What to Look for in Winter (18 page)

 

It is this feeling of docking cleanly that grows more elusive with blindness. I will, if I may, give an account of my mornings at this time of my
life. I get up at six, run a bath by ear, turn it off, feel for my electric toothbrush, load it with toothpaste, making sure by smell the toothpaste is not foot cream, do my teeth, get into the cardigan that I know hangs from the bathroom door, go into the room where the cats' litter trays are kept, find a roll of dustbin bags, somehow discover the mouth of each one and put one inside the other, in case of horrible leaks, fill these with the used litter and any old cat food and the newspaper the cat dishes sit on, give the cats clean litter, wash their dishes and dry them, put clean food into each dish, making sure not to spill any cat food on my hands or I shall smell it all day. I then take the bin bag downstairs, holding the grabs and banisters, to the catacombs of this Victorian house, undo by feel three deadlocks and put the full bin bag in the appropriate dustbin. I re-shut the deadlocks and move slowly towards the kitchen where I know how everything is stowed, though I still fall. I half fill the kettle (I can do this by weight), take the coffee from the upper shelf in the freezer door, shake about as much coffee as a squirrel's tail would weigh into the cafetière, wait for the water to boil, pour it on to the coffee grounds and commence my daily quarrel with the plunger. By now it will be 7.20 and my bath will be of any temperature at all, so that's a surprise to look forward to. When first I became blind I was determined to be well groomed, something I have never in my life been before. I'm not sure it's worked, although I know that I am clean. On my shelves however, await the jumpers of a well-groomed blind woman, each arranged in its own bag with lavender or cinnamon or clove (sovereign historic but useless remedy against moth). My jumpers are arranged from white to black through all the misty colours of grey and pink and blue and lavender and olive that I wear, the naturally occurring dyes of Scotland, where my jumpers were born. In its way my cupboard of jumpers is like Des Esseintes's organ of perfumes in Huysmans's
Against Nature
. In another way it's just me trying hard to kill two birds with one stone; that is magically to become tidy and, even more magically, to unbecome blind. I did the colour-coding holding open my eyes with my left
hand from the top of my forehead, like holding a cracked watermelon together.

 

About the time of Katie's first wedding I made a friend who is everything I am not. I met her through my Czech friend Cyril Kinsky. He has twenty-six Christian names, wanted to be a theatre director, and was for many years. Then he fell in love, started a family, and trained for the bar. He is a QC and a virtuoso of marquetry, indeed all forms of DIY. He is also cool, unusual in a DIY-er. Kafka lived to the side of his family's palace in Prague. His father Alphy smoked more eloquently than any man I've seen in my life.

Cyril brought to Cambridge his cousin, Sophie-Caroline Tarnowska. We've got an elective affinity. She knows what I think. Her husband Gilles is my son Minoo's elective affinity. He is a red-headed Protestant left-wing banker of vertiginous musicality. He is so nice you want to take him home. I have loved Sophie-Caroline over thirty years. Recently they took a second honeymoon in Scotland. Gilles reported that the rain was ‘so delicious, so varied, so interesting'.

When Minoo went on his French exchange to the Paris home of this family (all of whom speak better English than I do, so it was pretty silly), he telephoned to say that everything was perfectly all right, actually very homely, for example there was a red-headed
grand-mère
who lived upstairs with her dog Gavotte and who wore jeans and the oven had fallen out of the wall, ‘just like at home'.

Twice in my life Sophie-Caroline has given me the courage to act as I could not have without her. She has never had to be explicit because she reads my mind.

When I went blind she rang me and I was transfused with a reason to go on. I know that she is devout and she gave me some of it, like a lozenge, or a bit of mint cake on a steep climb, a viaticum, without actually mentioning the name of the Manufacturer, the Almighty, but
she was too clever and too kind to be so coarse as to say outright, ‘Do not harm yourself.'

For some of the time, they live in the Gers, in a sublime semi-ruin called Mazères, the ancient archiepiscopal palace of the archbishops of Auch. This house is the great romance of Gilles's parents, their last shared project, all still very much in the doing. The Angelus tolls daily in the tower. The fields around and the earth and the cows and the farm dogs are the colour of pale bread. In the roof of the palace is a library as long as a church. Minoo lives in this room when he visits. Next to it through a glazed rose window is the music room. It is quite possible to go from the music room into the library and miss Minoo, for all that he is tall, petrified with deep contentment into the room. Down four flights of stone stairs red griffins, faded after centuries, are stencilled in rhythm on the pale curve of the chalky walls. The history of the Cathars and of the Albigensians is legible in one layer after another in this fortress. A corner of a fallen room is blocked up with stone of another shade, from a time long before the already far time that seems to be the closest, yet is already centuries away.

There is an enfilade, falling, snowing, with whitewash, of mirrors laughing thinly into one another, the panelling tactfully bracketing itself around each tall looking-glass. The ceiling asks for chan deliers but incompletion is the keynote. How to describe it? Perhaps if Ely Cathedral grew like an opening stone rose and softly half fell down…?

In this house, at the age of fifty, one night in 2005 I listened out for hornets in my bedroom. I knew I had to change my life before I lost it. A wasp will kill me, but hornets carry more poison, so I'd die sooner. I know, because I was stung by an orange hornet the size of a conker at sea just off Tahiti and that was nearly it for me, before even marrying for the first time. My then fiancé whizzed me by rubber boat into hospital and by the time we arrived my arm was a washing-up glove full of jelly.

Decades on, I waited for hornets, standing with a shoe in my right hand in the hortensia-wallpapered room in the hot Gascon night. The small double bed was occupied by the semicircular body of my then companion. Marcel contemplates the sleeping body of Albertine in like pose, reflecting on the infinitude of traits one human soul may possess.

Such was nowhere near my reflection that night. I knew that to be anything like truthful or kind, I had to get away while there was still time for him to locate another comforter, before I turned on him for nothing worse than his own fulsome nature.

It was nothing anybody said save he himself. It would take Proust's cumulative genius to show how, feeling himself closest to truth, he most lied. To be with him through time was to see through him like a hoop. So, a profession can take the soul. It was politics that he professed.

 

In fewer than three months' time, I shall leave this flat for, as its delicate state attests, it is in need of structural and architectural attention. Its ceilings sag a bit, its draughts are tempestuous, and aspects of its layout, although I have come to love them, are certainly dated. Liv and I get our fizzy drinks from a suavely concealed mirrored wall that you press and it magically opens to reveal a cocktail niche. There is a flip-over serving counter for when the studio was in use for private views in the seventies. There is a door into the studio that obviates the necessity of entering the artist's private apartment, a system put in place for Sargent. The colours, that will of necessity have to go, are kind to pictures, ranging from every kind of dove grey through to lichenous greens and, in my bedroom, a colour that combines pink, blue, brown, grey, white and black and yet is very light; the colour of the gill of the smallest, freshest, field mushroom. The sitting room, that we call Henry James, might be any colour. It is
the colour of memory, a tactful background, a recessive, becoming, dark but festive, shade, making everything hung upon it look better.

Five or so years before his death, the owner of this flat sustained a stroke that made movement difficult, although it did not stop him painting. In order to help him remain independent, banisters and grabs were installed exactly as though it had been a ship. They save me from sinking.

 

I could have done with more of those grabs, on a metaphysical level, when I was at Cambridge. I did not know that there lay within me a thirst nothing could quench that would nearly kill me. There were signs, but they were illegible to me and my friends at the time.

My room at Girton was called F6; it took some ascending to. I was next to a popular girl whose parents visited most weekends bringing lox and bagels. I was very grateful one Sunday when the mother of this family gave me a bagel, stuffed full. Some kind of fear set in. I did not understand how to get out of one's room except to go to the college library or for meals in hall. I knew that when women were first up at university they joined one another for intense conversation over mugs of hot chocolate. I had two mugs, so that was a start. Further research revealed a row of three baths, each in its cubicle and each the size of a lifeboat, so I spent a good deal of my first year at Girton just sitting in the bath reading and getting wrinkly. I was an unreliable and irresponsible student, having come straight from school where, during the last term that Katie and Rosa were there, I had worked as a housemaid and kitchen maid, because I had got into Cambridge before my A levels, didn't want to be separated from them and needed to earn money. It was interesting to see the modification of girls' behaviour towards me as I changed from senior to skivvy. Mrs Rock, the house cook, was kind to this unhelpful pair of hands and gave me jobs she knew I could do like emptying the
commercial dishwasher, grating fifteen pounds of cheese, or slicing ox liver and onions for fifty-six people with a knife whose steel was whippy, sharp and thin as a line.

The school train started at Waterloo and ended at Sherborne. For some happy reason, one summer day when we were in our A-level year, it dawdled at Basingstoke. We were told that we might go and purchase refreshments at the station buffet. We were not yet changed into our school uniform, and no one in their right mind would want to challenge Katie's raised eyebrow. We purchased two pork pies and two miniatures of brandy. Brandy is rage and turmoil to me, gin the taste of isolation.

Otherwise strong drink hardly made its appearance at Sherborne, though there was a rebarbative cocktail offered by the headmistress to those girls considered made of the right stuff to meet visiting preachers such as Sir Robert Birley, formerly headmaster of Charterhouse and Eton. Katie and I were chosen for this privilege and liked him a lot. Neither of us felt the same about Dame Diana's refreshing sherry, tomato and orange juice cocktail that was the speciality at White Lodge, the headmistress's house.

In the first weeks at Girton, should someone have asked me what was wrong, I would have replied that I was simultaneously anxious and bored. I seemed frozen to the spot. I couldn't leave my room. In my room was a bottle of sherry. Everyone knew that undergraduates offered one another small glasses of sherry. I drank the bottle on my own and went to sleep. I imagine that this sleep will have been the first blackout of my life, and that having glimpsed this option, my brain's biochemistry was on the very tentative lookout for more.

There was a bus that took Girtonians into town for lectures and seminars. I ended up sleeping on the floors of my patient friends, Anthony Appiah the most patient of all, playing me his records of Marlene and Mahler and Noël Coward and allowing me to cramp his love life.

Of course there were some friends from school. Edward Stigant,
descendant of the Archbishop Stigand on the Bayeux Tapestry, was reading History at Christ's under Professor Jack Plumb. Edward looked like a very naughty Russian girl. He had the profile and eyelashes of a Borzoi and was short, lissom and bendy. His gift with languages was prodigious. When we did our examinations for Oxford and/or Cambridge, which were in those days separate from A levels, there was a translation paper from which you had to choose two longish passages from among a dozen or so languages to translate into English. Edward had done them all, with time to spare, and waltzed off with a scholarship. This took courage. His older brother had earlier achieved distinction at the same college and taken his own life while still at university.

Edward did not live very much longer than that brother, but oh the delightful nuisance he caused in his life. He was completely kind and, of course, when we first met at the school classics club, ‘The Interpretes', which was a decorous means of meeting boys, I lapped him up. He was having an affair with a Turkish air stewardess at the time. This strange reversion to what might be thought of as deviancy in the context of someone quite so camp, also struck him during the week of our Finals, when he fell head over heels in love with a magnificent girl, and sent her a dozen red roses every single day. They both emerged with congratulatory firsts.

I'm astonished that I have any friends from Cambridge. I was a dilatory worker, a shocking shirker of essays and supervisions, and I did not understand that it was perfectly possible to say no at any stage of the transaction should you be invited out by a member of the opposite sex. I had a powerfully developed sense of my own repulsive ness that cannot have been helped by the fashion for platform shoes that coincided with these years. Thus, when I did leave F6, I was six and a half feet high and, in some senses, quite unstable. There were three dons at Girton whom I feared and respected, though they might not have guessed it: Jill Mann for Chaucer, who spotted me at once for a coaster; Gillian Beer, who has, despite it all, become a
friend; and Lady Radzinowicz, who, with her dachsund Pretzel, taught me Milton and Spenser. I was so nervous about leaving F6 and actually getting on to the missile-launcher bus for central Cambridge, that I attended relatively few lectures, though I developed a fondness for Professor J.A.W. Bennett who must have been about twelve hundred years old by then. It was also compulsory, for reasons of cool as well as literary curiosity, to attend the lectures of the poet J.H. Prynne. I adored watching him take words to bits.