Muriel Spark - The Complete Short Stories

I started screaming when I got home, and was given a sedative. By evening everyone knew that Miss Simmonds had put the wrong drops in her eyes.

‘Will she go blind in that eye, too?’ people said.

‘The doctor says there’s hope.’

‘There will be an inquiry.’

‘She was going blind in that eye in any case,’ they said.

‘Ah, but the pain …’

‘Whose mistake, hers or his?’

‘Joan was there at the time. Joan heard the screams. We had to give her a sedative to calm —’

‘— calm her down.’

‘But who made the mistake?’

‘She usually makes up the eye-drops herself. She’s got a dispenser’s —’

‘— dispenser’s certificate, you know.

‘Her name was on the bottle, Joan says.

‘Who wrote the name on the bottle? That’s the question. They’ll find out from the handwriting. If it was Mr Simmonds he’ll be disqualified.’

‘She always wrote the names on the bottles. She’ll be put off the dispensers’ roll, poor thing.’

‘They’ll lose their licence.’

‘I got eye-drops from them myself only three weeks ago. If I’d have known what I know now, I’d never have —’

‘The doctor says they can’t find the bottle, it’s got lost.’

‘No, the sergeant says definitely they’ve got the bottle. The handwriting is hers. She must have made up the drops herself, poor thing.’

‘Deadly nightshade, same thing.’

‘Stuff called atropine. Belladonna. Deadly nightshade.’

‘It should have been stuff called eserine. That’s what she usually had, the doctor says.

‘Dr Gray says?’

‘Yes, Dr Gray.’

‘Dr Gray says if you switch from eserine to atropine —’

It was put down to an accident. There was a strong hope that Miss Simmonds’s one eye would survive. It was she who had made up the prescription. She refused to discuss it.

I said, ‘The bottle may have been tampered with, have you thought of that?’

‘Joan’s been reading books.’

The last week of my holidays old Mrs Simmonds died above the shop and left all her fortune to her daughter. At the same time I got tonsillitis and could not return to school.

I was attended by our woman doctor, the widow of the town’s former doctor who had quite recently died. This was the first time I had seen Dr Gray, although I had known the other Dr Gray, her husband, whom I missed. The new Dr Gray was a sharp-faced athletic woman. She was said to be young. She came to visit me every day for a week. After consideration I decided she was normal and in the right, though dull.

Through the feverish part of my illness I saw Basil at the desk through the window and I heard Dorothy scream. While I was convalescent I went for walks, and always returned by the lane beside the Simmonds’ house. There had been no bickering over the mother’s will. Everyone said the eye-drop affair was a terrible accident. Miss Simmonds had retired and was said to be going rather dotty.

I saw Dr Gray leaving the Simmonds at six o’clock one evening. She must have been calling on poor Miss Simmonds. She noticed me at once as I emerged from the lane.

‘Don’t loiter about, Joan. It’s getting chilly.’

The next evening I saw a light in the office window. I stood under the tree and looked. Dr Gray sat upon the desk with her back to me, quite close. Mr Simmonds sat in his chair talking to her, tilting back his chair. A bottle of sherry stood on the table. They each had a glass half-filled with sherry. Dr Gray swung her legs, she was in the wrong, sexy, like our morning help who sat on the kitchen table swinging her legs.

But then she spoke. ‘It will take time,’ she said. ‘A very difficult patient, of course.

Basil nodded. Dr Gray swung her legs, and looked professional. She was in the right, she looked like our games mistress who sometimes sat on a desk swinging her legs.

Before I returned to school I saw Basil one morning at his shop door. ‘Reading glasses all right now?’ he said.

‘Oh yes, thank you.’

‘There’s nothing wrong with your sight. Don’t let your imagination run away with you.

I walked on, certain that he had known my guilty suspicions all along.

‘I took up psychology during the war. Up till then I was in general practice.’

I had come to the summer school to lecture on history and she on psychology. Psychiatrists are very often ready to talk to strangers about their inmost lives. This is probably because they spend so much time hearing out their patients. I did not recognize Dr Gray, except as a type, when I had attended her first lecture on ‘the psychic manifestations of sex . She spoke of child-poltergeists, and I was bored, and took refuge in observing the curious language of her profession. I noticed the word ‘arousement’ . ‘Adolescents in a state of sexual arousement,’ she said, may become possessed of almost psychic insight.’

After lunch, since the Eng. Lit. people had gone off to play tennis, she tacked on to me and we walked to the lake across the lawns, past the rhododendrons. This lake had once been the scene of a love-mad duchess’s death.

‘… during the war. Before that I was in general practice. It’s strange, she said, ‘how I came to take up psychology. My second husband had a breakdown and was under a psychiatrist. Of course, he’s incurable, but I decided … It’s strange, but that’s how I came to take it up. It saved my reason. My husband is still in a home. His sister, of course, became quite incurable. He has his lucid moments. I did not realize it, of course, when I married, but there was what I’d now call an oedipus-transference on his part, and…’

How tedious I found these phrases! We had come to the lake. I stooped over it and myself looked back at myself through the dark water. I looked at Dr Gray’s reflection and recognized her. I put on my dark glasses, then.

‘Am I boring you?’ she said.

‘No, carry on.

‘Must you wear those glasses? … it is a modern psychological phenomenon … the trend towards impersonalization … the modern Inquisitor.’

For a while, she watched her own footsteps as we walked round the lake. Then she continued her story.’… an optician. His sister was blind — going blind when I first attended her. Only the one eye was affected. Then there was an accident, one of those psychological accidents. She was a trained dispenser, but she mixed herself the wrong eye-drops. Now it’s very difficult to make a mistake like that, normally. But subconsciously she wanted to, she wanted to. But she wasn’t normal, she was not normal.’

‘I’m not saying she was,’ I said. ‘What did you say?’

‘I’m sure she wasn’t a normal person,’ I said, ‘if you say so.

‘It can all be explained psychologically, as we’ve tried to show to my husband. We’ve told him and told him, and given him every sort of treatment — shock, insulin, everything. And after all, the stuff didn’t have any effect on his sister immediately, and when she did go blind it was caused by acute glaucoma. She would probably have lost her sight in any case. Well, she went off her head completely and accused her brother of having put the wrong drug in the bottle deliberately. This is the interesting part from the psychological point of view — she said she had seen something that he didn’t want her to see, something disreputable. She said he wanted to blind the eye that saw it. She said …’

We were walking round the lake for the second time. When we came to the spot where I had seen her face reflected I stopped and looked over the water.

‘I’m boring you.’

‘No, no.’

‘I wish you would take off those glasses.’