Last Things (4 page)

‘It’s a pity it’s meaningless. I don’t know why, but one doesn’t exactly approve of being annihilated. Though when it’s happened, nothing could matter less.’

One wouldn’t ask for much, Davidson was saying, just the chance to linger round, unobserved, and watch what was going on. It was a pity to miss all that was going to happen.

That was one of the few signs of sentimentality I had seen him show. Soon he was remarking sternly, as though reproving me for a relapse into weakness, that it was not respectable to talk about an afterlife. There wasn’t any meaning in it: there couldn’t be. It was the supreme wish-fulfilment. ‘Which, by the way,’ he said, brightening up, ‘has done the wretched human race a great deal more harm than good.’ He went on, still half-reproving me, telling me to think of the horrors that had been perpetrated in the name of the afterlife. Torturing bodies to save souls. Slaughter to get one’s place in heaven. ‘If people would only accept that this is the only life there is, they might be a shade more civilised.’

No, I didn’t want to argue: he was getting some sort of comfort from his old certainties. It seemed a perverse comfort. Yet he still believed in the enlightenment he grew up in, the lucky oasis, the civilised voices, the privileged Edwardian hopes.

Then he did something which also might have seemed perverse, if he had preserved the consistency of which he was so proud. It was a warm afternoon, and he was covered only by a single sheet. Suddenly, but not jerkily, he pulled it aside, and with eyes glossy-brown as a bird’s, oblivious of me, gazed down towards his feet. Against blue pyjama trousers, his skin shone pale, clear, not hairy: the feet were large, after the thin legs, with elongated, heavy-jointed toes. For some time I could not tell what he was studying so observantly. Then I noticed, over the left ankle, a small roll of swelling, so that the concavity between ankle-bone and talus had been filled in. On the right foot, the swelling might have been grosser; from where I sat, it was difficult to make out.

Davidson went on gazing, as intently, as professionally, as he used to look at pictures.

‘The oedema’s a shade less than this morning. Quite a bit less than yesterday,’ he said. He said it with a satisfaction that he couldn’t conceal, or didn’t think of concealing. Throughout his illness, for years past, he must have been studying his ankles, observing one of the clinical signs. Even now, night and morning (perhaps more often when he was alone) he went through the same routine. But it wasn’t routine to him. Sunday night – he had swallowed the capsules. All he said to me since, he meant. Nevertheless, when he inspected his ankles and decided the swelling was a fraction reduced, he felt a surge of pleasure, not at all ironic. No more ironic than if he had been in middle age and robust health, and had noticed a symptom which worried him but which, as he tested it, began to clear away.

VISITING her father every other day, Margaret’s behaviour, like his, began to show a contradiction which really wasn’t one. She couldn’t help becoming preoccupied with a future birth, with the child my nephew’s wife was expecting in four months’ time. Margaret had not previously given any sign of special interest in Muriel, and so far as she had a special interest in Pat it was negative, or at least ambivalent. Sometimes she found him good company, but when he had gone away she thought him worthless. And yet Margaret took to visiting them in their flat, and then invited them to dinner at our own, together with Muriel’s mother and stepfather.

That was a surprise in itself, a surprise, that is, that Azik Schiff should come. He was himself inordinately hospitable and in his own expansive fashion seemed to like us all. But he was also very rich: and, like other rich men, did not welcome hospitality unless he was providing it himself. However, he had accepted, and as we waited for them all I was saying to Margaret that one of the advantages of being rich was that everyone tended to entertain you according to your own standards. Just as all gourmets were treated as though the rest of us were gourmets. It seemed like a natural law, a curiously unjust one. Certainly the food and drink which had been set up for that night we shouldn’t have produced for anyone less sumptuous than Azik.

The young couple arrived a few minutes before the other two, but as soon as Azik entered the drawing-room he took charge. None of us had dressed, but he was wearing, as though in competition with Lester Ince, a cherry-coloured smoking jacket. He gave Margaret not a peck but a whacking kiss, and then stood on massive legs evaluating the room, in which he had never been before. In fact, he was more cultivated than any of us: the pictures he understood and approved of: but he was puzzled that, apart from the pictures, the furniture was so ramshackle. He had guessed our financial position – that was one of his gifts – and knew it as well as I did. Why did we live so modestly? He didn’t ask that question, but he did enquire about the flat. Yes, we had a lot of rooms, having joined two flats together. How much did we pay? I told him. He whistled. It was cheaper than he could have reckoned. He couldn’t help admiring a bargain: and yet, as he proceeded to explain, living like that was good tactics, but bad strategy.

‘You should buy a house, my friends,’ he said paternally (he was several years younger than I was) as at last he settled down on the sofa, his chest expanded, looking like a benevolent, ugly and highly intelligent frog.

Rosalind, his wife, braceleted, necklaced, bejewelled with each anniversary’s present, was looking at me with something like an apprehensive wink. She had known me when she was Roy Calvert’s mistress and later his wife: that was years before Margaret and I first met. Rosalind had known me when I was cagey and secretive, and it was a continual surprise to her that I didn’t mind, or even encouraged, Azik to interfere in my affairs. She was always ready to help me evade his questions, even after all the times when she had seen him and me get on so easily.

No, I said to Azik, if one has been born without a penny, one never learned to spend money. Azik shook his great head. ‘No, Lewis,’ he said, ‘there I must take issue with you. That excuse is not satisfactory. It doesn’t do credit to your intellect. First, I have to remind you that your lady bride’ (he beamed at Margaret: Azik spoke a good many languages imperfectly, and one of those was American business-English) ‘was not born without a penny. So there should be a corrective influence in this family. Second, I have to remind you that I also was born without a penny. I have to say that I have never found it difficult to spend money.’ With which Azik expounded on a ‘certain little difference’ between the tailor’s shop near the old Alexanderplatz where he was born, and his present home in Eaton Square.

Someone said (when Azik was projecting himself, he filled the room, and it wasn’t easy to notice who else was trying to edge in) was it true, the old story, that if one had been born rich and then had everything taken away one never minded much?

Azik pronounced that he had known some who suffered. People were almost infinitely resilient, I was beginning, but Azik went on with a shout: ‘You and I, Lewis, say we’ve lost everything tomorrow morning. You aren’t allowed to publish a word. These children don’t believe it, but we should make do. You’d pretend that nothing had happened and go and get a job as a clerk. As for me’ – he put a finger to the side of his nose – ‘I should make a few shillings on the side.’

He was benevolent and happy, parodying himself, showing off to Rosalind, whom he adored. None of us had such a flow of spirits, nor was so harmoniously himself. There might have been one single discontinuity, only one, and even that I could have exaggerated or imagined.

It happened when Margaret asked about the second drinks. On the first round she and I had had our usual long whiskies, and so had Pat: Azik had had a small one. He refused another, and watched our glasses being filled again.

Suddenly, quite unprovoked, he said: ‘No Jew drinks as you people do.’

‘Oh, come off it, Azik,’ I said. I mentioned something about parties in New York–

‘They are not real Jews. They are losing themselves.’

Real Jews, Azik went on, took sex easy, took wine easy: they didn’t go wild, as ‘you people’ do. I had never heard anything like that from him before. He might be overpowering, but he didn’t attack. We all knew that he kept up his Judaism; he went, not to a reformed synagogue, but to a conservative one, even though he said that he had no theology. All of a sudden, just for that instant (or was I reading back to my first Jewish friends?) Judaism seemed the least natural, or the least comfortable thing about him – as though it were a proud hurt, an affront to others.

He relaxed into paternal, prepotent supervision.

‘Ah well,’ he said, ‘enjoy yourselves.’

He was the only one to enquire about young Charles. Last heard of in Persia, I said, on his way to Pakistan. We had heard nothing for a fortnight.

‘You must be worried, Lewis,’ he said, with a rush of fellow feeling.

I said, ‘a little’: the dinner party had distracted me, until then.

‘Oh, he’ll be all right. He lands on his feet,’ said Pat.

‘That you should not say.’ Azik turned sternly onto Pat, who for once looked outfaced, sulky, quite aware that he had shown jealousy of his cousin, glancing at his young wife, whose face was reposeful, as though she had not noticed anything at all nor heard of Charles.

As we sat at the dinner table, I was paying attention to Rosalind. Beautifully accoutred as she was, she had nevertheless let her hair go grey: that must have been a deliberate choice. She knew what was required of the elegant wife, no longer young, of a great tycoon. Her thin, freckled hands displayed her rings. As before, she sometimes gave me a look – sidelong from her cameo face – as though we shared an esoteric private joke. But all she talked about was Azik’s business, and how next week she would have to entertain the Prime Minister of Brazil. ‘It’s all in the game, you know,’ she said, with a dying fall which sounded sad and which was nothing of the kind. I sometimes wondered whether she ever thought that, if it had not been for fatality, she would still be married to a distinguished, perhaps an unbalanced, scholar (it was hard to imagine what Roy Calvert would have become in his fifties). Probably she didn’t. Rosalind lived on this earth. She might sigh over memories, but she would sigh contentedly and get on with the day’s work, which was to keep Azik cheerful and well.

On my left, her daughter Muriel was quiet, cheekbones and jawline softened by pregnancy. Then I caught a flash of her eyes, as though she were surreptitiously making fun of Rosalind or me or both. It was the kind of green-eyed disrespectful flash I had seen often enough in her father, whom she had never known. She was polite to me as she was to everyone, maddeningly polite, but I didn’t begin to understand her. She had not once asked me a question about her father, though she must have known that I had been his closest friend. One day, out of curiosity or provocation, I had tried to talk about him. ‘Did you think that?’ she had said decorously. ‘Oh, I must ask Aunt Meg’ (as she called Margaret, of whom she seemed to be fond). Again, she must have known that Margaret and Roy had never met.

When, for an instant, Pat engaged his mother-in-law in conversation, Muriel asked a few soft-voiced questions about the autumn theatres. She knew that I wasn’t much interested, and rarely went. Was she being obtuse, or amusing herself? She was abnormally self-possessed and strong-willed, that was all I knew about her. Like a good many other men, I found her – in some inexplicable and irritating fashion – very attractive.

Just then – we had finished the fish, Azik was smelling his first glass of claret, for which, in spite of his earlier strictures, he had considerable enthusiasm – I heard Pat utter the name of Margaret’s father. Startled, turning away from Muriel, I looked down the table. Pat was smiling at Margaret with something between protectiveness and triumph. His brown eyes were shining: he had his air of doggy confidence, of one who managed to please but wasn’t easily put down.

‘Yes,’ he was telling her, ‘he was in better spirits, I’m sure he was.’

‘You mean, you’ve seen him?’

‘Of course I have, Aunt Meg.’

It became clear that Pat was telling the truth, which could not invariably be assumed. It also became clear that Austin Davidson had talked with his innocent candour, and that Pat knew everything we knew, and had – certainly to his wife and her mother – passed most of it on. Pat had paid, not one visit, but several: for an instant Margaret looked stupefied, astonished that her father had told us nothing of this. But why should he? He had other visitors besides ourselves, but he didn’t think it relevant to mention them.

The greater mystery was how Pat had learned that Davidson was in the clinic at all, and how he had got inside the place himself. As for the first, he was one of those natural detectives or intelligence agents, whom I had come across, and been disconcerted by, more than once in my life: and, further, he had always been specially inquisitive about Davidson, and anxious to know him. Not from motives which were entirely pure: Pat was an aspiring painter, and he believed that an eminent art critic, even though retired, must have retained some useful acquaintances. Anyway, insatiably curious and also on the make, Pat had somehow obtained the entrée to Davidson’s bedroom, quite possibly using my name without undue fastidiousness.

Once there, it was no mystery at all that Davidson had encouraged him to come again. Pat was on the make, he was a busybody, a gossip, often a mischief-maker and several kinds of a liar: but he was also kind. In the presence of the isolated old man, Pat would try to enliven him, using all his resources, which were considerable: for he was more than kind, to many people he was a life-giver. The unfairness was, he had that talent far more highly developed than persons of better character: when I came to think of it, life-givers of Pat’s species had, so far as I had met them, usually been people who wouldn’t pass much of an examination into their moral nature. That had been true of my boyhood friend Jack Cotery, whom in a good many ways Pat resembled. It was probable, I thought, that Pat’s visits were more of a help to Austin Davidson than either Margaret’s or mine.