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wouldn’t see him smile again, I thought: not the lightening of the eyes and the gleam of teeth, the quick appreciation of the black humor of life, the awareness of his own power.
    He was a magistrate, a justice of the peace, and he imported and sold semiprecious stones. Beyond these bare facts I knew few details of his day-to-day existence, as whenever we met it seemed that he was always more interested in my doings than his own. He had himself owned horses from the day he telephoned to ask my opinion: someone who owed him money had offered his racehorse to settle the debt. What did I think? I told him I’d phone back, looked up the horse, thought it was a bargain and told Greville to go right ahead if he felt like it.
    “Don’t see why not,” he’d said. “Will you fix the paperwork?”
    I’d said yes, of course. It wasn’t hard for anyone to say yes to my brother Greville: much harder to say no.
    The horse had won handsomely and given him a taste for future ownership, though he seldom went to see his horses run, which wasn’t particularly unusual in an owner but always to me mystifying. He refused absolutely to own jumpers on the grounds that he might buy something that would kill me. I was too big for Flat races; he’d felt safe with those. I couldn’t persuade him that I would like to ride for him and in the end I stopped trying. When Greville made up his mind he was unshakable.
    Every ten minutes or so a nurse would come quietly into the room to stand for a short while beside the bed, checking that all the electrodes and tubes were still in order. She gave me brief smiles and commented once that my brother was unaware of my presence and could not be comforted by my being there.
    “It’s as much for me as for him,” I said.
    She nodded and went away, and I stayed for a couple more hours, leaning against the wall and reflecting that it was ironic that it was he who should meet death by chance when it was I who actively risked it half the days of the year.
    Strange to reflect also, looking back now to that lengthening evening, that I gave no thought to the consequences of his death. The present was vividly alive still in the silent diminishing hours, and all I saw in the future was a pretty dreary program of form-filling and funeral arrangements, which I didn’t bother to think about in any detail. I would have to telephone the sisters, I vaguely supposed, and there might be a little long-distance grief, but I knew they would say, “You can see to it, can’t you? Whatever you decide will be all right with us,” and they wouldn’t come back halfway round the world to stand in mournful drizzle at the graveside of a brother they’d seen perhaps twice in ten years.
    Beyond that, I considered nothing. The tie of common blood was all that truly linked Greville and me, and once it was undone there would be nothing left of him but memory. With regret I watched the pulse that flickered in his throat. When it was gone I would go back to my own life and think of him warmly sometimes, and remember this night with overall sorrow, but no more.
    I went along to the waiting room for a while to rest my legs. The desperate young parents were still there, hollow-eyed and entwined, but presently a somber nurse came to fetch them, and in the distance, shortly after, I heard the rising wail of the mother’s agonized loss. I felt my own tears prickle for her, a stranger. A dead baby, a dying brother, a universal uniting misery. I grieved for Greville most intensely then because of the death of the child, and realized I had been wrong about the sorrow level. I would miss him very much.
    I put my ankle up on a chair and fitfully dozed, and sometime before daybreak the same nurse with the same expression came to fetch me in my turn.
    I followed her along the passage and into Greville’s s room. There was much more light in there this time, and more people, and the bank of monitoring screens behind the bed had been switched on.