Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“What are they saying?”

“They keep telling me that they’re sure I can manage until Christmas. I don’t like the sound of that, Lewis, I don’t like the sound of that.”

“Do they know how old you are?”

“Oh no. I haven’t told them that.” He regarded me with the most extreme shrewdness. “If anyone asks, I just say I’m a year older than I was this time last year.”

He burst out: “They’re beginning to ask if the walk home isn’t too much for me!”

It wasn’t an unreasonable question, addressed to a very old man for whom the walk meant a couple of hours on winter nights. It wasn’t an unreasonable question: but I hoped that that was all. I said, I was ready to arrange for a car, each time he had to attend the choir. Anything to prevent them getting rid of him. Anything.

“That’s very good of you, Lewis,” he said. “You know, I don’t want to give it up just now.”

His tone, however, was flat: and his expression hadn’t regained its innocent liveliness. My father might be a simple old man, but he had — unlike that fine scholar and man of affairs, Arnold Shaw — a nose for danger.

A voice was saying: “You’re waking up now.”

It was a voice I had not heard before, from close beside me. I had awakened into the dark.

“What time is it?” It was myself speaking, but it sounded thick-tongued in the dark.

“Nearly three o’clock.”

“Three o’clock when?”

“Three o’clock in the afternoon, of course. Mr Mansel operated this morning.”

Time had no meaning. A day and a bit since that visit to my father, that had no meaning either.

“I’m very thirsty.”

“You can’t have much. You can have a sip.”

As I became conscious, I was aware of nothing but thirst. I was struggling up to drink, a hand pressed my shoulder. “You mustn’t move.” I felt glass against my lips, a trickle of liquid: no taste, perhaps a dry taste, a tingle in the throat: soda water?

“More.”

“Not yet.”

In the claustrophobic dark, I was just a thirsty organism. I tried to think: they must have dehydrated me pretty thoroughly. Processes, tests, injections, the evening before, that morning, as I lay immobilised, blinded: reduced to hebetude. This was worse, an order of magnitude worse, than any thirst after a drunken night. I didn’t want to imagine the taste of alcohol. I didn’t want to touch alcohol again. Lemon squashes: lime juice: all the soft drinks I had ever known: I wanted them round me as soon as I got out of here, dreaming up a liquid but teetotal elysium.

Through the afternoon I begged sip after sip. In time, though what time I had no idea, the nurse said that my wife had come to see me. I felt Margaret’s hand in mine. Her voice was asking after me.

“I don’t like this much,” I said.

She took it for granted that it wasn’t discomfort I was complaining of. Yesterday’s superstition, today’s animal dependence — those I was grinding against.

“It won’t be long,” she said.

“Too long.”

Her voice sounded richer than when I could see her: she told me Mansel had reported that the operation had gone according to plan. It would have been easier if he could have done it earlier in the week (“obstinate devil,” I said, glad to be angry against someone). It had taken nearly three hours — “One’s playing with millimeters,” he had said, with a technician’s pride. He wouldn’t know whether it had worked or not for about four days.

“Four days.”

“Never mind,” she said.

“That’s easy to say.”

“There isn’t much I can say, is there?” she replied. “Oh, they’re all convinced you’re remarkably well. That’s rather a comfort, isn’t it?”

I didn’t respond.

“At least,” she said, “it is to me.”

Patiently she read to me out of the day’s papers. At last she had to leave me, in the dark.

Yet, though my eyes were shut and blindfold, it wasn’t the familiar dark. It wasn’t like being in a hotel room on a black night, thick curtains drawn. It was more oppressive than that. I seemed to be having a sustained hallucination, as though deep scarlet tapestries, colour glowing, texture embossed and patterned, were pressing on both my eyes. I had to get used to it, until the nightly drug put me to sleep, just as I had to get used to my thoughts.

Early next morning, time was still deranged; when I switched on the bedside radio it was silent. I heard Mansel’s greeting and felt skilled fingers taking off the bandages, unshielding the eye. Five minutes of light. The lens, the large eye peering, the aseptic “It looks all right so far”, the skilled fingers taking the light away again. A few minutes of his shop: it was a relief to get back into someone’s working life. What hours did he keep? Bed about 10.0, up at 5.30, first calls, like this one, between 6.0 and 7.0. Training like a billiards player, he couldn’t afford to take more than one drink a night: three operations that morning, two more after lunch. He enjoyed his job as much as Francis Getliffe enjoyed his: he was as clever with his hands. Nearly all his techniques were new. Thirty years ago, he told me, they couldn’t have done anything for me at all.

That was an interlude in the day. So was Margaret’s visit each afternoon, when she read to me. So was the radio news. Otherwise I lay there immobile, thinking, or not really thinking, so much as given over to a plasma of mental swirls, desires, apprehensions, resentments, sensual reveries, sometimes resolves. It wasn’t often that this plasma broke out into words: occasionally it did, but the mental swirl was nearer to a dream, or a set of dreams. Dreams in which what people called the “unconscious” lived side by side with the drafting of a letter. Once when I was making myself verbalise, I thought — as I had often done — that the idea of the unconscious as “deep” in our minds had done us harm. It was a bad model. It was just as bad a model as that of a “God out there”, out in space, beyond the clouds. We laughed at simple people and their high heavens, existing in our aboriginal three-dimensions: yet, when we turned our minds upon our own minds, we fell into precisely the same trap.

Thoughts swirled on. To anyone else, even to Margaret, I should have tried to make some sort of show of sarcasm. To myself, I hadn’t got the spirit. I didn’t like self-pity in myself or others. There were times, in those days, when I was doing nothing but pity myself. I had known that state before, ill and wretched, as a young man. I had more excuse then. This wasn’t enough excuse for one’s pride to break. Yet I couldn’t pretend.

Margaret asked if I wanted other visitors. None, I said, except her. That was an attempt at a gesture. Yes, I should have to see Charles March: as he was my doctor, I couldn’t keep him out. When he came in on the second morning, I told him, putting on an act, that it was absurd anything so trivial should be such a bore.

In his kind harsh voice (voices came at me out of the dark, some from nurses whom I had never seen) he replied: “I should find it intolerable, don’t you think I should?”

He was closer in sympathy than any of my friends, he could guess how I was handling my depression. As though casually, he set to work to support me by reminding me of the past. He had been thinking only the other day, he said — it gave him a certain malicious pleasure — of the way we had, in terms of money, exchanged places. When we first met, he had been a rich young man and I was penniless. Now he was living on a doctor’s income and I had become distinctly well-to-do.

“It would have seemed very curious, the first time you came to Bryanston Square, wouldn’t it?”