But these were merely abrasions. The sheer fact of his father’s dying must cut a lot deeper than that. He was almost afraid to examine it to the marrow. He thought tentatively what it would mean to lose his father. He tried to consider it not in the practical terms, but simply in human ones. At first, in the absence of any definite reaction to something so unassimilable, his mind struck a vague, eclectic attitude towards it, one derived from dim, subliminal sources. Death was a terrible and awesome thing. Without any experience of it, he knew that. It was the ultimate mystery, recurrent theme of poets and preachers. His thinking had been subtly conditioned to endorse a vague, idealized image of it by what he had read in books and seen in films and overheard in occasional muted references. As a boy, he had been aware of it as a furtive presence in adult conversations, accompanied by lowered voices or significant looks or suggestions that he go out and play, as if this was too fiercesome an ogre to be admitted to the understanding of a child. He had witnessed the heroism of countless cinematic deaths from decorously positioned arrows or invisible bullets, which caused the lifeblood to bloom as formally as a flower on the victim’s breast, while angelic voices choired man’s majesty and the glycerine grief of women registered irreparable loss. And he had seen most of them at an age when the moment of lonely communion in the dark was still too powerful to be dispelled by the need to evade ‘God save the Queen’ or by the glib cynicism of the foyer. He had learned of death’s stature at secondhand from the broodings of the Metaphysicals and the declamations of Shakespeare. Now he was to meet his magnificence in person.
But, sitting in this compartment – death’s mobile anteroom – with the insistence of the wheels imposing their practical rhythm on his thoughts, what gradually impressed itself on his mind was simply the depressing ordinariness of it all. There was no sense of grandeur about it. Nothing was any different. The random chords of the day did not combine into any impressive overture to death, but remained casually dissonant. In a station they passed through, a porter lounged in the doorway of a waiting-room, picking his teeth. Two horses stood immobile in a field, distinguishable from statues only by tail and mane. Everything that could be seen, through the patch Charlie’s hand had automatically cleared in the misted glass, was the same as ever. Was this how death happened, in the middle of a bright day that was too busy to notice? It was somehow shocking. What made it worse was that Charlie’s shock included himself. He was like a child who has closed his eyes against the imminent pain of a doctor’s touch, and opens them again in disbelief, surprised to find that it can hurt so little.
He was ashamed of himself, ashamed not because he had dreaded pain, but because his feelings didn’t justify that dread. How could he be so callous? How could he have been so callous in the past? For this callousness must have developed gradually in his relationship with his father, and was like a hard skin formed on his affection. How had it happened? He seemed hardly to have thought about his father as himself for as long as he could remember. The selfishness of it was shattering. He had known the last time he was home that his father had been X-rayed, but he had somehow assumed that it had been all right. His father had been very off-hand about what he called ‘just a check-up’, probably because he didn’t want to disturb Charlie’s studies. To Charlie’s father, ‘the studying’ was sacrosanct, a mysterious activity involving some miraculous act of concentration. And Charlie had let himself be convinced that there was nothing to worry about. The truth was that in the last few days his own problems had left no room for his father’s in his mind. But that was no excuse. For a long time now, he had been concerned almost exclusively with himself, living his separate life in Glasgow. It was so easy to become isolated. He had an established routine and it was a pleasant one. His only real worries had been examinations. And they were the kind you could defer until they gathered in one week and were over the next. The rest of the time he enjoyed just being a student. Certainly, he could have gone home more often. He thought again of how long it was since he had been home. Over a month, and it was only a short train journey away. But he had discussed it with his father and Elizabeth, and they had all decided that with important class examinations coming up it would be a good idea for him to stay in Glasgow and work at the week-ends. Mary had agreed reluctantly. She had come up to Glasgow for the day once or twice since then. It might have been better if she hadn’t, he reflected ruefully.
He should have gone down more often, he told himself. He should have gone down much more often. How was it possible to have been so thoughtless and indifferent about his own father? Their relationship had been so tacit and casual, confined to meetings at the tea-table or the occasional brief exchange when Charlie came in late at night. The whole relationship had become a cliche for Charlie, as incidental as the talk between these people with whom he happened to be sharing a compartment.
‘They’re making some drastic changes here,’ the one with the cigar said to the man beside him, indicating a street in the town they were going through.
‘Yes. It’s high time, too.’
‘Those buildings must have stood for seventy years, anyway.’
‘More like eighty.’
‘Yes. They’re very old.’
They nodded knowledgeably, the motion of the train prolonging the action until it looked like the perpetual acquiescence of dotage. Their jollity had lapsed before the seductive torpor of a long journey, and they sat recharging their batteries. The one with the cigar held it burnt out between his fingers, his trousers stained haphazardly with ash. The youngest one was making a show of looking out the window, conducting an optical conversation with the young woman. The old woman sat blinking in her corner like a cat, having a dignified disagreement with her eyelids, which kept insisting on sleep, although she jerked herself awake repeatedly.
Charlie sat staring out the window at himself. He wasn’t exactly enamoured of what he saw. A selfish taker, whose habitual gesture towards his father was an extended hand, palm up. It wasn’t as if things had been so easy for his father. Apart altogether from the money, it must have been hard going. Especially over the past six years. Was it six? Perhaps it was more. Charlie had trained himself not to think about it. That part of his memory was fenced off from everyday contact. It had left its effect on all of them when it happened, and each had had to make his own peace with it. They seldom talked about it. But he found himself wondering how big a toll it had taken of his father, while Charlie had been too busy to pay it any attention.
The telegraph poles outside went past more slowly now, measuring the progress of his private journey as well as that of the train. The coaches ricocheted to a standstill, waiting for the signal that would bring Charlie home not only to his father, but to himself. In the stillness, a wagon clanked somewhere in a siding and a man shouted some words that the wind pared to a shapeless sound. Then they could hear the signal swing down on its metal joint, and the train pulled in to the platform.
As they drew in, Charlie stood up, thinking for a second of his brief-case before he remembered that Andy had put it in his locker. He slid open the compartment door and went into the corridor. He left at a run, his tie flapping like an oriflamme, as if he could outpace the last six years or so.
‘Where’s the fire?’ said one of the businessmen, shutting the door.
The old woman, briefly disturbed, settled back into herself.
The youngest businessman looked at the young woman and winked at the other two. He slid casually into the seat opposite her that had been vacated by Charlie, wiping the pane unnecessarily with a prefatory hand.
‘That’s better,’ he said, smiling at the young woman.
She smiled back, not taking her eyes from his. She shifted slightly under his gaze. Her skirt moved a tantalizing inch and she let it lie. The other two nudged each other and got up.
‘We’re going out for a breath of air in the corridor, Ted,’ one of them said.
‘Right, John. Don’t walk off the end of the train.’
They left. The old woman had succumbed at last