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couldn’t prophesy about any single casualty, but that some of us would die one way or the other – within ten, fifteen years – one could predict with the certainty of a statistician. Only a fortnight before, while Margaret and I were still abroad, I had heard that Denis Geary, that robust schoolfellow of mine who had been a support to us a few months before, had gone out for a walk and been found dead.
    ‘Of course,’ said Davidson, ‘there’s only been one myth that’s ever really counted. I mean, the afterlife.’
    ‘It’s a pity one can’t believe in it,’ he said.
    ‘Yes.’ (Not then, but afterwards, I remembered kneeling by Sheila’s bed after her funeral, half-crazed for some sign of her, not even a word, just the shadow of a ghost.)
    ‘It’s a pity it’s meaningless. I don’t know why, but one doesn’t exactly approve of being annihilated. Though when it’s happened, nothing could matter less.’
    One wouldn’t ask for much, Davidson was saying, just the chance to linger round, unobserved, and watch what was going on. It was a pity to miss all that was going to happen.
    That was one of the few signs of sentimentality I had seen him show. Soon he was remarking sternly, as though reproving me for a relapse into weakness, that it was not respectable to talk about an afterlife. There wasn’t any meaning in it: there couldn’t be. It was the supreme wish-fulfilment. ‘Which, by the way,’ he said, brightening up, ‘has done the wretched human race a great deal more harm than good.’ He went on, still half-reproving me, telling me to think of the horrors that had been perpetrated in the name of the afterlife. Torturing bodies to save souls. Slaughter to get one’s place in heaven. ‘If people would only accept that this is the only life there is, they might be a shade more civilised.’
    No, I didn’t want to argue: he was getting some sort of comfort from his old certainties. It seemed a perverse comfort. Yet he still believed in the enlightenment he grew up in, the lucky oasis, the civilised voices, the privileged Edwardian hopes.
    Then he did something which also might have seemed perverse, if he had preserved the consistency of which he was so proud. It was a warm afternoon, and he was covered only by a single sheet. Suddenly, but not jerkily, he pulled it aside, and with eyes glossy-brown as a bird’s, oblivious of me, gazed down towards his feet. Against blue pyjama trousers, his skin shone pale, clear, not hairy: the feet were large, after the thin legs, with elongated, heavy-jointed toes. For some time I could not tell what he was studying so observantly. Then I noticed, over the left ankle, a small roll of swelling, so that the concavity between ankle-bone and talus had been filled in. On the right foot, the swelling might have been grosser; from where I sat, it was difficult to make out.
    Davidson went on gazing, as intently, as professionally, as he used to look at pictures.
    ‘The oedema’s a shade less than this morning. Quite a bit less than yesterday,’ he said. He said it with a satisfaction that he couldn’t conceal, or didn’t think of concealing. Throughout his illness, for years past, he must have been studying his ankles, observing one of the clinical signs. Even now, night and morning (perhaps more often when he was alone) he went through the same routine. But it wasn’t routine to him. Sunday night – he had swallowed the capsules. All he said to me since, he meant. Nevertheless, when he inspected his ankles and decided the swelling was a fraction reduced, he felt a surge of pleasure, not at all ironic. No more ironic than if he had been in middle age and robust health, and had noticed a symptom which worried him but which, as he tested it, began to clear away.

 
     
4:  Domestic Evening, Without Incident
     
    VISITING her father every other day, Margaret’s behaviour, like his, began to show a contradiction which really wasn’t one. She couldn’t help