For nearly all of his acquaintances, there was no news of Hillmorton over the Christmas holiday and the start of the new year. Ryle heard nothing. Nor did his daughter Liz, safely cocooned most of those short dark winter days in Julian’s flat. There was one person who did have news, though he was scarcely even an acquaintance. This was Doctor Pemberton.
Hillmorton, not only evasive out of habit, had been disingenuous when he seemed to answer Ryle’s questions about his health. He was stoical, unusually so, but not as stoical as he pretended. He had not gone to a doctor to be examined, but he had, before that evening in the club, spoken to one of his fellow members on the hospital board of governors. He had spoken as it were nonchalantly. He was having ‘a bit of discomfort’. It was nothing to bother people about, but just possibly it mightn’t be a bad idea to be ‘looked over’ when that didn’t interfere with anything else. He spoke so indifferently that the other man, who knew him only as a public figure, was taken in.
Ryle would have realised that Hillmorton was shirking being examined, wanting to be reassured, but also wanting to put it off, avoiding the evil eye, frightened. Just as frightened as anyone less trained to hide his feelings. He didn’t confess, any more than he had done to Ryle, that for some weeks past his right hand seemed to be half-numb, and that the numbness wasn’t passing. In private, he exercised the hand a good many times a day, trying to persuade himself that it had more sensation than half an hour before.
The result of that conversation, as casual as Hillmorton’s own tone, was an arrangement that he should go to the hospital for a check up (if Hillmorton had been free from qualms he might have felt even more distaste for that mechanical little phrase). The arrangement wasn’t hurried. Thus it was Christmas Eve when Hillmorton went to the hospital. That evening, after seven o’clock, the last patient having been dealt with, Dr Pemberton was sitting in his surgery when the telephone rang.
‘You’re interested in old Hillmorton, aren’t you?’ This was the voice of his medical contact at the hospital.
‘You know I am.’
‘He’s been here today.’
‘Business or pleasure?’
‘No. He’s been gone over by the neurologists.’
‘Has he, by God?’
‘It doesn’t look too good. I hope this doesn’t upset your Christmas–’
‘To hell with Christmas.’ Doctor Pemberton in no circumstances bore much resemblance to Tiny Tim. ‘What have they found?’
‘Oh, there’s a mass of tumour on one side of the brain.’
‘Which side?’ Clinical question without point.
‘Left.’
‘What do they think?’
‘Well, what do you think?’
Dr Pemberton didn’t reply. Anyone’s spot diagnosis would be about the same.
The other doctor said: ‘He must have noticed something before this. He ought to have come in months ago.’
‘If it’s what it’s most likely to be, that wouldn’t have made one per cent difference.’
‘True enough.’
Dr Pemberton said: ‘They must be doing the obvious tests?’
‘Chest X-ray tomorrow.’
‘Why wait that long?’
‘Holiday season. Bit of dislocation.’
‘Christ Almighty.’ Dr Pemberton uttered a few crisp words about the general efficiency and industriousness of the country.
‘Yes. But what you said before – if your man has had it, it won’t make one pen cent difference. Or point one of one per cent, come to that.’
‘Someone ought to be sacked. It would encourage the others. Anyway, let me know what happens. I am interested, I told you that.’
‘I’ll keep in touch.’
The other doctor duly kept in touch. The following night, when Pemberton was sitting at dinner with his wife and younger son, he was called to the telephone. He was drinking the single glass of port he allowed himself on festive occasions. That rationing of his alcohol still didn’t come easy to him. He was wearing a paper hat, which didn’t come easy to him either.
The conversation was short.
‘Your man Hillmorton.’
‘What about him?’
‘Two spots on the lung.’
‘That ties it up, then.’
‘You were afraid of it, weren’t you?’ said the other man. Pemberton thanked him for ringing and said that he must get back to dinner.
For some minutes, though, he didn’t do quite that. In the hall, antiseptic smelling like all that house, he sat beside the telephone, absently draping his paper hat over it. This meant that Hillmorton would die before long. How long, was anyone’s guess. Pemberton was a careful doctor, not an intuitive one. He had no use for intuitions, anyone else’s or his own. The only guides to be trusted were one’s knowledge and one’s mind. These carcinomas which the hospital had traced must be secondaries: there was a primary somewhere, and they would find that soon enough. That night Pemberton’s speculation – it wasn’t any more than that, but he thought dismissively that it was as good as anyone else’s – was that in about six months Hillmorton would have to go into a nursing home for the last time. After that, he would die in – maybe another year, maybe longer, only a fool predicted the course of terminal cancer.
Dr Pemberton felt little emotion of any kind, certainly not pity. He would have despised anyone who, in his situation, pretended to feel pity. He scarcely knew the man. All the man had done, in their couple of confrontations, was to humiliate him. Dr Pemberton, not vulnerable to a good many of the human wounds, was vulnerable to humiliation. He hadn’t forgotten and wouldn’t forget.
This man’s death would bring him some advantages, already imagined and reckoned out. That brought a certain, not excessive, gratification. More satisfying, so far as he was feeling anything, was the warmth, something like a moral warmth, of an injury being disposed of. Dr Pemberton would have considered it hypocritical to pretend.
Dr Pemberton considered it hypocritical to pretend pity or concern about most deaths. In his experience, people didn’t often feel either. They pretended to, but instead they felt slightly more alive because someone else had died. Most displays of mourning were so many shams. The only human beings whose deaths would move him were his wife and sons – and perhaps someone he had slept with. He had decided that in essence the same was true of all men.
If people really cared as they pretended about others’ deaths, human life would be unendurable. It wasn’t. Just look at their faces at a funeral. Few men were less religious in spirit than Dr Pemberton, but no one believed more completely that in the midst of life we are in death: and that we bear it more complacently than the most minor upset of our own.
Dr Pemberton also believed that we are all common flesh. He assumed that no one had told Hillmorton the truth about his condition. He had himself had to tell such news to others. They might put on an act, some made jokes and tried to make it easy for the doctor: but everyone was afraid. Hillmorton would be. Dr Pemberton had heard many people say that they wished to know the truth. So they might, provided it was pleasant. No one wished to know the truth, if it was news of his own death, Any doctor had learned that. Sometimes one had to tell it. But anyone was cowardly when he had to listen, Dr Pemberton was certain. We are all brute flesh, he would be cowardly himself. So, even though he was thinking of Hillmorton whom he hated, perhaps there was a mutter – impatient, pushed aside – of visceral sympathy.
If he had been attending him as his doctor, he wouldn’t have suppressed that. This was likely to be an unpleasant way of dying. Dying was a messy business anyway, far more often than not. One couldn’t tell with terminal cancer. Not even when they had investigated the primary source of Hillmorton’s, one still couldn’t tell. Sometimes his kind of cancer was merciful. As a rule it was a more messy way of dying than most.
That might be the case with Hillmorton. If it were so, Pemberton had a hope. It wasn’t gentle, it was fierce with Pemberton’s usual opinion of his kind. He hoped that Hillmorton had a doctor without any scruple about putting him out. The only pity worth having was practical. The rest was maundering and false. Dr Pemberton had killed a number of sufferers in his time. He wouldn’t have thought much of a man who had done otherwise. To anyone he could trust – which considerably reduced the number of possible confidants – he wouldn’t have softened either the word or the fact. People maundering on the sanctity of life – Dr Pemberton regarded them with more than his normal degree of contempt. They didn’t know what life was like: or what dying was like. Let them watch some ways of approaching certain death. Then, if they could still think of their individual salvation and didn’t do what he had done – well, human beings were miserable creatures and these were more miserable than most.
As usual, Dr Pemberton became invigorated when he had found extra reasons for being scornful of the species. He picked up his paper hat and returned to the dining room. His wife asked: ‘Oh dear. Do you have to go out?’
‘No, no. Nothing like that. Nothing much.’
The family knew, of course, about his heritage, but for years it had lingered like a vague and distant prospect, not coming nearer, not likely to come nearer. Pemberton would tell his wife the news later that night, but not in the presence of his younger son. Pemberton wasn’t so tough-minded within his family, and he was even worried at the thought of resentment between his sons. After all, this one would get nothing out of it except a courtesy title, which in Pemberton’s view was more of a nonsense and distinctly more useless than the rest.
So Pemberton sat down, and, though he kept to his own rule, he pressed them each to have another glass of port. They were hearty people who liked their drink as he would have done, and they took these with pleasure and without wondering what the telephone call had meant. Mrs Pemberton was wearing a purple crown and the son a tricorne hat. They were both big and handsome, the son, twenty years old, a couple of inches taller and not many pounds lighter than his father. Pemberton viewed them with benevolence. The son had received a cheque for £20 as a present that day, and Pemberton, who had a passion for instructing, proceeded to give a clear, Christmassy, after-dinner lesson on the principles of short-term investment.