What to Look for in Winter (32 page)

As far as I could, I avoided contact. This can worry and upset the small number that remains of persons who can endure you, or who are bound by piety or affection to do so. I terribly regret that.

If you think like this, you are likely to be straddling a cruel gulf into which you will decisively fall, and from which I am typing these words to you.

So hard is my brain lobbying to shut down my eyes that it makes up a headache in protest at the wrenching I'm imposing on my eyelids. Something has gone wrong in High Command, up here in my head. When I ask my brain whether it would like to come to bed, it replies that it has a headache.

In fifty-six days, I am to be the subject of the second half of a procedure that is quite untried but that has led to some relief for fourteen possessors of my condition. The other one has died, not of the procedure, but in the way of things. Most people with blepharospasm are women, yes, and most are older than I am. Which isn't to say that I won't die.

To my shame I have far too often and too routinely consulted means of doing so undetected in these last three years. I don't like to mention it, as the thought of my children having to outlive such a step pains me for them in the way that perhaps only the child of a suicide can know. If I can help it, my children will never know that particular shape of loss.

The procedure is called a Crawford Brow Suspension. In January, the muscles around my eyes were cut and stripped out. The effect is to toughen up the eyelids. Mine don't feel tougher, actually: they hurt more than they did. They are thicker and mauver than normal eyelids.
They feel and look swollen. They are shiny as though I have painted them with nail varnish the colour of certain small hard purple turnips. Where many women might put eyeshadow, I have scar tissue. So powerful continues the brain's imperative to the lids to remain in spasm that they force themselves shut with muscles extraneous to the lids themselves, muscles that the brain conscripts to effect its strange censoring.

The second half of the operation happens six months later, and I thought, at the time seven months ago when I elected to have this operation, that it would be a good idea to have it the day before my fifty-fourth birthday, which is on the 1st of July. The secret notion I had was that I would wake up remade on my birthday. The plain surgical fact is that I shall wake up not capable of walking comfortably for the coming month or so. And blind.

The operation comes in two parts in case of vascular crisis during a macabre reallocation, since the second half of a Crawford Brow Suspension, six months or more after the first, harvests the tendons from behind the subject's knees and inserts them, umbrella-frame-wise, beneath the forehead and the thickened, stripped eyelids. Some subjects report a subsequent difficulty with closing their eyes. Eye masks, like those used on long plane journeys, have been mentioned as being useful, as have partners, who may assist the subjects at close of day by firmly shutting down the now staring eyes of the once blinkered loved one.

I was chary of making the first part of this memoir and now I find myself writing a second, further to expose the first. It isn't unlike that eyebrow-stripping procedure: phase one, the first bit of memoir, to toughen up and prepare for deeper digging; phase two, this bit, to do that deeper digging, in order perhaps to see more, and be on the move again. Or to prepare to do these things.

I very much didn't wish ever surgically to interfere with my face and now am committed to doing it twice in a single year. It wasn't particularly that I was vain, though I was, but that I didn't fancy that
shared look of terror and conformity that declares cosmetic surgery's costly untruthful ghost to have passed. And I thought that I was interested by time and its effects upon a face. My children, too, had mentioned their misgivings about cosmetic surgery, the batched moms, the party lines of preservation. And it is expensive and self-necessitating; and I am a Scot and we don't do that like of thing.

I no longer physically recognise my face. My body is another matter that I would rather leave aside for the moment, which may have been something of the problem all along. Scotswomen make crack dualists; we are at odds with our bodies often, especially if we have early been fingered as being possessed of a brain.

 

I took the train to Glasgow from King's Cross. Since not noticing that my own house was on fire till I was nearly smoked, I have been staying at various places in London.

At Glasgow, I was met by the husband of my sister who is not my sister. So many of the relationships in my life are this kind of double negative adding up to a positive. As has been true throughout my life, quite little is what it seems, though much feels straightforward. I think this not unusual for people who make things.

I described earlier how I subtracted myself from home in my teens and added myself to the Howards in the Hebrides. Each of these islands is geographically, culturally and linguistically identifiably its own place. Smallness does not wear away individuation; rather the opposite.

I am here now, on the island of Colonsay, the place in the world where I borrowed a second childhood. I just sort of sank out of one life and emerged into another. It was not a kind thing to do. It may have set a pattern of which I cannot be proud and that my blindness may have given me the insight to break at last.

I'm renting a flat in the big house where we were children and where
I learned, if I learned, to share and transmit. This flat is made from rooms that were once nursery bedrooms; the flat's sitting room was the bedroom where my not-sisters Caroline and Katie ate Eno's Fruit Salts off their fingers in bed, and on the wall as he ever was is an engraving of Sir Wm Hamilton, Bt, Professor of Logic at the University of Edinburgh, published, as it happens, on 4 May 1857. Today is 4 May. I began this chapter on the 1st.

Next to Sir William is a coloured map of the Western Isles of Scotland, done into the Latin as befits a Scots nursery: ‘
Aebudae Insulae, sive Hebrides, quae Scotiae ad occasum praetenduntur, illustratae et descriptae de Timotheo Pont
. Colonsay appears, lying on its side as is the whole of the West Coast, preserving the modesty of the usually incontrovertibly (though docile) phallic Mull of Kintyre, under the cursive word ‘Collonsa'. The part of the island where this house would be built bears the label ‘Killouran'. Oransay, the small island off Colonsay, appears to be designated ‘Gruonsa', though that ‘G' may be a ruptured ‘O'.

The bathroom of the flat contains a small modern plastic bath that just holds me. Once, in its place, was a cast-iron bath that held all six of them and me, with a heavy steerable cylindrical contraption between the taps that was the plug. The bath (and all other) water in those days came off the hill and was the colour and flavour of peat. Now it is clear, though it still comes off the hill down from the loch above the house.

My brother Alexander who is not my brother is in charge here now, though his father, whom I call Papa, as all his children do, is completely alive. My not-sister Katie is Alexander's assistant and right hand and her husband William is woodman, dustman, playwright, diplomat, angle-grinder, freight-sorter, mandatory representative non-native at community meetings, and maker of vital connection. That is he takes life and rebags its stuff into packets that people can enjoy and be fed by. The blindworm boredom dare not come near him.

I have come here to recuperate in advance of whatever comes next
and to allow to settle the furious ineffectual seething of my inward life of this last year, and of too many of those years that preceded it. To some extent, too, I am getting myself, and the problem I constitute, out of the way. Where do you put a blind mother who falls over quite a lot and is not yet old enough to fold away for the winter with the barbecue and the swimming towels? It is I, not the children, who think like that, I know, and it's no help to anyone.

Upstairs a family who have rented a flat in what used when we were young women to be called the bachelors' corridor are preparing their tea. The father is talking. I cannot hear his words. It is not unusual for families to rent an annual holiday on the island over the whole transit of the raising of a family, whose progress may be followed through those irresistibly voyeuristic and eventually shaming comments books that are a feature of rental property. One is ashamed because one hasn't recreated the idyll recorded by some family more ideal, better at spotting otters, happier within itself, than one's own.

Or maybe that's me, who have been playing at families all along, with deadly seriousness and an eye on the competition because I've so little idea of how it works, my darling mother's surprising disembarkation having left me to improvise.

It is bath time upstairs. A tired young child is grizzling without commitment, nothing that a story will not sort. A radio is on. Water carries radio waves and I can hear enacted conversation, perhaps
The Archers
, under the living voices with their more convincing scoring for rests.

Outside, after a day of rain, the light is glittery. Through one window of the room where I am slowly typing may be seen the deep garden over and beyond a stream that is itself well beyond three swooping levels of lawn. Two huge trees,
Cupressus macrocarpa
, twisted by wind and time, hold the last evening sun till late (this is the North). Daisies and blossom smutch, sparkle and powder all the green lawn. Several surprising palm trees announce the passage of Victorian plant-hunters through this lush declivity, actually a geological fault, through Colonsay,
this old small rock, nine miles by three, covered with green and surrounded by that light-reflecting north-western sea. I know these sights because my memory provides them, though I can with discomfort and a certain stiff pincering address hold my eyeballs bare to take them in, even if it is not the same as the absorptive wash that soaks all-gathering sight. But it's something, and I do count my blessings.

I am unsure how good blessings-counting is for the character, or am I the only person who resents it when others tally your reasons to be cheerful for you? It's hard not to observe that they are finding coloured veins in the rock that sparkle best in rain. Also, don't lists with an uplifting undertow almost mandatorily make one gloomy?

A less negative aspect of blessings-counting came to me. Two electronic benefits occurred. I turned on a kettle, with whose product, hot water, I made a cup of Scottish Blend ferocious strong tea, with milk, and I received a text message from Claudia telling me of her doings today, and those of my son and Fram. I read the message by feeling my eyes and holding them bare, open.

Annabel and I also exchange texts most mornings. We have communicated daily for years. After all there are children in common. We are close friends who lead widely different days and may think we hanker for the other's way of life, but actually probably favour our own. I like the detail of her day; she accompanies the emptiness of mine and does much spiritually to fill it.

When we count blessings as they occur, we have a greater chance of valuing them. I cannot remember when I have not, having lived at certain times of my life without one or other of them, been grateful for plumbing and electricity. Hot water almost demands a deity of its own before which to lay oblations of scented soap and rough dry towels.

Which leads me to the pattern revealed in sleep to me, not for the first time, but with the soothing power of pain relief. My actual father, the man who with his short-lived first wife, my mother, conceived me, liked to ask me when I was small, ‘Do you know how to make a fishing net?'

The answer is that you find a lot of holes and tie them together.

Upstairs the toddler is gurgling. Voices through pipes make of the largest house a shared familial linked system, those rooms of space connected by the web of piping, the moving webs of water telling their message through the darker parts of the whole constructed system. Water is making comment throughout the pipes of the old house. A hum, the inception of warmth, accompanies the low hint of heated water through them. Flushes fall back and rise again within the white bathroom walls.

The best way to tell it is perhaps to try to thaw out that declared winter and to attempt to capture now what may be the actual, not the fancied, scene in the thaw. It is time to see that what felt like a sentence to emptiness may be an offer of air.

I
thought that I would take two lenses of time, one from after finishing the first part of this memoir, and one from now, here on Colonsay, this place that combines the present with the far personal past, and try to adjust them so as to see through or even catch some light to partly melt the snowy cover that lay across some of the bleaker branches or wider wastes of the earlier chapters.

There is a newish convention, that goes against any observation or experience of life that I have, that characteristics and narrative must not be ambivalent or ambiguous, or the reader will be confused. Since this is the condition of language itself, we are talking here about books brought to the level of nursery school reports, or of bad film synopses.

Ambiguity is there at all times. Tolstoy and Proust catch it. In triumph lies defeat, in consummation boredom, in despair self-watchfulness and the resurrection of attention. When I was told that I would never see my mother again, I felt not one but many things. As well as the confirmation that I was now unaccompanied, as well as the questions as to the cause of her death, that might not be asked, there was the unpleasant gratification of the event, that could not be admitted, but was nonetheless an attribute of that time. I knew that, for this probably very short time to come, no one would be unpleasant to me for being peculiar or showing off, or being fat, and that I would for a time be at the focus of something. In neither case was I in fact especially rewarded along the lines I had envisaged as parallel to feeling that harsh deep abandonedness. But I certainly knew that there was never going to be the simplicity and clarity I had previously imagined went along with growing up.

And surely it must grow one up remarkably, becoming motherless as quite a small child? Yes and no, of course. I have always tried to think how another person would behave, given my circumstances. I may think I can imagine this, but I cannot. Can I? Can you? I can
think how a character taken from a book would behave with more success than I might think how a friend or a member of my family might behave. I can guess, and I may be right, or I might be confounded, I cannot even imagine how I might behave. I just behave.

I may think that I have taken stock, but what will most likely have happened is that curdling mixture of inanition and violence that have characterised my life and that are more usual than either literature or our understanding of life conventionally allow. For if we were fully conscious of this catch all the time, it would be as impossible to live as if we were able continually to look at that glaring fact of mortality against which we have to fold our time away, and from which we must avert healthy eyes.

Our character and our personalities lie in the torsions between ambiguities, no matter how Romanly straight our apparent, enacted, nature. In fiction too it is these electrifyingly unsmoothed characters who most live, as against characters taken from stock. In life we are drawn often to people as unlike ourselves as possible. That compensating attraction means we outsource traits we do not possess but require. I twine like a convolvulus about people who apparently know their own minds. In very few, but how beloved, cases, have I been right.

As for such people as pride themselves on self-knowledge, it is as with those who admit with sheepish self-tenderness that they pride themselves upon their honesty. They are playing to their own gallery.

Some people do act without reflecting. They may be stupid, very brave or extremely well trained. Almost without exception there will be a sadness about them at the weight of those closed chambers and tightly stifled reflective surfaces within. Unless they are beyond privilege naïve, they are made jumpy by the untested and will not allow of the unknown. They curtail their vision with the red denial of a butcher insisting that his bloody crib is not an ox's carcass.

 

It is still raining in the Inner Hebrides in early May 2009. Through the water pipes I hear the upstairs toddler and through the window that is opposite the one that steams with garden green, I am aware–the window is at my back–of a conflict of rooftops, one curving over an arm of the house, the others sheltering its kitchen and offices, finished with softly bent pale lead and tiled with slate as deeply purple as pigeons. Everything is wet, the window as well. I am conscious of this sight because I have in my life seen it so often, so often that I am not sure that I need to see it now, such that I am saving my eyes for this screen rather than for the window whose view I am describing as I tap laboriously trying to elicit some scene from the past in order more clearly to stalk the truth like a white hare through the thaw, although I am pledged to the idea that truth about one's own life melts, or flits, again and again just as you breathe on it.

Not long after I spoke the words ‘Let's see', just after my birthday, I had the first and so far only grand mal fit of my life. It felt as though I were an old-fashioned camera, into which innumerable heavy lenses were being inserted one after another, each at a different and more acute setting, and then as quickly and clatteringly taken out. The world weighed heavy, shivered, fluctuated, jerked, grew too heavy utterly and fell to the ground in pieces as though my limbs were dud and chopped like fallen empty armour.

It felt not unlike the aftermath of drinking till blackout and indeed Fram, who saw me in hospital, at first wondered if I had been. For me the consequence of taking one drink is that I cannot stop for ever longer and more deeply degrading periods afterwards. If only it had been that simple. I do not know why my brain took this great insult and gave me a fit. I know that I was saved from something worse by my god-daughter, who was with me, and who rang an ambulance because she was afraid for both of us. She told me later, doing an imitation, that I hid from the ambulance men, and questioned their choice of shoes for hospital. I can remember nothing, just as after a blackout.

It was in A & E that I came to. I felt as though I was in the middle of a painting of a deathbed. I lay on a foreshortened bed off which I hung in a curtained space, with, to one side, a slim young man with striped hair in a stream like Beethoven running, and at the foot a group of young people in summery motley, cotton, stripes, lace, shawls, hoods. Two of them were blond and one had the dark hair and eyes of a young knight in a painting from the Renaissance. I remember thinking all that, the Beethoven, the clothes, the similarity to a painting, and I thought at that same moment that if I had had a stroke I was still myself within. I was frightened. I was worried that I had disrupted a number of people's days. I was embarrassed. I wondered how I could ever make it up to the children. There was also the startling fact that I could see.

I knew that I could not simply be polite and get out of this one. Something had occurred and the event, whatever it was, would not go away. I could not pretend that it had not happened. I was unable to remember that morning save for two detailed things. My first visitor that Sunday morning had been my daughter's friend Edward Behrens, later to be the Italian Renaissance figure at the foot of the bed in A & E. We had discussed the mushrooming scene in
Anna Karenina
, the moment when Tolstoy says that you could almost hear the grass growing, and describes a blade of grass that has pierced its way through a grey-green leaf of, I think, aspen. I said that I wanted to learn Russian and we discussed audio systems of teaching oneself a language. I suspected that I would be too passive to compensate for the absence of a teacher. Something was wrong that morning and I sent Behr on his way. It was a sunny day in Chelsea. He was off to lunch with friends. I felt as though the inside of my body were heating up and going to split my skin. I was afraid that I might be sick or worse in front of this clean young man who has been so good to me over these blind years.

The next thing I remember is that my god-daughter Flora appeared in the dark of the hall at that flat. Its lighting was faint,
its mood brown. The hall featured several subfusc contemporary oil paintings of Italian street scenes and a large bronze sculpture of a multiple demonic head that cast a horned shadow. When Flora arrived, over six foot two and thin as grasses in wind, she stood in the light of the front door and I saw her in the kind of intense detail that came to me often when I was very drunk and that was one of the reasons why I continued to explain my drinking to myself–that crack of clear high vision before passing out. It felt a bit like some kind of love, or doting.

I saw Flora heightened, as even more porelessly exquisite than her genes and mien have made her. She might have been the last thing I ever saw. For all she knew, she was. I scared her terribly. My last mortal sight before the new, fitting, world was a young woman of disproportionate height and slenderness in the lace and pinny of a Victorian child, complete with bloomers and smock. Below this stretched her long white legs, ending with ballet pumps. Her chiselled pale blonde head is perhaps a ninth of the length of the rest of her. Her hands waved like white cloth under water. She looks at the world through specs. God knows what she saw.

And then, for me, nothing. For poor Flora, panic and telephone calls, chasing to ground diverse family members, keys, messages, toothbrush, the intimate chores of sudden event. We get no rehearsal. She did it all with the kind of competence that can come only naturally.

I knew that something had happened and was possessed by the idea that it was a stroke. McWilliams die young of strokes, especially fat McWilliams. Thin ones die young of heart attack.

In the hospital Flora said, ‘Fram and Minoo are coming. Fram says everything will be all right.' Fram is the human whom I always believe. I hand to him inappropriately profound knowledge and sagacity, authority. It is burdensome for any mortal and worse for one as sceptical and intelligent. Nonetheless, all I wanted was Fram's assurance and he will have known that. The same goes for our son Minoo.

Beethoven said, ‘You are in the best place, Candia. We do not
think it is a stroke. As far as we can see, you seem to have had a grand mal fit.'

He knew what to say. He saw the main fear, addressed and dismissed it, and supplied as much fact as he was able. He also, with some generosity, said something sensible and kind about the ever higher doses of antipsychotic drugs I had been prescribed with a view to causing my brain to have some sort of benevolent convulsion that might, as had sometimes been suggested by certain controlled cases and had been written about in a couple of academic papers, alleviate my blepharospasm. What Beethoven said was mild, intelligent and noncommittal.

By now I realised Beethoven was in fact my GP and he knew me well enough to tell me the truth. It was a relief to be understood, to be treated as myself. He spoke sanely and the relief, that of finding myself in a sane, if frightening, world, was great. It is Beethoven, of all the first wave of doctors, who has helped the most. How frustrating then that his skills–common sense, empathy, compassion, practical doctoring–are undervalued in an NHS crippled by bureaucratic failure to communicate from the most basic to the most elevated levels and awash with specialisms that take no account of one another.

‘I'll tell you what,' said my GP. ‘You must go to
Don Carlos
.'

I heard it with gratitude as a sentence from the lost world, from which I had been cut off by a mixture of illness and my own self-isolation. Long before I had become ill, I had become almost incapable of going out. But this was a healthy sentence and I heard it gratefully. I also realised that very few people knew how odd and shy I now was and that the thought of going out at all was nearly impossible, that my automatic response to any invitation or suggestion was ‘No'. I wanted to be connected, but had forgotten the flags to hoist to make the right signals.

I love
Don Carlos
, the darkness of the bass voices, the problems of conscience and power, the fear that fills it, the intractable love-muddle. All the stuff that my father disliked about it, I love. It makes me feel
that nothing cannot be thought through to the sound of it, though actually my father might have said one is feeling rather than thinking. It thickens the air and my father liked his mental air clear although he could do turbid domestic silences and was a retired master of brooding absence. He did these for my mother, not my stepmother, who was certainly a better wife for him. I wonder how often in a day I think, in three contexts, that last phrase? So much so that the ease with which I use it to hurt myself bears reining in. Since my husbands' wives are not there to hurt me, why do I sink to using the thought of them to do so?

Because, perhaps, it feels familiar.

The days that followed in hospital I still cannot make out. I felt like an animal and I knew that I was dying. I could not explain this to people. I was acutely worried about my daughter, who was already in a bad way as her ex-boyfriend had recently died in his early twenties of anoxia. When I got to a ward, my diagnosis was posted on my bed. It said that I had anoxia. Clem was wobbly and I couldn't properly help. I was rigged up to tubes and looked unconvincing as a comforter. In American English a comforter is what we in Britain call an eiderdown or quilt or in Scotland it's a downy. In the Prayer Book, the Comforter is the Holy Ghost. I looked more like an eiderdown.

I kept trying to make things better for people and failing. I had the powerful sense that I was being a nuisance. It seemed that I could not make things clear to anybody.

I am absolutely certain that none of this is unusual when you find yourself in hospital. When it comes to hospital
Omne ignotum pro terrore
says it all. Why was I so sure I was going to die? Was I attention-seeking? At first I feared I might be. I determined to be as mouselike as I could. It is a thing I do, a McWilliamish habit. We go humble and invisible. It drives Fram mad. I see why. But it's what fear brings out in me.

I didn't think precisely that Death would pass me over on his ward
calls if I were polite and self-effacing enough. I thought that the nurses wouldn't resent me. It was as pathetic as that. And why should nurses resent their patients? Why are they nurses if they do that? I don't know, but these ones, or so I thought, did. I have reason now to think that I wasn't wrong, but let that come later.