Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

Anyway, the three of them remained on the best of terms, and Maurice and Pat had another drink or two before the end of the evening.

When Maurice had gone back to Cambridge and Margaret and I were alone, she reminded me more than once of that initiative of his. She was proud of how uninhibited he was, particularly when she was worrying about him again. And also she thought he had been right. She was a little ashamed of herself, of course, for having been softened by Pat’s blarney. She was, like Maurice, altogether on Vicky’s side. It would be bad for her if the affair dragged on like this.

So we talked, on pleasant October evenings. There wasn’t much on our minds. I was working hard, but not obsessively. On a Friday night Charles rang up, according to habit, from school. All well. I told him that, the following Wednesday, I had to go to the University Court and Congregation. “Multiplying mummery,” came the deep mocking voice over the wire. Politics too, I said. That’s more like it, said Charles.

The next morning I woke up, drowsy with well-being, looking forward as I came to consciousness to a leisurely weekend alone with Margaret. I was lying on my right, and through a gap in the curtains the misty morning light came in over the Tyburn gardens. As I looked at the gap, I noticed — no, I didn’t notice, it hit me like a jolt in a jet plane 30,000 feet up, the passage up to that instant purring with calm — a veil over the corner of my left eye. A black veil, sharp-edged. I blinked. The veil disappeared: I felt a flood of reassurance. I looked again. The veil was there, covering perhaps a quarter of the eye, not more.

Margaret was sleeping like a child. I got out of bed and went to the window, pulling a little of one curtain back. Outside was a tranquil autumn haze. It was the kind of morning in which, years before, it had been good to be back in England after a holiday abroad. On my left side, the black edge cut out the haze. I blinked. I went on testing one eye, then the other. It was like pressing on a tooth to make sure it is still aching. The veil remained. Now that I was looking out into the full light, there was a penumbra, orange-brown, along its edge, through which I had some sort of swirling half-vision, as through blurred smoked glass. The veil itself was impenetrable. No pain.

I tiptoed out to the bathroom, and looked at myself in the glass. A familiar eye looked back. There wasn’t a mark on it, the iris was bright, the white wasn’t bloodshot. The lines in my face had deepened, that was all.

I went back to bed, trying to steady myself. I was more frightened, or not so much frightened as nervously exposed, than I liked being. Later on, people made excuses for me, told me it wasn’t so unnatural: the eye is close to the central nervous system, and so, they said cheeringly, eye afflictions often have their psychological effects. But I wasn’t thinking of explanations or excuses then. All I wanted was to talk sensibly to Margaret.

She was still sleeping. As a rule, she slept heavily in the early morning, and woke confused. Again I left the bed, found our housekeeper already stirring, and asked for breakfast as soon as she could bring it. Then I sat looking down at my wife. I said, “I’m sorry, but I should like you to wake up now.”

AS I put my hand on her shoulder, she struggled through a dream, through layers of sleep. She managed to say, is anything the matter? I replied that a cup of tea would be arriving soon. She asked the time, and when I told her, said that it was too early. I said that I was just a little worried. What about, she said, still not awake, then suddenly she caught my tone of voice. What about? she said, only to act, slipping out of bed into her dressing gown, watching me, her face wide open.

While she had a cup of tea, smoked her first cigarette, I described my symptoms. Or rather my symptom, for there was only the one. “What can it be?” said Margaret. I was asking her the same thing. For a moment we looked at each other, each suspecting that the other had some guess or secret knowledge. Then we knew that we were equally lost.

She didn’t think of saying that it might pass. We were too much at one for that. Over breakfast she was wondering what advice we could get. Clearly we needed an eye specialist. What about the man whose son was at Charles’ school? No sooner had she thought of the name than she was riffling through the telephone directory. Mansel. Harley Street. No answer there. Home address. She got through, and, listening, I gathered that Mr Mansel was away. At an eye surgeons’ conference in Stockholm. He would be back very late tomorrow, Sunday, night.

“That’s probably time enough,” I said.

She said: “I want to know what you’ve got.”

I argued, with the perverse obstinacy of shock, that he was said to be first rate and that at casual meetings we had both liked him. We could ring him up on Monday morning: that would, I said again, be time enough.

“I want to know,” she said. Couldn’t we find a doctor who might have an idea? The curious thing was, we couldn’t really be said to have a doctor. Since my breakdown as a young man, I had been, apart from bouts of lumbago, abnormally healthy: so had she been, and she hadn’t yet entered the change of life. So far as we had a doctor, it was my old friend Charles March, but he hadn’t visited us professionally for something like ten years.

Still, she would talk to him, she said. Once more I listened to her on the telephone. Dr March was on holiday, was he? Back in a fortnight? He had a locum, of course? Could she have his telephone number?

“No, leave it now,” I said.

She did not mention the name of her first husband. He was an excellent doctor, she had complete faith in him — but no, she couldn’t, she couldn’t disturb, not the peace of the moment, but the insulation of the moment in which we sat together.

But there were other doctors. Later it seemed to us inexplicable — or out of character for either of us, especially her, so active and protective — that we spoke to none of them through that long weekend. She was used to a kind of pointless stoicism which sometimes, in bad trouble, came over me. As a rule, if we expected harsh news, she wanted to find out the worst and get it over: my instinct was to wait, it would come soon enough, other miseries had passed and so might this. That weekend, though, she behaved as I did myself. I was worried enough but, perhaps because I had a physical malaise to preoccupy me, she was worse. For once, she did not want to brave it out and discover our fate.

During the morning, I went into the study and found her there. In a hurry, she put her hand over what she was reading. It was a medical dictionary. I had come for exactly the same purpose. I gave her a smile. It was the sort of grim joke old Gay’s saga men would have enjoyed. She smiled back, but she was having to control her face.

Before lunch we went for a walk in the park. It was a day of absolute calm, the sun warm enough to tinge the skin, the mist still lying in the hollows. The grass smelt as welcoming as on a morning in childhood. Margaret, clutching my arm, was watching me shut and open my left eye.

“How is it?”

“No better,” I said. In fact, it was worse. The veil had spread and now covered between a third and a half of the eye. The orange penumbra flickered dizzily as I tried to gaze into the benign autumn sky. When I closed the eye, I could walk as comfortably as on the afternoon before, the time that Margaret and I had taken a stroll in the same beautiful weather.

It was a long weekend. I couldn’t write or even read: as for looking at television, that became an exercise in calculating whether the veil was creeping further. We talked a good deal, but only about what had happened to us, us together, us alone. Those we were interested in, or responsible for, we didn’t talk about at all. The exchanges of habit, as soothing as a domestic animal one loved, those we had thrown away: not a word about Charles’ next Sunday at home. Some time before the Sunday morning Margaret had made her own diagnosis. I didn’t ask to know it. And yet at moments, as in all strain, time played tricks. We were back on Friday evening, having our drinks after Charles’ telephone call. This hadn’t happened. And then Margaret was watching me as I opened my eye.