Tony: Novel Synopsis

Rushton is an elderly, retired doctor, who knows that he is approaching the end of his life.  What has he achieved?  The story opens as he is painting a picture in his study, on a bleak February afternoon.  He knows he is unlikely to complete the work, and in any case he is more interested in what the activity of painting can do to “recapture” those lost moments, sequences, images, scenes, which form his real past, a past which in a sense he has been unconscious of all his life.  Previously, he had looked forever forward to a future involved with whatever projects, usually professional, lay to hand.

Now there is no future.  In facing approaching death he must submerge himself in the experiences which only he has known.  He must understand what it is that life has given him, and how he came to be “in love”, insofar as he has experienced love.  Possible oblivion awaits him, and he considers how the “chance” meeting with a young woman soon after the war, as he was setting out on his medical career, gave him the opportunity to help her become the person she wanted to be, as expressed by the youthful eagerness he detects in her, despite the recent impact of her father’s death when she was just seventeen.

He remembers and considers his marriage, seen externally as a set of pledges and the background to family life, yet for him now something rather different – the chance meeting of two people and their consequent resolve to cooperate mutually in developing their lives along a pathway they would never otherwise have taken.

The novel describes Rushton’s internal sifting through his earlier experiences, simultaneously discovering the true story of his life and marriage.

He considers, sometimes ruefully and humorously, his own younger self and his younger aspirations.  He realises that his own assumptions about masculinity must have often hindered his early relationship with his wife.  He considers his wife’s femininity, remembering how it was necessary for him to give up his own expectations of her, in order for her own spirit to flower spontaneously, and for the marriage to “progress” towards some kind of mutual fulfilment.  Could such fulfilment, however limited, be the true achievement of his life?

The novel then describes his final days.  His condition deteriorates to the point where he arranges for his own admission to hospital.  Only when they visit him there do his wife and younger son realise that he is dying.  Rushton acknowledges to himself their own confusion and fear, but he is himself wrestling with dread as he perceives “the wall of death” coming ever nearer, seemingly making everything else insignificant, as the hospital activities and the first vague stirrings of the spring season continue around him.  Evening comes, and his wife and two sons come to visit him again.

When they have left, and as the night draws on, he finally rejects his own imprisoning conception of the loneliness and hopelessness of death.  He feels that he has at last discovered the experiences and joys which are his true self, and it is in contemplation of these that he faces his end.