was a reflection I hadn’t the nerve to make. He had frightened me. To begin with, it had been a frisson , the kind of shiver which my mother called ‘someone walking across her grave’. Now it was worse than that.)

‘It wouldn’t have been good for the place’, Porson said, ‘if you’d gone out feet first.’

‘Well, I didn’t.’

‘They weren’t to know that, were they? I’ll tell you something else. They didn’t breathe easy until a long time after you’d been brought back. They’ve told me that themselves. You were all settled down and comfortable and having a good night’s rest before they felt sure there wasn’t going to be a funeral after all.’

‘I hope they stood themselves a drink.’

‘I’ve done that, my boy. They know you’re an old friend.’

Later on, I had another reflection, that I had never discovered who ‘they’ were. Certainly males. Certainly not doctors. I guessed, but never knew for sure, that they must have been porters or medical orderlies. At the time, feeling the sweat prickling at my temples, I had just one concern, which was to get him out of the room.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘You go and stand them another one for me.’ I told him where to find my wallet, and soon he was duly pocketing a five-pound note. But even then, enjoying the conversation, he wasn’t eager to go. Pressed, I had to invent and whisper another pretext, of the kind that Ronald Porson couldn’t resist. A visitor was coming soon – no one knew, my wife didn’t know – I couldn’t tell even him the name, he’d understand. With a look, both confidential and jeering, of ultimate complicity, Porson weaved towards the door, saying at the threshold:

‘So long, my boy. I hope you’ve been listening to what I said.’

Yes, I had. I wiped sweat away, but I might have come out of a hot bath. I was ashamed that I couldn’t be steadier: why should my nerves let me down, just because old Porson blustered away? For days past, ever since the first fright left me free, I had listened to everyone without even a superstitious qualm. I hadn’t been putting on a front: I hadn’t needed to. Definitions of death, theological death, the different degrees of uneasiness with which people, my wife, my son, approached me. I had become something of an expert on relative uneasiness. Nothing had plucked a nerve. Then, after all that, after the visits of those closest to me, came Porson. Drunk, of course. Officious, as he had been ever since I first met him. Nothing new. I had been through it all before. But he had frightened me.

There was no denying, I had felt the chill. If I could have understood why, I might have thrown it off. I had no clue at all. The thought of Porson’s cronies, down in the hospital basement, counting my chances – what was so bad about that? (In cold blood afterwards, I doubted if they had been all that wrought up. Porson enjoyed his overheated fancy. They must have had a little excitement, no more.) There was nothing bad, or even remotely unnatural about that. Yet, when Porson told me, it brought back the dread.

Listening to him, I felt it as on the first night. Now he had gone, I was searching inward, testing how strong it was. It was exactly like the days after the first eye operation, when I was worried by each speck or floater in the field of vision, wondering whether the black edge was coming back. The dread. It would be hard to have that as a regular visitation. No, perhaps it was not quite like the first night. Perhaps there was already a spectator behind my mind. It wasn’t only the fright and nothingness.

Still, as I tried to eat the hospital supper, I was waiting, I didn’t know what for, perhaps for the chill again, or some sign that I wasn’t in the clear. I was glad that Martin was due to visit me that night.

When he arrived, though, I was for an instant disappointed. For he had brought his daughter Nina with him, enquiring about me in her fashionable whisper as she kissed me, her face hiding behind her hair. As a rule, I should have welcomed her. More and more she seemed the most agreeable girl in Charles’ circle, the one who was most likely to make a man happy and enjoy her marriage. Nevertheless, in her presence I couldn’t talk directly to my brother. Which was probably, I imagined, why he had brought her. It was a typical quiet tactic of his, meaning that there was nothing good to say about Pat and that Martin wished to evade any discussion. Also, now that Martin at last was compelled to show traces of realism about his son, he was turning to the daughter whom he had so long neglected. He even induced her to tell me about her music: her teachers were certain that she (quite unlike her brother, Martin might have been thinking) would become a good professional.

Martin had seen me once since the operation, enough to satisfy himself, but not alone. Now he was watching me.

‘How are you?’ he said.

‘All right.’

‘Only all right?’

‘A little tired of death-watch beetles.’

‘You’ve given them a first-class opportunity, you know.’ Martin was speaking with a tucked-in smile, but he and I were signalling to each other, and probably Nina didn’t recognise the code. ‘Anyone special?’

‘Old Ronald Porson’s been improving the occasion.’

‘When?’

‘Oh, not long ago.’

Martin nodded. ‘That must have been pleasant for you.’

‘He was telling me about the preparations downstairs for my demise.’

A slight pause. In his misleadingly soft voice, Martin said: ‘It’s high time we began to make modest preparations for his.’

‘He’s inclined to think that he’ll outlast me.’

‘Thoughtful of him.’

‘After all,’ I said, ‘he’d be the first to point out that he very nearly did.’

‘I’m sure he would.’

‘Nothing that rejuvenates an old man more, my father-in-law used to say, than to contemplate the death of someone younger.’

‘Naturally,’ said Martin. Then casually, as though in an afterthought of no interest, he said: ‘By the by, did you want to see that old sod?’ He didn’t explain to his daughter that he meant Porson.

‘No. He gatecrashed.’

‘I imagined so. Well, I’ll see that that doesn’t happen again.’ I looked at my brother, face controlled, eyes dark and hard. I speculated as to whether Nina knew that he was smouldering with anger.

‘Never mind,’ I said. ‘I can take him.’

‘I can’t see any reason why you should. I can see several reasons why you shouldn’t.’

That was all. Affectionate goodbyes. I expected that it would be some time before Martin left the hospital. For myself I didn’t abstain from my sleeping pills that night, and wasn’t long awake. Then I woke in the middle of the night, feeling calm. Immediately I waited for the fright to grip me. But it didn’t: at least, not enough to be more than a reminder, the kind of reminder of mortality that came at any age, from youth upwards, and wasn’t the real thing. Testing the black edge, I forced back thoughts of Porson. No, his voice bullied me in a vacuum, I recalled occasions long ago when he had lost a case and still took the offensive against everyone round him, not to himself defeated. I wondered if Martin had discovered who it was that let him in.

THE morning that Margaret came to fetch me home, I had been in that bedroom for eleven days. On the afternoon before, she, who knew how institutions gave me more than my normal claustrophobia, and that I didn’t make fine distinctions between prisons and hospitals, they were just places which shut one in, asked how long it felt. I said that often it had seemed no time at all. She wasn’t sure whether I was being perverse. But I had already told her of my relapse during Porson’s visit. Perhaps also perversely, that had given her confidence in my state of mind. She hadn’t quite trusted the complete serenity, the looking back to 28 November as though that eliminated disquiets past, present and to come: now she knew that the serenity could be broken, she trusted it more.