While she had a cup of tea, smoked her first cigarette, I described my symptoms. Or rather my symptom, for there was only the one. “What can it be?” said Margaret. I was asking her the same thing. For a moment we looked at each other, each suspecting that the other had some guess or secret knowledge. Then we knew that we were equally lost.
She didn’t think of saying that it might pass. We were too much at one for that. Over breakfast she was wondering what advice we could get. Clearly we needed an eye specialist. What about the man whose son was at Charles’ school? No sooner had she thought of the name than she was riffling through the telephone directory. Mansel. Harley Street. No answer there. Home address. She got through, and, listening, I gathered that Mr Mansel was away. At an eye surgeons’ conference in Stockholm. He would be back very late tomorrow, Sunday, night.
“That’s probably time enough,” I said.
She said: “I want to know what you’ve got.”
I argued, with the perverse obstinacy of shock, that he was said to be first rate and that at casual meetings we had both liked him. We could ring him up on Monday morning: that would, I said again, be time enough.
“I want to know,” she said. Couldn’t we find a doctor who might have an idea? The curious thing was, we couldn’t really be said to have a doctor. Since my breakdown as a young man, I had been, apart from bouts of lumbago, abnormally healthy: so had she been, and she hadn’t yet entered the change of life. So far as we had a doctor, it was my old friend Charles March, but he hadn’t visited us professionally for something like ten years.
Still, she would talk to him, she said. Once more I listened to her on the telephone. Dr March was on holiday, was he? Back in a fortnight? He had a locum, of course? Could she have his telephone number?
“No, leave it now,” I said.
She did not mention the name of her first husband. He was an excellent doctor, she had complete faith in him — but no, she couldn’t, she couldn’t disturb, not the peace of the moment, but the insulation of the moment in which we sat together.
But there were other doctors. Later it seemed to us inexplicable — or out of character for either of us, especially her, so active and protective — that we spoke to none of them through that long weekend. She was used to a kind of pointless stoicism which sometimes, in bad trouble, came over me. As a rule, if we expected harsh news, she wanted to find out the worst and get it over: my instinct was to wait, it would come soon enough, other miseries had passed and so might this. That weekend, though, she behaved as I did myself. I was worried enough but, perhaps because I had a physical malaise to preoccupy me, she was worse. For once, she did not want to brave it out and discover our fate.
During the morning, I went into the study and found her there. In a hurry, she put her hand over what she was reading. It was a medical dictionary. I had come for exactly the same purpose. I gave her a smile. It was the sort of grim joke old Gay’s saga men would have enjoyed. She smiled back, but she was having to control her face.
Before lunch we went for a walk in the park. It was a day of absolute calm, the sun warm enough to tinge the skin, the mist still lying in the hollows. The grass smelt as welcoming as on a morning in childhood. Margaret, clutching my arm, was watching me shut and open my left eye.
“How is it?”
“No better,” I said. In fact, it was worse. The veil had spread and now covered between a third and a half of the eye. The orange penumbra flickered dizzily as I tried to gaze into the benign autumn sky. When I closed the eye, I could walk as comfortably as on the afternoon before, the time that Margaret and I had taken a stroll in the same beautiful weather.
It was a long weekend. I couldn’t write or even read: as for looking at television, that became an exercise in calculating whether the veil was creeping further. We talked a good deal, but only about what had happened to us, us together, us alone. Those we were interested in, or responsible for, we didn’t talk about at all. The exchanges of habit, as soothing as a domestic animal one loved, those we had thrown away: not a word about Charles’ next Sunday at home. Some time before the Sunday morning Margaret had made her own diagnosis. I didn’t ask to know it. And yet at moments, as in all strain, time played tricks. We were back on Friday evening, having our drinks after Charles’ telephone call. This hadn’t happened. And then Margaret was watching me as I opened my eye.
On Monday morning, after a drugged and broken night, I woke early. I found Margaret looking at me. With a start I stared at the window. The veil was black: no larger, but like a presence on the nerves. I turned towards her, and said: “Well, we shall soon know.”
“Yes, we shall,” she said, steady by now.
When could I decently ring this man up? She was even prepared to smile at the “decently”: now the time had come, we had something to do.
Over breakfast we decided on nine o’clock. But when I tried his office, I heard that he had been in hospital since six. “Mr Mansel gets on without much sleep,” said his secretary, with proprietorial pride. I could get him there: which, fretted by the delays, in time I did.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t arrive home till late last night. They gave me your message.” The voice was brisk, light, professional. “What’s gone wrong with your eye?”
I told him. “That’s a very clear description,” the voice said with approval, rather as though I were a medical student walking the wards and making a report. I had better see him that morning. He was doing an operation at 9.30. He would be at Harley Street by 11.30. Too early for me?
No, not too early, we thought as the minutes dragged. I couldn’t block out the bad eye enough to read the newspapers. Margaret went through them for me: nothing much: a Kennedy speech: oh yes, the body of that child who was missing, the one in your home town, that’s just been found, poor boy: an old acquaintance called Lord Bridgwater (once Horace Timberlake) had died on Saturday. We were not interested. Margaret sat beside me in silence and held my hand.
Just as, still silent, she held my hand in the taxi on the way to Harley Street. It was only a quarter-of-an-hour’s trip from the north side of the park. We hadn’t been able to discipline ourselves; we arrived at 11.10. No, Mr Mansel wasn’t in yet: empty waiting-room, the smell of magazines, old furniture, the smell of waiting. All Margaret said was that, when he examined me, she wanted to be there.
At last the secretary entered, comely, hygienic, and led us in. Mansel was standing up, greeting me like a young man to an older; the room was sparkling with optical instruments, and Mansel himself was as sharp as an electronic engineer. Although our sons were in the same year at school, he was not more than forty, tall, thin, handsome in an avian fashion. Did he mind my wife staying? Not in the least. He showed her to a chair, me to another beside his desk. He had in front of him a card about me, name, age, address, clearly filled up: he asked a question.
“Should you say your general health was good?”
I hesitated. “I suppose so,” I said with reluctance, as though I were tempting fate.
No illnesses? Latest medical examination? Long ago. “Then we won’t waste any time on that,” he said with impersonal cheerfulness, and chose, out of a set of gadgets, what looked no more complicated than a single lens. Left eye? Firm fingers on my cheek, lens inches away, face close to mine. His eyes, preternaturally large, like a close-up on the screen, peered down: one angle, another, a third.