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.
I was twice as cut off by the snow re-bandaging the world as I was by my not-seeing eyes. The world seemed to be slipping, as though I were carrying sheets of sharp but melting ice and trying to slot them into sash windows. Nothing was solid, nothing stayed in its place, only the white felt firm. The safest place to be was in the bath under water or in bed under sheets.
I will not forget the silent arrival of my hot-water bottles, each covered like a piglet in a coat, carried by my handsome carer as he padded in three times a day with them. Their heat was my emotional life.
For the last ten days, I kept up a sort of routine, which involved spending the day in the part of the house that had once been its nursery, and spoke words into my Dictaphone. I did twenty hours. It wasn’t as shapely as a novel, it was far too deep in snow, and I was able to see, when my last stitch had melted and my swollen drifts of cheek settled back down, that not one of the tiny cassettes had failed to snarl up on itself with the discretion of a wormcast in sand. So much for my novel written in snow.
I learned later that friends of mine had decorated the house, friends who had decorated the house in which Quentin and I had lived when our daughter was born. Perhaps that simple graphic explanation was a key to the locked sense of being doubly not present, of being a ghost in whiteness in a place that had been happy but was–at any rate not so that it coincided with my flickering passage through it–not so happy now? I had the sense throughout my visit that I had been cut back so that I might regrow, and that the cut was speculative.
Like many things that are over though it seems at the time that they will never be, that period has struck deep roots in memory. It is on the turn inside my head. For all its white silence, that month and a half almost wholly under snow in the North-East, just up to the time of snowdrops, is expanding still and turning itself over under its quiet, like a sleeper, becoming something, perhaps.
I suppose that the person whom I met again and again day over day who wasn’t there upon the stair was myself, and that I did not like being snowed in with her. By the end, I was talking to the hot-water bottles and giving names to the taps. My bar of translucent pink soap had become the emblem of my time there and I washed with it angrily so as to wear away the hours of day to a sliver over the white cloudy lukewarm bathwater, in the house in the white silencing snow.
The snow did bear light within its reign though not the light that I had projected when I thought in advance of that sequestration in the North-East. I had thought that the post-operative period alone in the unknown countryside would cause things to settle and to calm, showing me thereby what I should do next in my life.
The phosphorescent snow bore some kind of reveal in its soft train when it melted, showing me that yet again what I had done was take an artificial position, in some pain, attempted to deal with it alone, got frozen in, waited for a rainy day and then–seen no option but flight.
Chapter 8: Eyes Half-cut
A kind friend drove me south to Fram and Claudia’s house, where I was due to spend a week or so over Minoo’s birthday.
We all wanted the idea of spring, no, more than that, the reality of spring. I had frozen my life so capably for so long while they were living through normal, seasonal, you might reasonably say seasoned, time.
They extended another chance to me. If it were a children’s game, it might be thought of as another ‘life’. Those reprieves feel like new breath in the playground, a fair portion of offered hope.
Fram tried to coax me into liking, even loving, myself again. The very notion of self-loving brings me out in an allergic unthinking nettle rash–we Scots may be prickly but we’re also dead allergic, and often to ourselves. I have made a fair job of burning up what was ostensibly loveable and now I’m left with what remains. There’s not much to love, while there is all too much of me. It’s not a new story. The phlogiston has burned off–the mothering, any glamour, the cooking, the social fun, the jokes, the pretty ways in a house, the observantness–which were all but mothering, fair tosh anyhow–and we’re left with the calx, which feels as reduced as it sounds, a shrivelled residue. How can I love that?
The answer is further in. Love in yourself what you would love in anyone, anyone at all, certainly in a sick person no matter how repulsive their illness, just because they are human and still retain life, or the vestige of it.
So, treat yourself as you would an employee. That’s what shrinks say, because they know that I can’t imagine treating another person as I treat myself, which is with automatic torrents of abuse that Fram thinks come from having experienced their like too early on. He also says they are part of a longing to have someone silence them by saying nice things.
The row over ransomed milk was so bad that I thought that was that. I had seen how exasperated they were by my incapacity to be
helped and just to accept that this was now; they were there; I was here; and that life is not fair.
Gestures are often insincere and lead almost always to regret. The two pounds for the milk was a gesture. Gestures may be staged for the notional watcher, who is the spirit of Punch and Judy, and, worse, of the Colosseum. Gestures may be lies, waiting for their big fat bluff to be called.
I will not forget the one time I slapped a young man for kissing me, in the dark after a dance here on Colonsay. The slap was pure gesture as the kiss was not. I was showing off to whoever was watching the film of my romantic life; that is no one at all. Or, at most, just me. Unforgivable. I apologised to this young man’s grave this week (he never grew old but lost his life to a knife in a city), but I did not say so to Katie. That would have been gestural. Whether or not it’s gestural to mention it here, I am attempting to discern as I write. Writing about private things can be gestural, and it can not be. The reader will have to decide.
I arrived at their house in Oxford from the North and, not meaning to but not knowing how else to be, set about being as tiresome as possible almost before I was through the door. I could see very little, and just wanted to hide. I went to Minoo’s room, which is my room when I am there, and although I couldn’t see, I scraped my bruised newly stitched eyes open so as to ingest anything new that might hurt about the room, packed as it is with memories of our marriage and of Minoo’s childhood, photographs of the other children, the cats, the poem written for our wedding by Peter Levi, framed, the sparmannia cuttings from our drawing room, the pink Roberts radio, Minoo’s soft tiger Siberia and his wife and son, Blanche and Albert, the various sketches of the house in Italy Fram’s mother made, Minoo’s clothes, many of which are clothes I bought for his father, my father’s furniture, my own, the painting of a Roman street vendor with buck teeth that once belonged to Henry James. So what? It is all Minoo’s life.
He is the wholeness that emerges and it is fitting that his life should be whole around him and his home also.
To fuss about things at all is symptom of nothing more than the awful ‘meum–tuum’ of bourgeois marriage. That is almost the whole truth. Occasionally, Fram gives me an offering he has come across from my past: my christening mug or my leaflet of Cardinal Newman’s Dream of Gerontius that I bought for six old pennies at McNaughtan’s second-hand bookshop in Leith Walk in Edinburgh before I went away to school in England. I carry it in my handbag. He can’t give me big things because where would they go now I’m a mobile mother? And do I actually want the things themselves? I want the continuity, the unbrokenness, the dream not woken from.
Which is like the burglar crying aloud for the uneased, unbroken window. Worse, like the roiling thug weeping over the grief and bodily harm he has inflicted. The things tell a more whole story under that happy roof than under any I might offer them.
After about one night and a bad morning when I even broke my own artificial taboo and went up on to the floor of the house where Fram and Claudia’s bedroom is and where you can see the crowns of trees and be among the church bells even higher, I decided to face the fact that I could either shut up and keep all this to myself or just move my suitcase to another pitch and get on with moaning, and I was running out of places to be. The reason I tell Fram and Claudia about the sadness’s shape is because they understand the metaphorical terms I, unconsciously but thoroughly, use, and that is more important to me than practically any other intimacy, the sense of swift mutual understanding. Even I could see that it was unjust to punish them for their pre-eminence among my loved ones.
So, there was a morning of me racing around trying ever more closely to define my understanding of the lostness which was of course like sewing hems with smoke. Then I settled down to their life, her taking him breakfast, and bringing it to me too, which seemed like far too much kindness, their trips to London for meetings, libraries, theatre, her book plans, her reviewing, her columns, her cousins and siblings and their babies, his going to college and returning exhausted and then working till three or four in the morning, her seeing friends, dealing with the animals, with family, the coming and going of Joanna the ironing lady who had been for ten years a steady soothant in the children’s lives under our roof, and whom somewhere along the way I loosed my bond with, like so much else that had been treasured and familiar.
Who would grudge anyone that? Anyone whom they love?
And I do not.
I have, however, and it’s quite an achievement, managed to empty my own life to the extent where I have made it a cell. Not St Jerome’s calm study, but a prison. I haven’t made a charming minimalist environment for the contemplation of the good, I have fixed up a metal cave. I think I did it with drink first and with a good disinfecting blast of high-pressure shame after that. Then I went blind.
It is easy to forget how to live. I did it. Getting back up is not easy. Getting back on, I am trying now, but the laps are faster and faster that the carousel is making, and those who are thrown off it or throw themselves or fall off it–why hadn’t I noticed this at the Dutch amusement park I so hated as a child, the Bedriegertjes?–never get back on if they are tentative. You have to leap and then be rock steady. You have to leap into the centre of the awful spinning thing to find any stillness; the edge will throw you off.
.
Chapter 9: Two Instances of Spring
The darkness brought down by my closed eyes is a new way of being shut out. Since that darkness is my circumstance, unless this operation which I am awaiting works, it is surely the right thing to turn that darkness into a new way to be alone.
The stay with Fram and Claudia over Minoo’s birthday was full of things that worked, as long as I kept the past from my mind. If I ceased thinking of my own life, that I had no job, no home and no systems within which to do more than exist as an organism from day to day, beyond the sketchy membranes of prayer and washing, then it was pleasant to be part of this busy house with the comings and goings of young people, conversation, and the tenor of wit and shared myth that lies at the heart of full lives.
Fram said, I am sure truthfully and I know welcomingly, that it was a matter of indifference to him whether I stayed for two hours or two years with them, they would carry on as they do with their lives, to which I might be as much of an addition as I wished. Claudia finds me easier. I second-guess his boredom and in doing so bring it into being.
Clementine and Rose came for Minoo’s birthday lunch, and Olly in the evening. At lunch, there was prosecco and a roast made by the twins’ father, Toby, and Clem and Rose brought presents wrapped in sparkly paper that left granular silver dust on our hands. Both girls had silvered their eyes like fish scales. Claudia’s son Xavier was there, and they shared a cake sent by Cousin Audrey in Edinburgh. The garden was sunny and early flowers were through in Fram’s newly made garden, scented paperwhites and wintersweet with its strong scent of milky Earl Grey tea. Clem likes Fram’s gardening and enjoyed the thin squeaky-stemmed fragrant narcissi. I was glad for her that the vase and the cutlery, the napery and some of the plates were familiar to her.
I loved it that she enjoyed the ironed flowered napkins that reminded her of Fram’s mother, who had chosen and hemmed them. Fram’s parents were fond of my older two children.
At tea that day, there arrived Claudia’s cousin Alexander with his family. He crowned the day by telling Clem and Rose that he and Claudia are their cousins. This gave plurality and wreathing life to the already happy day, so far is Alexander Waugh from the dead hand of genealogy and self-importance, unlike those satiating moments when Marcel notices how often he hears the word ‘cousin’ in the world of the Faubourg Saint-Germain.
Minoo became twenty, his siblings and coevals celebrated, several of his parent figures rejoiced, and his parents spent the week roughly under the same roof.
It was a blossomy time when I was in Oxford, a forward part of the country. Colonsay is slower to come into bower, so I’ve had two springs this year.
&n
bsp; Claudia was establishing a new outlet for a small independent publishing house during that week, so she was busy in the most congenial of ways to a blind onlooker. Fram showed towards her the mock-exasperated mixture of pretend scepticism and actual loyalty that is his braced and bracing form of support. Their days went forward in separateness together, that state praised by Fram’s friend and colleague John Bayley in his book Iris.
Claudia introduced me to a friend of hers who does massage. I am struck among some of her friends by their attention to the state of their own health. I might have done well to take account of the rules by which they are defending and monitoring their bodily lives, but at their age and younger, I would have thought it narcissistic to be so in touch with the body; my mistake, my very Scottish mistake. I think mean old baglike thoughts about their comparative youthful being and my own blown body and disability.
This woman however did something unlike any other massage I had undergone. There were no words, oils or embarrassing wavy or whaley soundtracks.
She used wordless intuition to make me breathe so slowly and deeply that my thoughts ceased for a time to race and repeat themselves. Her discipline has been learned over decades; she is not a proselytiser. Something really works. Regrettably, she lives on a beach with sharks in its sea at the very top of northern Queensland, but this spring I met her as often as possible before she and I went to our separate homes on islands of very different size. She has done more than most to see off the incessant internal instructions I give myself. You can attempt to defy what she does by pulling tension and acid into your mind, but she feels what you are doing and makes minutely inflected pressures that force you to release the knots and poisons. She leaves your organs with nowhere to hide. Meanwhile, you are fully clothed and forgetful of self. The sense afterwards is that you may, after all, have another chance, that you may have the equipment remaining within you with which to love.
What to Look for in Winter Page 40