Charles Snow - Last Things

‘Right,’ I said obediently.

‘There’s another point. I should consider that your unit of investment was too large. £3000 – that was it, wasn’t it? – is far too much for this kind of risk. It came off this time, but it won’t always, you follow. You’ve heard the units that I use myself–’

‘I had more faith in you.’

‘You oughtn’t to have that much faith in anyone–’

I had not heard him take so much part in the duologue for many months. His manner, despite the heavy breathing, stayed minatory and on the attack: but that meant he was enjoying himself or at least self-forgetful. He even asked me to pour him a small whisky, although it was not yet four in the afternoon. It might have been a device to make me stay, for he insisted – suddenly reminding me of Charles as a child, importuning me to talk to him before he went to sleep – that I pour another for myself.

When at last I was outside the clinic, standing in the Marylebone Road looking for a taxi, I felt a little more than the usual emancipation. The afternoon had been easy: of course it was good to be out: slivers of rain shone, as though they were frozen, past the nearest street lamp, and then bounced from the glistening pavement. I felt some of that zest – disgraceful and yet not to be denied – which came from being well in the presence of someone who couldn’t be well again. The lift in one’s step, which ought for decency’s sake to be a reproach, just wasn’t: it was good to breathe the dank autumnal air. It was not unpleasant, even, to stand in the rain waiting for a taxi. For an instant, a surreptitious thought occurred to me: it was rather a pity that I hadn’t, in cold fact, bought shares on the old man’s judgment. Either those or any others. The trouble was, I believed too much in his maxim about enthusiastic amateurs. If I hadn’t, if I had trusted him, I should have been a good deal better off.

That visit took place on a Monday. It was not on the following morning, but on the Wednesday that I woke up early, so early that the window was quite dark. I lay there, comfortable, not sure whether I should go to sleep again or not. It was pleasant to think of the day ahead, lying relaxed and well. Perhaps I dozed off. Light was coming through the curtains. As in a sleep-start, I jerked into consciousness. There was a blackout over the far corner of my left eye.

I knew what that meant, too well. I went to the windows, pulled a curtain, looked out over the Tyburn garden to a clear early morning sky. Trying to cheat the truth, I blinked the eye and opened it again. Yes, for an instant the blackout seemed dissolved. Comfort. Then it surged back again. A clear black edge. Against the lightening sky, a little smoky film beyond the edge.

I couldn’t cheat myself any longer. I knew what that meant, too well. The retina had come loose once more. Perhaps the veil didn’t spread so far as the other time. But I was complaining, Good God, this is rough, could I face going through all that again?

Margaret was still quiet in her morning sleep. There was no point in waking her. Minutes didn’t matter, and I could tell her soon enough.

BEFORE breakfast, Margaret rang up Mansel, the ophthalmologist who had operated on me before. We had learned his timetable by now, since he had been inspecting my eyes each month or so. He would call in, Margaret told me, about eleven, on his way from the hospital to Harley Street.

As we sat waiting, I said to Margaret: ‘He’ll want to have another shot.’

‘Let’s see what he says.’

‘I’m quite sure he’ll want to.’ I added: ‘But I’m not so sure that I can bear it.’

I wasn’t thinking of the operation, in itself that didn’t matter, but of the days afterwards, lying still, blinded, helpless in the dark. Though I had managed to control it, I had always had more than my share of claustrophobia. As I grew older, it got more oppressive, not less; and lying blinded for days brought on something like claustrophobia squared. The previous time had been pretty near my limit: or so it seemed looking back, even more than when I was going through it.

Margaret wanted to distract me. She said how this would have been more than a nuisance if I had been in government.

‘It’s a good thing you didn’t take that job,’ she said.

‘If I had taken it, this mightn’t have happened,’ I replied.

Oh come, Margaret said, glad to have found an argument, that was taking psychosomatic thinking altogether too far. But I didn’t respond for long.

When Mansel arrived, he was as usual brisk and elegant, busy and unhurried.

‘I’m sorry to hear about this, sir,’ he said to me.

We had come to know each other well, but it was a curious intimacy, in which he, almost young enough to be my son, insisted on calling me Sir, while I insisted on calling him by his Christian name. I admired him as a superb professional, and he listened to my observations as possibly useful to his clinical stock-in-trade.

While making conversation to Margaret, he was without fuss disconnecting a reading lamp, fixing a bulb of his own. The drawing-room was just as good as anywhere else, he said to her with impersonal cheerfulness. He had brought a case with him, packed with White Knight equipment invented by himself: but, searching into the back of my eyes, he had never used anything more subtle than an ordinary lens. As he did now, lamp shining on the eye, Mansel asking me to look behind my head, to the left, down, all the drill which I knew by heart.

He didn’t waste time. Within half a minute he was saying:

‘There’s no doubt, I’m afraid. Bad luck.’

Not quite in the same place as before, he remarked. Then, with some irritation, he said that there hadn’t been any indication or warning, the last time he examined me, only a month before. If we were cleverer at spotting these things in advance, he went into a short professional soliloquy. It would have been easy enough to use photolysis: why couldn’t we get a better warning system?

‘No use jobbing back,’ he said, as though reproaching me. ‘Well, we shall have to try and make a better go of it this time.’

I glanced at Margaret: that was according to plan.

‘Look, Christopher,’ I said, ‘is it really worthwhile?’

His antennae were quick.

‘I know it’s an awful bore, sir, I wish we could have saved you that–’

‘What do I get in return? It’s only vestigial sight at the best. After all that.’

Mansel gazed at each of us in turn, collected, strong-willed.

‘All I can give you is medical advice. But anyone in my place would have to tell you the same. I’m afraid you ought to have another operation.’

‘It can’t give him much sight, though, can it?’ Margaret wanted to be on my side.

‘This sounds callous, but you both know it as well as I do,’ said Mansel. ‘A little sight is better than no sight. There is a finite chance that the other eye might go. We’re taking every precaution, but it might. Myopic eyes are slightly more liable to this condition than normal eyes. Any medical advice is bound to tell you, you ought to insure against the worst. If the worst did come to the worst, and you’d only got left what you had yesterday in the bad eye – well, you could get around, you wouldn’t be cut off.’

‘I couldn’t read.’

‘I’m not pretending it would be pleasant. But you could see people, you could even look at TV. I assure you, sir, that if you’d seen patients who would give a lot even for that amount of sight–’

Margaret came and sat by me. ‘I’m afraid he’s right,’ she said quietly.

‘Would you like to discuss it together?’ Mansel asked with firm politeness.