TWO evenings later – Charles was still at home, but returning to school next day – a telegram was brought into the drawing-room, as we were having our first drinks. Margaret opened it, and brought it over to me. It read: Should be grateful if you and Lewis would visit me tonight Austin Davidson.
Austin Davidson was her father. It was like him, even in illness, to sign a telegram in that fashion. It was like him to send her a telegram at all: for he, so long the champion of the twenties’ artistic avant garde, had never overcome his distrust of mechanical appliances, and in the sixteen years Margaret and I had been married, he had spoken to me on the telephone precisely once.
“We’d better all go,” said Margaret, responsibility tightening her face. She didn’t return to her chair, and within minutes we were in a taxi, on our way to the house in Regents Park.
Charles knew that house well. As we went through the drawing-room where Margaret had once told me I could be sure of her, I glanced at him – did he look at it with fresh eyes, now he had seen how his other grandfather lived? In the light of the June evening, the Vlaminck, the Boudin, the two Sickerts, gleamed from the walls. Charles passed them by. Maybe he knew them off by heart. The Davidsons were not rich, but there had been, in Austin’s own phrase, “a little money about”. He had bought and sold pictures in his youth: when he became an art critic, he decided that no financial interest was tolerable (Berenson was one of his lifelong hates), and turned his attention to the stock market. People had thought him absent-minded, but since he was forty he hadn’t needed to think about money.
In his study, though it was a warm night, he was sitting by a lighted fire. Margaret knelt by him, and kissed him. “How are you?” she said in a strong maternal voice.
“As you see,” said her father.
What we saw was not old age, although he was in his seventies. It was much more like a youngish man, ravaged and breathless with cardiac illness. Over ten years before he had had a coronary thrombosis: until then he had lived and appeared like a really young man. That had drawn a line across his life. He had ceased even to be interested in pictures. Partly, the enlightenment that he spoke for had been swept aside by fashion: he had been a young friend of the Bloomsbury circle, and their day had gone. But more, for all his stoicism, he couldn’t come to terms with age. He had gradually, for a period of years, got better. He had written a book about his own period, which had made some stir. “It’s not much consolation,” said Austin Davidson, “being applauded just for saying that everything that was intellectually respectable has been swept under the carpet.” Then he had weakened again. He played games invented by himself, whenever Margaret or his other daughter could visit him. Often he played alone. He read a little. “But what do you read in my condition?” he once asked me. “When you’re young, you read to prepare yourself for life. What do you suggest that I prepare myself for?”
There he sat, his mouth half-open. He was, as he had always been, an unusually good-looking man. His face had the beautiful bone structure which had come down to Margaret, the high cheekbones which Charles also inherited. Since he still stumbled out to the garden to catch any ray of sun, his skin remained a Red Indian bronze, which masked some of the signs of illness. But when he looked at us, his eyes, which were opaque chocolate brown, quite different from Margaret’s, had no light in them.
“Are you feeling any worse?” she said, taking his hand.
“Not as far as I know.”
“Well then. You would tell us?”
“I don’t see much point in it. But I probably should.”
There was the faintest echo of his old stark humour: nothing wrapped up, nothing hypocritical. He wouldn’t soften the facts of life, even for his favourite daughter, least of all for her.
“What can we do for you?”
“Nothing, just now.”
“Would you like a game?” she said. No one would have known, even I had to recall, that she was in distress.
“For once, no.”
Charles, who had been standing in the shadows, went close to the fire.
“Anything I can do, Grandpa?” he said, in a casual, easy fashion. He had got used to the sight of mortal sickness.
“No, thank you, Carlo.”
Austin Davidson seemed pleased to bring out the nickname, which had been a private joke between them since Charles was a baby, and which had become his pet name at home. For the first time since we arrived, a conversation started.
“What have you been doing, Carlo?”
“Struggling on,” said Charles with a grin.
There was some talk about the school they had in common. But Austin Davidson, though he had been successful there, professed to hate it. How soon would Charles be going to Cambridge? In two or three years, three years at most, Charles supposed. Ah, now that was different, said Austin Davidson.
He could talk to the boy as he couldn’t to his daughter. He wasn’t talking with paternal feeling: he had little of that. All of a sudden, the cage of illness and mortality had let him out for a few moments. He spoke like one bright young man to another. He had been happier in Cambridge, just before the first war, than ever in his life. That had been the douceur de la vie. He had been one of the most brilliant of young men. He had been an Apostle, a member of the secret intellectual society (Margaret and I had learned this only from the biographies of others, for he had kept the secret until that day, and had not given either of us a hint).
“You won’t want to leave it, Carlo.” Davidson might have been saying that time didn’t exist, that he himself was a young man who didn’t want to leave it.
“I’ll be able to tell you when I get there, shan’t I?” said Charles. Again, all of a sudden, timelessness broke. Davidson’s head slumped on to his chest. None of us could escape the silence. At last Davidson raised his head almost imperceptibly, just enough to indicate that he was addressing me.
“I want a word with you alone,” he said.
“Do you want us to come back when you’ve finished?” asked Margaret.
“Not unless you’re enjoying my company.” Once again the vestigial echo. “Which I should consider not very likely.”
On their way out Margaret glanced at me and touched my hand. This was something he would not mention in front of Charles. She and I had the same suspicion. I said, as though a matter-of-fact statement were some sort of help, that I would be back at home in time for dinner.
The door closed behind them. I pulled up a chair close to Davidson’s. At once he said: “I’ve had enough.”
Yes, that was it.
“What do you mean?” I said automatically.
“You know what I mean.”
He looked straight at me, opaque eyes unblinking.
“One can always not stand it,” he said. “I’m not going to stand it any longer.”
“You might strike a better patch–”
“Nonsense. Life isn’t bearable on these terms. I can tell you that. After all, I’m the one who’s bearing it.”
“Can’t you bear it a bit longer? You don’t quite know how you’ll feel next month–”
“Nonsense,” he said again. “I ought to have finished it three or four years ago.” He went on: he didn’t have one moment’s pleasure in the day. Not much pain, but discomfort, the drag of the body. Day after day with nothing in them. Boredom (he didn’t say it, but he meant the boredom which is indistinguishable from despair). Boredom without end.
“Well,” he said, “it’s time there was an end.”
He was speaking with more spirit than for months past. He seemed to have the exhilaration of feeling that at last his will was free. He wasn’t any more at the mercy of fate. There was an exhilaration, almost an intoxication, of free will that comes to anyone when the suffering has become too great and one is ready to dispose of oneself: it had suffused me once, when I was a young man and believed that I might be incurably ill. At the very last one was buoyed up by the assertion of the “I”, the unique “I”. It was that precious illusion, which, on a lesser scale, was a consolation, no, more than a consolation, a kind of salvation, to men like my brother Martin when they make a choice injurious (as the world saw it) to themselves.
“You can’t give me one good reason,” he said, “why I shouldn’t do it.”
“You matter to some of us,” I began, but he interrupted me: “This isn’t a suitable occasion to be polite. You know as well as I do that you have to visit a miserable old man. You feel better when you get outside. If I know my daughter, she’ll have put down a couple of stiff whiskies before you get back, just because it’s a relief not to be looking at me.”
“It’s not as simple as that. If you killed yourself, it would hurt her very much.”
“I don’t see why. She knows that my life is intolerable. That ought to be enough.”
“It isn’t enough.”
“I shouldn’t expect her,” said Davidson, “to be worried by someone’s suicide. Surely we all got over that a long while ago.”
“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.