Charles Snow - The Sleep of Reason

“How are you?” I asked mechanically.

“No, how are you ?” he said.

I asked if he had seen Margaret. I was hoping that she had broken the news to him. No, he had come straight from school: he had begged the morning off to visit me.

He sat by the bedside, watching me. I saw his skin, fresh from an adolescent shave. I had to come out with it. I said, more curtly than I intended: “It hasn’t worked.”

His face went stern with trouble.

“What does that mean?”

I answered direct: “I think it means that I shall go blind in that eye. But you’re not to worry—”

“Good God, why aren’t I to worry? What’s your sight going to be—”

I interrupted, and began to talk as reassuringly as Mansel. The good eye was perfectly sound. One could do anything, including play games, with one eye. Nature was sensible to give us two of everything. “We’ve got to take reasonable precautions, obviously, “I went on. “Mansel will have to check that eye, we shall lay on a routine—”

“How often?”

“Once a month, perhaps—”

“Once a week,” said Charles fiercely. I had never seen him so moved on my behalf.

I tried to distract him. Going back to one of the reflections that rankled when I lay in the dark (going back and deliberately domesticating it), I produced the kind of question that normally made him grin. Being accused of something which is untrue — one feels a sense of moral outrage. But being accused of something which is dead true — one also feels a sense of moral outrage. Which is the stronger? I told him a story of Roy Calvert and me, travelling with false passports in the war, masquerading as members of the International Red Cross — and being accused by French officials at the airport of being frauds. Just as in fact we were. I had never felt more affronted in my life, more morally wronged.

Charles gave a faint absent smile, and then his face became stern again. I had a suspicion that he was hiding some trouble of his own. Love, perhaps — or equally possible, some essay that in his professional fashion he thought had been undermarked. In any case, he would have kept his own secrets: but that morning he wanted to conceal the expression on his face. Could he take me home? It was foolish to bring Margaret all this way. He would ring her up while I dressed.

Soon he was leading me through the corridors — the hospital smell threatening, the walls echoing and gaunt. He was supporting me, unnecessarily, on his arm, as he led me through the corridors down to the waiting taxi.

BACK in the flat, with Charles returned to school, I lay on the sofa, not talking much. Now at last I was beginning to feel it. Margaret, unself-regarding, gave me books that might snag my attention and brought in trays when I didn’t want to sit down to meals.

It went on like that for three days. On the morning after I left hospital, Mansel came in and took off the bandages, saying that the operation cut had healed. He also said that I should probably be more visually comfortable if I went on wearing a patch over the eye.

So I lay about in the drawing-room during those days, not able to rouse myself. Occasionally I inched up the patch for an instant, shutting the good eye, puzzled by the impact of light and what I did or did not see.

Exactly four days after Mansel had stood over my hospital bed and clipped out the verdict, I woke. It was half past seven. Out of habit I looked towards the chink of light between the curtains. I had taken off the patch when I went to bed. I closed the good eye and with the left eye open stared towards the chink. I dropped the eyelid, looked again. I did that several times, as if performing an exercise or doing an optical experiment. Then I got up, as I had nearly a fortnight before, pulled one of the curtains aside, shut my good eye again, and looked. Just as I had done nearly a fortnight before, I went back to bed. This time, I didn’t disturb Margaret, but waited for her to wake. At last she did so. Even then I did not speak at once, but waited until she was alert.

I said: “Something odd has happened.”

“What is it now?” Her voice was quick and anxious.

“No, nothing bad.” I went on carefully, as though my words might be quoted or as though I were touching wood: “The eye seems to have cleared itself up. At least, there doesn’t seem to be any black veil this morning.”

She cried out: “What can you see?”

“I can see a bit. Not very well. But anyway I do seem to have a full field of vision.”

It might be temporary, I warned her, trying to warn myself. In fact, for a couple of days past, I had been wondering each time when I squinted past the patch, where the black edge had gone to. Just for the moment, the eye appeared to be behaving something as Mansel had promised me it would, if the operation worked. I could see the shape of the room, Margaret’s face, I could make out the letters in the masthead of The Times , nothing else. Above all, there was no blackness pressing in. That made me hopeful, unrealistically in relation to what the eye could do.

“It would be better than nothing.” Again I was choosing the words.

Margaret also was trying to be cautious. Action was neutral, action didn’t mean false hope: the best thing she could do was telephone Mansel. He could come at half past one, she reported. Margaret and I talked the morning away, waiting until he arrived, spotless as David Rubin, always busy, never in a hurry, sacrificing the solitary sandwich and the half-hour off in his obsessive day.

Lying flat, I assisted (in the French sense) in the familiar routine. The lens, the scrutinising eye. It went on longer than usual, longer than the morning of decision four days before.

“Well, I’m damned,” said Mansel. He broke out: “Look, I am glad! You’re quite right. The retina has got itself back somehow.”

He had spoken simply, like one who was enjoying someone else’s good luck. Then he became professional once more, professional with a problem on his mind.

“You haven’t got much to thank me for. I think you ought to understand that. I’ve never seen anything quite like this. By all the rules that retina ought to be floating about. But there’s a great deal we don’t understand in this business. We’re really only at the beginning. It’s a great deal more hit-and-miss than it ought to be. I hope it will be a bit more scientific before I’ve finished.”

He was preoccupied with the problem, absent-minded as he gave me instructions. Inspections. This might be a fluke, he had better see me within the week. Premonitory symptoms, flashes of light before going to sleep: I must see him at once. His mind still absent upon the physics of the retina, he told me to avoid any risk of knocks on the head — such as in boxing or association football. I said mildly that those risks weren’t in my case so very serious. Mansel had the grace to give a sheepish youthful grin.

“You must think I’ve made a mess of things,” he said. He said it with the detachment of a man who knew that he was a master of his job: and who assumed that I knew it too.

After he had departed, Margaret burst out crying. Her nerves were strong when we were in trouble. Trouble over, she was left with the aftermath. Comforting her, I didn’t feel any aftermath at all. This had been an arrest of life. It was already over. I went for a walk in the park that afternoon, looking with mescalin-sharp pleasure (sometimes shutting my good eye) at the autumn grass. I felt full of energy, eager to escape from the solipsistic bubble in which I had been immersed for those last days. Life goes on, young Charles had told me consolingly after we paid that visit to my father. Had he ever heard of an arrest of life? When would he know one? Anyway, it was time to get back into the flow.