“I tell you, it would do more than worry her.”
“I thought we all agreed,” he was arguing now with something like his old enthusiasm, “that the one certain right one has in one’s own life is to get rid of it.”
When he said “we all”, he meant, just as in the past, himself and his friends. I had no taste for argument just then. I said no more than that, as a fact of existence, his suicide would cause a major grief to both his daughters.
“Perhaps I may be excused for thinking,” he said it airily, light-heartedly, “that it really is rather more my concern than theirs.”
Then he added: “In the circumstances, if they don’t like the idea of a suicide in the family, then I should regard them as at best stupid and at worst distinctly selfish.”
“That’s about as untrue of Margaret as of anyone you’ve ever known.”
It was curious to be on the point of quarrelling with a man so sad that he was planning to kill himself. I tried to sound steady: I asked him once again to think it over for a week or two.
“What do you imagine I’ve been doing for the last four years?” This time his smile looked genuinely gay. “No, you’re a sensible man. You’ve got to accept that this is my decision and no one else’s. One’s death is a moderately serious business. The least everyone else can do is to leave one alone.”
We sat in silence, though his head had not sunk down, he did not seem oppressed by the desolating weight that came upon him so often in that room. He said: “You’ll tell Margaret, of course. Oh, and I shall need a little help from one of you. Just to get hold of the necessary materials.”
That came out of the quiet air. He might have been asking for a match. I had to say, what materials?
Davidson took out of his pocket a small bottle, unscrewed the cap, and tipped on to his palm a solitary red capsule.
“That’s seconal. It’s a sleeping drug, don’t you know.”
He explained it as though he were revealing something altogether novel – all the time I had known him, he explained bits of modern living with a childlike freshness, with the kind of Adamic surprise he might have shown in his teens at the sight of his first aeroplane.
He handed the capsule to me. I held it between my fingers, without comment. He said: “My doctor gives me them one at a time. Which may be some evidence that he’s not quite such a fool as he looks.”
“Perhaps.”
“I could save them up, of course. But it would take rather a long time to save enough for the purpose.”
Then he said, in a clear dispassionate tone: “There’s another trouble. I take it that I’m somewhere near a state of senile melancholia. That has certain disadvantages. One of them is that you can’t altogether rely on your own will.”
“I don’t think you are in that state.”
“It’s what I think that counts.” He went on: “So I want you or Margaret to get some adequate supplies. While I still know my own mind. I suppose there’s no difficulty about that?”
“It’s not altogether easy.”
“It can’t be impossible.”
“I don’t know much about drugs–”
“You can soon find out, don’t you know.”
I said that I would make enquiries. Actually, I was dissimulating and playing for time. I twiddled the seconal between my fingers. Half an inch of cylinder with rounded ends: the vermilion sheen: up to now it had seemed a comfortable object. I was more familiar with these things than he was, for Margaret used them as a regular sleeping pill. Perhaps once or twice a month, I, who was the better sleeper, would be restless at night, and she would pass me one across the bed. Calm sleep. Relaxed well-being at breakfast.
Up to now these had been innocent objects. Though there were others – mixed up in my response as for the last few minutes I had listened to Davidson – which I had not chosen to see for many years. Another drug: Sodium amytal. That was the sleeping drug Sheila, my first wife, had taken. Occasionally she also had passed one across to me. She had killed herself with them. Davidson must once have known that. Perhaps he had not remembered, as he talked lucidly about suicide. Or else he might have thought it irrelevant. At all times, he was a concentrated man.
When I told him I would make enquiries, he gave a smile – a youthful smile, of satisfaction, almost of achievement.
“Well then,” he said. “That is all the non-trivial conversation for today.”
But he had no interest in any other kind of conversation. He became withdrawn again, scarcely listening, alone.
When I returned to the flat, Margaret and Charles were sitting in the drawing-room. Margaret caught my eye: Charles caught the glance that passed between us. He too had a suspicion. But it had better remain a suspicion. Margaret had had enough of parents like some of her father’s friends, who in the name of openness insisted on telling their children secrets they did not wish to hear.
It was not until after dinner that I spoke to Margaret. She went into the bedroom, and sat, doing nothing, at her dressing table. I followed, and said: “I think you’d guessed, hadn’t you?”
“I think I had.”
I took her hands and said, using my most intimate name for her: “You’ve got to be prepared.”
“I am,” she said. Her eyes were bright, but she was crying. She burst out: “It oughtn’t to have come to this.”
“I’m afraid it may.”
“Tell me what to do.” She was strong, but she turned to me like a child.
All her ties were deep, instinctual. Her tongue, as sharp as her father’s, wasn’t sharp now.
“I’ve failed him, haven’t I?” she cried. But she meant also, in the ambiguity of passionate emotion, that he had failed her because his ties had never been so deep.
“You mustn’t take too much upon yourself,” I said.
“I ought to have given him something to keep going for–”
“No one could. You mustn’t feel more guilty than you need.” I was speaking sternly. She found it easy to hug guilt to herself – and it was mixed with a certain kind of vanity.
She put her face against my shoulder, and cried. When she was, for an instant, rested, I said: “I haven’t told you everything.”
“What?” She was shaking.
“He wants us to help him do it.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s never been too good at practical things, has he?” I spoke with deliberate sarcasm. “He wants us to find him the drugs.”
“Oh, no!” Now her skin had flushed with outrage or anger.
“He asked me.”
“Hasn’t he any idea what it would mean?”
Again I spoke in our most intimate language. Then I said: “Look, I needn’t have told you. I could have taken the responsibility myself, and you would never have known. There was a time when I might have done that.”
She gazed at me with total trust. Earlier in our marriage I had concealed wounds of my own from her, trying (I thought to myself) to protect her, but really my own pride. That we had, with humiliation and demands upon each other, struggled through. We had each had to become humbler, but it meant that we could meet each other face to face.
“Can you imagine,” she cried, “if ever you got into his state – and I hope to God that I’m dead before that – can you imagine asking young Charles to put you out?”
All her life, since she was a girl, she had been repelled by, or found quite wanting in human depth, the attitude of her father’s friends. To her, they seemed to apply reason where reason wasn’t enough, or oughtn’t to be applied at all. It wasn’t merely that they had scoffed at all faiths (for despite her yearning, she had none herself, at least in forms she could justify): more than that, they had in her eyes lost contact with – not with desire, but with everything that makes desire part of the flow of a human life.
“Tell me what to do,” she said again.
“No,” I replied, “I can’t do that.”
“I just don’t know.” Usually so active in a crisis, she stayed close to me, benumbed.
“I will tell you this,” I said. “If it’s going to hurt you too much to give him the stuff, that is, if it’s something you think you won’t forget, then I’m not going to do it either. Because you’d find that would hurt you more.”
“I don’t know whether I ought to think about getting hurt at all. I suppose it’s him I ought to be thinking about, regardless–”
“That’s not so easy.”
“He wants to kill himself.” Now she was speaking with her father’s clarity. “According to his lights, he’s got a perfect right to. I haven’t got any respectable right to stop him. I wish I had. But it’s no use pretending. I haven’t. All I can do is make it a bit more inconvenient for him. It would be easy for us to slip him the stuff. It would take him some trouble to find another source of supply. So there’s no option, is there? I’ve got to do what he wants.”
The blood rushed to her face again. Her whole body stiffened. Her eyes were brilliant. “I can’t,” she said, in a voice low but so strong that it sounded hard. “And I won’t.”
I didn’t know what was right: but I did know that it was wrong to press her.
Soon she was speaking again with her father’s clarity. The proper person for him to apply to for this particular service would be one of his friends. After all – almost as though she were imitating his irony – there was nothing they would think more natural.
Obviously he had to be told without delay that we were failing him. “He’ll be disappointed,” I said. “He’s looking forward to it like a treat.”
“He’ll be worse than disappointed,” said Margaret.
“I’d better tell him,” I said, trying to take at least that load from her.
“That’s rough on you.” She glanced at me with gratitude.
“I don’t like it,” I said. “But I can talk to him, there’s no emotion between us.”
“There’s no emotion between him and anyone else now, though, is there?” she said.
Once more she stiffened herself.
“No, I must do it,” she said.
She looked more spirited, brighter, than she had done that night. Hers was the courage of action. She could not stand the slow drip of waiting or irresolution, which I was better at enduring: but when the crisis broke and the time for action had arrived, when she could do something, even if it were distasteful, searing, then she was set free.
So, with the economy of those who know each other to the bone, we left it there. We returned to the drawing-room, where Charles, who was reading, looked at us, curiosity fighting against tact. “You’re worried about him, I suppose,” he allowed himself to say.
ALL through those weeks, I was being badgered by messages from the Pateman family. One had arrived during Charles’ break; another the evening after Austin Davidson made his request, the same day that Margaret went to him with our answer. Dick Pateman’s messages came by telephone, in the form of protracted trunk calls (who paid the bills? I wondered): he had been found a place at a Scottish university, but that made him more dissatisfied. But his dissatisfaction was not so grinding as that of his father, who wrote letters of complaint about his son’s treatment and his own. There was, I knew it well, a kind of blackmail of responsibility: once you did the mildest of good turns, natures such as these – and there were more than you imagined – took it for granted that you were at their mercy. Well, after the June Court, I had decided to pay them a last visit and say that that was the end.
Meanwhile, Margaret had faced her father: and the result was not what we expected. True, he had been bitter, he had been intellectually scornful. He regarded what he called her “mental processes” as beneath contempt. And yet, she could not be sure, was he also feeling relieved, or perhaps reprieved? At any rate, he seemed both more active and less despairing: and physically, after his announcement to us and his quarrel with her, he had, for days which lengthened into weeks, something like a remission. If that had happened to anyone else, he would have thought it one of fate’s jokes, though in slightly bad taste. During Margaret’s visits, daily though uninvited, he produced ironies of his own, but didn’t speculate on that one. As for her, she dared not say a word, in case this state were a fluke, something the mind-body could hold stable for a little while, before the collapse.
On the day of the Court meeting, which was the twenty-second of June, I arrived at the station early in the afternoon and went straight out to the university. The Court was to meet at 3.0: the proceedings would be formal: but (so I had heard from Vicky) Leonard Getliffe and two of the younger professors had decided that, since it wasn’t necessary for them to attend, they wouldn’t do so. Arnold Shaw had expressed indifference: he was going to get his vote of support, there would be no dissension. Had the man no sense of danger? I thought. The answer was, he hadn’t. Among his negative talents as a politician, and he had many, that was the most striking. If one had watched any kind of politics, big or little, one came to know that a nose for danger was something all the real performers had. They might lack almost every other gift, but not that. Trotsky, like Arnold Shaw, whom he didn’t much resemble in other respects, had singularly little nose for danger. He got on without it for a few years. If he had had it, he might have held on to the power for longer.
Thus I was sitting in Leonard Getliffe’s office (they used the American term by now) in the physics department. Outside, it was a bright midsummer afternoon, just like the weather twenty-two years before, when Leonard was nine years old, the day we heard that Hitler’s armies had gone into Russia. A motor mower was zooming over the lawn, and through the open window came the smell of new-cut grass. In the room was a blackboard covered with symbols; there were three or four photographs, among whom I recognised Einstein and Bohr: on the desk, notebooks, trays, another photograph, this time of Vicky Shaw. Not a flattering one. She wasn’t photogenic. In the flesh she had both bloom and vital force, but in two dimensions she looked puddingy.
There the picture stood, in front of him. I said, wouldn’t he reconsider and come along to the Court? After all, we had done what we could for the students. Yes, said Leonard, even Pateman had got fitted up. “The Scots can cope with him now,” I said.
“No, not the Scots.” Leonard gave the name of a university close by, only twelve miles away. “They’ve accepted him,” said Leonard.