These are the last redoubts where a man could feel himself master. It is a sort of play, though it could not be further from the drawing room. It is a way of addressing otherness by not having to read or talk about it, while draining off animal spirits through considerable physical exertion. The pioneer character favours natural beauty over the created kind.
The demands made by beauty upon this house are visible through its windows and from its several balconies. All the beauty asks is that one absorb the light, which is changing all the time, dim and pearly yet full of sharp attentive spills that fall on the mountains, showing up here a grey rock, here a white church, or on the water, reaching down into it to show a lake trout hanging there in a column of revealed green, or to catch a dragonfly clipped in the air for its moment, the same size, apparently, as a single scull lying on the water moving with the smooth unbroken rhythm that looks like stillness.
In 1910 the villa was burgled. Finding it empty, the thief spent the night. He left a note, ‘Cantate anche per me’ (‘Pray for me, too’).
The older children have come from their work for the weekend. There is so much to see just now that I am staying at home at the villa. Everyone goes out in the boat to look at things. I stay at home and see things. I’ve lots of work and am still lame over distances and bad at stairs. The pearls I wear always, that Quentin gave me twenty-seven years ago and that need restringing every year or so on knotted cotton, now have the sort of fastening that is made for blind pearl-wearers, a magnetic clasp. It collects safety pins and paperclips while I sleep.
I work here for ten or so hours a day and meet the family at mealtimes and when they visit my balcony. I go rather slowly in order not to choke on my new experience of sight. It is hard to ration sight, but I am trying; I cannot yet avoid the superstitious sense that the consequence of seeing too much will be again to have my credit of sight-time withdrawn.
This July after my second operation, Fram discovered, after a lot of enquiries and effort, a priest who was also a psychiatrist whom I made an appointment to go and see. There had been some suggestion that I might start taking lithium for anxiety. Lithium is a drug whose reputation is at present enjoying a degree of rehabilitation after being thought of as quite controversial. A helpful doctor friend had identified what she called an ingrained habit of what she called ‘depersonalisation’ in me; she was right, if it means, as I think it does, a coping system of saying to oneself that nothing bad matters if it’s happening to oneself. Or, that nothing matters, since it’s happening to oneself.
She also told me that she believed more strongly every day that one never knows what is going on inside other people. It’s a sense upon which my life has been built, and which is a premise of, or a challenge to, much interesting fiction, but you seldom hear a doctor say it. Isn’t that odd?
I was willing to do almost anything to find some sort of dry land to rest on.
Most days, I walked to the chemist’s to buy new dressings and show my wound to the pharmacist. I put a gauze dressing on and then a creamy elastic long bandage that I wound round and round my thick right leg and pinned with little toothed clasps. My legs were thicker than ever, thick as waists at the knee, spongy and blue-red. Fram worried that the wound wasn’t healing and badgered me to do something more assertive. I didn’t.
The stitches were taken out of my leg. The scar was wet and about five inches long. The stitches had been neat. The stitches in my face came out in Nottingham, ten days after the operation, on 11 July. Fram took me. He and Mr Foss seemed to like each other; they were intrigued by one another’s take and speed. They had that never-questioned high-functioning intelligence in common. I turn dozy in such company but it’s the sort I like. I’m not bored; I’m listening. It’s like listening to music, not eavesdropping.
On 17 July, I went to Nottingham alone, a treat. I was already going blind again. Mr Foss had warned of this. He said that after the second operation there is often a honeymoon of twenty-four hours when the patient feels as though everything has righted itself. This honeymoon, he warned me, is misleading. I visited Mr Foss to have the first go of Botox injections which I will now have every three months for the rest of my life, if I want to see.
‘If’ I want to see? Do some people actually decide that they want to remain in the dark? Apparently, the answer to this, in any intelligent terms, is yes. We’ll come to that.
Mr Foss gave me four injections at specific points around each eye, eight featherlight poison darts in all. Any comparison with fencing is perfectly apt. He handles a syringe more lightly, more precisely, than anyone who has so far injected my eyes. Some people hurt. In their hands the needle feels wide and thick, unconfident. He was, as he always is, quick. He gave me the tiny jar of poison to take away, in case I needed topping up.
My deadly poison is still in Fram and Claudia’s freezer. How like a fairy tale. The poison that makes me see is in the coldest part of their warm home.
Minoo and I went to Edinburgh for the Book Festival for ten days. Every other day, I visited a surgery, to see about my leg, which had not healed properly, and which had put me back in the hospital for a time in Oxford. The flat we had rented was up many stone stairs.
Everything got better in Edinburgh. I was surprised by what happened to me at the Book Festival. I had felt I was there as a visitor, more than an author. Then someone got hold of the human story, the story that makes out of my whole recent experience something soppy; the ‘I once was blind, but now can see’. Which is far too simple and not true, so it will probably be what is remembered.
I hope not, though.
It is a human story. It is also a story about words. If I hadn’t been asked to write about going functionally blind for the Scottish Review of Books, The Times would not have reprinted the piece. Marion Bailey would not have read the piece nor so generously got in touch with me and told me about Mr Foss. I owe my present new-made sight to many, but directly to the Scottish Review of Books, The Times, John and Marion Bailey, and Alexander Foss.
The fight inside my head will not disappear, but the curtains may be lifted so that it may look outwards from its internal drama.
In there in my brain, decisions have been taken to shut my eyes down, taking much else with them.
Out there in the world, someone was imaginative enough to know what it might be like to be able to see and not to be able to see, and clever and knowledgeable and courageous enough to know that it might be done, and how.
Now it was the paper that owns the Scottish Review of Books that broke my little story. A few others went with it. The general tone was ‘Triumph over Tragedy’. Not so, of course. One interviewer, from The Times, asked very shrewd questions. In each case he hit the spot. He asked, ‘But has your condition gone or is it just held off?’ And he asked, ‘What has happened to your idea of yourself?’
My condition, or ‘the’ condition, so that it knows I’m not hugging it possessively to me, hasn’t gone. It is held off. That must be good enough for me. It fights back day and night and I feel it punching from within my head. I have a sore head and tense eyes most of the time. But I am not shut in in the dark alone as I was.
You, having read this book, will have some idea of the answer to the second question. I worry that I will look ugly in my children’s wedding pictures. I do look peculiar. I often don’t recognise myself. I realise that I did rely, to an extent I did not understand, on how I looked. But I never knew that I was, sometimes, beautiful. I didn’t feel it. Sometimes I see it now, in a photograph, and I think, ‘You fool, you didn’t do it right at all. When you looked like that, you felt as though you looked like this. You had it coming to you.’