Night Without Stars

by Winston Graham

  “You’re too intelligent to be conceited over most things.”

  Hugh said. “But that’s a form of conceit, you know. Or pride anyway. The I, I, cannot bend. Not as other mortals. That’s why Giles feels his loss of sight so much.”

  I said: “You’ll make us both pharisees in a minute.” It was strange to feel common cause with Caroline.

  “In the normal way” she said, “ I’ve very little faith in doctors. They’d be an anachronism in a society which lived the right sort of life and lived on the right sort of food. Except, of course, in this sort of case. Giles is blinded. If the knife can help him I’d say he should try it just this once more.”

  I hadn’t told them about the McWheeler job. Now I said: “I’ve decided to go abroad again in any case. Halliday thinks he can get permission.”

  “Have you ever tried to take up Braille?”

  “No.”

  “It’s a mistake not to, I think, Giles. It helps one to keep up with things. There was a man sitting next to me at the lecture when I fractured my leg. He was taking notes in Braille. It’s done, I think, by puncturing paper somehow. Makes a clicking sound. But I’m sure it does help. You should try it. Because it would be a new interest to keep up if the operation turned out disappointing.”

  I saw that she perceived the issues more clearly than I’d been giving her credit for.

  “I’ll wait another couple of weeks. There’ll be plenty of time to begin that—afterwards.”

  That night I faced up to the reasons for still hesitating about Coulson, and now the thing came fairly clear. It wasn’t the operation which stood in the way. What I was afraid of was failure. Since that first day with Alix, I’d grown more or less reconciled. Her company had done it. Even when she disappeared the old feeling hadn’t quite come back. But Halliday and Coulson had put forward a new hope, however thin. Once let me accept it as a possibility—and going for the operation meant accepting it—then any failure would be the end.You can’t go on offering the same carrot to the same donkey.

  I looked all round it that night and thought: Already it’s taking you all your time not to get excited about it, not to start thinking what it would be like to see again, to go back perhaps to Nice, to know what Alix really looks like, to find out the truth about Pierre.… But above all to see Alix and discover whether your feeling for her is solid or sham. Coulson and Halliday have put the seed there whether you want it or not; it’s there now stirring and sprouting. Caroline saw that this evening. That’s what she was trying to guard against.

  Perhaps there never was really any choice. Perhaps it was only fallacy to sit back and think I could do this or that. From the minute Halliday said, see Coulson, a movement inside me had begun, and without fail it would lead to the hospital and the knife.

  It was all very well to say I’d very little to lose. In a sense I had my eyesight to lose over again.

  The next morning I phoned Coulson and made an appointment to go into the ophthalmic wing at the Vauxhall on the following Monday week.

  Chapter 4

  They gave me a little room facing south in the same corridor as the general ward, but separated from it by the matron’s room. On the Tuesday morning the sun fell across my bed, crept up to my hands, but by the time Coulson arrived clouds had blown up and the day seemed chilly again.

  Or perhaps it was just his manner. I always think, however hard they try to be cheerful and kind, there’s a faintly sinister air about the surgeon and the nurses when there’s an operation in prospect. One gets a ha-ha-but-no-nonsense impression, as if they once had to deal with a hysterical child and have never quite forgotten it. Or maybe it’s just the circumstances.

  Eye operations aren’t much different from other operations except that you know more about them at the time, which is no asset. They’d given me luminal and had been putting cocaine drops in the eye every five minutes for the half-hour before he came, so things were more or less ready when we got into the theatre. When I felt Coulson’s warm hands on my forehead I thought, well, this is it.

  They began by injecting more cocaine—into the lower lid with a hypodermic—and then they pottered about for a few minutes while this also took effect. This part always reminds me of having a tooth out. Only the rest is different. I heard Coulson reject one of the instruments laid out for him, and another had to be brought.

  The other doctor, Saunders, sponged my eyelid and surrounding face with some sort of oily iodine, and presently Coulson’s hands were back again like warm butterflies and he fixed in a speculum, which is a wire thing on a spring to keep the eyelids apart. Then he pinched a tiny bit of the eyeball between forceps to hold the eye steady and cut into the top of the eyeball with a knife.

  “Now perfectly still, old man,” he said.

  It was damned hot in the room and I could feel myself beginning to sweat. I thought about Mont Boron and kissing a girl under a lamp and a plaintive Italian singing, Esser in prigione, e non poter fuggire. I felt like that myself.

  They mopped up some of the fluid which had drained out of the eye, and Coulson said:

  “Straight ahead, just as if you were looking at a football a few feet away: that’s right. Very still. Don’t squeeze the lids.”

  At this stage I gather he inserted the iridotomy scissors into the eyeball. I tried to think about that last journey home in the swaying bus together and the walk to her flat with our fingers clasped; and the telephone call a few days after, and the clopping hoofs of the horse taking me to Pierre’s place. I thought, if this comes off …

  Coulson said: “Steady,” and here he must have begun to cut the iris. I didn’t think of anything then.

  After a minute he said: “Splendid. Quite still. Eye on the ball, that’s it.”

  Light fell on my eye. I said: “ Christ!”

  He said: “Perfectly clear lens, Saunders. Better than I’d hoped. Just a few seconds more, old man.” He withdrew the scissors.

  I thought, here is the path to anonymity and here the signs … some poem. I must have gone a bit queer for a minute or two. When I came up again they were bandaging the eye. There was water running.

  Coulson was saying: “ Never know what you’re going to find. Halliday warned me in this case that …” His voice changed completely and he said: “Well, old man, it’s all over. Wasn’t too bad, was it? Feeling better?”

  I said: “ Success?”

  “All very good so far as the surgical part goes.” Because of the change in his voice I didn’t believe him. “ Now we must have rest and quiet for a few days. Peace and patience.”

  I said: “ Never told me what sort of football to look at. Soccer or rugger.”

  “What? Oh, that” He chuckled politely. “ Soccer preferably. It’s round, you know.”

  “Was looking at rugger ball. Hope it won’t affect result”

  He said: “ Now back to bed. See he gets absolute quiet, sister. I’ll be round to-morrow or Wednesday, Mr. Gordon. That’s right. Just a little patience now. We’ll have you up and about early next week.”

  Then the hours of darkness and doubt. After a bit shut up in the black room of your head, your mind gets like a squirrel, going round and round, treading the familiar ground for the sake of being on the move. Then you’ve got to stop it, stand four square with yourself, say: This is me, all that ultimately counts; you’re cosy, shut up like this, think, reason, get to know yourself, build something to show for it, be rational, sane in the darkness, creative. And your mind stays politely quiet for a few minutes—then as soon as it can it slips back to the treadmill.

  The hopeful things. “ Perfectly clear lens, Saunders,” he’d said. “Better than I’d hoped.” Did that mean much? Not said to me but to the other surgeon. Not for effect, then. Clear lens. Better than hoped. But what had he hoped? What had he been afraid of?

  Then his later voice; dry, different “ Never know what you’re going to find. Halliday warned me in this case.…” A dry voice, tired and vaguely flat. Disapp
ointed perhaps. Or faintly angry. Halliday had warned him, but hadn’t warned him perhaps of the right dangers. What you’re going to find. What had he found? A healthy eye or a diseased one?

  A few hours after the operation, when the cocaine was wearing off they gave me more luminal to ease things up, so I didn’t get much pain. It ached from time to time, that was all. Once a day they took the bandages off and put in atropine drops to keep the pupil dilated; and they put in some sort of antiseptic drops at the same time. The shades were always very carefully drawn, but in the second before the drops bleared everything I knew I could see. I could see the white glimmer of the nurse’s cuff and the dark ridge of her shoulder, and daylight filtering in through a few cracks and the dropper moving towards my eye: then blob.… “ Not to-day, Mr. Gordon. Another twenty-four hours perhaps. It depends what Mr. Coulson says. You’ve only been bandaged two days yet” and so on.

  Of course I was excited about that, but past experience, and one or two other blind people I’d talked to in those early days, had taught me that the knife can sometimes bring sight back for a few days but can’t keep it. Now and then I still got flashes of light in the other eye, but they didn’t count for anything.

  Pierre’s flat with the light and the fire on and the feel of his sticky hair. The smell of Walter’s new American car. The concertina at Villefranche. Charles Bénat’s voice, casual, indifferent; yet something in the man like a thin, taut wire.… I thought, if I’m still blind, will I still have the heart to go back and grope again? Stay with the Wintertons a month to break the ice. I thought of Alix, things about her that made her different from anyone else, the complex mystery of a personality that “ got across” in spite of my disability. The touch of her hands was not like other people’s; they were always warm, quick, and sure; the “roundness” of her voice, like a singer’s, only she didn’t sing.

  I thought, too, of Rachel, wondered if she ever remembered the times we spent together, if her marriage was a “ success.” I thought of Bénat’s advice: “ Come back in a year. On the law of averages …” Rachel had been married two. She and Alix. Everything about them was so different. I’d met Rachel when an officer in the R.A, with all the faintly glamorising effect of uniform, of being on leave, of wanting and getting a good time in a short time. When I met Alix it was all different. From one angle it seemed that my friendship with Rachel was the abnormal one—from another, Alix. It depended on the way you looked at it.

  On the fourth day Coulson came with Halliday. Nurse Rogers was with them but not the matron.

  “Good morning, Mr. Gordon. Morning. Well, feeling all right to-day? Think it’s about time we had some of these bandages off.”

  “High time from my point of view.”

  “Yes, I can understand your impatience. Natural enough. Still, it’s no good spoiling the ship. I’ve brought Mr. Halliday along.”

  “So I gather. Good morning.”

  “Good morning. I’m glad to hear that things have gone so well.”

  “Have they?” I said. “So am I.”

  Coulson said: “We’ve been telling him that for four days but he rather doubts our veracity.”

  “Proof of the pudding,” I said.

  Nurse Rogers had pulled the shades to, and now she began to unwrap the bandages. I began to sweat.

  I could see the light before the last was off, and as that came Halliday was standing at the foot of the bed and a rather stout middle-aged man was peering down at me on the opposite side from Nurse Rogers.

  “God Almighty!” I said.

  “Proof of the pudding, Mr. Gordon,” the middle-aged man said. “As you see, Halliday, we’ve been lucky.”

  After a minute Halliday grunted and said: “ Pull one of the shades up, nurse. We can dispense with them by degrees.”

  Nurse Rogers let in some more light. She was a small dark young woman with good teeth. When I could get a chance past the peering heads I saw it was raining.

  “God Almighty!” I said.

  Halliday was plucking at his lip. “One of the most satisfactory I’ve seen. If no irritable tendency has developed so far … I congratulate you, Coulson. And you, Gordon.”

  “A very good patient,” Coulson said. “A tendency towards skepticism, but we must forgive him that.”

  I said: “ I can see better than after that first operation.”

  “So you should. There’s no inflammation to interfere with the sight.”

  I felt like crying into the bedclothes. I cleared my throat irritably and said: “How long is it likely to stay like this?”

  “You’re all right. Don’t worry about that. Of course, we’ll have to take care of you for a few days yet.”

  Somebody’d put some flowers on the dressing-table. They were yellow chrysanthemums and pink michaelmas daisies, and the vase was green. My hairbrush was on the table, and the letter Nurse Rogers had read me, from Caroline; and a glass of water and a box of some sort and a handkerchief.

  I said; “ I can see without my glasses.”

  “Yes, the old ones won’t be much use to you now,” said Coulson. “Halliday’ll fix you up with a new pair in a day or two. You’ll probably feel better to keep on wearing them.”

  They talked for about five minutes. It all seemed quite casual to them, just a matter-of-fact part of the day, a matter for sober satisfaction, just as it would have been a matter for sober regret if it had gone the other way. I wanted to shake them out of it, make them realise.

  As they turned to go I looked at the clock on the table: it was twenty minutes past eleven; I looked at the chart beside it and saw that my temperature was sub-normal; I looked out again at the bit of greyness which was the October day. The silver rods of rain showed up against the window opposite. I was glad Nurse Rogers went with them to the door; it gave me a chance of trying to look normal again before she came back.

  Even then I worried a good bit. All that night and the following day, because the stakes were so high. In the evening when Coulson came in I tackled him about it.

  He said: “We’re hiding nothing from you now. I suppose it’s natural you should feel like that. But you must understand in an operation of such delicacy it would be inexcusable to claim too much. In your case one had to be specially cautious because of the complications which followed the last operation, d’you see. If that had come again …”

  “And what possibility is there in the future?”

  “A cut that heals satisfactorily in the eye is no more likely to give you trouble than a cut that heals in the body.”

  I said: “I met a man in hospital in Sussex, naval gunnery officer, blind from blast. They operated on one eye—for a detached retina, I think. In a week he could see right enough, but a fortnight after leaving hospital the thing slipped and he was as blind as ever.…”

  He said: “What a man you are for worry. There’s nothing to slip in your eye. I haven’t stitched anything on or pinned anything up. You’re all of a piece.” He got up. “Joking apart, have you looked at yourself in the mirror yet?”

  “Not closely.”

  “Well, you may think the new pupil I’ve given you is a bit tent-shaped. Don’t worry, it’ll round off in time.”

  “I don’t care what shape it is, so long as it works.”

  At the door he came back, blew out a breath. I wondered what he was going to say.

  “If you feel like it, six months or twelve months, come back and I’ll attempt something with that other eye. I believe I could make it function to some extent. Even though you might not get a lot of advantage, it’s much healthier to have an eye that isn’t a dead loss, and it always helps the good one to see better.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “ I’ll think about that.”

  Chapter 5

  When you come out of Dartmoor after a long stretch it may be that you would feel something the way I felt that afternoon twelve days later, standing on the corner of the street watching the traffic fights change colour and the busses grind to a sto
p and the taxis panting and the crowds.

  I remember that day I met Alix, feeling blindness had caught me up at last and that I’d really no place in the world, that I was a ghost of a man, waiting to go. There was an affinity with this day, for I felt a ghost of a man who had just come back. Rip Van Winkle, the returned soldier, the released convict, peering about for a friendly sign, a familiar face. Every now and then my eye would get bleared up, not with the old troubles but with feelings that I couldn’t keep in hand. I wanted to cry like a kid.

  In spite of all Coulson told me I was still scared. Scared stiff. It was too good to be true. They said the sight was five sixths of normal; but with glasses I could see practically as well as I’d ever seen, except that it was one-sided and therefore still clumsy. But I’d got used to that way of looking last year and the year before. It was like opening up a black-out curtain and finding the sun there all the time.

  … It’s no good going over all I did and felt those first weeks and months. There’s the mental change as well as the physical. Your attitude doesn’t adapt itself in a day. In my case I seemed to be harking back not to the few months of semi-seeing at the end of the war but to the pre-army life of six years ago and the gap was hard to jump.

  I did the things one would expect, saw something of Lewis and the office, tried to pick up the threads of a few friendships. But often people had developed their own interests, and I wasn’t somehow quite ready yet to meet them halfway. I was not properly awake—and still insecure, still groping.

  After a bit I moved from the hotel, took a flat in Kensington, though it wasn’t as good as the old one.

  Christmas in Oxford. Out walking every day when the weather was fine. Aimlessly strolling. And I saw in my dream how Mr. Greatheart came to Oxford city to be healed of the wounds that he had gotten … when his hurts began to be on an healing, he made shift to go abroad betwixt his crutches to view that city. Maybe it was something that way with me.