The allusion was lost on Gaskin who had never read Webster. He murmured:

'No indeed, sir,' and smiled his sly, sycophantic smile.

Five minutes later, he saw his customer and his parcels formally off the premises, congratulating himself with premature satisfaction – for despite his carefully nurtured sensitivity he had never claimed to be a clairvoyant – that he had seen and heard the last of the arm of the dead Princess.

CHAPTER FOUR

Less than two miles away, in a Harley Street consulting-room, Ivo Whittingham slipped his legs over the edge of the examination couch and watched Dr Crantley-Mathers shuffle back to his desk. The doctor, as always, was wearing his old but well-tailored pinstripe suit. Nothing so clinical as a white coat ever intruded into his consulting room, and the room itself with its patterned Axminster carpet, its Edwardian carved desk holding the silver-framed photographs of Sir James's grandchildren and distinguished patients, its sporting prints and the portrait of some solidly prosperous ancestor holding pride of place above the carved marble mantelshelf, looked more like a private study than a consulting room. No apparent effort was made to keep infection at bay; but then, thought Whittingham, germs would know better than to lurk in the well-upholstered armchair in which Sir James's patients awaited his advice. Even the examination couch looked unclinical, being covered with brown leather and mounted by way of elegant eighteenth-century library steps. The assumption was that, although a number of Sir James's guests might wish for some private whim to take off their clothes, that eccentricity could have nothing to do with the state of their health.

Now he looked up from his prescription pad and asked:

'That spleen troubling you?'

'As it must weigh twenty pounds and I look and feel like a lopsided pregnant woman, yes, you could say that it's troubling me.'

'The time may come when it's better out. No hurry, though. We'll have another think in a month's time.'

Whittingham went behind the painted oriental screen where his clothes were folded over a chair and began to dress, drawing his trousers up over the heavy belly. It was, he thought, like carrying one's own death, feeling it drag at the muscles, a foetus-like incubus which never stirred, reminding him with its dead weight, by the deformity which he saw in his mirror every time he bathed, what it was he bore within him. Looking over the screen, he said, his voice muffled by his shirt:

'I thought you explained that the spleen is enlarged because it's taken over the manufacture of the red blood corpuscles which my blood's no longer producing.'

Sir James didn't look up. He said with careful unconcern, 'That's more or less what's happening, yes. When one organ ceases to function, another tends to take over.'

'So would it be tactless to inquire which organ will obligingly take over the job when you've whipped out the spleen?'

Sir James guffawed at this witticism. 'Let's cross that bridge when we come to it, shall we?' He had never, thought Whittingham, been a man for originality of speech.

For the first time since his illness began Whittingham would have liked to ask his doctor directly how much time remained for him. It wasn't that there were affairs that he needed to put in order. Divorced from his wife, alienated from his children, and living now alone, his affairs, like his obsessively tidy flat, had been depressingly in order for the last five years. The need to know was now little more than a mild curiosity. He would be glad to learn that he was to be spared another Christmas, his most disliked time of the year. But he realized that the question would be in the worst of taste. The room itself had been designed to make it unsayable; Sir James was adept at training his patients not to ask questions which they knew it would distress him to have to answer. His philosophy – and Whittingham wasn't altogether in disagreement with it – was that patients would realize in their own good time that they were dying and that, by then, physical weakness would ensure that the realization would be less painful than a sentence of death pronounced when the blood still ran strongly. He had never believed that the loss of hope did anyone any good, and besides, doctors could be wrong. This last assertion was a conventional gesture to modesty. Sir James did not privately believe that he personally could be wrong, and indeed he was a superb diagnostician. It was hardly his fault, thought Whittingham, that the ability of the medical profession to diagnose is so far in advance of its ability to cure. Slipping his arms through his jacket sleeves he spoke aloud Brachiano's words from The White Devil:

'On pain of death, let no man name death to me:

It is a word infinitely terrible.' It was a view Sir James obviously shared. It was surprising, supposing him to know them, that he hadn't carved the words over his door lintel.

'I'm sorry, Mr Whittingham. I didn't quite catch what you said.'

'Nothing, Sir James. I was merely quoting Webster.'

Escorting his patient to the consulting-room door at which an exceedingly pretty nurse was waiting to see him finally on his way, the doctor asked:

'Are you going out of London this weekend? It's a pity to waste this weather.'

'To Dorset, actually. To Courcy Island, off Speymouth. An amateur company with some professional support is putting on The Duchess of Malfi and I'm doing a piece for one of the colour supplements.' He added, 'It's chiefly about the restoration of the Victorian theatre on the island and its history.' Immediately he despised himself for the explanation. What was it but a way of saying that dying he might be but he wasn't yet reduced to reviewing amateurs?

'Good. Good.' Sir James boomed out a note of approval which might have sounded excessive even for God on the seventh day.

When the imposing front door had closed behind him Whittingham was tempted to hire the taxi which had just drawn up, presumably to deposit another patient. But he decided he might manage a mile of the walk to his Russell Square flat. And there was a new coffee house in Marylebone High Street where the young couple who owned it ground the beans freshly and made their own cakes, and where a few chairs under umbrellas gave the locals the illusion that the English summer was suitable for eating out. He might rest there for ten minutes. It was extraordinary how important these trivial self-indulgences had become. As he resigned himself to the accidie of mortal illness he was beginning to acquire some of the foibles of old age, a liking for small treats, a fussiness about routine, a reluctance to bother with even his oldest acquaintances, an indolence which made even dressing and bathing a burden, a preoccupation with his bodily functions. He despised the half-man he had become, but even this self-disgust had some of the querulous resentment of senility. But Sir James was right. It was difficult to feel regret about losing a life so diminished. By the time this sickness had finished with him, death would be no more than the final disintegration of a body from which the spirit had already seeped away, worn out by pain, by weariness and by a malaise which went deeper than physical weakness, some brittle-armed traitor of the heart who had never mustered the will to fight.

As he made his way down Wimpole Street through the mellow autumn sunlight he thought of the great performances he had seen and reviewed and mentally spoke the names like a roll call: Olivier's Richard the Third, Wolfit playing Malvolio, Gielgud's Hamlet, Richardson's Falstaff, Peggy Ashcroft's Portia. He could recall them, could remember the theatres, the directors, even some of the most quoted extracts from his reviews. It was interesting that, after thirty years of play-going, it was the classics which had lasted longest for him. But he knew that, even if he were this night to take his accustomed seat in the third row of the stalls, formally dressed as he always was for a first night, listening to that anticipatory hum which is unlike any other sound in the world, nothing that happened when the curtain rose would move or excite him beyond a mild, detached interest. The glory and the wonder had departed. Never again would he feel that tingle between the shoulder blades, that almost physical surge of the blood which, for all his youth, had been his response to great acting. It was ironic that now, all passion spent, he was about to review his last play, and that an amateur production. But somehow he would find the energy for what he had to do on Courcy Island.