Kiss Kiss (2 page)

William Pearl did not leave a great deal of money when he
died, and his will was a simple one. With the exception of a
few small bequests to relatives, he left all his property to his
wife.
      
The solicitor and Mrs Pearl went over it together in the
solicitor’s office, and when the business was completed, the
widow got up to leave. At that point, the solicitor took a
sealed envelope from the folder on his desk and held it out to
his client.
      
“I have been instructed to give you this,” he said. “Your
husband sent it to us shortly before he passed away.” The
solicitor was pale and prim, and out of respect for a widow
he kept his head on one side as he spoke, looking downward.
“It appears that it might be something personal, Mrs Pearl. No
doubt you’d like to take it home with you and read it in
privacy.”
      
Mrs Pearl accepted the envelope and went out into the
street. She paused on the pavement, feeling the thing with her
fingers. A letter of farewell from William? Probably, yes. A
formal letter. It was bound to be formal—stiff and formal.
The man was incapable of acting otherwise. He had never
done anything informal in his life.

My dear Mary, I trust that you will not permit my departure
from this world to upset you too much, but that you will
continue to observe those precepts which have guided you so
well during our partnership together. Be diligent and dignified
in all things. Be thrifty with your money. Be very careful that
you do not . . . et cetera, et cetera.

      
A typical William letter.
      
Or was it possible that he might have broken down at the
last moment and written her something beautiful? Maybe this
was a beautiful tender message, a sort of love letter, a lovely
warm note of thanks to her for giving him thirty years of her
life and for ironing a million shirts and cooking a million meals
and making a million beds, something that she could read over
and over again, once a day at least, and she would keep it for
ever in the box on her dressing-table together with her
brooches.
      
There is no knowing what people will do when they are
about to die, Mrs Pearl told herself, and she tucked the
envelope under her arm and hurried home.
      
She let herself in the front door and went straight to the
living-room and sat down on the sofa without removing her
hat or coat. Then she opened the envelope and drew out the
contents. These consisted, she saw, of some fifteen or twenty
sheets of lined white paper, folded over once and held together
at the top left-hand corner by a clip. Each sheet was covered
with the small, neat, forward-sloping writing that she knew so
well, but when she noticed how much of it there was, and in
what a neat businesslike manner it was written, and how the
first page didn’t even begin in the nice way a letter should,
she began to get suspicious.
      
She looked away. She lit herself a cigarette. She took one
puff and laid the cigarette in the ash-tray.
      
If this is about what I am beginning to suspect it is about,
she told herself, then I don’t want to read it.
      
Can one refuse to read a letter from the dead?
Yes.
      
Well . . .
      
She glanced over at William’s empty chair on the other
side of the fireplace. It was a big brown leather armchair,
and there was a depression on the seat of it, made by his
buttocks over the years. Higher up, on the backrest, there
was a dark oval stain on the leather where his head had rested.
He used to sit reading in that chair and she would be opposite
him on the sofa, sewing on buttons or mending socks or putting
a patch on the elbow of one of his jackets, and every now
and then a pair of eyes would glance up from the book and
settle on her, watchful, but strangely impersonal, as if calculating
something. She had never liked those eyes. They were ice
blue, cold, small, and rather close together, with two deep
vertical lines of disapproval dividing them. All her life they
had been watching her. And even now, after a week alone in
the house, she sometimes had an uneasy feeling that they were
still there, following her around, staring at her from doorways,
from empty chairs, through a window at night.
      
Slowly she reached into her handbag and took out her
spectacles and put them on. Then, holding the pages up high
in front of her so that they caught the late afternoon light
from the window behind, she started to read:

T
HIS NOTE
,
my dear Mary
, is entirely for you, and
will be given you shortly after I am gone.
      
Do not be alarmed by the sight of all this writing. It is
nothing but an attempt on my part to explain to you precisely
what Landy is going to do to me, and why I have agreed that
he should do it, and what are his theories and his hopes. You
are my wife and you have a right to know these things. In fact
you must know them. During the past few days I have tried
very hard to speak with you about Landy, but you have steadfastly
refused to give me a hearing. This, as I have already told
you, is a very foolish attitude to take, and I find it not entirely
an unselfish one either. It stems mostly from ignorance, and I
am absolutely convinced that if only you were made aware of
all the facts, you would immediately change your view. That
is why I am hoping that when I am no longer with you, and
your mind is less distracted, you will consent to listen to me
more carefully through these pages. I swear to you that when
you have read my story, your sense of antipathy will vanish,
and enthusiasm will take its place. I even dare to hope that
you will become a little proud of what I have done.
      
As you read on, you must forgive me, if you will, for the
coolness of my style, but this is the only way I know of
getting my message over to you clearly. You see, as my time
draws near, it is natural that I begin to brim with every kind
of sentimentality under the sun. Each day I grow more extravagantly
wistful, especially in the evenings, and unless I watch
myself closely my emotions will be overflowing on to these
pages.
      
I have a wish, for example, to write something about you
and what a satisfactory wife you have been to me through
the years, and I am promising myself that if there is time, and
I still have the strength, I shall do that next.
      
I have a yearning also to speak about this Oxford of mine
where I have been living and teaching for the past seventeen
years, to tell something about the glory of the place and to
explain, if I can, a little of what it has meant to have been
allowed to work in its midst. All the things and places that I
loved so well keep crowding in on me now in this gloomy
bedroom. They are bright and beautiful as they always were,
and today, for some reason, I can see them more clearly than
ever. The path around the lake in the gardens of Worcester
College, where Lovelace used to walk. The gateway at
Pembroke. The view westward over the town from Magdalen
Tower. The great hall at Christchurch. The little rockery at
St John’s where I have counted more than a dozen varieties of
campanula, including the rare and dainty C. Waldsteiniana.
But there, you see! I haven’t even begun and already I’m falling
into the trap. So let me get started now; and let you read
it slowly, my dear, without any of that sense of sorrow or
disapproval that might otherwise embarrass your understanding.
Promise me now that you will read it slowly, and that
you will put yourself in a cool and patient frame of mind
before you begin.
      
The details of the illness that struck me down so suddenly
in my middle life are known to you. I need not waste time
upon them—except to admit at once how foolish I was not to
have gone earlier to my doctor. Cancer is one of the few
remaining diseases that these modern drugs cannot cure. A
surgeon can operate if it has not spread too far; but with me,
not only did I leave it too late, but the thing had the effrontery
to attack me in the pancreas, making both surgery and survival
equally impossible.
      
So here I was with somewhere between one and six months
left to live, growing more melancholy every hour—and then,
all of a sudden, in comes Landy.
      
That was six weeks ago, on a Tuesday morning, very early,
long before your visiting time, and the moment he entered I
knew there was some sort of madness in the wind. He didn’t
creep in on his toes, sheepish and embarrassed, not knowing
what to say, like all my other visitors. He came in strong and
smiling, and he strode up to the bed and stood there looking
down at me with a wild bright glimmer in his eyes, and he
said, “William, my boy, this is perfect. You’re just the one I
want!”
      
Perhaps I should explain to you here that although John
Landy has never been to our house, and you have seldom if
ever met him, I myself have been friendly with him for at
least nine years. I am, of course, primarily a teacher of
philosophy, but as you know I’ve lately been dabbling a good
deal in psychology as well. Landy’s interests and mine have
therefore slightly overlapped. He is a magnificent neuro-surgeon,
one of the finest, and recently he has been kind
enough to let me study the results of some of his work,
especially the varying effects of prefrontal lobotomies upon
different types of psychopath. So you can see that when he
suddenly burst in on me Tuesday morning, we were by no
means strangers to one another.
      
“Look,” he said, pulling up a chair beside the bed. “In a few
weeks you’re going to be dead. Correct?”
      
Coming from Landy, the question didn’t seem especially
unkind. In a way it was refreshing to have a visitor brave
enough to touch upon the forbidden subject.
      
“You’re going to expire right here in this room, and then
they’ll take you out and cremate you.”
      
“Bury me,” I said.
      
“That’s even worse. And then what? Do you believe you’ll
go to heaven?”
      
“I doubt it,” I said, “though it would be comforting to think
so.”
      
“Or hell, perhaps?”
      
“I don’t really see why they should send me there.”
      
“You never know, my dear William.”
      
“What’s all this about?” I asked.
      
“Well,” he said, and I could see him watching me carefully,
“personally, I don’t believe that after you’re dead you’ll ever
hear of yourself again—unless . . .” and here he paused and
smiled and leaned closer “. . . unless, of course, you have the
sense to put yourself into my hands. Would you care to consider
a proposition?”
      
The way he was staring at me, and studying me, and
appraising me with a queer kind of hungriness, I might have
been a piece of prime beef on the counter and he had bought
it and was waiting for them to wrap it up.
      
“I’m really serious about it, William. Would you care to
consider a proposition?”
      
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
      
“Then listen and I’ll tell you. Will you listen to me?”
      
“Go on then, if you like. I doubt I’ve got very much to lose
by hearing it.”
      
“On the contrary, you have a great deal to gain—especially
after you’re dead
.”
      
I am sure he was expecting me to jump when he said this,
but for some reason I was ready for it. I lay quite still, watching
his face and that slow white smile of his that always revealed
the gold clasp of an upper denture curled around the
canine on the left side of his mouth.
      
“This is a thing, William, that I’ve been working on quietly
for some years. One or two others here at the hospital have
been helping me, especially Morrison, and we’ve completed a
number of fairly successful trials with laboratory animals. I’m
at the stage now where I’m ready to have a go with a man.
It’s a big idea, and it may sound a bit far-fetched at first, but
from a surgical point of view there doesn’t seem to be any
reason why it shouldn’t be more or less practicable.”
      
Landy leaned forward and placed both hands on the edge
of my bed. He has a good face, handsome in a bony sort of
way, with none of the usual doctor’s look about it. You know
that look, most of them have it. It glimmers at you out of
their eyeballs like a dull electric sign and it reads
Only I can
save you
. But John Landy’s eyes were wide and bright and
little sparks of excitement were dancing in the centres of them.
      
“Quite a long time ago,” he said, “I saw a short medical film
that had been brought over from Russia. It was a rather
gruesome thing, but interesting. It showed a dog’s head
completely severed from the body, but with the normal blood
supply being maintained through the arteries and veins by
means of an artificial heart. Now the thing is this: that dog’s
head, sitting there all alone on a sort of tray, was
alive
. The
brain was functioning. They proved it by several tests. For
example, when food was smeared on the dog’s lips, the tongue
would come out and lick it away; and the eyes would follow
a person moving across the room.
      
“It seemed reasonable to conclude from this that the head
and the brain did not need to be attached to the rest of the
body in order to remain alive—provided, of course, that a
supply of properly oxygenated blood could be maintained.
      
“Now then. My own thought, which grew out of seeing
this film, was to remove the brain from the skull of a human
and keep it alive and functioning as an independent unit for
an unlimited period after he is dead.
Your
brain, for example,
after
you
are dead.”
      
“I don’t like that,” I said.
      
“Don’t interrupt, William. Let me finish. So far as I can
tell from subsequent experiments, the brain is a peculiarly
self-supporting object. It manufactures its own cerebrospinal fluid.
The magic processes of thought and memory which go on
inside it are manifestly not impaired by the absence of limbs
or trunk or even of skull, provided, as I say, that you keep
pumping in the right kind of oxygenated blood under the
proper conditions.
      
“My dear William, just think for a moment of your own
brain. It is in perfect shape. It is crammed full of a lifetime of
learning. It has taken you years of work to make it what it is.
It is just beginning to give out some first-rate original ideas.
Yet soon it is going to have to die along with the rest of your
body simply because your silly little pancreas is riddled with
cancer.”
      
“No thank you,” I said to him. “You can stop there. It’s a
repulsive idea, and even if you could do it, which I doubt, it
would be quite pointless. What possible use is there in keeping
my brain alive if I couldn’t talk or see or hear or feel?
Personally, I can think of nothing more unpleasant.”
      
“I believe that you
would
be able to communicate with us,”
Landy said. “And we might even succeed in giving you a
certain amount of vision. But let’s take this slowly. I’ll come
to all that later on. The fact remains that you’re going to die
fairly soon whatever happens; and my plans would not involve
touching you at all until
after
you are dead. Come now,
William. No true philosopher could object to lending his dead
body to the cause of science.”
      
“That’s not putting it quite straight,” I answered. “It seems to
me there’d be some doubt as to whether I were dead or alive
by the time you’d finished with me.”
      
“Well,” he said, smiling a little, “I suppose you’re right about
that. But I don’t think you ought to turn me down quite so
quickly, before you know a bit more about it.”
      
“I said I don’t want to hear it.”
      
“Have a cigarette,” he said, holding out his case.
      
“I don’t smoke, you know that.”
      
He took one himself and lit it with a tiny silver lighter that
was no bigger than a shilling piece. “A present from the people
who make my instruments,” he said. “Ingenious, isn’t it?”
      
I examined the lighter, then handed it back.
      
“May I go on?” he asked.
      
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
      
“Just lie still and listen. I think you’ll find it quite interesting.”
      
There were some blue grapes on a plate beside my bed. I
put the plate on my chest and began eating the grapes.
      
“At the very moment of death,” Landy said, “I should have
to be standing by so that I could step in immediately and try
to keep your brain alive.”
      
“You mean leaving it in the head?”
      
“To start with, yes. I’d have to.”
      
“And where would you put it after that?”
      
“If you want to know, in a sort of basin.”
      
“Are you really serious about this?”
      
“Certainly I’m serious.”
      
“All right. Go on.”
      
“I suppose you know that when the heart stops and the
brain is deprived of fresh blood and oxygen, its tissues die
very rapidly. Anything from four to six minutes and the
whole thing’s dead. Even after three minutes you may get a
certain amount of damage. So I should have to work rapidly to
prevent this from happening. But with the help of the machine,
it should all be quite simple.”
      
“What machine?”
      
“The artificial heart. We’ve got a nice adaptation here of
the one originally devised by Alexis Carrel and Lindbergh.
It oxygenates the blood, keeps it at the right temperature,
pumps it in at the right pressure, and does a number of other
little necessary things. It’s really not at all complicated.”
      
“Tell me what you would do at the moment of death,” I
said. “What is the first thing you would do?”
      
“Do you know anything about the vascular and venous
arrangements of the brain?”
      
“No.”
      
“Then listen. It’s not difficult. The blood supply to the brain
is derived from two main sources, the internal carotid arteries
and the vertebral arteries. There are two of each, making four
arteries in all. Got that?”
      
“Yes.”
      
“And the return system is even simpler. The blood is drained
away by only two large veins, the internal jugulars. So you
have four arteries going up—they go up the neck, of course—
and two veins coming down. Around the brain itself they
naturally branch out into other channels, but those don’t
concern us. We never touch them.”
      
“All right,” I said. “Imagine that I’ve just died. Now what
would you do?”