Through the afternoon I begged sip after sip. In time, though what time I had no idea, the nurse said that my wife had come to see me. I felt Margaret’s hand in mine. Her voice was asking after me.
“I don’t like this much,” I said.
She took it for granted that it wasn’t discomfort I was complaining of. Yesterday’s superstition, today’s animal dependence — those I was grinding against.
“It won’t be long,” she said.
“Too long.”
Her voice sounded richer than when I could see her: she told me Mansel had reported that the operation had gone according to plan. It would have been easier if he could have done it earlier in the week (“obstinate devil,” I said, glad to be angry against someone). It had taken nearly three hours — “One’s playing with millimeters,” he had said, with a technician’s pride. He wouldn’t know whether it had worked or not for about four days.
“Four days.”
“Never mind,” she said.
“That’s easy to say.”
“There isn’t much I can say, is there?” she replied. “Oh, they’re all convinced you’re remarkably well. That’s rather a comfort, isn’t it?”
I didn’t respond.
“At least,” she said, “it is to me.”
Patiently she read to me out of the day’s papers. At last she had to leave me, in the dark.
Yet, though my eyes were shut and blindfold, it wasn’t the familiar dark. It wasn’t like being in a hotel room on a black night, thick curtains drawn. It was more oppressive than that. I seemed to be having a sustained hallucination, as though deep scarlet tapestries, colour glowing, texture embossed and patterned, were pressing on both my eyes. I had to get used to it, until the nightly drug put me to sleep, just as I had to get used to my thoughts.
Early next morning, time was still deranged; when I switched on the bedside radio it was silent. I heard Mansel’s greeting and felt skilled fingers taking off the bandages, unshielding the eye. Five minutes of light. The lens, the large eye peering, the aseptic “It looks all right so far”, the skilled fingers taking the light away again. A few minutes of his shop: it was a relief to get back into someone’s working life. What hours did he keep? Bed about 10.0, up at 5.30, first calls, like this one, between 6.0 and 7.0. Training like a billiards player, he couldn’t afford to take more than one drink a night: three operations that morning, two more after lunch. He enjoyed his job as much as Francis Getliffe enjoyed his: he was as clever with his hands. Nearly all his techniques were new. Thirty years ago, he told me, they couldn’t have done anything for me at all.
That was an interlude in the day. So was Margaret’s visit each afternoon, when she read to me. So was the radio news. Otherwise I lay there immobile, thinking, or not really thinking, so much as given over to a plasma of mental swirls, desires, apprehensions, resentments, sensual reveries, sometimes resolves. It wasn’t often that this plasma broke out into words: occasionally it did, but the mental swirl was nearer to a dream, or a set of dreams. Dreams in which what people called the “unconscious” lived side by side with the drafting of a letter. Once when I was making myself verbalise, I thought — as I had often done — that the idea of the unconscious as “deep” in our minds had done us harm. It was a bad model. It was just as bad a model as that of a “God out there”, out in space, beyond the clouds. We laughed at simple people and their high heavens, existing in our aboriginal three-dimensions: yet, when we turned our minds upon our own minds, we fell into precisely the same trap.
Thoughts swirled on. To anyone else, even to Margaret, I should have tried to make some sort of show of sarcasm. To myself, I hadn’t got the spirit. I didn’t like self-pity in myself or others. There were times, in those days, when I was doing nothing but pity myself. I had known that state before, ill and wretched, as a young man. I had more excuse then. This wasn’t enough excuse for one’s pride to break. Yet I couldn’t pretend.
Margaret asked if I wanted other visitors. None, I said, except her. That was an attempt at a gesture. Yes, I should have to see Charles March: as he was my doctor, I couldn’t keep him out. When he came in on the second morning, I told him, putting on an act, that it was absurd anything so trivial should be such a bore.
In his kind harsh voice (voices came at me out of the dark, some from nurses whom I had never seen) he replied: “I should find it intolerable, don’t you think I should?”
He was closer in sympathy than any of my friends, he could guess how I was handling my depression. As though casually, he set to work to support me by reminding me of the past. He had been thinking only the other day, he said — it gave him a certain malicious pleasure — of the way we had, in terms of money, exchanged places. When we first met, he had been a rich young man and I was penniless. Now he was living on a doctor’s income and I had become distinctly well-to-do.
“It would have seemed very curious, the first time you came to Bryanston Square, wouldn’t it?”
The irony was designed to provoke me. The voice went on: “You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“All those years ago, if you had been told what was going to happen to you, would you have compounded for it?”
“Would you have done, about yourself?”
“I wasn’t as insatiable as you, you know. In most ways, yes.”
I didn’t have to explicate that answer. He hadn’t chosen to compete. His marriage, like mine to Margaret, had been a good one. He had two daughters, but no son. He envied me mine. But he was trying to be therapeutic, he didn’t want to talk about himself.
“You had a formidable power in you when you were young, we all knew that. We were all certain you’d make your name. You can’t say you haven’t, can you? But it must have been surprising when it happened. I know some of it’s been painful, I couldn’t have taken what you’ve had to take. Still, that was what you were made for, wasn’t it?”
I heard the friendly smile, half-sardonic, half-approving.
“You didn’t find your own nature,” he was saying, “altogether easy to cope with, did you?”
“You know I didn’t.”
“You started out subtle and tricky as well as rapacious. You had to make yourself a better man. And the trouble with that sort of effort is that one loses as well as gains. We’re both more decent than we were at twenty, Lewis, but I’m sure we’re nothing like so much fun.”
At that I laughed. That was the primordial Charles March. He might have become more decent, but his tongue hadn’t lost its sadistic edge.
“Still, I’ve told you before,” he went on, “it’s impossible to regret one’s own experience, don’t you agree?”
“I used to agree with you. Which you thought entirely proper, of course.” Just for an instant I had caught the debating tone of our young manhood. Then I said: “But in this I’m beginning to wonder whether you are right.”
He was glad to have revived me a bit, to have led me into an argument: but he was taken aback that I had spoken with feeling, and that my spirits had sunk down again. Quickly he switched from that subject, although he stayed a long while, casting round for other ways of interesting me, before he left.
Claustrophobia was getting hold of me. It had been a nuisance always. The scarlet tapestries pressed upon my eyes, the pillows were built up so that I couldn’t move my head more than a few degrees.
Blindness would be like this. Did one still have such hallucinations? Was it the absolute dark? Of all the private miseries, that was one I was not sure I could endure. None of us knew his limits. Once, when young Charles was conceived, I thought it might be beyond my limit if the genes had gone wrong, if he were born to a suffering one could do nothing about.