After a few moments he glanced over at Lacroix.
“Perhaps Mr. . . . ?”
“Lovall.”
“Perhaps Mr. Lovall could do as I am doing. Touching the eyelids. You will not object, Miss Frend?”
“No,” she said. She spoke as in a trance. (Who was that man in Paris who placed women in a kind of stupor? What became of him?) Lacroix walked past the desk to the window, stood in front of the chair, Rizzo at his shoulder.
“Very lightly,” said Rizzo. “Your hands here, and here. Your fingers . . . Yes. That is excellent.”
The instant Lacroix touched her he felt her response. The barest movement—a flinch, though he did not think she flinched away from him. He stroked his thumbs across the lids of her eyes, the living fragility of the skin with its shadowings, its tiny deltas of blood vessels. He touched an eyelash. He felt her breath on the inside of one of his wrists. Her own hands still gripped her bonnet. Knees together, boots together. Her back in the blue coat slightly arched.
“Now,” said Rizzo. “Please do the same with your own eyes . . . Yes? And now”—he took hold of Lacroix’s hands—“feel mine . . . ” The surgeon’s face. His skin warmer than Emily’s. The soft scrape of his whiskers. He smelled of something. Lacroix thought it might be Windsor soap. Emily looked up at them, blinking.
“There,” said Rizzo, removing Lacroix’s hands.
“Yes,” said Lacroix.
“You feel a difference? Miss Frend’s eyes are more stiff, yes? They do not . . . yield.”
“Yes,” said Lacroix. “I could feel that.”
“You could, of course.” The surgeon returned his attention to Emily. “You have headaches, Miss Frend?”
“On occasions.”
“You vomit?”
“No.”
“But each week you see a little less.”
“Yes.”
“Your father’s eyes?”
“Green,” she said, after a short pause.
Rizzo looked pleased with this. “I was thinking if he had a problem like your own.”
“No,” she said. “His eyes were always clear.”
“And your mother’s?”
“She died young. I was seven. I don’t remember her eyes.”
“Sisters, brothers . . . ?”
“They are both well,” she said.
“Except the teeth,” said Rizzo. He went to the desk, opened the drawer and took out a magnifying glass. It did not look particularly medical. More like an heirloom. He stared through the lens into Emily’s left eye, then the right. He muttered to himself. He scratched the bridge of his nose. Minutes passed. A slant of sunlight crossed the room. It lit the blue of Emily’s shoulder, the grey of Rizzo’s coat cuff, one of the knees of Lacroix’s trousers, then broke on the skirting board behind him in an eye-wide patch of light containing the rippling of tiny shadows, fern-like and hard to explain.
The cathedral bells sounded the half-hour. Rizzo seemed to wake from a dream of looking. He stood, returned his glass to the drawer, closed the drawer and took hold of his own elbows.
“The first thing I must tell you,” he said, “is that I do not know if I can be of assistance to you. Help you.” He waited.
Emily nodded. “And what is the next thing?” she asked.
“Next?”
“That was the first thing,” she said. “So there must be another. A second thing.”
“There is,” said Rizzo. “I can give you drops for your eyes. Belladonna. Or a tincture of aconite. I can give you a little bottle and three times each day you lean back your head and put the drops in your eyes. It is very simple.”
“It will cure me?”
“No,” said Rizzo. “It will not cure you.”
“Will it help me?”
“It may do. It may.”
She dropped her gaze to her lap, the blue bonnet, then looked up at Rizzo again. “I was hoping for more,” she said.
“Of course,” said Rizzo.
“I think I will be blind before the year is out,” she said.
“You wish me to operate on you,” said Rizzo.
“Can you?” asked Lacroix, who had been watching them intently.
“There is a procedure,” said Rizzo. “It has existed for many years, though in a very imperfect form. Recently, in Vienna and in Paris, there have been great advances. A colleague of mine at the Salpêtrière has performed it several times.”
“And you?” asked Emily. “Have you performed it?”
“He has sent me his drawings,” said Rizzo. He gestured to his desk. “Despite the war, Paris still speaks to Glasgow. The drawing are very exact. Rather beautiful. I have studied them. I have seen their . . . logic.”
“And what does it involve?” asked Lacroix. “The procedure?”
“It does not matter what it involves,” said Emily. “The question is whether Mr. Rizzo can do it and whether it will help.”
“Dear Miss Frend,” said Rizzo, “if I thought I could not do it I would never have mentioned it. Never. As to whether it will help you . . . ” He paused, then held his hands in front of his chest in an attitude of prayer. Slowly, he moved them apart. “Between yes and no,” he said, “we may imagine a line. The answer to your question is on that line, and closer, I believe, to yes than to no.”
“Much closer?”
“Closer.”
For a moment both Emily and Lacroix studied the air between Rizzo’s hands. Then Emily nodded.
“It is what I came for,” she said.
“You should consider it most carefully,” said Rizzo. “You should discuss it with your family. With your friends.”
“Mr. Rizzo,” said Emily. “I have thought of little else for several months. I do not want to think about it any more. Nor is it anyone’s decision but mine. If you can do it, if you will do it, if I am . . . suitable, then I wish it to be done. I wish that very much.”
Rizzo nodded. “You wish it to be done,” he said. He smiled. It was a kindly smile but seemed also to reflect some private thoughts on the character of human wishing. “As for your suitability,” he said, “how would you describe your general health?”
“Excellent,” she said. “I can walk all day without fatigue.”
“I might struggle to keep up with you,” said Rizzo.
“You might,” she said.
“And your appetite?”
“I do not eat meat but as you can see I manage perfectly well without it.”
“You eat fish?”
“I will eat whatever you tell me to eat.”
“If all my patients were so agreeable!” He turned to Lacroix, raised his glossy eyebrows then looked again at Emily. “So you wish me to operate?”
“I do.”
“What we are discussing will not restore to you the vision you had five years ago. Or even one. It cannot repair the damage already done. It is to stop further damage. To stop a deterioration.”
“To stop me from going blind.”
“Just so.”
“I understand.”
“And you understand also that I cannot offer you a guarantee of success?”
“I am not a child,” she said.
“No,” he said. “You are not a child and I do not wish to treat you as one.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You wish to know something more about my training?”
“Would they let you be here,” asked Emily, “if you were not suitably qualified?”
“I prefer to think not,” said Rizzo. He stared at Emily, fixed her with an intensity of regard that was, perhaps, part of his training. “Very well. I will do it. I will. Though first I must explain to you what the procedure . . . requires.”
Emily stood up. “I have confidence in you,” she said. “I do no
t need, do not want to be told, the particulars. I think then I might lose what courage I have.” She smiled. “Perhaps you would be kind enough to explain it to Mr. Lovall? He will tell me what he thinks I should know. In the meantime I will go and sit with the boy who brought us to you. Robert, is it not?”
She walked between the two men but did not quite manage to leave the room before she wept. Two, three big shudders, her face to the door.
“Emily,” said Lacroix quietly.
She did not turn around but raised a hand as if to keep either man from approaching. She said something, speaking to the door. Lacroix only heard the word “excess.” Then she touched her face, opened the door and left them.
“So . . . ” said Rizzo, after the men had spent some seconds staring into separate corners of the room.
“Yes,” said Lacroix. Then, “I am somewhat deaf. Or I hear very imperfectly. If you would speak as clearly as you can.”
“You have always been so?”
“It is a recent . . . affliction.”
“Following on an illness?”
“Yes.”
“Then perhaps it will improve. You may hope for that.”
Lacroix nodded. “Miss Frend’s eyes?”
“The eye,” said Rizzo, “is a bulb of living glass. Within this bulb are many things. Lens, sclera, cornea, nerves and so forth. There is also a fluid, an aqueous humour, that serves the eye in ways we may readily imagine. This fluid has its springs and channels, but if the channels are blocked and the spring continues to be productive, then the pressure inside the eye must be greater. That is the hardness you felt in Miss Frend’s eyes. As the pressure grows so it acts on the optic nerve. Over time the nerve is damaged. The result is loss of sight. In the operation I will seek to release the pressure and to allow the channels to flow again. As I have explained, the damage she has already suffered will remain. I cannot restore it. But if I am successful there will be no deterioration. She will keep the sight she has.”
“She will not be blind.”
“She will not.”
He stepped over to where the charts were pinned to the wall. He selected one and tapped it with a finger. “I will make a cut here, very small, and with a blade no larger than a needle and so sharp it parts the matter it touches as lightly as a thought. Through the incision I will draw out a part of her iris and I will remove it. For this I will employ another blade as precise as the first. All my instruments are made for me by Mr. Norie of Hutcheson Street, who is no village blacksmith, I may assure you. The entire operation will take less than half an hour. I will operate on the left eye first. It is the more damaged. Then the right eye when we are confident she has recovered her strength.”
“I suppose there will be pain,” said Lacroix.
“There will. But I believe she will bear it.”
“She must keep very still?”
“I will give her a soporific. I will calm her. And my assistant, Crisp, will hold her head.”
“For the cutting?”
“Yes.”
“And afterwards?”
“Her eyes will be bandaged. The dressings will be changed every day. This for a week or so. I cannot be more exact. Then, for another week, during daylight or in the presence of any strong light, her eyes should be covered. A simple silk scarf will suffice.”
“You make it sound straightforward enough,” said Lacroix, staring at the drawn eye on the chart. “What is the danger?”
“Bleeding. Excessive bleeding. Shock. Scarring. Above all the wound becoming morbid. But we are learning many new things in our new hospital. We are learning, for example, to wash our hands.”
“Yes? How can that help?” asked Lacroix. He was starting to turn against the whole business.
“It is a great debate among us,” said Rizzo. “The senior men still hold to the theory of night air, miasmas. But all the younger men, or most of us, are with Spallanzani. Soap and boiling water!” He walked the few steps to the door. “Come,” he said. “I will show you our theatre. It will reassure you. Or so I hope.”
Out of the room they turned away from the ward, following the corridor until they reached a short flight of steep stairs with a white-painted door at the top. They went up. Rizzo took a key from his coat pocket. “This is the surgeon’s entrance,” he said. “The patient enters on the other side.”
He unlocked the door and swung it open. Inside was a chamber, perfectly round, and perhaps three times the size of Rizzo’s consulting room. At the centre was a wooden table like a carpenter’s workbench, and on the floor beside it a woman was on her knees scrubbing the boards. Seeing the men she stopped her work and sat back on her heels.
“There’s nae supposed to be another until four o’clock,” she said. “Mr. Boyle is doing that poor wee man’s legs.”
“We are just visitors, Maggie,” said Rizzo. “We do not wish to disturb you.” To Lacroix he said, “In here we never need to operate by lamplight.” He pointed upwards to the curved roof of glass and iron, the luminous grey midday sky.
“This is the dome on the roof,” said Lacroix. “We are inside the dome?”
“We are!” said Rizzo. He picked up two chairs from where half a dozen were huddled by the patient’s door. He placed the chairs under the glass, stood on one while Lacroix climbed up on the other. Now their heads and shoulders rose above the bolted metal collar of the dome and they looked down on the roof of the cathedral, on smoking chimneys, the broken curves of the river, and out—out to heathland, woodland, the far hills of the western edge.
“We have been struck by lightning,” said Rizzo. “We have had to melt snow from the glass with pans of hot coals. Sometimes we are in a cloud. In general, however, I find the effect on patients to be excellent. In particular they like to see the birds. They take comfort from the sight of them.”
Lacroix nodded. He wondered how much comfort the poor wee man having his legs done that afternoon would find in the sight of seagulls overhead.
They climbed down from their chairs. The woman scrubbed still at the floor, dipping her brush then working it with both hands. The boards under the table were noticeably paler than those further out.
“When will you do it?” asked Lacroix as they descended the stairs.
“Now it has been decided,” said Rizzo, “it should be done as soon as possible. I will spend tonight studying my colleague’s notes. Can you be ready tomorrow? For noon? If you wait in the cathedral I will send someone to fetch you.”
They had reached the bottom of the stairs. They turned to each other.
“Tomorrow?” said Lacroix. “Surely you do not mean the operation?”
“First of all I will conduct another examination. Then, if I am satisfied and if Miss Frend is of the same mind as today, we will proceed. I intend to book the theatre for three. I have already seen there is a space then, a clear hour. Quite long enough.”
“But she cannot possibly be ready tomorrow!”
“No? Why not?”
“She must . . . prepare.”
“In what way?”
“I don’t know. She must . . . think about it.”
“You feel she has not done so? Not sufficiently?”
“You have only met her once!”
“This is true. Which is why tomorrow there will be a second examination. A very thorough one. That before anything.”
“Even so . . . Tomorrow!”
The surgeon smiled. He touched, very gently, Lacroix’s arm.
“It is you perhaps, Mr. Lovall, who is not ready. And please, I mean no criticism. You do not wish to see her place herself in any danger. But your Miss Frend sees it quite differently. The door you are afraid to watch her enter is the very same she longs to pass through. Of course, if she wishes for more time, then we delay. If she wishes to give up the whole affair, we give it up. If not, then tomorr
ow you wait in the choir of the cathedral and I will send someone to collect you. To collect Miss Frend.”
“At noon?”
“Noon precisely.”
As soon as he was outside with her, he led her into the hospital garden and told her Rizzo’s plan.
“And what did you say?” she asked.
“I said it was too soon. Of course.”
She nodded. She was silent. The city circled around them. From somewhere came the inexplicable sound of clanking chains.
“What time tomorrow?”
“Noon. In the cathedral.”
“The cathedral! Why there?”
“He did not say. I suppose he thinks it a more . . . peaceful place to wait.”
“He thinks I might want to pray,” she said.
“To what?”
“To pray. And you too.” She smiled. “This is vastly better,” she said.
“Is it? How?”
“He might have kept us waiting a week, a fortnight, a month. Think of it, John. Each morning rising to spend yet another day contemplating what is to come. I don’t think either of us could have stood it for very long. Or he might have thought me unsuitable. Or I might have thought him unsuitable. A thousand things.”
“You trust him?”
“Don’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose . . . But tomorrow!”
“It is you, I think, who is not ready,” she said.
“Me?”
“Yes.”
“That I am not ready?”
She nodded.
“That at least,” he said, passing a hand across his eyes, “seems agreed upon.”
They spent the afternoon taking in the sights, the alternative being to sit in a room at the inn endlessly picking over the interview with Rizzo. Lacroix instructed himself to accept. He was there as a companion of sorts, a friend. He was not a brother or husband. His role was to ensure she did not fall into someone’s cellar, that she was not accosted. Beyond that? Nothing, perhaps. Nothing but to be obliging. Kind.
They went to see Hamilton’s new playhouse on Queen Street. The summer season still had two weeks to run and in the foyer, in a gloom of unilluminated plush and dull gilt cherubs, Lacroix read out the playbill, a Caledonian adaption of Don Quixote, with Mr. Hamish Brewse as the Knight of the Sorrowful Countenance and Mrs. Adelaide McMartin as Sancho Panza. It sounded charming and foolish, and they pretended to each other that they might go and see it. Not tonight, of course, or tomorrow night or the next, but before the end of the run. “We could take a box,” said Lacroix. “Cornelius and Jane could join us.”
Now We Shall Be Entirely Free Page 24