It is a way of not making newly sober people, who may have achieved those first, literally miraculous, few un-drunk days, feel small. It is a way of not bullying.
Her next question quite baffled me. ‘Are you privatised?’ she asked.
I thought I could hear earrings. So, not a nurse, if allowed to wear tinkly jewellery at work.
‘I’m paying for this procedure. Do you mean that?’
‘No’, she replied, ‘I meant, are you married?’
I had never heard the expression.
I told her what I had told the nice young man with the wife from Edinburgh. Life was offering me exactly what was required, an opportunity to be plain and clear about what remained obscure — at any rate in words — to me.
‘Well, if you were a writer, you could write about it,’ she said.
I couldn’t engage with that. I was barely sure any more that I was anything, let alone a writer. I did the interviewee trick, and turned the tables.
‘Are you privatised?’ I asked. I wish now that I’d asked her where this odd term comes from. Can it make the husband feel nice, this microeconomic form of expression?
‘I,’ she announced, ‘am very happily privatised.’
She too has a terrific name. I will call her Theophania Droptangler.
The spirit of the woman, whose bright clothes I could hear and whose warmth was toasting me merrily through the anaesthetic and bandages and darkness, suggested there might be something well worth chasing on to the page. The next morning she was the first to come to me, at the sort of time my cat might have begun the day.
She was more than a chatty woman used to talking to zombies. In the intervals of her night watch, she had done a lot of background research.
‘So you weren’t bullshitting,’ she said. ‘You had it right you’re a writer.’
I said, ‘What?’
‘I found you. It was that unusual first name. We’re sitting ducks for stalkers, darling. And I’ve decided you can have seven sleepers to take away because I trust you.’
Useful being called Candia if it procures you sleep medication and binds you to other people with funny names.
I asked the nurses what this earring-loud lady looked like. I wanted to see if it matched my picture. She had told me her age, which was more than sixty. They confirmed all of it, sunshine colours usually reds, pinks, turquoise, lovely dark skin they said, henna through her hair, tiny like a bird, lots of kids, must be around fifty, looks about forty, and earrings like you would not find in a shop. Earrings in the shape of things, parrots on perches, ice creams in soda glasses with two straws, cactuses.
‘She’s exotic. Not like a doctor, more like a writer.’
The next stretch of time was like no other in my life. The closest I have come to it is V.S. Naipaul’s Enigma of Arrival, a book I have loved more on each rereading.
As I recall the book, it is an account of the writer’s time at a small house on an estate that had belonged to the Tennants, part of the set that included Ettie Desborough and the family who had lived at Clouds House, known to me for its architecture, its inhabitants the Souls, and its efficacy at drying me out. The estate was in fact Wilsford, to whose melancholy sale of contents Fram and I had been just after the death of its owner, Stephen Tennant, the lover of Siegfried Sassoon and later recluse, who dwelt alone indoors making bulgy drawings of matelots in many colours of biro, seldom leaving his bed and wearing powder and lipstick, in rooms upon which were drawn white satin curtains full of dust and in which vases of white ostrich plumes fussed up into the heavy air. Those impressions were gained from the sale and the house’s interior, the sad boxes of stuff that were having a harsh time of it in daylight, props as they were for a life of delectable tackiness and gimcrack fun, all, no doubt, in revolt against the stout Lowland virtues of solidity, bleach and no jokes, against which Tennants, beneficiaries of a chemical fortune, have for the last few generations so incandescently, sometimes chemically, rebelled.
The Enigma of Arrival, as I remember it, a recall of reading through blindness and forgetting, which seems in itself the sort of distancing such a monument to passing might rather enjoy having inspired, grows like moss upon the rapt reader, who perfectly enters its mood and is made part of it as he proceeds. Naipaul conveys the oldness of the landscape and the paths worn upon it, the ingrownness of the community and the dreams that make us who we are and what we might have hoped to have been. It is about hope and disappointment, dreams and death, and how worlds meet. It shows the absorptive power of the famously self-defining Naipaul. It is a great book. I can envisage its being read for many years beyond the time of our grandchildren because it is apparently clear yet it takes you into itself and shows you things there in the dimness for which you did not have words. It offers an England that isn’t ‘literary’. It’s geographical and spiritual. With words, it goes beyond words. Just as the artist is rare who can write drunkenness, the artist is rare who can describe our pre-verbal sensations and thoughts.
Not far from the hospital where my eyes were first cut, about forty minutes away maybe, stands an enormous house with a stony name, in woods famed for their many snowdrops.
What follows is not to do with the actual lineaments of anything that happened. My eyes could not see, I could barely walk, I was alone for long periods. The spring of 2009 was held in the grip of the most sudden and extreme snowfall in Britain since 1964.
The prevailing colour of my time up there is a white that fluctuates between being the blurry edges of my stitched-up eyes, with long filaments or tresses of light, the white of the snow-laden sky pressing down on the snow-covered earth, the fallen white of snowdrops beginning over one weekend to make shivery pools under black trees, the white stillness of the frozen lake, and the long white bath which I could not make hot, mainly because I was too passive to mention that the water ran at a heat that met the cold air without steaming. The big house was beyond the garden of the large Georgian vicarage that I had rented in a fantasy of recuperative entertaining and a mistaken certainty that I needed to be near the hospital. I believe that I was in this commodious house for six weeks. It was not unusual in me that I felt like an interloper. This was made worse because I was bed-bound, so couldn’t fall into my usual pattern of cooking and cleaning in order to feel less guilty. I had to lie still. I couldn’t afford this sojourn in any sense.
My eyes were prickly with big stitches of black thread holding them together. I was told the thread would melt and it did. My face was all bruise which became it rather if you forgot that it had been a face. It looked like those potatoes that are blue all through with a thin skin.
I had brought with me a Dictaphone, with an idea of dictating a novel into twenty-four one-hour-long tapes as small as eyeshadow pans. At first, I ignored it and then I realised that I must make a routine or I would…I don’t know what.
And that’s it. I don’t know why it was as it was. I felt as though I had fallen through time and into the lives of other people who did not know me. I felt as though I were being kept on ice to be unfrozen and eaten later.
I was melting through the money my house had fetched.
The vicarage had seen unhappiness, perhaps, but what house has not? I had no telephone reception, but that is not unusual in my life. I have quite little here on Colonsay.
I was clean, warm, and cared for with more than kindness by a man of unimpeachable cooking and organisational skills, with elegant grooming and a perfect memory for tractor models and railway time-tables. These last composed much of our conversation as he took me through the snowbound village, re-teaching me how to walk with the patience of a mother. He had worked on the railways and then his smouldering good looks had brought him to the attention of the local squire, and a golden age of triangular emotional tolerance had commenced in the stone pile by the lake, a golden age that had come to a close only with the passing of the squire, lamented, celebrated and beloved right through from Eton, where he had Wilfred Thesiger as his fagmaster, the Army, the war, and the long reign as squire, with his fond family and attachments around him up to his fairly recent death, which was crowned with posthumous literary plaudits and rich memory.