Leander and Rachel were wretched. They had a haunted sense that if he had stayed with me he would have been alive. If he’d stayed with me, though, he wouldn’t have had such a life, with companions, butterfly-attracting plants put in at his request, and fresh fish. He would not have had his summer of being Warburton and exploring the uncatty group ethic he enjoyed. He was a team player; an unusual characteristic in a cat.
After Ormy was buried, Minoo went round to the house in Oxford. He prefers his cats disdainful, sardonic and free, but he ate an entire lemon drizzle cake in memory of Ormy and reported the handsome location of my people-pleasing cat’s remains.
Something of Ormy’s appeal for me was that slight dogginess. He was in on the joke and played up to it, sometimes allowing himself to retrieve a ball if we were alone and unobserved.
He was funny, and you laugh aloud less often if you live on your own and don’t really read. I didn’t think I would ever say that about myself. It’s always been a sentence that puzzled me: ‘I don’t really read.’ I see it now. It means, ‘I read what I have to, like instructions on dangerous machinery or in lifts.’
My first blind summer, two friends, married to one another, had sat with me at Tite Street. They’d brought a rhubarb tart with crème patissière. He had glancingly said that he had counselled a mutual friend not to buy a puppy as it would be just another thing to grow fond of and eventually to lose. Rita the blue cat had fallen in love with him.
Now, a year and a half on, he, I and Rita remained above the earth. Ormiston had been an inch of air, a pinch of fluff. My friend’s wife had been his response and crown of life. Who can plumb her loss? Nothing took her away. Nothing had her. Nothing had its victory. Nothing endures.
I now missed the foolish flat face of my cat up against my neck, telling me that it was time to get up at five-thirty in the morning. Even though he had been doing it in another house, with other people, I had known he was on earth and cared for. What comic strands have emerged throughout these years of eye-time (well? There is much talk of me-time). Ormy had been a guileless occasion of laughter.
Others went some way to providing other forms of diversion. Some have to be buried for discretion, or transmuted.
My favourite fun theme has been the silent wager I make with myself about the literary ambitions of the medically distinguished, and of quacks, too, now that I think about it.
It’s my limited understanding that I have been visiting doctors so regularly for thirty-six months because I am decreasingly able to see. With my eyes, that is. My, admittedly subjective, sense has been that reading, by which I not only made to some extent my living, and by which I live, has become difficult. I’ll put it simply. Very often I can’t see. I’m blind.
You will be aware of this. You are a reader.
However, not invariably, but often enough to give reality a firm shake, a doctor will say to me as I leave his consulting rooms, very possibly having written a cheque (is that where I go wrong? They see that I can write, after all?), ‘Ah, Mrs Dinshaw, Candia, did you say you were a writer? Books, is that?’
A bit. Once. Things a bit challenging at present. My eyes, you see. Cranking the odd thing out for friends. Scottish literary papers. Things like that (thinking, ‘That’ll put him off. Surely he will realise that it’s a polite rebuttal of what he doesn’t know I know he’s going to say?’)
Women practitioners are as liable to do this as men. Let me be fair.
‘Ah yes. I must ask my wife to look you up. I don’t get much time to read. Other than for work. Papers, you know.’
Indeed so.
‘But you meet all sorts doing this job. It’s taken me all over the world. Some pretty amazing places. You wouldn’t believe. And I’ve often thought.’
If you had the time.
‘If I had a moment, that it would make a book. An interesting one.’
Not a novel, then.
‘I often think that real life reaches places, well, you won’t mind my saying this, but truth is, it’s not just a cliché, stranger than fiction. And you don’t make anything up. It’s all true.’
This is getting in deep. Ask it, do.
‘Would you know of who I should talk to about getting it published?’
And then, a little carried away by the different glories attendant upon the idea of being a writer as well as a doctor, ‘Would you mind having a look at it for me? I’ve actually had time to get something down. It’s typed, you know. No doctor’s writing!’
I am really interested by doctors. I wanted to be one. My mother and I, retrospect tells me, both go, or went, for tall men in old-fashioned clothes and good overcoats, which was, in Edinburgh terms in her young womanhood, doctors. We visited a doctor with pinstriped long legs and a watch chain quite a lot. I sat on his knee and he gave me boiled sweets from a jar with no top. His height and expertise and silver hair imprinted me for life with one way of being a glamorous man. I’ve no idea who prescribed her sleepers.
I would happily write about doctors in fiction. Or write fiction about doctors, or help a doctor friend write a paper. I might easily ghost a doctor’s memoir, should he want me to, were he to find my sight. A fair swap, words for seeing?
I except from all this my GP, whose understanding, he has self-deprecatingly said to me, falls short of words. It doesn’t. It goes beneath them and into music. His kind of doctoring has that human affinity that used to be called compassion.
As well as the doctor-autobiographers to whom I felt I couldn’t at that time give the assistance required, there was new and much more interesting comedy in the form of the surgeon who has come to the salvation of blepharospastics with his two-part operation. When people keep saying to you, ‘Of course, he is brilliant’, you know that you are going to be handed a sharp spray of human traits.
His name is Alexander Foss. I heard of him because a fellow sufferer from blepharospasm, Marion Bailey, had written to me after reading a piece that The Times reprinted from The Scottish Review of Books that I wrote about being blind and not blind. She and her husband have become as godparents to my eyes; they are the chief kind strangers in our family’s recent history. Alexander Foss gave Marion back her sight. She understands exactly the trap and paradox of the maddening condition that is blepharospasm. Her courage and generosity have kept me upright. She wrote to me, enclosing photographs, about the operations with which Alexander Foss had given her back her sight.
John and Marion Bailey came to meet Olly and me. Her story was my own, baffling, alarming, frustrating, frightening, intractable. But she had found some kind of redress, and now, if she husbanded it attentively, had a good measure of sight. We decided to follow her generous example. Words, their publication, and their being read, passed sight through the hands of Alexander Foss from Marion Bailey’s eyes to my own. How can I thank them all enough?
Annabel and I had made an appointment to meet Mr Foss in the Midlands, where he practises, before Christmas. We drove up in December snow, late one Monday. Our treat was a boutique hotel in Nottingham. I had a disabled room with a red cord to tug in case of falling. I was in a pneumatic boot by this time, and as ever used my white stick, not to feel my way, but to tell people not to be upset if I crashed into things, and that I was best avoided. The plumbing and electricity in the hotel were of that unexplained hidden kind that only those born to mobile phones can operate without fiddling and splash. The comfort was practical, the welcome warm.
Mr Foss works within swifter time passages than the rest of the race. His supreme charm as a doctor is that he does no prologue, no soothing, no explanation, no awful chat. I could tell at once that he was a surgeon, tout court, pure brain and action. We arrived, we asked questions from our careful list, then we were out. We tried in the coming weeks to work out what this acute man had said. We had fun thinking of things that he would be least likely to say. These included: