A Private View

G
EORGE BLAND, IN THE SUN, REFLECTED THAT
now was the moment to take stock. Nice, a town which he had not visited since his first holiday abroad, some forty years earlier, spread its noise and its light and its air about him, making him feel cautious; he was not up to this, he reckoned, having become unused to leisure. He had been here for four days and had found nothing to do, although there was much to occupy his thoughts, most of them, indeed all of them, proving unwelcome. Nice had been an unwise choice, though in truth hardly a choice at all; it had been more of a flight from those same thoughts, which faithfully continued to attend him here. He had sought a restorative, conventional enough, after the death of an old friend, Michael Putnam, who had inconveniently succumbed to cancer just when
they were enabled, by process of evolution, or by that of virtue rewarded, more prosaically by the fact of their simultaneous retirement, to take their ease, to explore the world together, as had been their intention. They had waited for too long, and the result was this hiatus, and the reflection that time and patience may bring poor rewards, that time itself, if not confronted at the appropriate juncture, can play sly tricks, and, more significantly, that those who do not act are not infrequently acted upon.

His friend Putnam, whom he sorely missed, had left him a quite respectable sum of money, which, added to his own capital, made of him a fairly wealthy man. The irony of this did not escape him, for he had started out poor, and poverty was imprinted on his mind and no doubt in his heart. If he were spending freely now it was in an effort to get rid of some of his money and in so doing to allay the pain of Putnam’s death. Yet the incongruity displeased him. Seated in an expensive restaurant—as it might be Le Chantecler—all he could remember was his last sight of Putnam, skeletal hand clutching the latest of a series of get-well cards from former colleagues, great eyes turning to the window in shock and doubt, then turning back to his friend with a look that was timid, wistful, almost eager, for he had trusted in life right up to the end. That the look had to be met, sustained; this was not easy. In time it had proved almost unbearable, but the effort was made, day after day, until, at the end of a mere three weeks, the eyes had closed for ever.

Bland was shaken by his death, had sought comfort in late out-of-season sunshine, which now struck him as garish. No one, he thought, could understand their friendship, as they themselves had understood it. Both unmarried, they somehow
did not impress the outside world as lovers, yet their closeness was remarked upon, puzzled over. In fact, what they had in common was their origin in shabby beginnings and their slow upward rise to middle-class affluence. This was their gleeful rueful secret. Lunching together on a Sunday at the club, or at one of the better London hotels, they might test each other with a brand name with which to conjure the past. Both appreciated sweet food and strong tea. Both, before making a purchase, had the same instinctive reaction: Is this allowed?

Sharing the past, any past, but particularly their own, made it more comfortable. Now that he was alone Bland found the present irksome, shot through with a sadness he had not previously suspected. And this was not merely the sadness of Putnam’s death, for that was more properly grief, but a sadness for the life they had lived through together, keeping up each other’s spirits, applauding in each other the middle-class virtues which, to their surprise, had come to them quite naturally, so that from an initial bedrock of misgiving and suspicion had flowered charity and judicious benevolence and a hard-won fair-mindedness. He had loved Putnam; now that Putnam was dead, he, George Bland, felt half dead himself.

With Putnam gone the rest of his life must be assumed single-handed, until it was his turn to lie in a hospital bed and to embrace friendship as if it were love, for so it would seem in those last heightened moments. With Putnam gone the past was his alone, and the present too. For the time being the present was the more problematic, although he knew that time, in passing, would annihilate his comfortable harmless days and restore to him early sights and sounds, and
with them the emotions that had always accompanied them. Above all, in his new unsupported state, he felt a curious sense of shame, that he had saved his own life to so little purpose. He was comfortably off, and he was superfluous. He had no family, no wife, no lover; he had lived so carefully that he occasionally caught sight of himself as an object of ridicule. He and Putnam, working contentedly in the same organisation until the retirement which Putnam had not lived to see, and which he, Bland, must now shoulder unaccompanied, had been cautiously happy. This grotesque interlude in Nice, for example (when he and Putnam should by rights be on their way to the Far East, as they had planned), offended him in some obscure way, nagged at him as some social mistake might have done. He hoped that he might meet no one he knew and be forced to explain himself, and to explain a presence which he would be hard put to justify.

But Putnam’s illness had made him shaky, as if for the first time he had realised that he was a man of sixty-five, not old, but elderly, upright, still slim, but with thinning grey hair, a more prominent nose. All at once, in the golden sunshine, with the breeze still warm in this late season, he felt alone, as he had not done since he was an adolescent. It seemed to him that he knew no one, that the office, the comfortable background to his life for so many years, had evaporated, or passed into other hands, leaving him adrift, to spend too much time sitting in cafés, or staring at the sea. He was newly aware of the pathos of their lives, his and Putnam’s, each leaving the other his life’s savings, since they had excluded the possibility of there being other beneficiaries. And all those sad thoughts, now unshared, threatening to overwhelm
him, as they once had. He had fought against them, successfully as it seemed, in the years of his maturity, but Putnam’s decline, mercifully short, had made him vulnerable again, and he was subject now not only to aching muscles if he walked too far, but to a backward-looking cast of mind which made his present comfort seem nugatory, as if it were built on sand, as perhaps it always had been.

Sometimes, in the absence of Putnam, he had to activate an inner voice, or voices, which he imagined to be those of tutelary deities, a surrogate family, bold decisive aunts, loyal unquestioning cousins, quite unlike the relations, or rather relation, he had known, his Aunt Lilian, with whom his mother had quarrelled enjoyably for as long as he could remember, as long in fact as they were still alive. These voices urged him to indulgence, even to excess. ‘Why not?’ they said. ‘You can afford it.’ Yet there was nothing he wanted, so that the function of the voices was dubious, and indeed unhealthy, for their encouragement seemed to belong to a phase of his life which was now safely behind him: the poor boy from Reading, unwittingly involved in the machinations of disorderly parents, for whom he had felt alternate bouts of love and hatred, a conflict which persisted in him and which he had never managed to resolve. To his bewilderment and shame his parents had descended the ladder of bourgeois respectability to the undistinguished level at which they felt most comfortable, so that his father, once a sports journalist, was now habitually to be found on the racecourse on his own account, and his mother, once a nursing sister, spent most of her days smoking, reading undemanding novels from the library, or enjoying a passage of arms with her husband or her sister Lilian.