He took perhaps a minute, maybe less.
“It’s quite straightforward,” he said. “You’ve got a detached retina.”
“Thank God for that,” I heard Margaret say.
“As a matter of fact,” he said coolly, “I could have diagnosed it over the telephone.”
“If you had,” I said, sarcastic with relief, “it would have saved us a bad couple of hours.”
“Why, what did you think it was?”
Margaret and I glanced at each other with something like shame. Ridiculous fears we hadn’t spoken. Fears uninformed. Fears out of the medical dictionary. Brain tumour, and the rest.
Mansel was speaking as though cross with us.
“I understand. It’s easy to imagine things.” Actually, he was cross with himself. He hadn’t been sensitive enough. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He wasn’t only a technician, I thought, he was a good doctor. From her corner by the surgical couch, Margaret broke out: “Mr Rochester.”
“What?” I said.
“He must have had exactly your condition. Don’t you remember?”
The point seemed to me well taken. Mansel found this conversation incomprehensible, and got down to business. He would have to operate, of course. What were the chances? I asked. Quite good. Statistically, I pressed him. Not worse than 75 per cent, not better than 85 per cent, he said with singular confidence. I wasn’t to expect too much: they ought to be able to give me back peripheral vision.
“What does that mean?”
“You won’t be able to read with it. But you’ll have some useful sight.”
If he could have operated on Saturday, he said, in an objective tone, just after the eye went, he might possibly have done better: it was too late now. Still, he had better get me into hospital that afternoon, and perform next morning.
“That’s a little difficult,” I said. To myself, my voice sounded as objective as his. I felt collected, exaggeratedly collected, as though, after the anticlimax, I had to compete on equal terms.
“Why is it difficult?”
I said that I had an engagement on Wednesday which I was anxious to keep. He interrogated me. I explained that I wouldn’t have thought twice about the formal ceremony at the university, but there was a Court meeting which I had given a serious promise to attend. Margaret, her face intent but hard to read, knew that I was referring to Vicky and her father.
“Some promises have to be broken,” said Mansel.
“I’ve got some responsibility this time. Some personal responsibility, you understand.”
“Well, I can’t judge that. But I’ve got to give you medical advice. You ought to have this operation tomorrow. The longer we put it off, the worse the chances are. I’ve got to tell you that.”
He was a strong-willed man. Somehow I had half-memories of the times I had clashed with men like this, both struggling for what I used to think of as the moral initiative.
“I’m not going to be unreasonable,” I said. “But you must be definite about the chances. Is that fair?”
“I’ll be as definite as I can.”
“If we delay three days, what difference will it really make?”
“Some.”
“Would it, say, halve the chances? In that case, of course, it’s off.”
His will was crossed by his professional honesty. He gave a frosty smile.
“No. Nothing like that.”
“Well then. Can you put it into figures again? Tomorrow you said it would be an 8o per cent chance. What would it be on Thursday?”
“A little worse.”
“How much worse?” I said.
“Perhaps 10 per cent.”
“Not more than 10 per cent?” I went on, “Less rather than more?”
“Yes,” said Mansel without palaver. “I should say that was true. Less rather than more.”
Then I asked, would he mind if I had a word with my wife alone? With his courtesy which was both professional and youthful, he said that he would be delighted: he was sure she would be the wisest of us all.
We looked into the waiting-room, but there were by now several people in it. So, her fingers interwoven with mine, we walked up and down the pavement outside the house. The mist had lifted, the air was pearly bright.
“Well,” I said, “what do I do?”
“I must say,” said Margaret, “I’d be happier to see you tucked up in hospital.”
“And yet, if you were me, you wouldn’t even hesitate, would you?”
“That’s a bit unkind.”
“No. The idea that you wouldn’t take a tiny bit of risk—”
She understood, without question, that I wasn’t being quixotic, as she might have been. If she had been asked, she might have said that I was showing defiance, taking my revenge for feeling helpless. In both of us as we grew older, there emerged a streak of recklessness which she had always had and which I loved in her. But this wasn’t a time, we took it for granted, to discuss motives. We had both got tired of the paralysis of subjectivism, when every action became about as good or about as bad as any other, provided that you could lucubrate it away.
She knew that if she asked me to go into hospital that night, I should do so. She understood me, and didn’t ask.
We returned to Mansel’s consulting-room. He stood up, polite and active, looking expectantly at Margaret.
“No,” I said. “I’m at your service any time from Thursday morning.”
“Right,” said Mansel, without a blink or sign of disapproval. “You’ll go in some time that afternoon, will you? I’ll deal with you early on Friday.”
12: Monocular Vision
WITH Margaret there to look after me, I arrived at the university robing-room half-an-hour before the morning ceremony. She had fitted me with a patch which shut out my left eye, and when Francis Getliffe saw it — he was already dressed in his cancellarial regalia — he walked across to us, frowning with concern. When Margaret explained what had happened, he said angrily: “You ought never to have come.”
“Francis,” I said, “you know perfectly well why I’ve come.” On the agenda for the Court that afternoon, over which he was to preside, there was an innocent-looking item standing in his son’s name. Shaw still hadn’t picked up the significance, so far as I had heard: but Francis knew, so did the group of young professors, and so did I.
We couldn’t speak any more, the room was bumbling with a kind of Brownian movement of human beings in fancy dress. Scarlet hoods, azure hoods, chef-like hats of French universities: hoods of this university, all invented by Shaw himself, one of which, the DSc, was a peculiarly startling yellow-gold. Soon I was in fancy dress myself, regarding the scene with monocular detachment: I could see perfectly well, as well as with two eyes, but somehow the sheer fact of physical accident kept me in a bubble of my own. People I knew, Shaw, Leonard Getliffe, Geary, did not look quite real. Nor did my old acquaintance, Lord Lufkin, who, since he was to be invested with a hood later in the morning, stood subfusc, among the blur of colours, in a black gown. He was well into his seventies by this time, and had at last been persuaded, or perhaps financially coerced, into retiring. But that hadn’t taken the edge off his public persona. He had taken to going about with someone I saw at his side in this milling, behooded mob; a man of fifty who acted as something like Lufkin’s herald, producing pearls of wisdom from Lufkin’s past, while the master himself stood by in non-participating silence.
That morning we came together in the crush. Untypically, Lufkin kissed Margaret’s cheek. “I’m glad to see your charming bride,” said Lufkin, who disapproved of American business idioms and often used them.
He was not above taking an interest in my misfortunes. Once more we had to explain.