The Last Samurai

I asked whether I could have orange juice instead.

He went to the refrigerator with his glass. He came back with the glass and a can of Coke.

He said

I don’t mean it wasn’t hard on my wife. She had to shoulder responsibility. She had to write a lot of letters to people who weren’t very helpful. She had to keep going for the sake of the children.

I said

Does she want to die?

He said

I don’t think so.

He said after a pause

It changed her a lot. She became much less

He said

Or rather she became much more

He said

That is she turned into the kind of person who

He said

That is she developed a lot of skills. She organised a successful campaign, you know, that is she organised a campaign that was successful as a campaign, it had a lot of supporters who gave money when she wrote to ask them for money and went on demonstrations when she told them there was going to be a demonstration and wrote letters to their MP when she said everyone should write to their MP. The papers published her letters when she wrote letters and they covered the demonstrations when there were demonstrations, and she got interviewed on radio and TV on a regular basis. That kind of thing doesn’t just happen, you know. Anyway once it happens you become quite confident that you can get that kind of thing to happen.

He said

Would you like another Coke?

I said OK.

He came back with another drink. He said he was sorry but they were out of Coke, he had brought me an orange juice instead.

He said

It sort of spoiled things for the campaign, in a way, my just escaping like that. Apparently negotiations had reached quite a promising stage or anyway my wife thinks they looked quite promising, I could have jeopardised everything by just making a run for it. It’s irritating for her to have this have-a-go-Grandad type of attitude to deal with because she thinks it was just luck that it worked whereas she doesn’t think that if a campaign works that’s luck. It’s not that it’s a major irritant, more of a minor irritant, it’s just that I had to keep hiding how happy I was to see the dog. He practically went insane as soon as I came into the room, it was all I could do not to or actually I think I did break down and it wasn’t as if he’d developed any media skills worth mentioning or made a significant contribution to the campaign or anything. What I mean is that my wife had spent, well all of them had spent five years making progress or facing setbacks whereas I’d just spent five years

He said

So obviously when the dog died

He said

Well anyway it’s past history. You’re bored, I’m bored, you’re bored or if you’re not you would be if you’d spent as much time thinking about it

I said

Have you read that book by Graham Greene?

He said

Which book by Graham Greene?

I said

The one where he kills his wife in a mercy killing and is tormented by the memory and then he loses his memory in an explosion?

He said

Oh that one. You read Graham Greene?

I said

Only that one and Travels with My Aunt. I liked Travels with My Aunt better. My mother read the other one and she thought: that’s it, I’ll get amnesia. So she tried banging her head on walls but she couldn’t even knock herself out, and then she remembered that she’d once been knocked out by a car and she could remember everything when she came to. So she read a lot of articles on amnesia but they weren’t very helpful. Then she thought: What about a hypnotist? People are always going to hypnotists and remembering things they’d forgotten that happened to them as a child, or in a previous existence when they were Cleopatra—why shouldn’t it work just as well the other way?

He said

Now there’s a grand idea. You go to the doctor a nervous wreck and come home Cleopatra Queen of the Nile.

I said

So she called the Samaritans.

He said

And what did they say?

I said

They said they didn’t know. So she called a lot of hypnotists and they all said this was an unhealthy attitude & hypnosis as a tool of psychotherapy was aimed at helping people to confront things & no ethical practitioner would contemplate and my mother said well what about an unethical practitioner? Suppose she found a rogue hypnotist, the kind who would fornicate with the unresisting body of his subject and steal her credit cards and her cashcard and ask her cashcard PIN number and take the pearls she got for her 18th birthday, would somebody like that be able to make her forget everything that had happened in the last 10 years or so?

He said

And what did they say?

I said

They hung up.

He said

So then what happened?

I said

She tried to kill herself.

He said

That must have been hard for you.

I said

Oh that was before I was born. I think she regrets it when people make fatuous remarks but now that she has me she thinks it would be irresponsible—sorry.

He said

It doesn’t matter. It’s what anyone would think. I did write the book, you know. I wrote the book and gave a lot of interviews and signed copies—funny the things people will buy.