I shouldn’t be able to read with my left eye. That was practical. If this could happen to one eye, it could happen to the other. Peripheral vision (Mansel’s voice). Useful vision. A great deal of my life was lived through the eye. How could I get on without reading? Records, people reading to me. It would be gritty. How could I write? I should have to learn to dictate. It would be like learning a new language. Still.
The machine wearing out (Rubin’s voice). People talked about getting old. Did anyone believe it? Ageing men went in for rhetorical flourishes: but were they real? One didn’t live in terms of history, but in existential moments. One woke up as one had done thirty years before. Certainly that was true of me. Men were luckier than women. There was nothing brutal to remind one of time’s arrow. Perhaps men like Rubin, physicists, mathematicians, remembered they had had great concepts in their youth: never again, the power had gone. I had seen athletes in their thirties, finished, talking like old men and meaning it. But for me, day by day, existence hadn’t altered. Memory faltered a little: sometimes I forgot a name. The machine wearing out.
As I pushed one fact away, another swam in. Living in public. Attacks. That year’s attack, people saying that I had stolen other men’s writing. They could have accused me of many things, but, as I had told George Passant, not of that. That I couldn’t have done. You had to make yourself a better man (Charles March’s voice). Yes, but even when I was as he first knew me, when I was “tricky and rapacious”, that I could never have done. Not out of virtue, but out of temperament. It was one of my deficiencies — and sometimes a strength — that I had to stay indifferent to what I didn’t know at first-hand. Yet the accusation hurt. It seemed to hurt more than if it had been true.
In the red-dark: motionless: there came — for instants among the depression or the anger — a sense of freedom. This was as low as I had gone. There was a kind of exhilaration, which I had known just once before in my life, of being at the extreme.
Then the vacuum in my mind began to fill itself again.
Early in the fifth morning, Mansel’s greeting. The clever fingers: the reprieve of light. The lens, the large eye. He was taking longer than usual, examining from above, below, and the right.
Crisply he said: “I’m sorry, sir. We’ve failed. The retina hasn’t stuck.”
It was utterly unanticipated, I had prepared myself for a good deal, not for this. At the same time it sounded — as other announcements of ill-luck had sounded — like news I had known for a long time.
“Well,” I said, “this is remarkably tiresome.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” said Mansel. He spoke in bad temper, blaming himself and me, just as I heard scientists taking it out of their lab assistant after an experiment had gone wrong. He was recalculating. There was an element of chance in these operations. There was an element of human error. He couldn’t trace the fault.
“Anyway, inquests are useless,” he said snappily. He became a doctor, a good doctor, again.
“There’s no reason why you should be uncomfortable any longer,” he said, taking the cover off my good eye. We shall have to look after that one, he remarked, in reassurance. It would have to be inspected regularly, of course. He would ring up my wife, so that she could take me home. I should feel better there. It would do me good to have a drink as soon as I arrived.
“What will happen to this?” I pointed a finger towards the left eye.
“For the present, it will probably be rather like it was before we operated. Then, if we did nothing further — I shall have to talk to you about that, you understand, but not just now — if we did nothing further, it would gradually die on you. That might take some time.”
After he had gone, I sat up in bed and drank a cup of tea. Lying flat, I had been scarcely able to eat a sandwich, and I was hungry. Obviously Mansel wanted to try another operation. It was dark to face the thought of going through all that again. Just to get some minor vision. A little sight was better than no sight. The bad eye would die on me. That might be the right choice. He was a strong-willed man, he wouldn’t have me let it go without a conflict. In my way I was stubborn too. I had to make my own forecasts.
Yet, in the middle of indecision, I got an animal pleasure out of being in the light. My left eye Mansel had bound up again, but the other was free. It was good to see the roofs outside, and a nurse’s face. She had spoken to me each morning, and now I saw her. If I had met her in the street, I should have thought she looked sensible enough, with the map of Ireland written on her. But now her face stood out, embossed, as though I had not seen a face before.
It was she who told me that I had a visitor. I looked at my watch. Still not ten o’clock. I thought Margaret had been in a hurry. But the nurse held the door open, not for her, but for young Charles.
“How are you?” I asked mechanically.
“No, how are you?” he said.
I asked if he had seen Margaret. I was hoping that she had broken the news to him. No, he had come straight from schooclass="underline" he had begged the morning off to visit me.
He sat by the bedside, watching me. I saw his skin, fresh from an adolescent shave. I had to come out with it. I said, more curtly than I intended: “It hasn’t worked.”
His face went stern with trouble.
“What does that mean?”
I answered direct: “I think it means that I shall go blind in that eye. But you’re not to worry—”
“Good God, why aren’t I to worry? What’s your sight going to be—”
I interrupted, and began to talk as reassuringly as Mansel. The good eye was perfectly sound. One could do anything, including play games, with one eye. Nature was sensible to give us two of everything. “We’ve got to take reasonable precautions, obviously, “I went on. “Mansel will have to check that eye, we shall lay on a routine—”
“How often?”
“Once a month, perhaps—”
“Once a week,” said Charles fiercely. I had never seen him so moved on my behalf.
I tried to distract him. Going back to one of the reflections that rankled when I lay in the dark (going back and deliberately domesticating it), I produced the kind of question that normally made him grin. Being accused of something which is untrue — one feels a sense of moral outrage. But being accused of something which is dead true — one also feels a sense of moral outrage. Which is the stronger? I told him a story of Roy Calvert and me, travelling with false passports in the war, masquerading as members of the International Red Cross — and being accused by French officials at the airport of being frauds. Just as in fact we were. I had never felt more affronted in my life, more morally wronged.
Charles gave a faint absent smile, and then his face became stern again. I had a suspicion that he was hiding some trouble of his own. Love, perhaps — or equally possible, some essay that in his professional fashion he thought had been undermarked. In any case, he would have kept his own secrets: but that morning he wanted to conceal the expression on his face. Could he take me home? It was foolish to bring Margaret all this way. He would ring her up while I dressed.
Soon he was leading me through the corridors — the hospital smell threatening, the walls echoing and gaunt. He was supporting me, unnecessarily, on his arm, as he led me through the corridors down to the waiting taxi.
15: Suave Mari Magno