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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 hisobsessively 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 thequerulous 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