BACK in the flat, with Charles returned to school, I lay on the sofa, not talking much. Now at last I was beginning to feel it. Margaret, unself-regarding, gave me books that might snag my attention and brought in trays when I didn’t want to sit down to meals.
It went on like that for three days. On the morning after I left hospital, Mansel came in and took off the bandages, saying that the operation cut had healed. He also said that I should probably be more visually comfortable if I went on wearing a patch over the eye.
So I lay about in the drawing-room during those days, not able to rouse myself. Occasionally I inched up the patch for an instant, shutting the good eye, puzzled by the impact of light and what I did or did not see.
Exactly four days after Mansel had stood over my hospital bed and clipped out the verdict, I woke. It was half past seven. Out of habit I looked towards the chink of light between the curtains. I had taken off the patch when I went to bed. I closed the good eye and with the left eye open stared towards the chink. I dropped the eyelid, looked again. I did that several times, as if performing an exercise or doing an optical experiment. Then I got up, as I had nearly a fortnight before, pulled one of the curtains aside, shut my good eye again, and looked. Just as I had done nearly a fortnight before, I went back to bed. This time, I didn’t disturb Margaret, but waited for her to wake. At last she did so. Even then I did not speak at once, but waited until she was alert.
I said: “Something odd has happened.”
“What is it now?” Her voice was quick and anxious.
“No, nothing bad.” I went on carefully, as though my words might be quoted or as though I were touching wood: “The eye seems to have cleared itself up. At least, there doesn’t seem to be any black veil this morning.”
She cried out: “What can you see?”
“I can see a bit. Not very well. But anyway I do seem to have a full field of vision.”
It might be temporary, I warned her, trying to warn myself. In fact, for a couple of days past, I had been wondering each time when I squinted past the patch, where the black edge had gone to. Just for the moment, the eye appeared to be behaving something as Mansel had promised me it would, if the operation worked. I could see the shape of the room, Margaret’s face, I could make out the letters in the masthead of The Times, nothing else. Above all, there was no blackness pressing in. That made me hopeful, unrealistically in relation to what the eye could do.
“It would be better than nothing.” Again I was choosing the words.
Margaret also was trying to be cautious. Action was neutral, action didn’t mean false hope: the best thing she could do was telephone Mansel. He could come at half past one, she reported. Margaret and I talked the morning away, waiting until he arrived, spotless as David Rubin, always busy, never in a hurry, sacrificing the solitary sandwich and the half-hour off in his obsessive day.
Lying flat, I assisted (in the French sense) in the familiar routine. The lens, the scrutinising eye. It went on longer than usual, longer than the morning of decision four days before.
“Well, I’m damned,” said Mansel. He broke out: “Look, I am glad! You’re quite right. The retina has got itself back somehow.”
He had spoken simply, like one who was enjoying someone else’s good luck. Then he became professional once more, professional with a problem on his mind.
“You haven’t got much to thank me for. I think you ought to understand that. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. By all the rules that retina ought to be floating about. But there’s a great deal we don’t understand in this business. We’re really only at the beginning. It’s a great deal more hit-and-miss than it ought to be. I hope it will be a bit more scientific before I’ve finished.”
He was preoccupied with the problem, absent-minded as he gave me instructions. Inspections. This might be a fluke, he had better see me within the week. Premonitory symptoms, flashes of light before going to sleep: I must see him at once. His mind still absent upon the physics of the retina, he told me to avoid any risk of knocks on the head — such as in boxing or association football. I said mildly that those risks weren’t in my case so very serious. Mansel had the grace to give a sheepish youthful grin.
“You must think I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. He said it with the detachment of a man who knew that he was a master of his job: and who assumed that I knew it too.
After he had departed, Margaret burst out crying. Her nerves were strong when we were in trouble. Trouble over, she was left with the aftermath. Comforting her, I didn’t feel any aftermath at all. This had been an arrest of life. It was already over. I went for a walk in the park that afternoon, looking with mescalin-sharp pleasure (sometimes shutting my good eye) at the autumn grass. I felt full of energy, eager to escape from the solipsistic bubble in which I had been immersed for those last days. Life goes on, young Charles had told me consolingly after we paid that visit to my father. Had he ever heard of an arrest of life? When would he know one? Anyway, it was time to get back into the flow.
Though I didn’t often write in the evening, I put in a couple of hours’ work before dinner. Later, I was busy with the letters that had stayed unread. Often I became irked by claims upon my time, other people’s dilemmas: not that night. I was back with them again.
As I read, I called out the news to Margaret. Nothing to vex either of us, as it happened. Just the balm of getting back into good nick, as Martin and the other games players used to say. A note from Maurice’s tutor — no, nothing worrying, in fact he seemed to be doing a little better. W— (the tutor) would like a chat about future plans for him, just that. Margaret wasn’t listening to any arrangements of W—’s: she was suffused with a tender, unprotected, abjectly-loving smile. At the most vestigial suggestion of good news — practical good news — about Maurice, she blushed as she did when she was first in love. How did one become a favourite child? Why had I, not Martin, been my own mother’s? Margaret loved young Charles because he was himself and because he was mine. But she took his academic skill for granted, just as she did her own. She could judge his ability with detachment. After all, she came from a family of professionals, where, when one got a first, someone like her father or one of his brothers came up and said, Well, it’s nice for you to know you’re not altogether a fool. Maurice she loved, though, with all her tenacious passion. She loved him in a light of his own. She responded like the simplest mother who had scarcely heard of universities and who was bedazzled to find her child was there. If Maurice could struggle through to any kind of degree she would be so proud.
Yes, of course I would see W—, I was saying. But I wasn’t prepared to go out of London yet awhile. After the past fortnight, I needed to get back into my own particular nick. Four hours’ work from 10 a.m. each morning, no lunch anywhere. Then I was at anyone’s disposal for the rest of the day. W— could call the next time he was in London.
Margaret blushed again. When I took the most prosaic administrative step on Maurice’s behalf, she was over-grateful. She asked if I had got through my pile of letters, and then produced another from her bag. “This is from Vicky,” she said. “I wasn’t to trouble you with it unless you were quite well.”
She went on: “She rang up this afternoon. When you were out on your walk. She’s been ringing up every day.”
As she handed me the letter, she said: “If you’d been free, you know, that girl would have fallen for you.”
“No,” I said, “for once you’re wrong.”
“I’m not jealous.”
“No, you’re not jealous, but you’re wrong.”
Margaret was happy, affectionate and obstinate. In snatches as I went through the letter, I persisted: I should have been the first to know. What Vicky needed was not someone to love (we had seen her taste), but a father to talk to. If a young woman had Arnold Shaw as a father, it wasn’t entirely unnatural that she should need to talk to someone else.