Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Yes?’

‘They found he had a spot on one lung. They operated at once, very skilfully, Francis says. He has a lot of use for their experimental technique. It was perfectly successful. He’s convalescing down there now. It’ll be a bit of time before he’s back to optimum form, but he’s remarkably well. His morale is very high and he’s fretting about not being back at the lab. He’s feeling stronger every day. We’re all extremely pleased with him. I think we were more worried than he was, but that’s gone now. We want to get him back in Cambridge by April. He’s very eager to see you, by the by.’

I tried to show no sign of disbelief as I gazed into the intelligent innocent face. From the moment he mentioned the operation, I had been horrified. Perhaps, I wanted to think, old anxieties were running away with me, Leonard might be right, Francis was not a self-deceiver.

I could not shift my own mood for an instant. I found Leonard’s euphoria dismaying, and anything he said of Francis’. After a few flat questions – I did not want to puncture Leonard’s well-being, but I could not, for premonition’s sake, not honesty’s – give any expression of pleasure or relief – I made an excuse, and went home.

As soon as I arrived there, I telephoned Charles March. Since old Mr March’s death, Charles had been reconciled to his sister and her husband, but it was the kind of reconciliation in which the years of difference were covered up, not eliminated or transformed. Still, he might have heard from them.

When I asked, that turned out to be true. What did he think, as a doctor?

There was a long pause at the other end. ‘I haven’t enough to go on, I haven’t even seen him. One’s opinion isn’t much use–’

Charles was growing more hesitant as he passed into his sixties. The fire and devil of his youth – and the unfairness – did not often show. He was more inclined to speak like a responsible citizen who didn’t want to be quoted.

‘No, but what is it? I want to know what you think, that’s all.’

Another long pause.

‘If it were you or me, I doubt if we should be as optimistic as they are.’

‘No.’

‘Mind, sometimes these operations really work.’ Charles mentioned some cases of cancer which he had seen.

‘How would you put his chances?’

He refused to make a guess. Then he said: ‘If what you’re afraid of did happen – and you know I’m as afraid of it as you are – then I’m terribly worried for Katherine. She loves her children, but he’s been her whole life.’

That same night, I wrote to her, carefully casual, saying I had just seen Leonard and was hoping that all continued well. A reply came about a fortnight later, from Francis himself, as euphoric as Leonard’s report had been. Of course, he couldn’t expect to get all his strength back overnight; it would take months rather than weeks; but they would expect Margaret and me in Cambridge in the summer. With a blend of invalid concentration and scientific interest, he enclosed a sketch of the original X-ray of his lungs, and a diagram showing how the surgeons had operated.

That letter arrived at the beginning of February. In April – our own family concerns still, so far as we knew, unchanged – came one from Katherine. In her bold and steady hand, it read: ‘All the children have had to be told, and I have also written to my brother. I’m sure that Francis would think that you ought to know too. He has not been so well for two or three weeks past, and last weekend went into hospital again. The disease has spread to the other lung and has advanced quickly there. There is nothing to say except that this promises badly. Francis has a desire to return home. The hospital people are trying to resist this, but I cannot see that they have any reason on their side.’

At the end of May, just at the time when the examination results were coming out, a telegram from Cambridge:

Francis died peacefully this morning Katherine Leonard Lionel Mary Penelope

The obituary notices were the longest of those for any of my friends, but they were stiff, a record of achievement, as though Francis’ public persona had warded off the writers from coming anywhere near him. A few personal notes followed, a surprisingly warm one from L of S (Luke of Salcombe), one from me. The funeral was private. That seemed to be the end.

Then in the post arrived the neat little envelope, the printed slip, announcing a memorial service after a Cambridge death. How many services for fellows of the colleges in my time? Vernon Royce, Roy Calvert, Despard-Smith, Eustace Pilbrow, C P Crystal, Winslow, Paul Jago, Crawford, M H L Gay. But this was the one I least expected to hear of. Even after I was anticipating Francis’ death. For he was the firmest of unbelievers, who didn’t attend memorial services for others and would have repudiated one such for himself. True, he had made a kind of apology for not going to Roy Calvert’s, but that had been a gesture of consolation to me, perhaps of regret that he had not liked Roy better. When that had happened, and we were all young men, I had not imagined, in the midst of grief, that one day I should be attending a service for Francis himself. Nor could I have imagined that I should feel such a sense of loss.

Staying in Martin’s house, within the college precincts, the night before the service, I confessed, what Margaret already knew, that I was sad in a way I didn’t look for. After all, at my age one had seen enough of death. Including one’s own, said Martin, with his own brand of Nordic irony. Including one’s own, I agreed. Oh, be quiet, said Irene, who had become fond of me, now that she was middle aged.

Margaret had spent the afternoon with Katherine, and was silent now.

Through the open window of Martin’s drawing-room, we could hear shouts in the court below. Glancing down, I caught sight of a posse of young men jostling along the path, some of them carrying suitcases. Another young man was walking between a middle-aged couple, perhaps his parents. That had been the last of the degree days, one of the less dramatic ritual occasions, graduates kneeling before the Vice-Chancellor and then being congratulated by tutors with meaningless heartiness on a feat which had been public knowledge some weeks before. In my time, the ceremony was becoming obsolescent, the independent young did not bother to attend: yet those below had been participating, somehow it still survived.

Although the sky was clear, turning dense indigo to the east, away from the sunset, it had been raining during the afternoon. The night seemed warmish, which we were not used to in that wet and frigid summer. There blew in wafts of flower scents, strong in the humid air. The smell of syringa, tantalising, aphrodisiac, poignant, prevailed over the rest. It brought back, not a memory, but a kind of vague disquiet: if I could remember an occasion when I had smelt the syringa so – Perhaps in that place? No, I couldn’t trace it. Just the scent, unease, the sensual knowledge that there had been other nights like this.

We had already heard from Martin how the memorial service had come about. As soon as Francis was dead, the Master, G S Clark, had been pressing condolences upon Katherine. The fact that he had detested Francis, and that Francis had not been overindulgent in return, seemed only to have enhanced the Master’s compassion. In his ardour, he had insisted there should be a service. Katherine believed as little as Francis and must have known his wishes: so did Leonard and the rest of the Getliffe family. The Master had borne them down.

It wasn’t that Katherine was as yet deadened by sorrow: on the contrary, having had to watch her husband through the long illness, she had returned to a kind of activity, an illusory vigour that might not last her long. She had argued about the service, and so had the family, but the truth was, they all wanted to agree.