What to Look for in Winter

by Candia McWilliam

  I moved into the flat on the floor above; it was less dramatic and atmospheric than Sargent’s former studio, but more practical too for a blind woman prone to fits. I was very confused. My friend Nicky found me weeping outside Tesco because I couldn’t find the hospital where I was due for an MRI scan. She cancelled her whole day and took me, holding on to me and steering me and taking me for the scan, then taking me home. I could have done nothing without her. I could not put one thought in front of the other. Not. One. Thought.

  In May, in Colonsay, the weather is prevailing. Rain is pouring through and down all the guttering and downpipes, what in Scotland are called the rones, and hail is tittering down the chimneys and on to the sills. The air is full of long brushes of rain, the wind whisking them. My radio, responsive to something electric in the weather, perhaps a storm to come, has become impossible to turn off. It’s desperate to tell me something. I’ve taken out its batteries: that’ll settle its hash.

  There must have been times when my family, most particularly Fram, must have wanted to do something like that to me, just shut me up, turning me over, sliding open the panel and slotting out whatever it is that keeps me transmitting. At the worst times I have only one frequency, that of guilt and shame. Self-pity is the one I fear. It’s what I’m worried would be on default, on my pilot light.

  This silence after the rain’s battering is delicious. Though it isn’t complete. Don’t say the radio can broadcast without power. Don’t say the radio is in my head.

  I moved to the upstairs flat in London, and settled there but for one thing. Two things. Rita and Ormiston. I realised that it had to be done. It was a smaller flat, with no outdoors. I was blind and might fall down unconscious in a fit, and then who would care for them? Rita went to be with an artist’s widow. Ormy went to be where he was always ecstatic, with our friends Leander and Rachel in Oxford. They reported on him constantly and in short order he had become Rachel’s slave, which in cat terms is master. Leander said that he chased butterflies but released them. I suppose he never caught them. He was the indulged new boy in a house with four other cats. At first uppish, he became the lieutenant of their top cat Elvis. He gardened and grew fat on tuna and prawns. To the children in their street, he was known as Warburton, a name as pleasingly Britishly pompous as his own. He got a bad scratch on one bulbous blue eyeball and had to wear a bonnet and have twice daily antibiotic shots over the summer. Rachel made their sitting room his sickroom and gave him love all day. She was looking for work at the time and awaiting the results of interviews. The artist’s widow has not said anything about Rita, herself a companionate but discreet cat never much given to getting in touch.

  July dwindled into August, which has all his life been the time when Minoo and I go to the Edinburgh International Book Festival, and then, most likely, over to Colonsay.

  I had a plan too for our stay in Edinburgh. I was hoping to visit the shaman who had helped the friend of a friend, as she understood, to see off grave illness from the very heart of her family.

  A shaman?

  Why not? I had by this point seen seven professors of neurology, one neuropsychiatrist, two consultant neurologists, two cognitive therapists, four ophthalmologists, one psychoanalyst, one counsellor, two general practitioners, a cranial osteopath and a beautiful octogenarian acupuncture-practising ex-nun named Oonagh Shanley Toffolo, who had modelled for Issey Miyake and to whom I was recommended by the owner of a clothes shop who saw me blindly patting her lurchers under the counter. Oonagh was very good. She was a great reader of Thomas Merton and was as certain of heaven as of the ground beneath her slender feet.

  I am not on the attack against conventional medicine. I just think that no one knows much about the relation of mind to body, while, it is to be hoped, learning more constantly about the relation of brain to body, though even that science is in its infancy. I have wondered, for example, whether my compromised dopamine system (which is what alcoholics have; we retrain our poor pleasure centres into thinking that a drink is what they want because once, just once, and once upon a time, it felt good) has not some relation to the closure of my sight. I do not know, and I am, or thought I was, resistant to barmy science.

  I am aware that the dopamine theory could just as well be the punishment theory in modern dress. I cannot bear to think that maybe the enormous pleasure that has for me been in looking has to be taken from me precisely because it was a pleasure and that for me all pleasure is bad, being analogous to alcohol. Can that be so? Or has some Calvinism crept in there?

  I am pretty sure that if I had ever understood–and practised–relaxation, and in that I would include dancing and some kinds of exercise as well as I understand willpower and self-punishment, I wouldn’t be in this tight spot.

  I am fairly certain too that an operation is a crude and mechanistic approach to something that maybe I should have tried to charm down out of the tree of my nerves and brain, a bad black snake I might really have induced to let go its grip, with talk and ease and music. Instead, full of fear, and keen to show those I love I have the will to fight, I have done the thing that Fram was the second person to tell me that I will insist on doing, which is to go out into the dark alone with a knife, and cast about me till I am bloody and on my own. Fram is far from the only person I love who is resistant to the idea of this operation.

  The first person who told me that I do this blind casting about was me. But I don’t listen to her. Or not when she talks sense.

  Or I hadn’t till recently, and am attempting to now.

  We set off for Edinburgh, where Minoo and I have been the consistently happiest over the years of internal exile, but not before I had had a terrible unseemly fight with Fram and Claudia.

  It started with two pints of semi-skimmed milk and two one-pound coins. I cannot write about it while the rain outside is falling. If I feel tearful when there is rain, the rain allows me to cry with its tears. I have learned this through a lifetime of living in a rainy country and seldom actually crying, though sometimes feeling that I will burst if I do not, by the use of one of my bluntest tools from the kit of self-damage, unnecessary control. I boil my tears dry on the nasty internal burner of my sense of injustice, and my hot stone of loneliness.

  Jealousy pains more than bare bones through skin. That’s not a figure of speech. I’ve had both in this last year and there isn’t a comparison. Jealousy is greener than those old sharp white bones I saw, though they were my own and sticking out sharp and splintered through my own flesh and skin.

  But that’s to come.

  I am daily working on its cure, the slaking of that thirsty rootless jealousy. If love is blind, jealousy is sharp of sight, even in the blind. Maybe it seethes more in the blind, who create evidence where it cannot be seen?

  I will save any account of that row till the sky is empty. It was my fault. By the pitchy light of my jealous nature I will perhaps see the sequence of my, always congruent, mistakes. I always slope off and never ask for help. I think I can mend myself on my own by thinking and instead I make the same mistake. I do not see it as being the same mistake in my own life because I treat myself with less care than I would treat a character in a book I was either reading or writing. I always think, however extreme the circumstances, ‘This doesn’t matter. The only person who is being hurt is me.’

  This idiotic yet evidently lifelong feeling for some reason does not allow itself to be supplanted by my expressed and fully conscious certainty that, however secret we are to one another, we are also connected in more ways than we can know.

  I think the word for it is dissociation, and I wouldn’t recommend it to an atom. Especially not to an atom, since the consequence might be annihilation.

  Minoo and I set off for Edinburgh. My Edinburgh friend Amanda had made an appointment with the shaman, in a suburb of the city called Portobello, a suburb that is something of a hydro, which is the Scotticism for spa, that is a fancy place you go for sea-bathing and the taking of the waters.
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  Plural water! And I’m that big a drinker!

  (I recall participating in a blind water-tasting with the son of Hugh MacDiarmid, Michael Grieve, and his wife, for the Glasgow Herald, in the house of two Highland friends. Apollinaris and Perrier were too strong. Later, we watered the water down.)

  Amanda, who, like all my friends who properly like me, likes Claudia, said, ‘You’ve to guess the shaman’s name. It’s auspicious. It’s what everyone’s called, Claude.’

  The shaman’s name was Claudia.

  During that time when the fit held the summer thick and dim to me and I felt ever more cut off and adrift, I didn’t say so until things became so desperate that I burned with disgust and anger at myself. The only person to whom I dared show it is the person for whom, with the children, I want to be best, as though I hadn’t yet understood that he knows me at my worst.

  All the things I miss doing for someone, the things that I thought were the accumulating point of me, cooking, cleaning, tidying, arranging, thinking together, sharing silence and words as Pierre and Natasha do at the end of War and Peace, all the setting forth in the vessel of home, I blew into the air with one neglected cinder of resentment allowed to smoulder over years because I accepted to be tidied away. Was that the pilot light? Resentment?

  I didn’t accept it, only, to be tidied away. I folded myself up like an unwanted sail and locked the sail-bin door from the inside, not having forgotten to make sure I was dry with exhaustion yet drenched with alcohol to the point of double flammability.

  The rain has gone and I shall rush at the story of the row and the milk and the money, which is about jealousy and left-outness.

  So Fram and Claudia visited me one evening in the upstairs flat in London. They were going on, out to dinner, or the theatre. I was overexcited and had saved up a selection of thoughts, of notes and queries. Thus the lonely blight the contact they do have. Punctuality exercises me. It is part of my tense need to be prepared and hospitable. It has always been my failing and it is made worse by not seeing because I have to try to make things, and myself, look OK. Or I think I do. After the time that was due to be crowned by company has passed away, a dismantling takes place as though an actor has been taken ill before the performance can be begun.

  Claudia rang from a supermarket. I am afraid that I can remember that it was Waitrose and not Tesco. Waitrose is more lavish and metropolitan than Tesco. Such is the ugly smallness of jealousy.

  She was ringing to say, ‘We’re in Waitrose. Can we get you anything?’ I replied, ‘I’d like two pints of semi-skimmed milk please, and don’t worry, I will pay you back.’

  As cheap as that. A world of love, flung aside from jealousy because it is one who has fallen short of it. I knew I was old and past it all then and that Fram and Claudia were like my social workers, fitting in a cup of tea with the old bitch who can’t get out before they returned to their real world of intimacy, the first-person plural, litres not smaller units, love, the theatre, seeing things…and Waitrose.

  Actually I can’t, yet, bear to go on. Jealousy is hard to abide in the feeling, the telling, the reading. It is witness to our worst selves. It is mad and hungry and it tells us lies. Which to our shame, we half want to hear.

  I have for the moment to hold the frame there. I typed ‘Fram’ in the middle of that word ‘frame’. There is nowhere jealousy doesn’t reach, nothing it doesn’t sour. It tears the kindly milk.

  This is the frame, held. They entered the flat. Claudia had on a new coat. I couldn’t see it properly of course, but it was embroidered with pink and green flowers. She is of normal size. I have always been tall for a woman and am now fat. She held the milk out to me. I held out two pounds in return for the milk.

  I could feel Fram’s anger as close as my own bile.

  That is the frame, held, to which I shall return when I have found a way of not crying over spilt milk.

  Now, for the company, I am listening to a concert from the Wigmore Hall in London and the main noise is interference, but it’s not unfriendly. It sounds like not the sea of faith but the sea of electricity; something that is a context, and one from which something clear may emerge. In the one case, a poem, in the other, music or light.

  Katie and I this morning bunched up the wet branches of flowers that she had gathered, rhododendrons and azaleas for the funeral that was today at two in the afternoon.

  It’s been a brute of a day for weather and the boat was not going to come alongside at the pier, but it did, for it was full of mourners, maybe twenty-five of them. Miss Angell, the aeroplane pilot from Oban, who works this route on a Thursday, flew in four more mourners in the teeth of the wind. The dead man leaves three daughters. A small granddaughter spoke in the church. Katie said that everyone was breathing with her to get her through. There was also a baby.

  The lady lay preacher spoke.

  There was a tribute from the dead man’s son-in-law, a big man on the island. The helpful breathing started again at the end of his words, when he described saying goodnight, every night (save the winters, when the dead man had annually gone down to Guildford to sleeve up and sell Christmas fir trees outside B & Q), so, saying goodnight, every night, with the same words, and that had gone on until this last Saturday, when there had not been the same exchange of goodnights, nor would be again.

  The graveside, in the wind’s teeth, was well attended. Poems were read; Auden, Katie thought, and Keats and Wordsworth.

  ‘No,’ said her husband. ‘It was Auden. Keats, I think. Wordsworth, certainly.’

  Katie made her face that signifies ‘Am I married to a man or an old deaf dog?’ and turned to her stove to poke at the lentils. She then asked a question that she didn’t need answered, ‘Why do people always say, when they know it can’t literally be true, that at least the widowed one will be back with the other now, at least they’ll be together?’

  That terse code for attachment to her spouse, and the old van she drove earlier to the church before the service, its windows blind with gathered creaking sappy boughs of flowers, cream and purple, cream and white, pink and cream, creamy pink and splashingly scented, cut from the dripping flowering lichen-armed rhododendrons that crown this garden, boughs shining after all that soaking rain, short-lived wet falling caps of coloured flowers more than six men could carry, those are her way to catch life’s fitfulness.

  Chapter 4: The Shaman in the Basement

  In the afternoons since my eyes shut, I have slept densely for two hours if the day permits. When I begin the sleep, I cannot endure that I shall wake up and know I am alone. When I wake up, I know that I am alone and that I have to be on with it. Thus sleep accommodates.

  There are several tricks writers use to get themselves moving along in a book when they are stuck: some use a walk; some a swim; some do chores; others either go to bed for the night on it or steal a short daytime sleep. I don’t have these sleeps nowadays because I’m stuck in my writing, but because I get stuck, at that point in the day, around two o’clock, in my life.

  An ebb so low is reached that I feel my thoughts dwindled to just the one thought trawling empty along the stony repetitious levels and approaching the underwater cave mouth I do not want to look into, covetable extinctness. Not extinction, extinctness. It is a wanting to be dead, not, emphatically, a wanting to die. Moreover I can see it off with various forms of everyday magic, from folding sheets to washing my hands with welcome soap. It’s just not practical, though, routinely to address low-grade thoughts of suicide early every afternoon if you can avoid it. It leaves a banal plaque on the mind and is no doubt antisocial, like bad breath. That is what it is, bad breath. The breath so bad, it stops at nothing.

  Not that I believe that we do not, or should not, live with the present consciousness of death. Or try to, since of course we cannot. It’s one of the blessings my mother passed to me, that appetite for life in the face of death. And she did nothing but make the gift greater by her own sudden departure. I have often worried
for friends who haven’t yet known death so close that it will break them. My mother in her dying gave me every single thing she had and turned a morbid child to life for life. I won’t take my own life unless its prolongation is causing distress to my children. By when I will be incapable…Ah no, there are ways and means. We must talk, my darlings, when the exact, the precise, moment presents itself.

  As a child, I used to wish that you could, as you can with many things, do ‘nasties before nicies’ and get death over with, buy it off by volunteering to do it first. But it’s like washing up before you serve the food. The abundance will have its toll and leave its trace, and must be made as though it had not been. I cannot remember a time when I was unaware that those I loved could die at any moment.

  I don’t think that innocence is the unawareness of death. I think it is, at its truest meaning, want of self-interest, an incapacity to receive pleasure from hurting another, and, at its least true extension, a sort of blindness willed by others. Although it was I who left him (something I think of and repent of maybe sixty times a waking day) I hanker for the innocence that was the world Fram and I had. Maybe it is just that it is available to regret the time before a catastrophe as prelapsarian. But that long mutuality feels like a close-sown flower meadow to me, a meadow that I harrowed up. Anyone raised with hymn-singing will hear the tone, the heart’s field red and torn, the foolish ways, the still small voice, the pity that dwells with the Peace of God.

  My afternoon sleep is longer than is usual for a siesta and I feel a bit guilty about it, but if I don’t go to bed by three at the latest there will be the equivalent of tears before bedtime.

  If I push on through the afternoon I unravel at the least thing. I don’t show it, but I direct at myself a regular stent of internal poison when I am tired and blindish, that can result in inelegant over-reaction to other people, extravagant concessiveness and really implausible self-sidelining or peculiar self-directed violence that is I suppose directed at the world.