Night Without Stars (16 page)

Of course I was excited about that, but past experience, and one or two other blind people I'd talked to in those early days, had taught me that the knife can sometimes bring sight back for a few days but can't keep it. Now and then I still got flashes of light in the other eye, but they didn't count for anything.

Pierre's flat with the light and the fire on and the feel of his sticky hair. The smell of Walter's new American car. The concertina at Villefranche. Charles Bénat's voice, casual, indifferent; yet something in the man like a thin, taut wire.… I thought, if I'm still blind, will I still have the heart to go back and grope again? Stay with the Wintertons a month to break the ice. I thought of Alix, things about her that made her different from anyone else, the complex mystery of a personality that “ got across” in spite of my disability. The touch of her hands was not like other people's; they were always warm, quick, and sure; the “roundness” of her voice, like a singer's, only she didn't sing.

I thought, too, of Rachel, wondered if she ever remembered the times we spent together, if her marriage was a “ success.” I thought of Bénat's advice: “ Come back in a year. On the law of averages …” Rachel had been married two. She and Alix. Everything about them was so different. I'd met Rachel when an officer in the R.A, with all the faintly glamorising effect of uniform, of being on leave, of wanting and getting a good time in a short time. When I met Alix it was all different. From one angle it seemed that my friendship with Rachel was the abnormal one—from another, Alix. It depended on the way you looked at it.

On the fourth day Coulson came with Halliday. Nurse Rogers was with them but not the matron.

“Good morning, Mr. Gordon. Morning. Well, feeling all right to-day? Think it's about time we had some of these bandages off.”

“High time from my point of view.”

“Yes, I can understand your impatience. Natural enough. Still, it's no good spoiling the ship. I've brought Mr. Halliday along.”

“So I gather. Good morning.”

“Good morning. I'm glad to hear that things have gone so well.”

“Have they?” I said. “So am I.”

Coulson said: “We've been telling him that for four days but he rather doubts our veracity.”

“Proof of the pudding,” I said.

Nurse Rogers had pulled the shades to, and now she began to unwrap the bandages. I began to sweat.

I could see the light before the last was off, and as that came Halliday was standing at the foot of the bed and a rather stout middle-aged man was peering down at me on the opposite side from Nurse Rogers.

“God Almighty!” I said.

“Proof of the pudding, Mr. Gordon,” the middle-aged man said. “As you see, Halliday, we've been lucky.”

After a minute Halliday grunted and said: “ Pull one of the shades up, nurse. We can dispense with them by degrees.”

Nurse Rogers let in some more light. She was a small dark young woman with good teeth. When I could get a chance past the peering heads I saw it was raining.

“God Almighty!” I said.

Halliday was plucking at his lip. “One of the most satisfactory I've seen. If no irritable tendency has developed so far … I congratulate you, Coulson. And you, Gordon.”

“A very good patient,” Coulson said. “A tendency towards skepticism, but we must forgive him that.”

I said: “ I can see better than after that first operation.”

“So you should. There's no inflammation to interfere with the sight.”

I felt like crying into the bedclothes. I cleared my throat irritably and said: “How long is it likely to stay like this?”

“You're all right. Don't worry about that. Of course, we'll have to take care of you for a few days yet.”

Somebody'd put some flowers on the dressing-table. They were yellow chrysanthemums and pink michaelmas daisies, and the vase was green. My hairbrush was on the table, and the letter Nurse Rogers had read me, from Caroline; and a glass of water and a box of some sort and a handkerchief.

I said; “ I can see without my glasses.”

“Yes, the old ones won't be much use to you now,” said Coulson. “Halliday'll fix you up with a new pair in a day or two. You'll probably feel better to keep on wearing them.”

They talked for about five minutes. It all seemed quite casual to them, just a matter-of-fact part of the day, a matter for sober satisfaction, just as it would have been a matter for sober regret if it had gone the other way. I wanted to shake them out of it, make them realise.

As they turned to go I looked at the clock on the table: it was twenty minutes past eleven; I looked at the chart beside it and saw that my temperature was sub-normal; I looked out again at the bit of greyness which was the October day. The silver rods of rain showed up against the window opposite. I was glad Nurse Rogers went with them to the door; it gave me a chance of trying to look normal again before she came back.

Even then I worried a good bit. All that night and the following day, because the stakes were so high. In the evening when Coulson came in I tackled him about it.

He said: “We're hiding nothing from you now. I suppose it's natural you should feel like that. But you must understand in an operation of such delicacy it would be inexcusable to claim too much. In your case one had to be specially cautious because of the complications which followed the last operation, d'you see. If that had come again …”

“And what possibility is there in the future?”

“A cut that heals satisfactorily in the eye is no more likely to give you trouble than a cut that heals in the body.”

I said: “I met a man in hospital in Sussex, naval gunnery officer, blind from blast. They operated on one eye—for a detached retina, I think. In a week he could see right enough, but a fortnight after leaving hospital the thing slipped and he was as blind as ever.…”

He said: “What a man you are for worry. There's nothing to slip in your eye. I haven't stitched anything on or pinned anything up. You're all of a piece.” He got up. “Joking apart, have you looked at yourself in the mirror yet?”

“Not closely.”

“Well, you may think the new pupil I've given you is a bit tent-shaped. Don't worry, it'll round off in time.”

“I don't care what shape it is, so long as it works.”

At the door he came back, blew out a breath. I wondered what he was going to say.

“If you feel like it, six months or twelve months, come back and I'll attempt something with that other eye. I believe I could make it function to some extent. Even though you might not get a lot of advantage, it's much healthier to have an eye that isn't a dead loss, and it always helps the good one to see better.”

“Thanks,” I said. “ I'll think about that.”

When you come out of Dartmoor after a long stretch it may be that you would feel something the way I felt that afternoon twelve days later, standing on the corner of the street watching the traffic fights change colour and the busses grind to a stop and the taxis panting and the crowds.

I remember that day I met Alix, feeling blindness had caught me up at last and that I'd really no place in the world, that I was a ghost of a man, waiting to go. There was an affinity with this day, for I felt a ghost of a man who had just come back. Rip Van Winkle, the returned soldier, the released convict, peering about for a friendly sign, a familiar face. Every now and then my eye would get bleared up, not with the old troubles but with feelings that I couldn't keep in hand. I wanted to cry like a kid.

In spite of all Coulson told me I was still scared. Scared stiff. It was too good to be true. They said the sight was five sixths of normal; but with glasses I could see practically as well as I'd ever seen, except that it was one-sided and therefore still clumsy. But I'd got used to that way of looking last year and the year before. It was like opening up a black-out curtain and finding the sun there all the time.

… It's no good going over all I did and felt those first weeks and months. There's the mental change as well as the physical. Your attitude doesn't adapt itself in a day. In my case I seemed to be harking back not to the few months of semi-seeing at the end of the war but to the pre-army life of six years ago and the gap was hard to jump.

I did the things one would expect, saw something of Lewis and the office, tried to pick up the threads of a few friendships. But often people had developed their own interests, and I wasn't somehow quite ready yet to meet them halfway. I was not properly awake—and still insecure, still groping.

After a bit I moved from the hotel, took a flat in Kensington, though it wasn't as good as the old one.

Christmas in Oxford. Out walking every day when the weather was fine. Aimlessly strolling. And I saw in my dream how Mr. Greatheart came to Oxford city to be healed of the wounds that he had gotten … when his hurts began to be on an healing, he made shift to go abroad betwixt his crutches to view that city. Maybe it was something that way with me.

Every day I went out, keeping mostly clear of the main streets, through the quiet alleys and closes of the town. I remembered one day it snowed, and I walked down Bear Lane and Oriel Street and Merton Street to Magdalen Bridge. The water was a kind of bottle-green, moving as slow as a snake, and the Tudor towers glimmered in it. The trees were all built up into a white architecture of their own; and the snow sky had broken up and there were pools and drippings of green in it as if a thaw had come. Starlings were chattering in the snow, fighting for a crust. I remember a boy on a bicycle came wobbling across the bridge, his wheels making new and finer lines among the ruts. I walked into St. John's Quad, where the snow was hardly disturbed and old Magdalen crouched in the quiet As I went home, through Queen's Lane and New College Lane, the sun set and an afterglow flushed into the sky. It lit up the towers and spires. I felt as if I was seeing something for the very first time.

During that week the tightness inside me began to slacken off at last. I began to feel the change was true, not just another promise which would go wrong like the last.

In the new year I stayed with an aunt in Yorkshire. More walking here, though of a different kind. It seemed for a time as if that was the thing I wanted to do most; not to think much but to give one's body something regular to do while one's mind took a holiday.

It was queer about France. Before the operation there'd been all that urge to go back. Lying under the bandages, I'd thought: if things come right I'll go by the first plane. But when sight came it was different. For one thing there was the risk. This that had come back was worth so much and, by experience, was so chancy, that I was afraid of doing half the usual things, of getting overtired, of sitting in draughts, of reading too much or jumping or bending or moving suddenly. Life in a bathchair would have been worth accepting if that was the only way of staying whole. Silly, perhaps, but … try the alternative for a while.

Then when spring came and a slow reassurance, and the sense of invalidism began to lift, another reluctance grew up. Perhaps it was going to be all right, all the things that I'd wanted so much were more or less permanently back: to be able to read and drive a car and meet people on an ordinary basis. If that was so, then I wanted just those things and no others, normalcy and nothing else. France was the unusual. France was the place where I'd been made a fool of; the very smell of the flowers and the food and the streets would bring back vividly the double frustration.

Oh, there was the pull of Alix—it wasn't the sort of thing one got over—there was the niggling anxiety that by not following it up at once something precious and important was being allowed to slip away, that in a sense I might be letting Alix down somehow; there was the itch to know, the old pugnacious desire not to be beaten; but just at present these feelings all together weren't quite strong enough to shift the balance.

Other things began to relax too. When I finally got down to reading I read a good bit; philosophy, poetry, things there'd been no time for since that year in Paris. I felt faintly ashamed, trying to work out something to fit my view of the universe now things were going well. The time for that, when the really big person would have showed himself, was last year. Instead I'd been bitter and suicidal. I'd developed a terrific inferiority complex which must have stuck out a mile. I'd been egocentric about the whole thing.

I found I could see almost as well without glasses as with, except for long bouts of reading, but I kept them on just the same as a protection. I put in a certain amount of work, but couldn't settle yet to regular attendance at the office. Lewis grumbled sometimes.

In May it seemed a good idea to spend a fortnight fishing in Devonshire. That would set me up for the summer. After that maybe one would settle down to law, in September think out the French business afresh, see if one wanted to face it then.

Going to Devon meant rather more of a pack-up than previous visits to sisters and aunts. I fished out the larger case, which was plastered with records of Continental travel.

A queer feeling; even the smell of the inside of the case was reminiscent. It struck at me with a sensation of alarm, as if there was danger in it, or had been, and the old gods were calling. A few odds and ends hadn't been taken out. I'm not tidy at the best of times, and blindness doesn't help. There was the torn-off bill of my dinner on the train, a couple of programmes of concerts with the Wintertons, the pair of shoes bought from Alix wrapped up in an old paper. Those gave me a turn. I unwrapped them, looked them over; the smell of the leather seemed to bring back that day. I wondered if I'd been a fool think going back, to leave something like that unfinished, a loose end to life.

I put the shoes away and tipped out the other things: bathing trunks, a pair of shorts, a beach towel, threw them on the bed; and began to pack the things needed this time. Alix's shoes might as well go after all, as they wouldn't look out of place in Devonshire. I was going to wrap them in the same newspaper, but having taken it up I stood beside the bed reading it, as I often did now, for the sheer pleasure of being able to read.