Straight Read Free

scaffolding that was being dismantled had fallen on him from a considerable height. One of the construction workers had been killed, and a second had been taken to hospital with a broken hip.
    I had been given my brother’s clinical details. One metal beam had pierced his stomach, another had torn into his leg; something heavy had fallen on his head and caused brain damage with massive cerebral bleeding. It had happened late the previous afternoon; he had been deeply unconscious from the moment of impact and he hadn’t been identified until workmen dealing with the rubble in the morning had found his diary and given it to the police.
    “Wallet?” I asked.
    No, no wallet. Just the diary with, neatly filled in on the first page, Next of Kin, Derek Franklin, brother; telephone number supplied. Before that, they had had no clue except the initials G.S.F. embroidered above the pocket of his torn and bloodstained shirt.
    “A silk shirt,” a nurse added disapprovingly, as if monogrammed silk shirts were somehow immoral.
    “Nothing else in his pockets?” I asked.
    “A bunch of keys and a handkerchief. That was all. You’ll be given them, of course, along with the diary and his watch and a signet ring.”
    I nodded. No need to ask when.
    The afternoon stretched out, strange and unreal, a time-warped limbo. I went again to spend some time with Greville, but he lay unmoving, oblivious in his dwindling twilight, already subtly not himself. If Wordsworth were right about immortality, it was the sleep and the forgetting that were slipping away and reawakening that lay ahead, and maybe I should be glad for him, not grieve.
    I thought of him as he had been, and of our lives as brothers.
    We had never lived together in a family unit because, by the time I was born, he was away at university, building a life of his own. By the time I was six, he had married, by the time I was ten, he’d divorced. For years he was a semistranger whom I met briefly at family gatherings, celebrations which grew less and less frequent as our parents aged and died, and which stopped altogether when the two sisters who bridged the gap between Greville and me both emigrated, one to Australia and one to Japan.
    It wasn’t until I’d reached twenty-eight myself that af ter a long Christmas-and-birthday-card politeness we’d met unexpectedly on a railway platform and during the journey ahead had become friends. Not close time-sharing friends even then, but positive enough for telephoning each other sporadically and exchanging restaurant dinners and feeling good about it.
    We had been brought up in different environments, Greville in the Regency London house which went with our father’s job as manager of one of the great landowning estates, I in the comfortable country cottage of his retirement. Greville had been taken by our mother to museums, art galleries and the theater: I had been given ponies.
    We didn’t even look much alike. Greville, like our father, was six feet tall, I three inches shorter. Greville’s hair, now graying, had been light brown and straight, mine darker brown and curly. We had both inherited amber eyes and good teeth from our mother and a tendency to leanness from our father, but our faces, though both tidy enough, were quite different.
    Greville best remembered our parents’ vigorous years; I’d been with them through their illnesses and deaths. Our father had himself been twenty years older than our mother, and she had died first, which had seemed monstrously unfair. The old man and I had lived briefly together after that in tolerant mutual noncomprehension, though I had no doubt that he’d loved me, in his way. He had been sixty-two when I was born and he died on my eighteenth birthday, leaving me a fund for my continued education and a letter of admonitions and instructions, some of which I’d carried out.
    Greville’s stillness was absolute. I shifted uncomfortably on the crutches and thought of asking for a chair. I