Last Things (45 page)

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.

They were holding on to anything that kept Francis in others’ minds: or perhaps, more primitive than that, they had the feeling that while his name was being mentioned he was not quite obliterated, his shadow (they would have liked to say his spirit or his ghost) was still there. Just as Martin himself had returned to a primitive piety when our father died, and had proposed that he should be buried according to religious rites in which Martin was the last person to believe.

Once Clark had won the Getliffes over, there followed one of the traditional college struggles, though for kindness’ sake Martin had let none of this reach Leonard, not to speak of Katherine. The question was, who was to give the memorial address? In the past this had been the prerogative of old Despard-Smith, the only fellow then in orders. With the result that he had made the oration over Roy Calvert, for whom he cherished extreme and ominous disapproval. Now, by a grisly coincidence, the pattern was repeating itself. There was at present no fellow in orders. So the Master assumed it was his own prescriptive right to make memorial orations. He had every intention of doing so for Francis Getliffe, for whom in life he had scarcely had one amiable thought.

Martin couldn’t explain why Clark was so set on this. It might have been he couldn’t resist, Martin suggested, ‘getting into the act’: after all, Francis was an eminent man. Or it might have been Christian charity. Martin, who was no more disposed to give Clark the benefit of the doubt than Francis had been, did not regard that suggestion of his own with favour.

In any case, Clark’s address was not to happen. Feeling ran round the college, for Francis had become revered by most of the younger fellows. And Arthur Brown, the elder statesman, seventy-seven years old, was deputed to make representations to the Master. Over Roy Calvert’s memorial service, Arthur Brown had tried to displace Despard-Smith, and had failed. This time in old age, the senior fellow since the death of Gay, Arthur was happy to have another go. He was himself, so Martin said, as moved as the younger men. He had a good deal of affection, and more respect, for Francis, despite his affiliations with a government which Arthur was increasingly prone to describe in terms that a Russian émigré in 1920 might have considered sensible as applied to Lenin’s administration, but perhaps a little over-strong. As for Arthur’s opinion of the Master, he would not have mentioned that except to one of his old allies, and they had died or left the college, leaving him alone.

The upshot was that Arthur Brown had emerged from the Lodge, looking contented but flushed, and told the protesters that he would deliver the oration himself. ‘It won’t be exactly a rabble-rouser,’ Martin had said that evening when he told the story, ‘but it’ll be perfectly decent. Which is more than we had a right to expect.’

Since we arrived, Martin and Irene had been waiting to tell us their own news. Irene had known Francis only as an acquaintance, and wasn’t pretending to more than a social sorrow. Martin had lost a friend, and more significantly, an ally, but you could lose friends and allies and still enjoy your joys within the next half hour. Unlike me, Martin had not known Francis for a lifetime. I was absent-minded, even when they felt that deference to mourning had been duly paid.

I was absent-minded, thinking of that occasion in hospital when Francis had said that if I died he would miss me. At the time it had sounded unusually unrestrained for Francis, and simultaneously a little inadequate and a little sentimental. Now I could test it for myself. He had known better than I had. I was already missing him. No more, no less. It wasn’t the fierce and comminatory grief which came like a brainstorm or illness at the death of someone you loved. This was different. Someone you had known for a lifetime. Missing was the right word. To say any more would have been sentimental: but so would to say any less.

Meanwhile, Martin and Irene hadn’t been able to suppress their triumph. The day before, Nina had become engaged to Guy Grenfell. All tied up and formal. The announcement would appear in
The Times
later that week. There had been family conferences and negotiations because she was so young.

I had seldom seen my brother look so happy. It seemed that all those disappointments and humiliations over his son had been cancelled. It was a pleasingly sarcastic flick – very much in his own style, though he wouldn’t have been grateful for being reminded of it now – that this should happen through the daughter to whom until recently he had given casual affection but not much more.

‘Old Grenfell’, he said, ‘isn’t a bad old creature. Eton, and the Brigade, and the City. But he’s not very good at chairing a meeting. There was him and his wife, the two of us, and the young couple. It was a pretty fatal combination for getting anything done quickly. There was only one thing to settle, ought they to wait a year or not?’

‘I’d been around more than she has before I was her age,’ said Irene with a lively lubricious grin.

‘You weren’t marrying into a respectable family, my girl.’ Martin’s smile was congratulatory, as though addressed not only to his wife but to Nina’s mother.

‘We haven’t any money, of course,’ Martin went on. ‘That was made quite clear. It seemed to puzzle Mrs G. They have quite a lot of money. That was also made quite clear. And that seemed a very reasonable state of things to Mrs G. Somehow it also seemed a rather strong argument to her for them to wait until she’s twenty-one. Old G didn’t quite see the logical connection, but he felt there was some force in it.’

He said, face illumined from inside, as it appeared when for once his self-control had slipped: ‘But they could have argued till the sun blows up, it wouldn’t have made any difference. The girl and boy were fine. I thought Guy was a bit of a wet when she first brought him here, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. He was like a rock. Very polite, long hair and all, but like a rock. He was apologetic, but they were going to get married in August. They were absolutely sure. They didn’t want to be awkward, but they were absolutely sure. They would make any concessions – they’d even have a smart wedding if that would give any pleasure – they didn’t want to disappoint anyone, so long as they were married in August.’

Martin was extracting pleasure, more even than Irene, from the last detail of their daughter’s engagement. He was fundamentally a healthy man, despite his pessimism – or perhaps it was because he was healthy that he could let his pessimism rip. My thoughts cast back to Francis: he too had rejoiced when each of his children married: it was part of the flow, there was a proper time to become a patriarch. Now Martin, whom occasionally I still regarded as my young brother, was enjoying that same proper time. It wasn’t made worse (as he had commented, executing a complex gibe against himself, the worldly people in general, and the worldliness of the world) because Guy was by the standard of Martin’s society, a distinctly desirable husband. Martin had had, in all external things and in some closer to him, less luck than most of us. It was good to hear him saying, without any reserve, tight lip all gone, that this was luck he hadn’t counted on.

He said something else, which made me feel that I had been facile in thinking about Guy. I had assumed that he was a rich young man who relished talk of world convulsions, so long as they took place in drawing-rooms. I remembered predicting to Charles that he would finish up in a merchant bank. So far, said Martin, there was no sign of that. He was trying to find a job in famine relief. And was being held up, by a beautiful piece of security machinery, because of his part in last year’s revolt.

No doubt their elders would go on waiting for Charles’ circle to renege. As yet, none had done so. The only half exception was the leader, Olly, who had recently been chosen as a Labour candidate; but as he was standing in one of the richest constituencies in London, he couldn’t be said to have compromised with professional politics yet awhile.

Next morning, from Martin’s drawing-room, we heard the chapel bell begin to toll. Charles had joined us there, after spending the previous night in his own college, packing ready to depart: he was wearing a black tie, as Martin and I were. As we walked along the paths through the college, other parties were converging on the chapel, women in black, like Margaret and Irene. It was all as it used to be for other memorial services, all as it was for Roy’s. Through the great gate, a group of a dozen people were entering, and the first court’s flags were jolted by a man moving slowly, as though in time with some inaudible march, clothes and gowns dark in the bright shower-washed sunlight. The grass on the lawn was so green, the eyes dazzled.

The chapel, its interior Georgian and seemly, was already full. Seats had been reserved for fellows and sometime fellows and their families, and we took up ours. Opposite sat Katherine, in a grey dress, not in full mourning, the Getliffe sons and daughters, their wives and husbands. Charles and Ann March were close by, and others of Katherine’s family. Chairs had been placed in the antechapel, under which some early Masters had been buried (and where old Gay had expressed a wish, not honoured, to lie himself). The moulded doors had been left open, and from our seats we could see the antechapel also full, with young men standing. Most of the faces, having been so long away from Cambridge, I didn’t know. Some of them must have been from Francis’ own laboratory, and I recognised one or two senior scientists from the Cavendish. There were several ministers, officers in uniform, civil servants, reminders of the strata of Francis’ public life. One pair I saw, inconspicuous in the distance, Roger Quaife and his wife.