Resting on his sticks, Conrad stood behind his uncle as the latter peered down at the occupant of the bed. The acid odour was more pungent and seemed to emanate directly from the bed. When his uncle beckoned him forward, Conrad at first failed to find the shrunken face of the man in the bed. The grey cheeks and hair had already merged into the unstarched sheets covered by the shadows from the curtained windows.
‘James, this is Elizabeth’s boy, Conrad.’ His uncle pulled up a wooden chair. He motioned to Conrad to sit down. ‘Dr Matthews, Conrad.’
Conrad murmured something, aware of the blue eyes that had turned to look at him. What surprised him most about the dying occupant of the bed was his comparative youth. Although in his middle sixties, Dr Matthews was twenty years younger than the majority of the tenants in the estate.
‘He’s grown into quite a lad, don’t you think, James?’ Uncle Theodore remarked.
Dr Matthews nodded, as if only half interested in their visit. His eyes were on the dark cypress in the garden. ‘He has,’ he said at last.
Conrad waited uncomfortably. The walk had tired him, and his thigh seemed raw again. He wondered if they would be able to call for a taxi from the house.
Dr Matthews turned his head. He seemed to be able to look at Conrad and his uncle with a blue eye on each of them. ‘Who have you got for the boy?’ he asked in a sharper voice. ‘Nathan is still there, I believe ‘One of the younger men, James. You probably won’t know him, but he’s a good fellow. Knight.’
‘Knight?’ The name was repeated with only a faint hint of comment. ‘And when does the boy go in?’
‘Tomorrow. Don’t you, Conrad?’
Conrad was about to speak when he noticed that a faint simpering was coming from the man in the bed. Suddenly exhausted by this bizarre scene, and under the impression that the dying physician’s macabre humour was directed at himself, Conrad rose in his chair, rattling his sticks together. ‘Uncle, could I wait outside…?’
‘My boy — ‘ Dr Matthews had freed his right hand from the bed. ‘I was laughing at your uncle, not at you. He always had a great sense of humour. Or none at all. Which is it, Theo?’
‘I see nothing funny, James. Are you saying I shouldn’t have brought him here?’
Dr Matthews lay back. ‘Not at all — I was there at his beginning, let him be here for my end…’ He looked at Conrad again. ‘I wish you the best, Conrad. No doubt you wonder why I don’t accompany you to the hospital.’
‘Well, I…’ Conrad began, but his uncle held his shoulder.
‘James, it’s time for us to be leaving. I think we can take the matter as understood.’
‘Obviously we can’t.’ Dr Matthews raised a hand again, frowning at the slight noise. ‘I’ll only be a moment, Theo, but if I don’t tell him no one will, certainly not Dr Knight. Now, Conrad, you’re seventeen?’
When Conrad nodded Dr Matthews went on: ‘At that age, if I remember, life seems to stretch on for ever. One is probably living as close to eternity as is possible. As you get older, though, you find more and more that everything worthwhile has finite bounds, by and large those of time — from ordinary things to the most important ones, your marriage, children and so on, even life itself. The hard lines drawn around things give them their identity. Nothing is brighter than the diamond.’
‘James, you’ve had enough—’
‘Quiet, Theo.’ Dr Matthews raised his head, almost managing to sit up. ‘Perhaps, Conrad, you would explain to Dr Knight that it is just because we value our lives so much that we refuse to diminish them. There are a thousand hard lines drawn between you and me, Conrad, differences of age, character and experience, differences of time. You have to earn these distinctions for yourself. You can’t borrow them from anyone else, least of all from the dead.’
Conrad looked round as the door opened. The older of the nuns stood in the hall outside. She nodded to his uncle. Conrad settled his limb for the journey home, waiting for Uncle Theodore to make his goodbyes to Dr Matthews. As the nun stepped towards the bed he saw on the train of her starched gown a streak of blood.
Outside they plodded together past the undertakers, Conrad heaving himself along on his sticks. As the old people in the gardens waved to them Uncle Theodore said, ‘I’m sorry he seemed to laugh at you, Conrad. It wasn’t meant.’
‘Was he there when I was born?’
‘He attended your mother. I thought it only right that you should see him before he died. Why he thought it so funny I can’t understand.’
Almost six months later to the day, Conrad Foster walked down towards the beach road and the sea. In the sunlight he could see the high dunes above the beach, and beyond them the gulls sitting out on the submerged sandbank in the mouth’of the estuary. The traffic along the beach road was busier than he remembered from his previous visit, and the sand picked up by the wheels of the speeding cars and trucks drifted in clouds across the fields.
