Mansel had told the nurses not to let me move, except from bed to chair. But the telephone was fixed close by, and I rang Margaret up, telling her to bring reading-matter. That wasn’t specially urgent, it was good enough to enjoy looking at things. But this presumably soon ceased to be a treat. Thirty years ago, I was remembering, an eminent writer had given me some unsolicited advice. Just look at an orange, she said. Go on looking at it. For hours. Then put down what you see. In the hospital room there was, as it happened, an orange. I looked at it. I thought that I should soon have enough of – what had she called it? The physiognomic charm of phenomena.
It was a relief when the telephone rang. The porter in the entrance hall, announcing that Mr Eliot was down below. ‘We’ve been told to send up the names of visitors from now on, sir.’ Mr Eliot? It could be one of three. When I heard quick steps far down the corridor, my ear was still attuned. That was Charles.
He came across the room and, in silence, shook my hand. Then he sat down, still without speaking. It was unlike him, or both of us together, to be so silent. There was a constraint between us right from the beginning.
With my unobscured eye, I was gazing at him. He gazed back at me. He said: ‘I didn’t expect–’
‘What?’
‘That they’d let you see.’
‘New technique,’ I said, glad to have a topic to start us talking. I explained why Mansel had unblinded me.
‘It must be an improvement.’
‘Enormous.’
We were talking like strangers, impersonally impressed by a medical advance: no, more concentrated upon eye surgery, more eager not to deviate from it, than if we had been strangers.
Another pause, as though we had forgotten the trick of talking, at which people thought we were both so easy.
At last I said: ‘This has been a curious experience.’
‘I suppose so.’ Then quickly: ‘You’re looking pretty well.’
‘I think I’m probably very well. Never better in my life, I dare say. It seems an odd way of achieving it.’
Charles gave a tight smile, but he wasn’t responding to the kind of sarcasm, or grim facetiousness, with which he and I, and Martin also, liked to greet our various fatalities. Was I making claims on him that he couldn’t meet? The last time my eye had gone wrong, and it seemed that I was going to lose its sight, he had been fierce with concern. Then he had been two years younger. Now, in so many ways a man, he spoke, or didn’t speak, as though his concern was knotted up, inexpressible, or so tangled that he couldn’t let it out.
It was strange, it was more than strange, it was disappointing and painful, that he should be self-conscious as I had scarcely seen him. At this time of all times. I thought later that perhaps we knew too much: too much to be easy, that is, not enough to come out on the other side. He had plenty of insight, but he wasn’t trusting it, as the constraint got hold of us, nor was I mine.
A father’s death. What did one feel? What was one supposed to feel? Sheer loss, pious and organic, a part of oneself cut away – that would have been the proper answer in my childhood: but a lot of sons knew that it wasn’t so clean and comfortable as that. When I was growing up, the answer would have changed. Now it meant oneself at last established, final freedom, the Oedipal load removed: and a lot of sons still knew that it wasn’t so clean and unambiguous as that. As Charles was growing up, all the Oedipal inheritance had passed into the conventional wisdom, at least for those educated like him: and, like most conventional wisdom, it was half believed and half thrown away.
Probably Charles and his friends weren’t so impressed by it as by the introspective masters: Dostoevsky meant more to them than the psychoanalysis did. Not surprisingly to me, for at twenty, older than they were and having lived rougher, I also had been overwhelmed. I had met, as they had, the difficult questions. Who has not wished his father dead?
That hadn’t meant much to me since, from a very early age, I could scarcely be said to have a relation with my father. From fourteen or so onwards, I was the senior partner, so far as we had a partnership, and he regarded me with mild and bantering stupefaction. Perhaps I had suffered more than I knew because he was unavailing. His bankruptcy in my childhood left some sort of wound. It was also possible that as a child I knew more than I realised about his furtive chases after women. I had a memory, which might not have been genuine but was very sharp, of standing at the age of seven or eight outside a rubber shop – with my father blinking across the counter, which mysteriously gave me goose-flesh as though it were a threat or warning. Still, all that was searching back with hindsight. During the short part of our lives which we had lived together, we impinged on each other as little as father and son, or even two members of the same family, ever could.
It was not like that with me and Charles. Partly because our temperaments were too much the same weight, and, though we were in many respects different, in the end we wanted the same things. And there was a complication, simply because I had lived some of my life in public. That meant that Charles couldn’t escape me and that, without special guilt on either side, I got in his way.
That night when he returned home from his travels, I had said in effect that I was leaving him an awkward legacy. He had replied, more harshly than seemed called for, that he wouldn’t be worried over. In fact, on the specific point I had been wrong. He didn’t mind in the least that, when I died, some of the conflicts and enmities would live on and he would sometimes pay for them. That he not only didn’t mind but welcomed. For, though he couldn’t endure my protecting him, he was cheerful and fighting-happy at the chance of his protecting me. And if he had to do it posthumously, well, he was at least as tenacious as I was. It was not the penalties that he wanted to escape, but the advantages. He had seen and heard my name too often. There were times when I seemed omnipresent. Anyone of strong nature – from my end, it was a somewhat bitter irony – would have preferred to be born obscure. Yet perhaps I was making it too easy for myself. Perhaps – if he had never heard my name outside the family – we should still have faced each other in the hospital bedroom with the same silences. Perhaps it was ourselves that we couldn’t escape. He might still have expected me to claim more than I did. I should have still felt ill-used, for I believed that I had been unpossessive, had claimed little or nothing, and wanted us to exist side by side.
Was that true? Was that all? My relation with Charles was utterly unlike mine with my own father. That was certain. But, as we sat in that room, the familiar sardonic exchanges not there to bring us together or smooth the minutes away, I felt a shiver – more than that, a menace and a remorse – from the past. For Charles was behaving now very much, nerve of the same nerve, as I had behaved when I sat by my mother at her deathbed.
It was more than forty years before. Instead of a smell evoking the past, the past evoked a smelclass="underline" in my hygienic flower-lined room, I smelt brandy, eau de Cologne, the warm redolence of the invalid’s bedroom. Then I had sat with the tight constrained feeling, full of dread, which overcame me when she called out for my love. For I couldn’t give it her, at least in the terms she claimed.
‘I wanted to go along with you,’ she had cried, demanding more for me than I did for myself. ‘That’s all I wanted.’
I did my best (I was about the same age as Charles was now) to console her. Yet, whenever I felt remorse, I had to recall one thing – whatever I did, I hadn’t brought her comfort. She was the proudest of women; she was vain, but she had an eye for truth. She knew as well as I that if one’s heart is invaded by another (that was how I used to think, when my taste was more florid, and I didn’t mind the sound of rhetoric), then one will either assist the invasion or repel it. I repelled it, longing that I might do otherwise. And she knew.