The Enemy of the Good

by Michael Arditti

  After a night which, although sleepless, was strangely restful, she packed a small case and gave instructions to the nurses. At ten thirty, with Mr Shepherd waiting outside, she took a last leave of Edwin. Hoping against hope that he would somehow acknowledge the magnitude of their parting, she was doubly dismayed by his blank expression. She kissed his swollen lips and walked slowly from the room. Meeting Clement in the hall, she drew him aside and, despite her best intentions, demanded further assurances that he knew the optimum dose of morphine to deliver. His melancholy nod dispelled any doubt and she clasped him as tightly as if he were the one about to die. Then, with a quick farewell to Ajax, whose reproachful stare threatened to shatter her resolve, she hurried down the steps and into the car.

  4

  CLEMENT

  1

  ‘Blessed are the merciful: for they shall obtain mercy’ echoed through Clement’s head in counterpoint to his sister’s Old Testament injunctions. The more she spoke, the more assured he grew of his position. She denounced him as irreligious, when it was precisely his faith in the afterlife that had allayed any lingering doubts about helping his father. It would be far harder were he dispatching him into a void.

  Confident of God’s blessing, he was now concerned to obtain his mother’s. Swift action was essential, but her distress at Shoana’s departure forced him to postpone the discussion until dinner. As a declaration of intent, he put on a shirt and tie, finding to his surprise when he entered the drawing room that she had made a similar effort, exchanging her blouse and slacks for a turquoise kaftan. Cheered by the concurrence, he went down to the cellar in search of a good bottle of claret, before grabbing the first that came to hand when the dusty racks brought his father’s death chillingly close.

  Either from the excellence of the wine or a determined attempt to blot out the horror on the other side of the wall, they joked their way through the first two courses, but the pudding made them pause.

  ‘Trifle,’ his mother said. ‘It’s your father’s favourite.’

  ‘Was,’ he corrected gently.

  ‘I can’t, Clement,’ she said, in a sudden change of tack. ‘Whatever we may have agreed before, I can’t do it. Your sister would never forgive me.’

  ‘She need never know.’

  ‘No? She’ll pick up on the slightest change in his condition. And I can’t lie. Not to Shoana.’

  ‘So she’ll let Pa suffer to salve her conscience?’ He struggled to excise any note of bitterness from his voice.

  ‘It won’t be long now, please God!’

  ‘How long is long? Every minute is a lifetime for him.’

  He waited for a reply, but she concentrated on her food. It was outrageous that she should submit to Shoana’s blackmail. He knew how much she longed for a grandchild, but he refused to believe that she would put her own desires before his father’s needs. Torn between tenderness and exasperation, he explained how he would see to everything while she took a well-earned break, ensuring that any suspicions Shoana might have would fall on him alone.

  He felt his mother’s anguish, as she agonised over both the plan and its consequences before finally giving her assent. With neither of them wishing to dally at table, they returned to the drawing room to find Mrs Shepherd laying a fire. ‘I thought you needed warming. It’s October,’ she added to avoid confusion. After a few glum words about ‘the Bishop’, whose title she invoked more reverently than ever, she poured their coffee and went out.

  ‘Now you’ve made up your mind, you should go at once,’ he said, returning to the subject of the visit. ‘Too much anticipation diminishes pleasure.’ What he meant and she knew that he meant and he knew that she knew that he meant – a sequence which could extend as long as a childhood dare – was that it was Thursday night and he needed to attend to everything before Shoana’s Sunday visit. She went out to phone Valerie Sinclair, a Somerville colleague who had accompanied her on one of her later fieldtrips to the Hadza. Valerie, a birdlike woman, whose fondness for white ankle socks had baffled Mark even before he heard her described as a bluestocking, had been vanquished in some faculty dispute and retired in high dudgeon to Sussex, from where she fired off long missives to her friends as if she were back in the bush. As predicted, she was delighted to welcome his mother, who confirmed that she would leave the next morning and, in a rare sign of dependency, asked him to look up the times of the trains. That settled, she announced that she would spend the final night at his father’s bedside, insisting that she had slept in tougher conditions than a wingback chair.

  Having made sure that she was as comfortable as could be – his only practical contribution being a stack of pillows – he went upstairs to ring home. A momentary panic on reaching the answer-machine was dispelled when Mike cut in to say that he had leapt straight out of the bath. ‘Tell me about your day,’ Clement charged, eager to hold on to the tantalising image for as long as possible. Mike obliged with a wry account of teaching the history of slavery to an ethnically diverse class of fourteen-year-olds, who regarded him as one of the oppressors.

  Mike then asked about his father and he explained that he was going ahead with the plan. ‘Would you like me to come down?’ Mike asked. ‘Given the way the Head’s pussyfooting around me, I suspect he’d allow me the day off to floss my teeth!’

  ‘No, I’d rather be on my own. If anything should go wrong – ’

  ‘You said it was foolproof!’

  ‘So it is. But there’s always an if and I don’t want you to be implicated… involved.’

  ‘I hate to think of you having to manage on your own.’

  ‘I won’t be. You’ll say I’m imagining it, but I feel – I can’t ever remember feeling it so strongly – Mark’s presence all around.’

  ‘My eternal rival,’ Mike said enigmatically.

  ‘He would have done it. No question.’

  ‘You do know exactly what to do?’

  ‘You sound like my mama,’ Clement replied, finding that even that failed to silence him. So he described how he had consulted their GP friend, Jimmy Naismith, who had outlined an infallible procedure. A slight twist of the dial on his father’s morphine pump would turn a palliative into a lethal dose.

  ‘I’m proud of you, Clem,’ Mike said, leaving him tempted to change his mind and ask him down, less for moral than for emotional support. He yearned for the warmth of his mouth, the touch of his skin, the vigour of his flesh thrusting into him. He had kept him at bay for too long, blaming the effect of the drugs on his libido, when the truth lay in the effect of the virus on his psyche. Fearing, however, that Mike’s presence would be a distraction, he resolved to stand firm. So, after telling him he loved him with no ‘You could never love me as much as I love you,’ to protect himself, Clement put down the phone. He washed, changed and slipped into bed, trying to blank out the image of the last vigil in the room below. Then, remembering his pills, he jumped up and dashed to the basin.

  The next morning he ate an early breakfast and went for a walk in the woods, in part, as he told Mrs Shepherd, to clear his head, but in the main to avoid his mother. Refreshed, he stole back into the house by the kitchen stairs, venturing down to the hall only when his regular checks at the bathroom window showed that Mr Shepherd had driven round to the front. He was relieved to see, from her coat and case, that his mother had not lost heart and, from her relaxed expression, that she had managed to sleep.

  ‘No, not a wink,’ she replied when he asked her. ‘I remembered, which was far more restful.’ Then, moving so close to him that their cheeks brushed, she whispered tentatively: ‘You’re quite sure of the dose?’

  Her question offended him. Rather than risk an answer, he made do with a slight nod. When he looked up, he found that his eyes had filled with tears.

  He carried her case down the steps, waiting while she said goodbye to Mrs Shepherd and Ruth and stroked Ajax’s muzzle. As they in turn watched him kiss her, he entreated her loudly to have a complete rest. ‘Promise me yo
u won’t worry about Pa. We’ll look after him.’ Then abandoning all restraint, he added: ‘He’ll still be here when you get back,’ at which she pulled away and climbed into the car, saying something to Mr Shepherd which sent them speeding down the drive.

  He returned indoors, following Ruth into the morning room where she was preparing to give his father a bed-bath. ‘Poor man,’ she said, gazing down at the living effigy. ‘All this must be specially hard for someone like him. The other day Linda and I were changing him and he looked at me and went “Shi….” Well, we thought it was number twos; you know how they speak their minds when they get to this stage.’ Clement grimaced. ‘So we winched him up, but he wouldn’t do anything. “Naughty boy!” I said, only joking you understand. It wasn’t until we winched him down, that Linda noticed my brooch. It was a sheep.’

  Had Clement felt any qualms about his plan, they would have been banished by Ruth’s story. Rather than skulk about the house, he strolled into the village, where the general concern about his father’s health and the occasional wary inquiry about his own led him to beat a rapid retreat. He walked back via the cottages and, on impulse, called on Karen, whom he found threading beads in a kitchen that reeked of camphor. She announced that she and her coven were ‘delivering charges for Uncle Edwin’s recovery’. He felt a twinge of unease and, refusing a mug of nettle tea, returned home. Suddenly shy of sitting in rooms so redolent of his father, he went upstairs until dinner, after which he told Ruth that, like his mother, he would spend the night in the morning room.

  ‘Any more of this and you’ll be docking my wages!’

  ‘I wouldn’t think of it!’

  ‘I was having you on. Besides, I’m on contract,’ she said, as though anything less would demean her.

  After Ruth’s departure, he sat studying his father’s face, making a conscious effort to memorise features he would never forget, when he was seized by a profound urge to sketch him. He went up to his room and, for the first time in over a year, took out a pad and pencils. The Roxborough disaster had sapped both his confidence and his will. On his way to the studio the following week he had thrown up in the corridor, assuring an anxious neighbour that it was caused by the lingering fumes of resin. Subsequent visits confirmed his revulsion. He had aimed to assist devotion and to provoke debate, not to put one man in hospital and another behind bars. Yet he refused to compromise by settling for mere technical facility. If the truth were so dangerous, the only honest course was silence.

  Immediately, all his uncertainty and self-disgust dissolved. It was as though the decision to act had reached to his very core and reignited his creativity. He returned to the morning room, determined to preserve his father’s features on paper even as he was releasing him from the world. Despite his lack of practice, the line flowed freely and he was filled with a deep sense of peace. He knew then that it was time, and he leant forward to whisper his intentions in his father’s ear, triggering a slight shift in his breathing, which he took for a sigh of approval, and a gentle moistening of his eyes. At a stroke, his father shed fifty years, his hair turned raven and his skin olive, and he found himself staring at Rafik. He shrank back in horror before realising that it was another sign. At long last he had taken control.

  With infinite care, as though adjusting the needle in his father’s arm rather than the dial on his pump, he increased the flow of morphine, flooding his body with life-giving death. The long-case clock in the hall struck twelve, as if to signal the approach of sleep. He sat back to keep vigil but, once again, the artist in him prevailed and he picked up his pad and pencil, determined to capture his father’s final hours. Never before had he felt so sure of himself: that the rightness of his actions was untainted even by the desire to see himself in the right. Honouring his father in the way he knew best, he focused intently on the tranquil face, until grief threatened to turn the drawing into an aquarelle.

  It was a token of his father’s great spirit that it should leave his body with so little fuss. There was no death rattle, not even a rasp, just a slow withdrawal until what had been passive became inert. The transition was at once imperceptible and pronounced. Gazing at the unchanged features, Clement recognised that the one irreversible change had taken place. He kept hold of his father’s hand, refusing to let it go even to check the pulse. He resolved against waking the household, not to arrogate the moment to himself but to allow his father to rest in peace. Besides, it felt more fitting to inform people at the start of a new day. So for three hours he sat by the bed, barely stirring, until he heard the clock strike seven. Recalling his father’s insistence on winding it himself, he was gripped by a searing sense of loss. Hot tears streamed down his cheeks and he laid his head on the hollow chest, howling into the blanket. Then, drying his eyes, he stood up with a cramp and hobbled to the door, before remembering to reset the pump.

  His first stop was the kitchen where Mrs Shepherd was frying bacon for her husband’s breakfast. He was startled by her extreme response to news that she must have long expected. As she clung to a chair, body slumped and face drenched with tears, he was seized by the notion that her relationship with his father might have been more than it seemed. He steeled himself for a lachrymose confession, complete with pleas for the family’s forgiveness, only to despair of his soap-opera sensibilities when she paid tribute to ‘the finest gentleman anyone could ever hope to meet’. So fierce was her sorrow that she made no acknowledgement of his, a glancing reference to ‘your poor mother’ being her sole recognition of those higher up the hierarchy of loss. She sat, wrapped in her memories, until, passing over the apostasy that had caused her so much pain, she comforted herself with the assertion that he had ‘gone to a better place’.

  Leaving her to break the news to her husband, he went up to the parlour to intercept Linda before she began her shift. He was glad that it was her rather than Ruth, since the laxness that had irritated him in the past made her less likely to notice any anomalies in the drip. Far from being suspicious, she wasn’t even surprised. ‘I could see it was his time to go. What a blessing you were with him! Too often it’s only one of us.’

  ‘I’m sure you do all you can.’

  ‘Oh don’t get me wrong. I count it a privilege. A true privilege. When people ask me how I bear it, I tell them I wouldn’t swap places with any midwife. Did you notice a change in the air? A sort of fluttering?’

  ‘I must have nodded off,’ he replied and hurried upstairs to ring his mother. His bystander’s account, a safeguard against eavesdroppers, added to the sense of unreality. His mother showed no such concern, replying with a muted ‘Thank you,’ that fed his paranoia.

  ‘That’s “Thank you for ringing me,” Valerie, if you’re listening. “Thank you for being with him,” Mrs Shepherd, if you’ve picked up the phone.’

  ‘Hush darling! Don’t upset yourself. There’s no one on the line but us.’

  Recovering, he assured her that the end had been peaceful: a gentle susurration as his father’s spirit returned to God.

  ‘There can be no more miracles,’ she said, giving no clue as to whether she was speaking personally or in general. After thanking him for being there, so formally that she seemed to be trying to convince herself, she said that she would take the first train home. As soon as she put down the phone, he rang Mike, catching him on his way to school. Imperturbable as ever, he promised to turn straight round and drive to Beckley, collecting Carla en route. Clement was grateful to have one less person to tell, afraid that, even if he succeeded in sticking to the story, repetition would make it glib.

  His mother made no mention of Shoana. Suspecting that she would have no time to call her in the flurry of leaving and that nothing would fuel his sister’s resentment more than being excluded, he reluctantly picked up the phone. His fears proved to be justified when, no sooner had she absorbed the news, than she demanded to know the exact time of death.

  ‘I’m afraid I can’t say,’ he replied. ‘Somewhere in the early hours.’


  ‘Be sure to ask the nurses. It’s important,’ she said, so vehemently that he presumed it had some religious significance.

  ‘Neither of them was there. Only me.’

  She made no comment, asking instead after their mother. For all that her absence had been central to the plan, he decided not to allude to it, at least for the present. ‘She’s very calm. I don’t know whether it’s sunk in yet. She’s been expecting it for months, and now it’s finally happened. I suppose it’s the difference between an inevitability and a fact.’ Her silence left him in little doubt of her disdain for such distinctions. Then, instructing him to arrange nothing without her, she hung up to ring Zvi.

  Having survived the conversation with his sister, he felt strong enough to call his aunt, whose demand to be told that ‘he didn’t suffer. I can’t bear to think of him suffering,’ betrayed her true priorities even in grief. Her insistence that the funeral should not be ‘some hole-in-the-corner affair’ reminded him that, like it or not, his father had been a public figure and there would be widespread interest in his death. Loath to deal with it himself, not least after his recent mauling by the press, he rang Lucy, his father’s part-time secretary, who promised to drive over from Oxford after lunch.

  He returned to the morning room, where Linda had been joined by Ruth. They had removed his father’s pills, smoothed his bedding and detached the syringe-driver from his arm, as though any remaining connection to the world would detract from the mystery of death. He accepted Ruth’s offer to call the doctor but, the moment she left the room, Linda resumed her homespun metaphysics, prompting him to plead exhaustion and flee upstairs. He hurried past the gilded array of ancestors, or ‘rogues gallery’ as his father had put it, but, catching the eyes of Squire Hubert Granville and his great-grandson, General Mark, he felt that their glazed expressions had grown more forgiving; he may have failed in his duty as an heir but he had fulfilled it as a son.