‘I suppose so. So it was no good?’
‘I wouldn’t say quite that. At least I had a look at the old chap. He’d clearly ordered his final gent’s suiting long ago. Nothing to measure him for, Duncan, except a shroud.’
‘He won’t last long?’
‘Well, not all that long. A little embalming might be possible, supposing him willing to submit to it. But it wouldn’t answer for long. Does anyone look after him?’
‘I don’t think so. Or not in a regular way. Would you say he ought to be in a home or something?’
‘No, I wouldn’t. The van will call in the end, I suppose. And I’ll continue to look in from time to time. He may get used to me.’
I suppose I must have shown my distress at this prognosis, for I became aware of Damian smiling. It would not be his usual response to the glum or stricken faces of a dying man’s relations. But, unlike most of these, I counted as an old friend.
‘Morbi tristisque senectus, Duncan,’ he said. ‘That’s Latin for the van at the door. Cheer up.’ And Damian walked away.
Three days after this conversation I went out to Linton Road again. Anything characteristic of Oxford has faded away by the time you get to Linton Road; you might be in any substantial suburb in England. It is true that at the farthest end of it, old Mrs Triplett’s house has been knocked down, and a whole new college built in its place. But that is screened and out of sight. The average age of the surrounding inhabitants has dropped a good deal, since in this part of North Oxford nearly all the big houses have been turned into flats for the younger members of the learned and scientific community. I thought it odd that this humdrum locality had once spelt romance for me, had been a kind of Lyonnesse, bringing magic to my eyes. Penny had been chiefly responsible for that, but Timbermill had played his part. Timbermill had in a quite real sense formed my mind. Any seriousness in me (and it was only because I did have a little seriousness that I was able to write comedy) he had injected. And now I had some responsibility to him that I didn’t see how to discharge.
This last proved an abortive thought. It had come to me too late. I had an intuition of the fact as soon as I saw, planted by the old kitchen door which served as the entrance to Timbermill’s staircase, two newspapers and two bottles of milk.
He had been, in his way, an orderly man, and I was sure that in his later years he had come down and collected his milk in its bottles as regularly as, long ago, he had taken his pitcher to collect it from Mrs Triplett’s celebrated cows. I picked up the bottles and the two copies of The Times and went upstairs. The bottles, having been in the sun, felt warm to my hand. I wondered whether I should find Timbermill feeling so.
He wasn’t dead. But he was lying, half dressed, on the floor of the big room in what I took at first to be a coma but which was, in fact, a semi-stupor and paralysis. His features moved as I knelt beside him, and his lips formed words which emerged as a mere gabble. Yet I knew instantly what he had tried to say. It had been his invariable greeting to me. Duncan, son of Lachlan! That had been it.
It wasn’t a moment in which to be overwhelmed with distress. I smiled at him and said I don’t know what – judging that his hearing might be more in working order than his speech. Then I ran downstairs and out of the house, as its idiotic botched architecture required before I could get to somebody’s telephone. At the front door I rang a bell. It brought a predictably cool and competent young academic female, with two curly-headed little boys grinning hospitably behind her. Yes, they were on the phone. Damian himself answered my call. I went upstairs again, able to feel that the proper wheels had begun to revolve. But, meanwhile, was there anything that it was vital I should be doing myself? I wondered about trying to get Timbermill on his bed, but decided I didn’t know enough about the hazardousness of moving him. I fetched a pillow and a frayed eiderdown, and while doing what was possible with these, noticed that his left hand was moving in what seemed designed as a meaningful gesture. But it wasn’t interpretable, and I found myself looking at him inquiringly, although it seemed not a tactful thing to do. His gaze suggested a mind lucid at least for the moment. I had never before encountered an imprisoned intelligence: present but bereft of the instruments of communication. To a person in this condition, one gives pencil and paper, and sees if anything can be elicited that way. I don’t know why I shrank from the attempt; perhaps it seemed too brutal an acknowledgement of his helplessness; in any case it was a matter for the judgement of the doctors. I continued making my one-way remarks from time to time, and was fairly sure that Timbermill understood them. But it wasn’t easy to say much that didn’t sound irrelevant, or impertinently of the cheer-up sort. I wondered about drinks, hot-water bottles. Then, blessedly, Damian arrived. It had presumably taken him about ten minutes from his consulting rooms in Beaumont Street, but it had felt much longer than that.
As Damian examined his patient, he behaved much as I had been doing: offering occasional spare remarks and admitting no inconvenience in the fact that any response was ruled out. Then, holding a clinical thermometer as if proposing to rinse it, he went into the bathroom and unobtrusively beckoned me after him.
‘We’ll have to make do,’ he said. ‘It would take the fire brigade to get him out of this damned garret.’
I thought of the ladder-like staircase up which weary housemaids had once clambered to their repose, and took the point.
‘It can be done?’ I asked.
‘For a short time, yes. If there’s any use in hospitalising him, we must take the risk of moving him. It’s marvellous what those ambulance wallas can do at a pinch. Away ahead of the furniture removers. Meanwhile, you’d better contact the relatives, Duncan. They’re entitled to be in on the act, if they see it that way. I’ll get agency nursing. And a home help. Queer place for a home help.’
‘Just what is a home help?’ This was an idle question. I was wondering if there were any relatives. I’d never heard of any.
‘Something laid on by the welfare shambles.’
‘I see. But I don’t know anything about brothers or sisters or nephews or nieces. I doubt if anybody does. Would it be decent to ransack his drawers, that sort of thing?’
‘Bugger decency! It’s up to you. Why isn’t there a telephone in this daft place?’
‘Timbermill has given up the telephone. But the woman at the bottom has one. I used it to get you.’
‘Then I’ll go and use it. Just stand by.’
So once more I was left alone with J. B. Timbermill. I knelt beside him again.
‘J. B.,’ I said, ‘would you like me to get Fiona?’ This seemed to me a sensible idea. Fiona had been much closer to Timbermill than I had ever been, and something of his family background might be known to her.
Timbermill made a noise which could be taken to be a reply. And the question hadn’t really been necessary. It was self-evident that Fiona must be got hold of at once.
‘Fiona’s in Copenhagen,’ Margaret Mountain said on the telephone. ‘She loves the place.’
‘Copenhagen?’ I repeated stupidly. It was still term-time. That Fiona might be out of Oxford – and without telling me – hadn’t entered my head.
‘At a conference. And she’s been asked to give a lecture by Steenstrup.’
‘Who the devil is Steenstrup?’
‘A professor there. Fiona took you to a lecture by him at the British Academy.’
‘So she did. It was quite too awful.’ Impatience had possessed me. ‘Look, Margaret, Timbermill has had a stroke or something, and isn’t expected to survive. Fiona would want to know. Do you think she can be contacted?’
‘I’ve no notion where she’s staying. But I can find out who the conference people are, and get them to have her ring me up. That will leave you free to be with Timbermill if you want to be.’ Miss Mountain was perceptive as well as reassuringly efficient, and it was evident that Timbermill’s ill opinion of her hadn’t entered her head. ‘Where is he? And is he conscious?’
�
�He’s at home, because it’s felt he’d be difficult to move. And he’s conscious in some fashion, I think. Only he can’t talk. Do what you can about Fiona, Margaret. She’d be a comfort to him.’
I rang off, and for some moments found Fiona’s absence from Oxford strangely confusing. I had an impulse to ring up Janet, and then wondered how such an irrelevant idea could occur to me, since her acquaintance with Timbermill must be either minimal or nonexistent. Moreover I knew perfectly well that the McKechnies had left for the United States a couple of days before. So it looked as if I myself badly wanted feminine support, which seemed an extravagant reaction to the impending death of a very old man who had made me learn Anglo-Saxon verbs long ago.
There was still the question of finding relatives. I started this hunt with Who’s Who. It named Timbermill’s parents and told me that his father had been a merchant banker. But these people were centenarians if they weren’t dead; there was no mention of marriage or of any other connections; and there wasn’t another Timbermill in the book. The Times would be holding a full obituary, and the colleges of which he was an honorary fellow must similarly be possessed of something in the curriculum vitae way. But they would scarcely run to nephews and nieces prepared to turn up and mourn on call It was borne in on me that a scholar of the first distinction could live out his life in Oxford without anybody knowing the first thing about him in a human and family way – or that it could be so, at least, if he was a reticent and reclusive man. Timbermill must have a bank manager, and probably a solicitor who had drawn up and now held a will. But gaining any information expeditiously looked like being a job for a professional private eye. As for hunting through Heorot for private papers, that didn’t seem to me to be on, particularly as there would be Timbermill himself, conscious even if as definitively incomunicado as he seemed likely to remain. If he were going to die, he would have to be seen through the mysterious occasion simply by two former pupils. And that was that. At least it wasn’t likely that there would be other persons for whose presence he felt an urgent need.
But this quite quickly took on the appearance of a fallacious assumption. Damian called me later that evening, and told me that Timbermill had recovered some very slight command of speech.
‘You mean he’s improving?’ I asked. ‘He may come through?’
‘No, Duncan. It isn’t that at all, I’d say. In fact there are other signs that point to the contrary. We’ll have him in hospital tomorrow morning, if he lasts that long. They’ll take out a window-frame and lower him on a stretcher. But he is uttering, as I say. Somebody’s name.’
‘Mine?’
‘Yours? No, it isn’t yours.’
‘I see.’ It felt as if I had said something rather foolish. ‘It’s just that he did name me – when I went in and found him. Or I did think he did, although it wasn’t really distinguishable. He likes my father’s pictures.’ I realised that this was an incomprehensible remark. ‘I mean he calls me Duncan, son of Lachlan.’
‘Oh, I see.’ I had a sense that Damian was glancing at his watch; he had more hopeful patients than Timbermill to be thinking of. ‘It’s a woman’s name.’
‘Fiona?’
‘No, not Fiona. Anna. Have you got a line on any relatives yet?’
‘I’m afraid not. But I’ll keep trying.’
‘Good. Duncan, if you want to see him again you’d better run out to Linton Road tonight. But after nine in the morning ring the Radcliffe. They’ll have got him there by then.’
This was all Damian had to say, and I called a taxi at once. As I was driven through the near-midsummer dusk, I wondered who on earth Anna could be, and whether she was likely to be still alive. Probably not: a person thus invocated by a very old man on his death-bed was likely to have existence only in a deep past. But this wasn’t certain; Timbermill’s Anna might be a living woman – an early love or a favourite sister – from whom he had been long estranged, and whose presence would be important to him now. This problem was still troubling me as I mounted that final narrow staircase to what Damian had called Timbermill’s garret.
Timbermill was on his bed, which had been moved out into the big room, perhaps because the bedroom was too cramped for nursing purposes. I had arrived at a moment when one nurse was packing up and another preparing to settle in for the night. There was also the sound of somebody pottering in the little kitchen; presumably this was the home help, and it seemed improbable that she was facing any long assignment. There was something disconcerting in Timbermill and myself being thus outnumbered in this celibate haunt by the female sex. The incoming nurse, moreover, disapproved of my visit at this hour, and I had to explain that I had turned up on Dr Damian’s authority.
Perhaps Timbermill had been sedated in some way and it wasn’t a good idea to disturb him. He was certainly lying peacefully enough on his back, and I’d have had a sensation of merely trespassing awkwardly on his normal repose if it hadn’t been for what his stricken brain had done to one side of his face. It had set a leer on it – comical rather than malign, so that the effect was of a cheerful vulgarity such as one might come upon in a strip cartoon. I wondered whether death would wipe this away and recompose Timbermill’s features along lines of youthful serenity and noble calm. I had always felt this, if it happened, to be a poor joke on death’s part. But I found myself hoping for it now.
Quite a lot of stuff had been humped up into the room: oxygen apparatus and similar gear. It lent the place an incongruous air, seemed to be in collision with the dusty massive evidences on every wall and vacant space of a lifetime given to remote learned purposes. And I now noticed that Timbermill’s left hand, which had been placed outside the coverlet, lay inertly on a leather-bound volume.
‘He could rotate the left wrist,’ the outgoing nurse said professionally. She had followed my glance. ‘He seemed pointing at the books – so I gave him one and it seemed to content him. It can’t have been the one he wanted, of course, supposing he did want one in particular.’
‘No,’ I said, ‘it can scarcely be that.’
‘They speak of dying with one’s boots on. Perhaps for Dr Timbermill—’
‘Yes, nurse; it’s a good point. Has he been trying to say anything more?’
‘He hasn’t even been murmuring for some time.’
‘Was there any attempt to see if he could write?’
‘I think the doctors found there was no possibility of that. There has been a consultation, you know, this afternoon. Dr Damian brought the Regius Professor.’
‘Ah, yes. Well, if your colleague doesn’t mind, I think I’ll stay for a time. Dr Timbermill, you see, was my tutor long ago.’
‘Oh, Nurse Jones won’t mind. And it won’t be difficult to find yourself a book, will it?’
This young woman went away. I had a little subdued conversation with her successor, and then sat down to a silent vigil near the bed. There seemed to be a feeling that Timbermill was unlikely even to approximate to articulate speech again. But I wanted to be within hearing if he did.
The night wore on. I must have dozed, because floating in my head was some macabre account, surely somewhere in Edgar Allan Poe, of misbehaviour on the part of the dead Schopenhauer’s false teeth. Perhaps to a tiny sound, and with grotesque effect of rictus, they had popped out—
There was a tiny sound in Heorot, and it brought me to my feet and to the bedside. Timbermill’s mouth was trembling, moving. I put my ear to his lips.
‘Anna!’ Timbermill whispered, almost inaudibly, but with extraordinary passion. And his eyes, which had been closed, slowly opened. But there was no speculation in them. The night-nurse, after certain tests, drew the sheet over his face.
I walked back to college in the small hours, with some very curious speculations dominating my consciousness. Instead of thinking about J. B. Timbermill’s life and character and achievement – and in particular what he had done for me – I continued to be troubled by the problematical Anna. Could Fiona perhaps identify her? I a
sked myself this question only to answer that it was unlikely. Yet mightn’t there be some connection unknown to me between Timbermill and Fiona’s family, and mightn’t it account for the very strong affection he had so obviously entertained for Fiona when his pupil? There was nothing irrational in this notion. But the same could scarcely be said of what next came to me. This was an impulse to haul into the picture, in what was surely an almost paranoiac fashion, the only Anna I myself happened to know. Wasn’t it possible that Timbermill might have known my elder Glencorry cousin, who became Fiona’s mother as Mrs Petrie of Garth? Fiona had never mentioned such a thing. But she seldom had much to say to me about family relationships, and I had even wondered at times whether she could have been told the story of my boyhood’s comically chivalric offer to make an honest woman of her mother at the time of young Petrie of Garth’s proving backward in coming forward as the unborn Fiona’s father. But the unlikelihood of there having been any such disclosure of an embarrassing family moment was extreme. Moreover, this line of thought was all nonsense in any event. It was impossible that between Timbermill and Fiona’s mother there could have been – even had they known one another – any relationship which would justify or explain the passion with which the dying man had uttered the name of Anna.
Fiona had caught the first available flight, and was back in Oxford not many hours after Timbermill’s death. But there was now nothing for either of us to do. Solicitors and undertakers were in charge; there was to be a private cremation; in a few weeks time there would be a memorial service in some college or other, which a surprising number of aged or elderly scholars would attend. I gave Fiona what account I could of Timbermill’s last hours.
‘Can you think of anybody called Anna he may have been interested in?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course I can.’ Fiona’s answer was decisive and immediate.
The Madonna of the Astrolabe Page 25