‘Very civil of you to come, Fanny.’
I saw Uncle Matthew but seldom these days and never really got accustomed to finding him old, that is to say, no longer in the agreeable, seemingly endless autumn of life but plunged in its midwinter. I had known him so vigorous and violent, so rampageous and full of super-charged energy that it went to my heart to see him now, stiff and slow in his movements; wearing spectacles; decidedly deaf. Until we are middle-aged ourselves, old age is outside our experience. When very young, of course, everybody grown up seems old while the really old people with whom we come into contact, never having been different during the few years – short to them, endlessly long to us – of our acquaintance, seem more like another species than members of our own race in a different condition. But the day comes when those we have known in the prime of life approach its end; then we understand what old age really is. Uncle Matthew was only in his seventies, but he was not well preserved. He had gone through life with one lung, the other having been shot away in the Boer War. In 1914, on the reserve of officers, he had arrived in France with the first hundred thousand and spent two years in the trenches before being invalided home. After that he had hunted, shot and played lawn tennis as though he had been perfectly fit. I can often remember, as a child, seeing him fight to get his breath – it must have been a strain on the heart. He had known sorrow too, which always ages people. He had suffered the deaths of three of his children and those his three favourites. Having lost a child myself I know that nothing more terrible can befall a human being; mine, having died as a baby, left no gap comparable with the disappearance of Linda and the two boys he was so proud of.
When he came back with the tea, looking like some old shepherd of the hills who had invited one to his chimney-corner, I said, ‘Whom were you visiting at St George’s?’
‘Why, Davey! I though you couldn’t have known he was there or you would have come.’ Davey Warbeck was my uncle, widower of Aunt Emily who had snatched me from my own, unmaternal mother and brought me up.
‘Indeed I would have. Whatever is he in for now?’ There was no terror in my voice as I asked; Davey’s health was his hobby and he spent much of his life in nursing homes and hospitals.
‘Nothing serious. It seems they have got a few human spare parts, frozen, don’t you know, from America. Davey came up from the country to give them the once over. He says it was hard to know what to choose, they were all so tempting. A few yards of colon, some nice bits of membrane, an eye (but where could he put it? Even Davey would look rather odd with three) – finally he picked on a kidney. He’s been after a suitable one for ages – he’s having it grafted. It’s to give the others a chance. Now who else would have thought of that? Wonderful fella – and all for nothing, don’t you know? We pay – health service.’
‘It sounds rather terrific – how did he seem?’
‘Strong as a bull and having the time of his life. Doctors and nurses so proud of him – exhibit A. I asked if they couldn’t give me a new lung but they wouldn’t touch it. Kill me stone dead they said, with my heart in the state it is. You want to be in the pink, like Davey, to have these graftings.’
‘Delicious girdle cake.’
‘Comes from the Shelter – they’ve got a Scotch cook there now. Davey’s been telling me about your mother’s new husband. You know how he likes to be in on things – he went to the wedding.’
‘No – how could he! Weren’t the papers awful?’
‘I thought so too, but he says not nearly as bad as they might have been. It seems to have been a thick week, luckily for us, with all these heiresses running to leper colonies and the Dockers docking at Monte Carlo. What they did put in they got wrong, of course. Have you seen him, Fanny?’
‘Who? Oh, my mother’s husband? Well no, she has rather stopped asking Alfred and me to meet her fiancés. They’ve gone abroad now, haven’t they?’
‘To Paris, I believe. He’s only twenty-two, did you know?’
‘Oh dear, I can easily believe it.’
‘She’s as pleased as Punch, Davey says. He says you must hand it to her, she didn’t look a day over forty. It seems your boy Basil was at the wedding – he introduced them in the first place.’
‘Goodness! Did he really?’
‘They both belong to the same gang,’ said Uncle Matthew, adding rather wistfully, ‘we didn’t have these gangs when I was young. Never mind, though, we had wars. I liked the Boer War very much, when I was Basil’s age. If you won’t have wars you must expect gangs, no doubt.’
‘Does my stepfather, aged twenty-two (oh, really, Uncle Matthew, it is past a joke. Why, he is the boys’ step-grandfather, you realize?), does he do any work or is he just a criminal?’
‘Davey said something about him being a travel agent.
