The Forsyte Saga Volume 2(27)

In Piccadilly he moused along on the Park side, taking his customary look up at the ‘Iseeum’ Club. The curtains were drawn, and chinks of light glowed, long and cosy. And that reminded him – someone had said George Forsyte was ill. Certainly he had not seen him in the bay window for months past. Well, George had always eaten and drunk too much. He crossed over and passed beneath the Club; and a sudden feeling – he didn’t know what – a longing for his own past, a sort of nostalgia – made him stop and mount the steps.

‘Mr George Forsyte in the Club?’

The janitor stared, a grey-haired, long-faced chap, whom he had known from away back in the eighties.

‘Mr Forsyte, sir,’ he said, ‘is very ill indeed. They say he won’t recover, sir.’

‘What?’ said Soames. ‘Nobody told me that.’

‘He’s very bad – very bad indeed. It’s the heart.’

‘The heart! Where is he?’

‘At his rooms, sir; just round the corner. They say the doctors have given him up. He will be missed here. Forty years I’ve known him. One of the old school, and a wonderful judge of wine and horses. We none of us last for ever, they say, but I never thought to see him out. Bit too full-blooded, sir, and that’s a fact.’

With a slight shock Soames realized that he had never known where George lived, so utterly anchored had he seemed to that bay window above.

‘Just give me the number of his rooms,’ he said.

‘Belville Row – No. II, sir; I’m sure I hope you’ll find him better. I shall miss his jokes – I shall, indeed.’

Turning the corner into Belville Row, Soames made a rapid calculation. George was sixty-six, only one year younger than himself! If George was really in extremis it would be quite unnatural! ‘Comes of not leading a careful life,’ he thought; ‘always rackety – George! When was it I made his will?’ So far as he remembered, George had left his money to his brothers and sisters – no one else to leave it to. The feeling of kinship stirred in Soames, the instinct of family adjustment. George and he had never got on – opposite poles of temperament – still he would have to be buried, and who would see to it if not Soames, who had seen to so many Forsyte burials in his time? He recalled the nickname George had once given him, ‘the undertaker’! H’m! Here was poetical justice! Belville Row! Ah! No. II – regular bachelor-looking place! And putting his hand up to the bell, he thought: ‘Women!’ What had George done about women all his life?

His ring was answered by a man in a black cut-away coat with a certain speechless reticence.

‘My cousin, Mr George Forsyte? How is he?’

The man compressed his lips.

‘Not expected to last the night, sir.’

Soames felt a little clutch beneath his Jaeger vest.

‘Conscious?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘Could you show him my card? He might possibly like to see me.’

‘Will you wait in here, sir?’ Soames passed into a low room panelled up to the level of a man’s chest, and above that line decorated with prints. George – a collector! Soames had never supposed he had it in him! On those walls, wherever the eye roved, were prints coloured and uncoloured, old and new, depicting the sports of racing and prize-fighting! Hardly an inch of the red wall space visible! About to examine them for marks of value, Soames saw that he was not alone. A woman – age uncertain in the shaded light – was sitting in a very highbacked chair before the fire with her elbow on the arm of it, and a handkerchief held to her face. Soames looked at her, and his nostrils moved in a stealthy sniff. ‘Not a lady,’ he thought. ‘Ten to one but there’ll be complications.’ The muffled voice of the cut-away man said:

‘I’m to take you in, sir.’ Soames passed his hand over his face and followed.

The bedroom he now entered was in curious contrast. The whole of one wall was occupied by an immense piece of furniture, all cupboards and drawers. Otherwise there was nothing in the room but a dressing-table with silver accoutrements, an electric radiator alight in the fireplace, and a bed opposite. Over the fireplace was a single picture, at which Soames glanced mechanically. What! Chinese! A large whitish sidelong monkey, holding the rind of a squeezed fruit in its outstretched paw. Its whiskered face looked back at him with brown, almost human eyes. What on earth had made his inartistic cousin buy a thing like that and put it up to face his bed? He turned and looked at the bed’s occupant. ‘The only sportsman of the lot’, as Montague Dartie in his prime had called him, lay with his swollen form outlined beneath a thin quilt. It gave Soames quite a turn to see that familiar beef-coloured face pale and puffy as a moon, with dark corrugated circles round eyes which still had their japing stare. A voice, hoarse and subdued, but with the old Forsyte timbre, said: