A Closed Book

by Gilbert Adair

  ‘“The question is more general, however, than that posed by blindness alone. In my own past, whenever an optician or ophthalmologist trained a pencil torch on my eye, or whenever I myself chanced to rub too hard and long on my eyeball, I seemed to catch sight of – well, what precisely? The retina? The eyeball’s inner surface? Its outer surface? Whichever: cratered, cicatrized, lunar, as red and rawly textured as the skin of a scrawny day-old nestling, as biliously opaque as a gaudy glass paperweight, the sight of it was deeply disquieting. It reminded me of the earth’s primaeval convulsions in the Sacre du Printemps sequence of Walt Disney’s Fantasia. It reminded me, above all, that the eyes are two parts of the body, are things, units that can be lost, cracked, broken, that, as I well know, can be disjoined from the head and held, even rolled around, in the palm of the hand. From ‘inside’ my head it never occurred to me, unless I happened to ‘think of it’, that I had in reality two eyes, not one. From inside I was a human Cyclops; my Cyclops eye, as I perceived it, was both the spectator and screen of the world; the world, as I confronted and controlled it – I mean, attempted to control it – was in a tangible sense inside the eye (remove the eye and you also remove the world). The eye, then, was finally just that gaudy glass paperweight which I mention above, save that, instead of a nostalgic little Christmassy vista (soft snow falls if you hold it upside-down), what it contained was the world itself.

  ‘“But was I really ‘seeing’ it, was I really seeing my own eye? How can an eye manage to see itself? See inwardly or, so to speak, self-referentially? Even way back then, I was myopic, even then I saw the external world only with glasses. Yet, miraculously, I could see this lunar surface just as sharply as would anyone possessed of normal vision. What was it, though, that I saw it with? With, doubtless, that instinctual and atavistic seeing reflex that I have already referred to and that ultimately transcends the possession of one’s very organs of sight.”’

  *

  ‘Sorry to be a bore, John, but I want to add something. Directly following “I have to see, whether such is my active intention or not”, I want to add – in brackets – something along the lines of “Let the reader close his eyes and verify for himself that, even then, even with his eyes closed, he continues to see” – inverted commas around “see” – “even if what he sees is nothing at all” – close brackets.’

  ‘You want me to add that now?’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘Very well. Can you dictate it again? More slowly this time.’

  ‘“Let the reader close his eyes –”’

  ‘Hold on, I’ve got to find the place.’

  *

  ‘Right. Fire away.’

  ‘“Let the reader close his eyes –”’

  ‘Sorry.’

  ‘What is it now?’

  ‘You don’t want to say, “Let the reader close his or her eyes”?’

  ‘Lord, no! I told you once before I won’t be a slave to that PC poppycock. It becomes so infernally awkward. “Let the reader close his or her eyes and verify for himself or herself –”’

  ‘Okay, okay. “And verify for himself –” Go on.’

  ‘“And verify for himself that, even then, even with his eyes tightly closed, he continues to see” – ICs – “even if what he sees is nothing at all.”’

  ‘Close brackets?’

  ‘Close brackets. Shit, I’ve suddenly realized. Three “evens” in the same sentence. And I shudder to think how you spelt Sacre du Printemps. Never mind, we’ll have another look at it all after we’ve had our break. I wonder how long it is. Offhand, I’d say just under eight hundred words. Seven hundred and – oh, fifty.’

  ‘Give me a sec and I’ll have the exact figure for you.’

  ‘What? Don’t tell me you’re some kind of mathematical prodigy? What do they call them? Idiot savants?’

  ‘No, of course not. I’m getting the Mac to give me a word count.’

  ‘Curiouser and curiouser. Is there anything it can’t do?’

  ‘Not much. Here you are. Seven hundred and seventy-five words. Not counting the title and date, seven hundred and seventy.’

  ‘Seven hundred and seventy, eh?’

  ‘I must say, you made a very impressive guess.’

  ‘When you’ve been around words for as long as I have, you get an instinct for these things.’

  *

  ‘So, Paul? Pleased with it?’

  ‘I don’t know what I think. This afternoon I may decide to cut the whole passage.’

  ‘What!’

  ‘Just kidding, John, just kidding. But be warned nevertheless. Somewhere along the line, and more than once, that’s exactly what will happen. If the reader skips any of the pages of a book, it’s almost always because the author himself should have skipped. That witticism – whose was it? Oscar Wilde’s? Flaubert’s? – the one about spending an entire morning putting a comma in and an entire afternoon taking it out again is no joke. You’ll just have to learn to live with it, as I have.’

  ‘I’m sure I’ll take it in my stride. Meanwhile, what about coffee? Unless you’d prefer something stronger. A glass of wine, maybe?’

  ‘No, no, no. Coffee it’s got to be. A writer never drinks and writes. It’s as dangerous as drinking and driving.’

  ‘Really? What about Hemingway? What about Charles Bukowski?’

  ‘Bukowski’s rubbish.’

  ‘And Hemingway?’

  ‘Is he the sort of writer you think I am, John? Gutsy? Hard-boiled? Whisky-swigging?’

  ‘I’ll make the coffee.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘God, this is a roomy wardrobe. You could actually step inside it.’

  ‘I’m aware of that. What about the ties?’

  ‘Quite an array of them here.’

  ‘Yes, all right. But is the Cerruti among them?’

  ‘Sorry. Describe it to me again.’

  ‘Velvet. With a motif of coloured squares. And the label’s Cerruti. Or Cerruti 1880. Or 1885. Something like that, I forget. That’s C, e, r, r, u, t, i.’

  ‘I’ll go through them one by one, shall I? No. No. No. No. No. No. Oh, here’s a Cerruti! No, this one has a spiral design. Nice tie, though.’

  ‘Really, John, I wish you’d keep your mind on the job.’

  ‘I am keeping my mind on the job.’

  ‘No, you aren’t. And I understand. But what you must understand is that the tie itself isn’t ultimately what matters. Since the accident – I mean, since I began to get my act together, as they say – I’ve learned to manoeuvre myself through the labyrinth of the world – because, you know, for me the world is a labyrinth – without either of my eyes. But if for any reason that world is tampered with, I simply cannot function. I simply can’t. So, for example, Old Ma Kilbride knows that whenever she does the cleaning she’s got to put every chair, every lamp, every bloody toothpick, back precisely where she found it. Not a centimetre to the left or right. Otherwise, you see, I really am blind.’

  ‘Well, Paul, I’m sorry to say that, while you’ve been talking, I’ve examined all the ties in the wardrobe and the only Cerruti is the one I mentioned already. I’m sorry.’

  ‘Why, that’s – that’s really most extraordinary. I don’t know what to believe.’

  ‘Could Mrs Kilbride have taken it to the laundry without telling you?’

  ‘Don’t be ridiculous. I’ve just told you. She won’t touch anything, anything at all, without first getting my permission.’

  ‘Well then, could it have been stolen?’

  ‘Stolen? A Cerruti tie? Preposterous. Who would have stolen it? No one ever comes here except Mrs Kilbride and – you’ve yet to meet him, I know – but the mind fairly boggles at the notion of Joe Kilbride mucking out his byre in a Cerruti tie. Of course it hasn’t been stolen. Not on the wardrobe floor, is it?’

  ‘I’ve already looked.’

  ‘Or else slipped behind – behind I don’t know what?’

  ‘Nope.’

&n
bsp; ‘Extraordinary, really extraordinary. Really rather unsettling. I feel as though I’ve tried to cash one of God’s cheques and it’s bounced.’

  *

  ‘Oh, and John, don’t bother jotting that one down. I’ve used it before. I’ve used it many times before.’

  Where is that tie? Where is it? It’s absurd to be unnerved by something so insignificant, but if just one brick is removed I have the impression the whole edifice is about to collapse on top of me. I simply can’t bear not knowing things. It forces me to realize that, for all my boasting and bragging, I was not observant at all. It forces me to realize how little I ever did look about me, how heartrendingly little of the world I ever truly saw. I didn’t have to look at things, I didn’t have to see them, they were there. Now nothing at all is there unless and until I know it’s there, and this one trivial enigma makes me wonder how much I think is there that no longer is. Oh God.

  ‘Here you are, Paul.’

  ‘Neat?’

  ‘Naturally.’

  ‘Chin chin.’

  ‘Chin chin.’

  ‘You know, John.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Having you here is just about the best thing that could have happened to me.’

  ‘Nice of you to say so.’

  ‘I mean it. Even aside from the work.’

  ‘Well, thank you. I appreciate that.’

  ‘And you? Do you enjoy being here? Please be honest.’

  ‘Yes, I do. It’s as stimulating as I hoped it would be.’

  ‘It is going well, don’t you think?’

  ‘I’d say so. But I can only speak for myself. I don’t know how much you’d normally expect to get done in nine days.’

  ‘Oh, well, as for that, rather more than you and I have done. But you must realize, my fear was that I wouldn’t be able to work at all under these conditions. Yet we have worked together well, haven’t we?’

  ‘Yes, we have.’

  ‘Worked surprisingly well, right?’

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I haven’t been too – too martinettish with you?’

  ‘Too what?’

  ‘Too much the martinet.’

  ‘You warned me, Paul.’

  ‘Well, hell, that means I have, doesn’t it?’

  ‘No. No, it doesn’t, actually. Look, you’re hardly the easiest person in the world to get along with. I’d be a liar if I tried to pretend you were. But, as I say, in the first place you did warn me.’

  ‘And in the second place?’

  ‘Well, uh, actually, there is no second place.’

  ‘Ah. And here was I hoping you’d say that in the second place it’s a privilege for you to be allowed to collaborate on this book of mine. My last book and, I believe, my best.’

  ‘Paul, that went without saying.’

  ‘Ah. Thank you. Well now. What’s today?’

  ‘Friday.’

  ‘Friday. So it is. That means, I suppose, you’re off tomorrow?’

  ‘Yes, I do have to get back to town.’

  *

  ‘It isn’t a problem, is it, Paul? I mean, it was agreed I’d be returning at the weekend?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely.’

  ‘I’ll probably get going just after –’

  ‘I was wondering, though.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Of course I don’t know just how busy you’re planning to be?’

  ‘Pretty busy, I expect. I haven’t been home for more than a week. There’ll be mail to answer, e-mail, faxes, the usual sort of thing. What was it you were going to ask me?’

  ‘Well, if you had a couple of hours to kill – mind you, only if you really did have a couple of hours –’

  ‘I probably will.’

  ‘There’s a reconnoitring job I shall want you to do for the next section of the book. And if you did it over the weekend, you see, it would save you driving back up to London on Monday or Tuesday.’

  ‘What exactly would it involve?’

  ‘There are two jobs, but they’re both in the same area. Next door to each other, in fact.’

  ‘Why don’t you just tell me what it is you want me to do?’

  ‘In the National Gallery there’s a Rembrandt self-portrait. Actually, there are two of them, but the one I’m talking about is my very favourite painting in the world. I mean to write about it in this new section that we’re now going to be tackling. Briefly, it’ll have to do with the whole concept of self-portraiture, particularly if you’re blind. I intend to call it “The Melancholy of Anatomy”.’

  ‘Uh huh.’

  ‘Well, that went down like a lead balloon.’

  ‘Sorry, what?’

  ‘Oh, nothing. Anyway, my thesis, which I’m about to simplify grossly, is that all the great self-portraits were painted as though by blind men and – God, it sounds frightfully trite put like that, but maybe you get the picture?’

  ‘I think so. And you want me to –?’

  ‘What I need is a meticulously detailed description of that particular self-portrait. It’s the older of the two in the National. I mean, in actual fact it’s the more recent, it’s Rembrandt himself who’s older, visibly older. If I remember aright, it was painted just days before he died. There ought to be a postcard of it for sale in the souvenir shop. In which case, buy it and bring it back with you. Otherwise, I’ll need you to study the painting and make notes of every detail. You understand? So I can copy it. A bit like an art student installing himself in front of the portrait and painting a copy. Only, in my case, in words.’

  ‘Yes, I can do that.’

  ‘Now I think of it, even if you do manage to find a postcard, it’ll still be better if you take some time to study the painting itself. Get a sense of the brushstrokes. It should take no more than half an hour out of your weekend.’

  ‘Not a problem.’

  ‘I’d also like – don’t ask – but I’d also like you to see if you could purchase, again in the souvenir shop, a jigsaw puzzle of the Rembrandt.’

  ‘A jigsaw puzzle?’

  ‘I know you can buy jigsaw puzzles of some of the paintings in the National’s collection. Holbein’s “Ambassadors” is definitely one. Probably Seurat’s “Bathers”. Oh, and the Crivelli “Annunciation with Saint Emidius”. I seriously doubt there’ll be one of the Rembrandt. Who’d want to do a jigsaw puzzle of a bulbous-nosed old codger in a smock? But will you take a look nevertheless?’

  ‘Was that the second favour?’

  ‘No, that’s still the first. The second – well, just in front of the National Gallery there is of course Trafalgar Square. And, as you probably know, there are three statues at three out of its four corners. I mean, apart from Nelson’s Column. At the corners, not in the middle.’

  ‘Yes, of course. I know those statues. There are only three of them, not four, right?’

  ‘Exactly. Well – and again, don’t ask – but I want you to report back with two pieces of factual data relating to those statues. First, which out of the four is the empty plinth? Is it the top right-hand corner one or else the bottom left-hand –’

  ‘I think I already know the answer to that. Isn’t it at the top left-hand corner?’

  ‘I wouldn’t be asking you if I could remember myself. Just double-check it, will you. It’s for a book, not a dinner-party conversation. It’s got to be absolutely right.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Second, who are the other statues of? The three names. One of them, I’m fairly sure, is George IV. The others, if I ever knew who they were, I no longer remember. And again, of course, who’s actually standing on which plinth?’

  ‘That’s all?’

  ‘That’s it. You see, it would take just one trip to Trafalgar Square. But, as I said before, only if it won’t spoil your weekend.’

  ‘No, no. I’m going to be around and about anyway. And it’ll be good for me. I haven’t been to the National Gallery in years.’

  ‘Then when shall I see you?’

>   ‘Well, I expect to leave just after breakfast tomorrow and return Sunday evening or first thing Monday morning. That okay?’

  ‘That’s perfect. Because I’ll want you to help me make a phone call Monday morning. I’d like to ring up my agent.’

  ‘No problem. I’ll most likely get back on Sunday evening. But very late. Don’t wait up for me. I’ll let myself in.’

  ‘Yes, all right.’

  ‘There’s one other thing, Paul.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You think I might have a cheque before I go?’

  ‘A cheque?’

  ‘Well, yes.’