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Mesopotamia?—that his military career, likewise seemingly destined for stardom, took its calamitous turn. The wrong decision at the wrong time, an order given or not given that should not or should have been given. An inglorious, unglorifiable blunder. Result: court martial, demotion, ignominy.
    My great-uncle did his best to outlive this disgrace, atleast in the strictly numerical sense, since he died aged eighty-one and was still lingering on shortly before I was born. Yet according to my mother—and I am repeating now what she told me, brazenly enough, when her own death-warrant had effectively been signed—it was craven fear of oblivion, the desire to cheat death by the vain quest for distinction, that was the root of the matter, as much with Ratty as with George.
    You would have thought that two brothers following the not unrelated trades of soldier and surgeon would not have been so affected. Both would have had fairly naked experience of mortality. But this, my mother claimed, was just the point. They chose professions that brought them close to death, in the empty hope that this would guard them against it. My great-uncle, who was no coward by a soldier’s standards and seems to have suffered, on that fateful day, an excess of valour over sense, hoped that his officer’s sword and his shining record in the Sudan and elsewhere would confer on him both renown and a kind of personal invulnerability. Likewise, George, as he audaciously probed what some have held to be the very seat of the Soul, might have felt himself privileged above ordinary beings, and might have foreseen his fame outlasting his forceps.
    With Rupert, she insisted, the real trouble only began one snowy morning in the winter of 1920, when, a sound but dishonoured sixty-five, he took a nasty tumble down the front steps, cracking his head badly on the way, and for a day or so lay in a parlous condition.
    “The man panicked, sweetie. He went to pieces. He thought his hour had come, with his shame still fresh upon him.”
    How she could have been so sure of this, I don’t know.She was only nine at the time. But then I was only nine when my father—
    In any case, it was this incident, in her view, that exposed the true tenor of the man and turned him for the rest of his life into an incurable and exasperating eccentric. The immediate “panic” had taken a specific form. In the midst of his fever and ill-founded terror, Rupert was apparently heard repeatedly to remonstrate that his younger brother was not to come near him, was not going to poke about in
his
skull with his fiendish instruments. George not only did come near him but, with little more than a cursory examination and no recourse to incision, pronounced that Rupert was making a big fuss about nothing and would recover in a day or so. The second humiliation of Uncle Ratty’s life.
    My great-uncle was revenged, of course, when George took his own irremediable tumble only three years later. But, not satisfied with this, Rupert, as the senior member of the family and chief possessor of its fortunes, proceeded to play a vindictive, teasing game with my grandfather and his children (my mother and her brother, James), taunting them in their reduced circumstances with the meanness of his hand-outs and his own obstructive longevity.
    But by this time, it seems, he was no longer entirely in possession of his faculties. That knock on the head, perhaps—just to spite his brother—had had its effect after all. He now devoted his time to perfecting in himself the caricature of a cranky, retired army officer, exaggerating or inventing past honours, while time softened his disgrace; and, when this didn’t work, looking for borrowed glory in the family archives. In his last years, this antiquarian urge (I admit it: the spirit of Uncle Ratty lives in me, as it lived even, for a while, in Sam) took an all-consuming form.Namely to prove that since his name, Rawlinson, denoted “son of Rawling,” in