There is pleasure, and I really doubted that there would be, in relistening, just as there is delight in rereading. It is a very different pleasure, and one of which I might not have, in the purist old days, approved. I have always deprecated the habit of reading simply for plot, for the solving of the puzzle. It is the texture of the text, the touch of the writer’s thinking upon my own thought, the intimacy of interinanimation that I loved and that had accompanied me all my conscious life.
I confess I haven’t had even one jolt of this quality of delight since becoming a listener, though there have been many moments when I clumsily tried to stop the machine there — just there—and catch the words again, in order to make, as I’m afraid I would have done before, a note in the margin, or on a bit of paper. I find these notes now next to my bed where I do most of my listening, but of course I can’t read them; it’s like darning a black sock trying to read my writing now. The sort of reading that I used to love, reading several books simultaneously, is not now possible. I used to do it when I felt a novel brewing, that time when the unconscious is bulging, sticky and collecting with a view to its unknown quarry; in those conditions the strangest books forged relationships with one another and something new would be born. Books, even alone in a room, have that quality; they breathe; they can even, somehow, parthenogenetically, reproduce.
Somehow? I know perfectly well how in my case. I buy them. It’s silly and I buy fewer than I did when I read or when I had some idea that I could or would read them, but I buy them to have them handy by me, to have their breath in my air, their breathing mixing with my own. I miss them.
Just how hard this is to express came home to me only yesterday when, after Liv’s first morning typing for me, a young friend of my daughter’s visited. He had told me last week that he was going to spend the bank holiday weekend, among other, ice-creamier things, reading Timon of Athens in order to ready himself to read A.D. Nuttall’s Shakespeare the Thinker on Timon. Never would I have thought that the intensest pleasure of my fifty-third year would be brought by being read aloud to from this generous, precise, thrilling book. It is the most intimate experience of my year so far and that intimacy was with the text and the ideas within the text and the modesty, breadth and quiddity of an, alas now posthumous, scholarly voice.
So far, in my experience, this hasn’t happened with talking books, but they are marvellous things nonetheless. I have the addict’s tooth-grinding shakes when I’m running out of talking books. I know that I can turn to Proust again, but I like to have a fresh stash hidden somewhere about the place. There are, for example, three box-fresh sets of CDs (Plutarch’s Lives, Aristotle and A Guide to Ancient Greek Philosophy) hidden in this room, and every room in the flat has a similar hoard. It is exactly like keeping vodka in your steam iron. Any alcoholic, set the task of finding my hidden tapes and CDs, ‘just for emergencies’, you understand, would be through with the hunt in five minutes, easy as finding a bottle in a gumboot.
The medical term used for my type of blindness is ‘functional’. The topsy-turvy logic of this is that I function hardly at all and can do very little for myself. I carry a fold-up-able white stick when I leave the house, which is seldom, and then mainly to visit doctors. You buy these white sticks from a website set up by the RNIB where all sorts of gadgets may be found, including talking microwaves. I’ve been fighting off microwaves since first they began and people started saying things like, ‘You can reheat your nasty cold coffee.’ I really don’t want a chatty microwave, but of course I see the point.
It is a new world and I’d best take it as the adventure it is, generously, as though it were a gift. It is in a way a new way of seeing, not to see.
Here I must advert to, and then we can each forget, or absorb, the saturation of our language with metaphors to do with sight.
One of the unlooked-for benefits of this functional blindness was that I simply gave up cooking as too extreme a sport; sadly, the new lot of drugs they are trying on me have made of the new, thinner, me the old, fatter, me.
Functional blindness is not a pest merely for its possessors. The state and its bureaucracy don’t much like it either, and in the past eighteen months I have spent much time with well-meaning personages assessing such grey areas as my ‘toileting ability’.
As things stand, I was advised by the state that I must apply for a Disability Living Allowance, since without this I cannot register as blind which I must do before I can be considered for a guide dog. This allowance has just skyrocketed 65 pence per week. But my short career as a benefits scrounger will, as far as I can see, be terminated at the next Budget, when, if New Labour are still in, I shall be reassessed and, putatively, retrained to do a job more suited to my capacity or rather, as they say, ‘ability’, meaning the opposite.
Back to that word ‘functional’. Perhaps it is my Scottishness, but I can’t see a way of writing this book without wanting it to be of some use. The privilege, as I understood it, of being a novelist was to touch the imagination of others with one’s own and to establish a contact more real than many other forms of encounter. It was my task, I thought, to convey the truth of what it is to be alive, to feel, and to think, to catch both differentness and connection in narratives that shed light on the secret human heart. So, perhaps, this exercise that intimidates me, on account of its going so deeply against my grain, may touch your synapses with my own as I give some account of what it has been to have lived, to have felt and to have thought within my head before and since it closed down its main route to, and means of, interpreting the world, my eyes.
I shall affix this spoken earpiece to the coming, first, dark lens of my account that follows. I wrote it before I knew how blind I was to become. After the central chapter named ‘Bridge’, the words are again spoken not written with that last stub of sight I had.
But first a few compass bearings:
I have three children each with a different last name.
I have been married twice.
In one sense I still am.
My children have two fathers.
My name is Candia. It is not Candida. When I meet people, they often say, ‘Don’t you mean Candida?’ not even, ‘Do you mean Candida?’ My nickname, which is complicated for reasons that will become clear, is Claude. My name is not Claudia. It is Candia. Greek, not Latin.
I have called five people Mum, Mummy or Mama.
The Partition of India and Pakistan in 1947 contributed much to the splitting of my second marriage.
My second husband, Fram, lives with someone else.
Her name is Claudia.
Fram and Claudia live together with her twins, whom I love, and their father, Toby Buxton.
I love my two husbands’ two partners.
Among the words that make me most frustrated are ‘Candia McWilliam’s swallowed the dictionary’. I heard them first in the sandpit, where I had just said ‘avocado’. I was three. It strikes me now that the accuser must have done some pretty heavy swallowing too. The sneers recurred a lot in reviews of my stuff; what annoyed me was the implication that women had better stay within lexical limits.