NATASHA SPENDER
59
cominuous drinking caught up with him and dangerously ill he was
suddenly rushed inLO a New York hospital. From there he wrote
shakily by hand, thanking me for a "wonderful" letter and saying that
he had had a curious mystical experience after five days' illness, having
woken with a curious lightness of the heart, as though the "long
nightmare" was over at last, and he had been "absolved."
It
is true that
he never again talked at length of the "long nightmare," though at
Palm Springs we all saw unacknowledged reverberations of it.
The end of Carlton had marked the end of the shuttle service as
such, though we all remained friends; his will to live had survived the
long-drawn-out crises which culminated in the New York hospital.
One could now hope that his good nature, the almost innocem wit,
and the affection for all his friends, which had shone intermittently
even between the worst clouded moments of the bereavement syn–
drome, would now prevail. The suicide threats were over, but I don't
believe any of us had the faintest effect on his drinking except for short
periods of vigilant care.
,.
,.
,.
The last of the three periods during which I saw Raymond
consecutively lasted a few weeks at the end of my American concert tour
in December 1956. He had telephoned sounding positively jaunty,
energetic and
(1
thought probably) well, and was longing to discuss all
his Californian plans including matrimonial ones, for he had spent
five months or so seeing a great deal of someone he had planned to
marry. But at the last moment they had decided not to go ahead; he was
still at times havering, yet already thinking of other possibilities in La
Jolla and said that he needed my advice. He was keen on desert air and
with his usual solicitude invited me for a two week rest cure to
Arizona (for I had been ordered off work for a few weeks) after which I
should go on LO Los Angeles and resume my concert tour. I had clearly
not been a good judge of his state by telephone, for when he met me by
car at Phoenix airport on December 6th he was again very jangled and
drunk and drove the car alarmingly, driving first of all straight inLO a
fence, and then weaving across and even off the road, so that it was a
miracle that we arrived in Chandler, Arizona without disaster.
It
took a nightmare vigil of some days to sober him up, after which
time with the well-known self-deception of the alcoholic he wrote an
affectionate letter LO "My Very Dear Stephen" saying how
well
he was.
"r
do not get drunk, obstreperous and think or say the unkind and
