Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

On Monday morning, after a drugged and broken night, I woke early. I found Margaret looking at me. With a start I stared at the window. The veil was black: no larger, but like a presence on the nerves. I turned towards her, and said: “Well, we shall soon know.”

“Yes, we shall,” she said, steady by now.

When could I decently ring this man up? She was even prepared to smile at the “decently”: now the time had come, we had something to do.

Over breakfast we decided on nine o’clock. But when I tried his office, I heard that he had been in hospital since six. “Mr Mansel gets on without much sleep,” said his secretary, with proprietorial pride. I could get him there: which, fretted by the delays, in time I did.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t arrive home till late last night. They gave me your message.” The voice was brisk, light, professional. “What’s gone wrong with your eye?”

I told him. “That’s a very clear description,” the voice said with approval, rather as though I were a medical student walking the wards and making a report. I had better see him that morning. He was doing an operation at 9.30. He would be at Harley Street by 11.30. Too early for me?

No, not too early, we thought as the minutes dragged. I couldn’t block out the bad eye enough to read the newspapers. Margaret went through them for me: nothing much: a Kennedy speech: oh yes, the body of that child who was missing, the one in your home town, that’s just been found, poor boy: an old acquaintance called Lord Bridgwater (once Horace Timberlake) had died on Saturday. We were not interested. Margaret sat beside me in silence and held my hand.

Just as, still silent, she held my hand in the taxi on the way to Harley Street. It was only a quarter-of-an-hour’s trip from the north side of the park. We hadn’t been able to discipline ourselves; we arrived at 11.10. No, Mr Mansel wasn’t in yet: empty waiting-room, the smell of magazines, old furniture, the smell of waiting. All Margaret said was that, when he examined me, she wanted to be there.

At last the secretary entered, comely, hygienic, and led us in. Mansel was standing up, greeting me like a young man to an older; the room was sparkling with optical instruments, and Mansel himself was as sharp as an electronic engineer. Although our sons were in the same year at school, he was not more than forty, tall, thin, handsome in an avian fashion. Did he mind my wife staying? Not in the least. He showed her to a chair, me to another beside his desk. He had in front of him a card about me, name, age, address, clearly filled up: he asked a question.

“Should you say your general health was good?”

I hesitated. “I suppose so,” I said with reluctance, as though I were tempting fate.

No illnesses? Latest medical examination? Long ago. “Then we won’t waste any time on that,” he said with impersonal cheerfulness, and chose, out of a set of gadgets, what looked no more complicated than a single lens. Left eye? Firm fingers on my cheek, lens inches away, face close to mine. His eyes, preternaturally large, like a close-up on the screen, peered down: one angle, another, a third.

He took perhaps a minute, maybe less.

“It’s quite straightforward,” he said. “You’ve got a detached retina.”

“Thank God for that,” I heard Margaret say.

“As a matter of fact,” he said coolly, “I could have diagnosed it over the telephone.”

“If you had,” I said, sarcastic with relief, “it would have saved us a bad couple of hours.”

“Why, what did you think it was?”

Margaret and I glanced at each other with something like shame. Ridiculous fears we hadn’t spoken. Fears uninformed. Fears out of the medical dictionary. Brain tumour, and the rest.

Mansel was speaking as though cross with us.

“I understand. It’s easy to imagine things.” Actually, he was cross with himself. He hadn’t been sensitive enough. He wouldn’t make that mistake again. He wasn’t only a technician, I thought, he was a good doctor. From her corner by the surgical couch, Margaret broke out: “Mr Rochester.”

“What?” I said.

“He must have had exactly your condition. Don’t you remember?”

The point seemed to me well taken. Mansel found this conversation incomprehensible, and got down to business. He would have to operate, of course. What were the chances? I asked. Quite good. Statistically, I pressed him. Not worse than 75 per cent, not better than 85 per cent, he said with singular confidence. I wasn’t to expect too much: they ought to be able to give me back peripheral vision.

“What does that mean?”

“You won’t be able to read with it. But you’ll have some useful sight.”

If he could have operated on Saturday, he said, in an objective tone, just after the eye went, he might possibly have done better: it was too late now. Still, he had better get me into hospital that afternoon, and perform next morning.

“That’s a little difficult,” I said. To myself, my voice sounded as objective as his. I felt collected, exaggeratedly collected, as though, after the anticlimax, I had to compete on equal terms.

“Why is it difficult?”

I said that I had an engagement on Wednesday which I was anxious to keep. He interrogated me. I explained that I wouldn’t have thought twice about the formal ceremony at the university, but there was a Court meeting which I had given a serious promise to attend. Margaret, her face intent but hard to read, knew that I was referring to Vicky and her father.

“Some promises have to be broken,” said Mansel.

“I’ve got some responsibility this time. Some personal responsibility, you understand.”

“Well, I can’t judge that. But I’ve got to give you medical advice. You ought to have this operation tomorrow. The longer we put it off, the worse the chances are. I’ve got to tell you that.”

He was a strong-willed man. Somehow I had half-memories of the times I had clashed with men like this, both struggling for what I used to think of as the moral initiative.

“I’m not going to be unreasonable,” I said. “But you must be definite about the chances. Is that fair?”

“I’ll be as definite as I can.”

“If we delay three days, what difference will it really make?”

“Some.”

“Would it, say, halve the chances? In that case, of course, it’s off.”

His will was crossed by his professional honesty. He gave a frosty smile.

“No. Nothing like that.”

“Well then. Can you put it into figures again? Tomorrow you said it would be an 8o per cent chance. What would it be on Thursday?”

“A little worse.”

“How much worse?” I said.

“Perhaps 10 per cent.”

“Not more than 10 per cent?” I went on, “Less rather than more?”

“Yes,” said Mansel without palaver. “I should say that was true. Less rather than more.”

Then I asked, would he mind if I had a word with my wife alone? With his courtesy which was both professional and youthful, he said that he would be delighted: he was sure she would be the wisest of us all.

We looked into the waiting-room, but there were by now several people in it. So, her fingers interwoven with mine, we walked up and down the pavement outside the house. The mist had lifted, the air was pearly bright.

“Well,” I said, “what do I do?”

“I must say,” said Margaret, “I’d be happier to see you tucked up in hospital.”

“And yet, if you were me, you wouldn’t even hesitate, would you?”

“That’s a bit unkind.”

“No. The idea that you wouldn’t take a tiny bit of risk—”

She understood, without question, that I wasn’t being quixotic, as she might have been. If she had been asked, she might have said that I was showing defiance, taking my revenge for feeling helpless. In both of us as we grew older, there emerged a streak of recklessness which she had always had and which I loved in her. But this wasn’t a time, we took it for granted, to discuss motives. We had both got tired of the paralysis of subjectivism, when every action became about as good or about as bad as any other, provided that you could lucubrate it away.