Last Things Read Free Page B

had staggered about, violently sick. While vomiting, he had fallen forward, gashing his forehead against the handle of the WC. Near by, he had been discovered at breakfast time, covered with blood but still alive. They had driven him to the –– clinic.
    ‘Fortunately,’ said Helen, ‘he seems to be surprisingly well. I don’t know whether I ought to say fortunately. He wouldn’t.’
    She had destroyed the two notes unopened. He had been at least half-lucid when she talked to him in his hospital room. He had asked, several times, to see me, without Margaret. So Helen had been obliged to give the message.
    ‘I wish’, I said, ‘that he had asked for her. She minds a great deal.’
    ‘That’s why he’d rather have you, maybe,’ said Helen.
    The midday roads were dense with cars, and it took forty minutes before the taxi reached the clinic. On the way, I had been wondering what I should find, or even more what I should manage, to say. I was fond of Austin Davidson, and I respected that bright, uncluttered mind. But it wasn’t the respect that one might feel for an eminent old man. It was an effort to think of him as my father-in-law. Except when the sheer impact of his illness weighed one down, he seemed much more like a younger friend.
    It was the clinic in which, during the war, I had first met Margaret. I thought I remembered, I might be imagining it, the number of my room. At any rate, it was on the same ground floor, at the same side, as the one I was entering now.
    In his high bed, flanked by flowers on the tables close by – the ceiling shimmered with subaqueous green reflected from the garden – Austin Davidson looked grotesque. His head, borne up by three pillows, was wrapped in a bandage which covered his right eye and most of his forehead: even at that, there was a bruise under the right cheekbone, and the corner of his mouth was swollen. More than anything, he gave the appearance of having just been patched up after a fight. Among the bandages, one sepia eye stared at me. I heard his voice, dulled but the words quite clear.
    ‘You see God’s own fool.’
    I felt certain that he had prepared that opening, determined to get it out.
    ‘Never mind.’
    ‘If one’s got to the point’ – he was speaking very slowly, with pauses for breath and also to hold his train of thought – ‘of doing oneself in – the least one can do – is to make a go of it.’
    ‘Lots of people don’t make a go of it, you know.’ To my own astonishment, at least in retrospect, for it was quite spontaneous, I found myself teasing him: dropping into a kind of irony, as he did so often, putting himself at a distance from the present moment. The visible side of Davidson’s face showed something like the vestige of a grin, as I reminded him of German officers during the war. Beck took two shots at himself, and then had to get someone to finish him off. Poor old Stülpnagel had blinded himself, but without the desired result. ‘You would expect them to be better at it than you, wouldn’t you? But they weren’t.’
    ‘Too much fuss. Not enough to show for it.’
    He was drowsy, but he did not seem miserable. To an extent, he had always liked an audience. And also, was there even now a stirring of, yes, relief? Had he wanted to persist – it didn’t matter how much he denied it?
    ‘Tell them. No more visitors today. Margaret can come tomorrow. If she wants.’
    ‘Of course she will.’ Margaret was his favourite daughter; but he had never appeared to realise that his detachment could cause her pain.
    ‘She’s prudish about suicide.’ His voice became louder and much more clear. ‘I simply can’t understand her.’
    After a moment:
    ‘Extraordinary thing to be prudish about.’
    Then he began to ramble, or the words thickened so that it was hard to follow him. Sources of supply . That might mean the way he got hold of his drugs. Some people wouldn’t act as sources of supply. Prudish. Glad to say, others