by C. P. Snow
“You ought to take care of your eyes, that you ought. I tell people, I must have told you once upon a time, be careful, you’ve only got one pair of eyes. That’s it. You’ve only got one pair of eyes.”
“At this moment,” I said, “I’ve got exactly half of that.”
This was a kind of grim comment in which Martin and I, and young Charles after us, occasionally indulged ourselves. My father was much too amiable a man to make such comments: but whenever he heard them – it had been true in my boyhood, it was just as true now – he appeared to regard them as the height of humour. So he gave out great peals of his surprisingly loud, harmonious laughter.
“Would you believe it?” he asked Margaret. “Would you believe it?” He kept making remarks about me, directed entirely at her, as though I were a vacuum inhabited only by myself. “He’s a big strong fellow, isn’t he? He’ll be all right, won’t he? He’s a young man, isn’t he?” (I was within a week of my fifty-eighth birthday). “I wish I were as young as he is.”
At that reflection, his face, usually so cheerful, became clouded. “I’m not so young as I used to be,” he turned his attention from Margaret to me. “I don’t mind for myself, I poddle along just as well as ever. But people are beginning to say things, you know.”
“What people?”
“I’m afraid they’re beginning to say things at the choir.”
I felt a stab of something like animal concern, much more as though he were my son than the other way about.
“What are they saying?”
“They keep telling me that they’re sure I can manage until Christmas. I don’t like the sound of that, Lewis, I don’t like the sound of that.”
“Do they know how old you are?”
“Oh no. I haven’t told them that.” He regarded me with the most extreme shrewdness. “If anyone asks, I just say I’m a year older than I was this time last year.”
He burst out: “They’re beginning to ask if the walk home isn’t too much for me!”
It wasn’t an unreasonable question, addressed to a very old man for whom the walk meant a couple of hours on winter nights. It wasn’t an unreasonable question: but I hoped that that was all. I said, I was ready to arrange for a car, each time he had to attend the choir. Anything to prevent them getting rid of him. Anything.
“That’s very good of you, Lewis,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to give it up just now.”
His tone, however, was flat: and his expression hadn’t regained its innocent liveliness. My father might be a simple old man, but he had – unlike that fine scholar and man of affairs, Arnold Shaw – a nose for danger.
14: The Dark and the Light
A voice was saying: “You’re waking up now.”
It was a voice I had not heard before, from close beside me. I had awakened into the dark.
“What time is it?” It was myself speaking, but it sounded thick-tongued in the dark.
“Nearly three o’clock.”
“Three o’clock when?”
“Three o’clock in the afternoon, of course. Mr Mansel operated this morning.”
Time had no meaning. A day and a bit since that visit to my father, that had no meaning either.
“I’m very thirsty.”
“You can’t have much. You can have a sip.”
As I became conscious, I was aware of nothing but thirst. I was struggling up to drink, a hand pressed my shoulder. “You mustn’t move.” I felt glass against my lips, a trickle of liquid: no taste, perhaps a dry taste, a tingle in the throat: soda water?
“More.”
“Not yet.”
In the claustrophobic dark, I was just a thirsty organism. I tried to think: they must have dehydrated me pretty thoroughly. Processes, tests, injections, the evening before, that morning, as I lay immobilised, blinded: reduced to hebetude. This was worse, an order of magnitude worse, than any thirst after a drunken night. I didn’t want to imagine the taste of alcohol. I didn’t want to touch alcohol again. Lemon squashes: lime juice: all the soft drinks I had ever known: I wanted them round me as soon as I got out of here, dreaming up a liquid but teetotal elysium.
Through the afternoon I begged sip after sip. In time, though what time I had no idea, the nurse said that my wife had come to see me. I felt Margaret’s hand in mine. Her voice was asking after me.
“I don’t like this much,” I said.
She took it for granted that it wasn’t discomfort I was complaining of. Yesterday’s superstition, today’s animal dependence – those I was grinding against.
“It won’t be long,” she said.
“Too long.”
Her voice sounded richer than when I could see her: she told me Mansel had reported that the operation had gone according to plan. It would have been easier if he could have done it earlier in the week (“obstinate devil,” I said, glad to be angry against someone). It had taken nearly three hours – “One’s playing with millimeters,” he had said, with a technician’s pride. He wouldn’t know whether it had worked or not for about four days.
“Four days.”
“Never mind,” she said.
“That’s easy to say.”
“There isn’t much I can say, is there?” she replied. “Oh, they’re all convinced you’re remarkably well. That’s rather a comfort, isn’t it?”
I didn’t respond.
“At least,” she said, “it is to me.”
Patiently she read to me out of the day’s papers. At last she had to leave me, in the dark.
Yet, though my eyes were shut and blindfold, it wasn’t the familiar dark. It wasn’t like being in a hotel room on a black night, thick curtains drawn. It was more oppressive than that. I seemed to be having a sustained hallucination, as though deep scarlet tapestries, colour glowing, texture embossed and patterned, were pressing on both my eyes. I had to get used to it, until the nightly drug put me to sleep, just as I had to get used to my thoughts.
Early next morning, time was still deranged; when I switched on the bedside radio it was silent. I heard Mansel’s greeting and felt skilled fingers taking off the bandages, unshielding the eye. Five minutes of light. The lens, the large eye peering, the aseptic “It looks all right so far”, the skilled fingers taking the light away again. A few minutes of his shop: it was a relief to get back into someone’s working life. What hours did he keep? Bed about 10.0, up at 5.30, first calls, like this one, between 6.0 and 7.0. Training like a billiards player, he couldn’t afford to take more than one drink a night: three operations that morning, two more after lunch. He enjoyed his job as much as Francis Getliffe enjoyed his: he was as clever with his hands. Nearly all his techniques were new. Thirty years ago, he told me, they couldn’t have done anything for me at all.
That was an interlude in the day. So was Margaret’s visit each afternoon, when she read to me. So was the radio news. Otherwise I lay there immobile, thinking, or not really thinking, so much as given over to a plasma of mental swirls, desires, apprehensions, resentments, sensual reveries, sometimes resolves. It wasn’t often that this plasma broke out into words: occasionally it did, but the mental swirl was nearer to a dream, or a set of dreams. Dreams in which what people called the “unconscious” lived side by side with the drafting of a letter. Once when I was making myself verbalise, I thought – as I had often done – that the idea of the unconscious as “deep” in our minds had done us harm. It was a bad model. It was just as bad a model as that of a “God out there”, out in space, beyond the clouds. We laughed at simple people and their high heavens, existing in our aboriginal three-dimensions: yet, when we turned our minds upon our own minds, we fell into precisely the same trap.
Thoughts swirled on. To anyone else, even to Margaret, I should have tried to make some sort of show of sarcasm. To myself, I hadn’t got the spirit. I didn’t like self-pity in myself or others. There were times, in those days, when I was doing nothing but pity myself. I had known that state before, ill and wretched, as a young man. I ha
d more excuse then. This wasn’t enough excuse for one’s pride to break. Yet I couldn’t pretend.
Margaret asked if I wanted other visitors. None, I said, except her. That was an attempt at a gesture. Yes, I should have to see Charles March: as he was my doctor, I couldn’t keep him out. When he came in on the second morning, I told him, putting on an act, that it was absurd anything so trivial should be such a bore.
In his kind harsh voice (voices came at me out of the dark, some from nurses whom I had never seen) he replied: “I should find it intolerable, don’t you think I should?”
He was closer in sympathy than any of my friends, he could guess how I was handling my depression. As though casually, he set to work to support me by reminding me of the past. He had been thinking only the other day, he said – it gave him a certain malicious pleasure – of the way we had, in terms of money, exchanged places. When we first met, he had been a rich young man and I was penniless. Now he was living on a doctor’s income and I had become distinctly well-to-do.
“It would have seemed very curious, the first time you came to Bryanston Square, wouldn’t it?”
The irony was designed to provoke me. The voice went on: “You’ve had an interesting life, Lewis, haven’t you?”
“I suppose so,” I said.
“All those years ago, if you had been told what was going to happen to you, would you have compounded for it?”
“Would you have done, about yourself?”
“I wasn’t as insatiable as you, you know. In most ways, yes.”
I didn’t have to explicate that answer. He hadn’t chosen to compete. His marriage, like mine to Margaret, had been a good one. He had two daughters, but no son. He envied me mine. But he was trying to be therapeutic, he didn’t want to talk about himself.
“You had a formidable power in you when you were young, we all knew that. We were all certain you’d make your name. You can’t say you haven’t, can you? But it must have been surprising when it happened. I know some of it’s been painful, I couldn’t have taken what you’ve had to take. Still, that was what you were made for, wasn’t it?”
I heard the friendly smile, half-sardonic, half-approving.
“You didn’t find your own nature,” he was saying, “altogether easy to cope with, did you?”
“You know I didn’t.”
“You started out subtle and tricky as well as rapacious. You had to make yourself a better man. And the trouble with that sort of effort is that one loses as well as gains. We’re both more decent than we were at twenty, Lewis, but I’m sure we’re nothing like so much fun.”
At that I laughed. That was the primordial Charles March. He might have become more decent, but his tongue hadn’t lost its sadistic edge.
“Still, I’ve told you before,” he went on, “it’s impossible to regret one’s own experience, don’t you agree?”
“I used to agree with you. Which you thought entirely proper, of course.” Just for an instant I had caught the debating tone of our young manhood. Then I said: “But in this I’m beginning to wonder whether you are right.”
He was glad to have revived me a bit, to have led me into an argument: but he was taken aback that I had spoken with feeling, and that my spirits had sunk down again. Quickly he switched from that subject, although he stayed a long while, casting round for other ways of interesting me, before he left.
Claustrophobia was getting hold of me. It had been a nuisance always. The scarlet tapestries pressed upon my eyes, the pillows were built up so that I couldn’t move my head more than a few degrees.
Blindness would be like this. Did one still have such hallucinations? Was it the absolute dark? Of all the private miseries, that was one I was not sure I could endure. None of us knew his limits. Once, when young Charles was conceived, I thought it might be beyond my limit if the genes had gone wrong, if he were born to a suffering one could do nothing about.
I shouldn’t be able to read with my left eye. That was practical. If this could happen to one eye, it could happen to the other. Peripheral vision (Mansel’s voice). Useful vision. A great deal of my life was lived through the eye. How could I get on without reading? Records, people reading to me. It would be gritty. How could I write? I should have to learn to dictate. It would be like learning a new language. Still.
The machine wearing out (Rubin’s voice). People talked about getting old. Did anyone believe it? Ageing men went in for rhetorical flourishes: but were they real? One didn’t live in terms of history, but in existential moments. One woke up as one had done thirty years before. Certainly that was true of me. Men were luckier than women. There was nothing brutal to remind one of time’s arrow. Perhaps men like Rubin, physicists, mathematicians, remembered they had had great concepts in their youth: never again, the power had gone. I had seen athletes in their thirties, finished, talking like old men and meaning it. But for me, day by day, existence hadn’t altered. Memory faltered a little: sometimes I forgot a name. The machine wearing out.
As I pushed one fact away, another swam in. Living in public. Attacks. That year’s attack, people saying that I had stolen other men’s writing. They could have accused me of many things, but, as I had told George Passant, not of that. That I couldn’t have done. You had to make yourself a better man (Charles March’s voice). Yes, but even when I was as he first knew me, when I was “tricky and rapacious”, that I could never have done. Not out of virtue, but out of temperament. It was one of my deficiencies – and sometimes a strength – that I had to stay indifferent to what I didn’t know at first-hand. Yet the accusation hurt. It seemed to hurt more than if it had been true.
In the red-dark: motionless: there came – for instants among the depression or the anger – a sense of freedom. This was as low as I had gone. There was a kind of exhilaration, which I had known just once before in my life, of being at the extreme.
Then the vacuum in my mind began to fill itself again.
Early in the fifth morning, Mansel’s greeting. The clever fingers: the reprieve of light. The lens, the large eye. He was taking longer than usual, examining from above, below, and the right.
Crisply he said: “I’m sorry, sir. We’ve failed. The retina hasn’t stuck.”
It was utterly unanticipated, I had prepared myself for a good deal, not for this. At the same time it sounded – as other announcements of ill-luck had sounded – like news I had known for a long time.
“Well,” I said, “this is remarkably tiresome.”
“That’s putting it mildly,” said Mansel. He spoke in bad temper, blaming himself and me, just as I heard scientists taking it out of their lab assistant after an experiment had gone wrong. He was recalculating. There was an element of chance in these operations. There was an element of human error. He couldn’t trace the fault.
“Anyway, inquests are useless,” he said snappily. He became a doctor, a good doctor, again.
“There’s no reason why you should be uncomfortable any longer,” he said, taking the cover off my good eye. We shall have to look after that one, he remarked, in reassurance. It would have to be inspected regularly, of course. He would ring up my wife, so that she could take me home. I should feel better there. It would do me good to have a drink as soon as I arrived.
“What will happen to this?” I pointed a finger towards the left eye.
“For the present, it will probably be rather like it was before we operated. Then, if we did nothing further – I shall have to talk to you about that, you understand, but not just now – if we did nothing further, it would gradually die on you. That might take some time.”
After he had gone, I sat up in bed and drank a cup of tea. Lying flat, I had been scarcely able to eat a sandwich, and I was hungry. Obviously Mansel wanted to try another operation. It was dark to face the thought of going through all that again. Just to get some minor vision. A little sight was better than no sight. The bad eye would die on me. That might be the right choice. He was a strong-willed man, he wouldn’t hav
e me let it go without a conflict. In my way I was stubborn too. I had to make my own forecasts.
Yet, in the middle of indecision, I got an animal pleasure out of being in the light. My left eye Mansel had bound up again, but the other was free. It was good to see the roofs outside, and a nurse’s face. She had spoken to me each morning, and now I saw her. If I had met her in the street, I should have thought she looked sensible enough, with the map of Ireland written on her. But now her face stood out, embossed, as though I had not seen a face before.
It was she who told me that I had a visitor. I looked at my watch. Still not ten o’clock. I thought Margaret had been in a hurry. But the nurse held the door open, not for her, but for young Charles.
“How are you?” I asked mechanically.
“No, how are you?” he said.
I asked if he had seen Margaret. I was hoping that she had broken the news to him. No, he had come straight from school: he had begged the morning off to visit me.
He sat by the bedside, watching me. I saw his skin, fresh from an adolescent shave. I had to come out with it. I said, more curtly than I intended: “It hasn’t worked.”
His face went stern with trouble.
“What does that mean?”
I answered direct: “I think it means that I shall go blind in that eye. But you’re not to worry–”
“Good God, why aren’t I to worry? What’s your sight going to be–”
I interrupted, and began to talk as reassuringly as Mansel. The good eye was perfectly sound. One could do anything, including play games, with one eye. Nature was sensible to give us two of everything. “We’ve got to take reasonable precautions, obviously, “I went on. “Mansel will have to check that eye, we shall lay on a routine–”
“How often?”
“Once a month, perhaps–”
“Once a week,” said Charles fiercely. I had never seen him so moved on my behalf.
I tried to distract him. Going back to one of the reflections that rankled when I lay in the dark (going back and deliberately domesticating it), I produced the kind of question that normally made him grin. Being accused of something which is untrue – one feels a sense of moral outrage. But being accused of something which is dead true – one also feels a sense of moral outrage. Which is the stronger? I told him a story of Roy Calvert and me, travelling with false passports in the war, masquerading as members of the International Red Cross – and being accused by French officials at the airport of being frauds. Just as in fact we were. I had never felt more affronted in my life, more morally wronged.