Memento Mori

side of the window. His approach to the subject was unique; few gerontologists had the ingenuity or the freedom to conduct their investigations on the lines he had adopted. He got about a good deal; he employed agents; his work was, he hoped, valuable; or would be, one day.

His wide desk was bare, but from a drawer he took a thick bound notebook and sat down to write.

Presently he rose to fetch the two boxes of index cards which he used constantly when working at his desk. One of these contained the names of those of his friends and acquaintances who were over seventy, with details of his relationship to them, and in the case of chance encounters, the circumstances of their meeting. Special sections were devoted to St Aubrey’s Home for mental cases in Folkestone where, for ten years, he had been visiting certain elderly patients by way of unofficial research.

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 ‘Nee 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 note—books.

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 St Petersburg 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 Naziazen? St Ambrose? St Augustine and St Martin died of fevers, proper to old age …

At half past nine 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 are you feeling tonight?’ he said. ‘Not so bad! How’s yourself, guy?’

‘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.’