What to Look for in Winter (40 page)

Is it not curious that the doctor who prescribed these drugs never got in touch with me again, when I had been told that any reduction in, let alone cessation of, dosage, could be perilous? What can he have thought was going on? I suppose it never came up in the life of one so busy. We wreck once more against the rock of comparative values placed on time.

The couplet remains inside my head but I think it is there more on account of its balance and structure than its message. Rhythm injects it deep into the head.

I couldn't work out what my point was. I saw myself as a tied-down giant, and Fram and Claudia as normal-sized beings who had worked out how to live, dancing free, in their triumph of enlightenment.

Why did I mind so much about the world, since I entered it almost never? Certainly, when people see a middle-aged woman whom they don't know, they try to place her within the customary grids, and marriage is one of these.

I must make myself whole by work. After all, I am old enough. I am at an age when I might not long at all ago have expected to be dead, or at least widowed.

Those things of which I am unpleasantly jealous reflect ill upon me and are to do with her having been born into a context, rather than into my little family where the hotter personality evanesced and the cooler one thought personal conversation all but contemptible. Or so I surmise. I just don't know. As must by now be clear, I've collected myself from here and there which may be the best I can do. In the middle are words and a capacity for recognition.

There is a particular formal stance of heartlessness that is a certain English way of protecting the heart, the elegant sternness that is one
mode and often goes with the throwaway unadvertised, indeed denied, deep sensibility that sees off the vain and fake. It may be found at a peak of comedy and sadness in the work of Evelyn Waugh. It has been a tone congenial to Fram all along and now he inhabits it.

He is an alert reader. He grasped just as well too the empty dove-cote that is the McWilliam tone. Scots say doocot, and so do I, but I thought I should spell it out. It's only by a feather that I didn't say columbarium, which is the word that first came to me; but that word is too full and successful and plump, though hardly too classical, for my father, who mentions in one of his books the fine columbarium kept by Drummond of Hawthornden.

 

I left Hampshire just in time to return there for our customary family Christmas.

I travelled by train from London carrying nothing but the stockings for the younger children. Standing room only on the train.

‘You are joking?' said the woman who stood bumpily next to me in the vestibule when I told her I couldn't see very well, which was why I was peering around and craning, ‘I had you down for different, but not blind. You've got lipstick on.'

We talked about Christmas plans.

Her son-in-law made sure the family had a tree that wasn't just thrown away. They had one tree outdoors with lights and real roots in the ground, and an artificial tree indoors with a long string of bud lights that also came in useful at birthdays. This was the first year she wasn't taking her cat, Graham, to the family over Christmas. The neighbour had a key and was going into her flat on the day itself, with Graham's stocking.

‘Nothing fancy, though. Toys, biscuits, a card and that. Just what he'd expect.'

O
n 8 January, my cat Ormiston was run over, the first time ever he had strayed from the girls' garden, where all summer he chewed grass and flew up to pat the air inaccurately over the spread purple buddleia tassels where a butterfly had been. Killed instantly, no marks. I still don't think about it. I skirt it in my mind because I am afraid to start, and, if he was only a cat, what do I do with all the other grief? Crying helps the sight after all.

Or it did, before I had the first operation for the Crawford Brow Suspension, on the 21st of January of this year, 2009. My eyes are different since that operation. Crying is hotter and tighter. I'll come to that.

Leander and Rachel were wretched. They had a haunted sense that if he had stayed with me he would have been alive. If he'd stayed with me, though, he wouldn't have had such a life, with companions, butterfly-attracting plants put in at his request, and fresh fish. He would not have had his summer of being Warburton and exploring the uncatty group ethic he enjoyed. He was a team player; an unusual characteristic in a cat.

After Ormy was buried, Minoo went round to the house in Oxford. He prefers his cats disdainful, sardonic and free, but he ate an entire lemon drizzle cake in memory of Ormy and reported the handsome location of my people-pleasing cat's remains.

Something of Ormy's appeal for me was that slight dogginess. He was in on the joke and played up to it, sometimes allowing himself to retrieve a ball if we were alone and unobserved.

He was funny, and you laugh aloud less often if you live on your own and don't really read. I didn't think I would ever say that about myself. It's always been a sentence that puzzled me: ‘I don't really
read.' I see it now. It means, ‘I read what I have to, like instructions on dangerous machinery or in lifts.'

My first blind summer, two friends, married to one another, had sat with me at Tite Street. They'd brought a rhubarb tart with crème patissière. He had glancingly said that he had counselled a mutual friend not to buy a puppy as it would be just another thing to grow fond of and eventually to lose. Rita the blue cat had fallen in love with him.

Now, a year and a half on, he, I and Rita remained above the earth. Ormiston had been an inch of air, a pinch of fluff. My friend's wife had been his response and crown of life. Who can plumb her loss? Nothing took her away. Nothing had her. Nothing had its victory. Nothing endures.

I now missed the foolish flat face of my cat up against my neck, telling me that it was time to get up at five-thirty in the morning. Even though he had been doing it in another house, with other people, I had known he was on earth and cared for. What comic strands have emerged throughout these years of eye-time (well? There is much talk of me-time). Ormy had been a guileless occasion of laughter.

Others went some way to providing other forms of diversion. Some have to be buried for discretion, or transmuted.

My favourite fun theme has been the silent wager I make with myself about the literary ambitions of the medically distinguished, and of quacks, too, now that I think about it.

It's my limited understanding that I have been visiting doctors so regularly for thirty-six months because I am decreasingly able to see. With my eyes, that is. My, admittedly subjective, sense has been that reading, by which I not only made to some extent my living, and by which I live, has become difficult. I'll put it simply. Very often I can't see. I'm blind.

You will be aware of this. You are a reader.

However, not invariably, but often enough to give reality a firm
shake, a doctor will say to me as I leave his consulting rooms, very possibly having written a cheque (is that where I go wrong? They see that I can write, after all?), ‘Ah, Mrs Dinshaw, Candia, did you say you were a writer? Books, is that?'

A bit. Once. Things a bit challenging at present. My eyes, you see. Cranking the odd thing out for friends. Scottish literary papers. Things like that (thinking, ‘That'll put him off. Surely he will realise that it's a polite rebuttal of what he doesn't know I know he's going to say?')

Women practitioners are as liable to do this as men. Let me be fair.

‘Ah yes. I must ask my wife to look you up. I don't get much time to read. Other than for work. Papers, you know.'

Indeed so.

‘But you meet all sorts doing this job. It's taken me all over the world. Some pretty amazing places. You wouldn't believe. And I've often thought.'

If you had the time.

‘If I had a moment, that it would make a book. An interesting one.'

Not a novel, then.

‘I often think that real life reaches places, well, you won't mind my saying this, but truth is, it's not just a cliché, stranger than fiction. And you don't make anything up. It's all true.'

This is getting in deep. Ask it, do.

‘Would you know of who I should talk to about getting it published?'

And then, a little carried away by the different glories attendant upon the idea of being a writer as well as a doctor, ‘Would you mind having a look at it for me? I've actually had time to get something down. It's typed, you know. No doctor's writing!'

I am really interested by doctors. I wanted to be one. My mother and I, retrospect tells me, both go, or went, for tall men in old-fashioned clothes and good overcoats, which was, in Edinburgh terms in her young womanhood, doctors. We visited a doctor with
pinstriped long legs and a watch chain quite a lot. I sat on his knee and he gave me boiled sweets from a jar with no top. His height and expertise and silver hair imprinted me for life with one way of being a glamorous man. I've no idea who prescribed her sleepers.

I would happily write about doctors in fiction. Or write fiction about doctors, or help a doctor friend write a paper. I might easily ghost a doctor's memoir, should he want me to, were he to find my sight. A fair swap, words for seeing?

I except from all this my GP, whose understanding, he has self-deprecatingly said to me, falls short of words. It doesn't. It goes beneath them and into music. His kind of doctoring has that human affinity that used to be called compassion.

As well as the doctor-autobiographers to whom I felt I couldn't at that time give the assistance required, there was new and much more interesting comedy in the form of the surgeon who has come to the salvation of blepharospastics with his two-part operation. When people keep saying to you, ‘Of course, he is brilliant', you know that you are going to be handed a sharp spray of human traits.

His name is Alexander Foss. I heard of him because a fellow sufferer from blepharospasm, Marion Bailey, had written to me after reading a piece that
The Times
reprinted from
The Scottish Review of Books
that I wrote about being blind and not blind. She and her husband have become as godparents to my eyes; they are the chief kind strangers in our family's recent history. Alexander Foss gave Marion back her sight. She understands exactly the trap and paradox of the maddening condition that is blepharospasm. Her courage and generosity have kept me upright. She wrote to me, enclosing photographs, about the operations with which Alexander Foss had given her back her sight.

John and Marion Bailey came to meet Olly and me. Her story was my own, baffling, alarming, frustrating, frightening, intractable. But she had found some kind of redress, and now, if she husbanded it attentively, had a good measure of sight. We decided to follow her
generous example. Words, their publication, and their being read, passed sight through the hands of Alexander Foss from Marion Bailey's eyes to my own. How can I thank them all enough?

 

Annabel and I had made an appointment to meet Mr Foss in the Midlands, where he practises, before Christmas. We drove up in December snow, late one Monday. Our treat was a boutique hotel in Nottingham. I had a disabled room with a red cord to tug in case of falling. I was in a pneumatic boot by this time, and as ever used my white stick, not to feel my way, but to tell people not to be upset if I crashed into things, and that I was best avoided. The plumbing and electricity in the hotel were of that unexplained hidden kind that only those born to mobile phones can operate without fiddling and splash. The comfort was practical, the welcome warm.

Mr Foss works within swifter time passages than the rest of the race. His supreme charm as a doctor is that he does no prologue, no soothing, no explanation, no awful chat. I could tell at once that he was a surgeon,
tout court
, pure brain and action. We arrived, we asked questions from our careful list, then we were out. We tried in the coming weeks to work out what this acute man had said. We had fun thinking of things that he would be least likely to say. These included:

How was your journey?

Are you staying locally?

And the family, how are they taking it?

Christmas plans, at all?

What a relief it was. Does the mutton roast want to be asked about its native pastures by the man with the whetstone and the blade?

We took against him for about two minutes each and then without
knowing it we turned him into a hero. I suppose he had been auditioning us too. Luckily Annabel is a doctor's daughter and managed a direct question.

Would it hurt for a long time afterwards?

I, sitting down, am about up to his chest when he is standing. He is nonetheless a formidable presence. His words come out at the speed of a lizard's tongue, where the fly is your attention. Only much later do you realise what's happened or been said. He smiles when he says the worst things, but not unkindly, at all. More like a true wit. I think he may be one. My guess is that he will not linger because what he does is of such intense moment. You can with ease imagine him seeing off death, around which he is often, as he is around the dark of blindness. His specialism is cancer of the eyes. He clicks and pops like an indoor firework.

What he told us was that I had one of the two worst cases of blepharospasm he had seen, and that I was lucky, as twenty years ago I would've been sectioned, that if I disliked him now I would hate him after the first operation, after the second it would be curtains for us, it would hurt so much.

Annabel and I returned south through the snow with a new person to develop inside the story. We each kept remembering delightfully, in a slow conventional world, rude, actually terrific, things he had said.

We started inventing them.

That leg'll have to come off too; no point holding on to a duff limb.

Prepare yourself for complete failure; no operation is more than a good try.

Only one thing's ever certain.

We imagined him paying compliments:

That hat has got to come off.

Ordering a meal:

Where's the bill?

Proposing:

It's shortly our tenth anniversary.

We liked Mr Foss.

For my first operation, it was again Annabel who took me. We tried to imagine, in hospital that January morning before I went down to the theatre, what he might say when he came on his visit to me before I was knocked out and wheeled in for his attention.

Mr Foss came into the clean little hospital room where I was too big for everything, chairs, bed, gown, slippers, paper knickers.

He had a form.

We'd been surmising and practising reassuringly feel-bad things he might be moved, or, admit it, induced, to say.

Annabel was in the lead with, ‘I'm dispensing with time-wasting anaesthesia.'

She had also scored highly with, ‘Look here, I'm busy today.'

He raced through the form. It was the usual. Next of kin, religion, etc.

He filled in the name of the operation: Crawford Brow Suspension.

Then he spluttered boyishly, ‘Benefits of operation?'

We waited. It was, after all, his field.

‘None. No benefits. None at all. Not that I can honestly say,' he said, and was gone, leaving us in the highest possible spirits. That man could be a general. One would lose a limb for him with his surgical high spirits.

There used to be a phrase, used of certain drinks, ‘A meal in itself'.

Mr Foss is the life force in itself.

This is not in my experience true of most doctors.

Annabel set off for the South; she drives with mettle. She is the sort of ladylike quiet person with quick reactions whom you will find calmly running things when flashier ones have decamped. Accomplished, brave, capable, dutiful, her alphabet might begin. She can name most popular music tracks of the last forty years, and keep a poker face.

It's odd. I am afraid of blue eyes, yet both Annabel and Claudia have them, markedly so, each in her way. Annabel's are pale blue, really like aquamarines, and give you a shiver with their bright chill and almost pure colour, no black but for a pierced dot. If she weren't smiling below them, they would be icy, and can look uninhabited. Claudia's too can alarm because they inhabit a face that will not play along with anything that discomfits.

Both Annabel and Claudia have a gaze of pinning intentness. Each is a contact-lens wearer of long standing, and short-sighted. Both shake themselves when their eyes are tired, as though to refocus. Each pushes her fringe up with a hand to catch and ingest light through her pair of blue irises.

My own pair of green eyes woke up in the afternoon that January with bloody blinkers made of gauze strapped over them. My whole face, when I patted it, was strapped, like a mummy in a horror film.

I was ridiculously anxious that no nurse should think that I had had a cosmetic procedure. I knew these were going on around me in that hospital.

When I came round in the post-operative room, a nice young male anaesthetist asked, ‘Are you married?'

I replied that I was but that as I understood it, it was complicated and the terms hadn't been invented yet and that my husband lived with someone else whom I was fond of.

I thought that this was a good opportunity to start as I meant to go on, naming things as I awoke into this new post-operative world.