Memento Mori

by Muriel Spark

  Much of the information on this first set of cards was an aid to memory, for, although his memory was still fairly good, he wished to ensure against his losing it: he had envisaged the day when he might take up a card, read the name and wonder, for instance, “Colston—Charmian,—who is Charmian Colston? Charmian Colston…I know the name but I can’t for the moment think who…” Against this possibility was inscribed “Née Piper. Met 1907. Vide Ww page…” “Ww,” stood for Who’s Who. The page number was inserted in pencil, to be changed every four years when he acquired a new Who’s Who. Most of the cards in this category were filled in with small writing on both sides. All of them were, by his instruction, to be destroyed at his death. At the top left-hand corner of each card was a reference letter and number in red ink. These cross-referred to a second set of cards which bore pseudonyms invented by Dr. Warner for each person. (Thus, Charmian was, in the second set of cards, “Gladys.”) All these cards in the second set were his real working cards, for these bore the clues to the case-histories. On each was marked a neat network of codes and numbers relating to various passages in the books around the walls, on the subjects of gerontology and senescence, and to the ten years’ accumulation of his thick notebooks.

  Alec Warner lifted the house phone and ordered grilled turbot. He sat to his desk, opened a drawer and extracted a notebook; this was his current diary which would also be destroyed at his death. In it he noted his afternoon observations of Charmian, Mrs. Pettigrew and himself. “Her mind,” he wrote, “has by no means ceased to function, as her husband makes out. Her mind works associatively. At first she went off into a dream, making plucking movements at the rug on her knees. She appeared to be impatient. She did not follow my story at all, but apparently the words ‘Queen Victoria’ had evoked some other regal figure. As soon as I had finished she embarked upon a reminiscence (which is likely to be true in detail) of her visit to Petrograd to see her father in 1908. (As she spoke, I myself recalled, for the first time since 1908, Charmian’s preparations for her journey to Russia. This has been dormant in my memory since then.) I observed that Charmian did not, however, mention the meeting with her father nor the other diplomat whose name I forget, who later committed suicide on her account. Nor did she mention that she was accompanied by Jean Taylor. I have no reason to doubt the accuracy of her memory on the habits of Russian travellers. So far as I recall her actual words were…”

  He wrote on till his turbot came up.

  My Aunt Marcia, he reflected as he ate, was ninety-two, that is seven years older than Charmian, and was still playing a brilliant game of chess to the time of her death. Mrs. Flaxman, wife of the former Rector of Pineville, was seventy-three when she lost her memory completely; twelve years younger than Charmian. Charmian’s memory is not completely gone, it is only erratic. He rose from the table and went to his desk to make a note in the margin of his diary where he had written his day’s account of Charmian: “Vide Mrs. Flaxman.”

  He returned to his turbot. Ninon de Lenclos of the seventeenth century died at ninety-nine, in full reason and reputed for wit, he reflected.

  His wine glass rested a moment on his lip. Goethe, he mused, was older than me when he was writing love poems to young girls. Renoir at eighty-six…Titian, Voltaire. Verdi composed Falstaff at the age of eighty. But artists are perhaps exceptions.

  He thought of the Maud Long Ward where Jean Taylor lay, and wondered what Cicero would make of it. He looked round his shelves. The great Germans on the subject: they were either visionaries or pathologists, largely. To understand the subject, one had to befriend the people, one had to use spies and win allies.

  He ate half of what he had been sent. He drank part of half a bottle of wine. He read over what he had written, the account of the afternoon from the time of his arrival at the Colstons’ to his walk back across the park with the thoughts, which had taken him by surprise, of Mrs. Pettigrew whose intrusive presence, as he had noted in his diary, had excited him with both moral irritability and erotic feelings. The diary would go into the fire, but his every morning’s work was to analyse and abstract from it the data for his case-histories, entering them in the various methodical notebooks. There Charmian would become an impersonal, almost homeless, “Gladys.” Mabel Pettigrew “Joan” and he himself “George.”

  Meantime he put away his cards and his journal and read, for an hour, from one of the fat volumes of Newman’s Life and Letters. Before he put it down he marked a passage with a pencil:

  I wonder, in old times what people died of. We read, “After this, it was told Joseph that his father was sick.” “And the days of David drew nigh that he should die.” What were they sick, what did they die, of? And so of the great Fathers. St. Athanasius died past seventy—was his a paralytic seizure? We cannot imitate the Martyrs in their death—but I sometimes feel it would be a comfort if we could associate ourselves with the great Confessor Saints in their illnesses and decline: Pope St. Gregory had the gout, St. Basil had a liver complaint, but St. Gregory Nazianzen? St. Ambrose? St. Augustine and St. Martin died of fevers, proper to old age….

  At nine-thirty he took a packet of ten cigarettes from a drawer and went out. He turned into Pall Mall where the road was up and a nightwatchman on duty whom Alec Warner had been visiting each night for a week past. He hoped to get sufficient consistent answers to construct a history. “How old are you? Where do you live? What do you eat? Do you believe in God? Any religion? Did you ever go in for sport? How do you get on with your wife? How old is she? Who? What? Why? How do you feel?”

  “Evening,” said the man as Alec approached. “Thanks,” he said, as he took the cigarettes. He shifted up on the plank by the brazier to let Alec sit down beside him.

  Alec warmed his hands.

  “How you feeling to-night?” he said.

  “Not so bad! How’s yourself, guv?”

  “Not so bad. How old did you say…?”

  “Seventy-five. Sixty-nine to the Council.”

  “Of course,” said Alec.

  “Doesn’t do to let on too much.”

  “I’m seventy-nine,” coaxed Alec.

  “Don’t look a day over sixty-five.”

  Alec smiled into the fire knowing the remark was untrue, and that he did not care how old he looked, and that most people cared. “Where were you born?” said Alec.

  A policeman passed and swivelled his eyes towards the two old men without changing the rhythm of his tread. He was not surprised to see the nightwatchman’s superior-looking companion. He had seen plenty of odd old birds.

  “That young copper,” said Alec, “is wondering what we’re up to.”

  The watchman reached for his bottle of tea, and pulled out the cork.

  “Got any tips for to-morrow?”

  “Gunmetal for the two-thirty. They say Out of Reach for the four-fifteen. Tell me—”

  “Gunmetal’s even money,” said the watchman. “Not worth your trouble.”

  “How long,” said Alec, “do you sleep during the day?”

  Charmian had been put to bed. Rough physical handling made her mind more lucid in some ways, more cloudy in others. She knew quite well at this moment that Mrs. Anthony was not Taylor, and Mabel Pettigrew was Lisa Brooke’s former housekeeper, whom she disliked.

  She lay and resented, and decided against, Mrs. Pettigrew. The woman had had three weeks’ trial and had proved unsatisfactory.

  Charmian also lay and fancied Mrs. Pettigrew had wronged her, long ago in the past. This was not the case. In reality, it was Lisa Brooke who had blackmailed Charmian, so that she had been forced to pay and pay, although Lisa had not needed the money; she had been forced to lie awake worrying throughout long night hours, and in the end she had been forced to give up her lover Guy Leet, while Guy had secretly married Lisa to satisfy and silence her for Charmian’s sake. All this Charmian blamed upon Mrs. Pettigrew, forgetting for the moment that her past tormentor had been Lisa; so bitter was the particular memory and so vicious was her
new tormentor. For Mrs. Pettigrew had wrenched Charmian’s arm while getting her dress off, had possibly bruised the arm with her hard impatient grasp. “What you need,” Mrs. Pettigrew had said, “is a nurse. I am not a nurse.”

  Charmian felt indignant at the suggestion that she needed a nurse.

  She decided to give Mrs. Pettigrew a month’s money in the morning and tell her to go. Before Mrs. Pettigrew had switched out the light, Charmian had spoken sharply. “I think, Mrs. Pettigrew—”

  “Oh do call me Mabel and be friendly.”

  “I think, Mrs. Pettigrew, it will not be necessary for you to come in to the drawing-room when I have visitors unless I ring.”

  “Goodnight,” said Mrs. Pettigrew and switched out the light.

  Mrs. Pettigrew descended to her sitting-room and switched on the television which had been installed at her request. Mrs. Anthony had gone home. She took up her knitting and sat working at it while watching the screen. She wanted to loosen her stays but was not sure whether Godfrey would look in to see her. During the three weeks of her stay at the Colstons’ he had been in to see her on five evenings. He had not come in last night. Perhaps he would come to-night, and she did not wish to be caught untidy-looking. There was indeed a knock at the door, and she bade him come in.

  On the first occasion it had been necessary for him to indicate his requirements to her. But now, she perfectly understood. Godfrey, with his thin face outstanding in the dim lamplight, and his excited eyes, placed on the low coffee table a pound note. He then stood, arms dangling and legs apart, like a stage rustic, watching her. Without shifting her posture she raised the hem of her skirt at one side until the top of her stocking and the tip of her garter were visible. Then she went on knitting and watching the television screen. Godfrey gazed at the stocking-top and the glittering steel of the garter-tip for the space of two minutes’ silence. Then he pulled back his shoulders as if recalling his propriety, and still in silence, walked out.

  After the first occasion Mrs. Pettigrew had imagined, almost with alarm, that his request was merely the preliminary to more daring explorations on his part, but by now she knew with an old woman’s relief that this was all he would ever desire, the top of her stocking and the tip of her garter. She took the pound note off the table, put it in her black suède handbag and loosened her stays. She had plans for the future. Meantime a pound was a pound.

  Chapter Six

  Miss Jean Taylor sat in the chair beside her bed. She never knew, when she sat in her chair, if it was the last time she would be able to sit out of bed. Her arthritis was gradually spreading and digging deep. She could turn her head slowly. So, and with difficulty, she did. Alec Warner shifted his upright chair a little to face her.

  She said, “Are you tormenting Dame Lettie?”

  The thought crossed his mind, among other thoughts, that Jean’s brain might be undergoing a softening process. He looked carefully at her eyes and saw the grey ring round the edge of the cornea, the arcus senilis. Nevertheless, it surrounded the main thing, a continuing intelligence amongst the ruins.

  Miss Taylor perceived his scrutiny and thought, It is true he is a student of the subject but he is in many ways the same as the rest. How we all watch each other for signs of failure!

  “Come, Alec,” she said, “tell me.”

  “Tormenting Lettie?” he said.

  She told him about the anonymous telephone calls, then said, “Stop studying me, Alec. I am not soft in the brain as yet.”

  “Lettie must be so,” he said.

  “No, she isn’t, Alec.”

  “And supposing,” he said, “she really has been receiving these telephone calls. Why do you suggest I am the culprit? I ask as a matter of interest.”

  “It seems to me likely, Alec. I may be wrong, but it is the sort of thing, isn’t it, that you would do for purposes of study? An experiment—”

  “It is the sort of thing,” he said, “but in this case I doubt if I am the culprit.”

  “You doubt.”

  “Of course I doubt. In a court of law, my dear, I would with complete honesty deny the charge. But you know, I can’t affirm or deny anything that is within the range of natural possibility.”

  “Alec, are you the man, or not?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “If so, I am unaware of it. But I may be a Jekyll and Hyde, may I not? There was a recent case—”

  “Because,” she said, “if you are the culprit the police will get you.”

  “They would have to prove the deed. And if they proved it to my satisfaction I should no longer be in doubt.”

  “Alec,” she said, “are you the man behind those phone calls?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said.

  “Then,” she said, “you are not the man. Is it someone employed by you?”

  He did not seem to hear the question, but was watching Granny Barnacle like a naturalist on holiday. Granny Barnacle accepted his attention with obliging submission, as she did when the doctor brought the medical students round her bed, or when the priest brought the Blessed Sacrament.

  “Ask her how she is keeping,” said Miss Taylor, “since you are staring at her.”

  “How are you keeping?” said Alec.

  “Not too good,” said Granny Barnacle. She jerked her head to indicate the ward dispensaries just beyond the door. “Time there was a change of management,” she said.

  “Indeed yes,” said Alec, and, inclining his head in final acknowledgment, which included the whole of the Maud Long Ward, returned his attention to Jean Taylor.

  “Someone,” she said, “in your employ?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “In that case,” she said, “the man is neither you nor your agent.”

  When she had first met him, nearly fifty years ago, she had been dismayed when he had expressed these curious “doubts.” She had thought him perhaps a little mad. It had not occurred to her till many years later that this was a self-protective manner of speech which he used exclusively when talking to women whom he liked. He never spoke so to men. She had discerned, after these many years, that this whole approach to the female mind, his only way of coping with it, was to seem to derive amusement from it. When Miss Taylor had made this discovery she was glad they had never been married. He was too much masked behind his mocking, paternal attitude—now become a habit—for any proper relationship with a grown woman.

  She recalled an afternoon years ago in 1928—long after the love affair—when she had been attending Charmian on a week-end party in the country and Alec Warner was a fellow-guest. One afternoon he had taken Jean Taylor off for a walk—Charmian had been amused—“to question her, as Jean was so reliable in her evidence.” Most of their conversation she had forgotten, but she recalled his first question.

  “Do you think, Jean, that other people exist?”

  She had not at once understood the nature of the question. For a moment she had wondered if his words might in some way refer to that love affair twenty-odd years earlier, and his further words, “I mean, Jean, do you consider that people—the people around us—are real or illusory?” had possibly some personal bearing. But this did not fit with her knowledge of the man. Even at the time of their love relationship he was not the type to proffer the conceit: there is no one in the world but we two; we alone exist. Besides, she who was now walking beside this middle-aged man was herself a woman in her early fifties.

  “What do you mean?” she said.

  “Only what I say.” They had come to a beech wood which was damp from a last night’s storm. Every now and then a little succession of raindrops would pelt from the leaves on to his hat or her hat. He took her arm and led her off the main path, so that for all his sober sense, it rapidly crossed her mind that he might be a murderer, a maniac. But she had, the next instant, recalled her fifty years and more. Were they not usually young women who were strangled in woods by sexual maniacs? No, she thought again, sometimes they were women of fifty-odd. The leave
s squelched beneath their feet. Her mind flashed messages to itself back and forth. But I know him well, he’s Alec Warner. Do I know him, though?—he is odd. Even as a lover he was strange. But he is known everywhere, his reputation…Still, some eminent men have secret vices. No one ever finds them out; their very eminence is a protection.

  “Surely,” he was saying, as he continued to draw her into the narrow, dripping shadows, “you see that here is a respectable question. Given that you believe in your own existence as self-evident, do you believe in that of others? Tell me, Jean, do you believe that I for instance, at this moment, exist?” He peered down at her face beneath the brim of her brown felt hat.

  “Where are you taking me?” she said, stopping still.

  “Out of these wet woods,” he said, “by a short cut. Tell me, now, surely you understand what I am asking? It’s a plain question….”

  She looked ahead through the trees and saw that their path was indeed a short cut to the open fields. She realised at once that his question was entirely academic and he was not contemplating murder with indecent assault. And what reason, after all, had she to suspect this? How things do, she thought, come and go through a woman’s mind. He was an unusual man.

  “I agree,” she then said, “that your question can be asked. One does sometimes wonder, perhaps only half-consciously, if other people are real.”

  “Please,” he said, “wonder more than half-consciously about this question. Wonder about it with as much consciousness as you have, and tell me what is your answer.”

  “Oh,” she said, “I think in that case, other people do exist. That’s my answer. It’s only common sense.”